Bidengate and the Doom Loop

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
July 8, 2024

The entire 2019-20 Biden candidacy and subsequent presidency were predicated on a rotten Faustian bargain. A hale Joe Biden would feign his aw-shucks, Joe from Scranton schtick. And an ossified working-class Joe’s camouflage would get the hard left elected—especially thanks to the changes in balloting laws that often saw only 30 percent of the electorate voting on Election Day in key states.

In exchange, the two narcissistic Bidens would bask in the power and attention of the presidency. From the start, Jill and the media would orchestrate deep cover for Joe’s escalating dementia as well as the true intentions of the now-in-power radical Democratic Party with its neo-socialist agenda. The former Obama acolytes would get their long-dreamed-of third presidential term. And this time they would enact a truly radical agenda while their string puppet mumbled to everyone that he was just old, familiar Joe working for the middle class.

The problem, inter alia, with the ruse was that it was based on a complete lie to the American people. Joe Biden was nowhere near cognitively competent. He could not campaign “normally” in 2020. And it would be impossible for his dementia to go undetected even in the ceremonial duties of the presidency for four, perhaps even eight, more years.

And there were plenty of other problems that transcended even Biden’s mental confusion.

First, the new Obama agenda—hyperinflation, open borders, woke crime theories, destroying deterrence abroad, green extremist mandates—was further to the left of the American people than in 2016.

And worse, it was nihilist and destructive. By the August 2021 Kabul withdrawal humiliation, Biden would never again win 50 percent approval from an increasingly exasperated public who felt they had been had by the mannequin Scranton Joe and his false 2020 calls for “unity” and “healing America.”

Second, Joe Biden, senator, vice president, quid-pro-quo sudden multimillionaire, was never a “nice guy.” His (brief) 1984, 1988, and 2020 presidential runs were characterized by assorted gaffes, plagiarism, and racism (the first “clean” and “articulate” black presidential candidate, “junkie,” “you ain’t’ black,” and the corn-pop sagas).

He always displayed a short-fuse, mean streak (cf. his 1988 angry and falsified defense of his law school and stump speech plagiarism) and bullying (his 2020 slurs of “fat,” “lying dog-faced pony soldier,” etc.).

Biden’s scowls and outbursts grew as he seemed to come alive only when slurring and slandering half the country as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” deplorables. So, in the recent debate, Biden at least admitted that he had written off half the nation that voted for Trump.

Third, if Trump was an exaggerator, Biden was a long-time mythologist, fabricating his bio, family history, and Trump’s record (from the yarn about cannibals eating his uncle to inheriting a completely unvaccinated country and 9 percent hyperinflation in 2021).

Fourth, there was a creepy side to Joe Biden—from stories of swimming nude in front of female Secret Service agents and the Tara Reade days to his 2020 apologies for sexual buffoonery and his fixations with pre-teen young girls, expressed by embarrassing crowd call-outs or blowing and touching “inappropriately” their hair, shoulders, and necks. Most Washington women knew in advance to avoid Joe’s too-long hugs and bizarre air blasts on their hair and ears.

In short, there were plenty of reasons why Joe Biden never got far as a presidential candidate, given he was a blowhard, cruel to people, a fabricator, of questionable ethics, and eerily interested in young girls—a far cry from ol’ Joe from Scranton, who, in a debilitated state, was supposed to offer the moderate veneer to a Jacobin agenda.

And now? Biden’s dementia has become so overt and so impossible to hide that the entire “crooked deal” has blown up. As a result, in the eleventh hour, there are very few pathways to salvation—as there never are when everything is birthed on a lie and its media-assisted cover-up.

Bidengate is far worse than Watergate. This time around, the media was not exposing the wrongdoing of a conservative president but instead serving as a force multiplier in deceiving the very American people it was supposed to inform. “Democracy Dies in Deceit” is now the Washington Post’s de facto motto.

Remember, the left is worried only that Biden is so challenged that he cannot win an election. But they are not bothered that he has no business continuing in his dementia as commander-in-chief and putting the country in real danger each day he occupies the Oval Office—a bitter paradox that is beginning to infuriate the American people.

So, can Joe Biden just press ahead, sleep more, and fulfill his Faustian obligations? Or is he not in a doom loop? The more he rests, sleeps, and avoids the media, the more the public considers him an inadequate, one-quarter president. Yet the more he might welcome more exposure, interviews, press conferences, debates, and town halls, the more his ensuing dementia becomes apparent to the public. So, his handlers haggle over the choice between an ensconced virtual president versus an all-too-real, obviously senile one.

Some House liberal presidential historians cite a failing FDR in 1944 who was visibly ill during the campaign and from a variety of serious ailments. They chirp in that Roosevelt nevertheless mocked his critics, got reelected, and entered his fourth term on January 20, 1945. But they forget that the end of the story negates their very point. FDR dropped dead in office, as his critics feared, just 11 weeks later, and as historians seem to pass over.

What if Biden does an FDR, ignores critics and runs—and likewise somehow wins?
Unlike a failing Biden, had FDR not given into intense pressure from the Democratic donor class, the big-city machine bosses, the Southern segregationists, and the liberal print media, and thus had he not removed then-current Vice President Henry Wallace as his running mate, then the wartime commander-in-chief overseeing the Okinawa campaign, the Potsdam Conference, the decision to drop the atomic bomb, and dealing with an ascendant Joseph Stalin and the postwar Soviet Union monster would have been socialist/communist President Henry Wallace.

But unlike FDR, Biden still has no plans to remove Vice President Kamala Harris. Most certainly, then, soon the next president of the United States in 2025-6 will be an unelected and more incompetent successor: President Kamala Harris. And that thought terrifies seasoned Democrat donors, insiders, and politicos as much as it did in 1944.

More realistically, Biden is far more cognitively challenged than FDR was in 1944. The chances that he will stay cogent for the next five months and win the election are quickly vanishing. Even the Biden-inspired, now discredited lawfare campaign against Trump has not just failed but boomeranged by increasing Trump’s popularity.

If a stubborn Biden stays on the ticket and more likely loses, he will destroy what is left of the vestigial Democratic Party of the once-triangulating Clintons. He will forever discredit the old-boy hierarchy and be the final obstacle to the full and overt manifestation of a Democrat, woke European-socialist party of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Squad, and the DEI caucuses.

Note Biden has already taken down with him most of the Washington-New York media, who only now confess they participated in suppressing real evidence of Biden’s dementia – and this from the same “journalists” who used to insidiously shout “25th Amendment” during the Donald Trump years.

Biden and the apparat that presses on with the current farce might well lose more than the presidency—by losing both houses of Congress and ensuring Trump an unobstructed legislative trajectory to implement a complete reversal of the Obama-Biden years.

Yet, if Biden should step down voluntarily, pundits have run through the endless ensuing problematics. They are considerable: will his successor be on the ballot in all 50 states? What will the Party’s leftist base do if the identity-politics-selected Harris is pushed aside (and what will it do if she is not and steps up to the presidency?)?

And how would a successor to Biden emerge in a free-delegate luche libre at a Chicago carnival convention, with chaos both inside the convention hall and a more violent “Death to America!’ bedlam on the streets outside?

So given all these nihilist alternatives, the two Bidens’ choice for now is to bark at the public. They will insult their own toadish media and deny the obvious. They will put the country’s interest dead last and connive that Joe can scowl, scold, lie, and yell at his critics—with not a care that our enemies abroad will conclude this is a golden Biden moment to do something stupid that may not come again.

The Renewed Epidemic of
Trump-Derangement Projectionism.
By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One – June 18, 2024
Biden’s favorability is now consistently below 40 percent. His brain and body freezes are routine.

Biden’s word salad and fantasy spins do not even merit the news. His lectures about the “convicted felon” Trump are over, along with his rants about the evil Second Amendment—given Hunter’s felony gun convictions.

If Hunter is convicted of an open-and-shut case of not filing on a huge million-dollar-plus tax obligation, Biden will also be told to stop the “make them pay their fair share” income-tax demagoguery.

So, we have reached the point where no one assumes Biden is cognitively fit to continue in office; no one believes that Biden’s family did not sell the Biden name for influence overseas, raking in millions of dollars by subordinating American interests to his own.

No one thinks that Biden has not weaponized the DOJ to go after political opponents. And no one denies that none of Biden’s political initiatives poll below 50 percent. And so panic sets in among the Left about what to do with him—a man who is not able to handle almost any other job in America, apparently, except the presidency.

Leapfrog Kamala? She only seems enthused when virtue signaling her DEI dislike of Israel. Otherwise, it is the same old, same old: the cackles, the wash, rinse, spin cycle of word repetition, and odes to school buses. Her race and gender supposedly ensure her renomination, but the Democratic elite value power more than ideology and may also have to ease her out if Joe looks hopeless after the debate. In an open convention, she would not win the delegate count.

The national polls show a tight race, but in the swing states and on issues, voters seem to have had it with Biden. The result is again rolling panic.

Sometimes, the hysteria over losing power is expressed by shameless pandering for votes—asking Mexico suddenly to close the border, suddenly canceling more student loans, suddenly draining more from the petroleum reserve, suddenly leveraging the federal reserve to lower interest rates, suddenly ordering Ukrainians to refrain from hitting Russian refineries, suddenly turning on Israel for Michigan Islamic votes, and suddenly slapping tariffs on Chinese cars for Michigan UAW votes.

Sometimes there is poll panic (can Biden go below 30 percent?); Biden debility panic (can he even make it to the convention?); Harris panic (she makes Sarah Palin and Dan Quayle—the left’s old bugaboos—look like Socrates and Aristotle).

And sometimes there is just realization that the Faustian bargain of using the shill of good ol’ Joe from Scranton to mask the neo-Marxist agendas of his handlers is no longer viable without a replacement fix in sight.

So, without alternatives, the result of all the above is a new epidemic of projectionism. The Left obsessively is already accusing an elected Trump in 2025 of going after his enemies in a way the Left most certainly would have if it had suffered what it has dished out to Trump. The Left believes when they sought to kill the proverbial king, they only wounded him, and thus, he will return the favor in the manner that they are sure they would too.

There are also more pragmatic aspects to the Left’s projection of their own sins onto Trump:
One, the more they accuse Trump of planning to punish his enemies by destroying the Constitution (as they would), all the more the “moderate” Right begins to lecture on the need to turn the other cheek, to not fall into a tit-for-tat cycle, to remember they are the Marquis of Queensberry Rules party, and thus to avoid being libeled by the mainstream media, academia, and the entertainment Left. So, the Left then achieves deterrence by scaring off Trump from retaliating.

Two, by accusing another of precisely the crimes you are planning and committing, you become the prosecutor rather than the defendant. How can one be a criminal when he is always scanning the horizon to find criminals? And who knows the mind of the criminal and the nature of his crimes better than the master criminal himself?

Part Two – June 19, 2024
Much of the screaming about tyranny, Trump fascism, internment camps, etc., is also ego-driven. AOC, in her selfies, believes that she must be Trump’s numero uno target (No one cares about her psychodramas).

The barking Michael Cohen sounds like a disaffected Putin thug warning about Trump pushing people off buildings.

Rachel Maddow, apparently given her own sense of genius, beauty, and influence, believes she may be Gulaged. After all, what would the Trump opposition do without Rachel Maddow?

The madwomen of The View also vie to see who will be sent off first to the detention center.

Jane Fonda is screaming about her exile on January 20, as if she were back on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.

Barbra Streisand is back again with promises, promises of leaving the country when Trump takes over.

Robert De Niro—who brilliantly portrayed creepy Max Cady (Cape Fear), Travis Bickel (Taxi Driver), James Conway (Goodfellas), and Sam Rothman (Casino) simply by playing his own repugnant self—is still screaming about a Third-Reich America to come and has been reduced to shouting at MAGA supporters on the street.

I say all this projectionism is insane because:
We have seen the mass hysteria before in 2016. Remember the election denialist Hollywood commercials begging the electors to violate their oath and as faithless electors flip to Hillary to save the country? Or recall Rosa Brooks’ Foreign Policy article in 2017 outlining how to get rid of a freshly elected but supposedly fatally dangerous Trump by impeachment, 25th Amendment, or military coup.
Trump has a record in 2017–2020 of not weaponizing the government, not locking Hillary up, not going after the corrupt Bidens, and not politicizing the military;
The only ones who have sought to destroy democratic norms as we know them are the projectionist Left. So, consider who has been involved with…

ü Removing Trump from state ballots
ü Using 5 federal, state, and local courts to bankrupt, jail, and destroy Trump
ü The Russian collusion hoax
ü The laptop disinformation farce
ü The two first-term impeachments, the moment the Democrats gained the House
ü The Senate trial of private citizen Trump
ü The collusion of the FBI and social media
ü The warping of the FISA court
ü The packing of the January 6 committee
ü The FBI lying about the authentic laptop
ü Crying to pack the court
ü Screaming about ending the filibuster
ü Scheming to end the Electoral College
ü Dreaming of making the Senate popularly elected like the House
ü Wishing to bring in two more states with four more leftwing senators

If you do not take an interest
in the affairs of your government,
then you are doomed to live under
the rule of fools.
Plato

June 23, 2024Special Edition We’re All Soviets Now A government with a permanent deficitand a bloated military, a bogus ideologypushed by elites, poor health amongordinary people, and senescent leaders—sound familiar? By: Niall FergusonThe Free PressJune 18, 2024(Emphasis added) The witty phrase “late Soviet America” was coined by the Princeton historian Harold James back in 2020. It has only become more apposite since then as the cold war we’re in—the second one—heats up. I first pointed out that we’re in Cold War II back in 2018. In articles for The New York Times and National Review, I tried to show how the People’s Republic of China now occupies the space vacated by the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991.  This view is less controversial now than it was then. China is clearly not only an ideological rival but firmly committed to Marxism-Leninism and one-party rule. It’s also a technological competitor—the only one the U.S. confronts in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. It’s a military rival with a navy that is already larger than ours and a nuclear arsenal that is catching up fast. And it’s a geopolitical rival, asserting itself not only in the Indo-Pacific but also through proxies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?” I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day—perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets? Yes, I know what you are going to say.  There is a world of difference between the dysfunctional planned economy that Stalin built and bequeathed his heirs, which collapsed as soon as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform it, and the dynamic market economy in which we Americans take pride.  The Soviet system squandered resources and all but guaranteed shortages of consumer goods. The Soviet healthcare system was crippled by dilapidated hospitals and chronic shortages of equipment. There was grinding poverty, hunger, and child labor.  In America today, such conditions exist only in the bottom quintile of the economic distribution—though the extent to which they do exist is truly appalling. Infant mortality in the late Soviet Union was around 25 per 1,000. The figure for the U.S. in 2021 was 5.4, but for single mothers in the Mississippi Delta or Appalachia it is 13 per 1,000.  The comparison to the Soviet Union, you might argue, is nevertheless risible. Take a closer look.  A chronic “soft budget constraint” in the public sector was a key weakness of the Soviet system. I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future and to rise inexorably to 8.5 percent by 2054. The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration’s “industrial policy.” Economists keep promising us a productivity miracle from information technology, most recently AI. But the annual average growth rate of productivity in the U.S. nonfarm business sector has been stuck at just 1.5 percent since 2007, only marginally better than the dismal years 1973–1980. The U.S. economy might be the envy of the rest of the world today, but recall how American experts overrated the Soviet economy in the 1970s and 1980s. And yet, you insist, the Soviet Union was a sick man more than it was a superpower, whereas the United States has no equal in the realm of military technology and firepower.  Actually, no.  We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear. As I read Wicker’s report—and I recommend you do the same—I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and, therefore, most lethal military in the world. On paper, it was. But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of. It could not even win a war in Afghanistan, despite ten years of death and destruction. (Now, why does that sound familiar?) On paper, the U.S. defense budget does indeed exceed those of all the other members of NATO put together. But what does that defense budget actually buy us? As Wicker argues, not nearly enough to contend with the “Coalition Against Democracy” that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have been aggressively building.  In Wicker’s words: “America’s military has a lack of modern equipment, a paucity of training and maintenance funding, and a massive infrastructure backlog. . . . it is stretched too thin and outfitted too poorly to meet all the missions assigned to it at a reasonable level of risk. Our adversaries recognize this, and it makes them more adventurous and aggressive.” And, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the federal government will almost certainly spend more on debt service than on defense this year.  It gets worse.  According to the CBO, the share of gross domestic product going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041. This is partly because the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3 percent of GDP this year to a projected 2.3 percent in 30 years’ time. This decline makes no sense at a time when the threats posed by the new Chinese-led Axis are manifestly growing. Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.  But by current American standards, the later Soviet leaders were not old men. Brezhnev was 75 when he died in 1982, but he had suffered his first major stroke seven years before. Andropov was only 68 when he succeeded Brezhnev, but he suffered total kidney failure just a few months after taking over. Chernenko was 72 when he came to power. He was already a hopeless invalid, suffering from emphysema, heart failure, bronchitis, pleurisy, and pneumonia. It is a reflection of the quality of healthcare enjoyed by their American counterparts today that they are both older and healthier. Nevertheless, Joe Biden (81) and Donald Trump (78) are hardly men in the first flush of youth and vitality, as The Wall Street Journal recently made cringe-inducingly clear. The former cannot distinguish between his two Hispanic cabinet secretaries, Alejandro Mayorkas and Xavier Becerra. The latter muddles up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. If Kamala Harris has never watched The Death of Stalin, it’s not too late. Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. Leon Aron’s brilliant book Roads to the Temple shows just how wretched life had become in the 1980s.  In the great “return to truth” unleashed by Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, Soviet citizens were able to pour forth their discontents in letters to a suddenly free press. Some of what they wrote about was specific to the Soviet context—in particular, the revelations about the realities of Soviet history, especially the crimes of the Stalin era. But to reread Russians’ complaints about their lives in the 1980s is to come across more than a few eerie foreshadowings of the American present. In a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda from 1990, for example, a reader decried the “ghastly and tragic. . . loss of morality by a huge number of people living within the borders of the USSR.” Symptoms of moral debility included apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching. The entire country, he wrote, was suffocating in a “miasma of bare-faced and ceaseless public lies and demagoguery.” By July 1988, 44 percent of people polled by Moskovskie Novosti felt that theirs was an “unjust society.” Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979. It is now well known that younger Americans are suffering an epidemic of mental ill health—blamed by Jon Haidt and others on smartphones and social media—while older Americans are succumbing to “deaths of despair,” a phrase made famous by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. And while Case and Deaton focused on the surge in deaths of despair among white, middle-aged Americans—their work became the social-science complement to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy—more recent research shows that African Americans have caught up with their white contemporaries when it comes to overdose deaths. In 2022 alone, more Americans died of fentanyl overdoses than were killed in three major wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries. The main explanations, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, are a striking increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicide, and a rise in various diseases associated with obesity. To be precise, between 1990 and 2017 drugs and alcohol were responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths among the working-age population (aged 25 to 64). Suicide accounted for 569,099 deaths—again of working-age Americans—over the same period. Metabolic and cardiac causes of death, such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease, also surged in tandem with obesity.  This reversal of life expectancy simply isn’t happening in other developed countries.  Peter Sterling and Michael L. Platt argue in a recent paper that this is because West European countries, along with the United Kingdom and Australia, do more to “provide communal assistance at every stage [of life], thus facilitating diverse paths forward and protecting individuals and families from despair.” In the United States, by contrast, “Every symptom of despair has been defined as a disorder or dysregulation within the individual. This incorrectly frames the problem, forcing individuals to grapple on their own,” they write. “It also emphasizes treatment by pharmacology, providing innumerable drugs for anxiety, depression, anger, psychosis, and obesity, plus new drugs to treat addictions to the old drugs.” The mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase deaths of despairfor years has been ringing a faint bell in my head. This week I remembered where I had seen it before: in late Soviet and post–Soviet Russia. While male life expectancy improved in all Western countries in the late twentieth century, in the Soviet Union it began to decline after 1965, rallied briefly in the mid-1980s, and then fell off a cliff in the early 1990s, slumping again after the 1998 financial crisis. The death rate among Russian men aged 35 to 44, for example, more than doubled between 1989 and 1994.  The explanation is as clear as Stolichnaya. In July 1994, two Russian scholars, Alexander Nemtsov and Vladimir Shkolnikov, published an article in the national daily newspaper Izvestia with the memorable title “To Live or to Drink?” Nemtsov and Shkolnikov demonstrated (in the words of a recent review article) “an almost perfect negative linear relationship between these two indicators.” All they were missing was a sequel—“To Live or to Smoke?”—as lung cancer was the other big reason Soviet men died young. A culture of binge drinking and chain smoking was facilitated by the dirt-cheap prices of cigarettes under the Soviet regime and the dirt-cheap prices of alcohol after the collapse of communism.  The statistics are as shocking as the scenes I remember witnessing in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which made even my native Glasgow seem abstemious. An analysis of 25,000 autopsies conducted in Siberia in 1990–2004 showed that 21 percent of adult male deaths due to cardiovascular disease involved lethal or near-lethal levels of ethanol in the blood. Smoking accounted for a staggering 26 percent of all male deaths in Russia in 2001. Suicides among men aged 50 to 54 reached 140 per 100,000 population in 1994—compared with 39.2 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic American men aged 45 to 54 in 2015. In other words, Case and Deaton’s deaths of despair are a kind of pale imitation of the Russian version 20 to 40 years ago.  The self-destruction of homo sovieticus was worse. And yet is not the resemblance to the self-destruction of homo americanus the really striking thing? Of course, the two healthcare systems look superficially quite different. The Soviet system was just under-resourced. At the heart of the American healthcare disaster, by contrast, is a huge mismatch between expenditure—which is internationally unrivaled relative to GDP—and outcomes, which are terrible. But, like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy, brilliantly parodied by South Park in a recent episode—is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles. Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.  In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants and that the United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis had been in “the Great Patriotic War.” The truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude, while Stalin, who had started World War II on the same side as Hitler, utterly failed to foresee the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and then became the most brutal imperialist in his own right. The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.” In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.” As for the current direction of U.S. foreign policy, it is not so much to help other countries defend themselves as to egg on others to fight our adversaries as proxies without supplying them with sufficient weaponry to stand much chance of winning. This strategy—most visible in Ukraine—makes some sense for the United States, which discovered in the “global war on terror” that its much-vaunted military could not defeat even the ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort. But believing American blandishments may ultimately doom Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to follow South Vietnam and Afghanistan into oblivion.  As for climate change, the world is now awash in Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, and solar cells, all mass-produced with the help of state subsidies and coal-burning power stations. At least we tried to resist the Soviet strategy of unleashing Marxism-Leninism on the Third World, the human cost of which was almost incalculable. Our policy elite’s preoccupation with climate change has resulted in utter strategic incoherence by comparison. The fact is that China has been responsible for three-quarters of the 34% increase in carbon dioxide emissions since Greta Thunberg’s birth (2003) and two-thirds of the 48% increase in coal consumption. To see the extent of the gulf that now separates the American nomenklatura from the workers and peasants, consider the findings of a Rasmussen poll from last September, which sought to distinguish the attitudes of the Ivy Leaguers from ordinary Americans. The poll defined the former as “those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile,” and having attended “Ivy League schools or other elite private schools, including Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.”  Asked if they would favor “rationing of gas, meat, and electricity” to fight climate change, 89 percent of Ivy Leaguers said yes, as against 28 percent of regular people. Asked if they would personally pay $500 more in taxes and higher costs to fight climate change, 75 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said yes, versus 25 percent of everyone else. “Teachers should decide what students are taught, as opposed to parents” was a statement with which 71 percent of the Ivy Leaguers agreed, nearly double the share of average citizens. “Does the U.S. provide too much individual freedom?” More than half of Ivy Leaguers said yes versus just 15 percent of ordinary mortals. The elite were roughly twice as fond as everyone else of members of Congress, journalists, union leaders, and lawyers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 88 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said their personal finances were improving, as opposed to one in five of the general population.  A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition. The question that haunts me is: What if China has learned the lessons of Cold War I better than we have? I fear that Xi Jinping has not only understood that, at all costs, he must avoid the fate of his Soviet counterparts. He has also, more profoundly, understood that we can be maneuvered into being the Soviets ourselves. And what better way to achieve that than to “quarantine” an island not too far from his coastline and then defy us to send a naval expedition to run the blockade, with the obvious risk of starting World War III? The worst thing about the approaching Taiwan Semiconductor Crisis is that, compared with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the roles will be reversed. Biden or Trump gets to be Khrushchev; XJP gets to be JFK. (Just watch him prepping the narrative, telling European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that Washington is trying to goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan.) We can tell ourselves that our many contemporary pathologies are the results of outside forces waging a multi-decade campaign of subversion. They have undoubtedly tried, just as the CIA tried its best to subvert Soviet rule in the Cold War.  Yet we also need to contemplate the possibility that we have done this to ourselves—just as the Soviets did many of the same things to themselves. It was a common liberal worry during the Cold War that we might end up becoming as ruthless, secretive, and unaccountable as the Soviets because of the exigencies of the nuclear arms race. Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway. I still cling to the hope that we can avoid losing Cold War II—that the economic, demographic, and social pathologies that afflict all one-party communist regimes will ultimately doom Xi’s “China Dream.” But the higher the toll of deaths of despair rises—and the wider the gap grows between America’s nomenklatura and everyone else—the less confident I feel that our own homegrown pathologies will be slower-acting.  Are we the Soviets? Look around you. Niall Ferguson has two degrees from Oxford and has taught there as well as at Cambridge, NYU, the London School of Economics, and Harvard. He’s now a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He was recently knighted by King Charles. If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato

Israel Is Not Losing the War

Part Three 

By: Victor Davis Hanson

The Patriot Post

June 14, 2024

So, no wonder that about 80 percent of the American people support Israel’s efforts against Hamas, a margin that has stayed more or less constant since October 7, despite global elite and media condemnation of the Israeli entry into Gaza.

Biden keeps pandering to a quarter-million potential Arab American voters. Yet, it is not clear that Biden’s waffling between sending Israel aid and suspending it pleases the Democrats’ once solid Arab American base. Far more worrisome are the 4-6 million Jewish voters—traditionally 70 percent pro-Democrat—who may defect from the Democratic Party both as voters and donors given its pro-Gaza pandering.

Bottom line: Despite daily anti-Israel vitriol from the global media and undisguised hatred directed at conservative Prime Minister Netanyahu, public opinion here and in Israel supports the Israeli government’s effort to respond to October 7 by defeating and eradicating its enemies.

Note Hezbollah has displaced nearly 100,000 Israelis from their homes along the Lebanese border by launching a variety of missiles, rockets, and slow-moving drones. But here, too, Hezbollah is operating only opportunistically, given the war in Gaza. When that ends in an Israeli victory, and it will, Israel will have to turn its attention to Hezbollah which will not have a kindred deflective Hamas any longer on the opposite front. The Palestinian Authority will do nothing if Israel responds to Hezbollah. It likely hates the Shiites in Lebanon as much as their paymasters in Tehran. The two million Arab citizens of Israel will be more worried about ensuring their permanent residence in Israel than volunteering to fight for Hezbollah.

Iran ponders its recent exchange with Israel; 99% of its rocket and drone waves did not hit the target, while Israel’s symbolic response reminded the world it could hit anything in Iran with precision.

Moreover, there is a 55/45% chance that the most anti-Israeli administration in modern memory will be gone after January 20, 2025, replaced by one of the most pro-Israeli American governments in memory.

In short, Hezbollah will have to pull back and cease hammering the Israeli border, or Israel will replicate the 2006 destruction of Beirut—damage that only now, nearly two decades later, is being repaired. Beirut is broke, Iran’s proxies are targeted, and the next administration will reinstate an oil embargo on Iran.

In sum, the geostrategic outlook for Israelis is not nearly as bleak as predicted.

Hezbollah can do a lot of damage with 120,000 rockets and drones. But even such a nightmarish notion pales in comparison to what Israel can do to Hezbollah, its patron in Tehran, and its uneasy hosts in Beirut.

Public opinion remains solidly pro-Israel. The campus and street demonstrations on behalf of Hamas repelled, not enlisted, Americans to the cause.

Hamas is not just losing its war but its very existence. When Israel is done in Gaza, the population may hate Israel, but its wrath will turn on the idea of Hamas as well as it walks the rubble and cratered surface beneath which is a multibillion-dollar but now collapsed city

The so-called Arab moderate nations resent Shiite Persians using Arabs as proxy cannon fodder in their war against Israel and are waiting for the end of the Biden administration to reassert their hatred of Iran.

The slithering Joe Biden will likely inherit the worst of both worlds, turning off thousands of Michigan voters who may stay home while alienating even more Jewish voters by his disconnect from the reality that Israel was attacked at peace by medieval killers.

As far as the battlefield goes, Israel has a much better chance to destroy Hamas, neuter Hezbollah, and deter Iran than Ukraine does to survive the constant Russian aggression and escalation.

Yet, while Biden loudly boasts about his support of Kyiv, he grows quiet about Israel. 

Or is it worse yet? Biden demands from Israel—ceasefires, proportionality, notification of impending attacks, coalition governments, continuance of elections—what it would never demand of Ukraine.

And so, we end in Orwellian territory. Somehow, Israel is a renegade nation in the eyes of the American administration by responding to the greatest terrorist attack in its history and killing of some 30,000 terrorists, and without intent, their civilian shields—even as we are told Ukraine must press on in its war as it surpasses the casualties of Verdun on its way to outdo the butchery of the Somme.

How Left-wing Conspiracies Work

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

June 17, 2024

Since 2016, there has been a clear pattern to left-wing conspiracies—beyond the obvious fact that they traffic in lies, stereotypes, and paranoia to serve precise political agendas.

We now know that the conspiracy to cook up the Russian collusion hoax—Donald Trump allegedly conniving with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 vote—was perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Its funding was hidden by the Democratic National Committee, the law firm Perkins Coie, and Fusion GPS.

The Russian “disinformation” laptop hoax—the notion that the same Russians four years later created a fake Hunter Biden laptop to smear the Biden family on the eve of the first 2020 debate—was jumpstarted by the Biden campaign’s then-chief foreign policy advisor, current Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

There was never much evidence that a wayward bat or pangolin in a meat market birthed the COVID-19 pandemic, despite the efforts of China, Western and international health officials, and Dr. Fauci’s health bureaucrats to spread that lie.

The January 6th riot was certainly wrong and buffoonish. But the idea that it was an insurrection aiming to overthrow the U.S. government violently was also a left-wing myth fueled by the Democratic House leadership and the media.

All these schemes have their commonalities:

1) They are aimed at achieving political objectives.

False claims of Russian collusion likely drained millions of votes from the 2016 Trump candidacy.

A later conservative poll found that Russian disinformation may have swung enough voters to ensure a 2020 Trump loss. It certainly saved Joe Biden in the first debate when he faced the American people and flat-out lied about the laptop, quoting “experts” that his team had rounded up to legitimize his obvious untruths.

The last thing the global health community wanted was to confront China about its culpability for killing millions worldwide. And what the Fauci health conglomerate most feared was the airing of the truth that U.S. “scientists” had helped fund and enhance quite dangerous, understandably outlawed, viral gain-of-function research at a Chinese lab soon to be run by the People’s Liberation Army. These functionaries’ clear hatred of President Trump was a subtext to their distortions and lies that only a complete shutdown of the U.S. economy could save America from millions of unnecessary deaths. In other words, for well over two years, anyone who dared suggest a laboratory origin for COVID was pilloried, while the accusers privately knew that it was likely true and that they were complicit.

The January 6th myth—that conservatives were violent insurrectionaries—led to the most extraordinary militarization of Washington, DC, since the Civil War. Barbed wire and fencing around all the major tourist spots helped advance the myth of a besieged nation that Joe Biden, that old moderate, would heal from the existential threats birthed by the soon-to-be-impeached-twice Donald Trump.

2) These conspiracies involved the most powerful U.S. government agencies.

James Comey’s FBI altered a FISA warrant. Comey misled the president of the United States, lying that the latter was not the target of an FBI investigation while leaking confidential, if not classified, documents. The FBI hired foreign national Christopher Steele to compile dirt on a presidential candidate. The FBI’s Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Andrew McCabe, and James Baker were knee-deep in efforts to leak the dossier and other disinformation to ensure Trump was not elected. The CIA’s John Brennan and the Department of Justice’s Loretta Lynch were well aware of their agencies’ involvement in fueling the slander.

Fifty-one former “intelligence authorities” brazenly lied in 2020 when they signed a letter claiming that the Biden laptop—then in the possession of the FBI, which knew of its authenticity—had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. Grandee signatories like James Clapper, John Brennan, Michael Hayden, and Leon Panetta had no evidence that the laptop had anything to do with the Russians. Lots of contacts in the FBI confirmed that it did not. Yet they signed their names and, in doing so, ruined their former agencies’ credibility, all for the short-term agenda of getting Joe Biden elected.

From 2020 to 2023, at the height of the pandemic, the main players in the U.S. health apparatus—the NIH, the CDC, and the NIAID—all created narratives that were blatant lies, or at least had no evidence to sustain them. There was never clear-cut evidence for the bat/pangolin theory of COVID genesis, for state-imposed mass masking and social distancing as scientifically-proven effective tools to control the pandemic, for the assurance that a national quarantine would do far less damage than the virus, and for the idea that experimental mRNA coronavirus vaccinations and their serial boosters in the long term would prevent the vaccinated from being either infected or infectious.

The reaction to the January 6th riot was likely politicized by the Speaker of the House, the Pentagon, and the Capitol Police on the theory that the small number of violent rioters, if left to run amok and then severely punished after show trials in federal courts, would do lasting damage to the conservative cause and Donald Trump in particular.

3) The media conspired with government agencies to spread the hoaxes.

On the eve of the 2016 election and in its aftermath, Buzzfeed, CNN, the Washington Post, and other news outlets all rushed to leak the most salacious made-up smears from the Steele dossier, fed to them by the FBI and other government officials. Their unsourced yellow journalism soon ensured the ill-fated Mueller investigation that was designed, quite successfully, to derail or slow the early Trump administration agenda.

In 2020, top members of the FBI partnered with social media companies, especially Twitter and Facebook, to censor news that contradicted the yarn that the Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

While Anthony Fauci and his team, along with officials at the CDC and NIH, were furiously corresponding to tamp down any suggestion of a lab-leak origin for COVID or that their own policies were scientifically unproven, the media was fed their heroic stories and spread them as gospel.

As a result, the nation was assured that Fauci et al. stood for “science,”and their skeptics were little more than ultra-MAGA, Trumpist yahoos. The old, time-tested, safe, and life-saving Ivermectin, well aside from the debate over its actual efficacy in treating COVID, was rendered a dangerous “horse dewormer,” while the mRNA vaccines were deemed perfectly safe for young, healthy men, despite being in little danger from COVID but susceptible to vaccination-caused myocarditis.

So effective were our bureaucrats in using the media in their propaganda that ancient canons of medical science—viruses can indeed provide valuable natural immunity; vaccines are of only temporary efficacy against the quickly mutating coronaviruses; complete nationwide quarantines would lead to untenable social, economic, and political damage; viral pandemics are unlikely to be of direct animal origin if the virus has never been observed in an animal prior to human infections, etc.—were often mocked as self-interested pseudoscience.

The media ensured that reports of numerous FBI informants present on January 6 were suppressed. They also smothered evidence that the loaded January 6th congressional committee was manipulating evidence, suppressing testimonies, and deliberately not interviewing inconvenient witnesses.

Instead, the media ran with wild lies of violent and often-armed “insurrectionists” who had long planned a systematic takeover and who had succeeded in killing “five law enforcement officers” (only one, Brian Sicknick, died—a day later on January 7, from natural causes). The media smeared the name and reputation of the unarmed Ashli Babbitt, killed while going through a broken window into the Capitol, and then hid the name of the Capitol Police officer who had lethally shot her.

4) Few, if any, in the media or the government were ever punished for their conspiracies to create and spread such complete fabrications.

Few at CNN who spread the Russian collusion lie were ever permanently punished. No Pulitzer Prizes for such false coverage were revoked. James Comey (claiming amnesia 245 times while under congressional oath), James Clapper (previously lying under congressional oath), John Brennan (previously lying twice while under congressional oath), and Andrew McCabe (repeatedly lying to federal investigators) were never formally charged—unlike those who went to jail after falsely being indicted for collusion. All instead used their liberal notoriety to land lucrative network consultantships or book deals—and to persist in the Russian collusion hoax.

None of the 51 intelligence authorities who lied to the nation and thereby helped warp an election have ever retracted their statements, much less apologized. All knew then, and are currently without a doubt after Hunter Biden’s conviction, that his laptop and contents were not just authentic but proven to be so by the FBI. Barring apologies, the assumption remains that they believe their misinformation and disinformation led to Joe Biden’s election and, thus, that their noble ends were properly justified by any means necessary.

Dr. Francis Collins, Dr. Fauci, and his lieutenants, Peter Daszak, and a string of others have never been formally disciplined for their efforts to spread misinformation that likely contributed to tens of thousands of deaths from the unwarranted national lockdowns. Even to this day, Dr. Fauci insists U.S. funding for Wuhan had nothing to do with gain-of-function research and still does not concede that it is almost certain that the virus originated in the lab.

From the above, we can assume that conspiracies successfully achieve left-wing goals. Bureaucracies used hoaxes against conservatives and Republican candidates. They are spread like wildfire by a corrupt media and, when exposed and refuted, rarely lead to legal culpability or disgrace rather than publicity-driven lucrative post-scandal employment.

One chief common trait is projection. By accusing others of high crimes and misdemeanors, the conspirators become exempt from criminal charges.

ü Hillary Clinton and her campaign were never charged with illegally hiring a foreign national to draw on Russian sources to smear their 2016 campaign opponent.

ü The Biden campaign was never held accountable for conspiring to organize so-called retired intelligence experts to formally lie to the American people to influence an election.

ü High officials of the U.S. government lied under oath with impunity about their role in funding gain-of-function research after conspiring to circumvent U.S. law prohibiting such research.

ü U.S. elected and bureaucratic officials deliberately suppressed the use of law enforcement on January 6 despite the ensuing lax security, warped a U.S. House committee investigation, and used the Washington D.C. court system to convict hundreds for dubious crimes in order to use their convictions and prison terms for political agendas.

No wonder, then, that we should expect some sort of similar hoax to arise before the 2024 election. Do not be surprised when told of a “secret” Trump plan uncovered to round up critics in 2025 and send them to “camps,” or lurid revelations about “evidence” that Trump is in worse physical and mental shape than is a debilitated Biden, or some fantastic MAGA plot to implement “voter suppression,” or allegations that the Trump campaign’s “dark money” involves“collusion,” “disinformation,” and “sinister foreign actors.”

When we hear such things in the months to come, remember that these mythologies are usually a warning: what the left is alleging is, quite often, precisely what the left is already doing.

June 11, 2024Special Edition The End of Everything. History Becomes Now? By: Victor Davis Hanson(Emphasis added) Part One: Why Are Civilizations Erased? – May 28, 2024I wrote The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation out of curiosity about why, on rare conditions, wars don’t just end in the capitulation of the defeated, the occupation or annexation of their homelands, or the victors’ demands to pay reparations or fines. Rather, they sometimes cease only with the complete erasure of the civilization, language, religion, and soon even the memory of the vanquished. There are occasional cases of such annihilation from antiquity—Philip II’s obliteration of Olynthus or the Athenians’ destruction of the Melians—and a few from later times (the disappearance of the Incas by Pizarro and the Spanish or the two-centuries-long Indian wars that resulted in the destruction of Native American civilization as an autonomous culture. But I was more interested in large civilizations that ended abruptly through war, within a day, a month, or two to three years. I chose four examples in The End of Everything—the eradication of the classical Thebans by the Macedonian Alexander the Great (335 BC), the flattening and disappearance of Carthage by Scipio Aemilianus and the Romans (149–146 BC), the Ottoman destruction of Byzantine civilization and absorption of Constantinople (May 29, 1453), and the Spanish destruction of the Aztecs and their capital at Tenochtitlán by Hernán Cortés. In the next five essays, I will briefly summarize some portions of the book’s contents and four case studies in our readings, ending with the epilogue that suggests that even now (or especially now?), the inconceivable can become all too real. What will follow are not excerpts from the book but summaries designed for these essays. I note in the aftermath chapter of the book that while human nature and its precivilizational savagery (cf. October 7) have not changed much, the delivery systems of destruction—nuclear, biological, chemical, and artificial intelligence (?)—have become ever more lethal and increasingly not so controllable. And that should terrify us given the Alexanders, Scipios, and Mehmets in our contemporary midst. But for now, what commonalities did all these targeted, doomed civilizations and their destroyers share? Here is a sampling of a few of the many delusions discussed in the book that helped to obliterate the losers. First, the defeated were in a state of denial about the exact status of their own vulnerability and insidious and ongoing decline, which were apparent to their conquerors but not to themselves. Thebes was the most hallowed Greek city of myth and legend (Antigone, Oedipus, and Cadmus), and forty years earlier, it had unchallenged preeminence among the city-states under the great liberator Epaminondas. But Thebes of the past was not Thebes of the present. Its walls were not as invincible as the “seven-gated” Thebes of the Athenian stage. It had lost the terrible battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) to Philip and Alexander just three years earlier, and it was racked by internal divisions. Carthage was similar. After two prior lost wars, it was reduced to a commercial city without an empire, a sort of Singapore—rich, lavish, but militarily largely impotent. Its walls had never been breached. But then again, no army had ever landed, 80,000 strong, much less one like the Romans. The Constantinople of 1453 was hardly the city of even a century earlier, much less the million-person citadel and bulwark of Christendom, Hellenism, and Western Civilization since the time of its founder Constantine the Great and its later renaissance under Justinian. It had stood indomitable and unassailable for a millennium. The Byzantines bragged that its land walls had never been overwhelmed (the Fourth Crusaders came in on the seaside). Ditto the Venetian-like city of Tenochtitlán. It may have been the capital of a four-million-person Aztec empire. However, the Aztecs struggled with increasingly dissident subjects and an array of enemies, even prior to the 1519 arrival of the Spanish in Mexico. Second, the doomed believed that allies, friends, and compatriots would surely appear at the eleventh hour and save their iconic cities. Would not the Spartans and Athenians save Greece’s most hallowed city? (Not if it meant their own destruction.) Would not the Macedonians attack the Romans to the rear and relieve the pressure off the besieged in Africa? (But why die for Carthage?) Would not a Christian fleet, perhaps led by the invincible Venetians, sail up the Dardanelles and, at the last minute, swarm the Ottoman besiegers from the rear? (But why would self-interested Roman Catholics die for what they considered were Eastern Orthodox apostates?) Would not the vast armies of the Aztec Empire throng to the capital to wipe out Cortés’s pitiful force in a common alliance of indigenous Mexica against these white strangers and their Tlaxcalan stooges? (But why help a murderous regime that yearly sacrificed hundreds of the youth of allied cities?) Third, in all these cases, the soon-to-be erased had no idea of their attackers’ genius or murderousness. Was not Alexander the Great tutored by Aristotle? And how could a distant Macedonian army reach Thebes quickly, much less build siege engines ex nihilo to take down the city? Did not Scipio Aemilianus have the renowned historian Polybius at his side, and wasn’t he a student of Homer? Wasn’t it true that Mehmet II bragged of his vast library and surely would not wish to wipe out a kindred storehouse of great literature and science? Did not Cortés express promises of friendship, and would not his wonderous technology be put to good use as a new partner to further enhance the mystical capital on the lake? So, the targeted clung to the inconceivable, when the terrible and very likely stared them in the face. Part Two: Target Thebes, 335 BC – May 29, 2024As the power of the fifth-century Athenian and fourth-century Spartan empires declined, and after Sparta’s stunning defeat at the battle of Leuctra (371 BC), the most ancient of the Greek city-states, Thebes, proved re-ascendant. For more than a decade, under the twin leadership of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, it dominated the politics and wars of the classical Greeks. Thebes had defeated Sparta, invaded its supposedly inviolate homeland, freed the Messenian helots, democratized much of the Peloponnese, and anchored the Panhellenic resistance to Macedonian aggression. But by the time of the Macedonian victory over Greece at Chaeronea (338 BC), both Theban generals had been dead for over two decades, and the city’s prestige rested largely on the fumes of its past glory. So, the city, too, came under the domination of the Macedonians, as did all other Greek city-states. Yet in 336 BC, the 46-year-old conqueror of Greece, the Macedonian Philip II, was assassinated. Ebullition broke out on the rumors of his demise. The 1,500 Greek city-states immediately sensed liberation was at hand. Rumors that Alexander, Philip II’s son, was also murdered next reached Greece. Dynastic chaos supposedly was now engulfing Macedon and sparked renewed resistance. The Thebans, with visions of past grandeur, attacked and imprisoned the occupying Macedonian garrison. They rashly declared their independence and announced that all Greece would be free and would follow their prompt. Supposedly, allied armies from the Peloponnese, led by Sparta, were soon on the move to join the upstart Thebes. The Athenian orator Demosthenes swooned with the news and promised Athenian help. But soon, darker rumors reached Greece. The 21-year-old Alexander, who had fought alongside his father at Chaeronea just three years earlier, was not only not dead, but he had already squashed his numerous rival relatives, old-guard generals, and would-be claimants. Indeed, Alexander was not only now the new successor king of Thebes but also reportedly on his way southward to put down the Greek rebellion some 250 miles distant. And then, in less than two weeks, Alexander, to the amazement of all, actually showed up outside the walls of Thebes with 30,000 battle-hardened Macedonians to cut off the head of the rebellion. He delivered ultimata to release the hostage Macedonians inside the walls,  surrender the city, turn over the firebrand insurrectionists, and thereby save Thebes and see it return as a calm and safe subject city of the soon-to-be global Macedonian empire. He waited only three days as he prepared his assault. The Thebans rejected all those terms. They even insulted Alexander and dared him to take the city. The Macedonians furiously had built siege engines (rams and catapults), massed their phalanx outside the walls, and were now determined to storm the walls and erase Thebes from existence—and so remind the other Greeks of the eliminationist wages of resistance. Then suddenly, as Thebes was surrounded, help from Athens evaporated. The Peloponnesian armies that had reached the Isthmus of Corinth and were not far away suddenly turned around and went home. Thebes was alone. It nevertheless rejected terms and sent its own hallowed phalanx out to fight the Macedonians beyond the walls. What followed was predictable. The deadly Macedonian phalanx pushed the Thebans back into the city, collapsing resistance. Then the entire besieging army broke through and ransacked the city, murdering 6,000 soldiers and civilians and capturing at least 30,000 surviving women, children, and elderly—all at a loss of 500 Macedonians. Alexander enslaved and sold off almost all the survivors. He unleashed the men of rival and hostile nearby city-states who had historically hated the Thebans to ravage the city, murder any hide-out survivors, and loot the countryside. Alexander then leveled all the buildings of hallowed Thebes except for the house of the iconic poet Pindar and some religious shrines. He recovered a small fortune from the sale of the now-enslaved surviving Thebans. As a result, there were now no Thebes, no Thebans, and little reminders of the 1,100-year-old city. As a postscript, the Macedonian regent Cassander, twenty years later, eight years after the death of Alexander himself, founded a new Macedonian Thebes on the rubble, as a simulacrum of the vanquished ancient city and its people who had long disappeared into history. It was said later that Alexander regretted his extermination and that the Macedonian successors had founded their own city of Thebes in homage to the end of mythical Thebes as a way to ingratiate themselves with the Greek city-states. Rumors spread that a few old Thebans had escaped the original siege, found sanctuaries as exiles from the city, and now drifted back to the Macedonian surrogate city. What explains the last hours of the doomed ancient city? Naïve reliance on fickle allies? Nearly inexplicable ignorance about the true aims and capability of the new young king Alexander? A belief that Thebes was the Thebes of old and that the city-state system of Greece was still vibrant and dynamic? All that and more ensured the annihilation. And so disappeared from history the celebrated home to Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy (Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus) and Euripides’ Bacchae. So, the city and culture that had produced Pindar, Pelopidas, and Epaminondas came to an end, whose memory now lingered only on the Athenian stage. Part Three: The Deletion of Carthage, 146 BC – May 31, 2024Carthage fought and lost two Punic wars against Rome (264 BC–201 BC). After the end of the Hannibalic War (201), the city lost almost all its empire and many of its North African alliances and was forced to pay Rome huge fines. Yet a mere half-century later, by 149 BC, Carthage was once again ascendant. A Roman visiting fact-finding mission returned home terrified, confirming the pessimism of the old Senator Cato, who had finished every speech with Carthago delenda est (“Carthage must be destroyed”). The diplomats had gazed upon a huge city of 500,000, lavish and rich from Mediterranean trade, safe within its massive walls, and seemingly stronger than even its defeated predecessors. Worse, Carthage was now free after paying off all its indemnities early. In the eyes of the Roman Senate, a somnolent monster was about to reawaken and abort Rome’s fated mission of ruling the entire Mediterranean. In truth, however, Carthage was a commercial city, not a maritime or naval empire anymore, set on the conquest of the Western Mediterranean. No matter, the paranoid Romans still clung to the nightmare of full-scale war against a resurgent Carthage that would resume aggression akin to Hannibal’s rampages for nearly two decades inside Italy. So, in 149 BC, a huge Roman fleet of perhaps 80,000 sailors and soldiers, led by the initial two consuls Manilius and Censorinus, landed at Utica not far from the indomitable walls of Carthage. The envoys demanded the Carthaginians turn over all their weapons, including their legendary elephants. The dutiful city complied. But then, the Romans interpreted such obedience as weakness to be further exploited rather than to be reciprocated with magnanimity. So, the consuls presented even more demands from the Senate, including the destruction of the city and its relocation at least 10 miles from the sea. The Carthaginians finally chose resistance to the absurd ultimatum. A furious mob picked new leaders, including the firebrand Hasdrubal (probably no relation to Hannibal’s brother of that name), and hunkered down for the siege. For two years, the consuls failed to cut off the city from its tributary nearby towns that supplied it with provisions. The legendary walls of Carthage, 30 feet thick and towering 70 feet in some sections, remained impenetrable. Cavalry forays from the city took a toll on the weary Roman besiegers camped outside. Finally, the Senate acted and recalled a second set of incompetent generals headed by another mediocre consul, Caesoninus. In their place, the Senate appointed the young Scipio Aemilianus, the adopted grandson of the famous Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Hannibal in the Second Punic War. Upon Scipio’s return, the entire complexion of the war began to change. He reinstituted discipline among the Roman ranks, drummed out slackers and the sick, bought off or coerced allied cities to cut off supplies to the Carthaginians, and soon walled off the great peninsular city from the mainland. Then, he moved up his siege engines and began creating fissures in the walls. Finally, after a desperate year of fighting, Scipio entered the city, finding, after three years of resistance, rampant starvation and disease. Most of the surviving population was holed up in the upper citadel and had to be pried out of fortified houses. What followed was an utter bloodbath. Well over 400,000 had perished. Some 50,000 survivors were enslaved on the last day of the assault. The legions systematically sectioned off the survivors and block-by-block killed every living thing they found. The city was reduced to rubble (though the ground was not salted as legend insists), and its flotsam and jetsam were plowed under. So ended Carthage of some 800 years. With its demise disappeared the Punic language, religion, and traditions in North Africa. Why had not Carthage comprehended its peril? Appeasers had kept convincing the population that one more yielding would satisfy the Romans, when in fact, such obeyance and compliance only whetted the Roman appetite for more. Some clung to the fantasy that the Macedonian firebrand Andriskos might win his war against Rome in the Balkans. According to such vain hopes, surely Rome would recall its generals to redeploy the huge expeditionary African army across the Mediterranean to put down a Macedonian uprising. Few Carthaginians comprehended that the Rome of 146 BC was hardly the poorer and smaller Rome that their grandfathers had fought 118 years earlier but was now poised to control both the Western and Eastern Mediterranean (and indeed would reduce Corinth to rubble almost at the same time it leveled Carthage). Some Carthaginians believed that their allied cities of North Africa would never betray them, nor would their walls ever be breached. Both were pipe dreams, given no foreign army had ever approximated the size and professionalism of Scipio’s besiegers. Nor did Carthage comprehend the diplomatic genius of Scipio, who was offering amnesties, grants, and perpetual Roman alliances and protection for any Punic city that would forsake Carthage and cut off the mother city from the mainland. So, in the end, what followed was the surreal scene of the destroyer Scipio, watching his men’s final sacking of Carthage, at his side his brilliant friend, the Greek historian Polybius. The historian Appian tells us that Scipio began to cry crocodile tears amid quoting passages from Homer about the fate of a doomed Troy—as if he had regretted the mass death that he ensured. Part Four: The End of the Byzantines, 1453 – June 4, 2024Despite bouts of destructive bubonic plague, the pillaging of the city by fellow Christians from Western Europe during the aborted Fourth Crusade (1204), and a tidal wave of Turkish invasions that finally under the Ottoman Sultanate had surrounded Constantinople, the eternal city of 1453 and its vestigial outlands still held out. Under its last emperor, Constantine XI, the embattled capital remained determined to keep what was left of its once grand Byzantine empire and thereby remain the Christian, Hellenic, Greek-speaking guarantor of Romanity in the East. Outside the walls, at the head of a huge army that with attendants might have numbered somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000, Mehmet II, the new 21-year-old sultan, was assured that even the massive Theodosian walls, the greatest fortifications of the ancient and medieval worlds, would fall to his cannons, his Janissaries, and his horde of conquered Christians and Turkish peasants. The city, he knew, was boxed in, a mere 50,000 still inside the walls. To the east, the Bosporus passage to the Black Sea was now blocked by Ottoman forts on both sides of the strait. To the west and the wider Mediterranean, the Dardanelles, the ancient Hellespont, was likewise cut off, patrolled by Ottoman galleys that were protected by forts on both sides of the channel. Prior sultans had largely left alone the once one-million-person Christian city, convinced it would eventually fall without the need to lose tens of thousands butting against the legendary walls. But Mehmet was young, hasty, and inherited an empire at its near apex, already consolidating almost all the old Asian and Balkan empires of the Byzantines. And yet here it still was, stalled after two months, with summer looming, while the city remained defiant and intact, given some 50,000 Ottoman attackers were already dead. Finally, on May 29, 1453 (“Black Tuesday”), the sultan’s generals asked for one last assault on the worn-out defenders on the ramparts. For most of the day, the subsequent waves of Muslim soldiers broke, pelted from far above by gunfire, arrows, rocks, and oil—until the anchor of the Byzantine defense, the Genovese mercenary Giovanni Giustiniani, fell wounded and was carried off to his anchored ships. The result of his absence and the disappearance of his bodyguard was a sudden panic on the walls, as swaths of the ramparts were left unguarded when the Genovese retreated. Immediately in response, the Janissaries focused on the gaps, now redoubled their efforts, scaled the walls, and almost instantly collapsed the Byzantine defense of the inner walls. What followed were three days of looting, destruction, slaughter, rape, torture, and hostage-taking. When it was over, Sultan Mehmet II assumed control of the city, executed many of its most prominent survivors, and sent captive rich boys and girls to his harem. He finally saved a few of the inhabitants once he discovered a need for expert Byzantines and Italians to restore urban services and help transform the 1,100-year-old Roman and then Byzantine city into the Islamic capital of an ascendant Muslim empire. Could Constantinople have survived? It certainly had endured this far—even in a weakened state for over 200 years after the recovery of much that was lost to the Franks and Venetians after the Fourth Crusade. Had the Western Christians sent a small army of even 20,000, with plentiful cannons and gunpower, or had a fleet of 100 Venetian galleys arrived, or had East and West agreed to cease their religious differences and reunited Christianity, then certainly the Sultan would have failed. Instead, a millennium of civilization disappeared. Within 40 years, most of the Greek-speaking surviving scattered enclaves in mainland Greece, the Balkans, and along the Black Sea shoreline were conquered, wiped out, and vanished. For the next century-and-a-half, the Sultanate systematically swept away Byzantine culture from the Mediterranean Crete to the Dodecanese Islands, ensuring that Asia at least would be forever non-European. It is easy to talk pejoratively of “Byzantine”—a modern synonym for bureaucratic rot. In truth, the eastern, Greek-speaking half of the Roman Empire survived for a millennium, even as its western half fell. It was in Constantinople that most of the classical Greek texts from antiquity survived, where the greatest cathedral in the Christian world, the emperor Justinian’s Hagia Sophia (the church of “Holy Wisdom”), had remained the world’s largest and most impressive church for over a thousand years, and where the modern European tradition of a codified set of laws was first established. Yet the road to May 29 was familiar from earlier civilizational erasures. There was a sense of Byzantine complacency, of denial that what had never fallen and never been breached would somehow endure—if perhaps in extremis descending archangels would save their favorite emperor and city. In reality, the city was broken, its population fractious and scattered, distrustful of Western Christians as much as of Muslims, and the too few defenders squabbling and torn by internal strife. Even during the last week of the city’s life, after nearly two months of heroic but increasingly doomed defense, those on the walls believed they would still see any day a Western fleet of savior Christians, no doubt fighting their way through the Ottoman fleet and rescuing the city. Surely, the Pope would not let the bulwark of Christendom fall and thereby expose Europe to the Islamic onslaught. For too long, Constantinople’s elite underestimated the young sultan. They naively assumed that he was to be like his father and earlier rulers, who preferred to allow the overripe city to fall into their laps in a few generations rather than lose thousands trying to storm it. Only too late did Constantine XI realize that Mehmet II was a destroyer, determined to be enshrined in Islamic memory as the hero who finally expunged ancient Christianity from Asia. Part Five: The Annihilation of the Aztecs, 1521 –  June 5, 2024Hernán Cortés was an unlikely conqueror of civilizations. He was born into a middle-class Castilian family and left Spain just 12 years after the European discovery of the New World. At 18, the young Cortés planned to get rich, acquire estates, and thus advance in the New World’s Spanish elite hierarchy—in a way impossible back in an impoverished Castille. But after landing in what is now the Dominican Republic, Cortés languished for some 15 years as a ne’er-do-well estate owner and minor official—before gaining permission in his mid-thirties to explore the vast but mostly unknown lands of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America. Based on rumors of a vast, rich civilization in the heartlands of modern-day Mexico, Cortés landed in what is now Vera Cruz, on the eastern coast of Mexico, in February 1519. He immediately ordered his small army inland, following rumor and occasional guides for some 250 miles, until he entered the vast city-upon-the-lake, Tenochtitlán, the capital of a four-million-person empire, known then as the domain of the Mexica, now as the Aztecs. For the next few months, the rag-tag band of some 500 Spanish conquistadors, at times augmented by a thousand or so Tlaxcalan indigenous allies who deeply resented their subservience to the Aztecs, camped out in Tenochtitlán under careful scrutiny if not at times confinement. The city was deemed nearly invulnerable to outside attack, a Venice-like island hub on a vast lake protected by various intricate levies, locks, and causeways. After several months, the initial wonder disappeared from both sides. The Mexica no longer saw the bizarre Spanish interlopers as deities, demi-gods, or a supernatural race—despite their strange steel armor, Toledo blades, cannon, harquebuses, crossbows, horses, huge mastiff dogs, and strange white appearance. The Spanish seemed altogether a different species from the Aztecs, at least as perceived in their practice of Catholicism, lust for gold, repugnance for human sacrifice, cannibalism, sodomy, and various frightening Aztec gods. Cortés, whether in transit or camped in Tenochtitlán, was under constant danger from increasingly angry Aztecs to a second Spanish expedition sent to Vera Cruz to arrest the insubordinate upstart. Yet he surmounted all such challenges—at least for a few months—by flipping the newcomer Spanish contingent to his own side, and thus augmenting his tiny conquistador force inside Tenochtitlán to some 1,500 while taking hostage the emperor Montezuma II himself. And then everything fell apart. His firebrand subordinate Pedro Alvarado, in the absence of Cortés, had murdered hundreds of Aztec festival goers. The bloodbath aroused the entire population of the city proper, somewhere between 200,000-300,000, well apart from the allied and subject lake tribes. In what followed and became known as the Noche Triste (“Mournful Night”),the Spanish attempted a secret flight from their confinement amid storm and darkness along the causeways to the mainland. It proved a disaster. Some 600-800 Spanish were captured or killed, and hundreds were subsequently sacrificed at the city’s center—and eaten. For a year, Cortés’s once hopeful expedition was written off as an ungodly disaster. He fled to his only remaining allies, the Tlaxcalans—his remnant force wounded, sick, and eager to sail back to Cuba. Yet somehow, Cortés regrouped, restored morale, was resupplied with men and materials, built a fleet of small ships, disassembled them, transported the brigantines over the mountains to Lake Texcoco, and launched his navy against the city. He then waged a combined land and sea attack over the causeways, bolstered by tens of thousands of Tlaxcalans eager for revenge against their Aztec nemeses. Outbreaks of smallpox, malaria, and whooping cough decimated the Aztecs, who found themselves increasingly alone, as thousands of their allies either stayed home or began slowly to join what was thought to be the eventual winning Spanish side. Like the false regrets of Alexander and Scipio, Cortés, in his official reports to the Spanish crown, claimed he had the intention of destroying the city block by block but preferred to keep it intact as an indigenous jewel in the new Spanish province of Mexico. Perhaps. But when he was done, hundreds of thousands of Aztecs were butchered, more enslaved, the city leveled, and Aztec religion, dialect, traditions, and customs increasingly forgotten and relegated to isolated settlements of native peoples who remembered only in folklore and myth the once wondrous city on the lake. Again, Cortés never at one time had more than 1,500 conquistadors. So, how did he destroy an enormous empire? The Aztecs had no idea with whom they were dealing and missed several chances to kill Cortés and his small band when they were holed up on their initial visit to the city. They had little way of knowing that Castilian conquistadors were some of the most fearsome warriors of sixteenth-century Europe, honed by decades of warring against the Muslims of Spain during the Reconquista and fighting nonstop against Protestant enemies of northern Europe as well as Italian rivals. And more unfortunately for them, Hernán Cortés was an unlikely but undeniably natural leader, a military genius who far surpassed his contemporaries in talent, courage, and sheer audacity. Nor did Aztec leaders calibrate how hated they were by their subjects, given their yearly harvests of thousands of captives for sacrifice to their hungry gods and their constant demands for tribute. One of the more amazing aspects of the Spanish conquest of the New World is how a Spanish interloper was seen as the salvation of thousands of indigenous peoples rather than their own kindred Nahuatl overseers. “Cultural confusion” is often used to explain the abject dichotomy between the Spanish and the Aztecs: the Europeans fought to kill, take ground, and break the will of the enemy; the Aztecs often engaged in “flower wars” to hit, stun, bind, and capture human fodder for their mass human sacrifices at Templo Major. Moreover, they never fully understood the advantages in such Western wars that steel blades and armor, cavalry, gunpowder weapons, and crossbows gave the vastly outnumbered Spanish in conflict against warriors who often fought individually, without formation, protected by cloth, and equipped with sharp obsidian blades whose edges dulled after a few blows. Like “new” Thebes, “new” Carthage, and “new” Kostantiniyye (later Istanbul), a new Mexico City was built atop the center of Tenochtitlán. But it was a city founded not on similar but antithetical protocols to its flattened and soon forgotten predecessor. Part Six: Is Civilizational Erasure Possible Today? – June 7, 2024We saw on October 7 unprovoked mass slaughter, rape, torture, mutilation, decapitation, and hostage-taking, and agreed that human nature has not changed much since the era of the Aztecs or Macedonians. But the delivery systems of mass death—nuclear, chemical, biological, and the use of artificial intelligence—have evolved far beyond the muscular strength of the old, resulting in the specter of instantaneous and comprehensive mass death. True, civilizational annihilation, as we saw in the past, is the rare exception, not the rule of the victors’ terms to the defeated. Even the defeated and murderous Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were recalibrated into democracies rather than erased as peoples. Yet currently, there are five autocratic nuclear powers (counting Iran)—as numerous as those democratic (U.S., U.K., France, India, and Israel). And those threatening to use such nihilist weapons include almost all the dictatorial nuclear clubs. Iran routinely threatens to obliterate Israel and, for the first time in history, hit the Israeli homeland with a huge swarm of 320 cruise and ballistic missiles and drones. (About half the ballistic missiles failed to launch or imploded en route). Threats to launch nuclear weapons rather than lose Ukraine have come thick and fast from Russian generals, media blowhards, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and former president Dmitry Medvedev (e.g., “Attempts to restore Russia’s 1991 borders will lead only to one thing—a global war with Western countries with the use of our entire strategic [nuclear] arsenal against Kyiv, Berlin, London, and Washington. And against all other beautiful historic places that have long been included in the flight targets of our nuclear triad.”). There is no need to list all the targets that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has threatened to nuke. Periodically, Pakistan talks of resorting to nuclear weapons to overcome India’s strategic and demographic advantages. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has produced an entire corpus of existential threats—to use the remedies of his grandfathers to deal with the Armenians, to rain down a storm of missiles on Athens, and to “come at any night unexpectedly” against Israel. China threatened to nuke Japan if it were to help Taiwan and issued a snuff video of such an envisioned strike against Japan, with a warning: “When we liberate Taiwan, if Japan dares to intervene by force, even if it only deploys one soldier, one plane, and one ship, we will not only return reciprocal fire but also start a full-scale war against Japan. We will use nuclear bombs first. We will use nuclear bombs continuously until Japan declares unconditional surrender for the second time.” The reaction to such “hyperbole”? It is not much different from the naivete of the Thebans or Carthaginians. So, we, too, dismiss such threats as mere braggadocio. And like prior vanquished states, we assume that we are still preeminent as of old. We preen still that we are so strong that no entity would dare attempt the inconceivable—even in the age of September 11, the gain-in-function Covid-19 virus, and the mass cheering throughout the Muslim Middle East on news that 1,139 innocent civilians were grotesquely butchered at a time of peace in the worst single-day mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The postwar American imperium ended two decades ago, as massive borrowing and spending, costly quagmires abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan, an increasingly ossified, bureaucratic, and woke military, an open border, millions of illegal aliens, and suicidal energy, race, and crime policies have combined to encourage our enemies to no longer fear the United States and friends and allies no longer to respect us. America is on its own. There is no help on the way, any more than there was a Spartan army to the rescue of Thebes or a Genovese fleet to save Constantinople at the eleventh hour. Like the deluded of the past, America shrugs that it is borrowing $1 trillion every three months, with little worry that the interest on the soaring national debt alone exceeds the defense budget. Our military is short 45,000 recruits—after 8,500 skilled officers and enlisted men, many with natural COVID-19 immunity, were drummed out, and witch hunts sought to root out nonexistent cabals of “white supremacists.” The country has been more divided than at any time since 1861. The legal system has lost global respect, as it has degenerated into a Third-World extension of the state’s hounding of its enemies. Past prestigious institutions, brands, and labels have blown themselves up due to their incoherence, incompetence, and hubris—whether Disney, Anheuser Busch, Target, United, Boeing, Harvard, Columbia, or MIT. No one knows where the limits, if any, will be on Artificial Intelligence—only that those who have designed Google, the old Twitter, and Facebook to warp elections and suppress the news are the same who have moved on to programming AI. It is past time for America to practice fiscal sanity, protect our skies from storms of enemy missiles, repair the Pentagon and end its woke agendas, secure our borders and restore the primacy of citizenship, reunite the country, and let the voters, not the lawyers, select a president. There was a time when Macedon would not have dreamed of attacking a hallowed Thebes, when Rome would not have dared to land a fleet near the harbor of Carthage, and when Constantinople fought its enemies a thousand miles away rather than from its walls. Decline is a choice, not a fate, and when it is perceived, all sorts of Alexanders and Scipios arrive out of nowhere, the sort of men who can make an end of everything. If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato

CAT1POLITICS

Alvin Bragg was stunned by this terrible truth about the fallout from the Trump verdict

JUN 10, 2024

The ramifications of Alvin Bragg’s criminal case are bigger than anyone imagined.

Convicting Donald Trump in a politically motivated case has serious consequences. 

And Alvin Bragg was stunned by this terrible truth about the fallout from the Trump verdict.

Donald Trump’s criminal conviction hurts New York’s reputation with businesses

Democrats have tried to bury former President Donald Trump under an avalanche of bogus criminal cases and civil lawsuits.

New York has tried to bankrupt Trump with a civil fraud lawsuit and throw him in jail with a criminal case.

Waging politically-motivated lawfare against Trump is sending a message loud and clear to the business community.

Anyone could be targeted by a weaponized justice system in New York who gets crosswise with the Democrats who run the state.

https://decide.dev/lad/15403696833945446?pubid=ld-1632-7825&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.deplorabledaily.com&rid=&width=817&path=%2Falvin-bragg-was-stunned-by-this-terrible-truth-about-the-fallout-from-the-trump-verdict%2F&x=242.5&y=1279.140625&utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dpd_14254&utm_term=&utm_content=&embed_type=7&embed_frame_container_type=3

Billionaire businessman John Catsimatidis warned that the rule of law was gone in New York during an appearance on Fox Business.

“If they can do this to a business person like Donald Trump, they could do it to anybody in New York and a lot of businesses,” Catsimatidis said. “A lot of people are concerned that there is no rule of law.”

Catsimatidis described the shock and outrage that poured in after the Trump verdict came back from the rigged jury.

“The city was shocked. The country was shocked. The world was shocked, and it was just mind-boggling,” Catsimatidis recalled. “People texted me that they just got home and their wives were crying. We have to bring back the rule of law.”

Cardone Capital founder Grant Cardone wondered what chance he had if New York could do this to Donald Trump.

“If they can do this to Donald Trump, a former President, regardless of how you feel about the politics, if they can do this to a former President, what can they do to Grant Cardone?” Cardone asked. “What can they do to any other businessman?”

Real estate investor walks away from New York

Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary has warned that waging legal warfare against Trump would hurt New York’s brand with businesses from around the globe.

Becoming a banana republic to get the former President sent a signal that New York is a risky place to do business.

https://decide.dev/lad/15403698813656934?pubid=ld-2391-6897&pubo=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.deplorabledaily.com&rid=&width=817&path=%2Falvin-bragg-was-stunned-by-this-terrible-truth-about-the-fallout-from-the-trump-verdict%2F&x=242.5&y=1887.515625&utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dpd_14254&utm_term=&utm_content=&embed_type=7&embed_frame_container_type=3

Cardone cut his business ties with New York after Trump was hammered with a $355 million judgment in the frivolous civil fraud case against him.

“I have 15,000 investors with me at Cardone Capital. We’ve raised $1.3 billion. If I went to them today and said, ‘I want to invest in New York City,’ they would not give me money to do that,” Cardone explained.

“That’s one of the greatest cities on planet Earth. And nobody wants to go there and do business,” Cardone added. “I blame the legal system. Clearly, the political system has been weaponized.”

He said that Cardone Capital redirected $500 million that was earmarked for real estate investments in New York to Florida.

“You just have too many other risks that, as a fiduciary of other people’s money, I can’t raise the rents, I can’t evict, I cannot predict the taxes,” Cardone said. “As great a city as New York City is, I need stability in the marketplace. And right now you have problems picking up the trash.”

Trying to destroy Donald Trump could end up ruining New York’s economy as businesses and investors shun the state.

> Victor Davis Hanson    –    The Myth That Biden Had Nothing to 

                Do with the Prosecutions of Trump

>Omega4America         –          Cleaning Voter Rolls

> Elizabeth Nickson           –           Welcome to Absurdistan

> Michael McFaul            –           Biden Should Stop by 

                                                         the Ukraine Peace Conference

 

The Myth That Biden Had Nothing to

Do with the Prosecutions of Trump

By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

June 6, 2024

The five criminal and civil prosecutions of Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them.

But Joe Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Department of Justice’s federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Donald Trump.

Biden was upset because any delay might mean that his rival, Trump, would not be in federal court during the 2024 election cycle. And that would mean he could not be tagged as a “convicted felon” by the November election while being kept off the campaign trail.

Politico has long prided itself on its supposed insider knowledge of the workings of the Biden administration. Note that it was reported earlier this February that a frustrated Joe Biden “has grumbled to aides and advisers that had Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded…”

If there was any doubt about the Biden administration’s effort to force Trump into court before November, Politico further dispelled it—even as it blamed Trump for Biden’s anger at Garland: “That trial still could take place before the election, and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team.”

Note in passing how a presidential candidate’s legal right to oppose a politicized indictment months before an election by his opponent’s federal attorneys is smeared by Politicoas “deliberate resistance.”

Given Politico was publicly reporting six months ago about Biden’s anger at the pace of his DOJ’s prosecution of Trump, does anyone believe his special counsel, Jack Smith, was not aware of such presidential displeasure and pressure?

Note Smith had petitioned and was denied an unusual request to the court to speed up the course of his Trump indictment.

And why would Biden’s own Attorney General, Merrick Garland, select such an obvious partisan as Smith? Remember, in his last tenure as special counsel, Smith had previously gone after popular Republican and conservative Virginia governor Bob MacDonald.

Yet Smith’s politized persecution of the innocent McDonnell was reversed by a unanimous verdict of the U.S. Supreme Court. That rare court unanimity normally should have raised a red flag to the Biden DOJ about both Smith’s partiality and his incompetence.

But then again, Smith’s wife had donated to the 2020 Biden campaign fund. And she was previously known for producing a hagiographic 2020 documentary (“Becoming”) about Michelle Obama.

Selecting a special counsel with a successful record of prior nonpartisan convictions was clearly not why the DOJ appointed Smith.

The White House’s involvement is not limited to the Smith federal indictments.

Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis’s paramour and erstwhile lead prosecutor in her indictment of Trump, Nathan Wade, met twice with the White House counsel’s office. On one occasion, Wade met inside the Biden White House.

Subpoenaed records reveal that the brazen Wade actually billed the federal government for his time spent with the White House counsel’s staff, although no one has disclosed under oath the nature of such meetings so far.

Of the tens of thousands of local prosecutions each year, in how many instances does a county prosecutor consult with the White House counsel’s office—and then bill it for his knowledge?

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s just-completed felony convictions of Donald Trump were spearheaded by former prominent federal prosecutor Matthew Colangelo. He is not just a well-known Democratic partisan who served as a political consultant to the Democratic National Committee.

Colangelo had also just left his prior position in the Biden Justice Department—reputedly as Attorney General Merrick Garland’s third-ranking prosecutor—to join the local Bragg team.

Again, among all the multitudes of annual municipal indictments nationwide, how many local prosecutors manage to enlist one of the nation’s three top federal attorneys to head their case?

So, apparently, it was not enough for the shameless Bragg to campaign flagrantly on promises to go after Trump. In addition, Bragg brashly drafted a top Democratic operative and political appointee from inside Joe Biden’s DOJ to head his prosecution.

Not surprisingly, it took only a few hours after the Colangelo-Bragg conviction of Trump for Biden on spec to start blasting his rival Donald Trump as a “convicted felon.” Biden is delighted that his own former prosecutor, a left-wing judge, and a Manhattan jury may well keep Trump off the campaign trail.

So, it is past time for the media and Democrats to drop this ridiculous ruse of Biden’s White House “neutrality.” Instead, they should admit that they are terrified of the will of the people in November, and so are conniving to silence them.

Cleaning Voter Rolls

Is The Republican’s Climate Change Scam

A never-ending grift, never successful, 

constantly driving dopey donors

By: OMEGA4AMERICA

June 3, 2024

One of the gifts of the climate change scam is there is no way to verify it is really happening.

If the ice caps melt, Miami goes underwater, and Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard downstairs floods, nobody alive today will be around to see it.

Scary things that cannot be verified and never get better make wonderful fundraisers.

Now that the Fractal team can see every NGO and 501c organization, we show the Left’s inner-connected galaxy of fundraising entities that raise billions, pay their management huge 6 and sometimes 7-figure salaries, and keep that climate scam going.

Republicans are no different.

Take a stroll through the Fox Evening News, and you hear one CEO after another from a Republican Washington DC group on what’s wrong with America. Then Google their sites, and you will see red, white, and blue websites – which do literally nothing but raise money from clueless donors. To no accountable end.

There are great ones, like Heritage and Judicial Watch, but many more are both unaccountable and useless.

When Trump had 2020 stolen, pretty much in plain sight, voter organizations sprung up in every state. A lot of them did great work. Most evolved into make-work projects for idle, well-intentioned hands after they realized nobody was going to take the thousands of fake voters they found off voter rolls.

Other groups went totally nuts, pitching flying drones over election sites to see if there might be an internet connection. Perhaps they might have saved time and embarrassment by just checking their phone’s hotspot locator.

One interesting character, Doug Frank, a former high school teacher, makes a small but thriving business showing stats about how states went off the rails in 2020.

He’s correct – election fraud happened.

We are big supporters of Doug Frank’s work and recommend him to all the voter integrity groups that have no money or technology but need to chase illegitimate voters, even if they can do nothing about it.

Doug Frank should be the data guru for the ineffective among us.

As we at Fractal have shown, across 26 states, taking voters off the voter roll in time for 2024 is a fantasy. It did NOT happen, it will not happen, and those pushing this nonsense know better – because they failed to get it done.

Canceling a voter is a big deal – as it should be.

There is a panoply of laws protecting someone’s right to vote – which is a very good thing.

Good laws are artfully extended by Leftist organizations to make sure nobody is taken off the voter roll. Nobody needs to show an ID. A ballot can arrive days after an election and be counted. You know the drill.

Like it or not, the voter roll battle for 2024 is over.

The voter rolls, as they exist today, are showing up in 2024 – not much different from 2020 – only with illegal aliens now present in growing numbers.

40 months of ineffective but well-intentioned work by hundreds of voter groups around the country resulted in little headway.

The grift, however, continues.

If all you have is a pencil, a calculator, Microsoft Excel, and a relational database, the fantasy that you can erase 3% of the Michigan or Arizona voter roll in the next 150 days is the only play you can call.

Because you need the work and the few dollars you scrape from it.

When one applies advanced quantum technology, the outcome choices are wider.

Here is the Fractal agenda, now being implemented in some swing states:

1.     Identify undeliverable ballot collection points and challenge ballots being sent to phantom voters at these addresses.

2.     Assist local ground teams in implementing short-term legal challenges to disrupt the Left’s illegal mail-in ballot strategy for manipulating the outcome of the national election.

3.     Drastically reduce the number of mail-in ballots going to phantom voters at improper addresses through administrative processes to protect the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election.

4.     Identify and publicize Chinese Communist-tinged money funding Leftist groups in swing states and publicize the hell out of it.

The Problem:

Swing states will again be won or lost by mail-in ballots. 

Again, the margin of victory may be fewer than 100,000 votes in Pennsylvania and 20,000 votes in several states.

Implementing a “stop mail-in ballots from going to ineligible addresses” strategy impacts over 100,000 to 400,000 ineligible addresses in each swing state.

Given the time at hand, no other strategy can impact so many ballots in so short a time in states where 20,000 ballots may choose the next U.S. President.

Many swing states’ election apparatus is controlled by Leftists who have no interest in honest mail-in ballot procedures.

Each swing state has thousands, into hundreds of thousands of ineligible ballot accumulation locations where a mail-in ballot will be sent in 2024, yet not find an eligible recipient.  These include gas stations, strip malls, and large apartment buildings where the ballot has no apartment number. 

The RNC and the Trump Campaign do not have the technology to identify these ineligible locations, so they ignore their existence.

The entire voter integrity organization industry is lost chasing phantoms on voter rolls who will remain there for decades.

An Effective Solution:

Several swing state organizations worked with the Fractal team to use Fractal quantum technology to visualize anomalies in voter rolls not visible to current relational technology. 

Videos of some of those findings are on the Omega4America.com website and on Rumble.

These are the deliverables that could be in the field in 30 days:

1.     Each state’s voter rolls will be loaded into a Fractal database.  Multiple copies of the voter rolls on different dates will continue to be loaded, enabling time series analysis.

2.     Property tax records will be loaded for the large, urban counties.  These are cross-searched against the voter rolls.  The result identifies locations where a voter is registered (voter roll), but the address cannot receive a ballot (property tax roll).  Such addresses include gas stations, strip malls, UPS Boxes and hundreds of other entities which do not have bedrooms.  They aggregate into the hundreds of thousands.

3.     Apartment reconciliation. One of the most successful means of creating a ballot accumulation point is to register voters at large apartment complexes, leaving out an apartment or unit number. Thus, the ballot accumulates on the floor or is kept by the Postal Service (and testimony shows these are often given to Leftist organizations). The Fractal system identifies every location against every voter missing such delivery information.

4.     Artificial Intelligence address matching.  Every address is compared with its proper address in the U.S. Postal database, and any anomalies are flagged. 

5.     Illegal alien voter registration is identified by applying time series analysis against every location in a state.  Ballot aggregation locations will be identified and frozen, and challenges will be placed to stop mail-in ballots to those locations.

Taken together, these deliverables constitute the Undeliverable Ballot Database.

The solution also includes the Voter Roll Canvassing System.

The RNC database on which every Republican candidate relies is wildly inaccurate. The Fractal team tested it in Michigan and Wisconsin and found it to be 52% incorrect.

Thus, a Republican candidate begins with a canvassing/direct mail list in which half of their expenses are wasted.  The Fractal system, with the Wisconsin Titan system, enables these voter rolls to be cleaned to over 90% effectiveness in 30 days.

The Fractal system also identifies, visually and in spreadsheet form, the relationships between Chinese Communist tainted funds and Leftist electioneering organizations in each state. Foreign money subsidizes Left-leaning candidates and makes it impossible for challengers to raise enough money to compete in traditional election strategies.

Conventional technology cannot find these complex relationships based on funding one another, common employees, common directors, phone numbers, and addresses.  The Fractal system can identify every such relationship, show it graphically, tie it to the IRS 990 official documents, and publish this very powerful information.

This deliverable constitutes the Fractal Dark Money System, and it can be implemented in any swing state in days, not weeks.

Another deliverable is the Sovereign Fraud Analysis System. 

Leftist organizations have access to voter rolls, and they add voters at the last minute – invisible to Republicans.  The Fractal team showed how in 2022, Kari Lake lost her election when one county added 22,000 new voters days before the election, invisible to her, to RNC technology – and she lost by 17,000 votes.

In each state, copies of the voter rolls will be compared every 30 days or more frequently.  Every cell in one voter roll will be compared with the cell in a subsequent such roll.  Any voters who are:

·      Added to the voter roll

·      Deleted from the voter roll

·      Status changed from ineligible to eligible

·      Moved to a different voting location within a state for strategic positioning are flagged for review. 

Thus, voter rolls are visible in near real-time, and any Leftist voter roll modification, as has happened before, can be identified BEFORE the final election date—not litigated afterward.

This is Time Series Analysis and it is part of the Fractal solution.

Time series analysis is particularly effective in reviewing college dorms, homeless shelters, and churches. 

Population turnover at these facilities fosters huge opportunities for the Left to stuff voter rolls and vote in the names of people who have moved on in life. Time series analysis identifies, for example, a college dorm or frat house with 109-year-old voters who have been voting from those locations for 30 years. 

The Fractal videos show this is a common occurrence and often changes the outcome of state-wide elections.

Each of these anomalies has eluded current technology for decades. In swing states, however, these techniques can be in full production in less than a month.

The time to choose is upon us.

National voter integrity organizations and their dopey donors continue the nonsense that voter rolls are going to be cleaned at scale. Our videos show they have not been cleaned in 30 years.

The RNC and Trump Campaign are hiring “armies” (their word) of lawyers to litigate after the 2024 fraud happens—good luck. How did that work out last time?

The crazies are flying drones.

The ineffective are presenting PowerPoint graphs about the fraud that happened in 2020.

Fortunately, people are waking up and realizing that if mail-in ballots can be STOPPED from going out in the first place to Walmarts, 7-11s, and strip malls to be collected by Leftists – that makes sense.

Welcome to Absurdistan

Wall Street’s Planned Theft of America’s Lands and Waters

Imagine a world where everything, including the very air we breathe,

 is reduced to a mere commodity to be monetized, measured, and traded.

 This is the disturbing reality we are facing.

By: Elizabeth Nickson

June 3, 2024

Up next on Wall Street’s exploitation list.

If not halted, on the alarming date of November 17th, the U.S. government will enact a rule that paves the way for America’s protected lands, including parks and wildlife refuges, to be listed on the N.Y. Stock Exchange. These Natural Asset Companies (NACs) will be owned, managed, and traded by entities like BlackRock, Vanguard, and even China.

Since the early 2000s, outfits like Goldman Sachs have been trying to trade air or specifically carbon, without much success. Their 2005 carbon exchange staggered along until it was quietly discontinued, and their Climate Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) is now facing delisting. “ESG” was the next attempt to monetize the un-monetizable, with the “E” part of that acronym standing for Environment, ill-defined as that was. Now ESG is failing. Market leaders say it is facing “a perfect storm of negative sentiment,” and its U.S. investments fell by $163 billion in the first quarter of 2023 alone.

Signs of Hope: The Net-Zero Backlash and the Power of Opposition. Vanguard has pulled out of Net-Zero funds. The British government, too, is backing out of Net-Zero, saying, “We won’t save the planet by bankrupting the British people.”New Zealand’s new government revised the country’s Net-Zero plans in its first week in office. In the hard-hit Netherlands, the Farmer-Citizen movement is now the dominant party in the Dutch Senate and every provincial assembly. Sweden has abandoned its 100 percent Net-Zero plans, and Norway has announced another $18 billion in oil and gas investments.

Not going to happen.

Even in the submissive E.U. voters are turning from the “green” parties toward anti-E.U. parties. Renewables funds are seeing massive outflows because of rising interest rates and declining subsidies. Of course, the massive subsidies taxpayers have already given both “renewables” investors and “renewables”companies will never be clawed back. All we will get is a shrug as they move on to the next kill. Which is so obvious it is a wonder no one predicted it.

The entire universe envies the lush interior of the U.S. Increasingly empty. It is filled with a cornucopia of minerals, fiber, food, waters, extraordinarily fertile soil, and well-ordered, educated, mostly docile people. Worth in the quadrillions, if one could monetize and trade it, financialize it, the way the market has financialized the future labor of Americans, well, it would be like golden coins raining from the sky.

On October 4th, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a proposed rule to create Natural Asset Companies (NACs). A twenty-one-day comment period was allowed, which is half the minimum number of days generally required. NACs will allow BlackRock, Bill Gates, and possibly even China to hold the ecosystem rights to the land, water, air, and natural processes of the properties enrolled in NACs. Each NAC will hold “management authority” over the land. When we are issued carbon allowances, owners of said lands will be able to claim tax deductions and will be able to sell carbon allowances to businesses, families and townships. In the simplest of terms, that’s where the money will be made. WE peons will be renting air from the richest people on earth.

The following are eligible for NACs: National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, Wilderness Areas, Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, Conservation Areas on Private and Federal Lands, Endangered Species Critical Habitat, and the Conservation Reserve Program. Lest you think that any conserved land is conserved in your name, the largest Conservation organization in the U.S. is called The Nature Conservancy, or TNC, which, while being a 501(c)3, also holds six billion dollars of land on its books. Those lands have been taken using your money via donations and government grants and transferred to the Nature Conservancy, which can do with those lands what it wills.

If this rule passes, America’s conserved lands and parks will become the assets of the richest people in the world. They will decide how to manage those lands, and their operations will be opaque.

Farm country is fighting back. American Stewards of Liberty, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, Kansas Natural Resource Coalition, Financial Fairness Alliance, and Blue Ribbon Coalition have filed comments, Republican senators Pete Ricketts, James Risch, and Mike Crapo have sent pointed queries to the SEC. This week, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-WY) offered an amendment that would defund the SEC proposed rule to approve listing “NACs.”

Most of us ill-understand “financialization.” It is a complex set of maneuvers best explained by the behavior that crashed the economy in 2008 which bundled up questionable mortgages and brokered off the risk to dozens of different funds in order to share that risk. NACs are asset grabs. From ’09-’20, funds asset-stripped America’s manufacturing via debt obligations, buying the company, selling off the equipment, firing the most expensive employees, and gutting, if they could, pension funds. Then, they upped the price and sold the assets, which were bundled and brokered off. These are called collateralized debt obligations, and they thunder doom underneath the debt-fueled economy.

Natural Asset Companies are an attempt to grab hard assets to make up for an inevitable collapse. But taking more land out of production makes it certain that collapse moves ever closer. Land needs to be used, cared for, and maintained by the people who live on and use the land. Otherwise, it runs to desert and invasive species. The mad rush to “green” and net zero has triggered financialization, or a brokering of the future, because only energy spurs real growth — and energy has been increasingly restricted over the past twenty years. NACs are another destroyer of America’s heartland.

Biden Should Stop by the Ukraine Peace Conference

Two hours for the sake of peace in

Ukraine and our national interests

By: Michael McFaul

June 3, 2024

When I worked at the National Security Council for the first three years of the Obama administration, I learned that presidential time is the most precious commodity in the world. Every day at the White House there was fierce competition for every minute of President Obama’s time. We had to submit detailed “packages” to justify a short meeting or a phone call for the president with another head of state. During my first two years at the White House, I was part of the team negotiating the New START treaty with Russia. Because of dysfunction at lower levels in the Russian government, Presidents Obama and Medvedev became lead negotiators, which required presidential time – phone calls or side meetings at multilateral gatherings. And every minute that Obama spent negotiating limits on ICBMs or telemetry, he was not lobbying Congress to pass Obamacare. Fights over where the president should go and what he should do on international trips were especially intense. In 2009, I won a big internal battle by convincing President Obama and his senior advisors to travel to Moscow in July 2009. But during that summit, the White House scheduling team sparked a mini-diplomatic scandal by declining Obama’s invitation to attend a formal dinner at the Kremlin so that he could instead have dinner with his family at the Ritz Carlton that night. How presidents allocate their time shows their priorities. On that trip, Obama signaled his commitment to work-life balance to both his staff and the world. The impact of presidential time allocation on priorities cannot be understated, and attending the Ukraine Peace Conference is a clear reflection of President Biden’s commitment to peace and our national interests.

So, I understand the difficult decisions that President Biden’s team makes every day in deciding how to allocate his time, especially in an election year. By traveling to Europe next week, first to attend the D-Day commemoration ceremony in France and then the G7 summit in Italy (June 13-15, 2024), President Biden is clearly signaling that our allies are both his and the United States’ priority. The following month, Biden will host the NATO Summit in Washington to mark the 75th anniversary of the strongest and most enduring alliance in the world. That, too, is an excellent use of the president’s time. In the same vein, attending the Ukraine Peace Conference is a natural extension of President Biden’s commitment to our allies and their security. Therefore, I urge President Biden to consider attending this significant event during his trip to Europe next week and stop by the Summit on Peace in Ukraine in Switzerland (June 15-16, 2024) right after the G7 in Italy.

Just two hours of presidential time at the Summit on Peace and Ukraine could achieve several U.S. national security priorities in a very short amount of time. Plus, it is a quick stop on his way home.

First, by attending this summit, Biden could associate the United States with the goal of the peace summit which “is to inspire a future peace process and to develop practical elements as well as steps towards such a process.” Biden could also signal support for President Zelenskyy’s peace plan. Biden critics, including some American voters, wrongly claim that he is not interested in negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, seeking only to prolong the conflict to weaken Russia. The Summit on Peace in Ukraine is the perfect platform for Biden to first endorse Zelenskyy’s ideas but also propose his own initiatives to try to end Putin’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine. 

Of course, Putin will reject these ideas. He thinks he is winning on the battlefield and, therefore, is in no hurry to end his invasion. He also is waiting for Donald Trump to be reelected in November, believing with good reason that President Trump would help him achieve more favorable conditions in future peace negotiations. But, by outlining his ideas for peace now, Biden would put Putin on the defensive. Putin has never published a peace plan.

Second, a Biden appearance at this peace summit in Switzerland would help American public diplomacy in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Tragically, too many governments and societies in the “Global South” still do not frame Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a war of imperialism and recolonization. As the UN abstention votes show and public opinion polls reveal, there are still too many people who wrongly blame Biden for one, triggering this war by allegedly expanding NATO and two, prolonging the war by supplying weapons to Ukraine. Even in countries like Georgia, which used to have close relations with the United States, some government officials are calling Biden and the Americans warmongers. By participating in this peace summit, Biden would signal to the rest of the world that his administration is committed to ending this war as soon as possible. Over 100 countries will have representatives, and therefore media, at this summit. It is the perfect place for Biden to give a speech on peace. At the meeting, Biden could even appoint a special envoy for peace negotiations like the Chinese have already done.

Third, by attending this peace summit, which is extremely important to Zelenskyy, Biden could help reduce friction between the United States and Ukraine before the NATO summit in July. It’s clear, Ukraine will not be receiving an invitation to join NATO during the Washington summit. That outcome will be deeply disappointing to Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian society, and other NATO allies. If Biden did Zelenskyy a favor in June by attending the Switzerland summit, then Zelenskyy could return the favor to Biden and not make a big fuss about the lack of Ukraine’s invitation to join NATO in Washington in July. Neither the alliance nor Biden’s reelection campaign needs public disunity and discord at this historic summit.

(To be clear, I personally support the issuing of a formal invitation to Ukraine to join NATO at this summit, followed by a long accession process that most likely would not end until the war is over. Before the NATO summit in Vilnius last year, I wrote about this idea here. To the best of my understanding, however, this is not the current position of the Biden administration.)

Two hours of presidential time is extremely valuable. And anytime the president moves, especially across borders, hundreds of people, cars, airplanes, and decisions are involved. At the same time, Biden is flying on Air Force One, and the Swiss would provide him with a police escort from the airport to the summit venue, further reducing the time Biden would have to spend in Switzerland on his way home. It is two hours worth expending in the pursuit of multiple American interests at the same time.

 ON THE 35th ANNIVERSARY OF JUNE 4, 1989 TIANANMEN MASSACRE, of which the disordered world lives in the consequence

When 1.5 billion Chinese are banned inside and threatened outside of China to mention a single word of it

When Cdl Zen, the only Chinese prelate on the planet daring to say Memorial Mass for it, and Jimmy Lai, who paid his ultimate price for reporting it, are silenced 

When the West, proving Pres Deng’s confidence before killing “Don’t worry, Westerners will forget”, has forgotten or been complicit 

When Bp Strickland, perhaps the only prelate willing to voice support for the betrayed Chinese yet ordered by higher authority to shut up, has tweeted prayers for the Massacre

When Tiananmen Mothers, the most hopeless & determined mothers who fight for justice for their young children, are harassed, ignored and dying

TODAY WE BEG YOU TO CARRY THE TORCH: 

TO SPREAD THE WORD
TO TELL YOUR CHILDREN 
TO FAST & PRAY

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0?ui=2&ik=513e54dcd3&attid=0.1&permmsgid=msg-f:1800864672318177202&th=18fdf4e0ca133fb2&view=att&disp=safe

Our Revolutionary Times

By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

May 30, 2024

Sometimes unexpected but dramatic events tear off the thin veneer of respectability and convention. What follows is the exposure and repudiation of long-existing but previously covered-up pathologies.

Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the October 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization.

Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so.

But the post-October 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed difference.

Masked left-wing protestors were unashamedly and virulently anti-Semitic. Students on elite campuses especially showed contempt for both middle-class police officers tasked with preventing their violence and vandalism and the maintenance workers who had to clean up their garbage.

Mobs took over buildings, assaulted Jewish students, called for the destruction of Israel, and defaced American monuments andanti commentaries.

When pressed by journalists to explain their protests, most students knew nothing of the politics or geography of Palestine, for which they were protesting.

The public concluded that the more elite the campus, the more ignorant, arrogant, and hateful the students seemed.

The Biden administration destroyed the southern border. Ten million illegal aliens swarmed into the U.S. without audit. Almost daily, news accounts detail violent acts committed by illegal aliens or their surreal demands for more free lodging and support.

Simultaneously, thousands of Middle Eastern students, invited by universities on student visas, block traffic, occupy bridges, disrupt graduations, and generally show contempt for the laws of their American hosts.

The net result is that Americans are reappraising their entire attitude toward immigration. Expect the border to be closed soon and immigration to become mostly meritocratic, smaller, and legal, with zero tolerance for immigrants and resident visitors who break the laws of their hosts.

Americans are also reappraising their attitudes toward time-honored bureaucracies, the courts, and government agencies.

The public still cannot digest the truth that the once respected FBI partnered with social media to suppress news stories, surveil parents at school board meetings, and conduct performance art swat raids on the homes of supposed political opponents.

After the attempts of the Department of Justice to go easy on the miscreant Hunter Biden but to hound ex-president Donald Trump for supposedly removing files illegally in the same fashion as current President Biden, the public lost confidence not just in Attorney General Merrick Garland but in American jurisprudence itself.

The shenanigans of prosecutors like Fani Willis, Letitia James, and Alvin Bragg, along with overtly biased judges like Juan Merchant and Arthur Engoron, only reinforced the reality that the American legal system has descended into third-world-like tit-for-tat vendettas.

The same politicization has nearly discredited the Pentagon. Its investigations of “white” rage and white supremacy found no such organized cabals in the ranks. But these unicorn hunts likely helped cause a 45,000-recruitment shortfall among precisely the demographic that died at twice their numbers in the general population in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Add in the humiliating flight from Kabul, the abandonment of $50 billion in weapons to the Taliban terrorists, the recent embarrassment of the failed Gaza pier, and the litany of political invective from retired generals and admirals. The result is that the armed forces have an enormous task to restore public faith. They will have to return to meritocracy, emphasize battle efficacy, enforce the uniform code of military justice, and start either winning wars or avoiding those that cannot be won.

Finally, we are witnessing a radical inversion in our two political parties. The old populist Democratic Party that championed lunch-bucket workers has turned into a shrill union of the very rich and subsidized poor. Its support of open borders, illegal immigration, the war on fossil fuels, transgenderism, critical legal and race theories, and the woke agenda are causing the party to lose support.

The Republican Party is likewise rebranding itself from a once-stereotyped brand of aristocratic and corporate grandees to one anchored in the middle class.

Even more radically, the new populist Republicans are beginning to appeal to voters on shared class and cultural concerns rather than on racial and tribal interests.

The results of all these revolutions will shake up the U.S. for decades.

Soon we may see Georgia Tech or Purdue degrees as far better proof of an educated and civic-minded citizen than a Harvard or Stanford brand.

We will likely jettison the failed salad bowl approach to immigration and return to the melting pot as immigration becomes exclusively legal, meritocratic, and manageable.

To avoid further loss of public confidence, institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the DOJ will have to re-earn rather than just assume the public’s confidence.

And we may soon accept the reality that Democrats reflect the values of Silicon Valley plutocrats, university presidents, and blue-city mayors, while Republicans become the home of an ecumenical black, Hispanic, Asian, and white middle class.