March 21, 2024Special EditionWhen and How Did We Get Here?Gradually, then Suddenly.By: Victor Davis Hanson Part One –  March 12, 2024Presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—have either doubled the national debt in their four- or eight-year tenures or added several trillion to it. We all know that adding a trillion dollars in debt to what we collectively owe every 100 days is unsustainable. But then again, we all know that to stop the borrowing, much less to concede the need to run surpluses, would earn a president the smears of “racist,” “uncaring,” and “cruel,” if not run the risk of a recession or worse. So our presidents, in how individual Americans handle credit card debt, embrace Louis XV’s much-quoted observation “Après moi, le déluge”—“after me, the flood.” Put in modern Americanese, it means enjoying the unsustainable while you can because the next generations will pay heavily for what we incurred. Presidents prime the economy by printing trillions of dollars in funny money, hoping, as in the game of musical chairs, that the money music won’t abruptly stop on their watch, leaving them without a seat. It is astonishing how our major downtowns so quickly, so easily transmogrified into near wastelands. Drive into downtown Los Angeles in 2019 and it was a crowded bustling city, with a rebooted downtown. Ditto San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Drive into them just five years later and they are dangerous and toxic moonscapes. Had we shown a photo of a 2024 San Francisco Walgreens to someone in 2019, he would have thought it a caged prison infirmary. So what or who tore off the thin Thucydidean veneer of civilization so quickly? First, we must concede the “gradually,” given we have been in decline for a long, slow time—printing money, turning our schools into feel-good therapeutics rather than rigorous learning, destroying merit, contextualizing crime, embracing racial tribalism and chauvinism, allowing our roads, reservoirs, and bridges to decay, weaponizing our agencies from the CIA and FBI to the IRS and Pentagon. No good could have come from jettisoning civic education, history, languages, science, and math—and crowding them out with the social sciences and their bastard children of -studies courses (black studies, green studies, queer studies, Chicano studies, etc., etc.) and faddish classes on comic books, social media, sports, and popular culture from rap music to TikTok. How did we end up with our elite universities amassing multi-billion-dollar tax-free endowments while the government is in hock for $2 trillion in student loans, with 30% of them nonperforming? All that was the “gradual,” but why in 2020 did the decaying nation suddenly start to implode? In the last four years, we discovered there is no free speech on campus, but plenty of anti-Semitism and tribal hatreds. We learned that our entire system of jurisprudence was hijacked by critical legal and critical race theory jackals, who either did not charge violent lawbreakers with crimes or let those out who were convicted or both. We now expect the Left to remove their opponents from ballots or to use the courts to achieve what they cannot through the ballot. When did these new Soviet versions of McCarthyism, the Salem Witch trials, and medieval iconoclasm take over—doxing, deplatforming, shadow banning, ghosting, ostracizing, erasing perceived rivals and opponents? When did the increasingly unmarried, childless, hook-up/break-up young males become the near norm—disengaging to stagnate amid video games in their parent’s basements? What were the forces that caused the statue toppling, the name changing, and the Trotskization of our past? Since when did states encourage 70 percent of their voters not to show up on Election Day, present an ID, and do their civic duty? Who destroyed the Oscars, the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Grammys? What turned the NBA of Julius Erving and Michael Jordan into the buffoonery of LeBron James? How did a mediocrity like Colin Kaepernick gain such attention for dishonoring the symbols of his country? Where did the Squad and its hatred of the American past come from? Why did corporations lavish tens of millions of dollars upon the thieving architects of the racist Black Lives Matter? Why did we allow Antifa to burn and destroy our cities? Why did the border simply disappear? Why did we canonize the law-breaking illegal alien and ignore the law-abiding legal immigrant? Since when were defecation, urination, injection, and fornication OK on our public streets—if committed by the homeless? And since when did Mexico, the cartels, and China face no repercussions for lacing all sorts of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs with fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year with impunity? Why does the government shut down its cheap energy sources, outlaw clean-burning natural gas stoves, and try to ban efficient gasoline and diesel engines? Was Afghanistan planned, given such lethal incompetence would be hard to replicate? Why was not the Chinese spy balloon shot down on day one of crossing into U.S. airspace? How and why did the most lethal military in history fly from Afghanistan, abandoning billions in weaponry to terrorists? How did Iran simply take over the Middle East through the bloodwork of its terrorist tentacles? So what exactly caused this “suddenly” that followed the “gradually”?  Part Two – March 13, 2024Our nation’s change into something unrecognizable just four years ago had a few precursors and catalysts. The first was the Obama administration’s redefining of American norms. Before Obama, “racial relations” were largely defined as the historical 12 percent black/88 percent “non-black” dichotomy, in the context of dealing with the sins of southern slavery and Jim Crow and widespread discrimination—and the quest to make race incidental not essential to us all. Sixty years of serial Civil Rights acts, affirmative action, increased integration and assimilation, interaction, and intermarriage, and “content of your character, not the color of your skin” mentalities were all working toward an ecumenical society, in which soon we would not consider race relevant to who were are and instead focus on the individual not the collective. “Climate change” took over from “global warming” as Al Gore/John Kerry were unleashed. Suddenly clean-burning natural gas was a culprit, a fossil fuel supposedly wrongly disguised as a valuable transition fuel. Abroad, Iran was redefined as the oppressed Persian, Shiite counterweight to the overdog Gulf monarchies and Zionist Israel. We then would green-light a “Shiite Crescent”—Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza—that would balance our former pro-Western allies, Israel in particular. We then from time to time, as the rivalry heated up, would adjudicate the ensuing creative tension. America would be the honest broker with no real preference for a democratic Western Israel or pro-American autocratic governments in the Gulf, Jordan, or Egypt. A second catalyst in the “sudden” transformation of America was the ill-fated COVID-19 lockdowns, the first time in American history that the entire nation went into quarantine. The result, as we can finally see in retrospect, was a disaster in almost every dimension: increased suicides, spousal/familial/substance abuse, economic ruin, increased psycho-social problems, social polarization, unsustainable federal spending, and deficits, destruction of a critical two-years of K-12 education for millions of our school-aged children, universities shut down, GDP in freefall, and unemployment up. Yet in retrospect, the Swedish model of focusing on the vulnerable and elderly while keeping society open and functioning cost no more lives than COVID-19 but saved millions from life-long disastrous consequences of lockdowns. In the case of the U.S., millions were shut inside their homes, distant from human interaction. They became inert and dependent on their computers, cell phones, Zoom links, and televisions for news, communications, and information. The result was a caged, paranoid society now prone to rumor, hysteria, and fits of passive-aggressive mania. Without human interaction and conversation, a nation of 330 million recluses after a year or two became susceptible to what followed the death of George Floyd. Part Three – March 15, 2024The third catalyst that fueled our sudden madness and melted down the country was the aftermath of the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The eight-time felon was reportedly arrested after trying to pass counterfeit bills. He resisted arrest, was likely under the influence of recent (or very recent) fentanyl ingestion and amphetamine drugs, and suffered from cardiovascular disease and recent COVID sequelae. He tragically died in police custody purportedly due to asphyxiation and cardiac arrest caused by a police officer using a knee to compress his neck for nearly 10 minutes—a finding challenged in antithetical autopsies. The seemingly cruel grimace on the face of Officer Chauvin and his failure to stand down as Floyd claimed he was breathless were the matches that lit the ensuing explosions. The actual details of Floyd’s death mattered little to the public. Much less important were statistics that showed unarmed African Americans died no more commonly than whites from police, at least when their respective incidence of arrests and encounters were factored in. No matter. Murals appeared of Floyd with a halo and angel wings from Washington, D.C. to Kabul. Politicians damned the police in general. What followed were 120 days of mass rioting, looting, arson, murder, assault, and random violence that resulted in $2 billion in property damage, 1,500 injured police officers, 14,000 arrests (most subsequently let go or never charged), and 35-40 dead. The non-ending riot was egged on and led by Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and encouraged by the likes of Kamala Harris (“They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day.” Note how fact-checkers preposterously claimed she meant only the peaceful protests, even as the streets were burning and mass looting was then the norm). In fear of the civilizational meltdown, terrified blue-state mayors and governors would not stop the madness, but pandered to and appeased it. We talk now about the crime of entering unlawfully the Capitol Rotunda (though not when protesting on behalf of Hamas), but shrug on the news that the 2020 mobs torched a police precinct, federal courthouse, the iconic St. John’s Episcopal Church, and tried to storm the White House grounds and get to the president, who was whisked away to the presidential bunker. (Is not an attempt to storm the White House grounds analogous to January 6th? Or perhaps the more recent pro-Hamas mob effort to block the presidential motor entourage to the Capitol that resulted in Biden delaying his State of the Union address for 20 minutes!). The New York Times laughed at Trump’s supposed cowardice of being escorted below, rather than condemning the insurrectionary act of trying to take over the White House grounds. Somehow all those violent months were “largely peaceful” and “a summer of love” while the buffoonish January 6th afternoon was an “insurrection” and “the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War.” In fear that our cities would go up in smoke, suddenly the cooped-up nation went nuts—defunding the police, hiring thousands of DEI commissars on campuses and in corporations, capitalizing “Black,” and turning over downtown streets to weeks-long occupation by the mob. Universities began reparatory admissions. Stanford restricted its white quota to 20-21 percent of its incoming classes and published the fact, proud of its new Kendi-“anti-racism” racism. Universities ditched the SAT after decades. New faculty were hired in various grievance studies. In some sense, this was the hour of the opportunist and the time of the manipulator and the careerist. George Soros stepped up his strategies of lavishing funds on critical legal theory prosecutors in otherwise usually below-the-radar elections—to ensure as many cities as possible would allow criminals to commit violence without ramifications. Fakers and grifters came out of the woodwork—from Professor Kendi to the shake-down artists of Black Lives Matter. Suddenly, publishing companies, Hollywood, corporations, and foundations competed in virtue signaling with each other to pour money into anti-policing causes, to create faculty and administrative positions, to solicit scripts and books—all to spread the lie that the United States was a systemically racist nation. Suddenly the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Chief of Naval Operations were revising their curricula to include Black Lives Matter nonsense while promising to hunt down “white supremacists” in the ranks. Two years later in December 2023, the Pentagon quietly released its internal investigation report that found no such cabal—but not before alienating thousands of would-be white-male soldiers who no longer wanted any of the new summer of 2020 military, and were certainly no longer willing to die in combat at twice their percentage of the population only to be libeled as conspiracists and insurrectionists or drummed out as “anti-vaxers.” Part Four – March 19, 2024The final catalyst that led to our collective implosion was the election year 2020 and the accelerating Trump Derangement Syndrome. As the cities burned, unbelievable madness followed in efforts to ensure the incumbent president would not be reelected. Suddenly, congressional officials, mayors, and governors all refused to keep the peace by requesting federal troops to stop the summer riots. The more the cities went up in flames, the more the blue states blamed Trump. It was almost as if they would fault Trump for the ongoing violence and blame him even more if he sent in the military to quell it. Had they forgotten the Rodney King LA riots of 1992, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Colin Powell, called up President George H. W. Bush to encourage him to deploy the 5,000 Marines then ready to go into South Central and Watts to quell the violence? And so, Bush did just that and stopped the mass looting and rioting. No matter. The nation was now a Luche Libre of open anti-Trump craziness. Mark Zuckerberg poured in a historic $419 million to absorb the work of the registrars in key election precincts. Social media suppressed news unfavorable to Biden. Street riots and protests were modulated to aid the Biden campaign. Liberal Time essayist Molly Ball described the “conspiracy”: There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises resulted from an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy. Seventy percent of the electorate in many states voted by mail before Election Day (with a radical drop in the rate of rejected ballots), in the greatest revolution in national balloting in our history. Or as Ball gushed:Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks… Shortly after the first debate Trump got Covid—to the delight of his opponents—and was hospitalized (and may have been stricken during the actual debate itself). Biden had sought refuge in the Covid lockdowns to justify his eight-to-noon basement campaign, and there were only two debates. Trump lost the first, Biden the second—but the latter took place after 60 million people had already voted. In nineteenth-century front porch style and for the first time in a century, a major party candidate outsourced his entire campaign to subordinates, in Biden’s case the media, big money, and leftwing politicos. Suddenly, our retired generals were libeling their president as a veritable Nazi and a fascist. We were to learn later that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley had called up his Chinese communist counterpart to apprise the Chinese military that in times of international crises, Milley, now both general and apparently certified psychiatrist, would diagnose Trump, and if he was found unstable, would not necessarily follow his presidential orders but instead warn the Chinese. The FBI? It too was now actively paying Twitter and Facebook contractors to suppress the news to aid the Biden campaign. Its last three directors had either lied to federal investigators or pled amnesia when grilled before Congress. The CIA Director and the Director of National Intelligence under Obama had both lied under oath—with impunity. And now the two cheered on the lie that Trump was a “Russian asset.” The CIA? Its retired “authorities” had gone over to the dark side. They now organized 50 former intelligence officers knowingly to lie that Hunter’s laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.” That whopper they knew to be a lie, given the FBI had the laptop and had already authenticated it, but kept it tightly in their control. Leon Panetta, ex-CIA director, was assuring us that the Russians fabricated the embarrassing information in the Hunter Biden laptop. Whom to trust? What followed by 2023 were attempts to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot, to use lawfare to bankrupt, to indict, to convict, and to jail him before the election. Democrats were mobilizing to find ways to stop the certification of the 2024 election should Trump win—pretty much what they had accused Trump of doing in 2020. The country might have been able to remain unchanged as it recovered from the revolutionary seeds that Obama has sewn over his eight years in office. It might have survived its national quarantine and lockdown. It could have endured the George Floyd riots and the mass racial hysteria that followed them. And it might have sustained the Trump Derangement Syndrome and Election Day insanity. But it was not able to overcome all four incitements and goads. And so, what had been “gradual” became “sudden.” The result is that America has never been the same since. 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

March 21, 2024Special EditionWhen and How Did We Get Here?Gradually, then Suddenly.By: Victor Davis Hanson Part One –  March 12, 2024Presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden—have either doubled the national debt in their four- or eight-year tenures or added several trillion to it. We all know that adding a trillion dollars in debt to what we collectively owe every 100 days is unsustainable. But then again, we all know that to stop the borrowing, much less to concede the need to run surpluses, would earn a president the smears of “racist,” “uncaring,” and “cruel,” if not run the risk of a recession or worse. So our presidents, in how individual Americans handle credit card debt, embrace Louis XV’s much-quoted observation “Après moi, le déluge”—“after me, the flood.” Put in modern Americanese, it means enjoying the unsustainable while you can because the next generations will pay heavily for what we incurred. Presidents prime the economy by printing trillions of dollars in funny money, hoping, as in the game of musical chairs, that the money music won’t abruptly stop on their watch, leaving them without a seat. It is astonishing how our major downtowns so quickly, so easily transmogrified into near wastelands. Drive into downtown Los Angeles in 2019 and it was a crowded bustling city, with a rebooted downtown. Ditto San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Drive into them just five years later and they are dangerous and toxic moonscapes. Had we shown a photo of a 2024 San Francisco Walgreens to someone in 2019, he would have thought it a caged prison infirmary. So what or who tore off the thin Thucydidean veneer of civilization so quickly? First, we must concede the “gradually,” given we have been in decline for a long, slow time—printing money, turning our schools into feel-good therapeutics rather than rigorous learning, destroying merit, contextualizing crime, embracing racial tribalism and chauvinism, allowing our roads, reservoirs, and bridges to decay, weaponizing our agencies from the CIA and FBI to the IRS and Pentagon. No good could have come from jettisoning civic education, history, languages, science, and math—and crowding them out with the social sciences and their bastard children of -studies courses (black studies, green studies, queer studies, Chicano studies, etc., etc.) and faddish classes on comic books, social media, sports, and popular culture from rap music to TikTok. How did we end up with our elite universities amassing multi-billion-dollar tax-free endowments while the government is in hock for $2 trillion in student loans, with 30% of them nonperforming? All that was the “gradual,” but why in 2020 did the decaying nation suddenly start to implode? In the last four years, we discovered there is no free speech on campus, but plenty of anti-Semitism and tribal hatreds. We learned that our entire system of jurisprudence was hijacked by critical legal and critical race theory jackals, who either did not charge violent lawbreakers with crimes or let those out who were convicted or both. We now expect the Left to remove their opponents from ballots or to use the courts to achieve what they cannot through the ballot. When did these new Soviet versions of McCarthyism, the Salem Witch trials, and medieval iconoclasm take over—doxing, deplatforming, shadow banning, ghosting, ostracizing, erasing perceived rivals and opponents? When did the increasingly unmarried, childless, hook-up/break-up young males become the near norm—disengaging to stagnate amid video games in their parent’s basements? What were the forces that caused the statue toppling, the name changing, and the Trotskization of our past? Since when did states encourage 70 percent of their voters not to show up on Election Day, present an ID, and do their civic duty? Who destroyed the Oscars, the Emmys, the Tonys, and the Grammys? What turned the NBA of Julius Erving and Michael Jordan into the buffoonery of LeBron James? How did a mediocrity like Colin Kaepernick gain such attention for dishonoring the symbols of his country? Where did the Squad and its hatred of the American past come from? Why did corporations lavish tens of millions of dollars upon the thieving architects of the racist Black Lives Matter? Why did we allow Antifa to burn and destroy our cities? Why did the border simply disappear? Why did we canonize the law-breaking illegal alien and ignore the law-abiding legal immigrant? Since when were defecation, urination, injection, and fornication OK on our public streets—if committed by the homeless? And since when did Mexico, the cartels, and China face no repercussions for lacing all sorts of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs with fentanyl to kill 100,000 Americans a year with impunity? Why does the government shut down its cheap energy sources, outlaw clean-burning natural gas stoves, and try to ban efficient gasoline and diesel engines? Was Afghanistan planned, given such lethal incompetence would be hard to replicate? Why was not the Chinese spy balloon shot down on day one of crossing into U.S. airspace? How and why did the most lethal military in history fly from Afghanistan, abandoning billions in weaponry to terrorists? How did Iran simply take over the Middle East through the bloodwork of its terrorist tentacles? So what exactly caused this “suddenly” that followed the “gradually”?  Part Two – March 13, 2024Our nation’s change into something unrecognizable just four years ago had a few precursors and catalysts. The first was the Obama administration’s redefining of American norms. Before Obama, “racial relations” were largely defined as the historical 12 percent black/88 percent “non-black” dichotomy, in the context of dealing with the sins of southern slavery and Jim Crow and widespread discrimination—and the quest to make race incidental not essential to us all. Sixty years of serial Civil Rights acts, affirmative action, increased integration and assimilation, interaction, and intermarriage, and “content of your character, not the color of your skin” mentalities were all working toward an ecumenical society, in which soon we would not consider race relevant to who were are and instead focus on the individual not the collective. “Climate change” took over from “global warming” as Al Gore/John Kerry were unleashed. Suddenly clean-burning natural gas was a culprit, a fossil fuel supposedly wrongly disguised as a valuable transition fuel. Abroad, Iran was redefined as the oppressed Persian, Shiite counterweight to the overdog Gulf monarchies and Zionist Israel. We then would green-light a “Shiite Crescent”—Teheran to Damascus to Beirut to Gaza—that would balance our former pro-Western allies, Israel in particular. We then from time to time, as the rivalry heated up, would adjudicate the ensuing creative tension. America would be the honest broker with no real preference for a democratic Western Israel or pro-American autocratic governments in the Gulf, Jordan, or Egypt. A second catalyst in the “sudden” transformation of America was the ill-fated COVID-19 lockdowns, the first time in American history that the entire nation went into quarantine. The result, as we can finally see in retrospect, was a disaster in almost every dimension: increased suicides, spousal/familial/substance abuse, economic ruin, increased psycho-social problems, social polarization, unsustainable federal spending, and deficits, destruction of a critical two-years of K-12 education for millions of our school-aged children, universities shut down, GDP in freefall, and unemployment up. Yet in retrospect, the Swedish model of focusing on the vulnerable and elderly while keeping society open and functioning cost no more lives than COVID-19 but saved millions from life-long disastrous consequences of lockdowns. In the case of the U.S., millions were shut inside their homes, distant from human interaction. They became inert and dependent on their computers, cell phones, Zoom links, and televisions for news, communications, and information. The result was a caged, paranoid society now prone to rumor, hysteria, and fits of passive-aggressive mania. Without human interaction and conversation, a nation of 330 million recluses after a year or two became susceptible to what followed the death of George Floyd. Part Three – March 15, 2024The third catalyst that fueled our sudden madness and melted down the country was the aftermath of the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The eight-time felon was reportedly arrested after trying to pass counterfeit bills. He resisted arrest, was likely under the influence of recent (or very recent) fentanyl ingestion and amphetamine drugs, and suffered from cardiovascular disease and recent COVID sequelae. He tragically died in police custody purportedly due to asphyxiation and cardiac arrest caused by a police officer using a knee to compress his neck for nearly 10 minutes—a finding challenged in antithetical autopsies. The seemingly cruel grimace on the face of Officer Chauvin and his failure to stand down as Floyd claimed he was breathless were the matches that lit the ensuing explosions. The actual details of Floyd’s death mattered little to the public. Much less important were statistics that showed unarmed African Americans died no more commonly than whites from police, at least when their respective incidence of arrests and encounters were factored in. No matter. Murals appeared of Floyd with a halo and angel wings from Washington, D.C. to Kabul. Politicians damned the police in general. What followed were 120 days of mass rioting, looting, arson, murder, assault, and random violence that resulted in $2 billion in property damage, 1,500 injured police officers, 14,000 arrests (most subsequently let go or never charged), and 35-40 dead. The non-ending riot was egged on and led by Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and encouraged by the likes of Kamala Harris (“They’re not going to stop, and everyone, beware. Because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before election day in November, and they are not going to stop after election day.” Note how fact-checkers preposterously claimed she meant only the peaceful protests, even as the streets were burning and mass looting was then the norm). In fear of the civilizational meltdown, terrified blue-state mayors and governors would not stop the madness, but pandered to and appeased it. We talk now about the crime of entering unlawfully the Capitol Rotunda (though not when protesting on behalf of Hamas), but shrug on the news that the 2020 mobs torched a police precinct, federal courthouse, the iconic St. John’s Episcopal Church, and tried to storm the White House grounds and get to the president, who was whisked away to the presidential bunker. (Is not an attempt to storm the White House grounds analogous to January 6th? Or perhaps the more recent pro-Hamas mob effort to block the presidential motor entourage to the Capitol that resulted in Biden delaying his State of the Union address for 20 minutes!). The New York Times laughed at Trump’s supposed cowardice of being escorted below, rather than condemning the insurrectionary act of trying to take over the White House grounds. Somehow all those violent months were “largely peaceful” and “a summer of love” while the buffoonish January 6th afternoon was an “insurrection” and “the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War.” In fear that our cities would go up in smoke, suddenly the cooped-up nation went nuts—defunding the police, hiring thousands of DEI commissars on campuses and in corporations, capitalizing “Black,” and turning over downtown streets to weeks-long occupation by the mob. Universities began reparatory admissions. Stanford restricted its white quota to 20-21 percent of its incoming classes and published the fact, proud of its new Kendi-“anti-racism” racism. Universities ditched the SAT after decades. New faculty were hired in various grievance studies. In some sense, this was the hour of the opportunist and the time of the manipulator and the careerist. George Soros stepped up his strategies of lavishing funds on critical legal theory prosecutors in otherwise usually below-the-radar elections—to ensure as many cities as possible would allow criminals to commit violence without ramifications. Fakers and grifters came out of the woodwork—from Professor Kendi to the shake-down artists of Black Lives Matter. Suddenly, publishing companies, Hollywood, corporations, and foundations competed in virtue signaling with each other to pour money into anti-policing causes, to create faculty and administrative positions, to solicit scripts and books—all to spread the lie that the United States was a systemically racist nation. Suddenly the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the Chief of Naval Operations were revising their curricula to include Black Lives Matter nonsense while promising to hunt down “white supremacists” in the ranks. Two years later in December 2023, the Pentagon quietly released its internal investigation report that found no such cabal—but not before alienating thousands of would-be white-male soldiers who no longer wanted any of the new summer of 2020 military, and were certainly no longer willing to die in combat at twice their percentage of the population only to be libeled as conspiracists and insurrectionists or drummed out as “anti-vaxers.” Part Four – March 19, 2024The final catalyst that led to our collective implosion was the election year 2020 and the accelerating Trump Derangement Syndrome. As the cities burned, unbelievable madness followed in efforts to ensure the incumbent president would not be reelected. Suddenly, congressional officials, mayors, and governors all refused to keep the peace by requesting federal troops to stop the summer riots. The more the cities went up in flames, the more the blue states blamed Trump. It was almost as if they would fault Trump for the ongoing violence and blame him even more if he sent in the military to quell it. Had they forgotten the Rodney King LA riots of 1992, when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Colin Powell, called up President George H. W. Bush to encourage him to deploy the 5,000 Marines then ready to go into South Central and Watts to quell the violence? And so, Bush did just that and stopped the mass looting and rioting. No matter. The nation was now a Luche Libre of open anti-Trump craziness. Mark Zuckerberg poured in a historic $419 million to absorb the work of the registrars in key election precincts. Social media suppressed news unfavorable to Biden. Street riots and protests were modulated to aid the Biden campaign. Liberal Time essayist Molly Ball described the “conspiracy”: There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises resulted from an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy. Seventy percent of the electorate in many states voted by mail before Election Day (with a radical drop in the rate of rejected ballots), in the greatest revolution in national balloting in our history. Or as Ball gushed:Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers, and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks… Shortly after the first debate Trump got Covid—to the delight of his opponents—and was hospitalized (and may have been stricken during the actual debate itself). Biden had sought refuge in the Covid lockdowns to justify his eight-to-noon basement campaign, and there were only two debates. Trump lost the first, Biden the second—but the latter took place after 60 million people had already voted. In nineteenth-century front porch style and for the first time in a century, a major party candidate outsourced his entire campaign to subordinates, in Biden’s case the media, big money, and leftwing politicos. Suddenly, our retired generals were libeling their president as a veritable Nazi and a fascist. We were to learn later that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley had called up his Chinese communist counterpart to apprise the Chinese military that in times of international crises, Milley, now both general and apparently certified psychiatrist, would diagnose Trump, and if he was found unstable, would not necessarily follow his presidential orders but instead warn the Chinese. The FBI? It too was now actively paying Twitter and Facebook contractors to suppress the news to aid the Biden campaign. Its last three directors had either lied to federal investigators or pled amnesia when grilled before Congress. The CIA Director and the Director of National Intelligence under Obama had both lied under oath—with impunity. And now the two cheered on the lie that Trump was a “Russian asset.” The CIA? Its retired “authorities” had gone over to the dark side. They now organized 50 former intelligence officers knowingly to lie that Hunter’s laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.” That whopper they knew to be a lie, given the FBI had the laptop and had already authenticated it, but kept it tightly in their control. Leon Panetta, ex-CIA director, was assuring us that the Russians fabricated the embarrassing information in the Hunter Biden laptop. Whom to trust? What followed by 2023 were attempts to remove Trump from the 2024 ballot, to use lawfare to bankrupt, to indict, to convict, and to jail him before the election. Democrats were mobilizing to find ways to stop the certification of the 2024 election should Trump win—pretty much what they had accused Trump of doing in 2020. The country might have been able to remain unchanged as it recovered from the revolutionary seeds that Obama has sewn over his eight years in office. It might have survived its national quarantine and lockdown. It could have endured the George Floyd riots and the mass racial hysteria that followed them. And it might have sustained the Trump Derangement Syndrome and Election Day insanity. But it was not able to overcome all four incitements and goads. And so, what had been “gradual” became “sudden.” The result is that America has never been the same since. 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

March 17, 2024 Special Edition CRIMINAL GANGS and CARTELS ARE COMINGTO A NEIGHBORHOOD NEAR YOU; FIX IT By: Marvin L. Covault,Lt Gen US Army, retiredMarch 12, 2024 PART 1, WHERE WE ARE TODAYThe Problem as defined in some recent headlines;·       HONDURAS DECLARES NATIONAL EMERGENCY OVER GANG EXTORTIONS·       EL SALVADOR: THOUSANDS OF TROOPS SURROUND CITY IN GANG CRACKDOWN·       COLOMBIA’S ‘CAPITAL OF HORROR’ DESPAIRS AMID NEW WAVE OF GANG VIOLENCE ·       GUATEMALA BATTLES WAVE OF MEXICAN DRUG GANGS·       MEXICO’S GANGS ARE BECOMING CRIMINAL CONGLOMERATES·       OVER 200 GANGS ACTIVE IN PANAMA·       THE VENEZUELAN GOVERNMENT IS LOSING GROUND AS GANGS TAKE TERRITORY·       GANGS RULE HAITI’S CAPITAL, KIDNAPPING AND KILLING THOUSANDS  As we move through this discussion, keep in mind that there are three crisis issues inexorably linked together facing Americans every day; gangs, cartels, and drugs.  CRIMINAL GANGS IN THE U.S.Altogether within the U.S., the FBI reports that some 33,000 violent street gangs, motorcycle gangs, and prison gangs are criminally active with about 1.4 million members. The average size gang is about 42 and most of the recruits are ages 17 and 18.  Many are sophisticated and well-organized. All use violence to control neighborhoods and boost their illegal money-making activities, which include robbery, drug and gun trafficking, prostitution, human trafficking, and fraud. To help curb the growth of gangs, the FBI, at the direction of Congress, established the National Gang Intelligence Center, or NGIC, in 2005.  Some of the largest gangs in the US include the Latin Kings, 18th Street, MS13, Bloods, and Crips. TRANSNATIONAL GANGS: Transitional gangs move us forward from the urban neighborhood street gang that controls a few city blocks and pushes a little dope, to something larger, more violent, and linked and aligned to more advanced and sophisticated crime organizations in Latin America.   MS13, for example, has become a transnational organization in that leaders in El Salvadore have been sending representatives into the U.S. illegally, to gain control of local MS13 gangs. The representatives then connect the local MS13 gangs to leaders in El Salvador. This transnational alliance, called “The Program”, or “La Programma,” in which the leaders direct the American MS13 gangs to become more violent and to control territory. The gangs accomplish this by killing rivals and extorting legitimate businesses run by legal Central American immigrants and illegal businesses such as prostitution and gambling. The local, U.S.-based MS13 gangs then send a portion of their profits to the leadership in El Salvador.  MS13 is the current leading transnational gang example. It is the largest street gang in Latin America and one of the world’s largest and most violent gangs. The gang began in Los Angeles during the 1980s, formed by immigrants from El Salvador. The MS stands for Mara Salvatrucha, said to be a combination of Mara, meaning gang, Salva, for Salvador, and trucha, which translates roughly into street smarts. The 13 represents the position of M in the alphabet. MS13’s motto is, “kill, rape, control.” MS13 is a transnational criminal organization with more than 10,000 members in the United States. They regularly conduct gang activities in at least 40 states and the District of Columbia.  It is important to point out that MS13 is not the only transnational gang organization in the U.S., the 18th Street gangs also continue to expand their influence in the United States. FBI investigations reveal these transnational gangs are present in almost every state and continue to grow their memberships GANGS vs SOCIETY:     American gangs are responsible for: 48.9% of violent crimes, 42.9% of property crime,39.9% of drug sales and 13% of all homicides.  Gangs are responsible for close to 40% of homicides in most Latin American countries.  A Portland study found that 49.1% of human trafficking victims were connected to a gang; 96.4% of the victims were female. LAW ENFORCEMENT vs GANGS:MS13 gang member apprehensions in the U.S. in FY 2023 were a trivial 178. In 2019 the FBI dismantled 217 of the existing 33,000 gangs; .0065%.  In 2020, 71% of gang members actively used social media to mobilize and attract vulnerable teenagers, video posting, bragging, and celebrating the life of a gang member. WHO IS WORKING THE CRIMINAL GANG PROBLEM? The National Gang Center (NGC) is a project funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), and the Department of Justice (DOJ). The NGC is an integral component of the Justice Department’s mission to provide innovative leadership in coordination with federal, state, local, and tribal justice systems to prevent and reduce crime. The NGC disseminates information, knowledge, and outcome‐driven practices that engage and empower those in local communities with chronic and emerging gang problems to create comprehensive solutions to prevent gang violence, reduce gang involvement, and suppress gang‐related crime. MEXICAN CARTELS:  The current criminal landscape in Mexico is driven largely by the battle between the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) and the Sinaloa Cartel (CDS). However, three other major transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), Los Zetas, Gulf Cartel, and Juarez Cartel, all contribute to high levels of violence.·      Mexican drug cartels are leading suppliers of fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and other illicit narcotics to the United States.·      The cartels and the drug trade fuel rampant corruption and violence in Mexico, contributing to tens of thousands of homicides in the country each year.·      Since Mexico launched a war on the cartels in 2006, the United States has provided billions of dollars in security and counternarcotics assistance with limited success.  RECENT EVENTS: Rising violence in 2018 helped propel President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, into office, with Mexicans’ desperation for basic safety a key driver of the vote for change. He promised a seismic shift, ending the war on drugs with a concept of operations he calls, “hugs not bullets.” It has been and continues to be a complete failure.  As reported in 2019: “The streets of Culiacan, the capital of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, became a battlefield, with the Sinaloa cartel directly confronting the government and winning. The week before, thirteen police officers were killed in an ambush in Michoacan, likely by the Jalisco Nueva Generacion cartel. Overall, murders and kidnappings are at record levels and spreading through Mexico’s once-safer industrial heartland. Talk of Mexico becoming a failed state is again on the rise.” Criminal gangs and cartels in Mexico, under AMLO rule are experiencing accelerated growth in seized territory, taking over elected and appointed positions in local governments, the murder of political rivals, and extortion of local businesses.  Killing of government officials, candidates, and political party members increased from 94 in 2018 to 355 in 2020.  Good, competent people are reluctant to run for office, fearing for their lives and the safety of their families. The situation is driving Mexican families to the U.S. in record numbers; with about 30,000 in December 2023. Ironically, by diversifying into migrant smuggling, cartels are profiting from the locals who are attempting to flee from cartel control.  Mexico is disappearing one village and town at a time.  The common scenario: Armed criminal gangs and/or cartel operatives will enter a town in force, and start threatening, extorting, torturing, and killing locals until they relinquish all control. For example, organized crime groups operated in 16% of Mexico’s municipalities in 2017. Three years later in 2020, that number had increased to 29%.  Some of these facts are from an exhaustive Wall Street Journal article last month on 26 February,  Cartels vs criminal gangs; criminal gangs vs cartels; cartel/criminal gang partnerships, etc. “Who’s on first?”As the cartels continue at war against each other, Mexico’s criminal landscape has shifted over the past decade, with splinter groups and more than 400 criminal gangs emerging. Those groups partner with and fight against the remaining major cartels that control much of the drug trade. That proliferation has been both a challenge and an asset for major cartels, but it has overwhelmed Mexican law enforcement.  The worst news is that most of these criminal organizations have ties inside the U.S.  The “splintering” is in some cases intentional and operationally advantageous to reinforce a well-known and successful operational concept, “maximum centralized planning, maximum decentralized execution.” The Sinaloa Cartel, for example, has split into more than 37 “small and medium-sized cells.”  The Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion operates with more than 36 cells around the country. The proliferation of small gangs and the presence of powerful criminal organizations have overwhelmed Mexican law enforcement. The criminal organizations in Mexico are extremely empowered by the fact that they believe there is no threat to them by the Mexican state. It is generally held that by threats to individuals and/or their families or by choice many of Mexico’s law-enforcement authorities are actively and sometimes willingly participating in organized crime. CARTELS IN THE U.S.There are at least 13 U.S. cities that are used as distribution hubs by the Mexican drug cartels. These cartels primarily employ Mexican nationals to oversee their distribution operations in the U.S. Their second choice for leadership positions is U.S. citizens who are of Mexican origin.   This is where the transnational gangs in the U.S. come into play. They are the in-place foot soldiers for the distribution and sale of cartel-supplied drugs.  THE IMPORTATION OF FENTANYL:The availability of massive amounts of fentanyl changed everything. Since it is so profitable and can be moved in such small quantities, fentanyl has made the cartels much more empowered, controlling, and rich, thereby overwhelming all levels of authority. It’s encouraging to hear about U.S. authorities intercepting hundreds or even thousands of pounds of fentanyl at the Mexican border. That is until we also hear the Border Patrol authorities tell us they estimate that the recovery is only about 5% of what gets successfully into the U.S. and distributed throughout the country.  On average in 2023, 307 young Americans died EVERY DAY from drug overdose, the majority from fentanyl.  Has your president ever mentioned this?   WHAT ARE WE DOING ABOUT THE INVASION OF CRIMINAL GANGS, CARTELS and DRUGS?Let’s start at the top….ü The President: President Biden is so fond of warning us about “emerging existential threats”, shouldn’t criminal gangs and cartel operatives make the list and at least rank up there with “MAGA extremists”?ü The Vice President: Isn’t this invasion related to the 3 million Biden illegal “gotaways” at our nonexistent southern border? Should we expect something from VP Kamala, our border czar?  Dream on. ü Homeland Security: Isn’t this all about the national security of our homeland or the lack thereof?  Where is Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas?  Still AWOL?ü The Attorney General: At its roots, isn’t this all about law and order?  What have we heard from the nation’s “top cop” the Attorney General? ü The FBI: In a couple of Congressional hearings this year, the FBI Director has mentioned gangs but only in the context of them as a growing threat, with no mention of a solution to the problem. ü Drug Enforcement Administration: The mission of the DEA is to enforce the controlled substances laws and regulations of the United States and bring to the criminal and civil justice system of the United States, or any other competent jurisdiction, those organizations and principal members of organizations, involved in the growing, manufacture, or distribution of controlled substances appearing in or destined for illicit traffic in the United States. How are they doing?  307 Americans overdosed per day. ü Congress: How about some specific, focused, Congressional hearing to get the above players activated?ü The National Gang Intelligence Center: NGIC is an agency of the US Department of Justice established by the FBI upon order of Congress in 2005. The NGIC is a multi-agency effort that integrates the gang intelligence assets of federal, state, and local law enforcement entities to serve as a centralized intelligence resource for gang information and analytical support. Ever heard of them?ü The Drug Czar: Dr. Rahul Gupta, the Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, ONDCP will have a $46.1 billion FY24 budget to advise the president, evaluate, coordinate, and oversee the international and domestic anti-drug efforts. of executive branch agencies. and ensures that such efforts sustain and complement State and local anti-drug activities. Ever heard from them? ü Transnational anti-gang (TAG) task forces:  These FBI TAGs continue to work with international partners to eradicate transnational gangs.  The success rate is about zero- nonexistent. ü The National Gang Center: NGC is a project funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The NGC is an integral component of the Justice Department’s mission to provide innovative leadership in coordination with federal, state, local, and tribal justice systems to prevent and reduce crime. The alphabet soup issue: POTUS, VPOTUS, HLS, DOJ, FBI, NGIC, DEA, ONDCP, TAG, OJP, NGC, OJJDP, etc. collectively equals tens of billions of annual tax dollars, thousands of bureaucrats, and untold laws and regulations. The problems get studied to death year after year with little or no action at the point of execution which is in every community in America. Case in point, with all that wasted money and manpower we apprehended a grand total of 178 MS13 members in the U.S. in FY 2023, while we lost, to drug overdose, on average, 307 young Americans EVERY DAY.   The drug policy experts tell us, “The magnitude of this calamity now eclipses every previous drug epidemic, from the 1980s to the prescription opioid crisis of the 2000s.” FYI, AN ONGOING ACTION BY EL SALVADOR’S NEW PRESIDENT: President Nayib Bukele has declared a state of emergency and constructed a huge new mega-prison, the largest in the Americas, as the centerpiece. The prison will eventually house up to 40,000 inmates. Tens of thousands of gang members have been rounded up and the first group of 2,000 have been moved to the prison. President Bukele tweeted “This will be their new house, where they will live for decades, unable to do any further harm to the population.” Dramatic photos online of “President Nayib Bukele’s gang prison” show hundreds of inmates in tight formations completely helpless and compliant.  This is a prison where the inmates are neither running the show nor conducting gang operations from inside. Interesting SOME CONCLUSIONS:Ø All of this is sad news, bad news, getting worse rapidly, and a true threat to our safety and security. Ø As usual, we are trying to solve a serious problem with a massive federal bureaucracy, and by throwing billions of dollars at the problem repeatedly and getting the same failed annual results; the true definition of insanity. Ø Our most senior leaders in the executive and congressional branches have, are currently, and will in the near term fail to lead. Ø No society can survive without law and order at the local level; that must therefore be the point of execution. At the local level investigate, find the gang members, arrest them, try them, and send them to prison. All the planning and funding must focus on that formula. Ø We should probably begin to build more prisons.  Ø A lack of law and order is consistently destroying our cities and their economies. Ø Arresting criminals with long rap sheets of 10, 20 sometimes more prior arrests flies in the face of the simple philosophy that if the criminals are off the streets and in jail, crime will go down.  The U.S. may have to consider using force in Mexico to take down the cartels.  I absolutely believe it can be done.  See the concept of operations at:    THE U.S. IS UNDER ATTACK  www.WeThePeopleSpeaking.com Sep 4, 2023 HOW TO MOVE FORWARD. The current problem is our president: First, he will not admit he has a problem that exists in his administration.  If forced to address a crisis he will do so with the blame game.  Most of the time it begins with, “My predecessor…..” as he did 13 times during his recent State of the Union address. Cardinal rule, “Blame” is the first fallback position of a failed leader. Then he will let the issue die out of focus and hope the left media comes to his rescue by dropping it from public view.  BOTTOM LINE:  this cannot be allowed to endure.  PART 2, LET’S CLEAN UP THIS MESSWe should recognize that the alphabet-soup government agencies have proven they are, collectively, incapable of solving this problem with their current agenda.  Every year, within the local, state, and federal governments we probably produce thousands of studies, have countless meetings spend billions of dollars, and watch the problem get progressively worse every year because NO ONE is in charge.  There is no specificity and no focus associated with the day-to-day efforts.  There are no identifiable positive results.  No best practices are being shared from community to community.   Here is what we need to do: PHASE ONE, 2024: Elect a president who can lead, who can plan, who can act, and will kick ass and take names.  PHASE TWO, 20 January, 2025. About 4 pm: Begin the process of focusing We-the-People on criminal gangs. Begin the process of changing the culture of law enforcement in America. Criminals, once arrested, should not be intentionally and immediately put back on the streets to commit another crime.   The new president’s first Executive Order should specify his or her intent and look something like this: 1)          The level of lawlessness and drug abuse in this country is unacceptable and a growing threat to our national security. Therefore, I intend to rid our country of criminal gangs, cartel operatives, and drug dealers by focusing our efforts on identifying every one of them, arresting them, giving them a speedy trial, and, if convicted, putting them in jail, thereby dramatically reducing crimes of all types at all levels and simultaneously reducing the import, distribution, and sale of illegal drugs. 2)         To accomplish this, I am hereby declaring a narrowly focused national state of emergency to curb rampant lawlessness across the country.  It will NOT infringe on your day-to-day rights and privileges. It will NOT restrict your actions and activities.  It will NOT raise your taxes. But it will require you to be a willing participant and to respect and support all of our first responders, law enforcement officers, and those prosecutors and judges administering the judicial system. 3)         This will be a focused effort with all actions from families, leaders, and administrators at the local level to the Office of the President, seeking to take down criminal gangs, Mexican Cartel operatives, and anyone associated with the transport, warehousing, production, distribution and sale of illegal drugs.  4)          Upon publication of this Executive Order, every gang member is hereby designated a criminal guilty of a felony offense simply by being a gang member. 5)         What is a “gang”? ·      A group whose members share an identity, typically linked to a name, and often some other symbols.·      Members view themselves as a gang, and they are recognized by others as a gang.·      The group has some permanence and a degree of organization and leadership.·      The group is involved in some level of criminal activity.·      This becomes the national definition.  No ambiguity, no soft-on-crime individual states, cities, or communities. 6)         The law:  it is illegal to be a member of an organization, whatever size, that is engaged in criminal activity. One does not have to physically engage in committing a crime (for example, selling illegal drugs), simply being a member of a gang that does it is, in and of itself, a crime. Being a gang member is a felony offense. If convicted, jail time is hereby a mandatory sentence. We have to get specific about the law and its consistency among all the states.  7)         Family involvement:  Across this country, tonight every family, particularly those with teenage youngsters, should have this conversation: Jimmy/Susan, if you are a member of a gang, as of today you are a criminal committing a federal felony offense and you are subject to being arrested, tried and sentenced to prison. The point is that at the dinner table within a few hours of signing this Executive Order there is focused initiative in tens of millions of homes across the entire nation and the 33,000 gang structures are under siege.  8)         Human intelligence, Humint, will be the center of gravity for this campaign.  Definition: The center of Gravity can be a person, thing, circumstance, or situation that is central to the success of an operation or can cause it to fail.  There are an estimated 33,000 gangs in the U.S.  In order to take them down law enforcement must know who the members are, where they live, and with what criminal activities they are involved. Certainly, there can and will be some surveillance involved in fact-gathering.  But the bulk of the information will come from within the community.  People know who the gang members are, and will be encouraged to share their knowledge.  But the bulk of the Humint will come from the members themselves.   9)         Amnesty: Every community will immediately set up and announce a short-term (weeks not months) amnesty program in which every gang member, cartel operative, and drug dealer is offered the opportunity to make an appointment with law enforcement officials and in a confidentially recorded conversation denounce their membership, disclose the who/what/when/where facts about their organization and in exchange be offered amnesty from prosecution relative to past crimes in which they participated, except for murder. The main objective of the interview is to gather all possible information about the gang’s leaders.  Acting on that information, the police should then arrest the leaders which will prompt the remaining members to apply for amnesty and effectively shut down the gang within days of activating this campaign. 10)                  At the end of the amnesty period, across the country, the mass roundup of active gang members, cartel operatives, and drug dealers will begin.  11)                  Prosecutors and judges serve at the will of We-the-People they swore to protect.  They will use their power to the full extent of the law and if they choose to function outside the intent of this Executive Order, they should be removed and replaced.  12)                  Outside the bounds of this Executive Order, but still key to reestablishing law and order across the nation are two additional directives:  First, a too-often occurrence today when arresting an alleged criminal is to discover they have a ridiculously lengthy “rap sheet” with a dozen or even dozens of prior arrests. Therefore, it is hereby directed that a third misdemeanor arrest will automatically be recorded and prosecuted as a felony crime.   The second point has to do with minimum sentencing. If a gang member has been convicted of committing a crime and is sentenced, the minimum sentence will be two years in jail without parole just for being a gang member.  A gang member arrested with a gun will receive a minimum sentence of 4 years in jail without parole.  As the numbers of gangs and gang members diminish, there will be an impact on illegal drug distribution. The FBI and DEA must go with the flow, and adjust plans and actions to take advantage of reduced foot soldiers to defeat drug importation, distribution, and sale.  Sanctuary states and cities are not excluded from any of the above directives.  The objective of publishing this Executive Order is to dramatically and simultaneously launch the law-and-order campaign in millions of homes and every community today. Tomorrow, actions should begin and will continue until the 33,000 gangs are gone from our communities.   Repeating the previously stated current statistics, the estimated 1.4 million American gang members are responsible for: 48.9% of violent crimes, 42.9% of property crimes, 39.9% of drug sales, and 13% of all homicides.  If we can get perhaps a million of them to accept amnesty in the next few weeks, the crime rates may be reduced to the point that our diminished police forces can effectively handle the remaining crime load.  The overall intent of this campaign is to create an enduring overarching culture of deterrence when it is time for teens to choose between law and order or a criminal street gang, they will think hard about the possibility of landing in jail for two years.  This must become the law of the land.  No separate versions for the soft-on-crime individual states, cities, or communities are authorized. Logically, the Attorney General and Department of Justice should take the lead for the following reasons: First of all, he/she is the existing senior cop in the country; no reason to create a new organization to do this. Additionally, two of the critical subordinate action organizations are already direct-reports to the Attorney General; they are, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration.  I request that every newspaper and news magazine publish this entire Executive Order at their earliest convenience. I want a couple hundred million Americans to have access to their own personal copy.  If this Executive Order, for any reason, becomes a partisan issue, we will be doing the American public a terrible disservice.  End of Executive Order. Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, FIX THE SYSTEMS, TRANSFORM AMERICA as well as the author of a blog WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.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

By Victor David Hanson

March 14, 2024 Special EditionThe Mythologies of the Middle East:By: Victor Davis Hanson Part One – March 5, 2024Hamas Is an Aberration Without Popular Support? After the forced removal of all Israelis from Gaza in 2005, and the Western-sanctioned election of 2006 that led to Hamas taking power, there has not been a single election. The Middle East rule of “one election, one time” has been in effect for over two decades. Hamas is a brutal dictatorship that liquidated Palestinian Authority rivals in 2006 and maintained power by violence. In its 18-year reign, it has diverted billions of dollars in international aid away from the needs of its own people into the largest labyrinth of military tunnels in history. Yet its massive war project was not unknown to civilians of Gaza, whose perennial status as “refugees” (apparently unlike the over one million Jews who were ethnically cleansed from Middle Eastern nations from the 1950s to the 1970s, and forced to flee to Israel or the West) leveraged separate cash streams that explain the hotels, hospitals, schools, mosques, and high rises of Gaza, many of which enjoyed dual-use as shields for the military tunnels beneath them. True, pre-October 7th, there were occasional Western stories purportedly attesting to Hamas’s unpopularity. But if true, it was likely not necessarily because of Hamas’s corruption, its diversions of massive aid to its underground command and control centers, or even the multimillionaire status of Hamas grandees ensconced in the Gulf or Lebanon. Rather, the Gazans resented the combination of corruption with the perception of Hamas’s impotence, more particularly with the reality that Israel was more powerful, more affluent, and more confident than ever before. In other words, the more Gazans saw their money diverted to corrupt officials and the city beneath their feet, and the more they saw Hamas’s inability to do much about Israel’s power, the more they chafed at their autocrats. That changed on October 7. Over 500 Gazan civilians tagged along with Hamas killers to join in the thievery, assault, torture, beheadings, rape, and murder. Many civilians were also among the 20,000 day laborers who worked in Israel and thus lent their knowledge of the geography of the kibbutzim to enable Hamas killers to hunt down Jews. Hostages who were removed to Gaza were struck and spit upon by throngs of civilians. Trophy corpses trucked back were further desecrated by the frenzied street mobs. The knowledge that hundreds of Jews were being murdered a short distance away did not sober Gazans but sent them into hysterical rejoicing. Occasional reports from released hostages or Israeli captives who attempted to escape confirmed the general support of the people for Hamas’s killing spree. Bonuses were offered to freelancing Gazans–in the fashion of Old West bounty hunters–to bring back Israeli hostages: for the most part, young children, women, and the elderly. Reports of selling live hostages circulated. Here in the West, particularly in Europe and the United States, both Arab-Americans and student-visa students from the Middle East in general and Gaza and the West Bank in particular, grew ecstatic on news of the mass murder. How ironic that the American Left and the U.S. government itself did their best to promote the lie that Hamas had no popular support for its October 7th murder spree, and thus was a separate entity from its people, even as massive protests assumed the two groups were one and the same. Even more ironically, pro-Hamas protests not only made no distinctions between the IDF and Israeli civilians, but also treated American Jews as indistinguishable from Israelis, and thus sought to harass and injure them in universities, at their homes, and on the street. The only entity that is making a concentrated effort to separate Gazan civilians from the Hamas murderers who hide beneath them and are shielded above ground by civilian schools, mosques, and hospitals, is the IDF. Oddly, it is doing far more to warn civilians of impending targeting of Hamas concentrations than Hamas itself which has also launched over 7,000 rockets into Israeli civilian centers with the expressed purpose of killing civilians. Our protesters never note that it apparently is felt to be in Hamas’s interest that its civilian shields are collaterally killed. At the same time, it is in the interest of Israeli pilots and ground troops to take all measures to prevent their deaths. For that matter, when Ukraine strikes back against Russian aggressors and occupiers in Crimea and the Donbas, none of the same Western critics of the IDF extend similar censure to the Ukrainian military, which surely does not text or drop leaflets among civilians surrounding targeted Russians to avoid “collateral damage”—a phenomenon that is never reported in the West. When Gazans cheer the murdering of Jews, and their counterpart supporters in the West celebrate the bloodwork of Hamas, we should agree that they are all—both Hamas gunmen and their civilian boosters—on the same page.  Part Two – March 6, 2024 The Myth of “Proportionality”As a general rule, in the long history of war, victory is found only by being disproportionate in the use of force. That is a truism so banal as to need little elaboration. When both sides are “proportionate” in their ability to harm their opponents, the result is either a bloody tactical deadlock such as at Verdun or the Somme, or an open strategic sore like Vietnam and Afghanistan, or decades-long “proportionate” killing such as the Peloponnesian War or Thirty Years’ War. The whole point of Western aid to Ukraine apparently and logically is to allow it to harm Russia disproportionally, especially given the vast imbalance in resources, both human and material. The great tragedy of this horrific two-year war is the reality that Ukraine has only been able to achieve proportional success against Russia, as the current deadlocked map of the battle space attests. Hamas began its war on October 7, seeking to achieve a disproportionate success; that is, to kill more Jewish civilians in any single day since the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It knew the Israelis possessed a disproportionate ability in strictly military terms to retaliate and do real damage to Hamas. But the Hamas terrorist leaders in turn assumed they had a disproportionate ability to appeal to the larger Muslim and Arab Middle East of 500 million people, as well as hundreds of millions of supporters in the old Third World as well as in the U.S. and Europe. Their logic was brutally simple: while the West, the UN, and the rest would for a moment deplore their tactics, Hamas assumed that privately they either would approve of the damage inflicted on Israelis or at least tolerate it and thus use their various levels of influence to restrain the Israeli response. In other words, as Israelis sought to destroy Hamas through classical laws of a disproportionate response, Hamas sought to limit the Israeli tactical ability to do so by its own geostrategic disproportionate effort to galvanize Western leftists to force Jerusalem to call off the IDF and to send massive “humanitarian” aid to Gaza. Hamas was confident it would find solidarity with the Muslim Street and thus garner cash and weapons from the Middle East. And, it could appeal to the anti-Western block of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Turkey, and assorted rogue regimes to offer them both public support and stealthy resupply. In general, the more thuggish the regime, the more likely it was to openly support Hamas. So we are in a war of disproportionality: the Israelis rush to destroy Hamas tactically to the point it can never recombine to resume control of Gaza, while the Gazans seek to rev up their benefactors worldwide to force the Israelis to accept a ceasefire, after which Hamas will declare victory on the premise it committed the most heinous crimes against the Jewish people since 1945 and survived. If all belligerents seek to obtain disproportionate and thus victorious strategies and tactics, why does the world seem to demand Israel alone to be proportionate? Lots of reasons. It is a powerful Western country and thus supposedly should suffer from the Western Left’s postcolonial, postimperial guilt, especially in a war against the victimized “other.” As a Jewish state, it suffers the added writ of anti-Semitism, as we saw after October 7th when the supposedly careful distinction between “Israeli” and“Jewish” suddenly disappeared, and pro-Hamas thugs began attacking Jewish Americans with impunity. In realpolitik, there are 500 million Middle Eastern Muslims and 11 million Jewish Israelis, so examine the eerie paradoxes. In the real world of geostrategic power, Israel is vastly outnumbered, at least in terms of population, collective GDP, and area. Yet because it fights individual Arab or Muslim entities successfully, it thus somehow is damned as a bully. In other words, the world sides against Israel in part because the numbers, the oil, and the terrorists are all on the other side, but somehow still fault Israel for ganging up on Hamas or Hezbollah because it proves much more adept than either. And so presto, the underdog is conveniently labeled as the overdog the moment it proves too lethal on the battlefield. Part Three – March 8, 2024 The Myth of the Oppressed PalestiniansThere are lots of refugees in the world with much longer claims of displacement than the Palestinians, and also some with much more recent suffering. And yet we hear nothing about them. Does anyone challenge Turkish president Erdogan for his ongoing threats to send missiles into Athens or to brag that he has a solution like his “grandfathers” for the Armenian “problem”? Or do they lament the 1974 ethnic cleansing of northern Cyprus that resulted when the Turkish military invaded the island, created a puppet separatist regime in the north, appropriated land that had been Greek for three millennia, and then slaughtered Greeks and drove them down into the south of the island? Are there protests today demanding justice and a “right of return” for the Greek Cypriots? Do we talk of “colonialist” or “settler” Turks who were moved from the mainland to Cyprus to alter the demography of the island? For that matter, do any lament the fate of the Volga Germans (nearly two million) who were packed up by Joseph Stalin and uprooted from their ancient homes in 1941–42? Are we aware that until 1939 western Ukraine was the ancient home of millions of Catholic Poles, who were driven out by communist Russia in its hideous 1939 deal with Hitler and never returned after the war? Or do we lament the 13 million East Prussians who were ethnically cleansed after World War II to give lands to a new Poland that was robbed by Stalin of its old domains? Are any of these peoples today considered UN refugees? Do octogenarian Germans dangle the keys of their old homes in Danzig to cameras, as if they will someday have “a right of return” to present-day Poland? Had Hamas not confiscated hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid to build its macabre 300-mile-long subterranean military network and instead simply used the money for the benefit of its own people, would Gaza have been a Hong Kong or Singapore rather than the home of murderous cliques? Twenty-one percent of Israelis are Arabs and enjoy the greatest freedom in the Middle East—and the highest standard of living apart from the oil-rich Gulf states. How can Israel be an imperialist apartheid state when a fifth of its citizens are Arabs who form political parties, vote, and enjoy constitutional protection unheard of in the Middle East? As far as the “right of return,” why would anyone on the West Bank or Gaza wish to return to live in Israel given their eliminationist rhetoric of “From the River to the Sea”? Or is the message that they wish to return to Israel to overwhelm and destroy its constitutional system and then set up a government analogous to the one-election/one-time Palestinian Authority or Hamas—and thus enjoy less freedom and prosperity than the Israeli Arabs do now, none of whom express a desire to move either to Gaza or the West Bank? Why would anyone from Gaza or the West Bank wish to emigrate to the United States, given the venomous rhetoric about the so-called Great Satan? Is the point to emigrate to America, demonstrate on behalf of Hamas, break the law, surge bridges to disrupt traffic, harass Jewish Americans, take over classrooms, and disrupt lectures on university campuses—all in order to abuse such freedoms to support those who never would extend such tolerance to such kindred protesters? Why are the calls to Israel for proportionality, ceasefires, avoidance of collateral damage, and to form a bipartisan wartime cabinet of all views not extended to our other ally Ukraine that seeks to defend itself by being disproportionate, refusing ceasefires, not worrying about collateral damage, and canceling elections and political parties? Why can we agree that the Russians started the war by invading Ukraine and are waging a brutal fight, but cannot say the same about Hamas which started the conflict on October 7th, by outdoing even the Russians in its beheading, mutilations, raping, torturing, murdering, and hostage-taking?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

Flashback: Hypocrisy: Cdl. Dolan’s Double Standard for Citizen Lawbreakers vs. Illegal Alien Lawbreakers

February 23, 2024

June 16, 2018

Cardinal Timothy Dolan has never said that it is “God’s law” that US citizen parents who break the law which causes them to be jailed can’t be separated from their children.

If it is “God’s law” that parents who break the law must never be separated from their children then Dolan needs to demand that all US citizen parents in New York City jails separated from their children immediately be released or placed in facilities where they can be together.

It appears that Dolan means only illegal aliens are above the law and may illegally break the laws of our country.

Apparently, Dolan supports New York City “sanctuary laws” which according to the New York Post says critics claim “shields undocumented aliens who commit… sexual abuse, prescription drug sales, bribery, money laundering, harassment, grand larceny and drunk driving, from federal detention and deportation.” 

Staten Island Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis said:

“It’s almost as if the City Council is more interested in protecting illegal immigrants than the safety of the very citizens they represent.”

(New York Post, “This NYC laws shields illegal aliens who commit crimes,” March 6, 2016)

Is Dolan more “interested in protecting illegal immigrants than the safety of” US citizens?

Does he think illegal aliens have rights while US citizens aren’t allowed to have the same rights under “God’s law”?

Dolan is a hypocrite unless he goes on CNN and demands all citizen parent lawbreakers who are separated from their children be immediately reunited.

According to pychopathfree.com, hypocrites are “hyper-aware of minor (or non-existent) wrongdoings, while actively dismissing anything that they themselves are doing wrong.”

Here are a few examples of things that according to Dolan, apparently, are not against “God’s Law”:

– LifeSiteNews reported Dolan said Met Gala costumes of a “sexualized Blessed Virgin Mary, Rihanna dressed as a pope and ‘flesh-flashing’ outfits adorned with Christian  symbols” were not “blasphemous.”

-Church Militant reported Dolan was sued by parishioners for “covering up for a homosexual priest who stoled millions from parishes to finance a sadomasochistic sex life.”

According to Church Militant, Dolan allowed gay groups into the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, but no “pro-life group has ever been allowed, though several applications have been made.”

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church.SHARE

Part 5

TRANSFORM THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH

OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

February 24, 2024

Special Edition

February 24, 2024

Special Edition

2024 REPUBLICAN  CAMPAIGN PLATFORM

Part 5

TRANSFORM THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH

OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

PART ONE provided a concept of operations for establishing lasting world peace. 

PART TWO provided a simple fix to the illegal immigration crisis.

PART THREE provided a concept to fix education and race relations.

PART FOUR defined how to eliminate voter fraud.

There are ten current crises that can and should be part of the 2024 Campaign Platform but the Republican National Committee has not published a Platform since 2016 and has no intention of doing so until at least July of this year.  Too late, we needed it yesterday!

TRANSFORM THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH: 

Make the federal government smaller, more focused, more efficient, and more effective.  The national debt is increasing at the rate of several billion dollars per day This is the first step to institutionalizing spending cuts. 

GROUND TRUTH

A mammoth, sprawling, uncontrollable, federal government currently numbering about 4.3 million plus hundreds of thousands of contract employees was never the vision or intent of the Founding Fathers.  Organizations have a propensity to grow to a point of diminishing returns; cease to be efficient, and effective, and no longer perform the functions for which they were created.  At that point, a large organization will tend to look inward and become self-perpetuating rather than value-added for the greater good.

Some or all of that could apply today to the Departments in the Executive Branch of the federal government. This results in two major problems that desperately need to be fixed:

First, a too-large organization is very expensive to maintain.  A more effective and efficient Executive Branch will be much smaller and less expensive. Every 1% reduction in end strength equals about a $1.5 billion saving in annual salaries plus billions of dollars more in long-term retirement pay and benefits.

Second, and more importantly, the annual U.S. budget boils up out of this massive organization. Every government-funded program is maintained and sustained inside these bureaucracies.  These programs are this organization’s product.  General Motors’ product is vehicles; the Executive Branch’s product is taxpayer-supported programs.  The question is, what is the value added by those programs?  An in-depth review will undoubtedly find programs that have existed for decades, their original purpose no longer relevant, programs that sounded good at their inception but have failed in execution, programs to solve a problem that should have been the purview of state or local governments, programs initiated to solve a short-term problem but live on forever.  President Reagan summed up the problem with this statement, “Government is like a baby, an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

MAKE EXECUTIVE BRANCH TRANSFORMATION A CRITICAL 2024 CAMPAIGN PLATFORM ISSUE:

The first question is, who should initiate and conduct the Executive Branch review? 

Congressional oversight is one of the “implied” powers granted to Congress by the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution. 

Congressional oversight is a key element of the system of checks and balances of power among the three branches of government. The main goals of Congressional oversight are to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse, and to protect rights and civil liberties. In this regard, Congress has failed miserably. Someone else has to step up and do this. 

Therefore, the next president should fix the Executive Branch, and that person should make this reform part of their campaign platform. 

Beginning now, and extending through the 2024 general election campaign, the Republican presidential candidates should make it clear that the priority for his/her vice president will be to lead the restructuring process to its conclusion.

November 2024 through January 2025. The president/vice president-elect should concentrate their selection of Cabinet leaders and their deputies who understand organizations, who have successfully led large complex organizations, and who will lead the effort to re-think their mission and to restructure their organization to most effectively and efficiently achieve their mission while also cutting spending. 

From inauguration day on through at least the summer of 2025, the Vice president will set up and execute the process. This will be difficult because we are talking about massive changes within the Executive Branch. We must recognize that for any large organization, especially one as large as the Executive branch, change is very difficult. Fear of the unknown is a powerful human force, especially in a government with an entrenched, layered bureaucracy that is stiff, stifling, introspective, and, in many respects, self-serving.

The newly elected vice president will provide hands-on leadership from start to finish with periodic in-progress reviews provided to the President and We-The-People. This is a long and tedious process. There are no viable shortcuts to re-thinking, re-designing, and re-structuring large organizations, and making them be all they can and should be.

FIRST, during the last week in January 2025, the vice president should set up a senior Organization and Spending Task Force consisting of the deputies of all the departments, agencies, and commissions. They will be the change agents and become the junkyard dogs of the federal government. 

SECOND, early February 2025, define the end state and end date for the campaign. For example, in a formal announcement with the President and the task force members standing alongside, the VP could announce:

 “Over the next several months, or as long as it takes, our task force will look inside every organizational element of the Executive Branch;  

ü Assess their mission – is it relevant today, 

ü Their structure – too many or too few people, 

ü Layering – is it OK or dysfunctional, 

ü Can the organization integrate vertically and horizontally efficiently and effectively on a day-to-day basis? 

ü Is the organization as a whole agile – able to deal with change as a matter of course, and 

ü Is there overall value-added for the government and especially for the American people?”

THIRD, immediately begin execution. The process begins in every named organization by putting together a very detailed organization chart. That’s the visual for the task force, and it provides an immediate sense of size, complexity, and layering.  Big government is layer after layer after layer, some of which produce nothing; they exist just to oversee what is being produced at the layers below.  Why the organization chart?  Because it allows the task force to begin the analysis and restructure at the bottom of the organization. One cannot reorganize and restructure top-down. To be successful, it must be bottom-up. 

BOTTOM-UP FROM THE ORGANIZATION CHARTS: 

Using the Department of Agriculture as an example, 65 different organizational elements come under the headings of departments, agencies, councils, institutes, programs, foundations, services, authorities, offices-of, boards, and facilities.  Inside them are departments, directorates, branches, sections, cells, and individual elements.  Every one of those becomes a “box” in the organization chart.  

Each organizational box must list the name of the element, number of employees, and the grade of the leader, GS 10, 12, whatever.

Within the Department of Agriculture, for example, the Deputy Secretary, part of the VP’s senior task force, will form his/her own internal departmental task force. The Department Task Force’s first action will be to send out an internal memo to the leaders of every “box” to submit, in one week, a no-more-than-two-page report to the Deputy Secretary.  The report format should include, as a minimum these six elements: 

1)    A one or two-sentence mission statement that describes what it is that element collectively does; for example, “responsible for writing, executing, and enforcing Department Regulation 135, Beef Export Program, and reporting results quarterly to ………”  During the following week, the Department Task Force will begin a detailed review of every input report. Their job is to ask, do we need Dept Reg 135 any longer?  If so, could this be done with fewer people?  Could the same number of employees also be responsible for Dept Reg 246, Pork Export Program? Do we need the report quarterly? And most importantly, what is the value-added of that report and organizational element to the overall Agriculture Department’s mission? Keep in mind that there are undoubtedly tens of thousands of worthless reports written every year by an entrenched bureaucratic mass that lives on forever sucking up tax dollars, stifling initiative, and being a roadblock to progress.

2)    The report should describe the grade structure of all the employees in the box. The Department Task Force will look at the grade structure for each of the boxes in the organization chart.  Is it commensurate with the degree of complexity of the mission? Could two or more similar “boxes” be combined, perhaps scaled down and led by this same leader (a span of control issue)? 

3)    Describe a typical work week; number of meetings, amount of travel, etc.  

This can reveal a lot about an organizational element and its leader.  Many meetings are just to fill up time, or are a daily social coffee clutch, or make the person in charge feel like he/she is actually “leading”.  Many are a colossal waste of time. If employees have time to attend too many meetings, they probably are not very busy to begin with. Is the travel critical to success, nice to have, or perhaps just to fill up the workweek? Travel is very expensive. 

4)    What laws and/or regulations guide that organization’s work? 

This is a critical element in the review.  Has this organization been acting out a scenario that is unnecessary or at least should better reside at the state or local level? 

5)    Include a list, in single sentences, of major accomplishments in the past twelve months. The task force will then determine if the accomplishments are in line with the mission or are just doing busy-work.

6)    A short statement of value-added. For example, without us, the Department would not/could not do the following……… 

The Department Task Force reviews of the input from the bottom up are all about policy, practices, process, and grade structure commensurate with overall responsibility, span of control, layering, and value-added determination.  

There will be tremendous resistance in many, maybe most, departments.  There will need to be a heavy hand on the part of the president, VP, department heads, and deputies. The President and VP will need to lead by example and downsize the White House staff as well.  When the Vice president routinely attends Departmental Task Force sessions, he/she will be grading their work and progress; 

ü are they tough enough, 

ü too tough, 

ü thorough enough, 

ü on the right track, or 

ü being overly protective of the status quo? 

The VP will constantly stress to the overall task force that the status quo is unacceptable. The VP will also be able to pick up strong points and pass them along to other Departments as best practices. 

The leaders of the Executive Departments along with their deputies will attend, in mass, a monthly in-progress-review with the president and vice president where they will lay out their findings to date in front of the President and other Cabinet leaders. Invite the media to listen in. 

Once the task force has worked its way up from the bottom, looking at every element, their individual mission, and value-added, then and only then will they be capable of looking back and seeing how many subordinate elements are off track, irrelevant, unnecessary, or even counterproductive.  They will then be capable of restructuring, re-aligning, re-tasking, and reorganizing the subordinate elements to create an organization that is more focused, aligned, responsive, innovative, agile, and rid of pockets of resistance.

What must be emphasized here is the importance of the bottom-up review process.  As the task force works up from layer to layer on the organization chart, they will come to some conclusions about the value added at each level. Having reached the top of the organization chart it is possible the Vice president’s senior task force could conclude that an entire department’s continued existence should be questioned.  

A prime example is the Department of Education.   We know that education in America is a national disgrace and not getting better despite (or because of) the 4,400 employees and a 2024 budget of $90 billion, a $10.8 billion increase over 2023. Back in Part 3 of this series, Education and Race Relations Reform, a strong case was made for the elimination of the Federal Department of Education.

This process may look tedious and time-consuming because it is.  But unless we begin at the bottom and unless we include every element, we will never achieve an acceptable level of success.

CONCLUSIONS: 

The task forces must be especially mindful of the phrase, “We provide oversight.”  That is a red flashing light that an organization does not, in and of itself, produce anything of value. They simply exist to grade papers, expand their purview, inhibit progress, and expend tax dollars.  As President Reagan reminded us, “The most terrifying words in the English language are, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

During the process, it is important to not lose sight of the two-fold objectives.  First, the objective is NOT to reach some specific lower-end-strength number of federal employees.  The objective is to rid the government of “boxes” in the organization charts that have no value added. They just exist because they have always been there.  The end state is an organization that is leaner, more focused, more efficient, more effective, and more agile. The second objective is to end up with an organization that has a much smaller and more realistic annual budget. 

Why do all of this work?  

Two reasons:

One the most common attempts at downsizing, in my experience, used numerous times over the past decades, has been to declare a hiring freeze or order an across-the-board, for example, ten percent personnel cut, neither of which make any sense nor achieve any lasting positive results. 

Second, what I have described above has never been done before.  We have just allowed the Executive Branch to grow without ever undertaking a necessary pruning process.

When completed, many positions, perhaps tens of thousands of them, will be eliminated. It will then take a couple of years of shuffling the deck by the Office of Personnel Management to get folks reassigned or retired, but it is within the art of the possible and worth the effort. 

Let me remind you one more time, the president’s budget is the sum of what all of the departments, agencies, councils, institutes, programs, foundations, services, authorities, offices of, boards, and facilities believe they need to accomplish their mission.  When, perhaps tens of thousands of actions, regulations, programs, and policies are eliminated because they are outdated, unnecessary, and/or redundant, the budget requirement can in all probability be downsized by hundreds of billions of dollars. 

There is also a states’ rights issue in all of this.  As the federal government grows, a natural outcome is that they over-reach into areas that are better and more effectively handled at the local and state levels.  Federal overreach tends to result in a one-size-fits-all approach to problem-solving and creates a stifling regulation-nation. 

BOTTOM LINE:

Everyone is talking about cutting spending but no one in recent memory has done anything about it. Making it happen is a 2-step process.  This is step one.  The second step is coming soon when we talk about how to “fix” Congress. 

Getting spending and hence debt under control will resonate with the American people, and be a very positive undertaking as opposed to the current tax-and-spend economic baseline of the Democrat Party.  

President Reagan got it right when he reminded us that:

“Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.”

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

“Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.”

The Republican Party needs to embrace this concept of operations of transforming the Executive Branch of government as a critical Campaign Platform issue. 

Embrace it, and talk about it. 

In the book, FIX THE SYSTEMS, TRANSFORM AMERICA, see Chapter 4, TRANSFORM THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT, for more details on how to implement this reform concept.

If you know a candidate running for office, please pass this on to them.  Thank you.

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, and FIX THE SYSTEMS, TRANSFORM AMERICA as well as the author of a blog WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.

OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

PART ONE provided a concept of operations for establishing lasting world peace. 

PART TWO provided a simple fix to the illegal immigration crisis.

PART THREE provided a concept to fix education and race relations.

PART FOUR defined how to eliminate voter fraud.

There are ten current crises that can and should be part of the 2024 Campaign Platform but the Republican National Committee has not published a Platform since 2016 and has no intention of doing so until at least July of this year.  Too late, we needed it yesterday!

TRANSFORM THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH: 

Make the federal government smaller, more focused, more efficient, and more effective.  The national debt is increasing at the rate of several billion dollars per day This is the first step to institutionalizing spending cuts. 

GROUND TRUTH

A mammoth, sprawling, uncontrollable, federal government currently numbering about 4.3 million plus hundreds of thousands of contract employees was never the vision or intent of the Founding Fathers.  Organizations have a propensity to grow to a point of diminishing returns; cease to be efficient, and effective, and no longer perform the functions for which they were created.  At that point, a large organization will tend to look inward and become self-perpetuating rather than value-added for the greater good.

Some or all of that could apply today to the Departments in the Executive Branch of the federal government. This results in two major problems that desperately need to be fixed:

First, a too-large organization is very expensive to maintain.  A more effective and efficient Executive Branch will be much smaller and less expensive. Every 1% reduction in end strength equals about a $1.5 billion saving in annual salaries plus billions of dollars more in long-term retirement pay and benefits.

Second, and more importantly, the annual U.S. budget boils up out of this massive organization. Every government-funded program is maintained and sustained inside these bureaucracies.  These programs are this organization’s product.  General Motors’ product is vehicles; the Executive Branch’s product is taxpayer-supported programs.  The question is, what is the value added by those programs?  An in-depth review will undoubtedly find programs that have existed for decades, their original purpose no longer relevant, programs that sounded good at their inception but have failed in execution, programs to solve a problem that should have been the purview of state or local governments, programs initiated to solve a short-term problem but live on forever.  President Reagan summed up the problem with this statement, “Government is like a baby, an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

MAKE EXECUTIVE BRANCH TRANSFORMATION A CRITICAL 2024 CAMPAIGN PLATFORM ISSUE:

The first question is, who should initiate and conduct the Executive Branch review? 

Congressional oversight is one of the “implied” powers granted to Congress by the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution. 

Congressional oversight is a key element of the system of checks and balances of power among the three branches of government. The main goals of Congressional oversight are to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse, and to protect rights and civil liberties. In this regard, Congress has failed miserably. Someone else has to step up and do this. 

Therefore, the next president should fix the Executive Branch, and that person should make this reform part of their campaign platform. 

Beginning now, and extending through the 2024 general election campaign, the Republican presidential candidates should make it clear that the priority for his/her vice president will be to lead the restructuring process to its conclusion.

November 2024 through January 2025. The president/vice president-elect should concentrate their selection of Cabinet leaders and their deputies who understand organizations, who have successfully led large complex organizations, and who will lead the effort to re-think their mission and to restructure their organization to most effectively and efficiently achieve their mission while also cutting spending. 

From inauguration day on through at least the summer of 2025, the Vice president will set up and execute the process. This will be difficult because we are talking about massive changes within the Executive Branch. We must recognize that for any large organization, especially one as large as the Executive branch, change is very difficult. Fear of the unknown is a powerful human force, especially in a government with an entrenched, layered bureaucracy that is stiff, stifling, introspective, and, in many respects, self-serving.

The newly elected vice president will provide hands-on leadership from start to finish with periodic in-progress reviews provided to the President and We-The-People. This is a long and tedious process. There are no viable shortcuts to re-thinking, re-designing, and re-structuring large organizations, and making them be all they can and should be.

FIRST, during the last week in January 2025, the vice president should set up a senior Organization and Spending Task Force consisting of the deputies of all the departments, agencies, and commissions. They will be the change agents and become the junkyard dogs of the federal government. 

SECOND, early February 2025, define the end state and end date for the campaign. For example, in a formal announcement with the President and the task force members standing alongside, the VP could announce:

 “Over the next several months, or as long as it takes, our task force will look inside every organizational element of the Executive Branch;  

ü Assess their mission – is it relevant today, 

ü Their structure – too many or too few people, 

ü Layering – is it OK or dysfunctional, 

ü Can the organization integrate vertically and horizontally efficiently and effectively on a day-to-day basis? 

ü Is the organization as a whole agile – able to deal with change as a matter of course, and 

ü Is there overall value-added for the government and especially for the American people?”

THIRD, immediately begin execution. The process begins in every named organization by putting together a very detailed organization chart. That’s the visual for the task force, and it provides an immediate sense of size, complexity, and layering.  Big government is layer after layer after layer, some of which produce nothing; they exist just to oversee what is being produced at the layers below.  Why the organization chart?  Because it allows the task force to begin the analysis and restructure at the bottom of the organization. One cannot reorganize and restructure top-down. To be successful, it must be bottom-up. 

BOTTOM-UP FROM THE ORGANIZATION CHARTS: 

Using the Department of Agriculture as an example, 65 different organizational elements come under the headings of departments, agencies, councils, institutes, programs, foundations, services, authorities, offices-of, boards, and facilities.  Inside them are departments, directorates, branches, sections, cells, and individual elements.  Every one of those becomes a “box” in the organization chart.  

Each organizational box must list the name of the element, number of employees, and the grade of the leader, GS 10, 12, whatever.

Within the Department of Agriculture, for example, the Deputy Secretary, part of the VP’s senior task force, will form his/her own internal departmental task force. The Department Task Force’s first action will be to send out an internal memo to the leaders of every “box” to submit, in one week, a no-more-than-two-page report to the Deputy Secretary.  The report format should include, as a minimum these six elements: 

1)    A one or two-sentence mission statement that describes what it is that element collectively does; for example, “responsible for writing, executing, and enforcing Department Regulation 135, Beef Export Program, and reporting results quarterly to ………”  During the following week, the Department Task Force will begin a detailed review of every input report. Their job is to ask, do we need Dept Reg 135 any longer?  If so, could this be done with fewer people?  Could the same number of employees also be responsible for Dept Reg 246, Pork Export Program? Do we need the report quarterly? And most importantly, what is the value-added of that report and organizational element to the overall Agriculture Department’s mission? Keep in mind that there are undoubtedly tens of thousands of worthless reports written every year by an entrenched bureaucratic mass that lives on forever sucking up tax dollars, stifling initiative, and being a roadblock to progress.

2)    The report should describe the grade structure of all the employees in the box. The Department Task Force will look at the grade structure for each of the boxes in the organization chart.  Is it commensurate with the degree of complexity of the mission? Could two or more similar “boxes” be combined, perhaps scaled down and led by this same leader (a span of control issue)? 

3)    Describe a typical work week; number of meetings, amount of travel, etc.  

This can reveal a lot about an organizational element and its leader.  Many meetings are just to fill up time, or are a daily social coffee clutch, or make the person in charge feel like he/she is actually “leading”.  Many are a colossal waste of time. If employees have time to attend too many meetings, they probably are not very busy to begin with. Is the travel critical to success, nice to have, or perhaps just to fill up the workweek? Travel is very expensive. 

4)    What laws and/or regulations guide that organization’s work? 

This is a critical element in the review.  Has this organization been acting out a scenario that is unnecessary or at least should better reside at the state or local level? 

5)    Include a list, in single sentences, of major accomplishments in the past twelve months. The task force will then determine if the accomplishments are in line with the mission or are just doing busy-work.

6)    A short statement of value-added. For example, without us, the Department would not/could not do the following……… 

The Department Task Force reviews of the input from the bottom up are all about policy, practices, process, and grade structure commensurate with overall responsibility, span of control, layering, and value-added determination.  

There will be tremendous resistance in many, maybe most, departments.  There will need to be a heavy hand on the part of the president, VP, department heads, and deputies. The President and VP will need to lead by example and downsize the White House staff as well.  When the Vice president routinely attends Departmental Task Force sessions, he/she will be grading their work and progress; 

ü are they tough enough, 

ü too tough, 

ü thorough enough, 

ü on the right track, or 

ü being overly protective of the status quo? 

The VP will constantly stress to the overall task force that the status quo is unacceptable. The VP will also be able to pick up strong points and pass them along to other Departments as best practices. 

The leaders of the Executive Departments along with their deputies will attend, in mass, a monthly in-progress-review with the president and vice president where they will lay out their findings to date in front of the President and other Cabinet leaders. Invite the media to listen in. 

Once the task force has worked its way up from the bottom, looking at every element, their individual mission, and value-added, then and only then will they be capable of looking back and seeing how many subordinate elements are off track, irrelevant, unnecessary, or even counterproductive.  They will then be capable of restructuring, re-aligning, re-tasking, and reorganizing the subordinate elements to create an organization that is more focused, aligned, responsive, innovative, agile, and rid of pockets of resistance.

What must be emphasized here is the importance of the bottom-up review process.  As the task force works up from layer to layer on the organization chart, they will come to some conclusions about the value added at each level. Having reached the top of the organization chart it is possible the Vice president’s senior task force could conclude that an entire department’s continued existence should be questioned.  

A prime example is the Department of Education.   We know that education in America is a national disgrace and not getting better despite (or because of) the 4,400 employees and a 2024 budget of $90 billion, a $10.8 billion increase over 2023. Back in Part 3 of this series, Education and Race Relations Reform, a strong case was made for the elimination of the Federal Department of Education.

This process may look tedious and time-consuming because it is.  But unless we begin at the bottom and unless we include every element, we will never achieve an acceptable level of success.

CONCLUSIONS: 

The task forces must be especially mindful of the phrase, “We provide oversight.”  That is a red flashing light that an organization does not, in and of itself, produce anything of value. They simply exist to grade papers, expand their purview, inhibit progress, and expend tax dollars.  As President Reagan reminded us, “The most terrifying words in the English language are, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

During the process, it is important to not lose sight of the two-fold objectives.  First, the objective is NOT to reach some specific lower-end-strength number of federal employees.  The objective is to rid the government of “boxes” in the organization charts that have no value added. They just exist because they have always been there.  The end state is an organization that is leaner, more focused, more efficient, more effective, and more agile. The second objective is to end up with an organization that has a much smaller and more realistic annual budget. 

Why do all of this work?  

Two reasons:

One the most common attempts at downsizing, in my experience, used numerous times over the past decades, has been to declare a hiring freeze or order an across-the-board, for example, ten percent personnel cut, neither of which make any sense nor achieve any lasting positive results. 

Second, what I have described above has never been done before.  We have just allowed the Executive Branch to grow without ever undertaking a necessary pruning process.

When completed, many positions, perhaps tens of thousands of them, will be eliminated. It will then take a couple of years of shuffling the deck by the Office of Personnel Management to get folks reassigned or retired, but it is within the art of the possible and worth the effort. 

Let me remind you one more time, the president’s budget is the sum of what all of the departments, agencies, councils, institutes, programs, foundations, services, authorities, offices of, boards, and facilities believe they need to accomplish their mission.  When, perhaps tens of thousands of actions, regulations, programs, and policies are eliminated because they are outdated, unnecessary, and/or redundant, the budget requirement can in all probability be downsized by hundreds of billions of dollars. 

There is also a states’ rights issue in all of this.  As the federal government grows, a natural outcome is that they over-reach into areas that are better and more effectively handled at the local and state levels.  Federal overreach tends to result in a one-size-fits-all approach to problem-solving and creates a stifling regulation-nation. 

BOTTOM LINE:

Everyone is talking about cutting spending but no one in recent memory has done anything about it. Making it happen is a 2-step process.  This is step one.  The second step is coming soon when we talk about how to “fix” Congress. 

Getting spending and hence debt under control will resonate with the American people, and be a very positive undertaking as opposed to the current tax-and-spend economic baseline of the Democrat Party.  

President Reagan got it right when he reminded us that:

“Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.”

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

“Government always finds a need for whatever money it gets.”

The Republican Party needs to embrace this concept of operations of transforming the Executive Branch of government as a critical Campaign Platform issue. 

Embrace it, and talk about it. 

In the book, FIX THE SYSTEMS, TRANSFORM AMERICA, see Chapter 4, TRANSFORM THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT, for more details on how to implement this reform concept.

If you know a candidate running for office, please pass this on to them.  Thank you.

Marvin L. Covault, Lt Gen US Army, retired, is the author of VISION TO EXECUTION, a book for leaders, and FIX THE SYSTEMS, TRANSFORM AMERICA as well as the author of a blog WeThePeopleSpeaking.com.

The Crazy Story

Behind the Disturbing News

By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part Five – February 2, 2024

The Strangest Case of E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump

80-year-old E. Jean Carroll, a former relationship- and sex-advice columnist, just won a huge $83.3 million settlement from Donald Trump in connection with a previous finding that she was “defamed” by Donald Trump.

New York is not a hospitable place for any conservative politician or celebrity, much less one ex-president Donald Trump—as we have seen from prosecutors Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, who both promised voters that they would get Trump if just elected.

But here are some strange facts about the case—with the proviso we have no idea of what exactly happened when both Carroll and Trump consensually and strangely entered into ribald banter in a department store’s lingerie section, then mutually and apparently willfully entered a dressing room, at which point their stories radically diverge (as opposed to somewhat diverged, since Trump at various times said he didn’t recall meeting her at all).

Trump appeared raucously in person in court to turn the civil suit into a referendum on the supposedly coordinated leftwing efforts to damage his presidential candidacy. But he was fighting with a Bill Clinton-appointed judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, and with a New York liberal jury pool, in a suit concerning his denials of a sexual assault of Carroll some 30 years ago. She won an earlier ruling that his mea culpa was excessive and entered the realm of character assassination and therefore was suing for defamation damages. 

Judge Kaplan certainly grew tired of Trump’s editorialization and like most New York jurists probably did not enjoy Trump in his courtroom in the first place. And although a jury earlier did not find Trump guilty of “rape,” Kaplan de facto has stated that it was OK to claim publicly that Trump was nevertheless guilty of rape. Or as the judge put it, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

But if that’s true, Judge Kaplan, why didn’t the jury, on the judge’s prior own instructions, simply convict Trump of rape, which it certainly had the power to do? How can someone not guilty of the definition of rape be guilty of rape?

Carroll could never decide what year the “assault” took place, only sometime in the 1994,1995, or 1996 three-year time frame. That and dozens of other inconsistencies in her narrative prompted the Christine Blasey Ford sort of question of how would one remember such minute details of an alleged violent encounter but not even the year in which it took place. For well over 20 years, she did not write about the alleged attack, much less accuse Trump of sexual assault—at least until he became a controversial rightwing presidential candidate in 2015–16.

There were no witnesses to the alleged assault. Still, Carroll drew her complaint from earlier material she had published in a 2019 book, What Do We Need Men For? and has variously characterized the alleged assault not as rape but a “fight.” If one claims one is damaged in the public square from the attention fueled by outrageous denials by Donald Trump to charges that nearly 30 years ago he assaulted a woman, why would one, for the first time in three decades and during the Trump presidency, write a widely covered and publicized article accusing the then president of the United States of an alleged rape? Would not that be designed to gain publicity, and much of it given the chronological lapses, bad publicity?

Carroll claimed she was defamed and ruined by Trump’s vehement denials of her charges of rape. But her employer at ELLE magazine denied her spat with Trump had anything to do with the decision to fire her at 76 (how many fashion/boyfriend/sex/ dating columnists are still writing in their late seventies?).

Part Six – February 6, 2024

The Strangest Case of E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump (continued)

As for Carroll’s suits, there were originally no criminal or civil charges filed because the statute of limitations had long since expired. But that changed in 2022 when a new law (“The Adult Survivors Act”) was passed in the New York legislature.

The law created a one-year window (beginning six months from the signing of the bill) that allowed survivors of long-ago alleged sexual assaults to sue the accused perpetrator, regardless of the statute of limitations. That opening suddenly gave Carroll’s prior unsuccessful efforts an entirely new life and she quickly refiled.

But the origin of the legislation is a bit strange: the legislator who introduced the bill, Brad Hoylman-Sigal, was a known Trump antagonist. More interesting, he had earlier introduced and passed another Trump-targeted bill. His so-called TRUST Act had empowered particular federal Congressional committees to have access to the New York State closed tax returns of high-ranking government officials. That bill’s subtext was that suddenly members of Congress could review Donald Trump’s tax returns.

In sum, while these new laws were perhaps not quite bills of attainder or ex-post-facto laws explicitly forbidden by the Constitution’s Article 1, sections 9 and 10, Hoylman-Sigal successfully got them passed with a view of targeting Trump for long past behavior, in a manner that would have been difficult if not impossible without such new legislation.

Translated, if you think something Donald Trump did in the past was wrong or illegal but there is no legal remedy to address it, then we now in America simply pass a new law that allows one to prosecute someone that before the law was not actionable.

Do you see where we are going? When we wish to go after our political enemies and there is no current law to prosecute them, we pass a new one and claim it applies to something they did in the distant past.

Only Carroll and Trump know exactly if both of them really did go from the lingerie section to a dressing room, or why, if they did sequester themselves, what exactly transpired, other than a He said–She said something or other. But there are doubts given past contradictory statements of Carroll, assertions that she remembers the dress type she wore (though it was not in existence at the time of the alleged crime), and her raucous and flamboyant journalistic career (hunting down ex-boyfriends and then moving in with them and their wives for a spell, listing all of Trump’s prior sexual encounters, etc.).

In 2015, Carroll marketed a strange app game she invented about wrecking people’s love lives: “Your object is to break them up…to stir up shit.” Or as Axios described it more fully:

The game, Damn Love, is available for iPhones and Androids, and it’s as simple as a game can get: You’re shown two people who are madly in love. Your object is to break them up. Shown a pair of options, you choose the ones more likely to stir up shit, given each person’s personality and proclivities, and the quicker you can make them split, the more you increase your evilness and rise through the ranks.

In sum, when one has 25 years to find legal redress and does not—until the chance encounter person of the past becomes the most famous person in the world––then one should ask, “Why him now?”

And when arch-Trump hater and leftwing billionaire Reid Hoffman heard about Carroll and decided to fund her multimillion-dollar suit against Trump, then we can only confirm that the Carroll mess is a tessera in the larger Bragg/James/Smith/Willis lawfare effort to bankrupt, destroy, and imprison an ex-president to ensure the people cannot be trusted once again to elect him to the presidency.

THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

SEARCH

Breaking: “Italian theologian..Pocher has confirmed that Pope Francis is in favour of the diaconate of women”: Cdl. Mueller has said Francis could be an Antipope if “he makes possible the ordination of women” 

February 11, 2024

Cardinal Müller: No pope or council could permit female deacons, ‘it would be invalid’

---

The Cardinal called the upcoming Synod a ‘wrecking ball’ that aims at a ‘restructuring of the Universal Church.’German cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Muller at Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome, January 6, 2015. [https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cardinal-mueller-no-pope-or-council-could-permit-female-deacons-it-would-be-invalid]

at

Dr. Maike Hickson

@HicksonMaike

Next bombshell is coming our way: “Italian theologian and religious Linda Pocher has confirmed that Pope Francis is in favour of the diaconate of women. As reported by the Spanish portal “Religion Digital” (Friday), the Pope is “very much in favour of the diaconate for women”, according to the Don Bosco sister, who teaches Christology and Mariology in Rome.” https://english.katholisch.de/artikel/50971-theologian-pope-is-a-great-advocate-of-the-diaconate-for-women…

1:23 PM · Feb 10, 2024

·

67.1K Views

In 2019, the former highest doctrinal authority in the Church, ex-Prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig admitted that Francis could be an antipope.

Remember that only an antipope when he speaks “ex cathedra” can speak what is “invalid” because the false pope’s papacy is invalid.

LifeSiteNews reported that Cardinal Muller said:

“‘[I]f he [Francis] spoke ex cathedra… make[ing] possible the ordination of women… in contradiction to the defined doctrine of the Church,’ he continues”

“‘It would be invalid,’ he adds.” [https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/cardinal-mueller-no-pope-or-council-could-permit-female-deacons-it-would-be-invalid]

Pray an Our Father now for reparation for the sins committed because of Francis’s Amoris Laetitia.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He wants you to do now and next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.

Francis Notes:

– Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales totally confirmed beyond any doubt the possibility of a heretical pope and what must be done by the Church in such a situation:

“[T]he Pope… WHEN he is EXPLICITLY a heretic, he falls ipso facto from his dignity and out of the Church, and the Church MUST either deprive him, or, as some say, declare him deprived, of his Apostolic See.”
(The Catholic Controversy, by St. Francis de Sales, Pages 305-306)

Saint Robert Bellarmine, also, said “the Pope heretic is not deposed ipso facto, but must be declared deposed by the Church.”
[https://archive.org/stream/SilveiraImplicationsOfNewMissaeAndHereticPopes/Silveira%20Implications%20of%20New%20Missae%20and%20Heretic%20Popes_djvu.txt]

– “If Francis is a Heretic, What should Canonically happen to him?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2020/12/if-francis-is-heretic-what-should.html

– “Could Francis be a Antipope even though the Majority of Cardinals claim he is Pope?”: http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2019/03/could-francis-be-antipope-even-though.html

– If Francis betrays Benedict XVI & the”Roman Rite Communities” like he betrayed the Chinese Catholics we must respond like St. Athanasius, the Saintly English Bishop Robert Grosseteste & “Eminent Canonists and Theologians” by “Resist[ing]” him: https://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/12/if-francis-betrays-benedict-xvi.html 

 –  LifeSiteNews, “Confusion explodes as Pope Francis throws magisterial weight behind communion for adulterers,” December 4, 2017:

The AAS guidelines explicitly allows “sexually active adulterous couples facing ‘complex circumstances’ to ‘access the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.’”

–  On February 2018, in Rorate Caeli, Catholic theologian Dr. John Lamont:

“The AAS statement… establishes that Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia has affirmed propositions that are heretical in the strict sense.”

– On December 2, 2017, Bishop Rene Gracida:

“Francis’ heterodoxy is now official. He has published his letter to the Argentina bishops in Acta Apostlica Series making those letters magisterial documents.”

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church by the bishops by the grace of God.

Election Notes: 

– Intel Cryptanalyst-Mathematician on Biden Steal: “212Million Registered Voters & 66.2% Voting,140.344 M Voted…Trump got 74 M, that leaves only 66.344 M for Biden” [http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/intel-cryptanalyst-mathematician-on.html?m=1]

– Will US be Venezuela?: Ex-CIA Official told Epoch Times “Chávez started to Focus on [Smartmatic] Voting Machines to Ensure Victory as early as 2003”: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2020/12/will-us-be-venezuela-ex-cia-official.html

– Tucker Carlson’s Conservatism Inc. Biden Steal Betrayal is explained by “One of the Greatest Columns ever Written” according to Rush: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/tucker-carlsons-conservatism-inc-biden.html?m=1

– A Hour which will Live in Infamy: 10:01pm November 3, 2020:
http://www.thecatholicmonitor.com/2021/01/a-hour-which-will-live-in-infamy-1001pm.html?m=1

What is needed right now to save America from those who would destroy our God given rights is to pray at home or in church and if called to even go to outdoor prayer rallies in every town and city across the United States for God to pour out His grace on our country to save us from those who would use a Reichstag Fire-like incident to destroy our civil liberties. [Is the DC Capitol Incident Comparable to the Nazi Reichstag Fire Incident where the German People Lost their Civil Liberties?: http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/is-dc-capital-incident-comparable-to.html?m=1 and Epoch Times Show Crossroads on Capitol Incident: “Anitfa ‘Agent Provocateurs‘”:
http://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2021/01/epoch-times-show-crossroads-on-capital.html?m=1] 

Pray an Our Father now for the grace to know God’s Will and to do it.

Pray an Our Father now for America.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church as well as the Triumph of the Kingdom of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.SHARE

SHARE

Comments

Anonymous said…

If the last Roman Pontiff of the Church abdicated the ministry instead of the Petrine Munus, then it is evidence that his abdication was invalid. And if we look for the Universe Dominici Gregis teachings confronting Bergoglio’s pontificate on this fact, then the same Apostolic Constitution says that Bergoglio’s pontificate does not exist, because his acts are invalid and worthless. That is, Müller’s uncertainty would be answered clearly. But the German prelate is going down the same path as Viganò through no fault of his own as well, that is, showing a canonical contempt. This is dangerous because it moves further and further away from the evidence that shows the truth.

12:43 AM

• CURRENT NEWS ANALYSIS

Pope Francis Hopes Jesus Was Wrong…

 Kennedy Hall January 16, 2024 0 Comments

Editor’s note: with the latest scandal against the Faith from the Roman Pontiff himself, we recall how Scalfari reported that the Pope did not believe in the dogma of hell, and the Vatican’s failure to condemn this heresy in a political newspeak non-answer. This latest scandal seems to confirm, in some way, that the Pope does not believe in hell. Here we recommend our readers to our contributing editor, Kennedy Hall, in which he compares the words of Pope Francis to the words of Jesus Christ. TSF

Kennedy Hall

Kennedy Hall is a contributing editor for OnePeterFive. He is the author Terror of Demons: Reclaiming Traditional Catholic Masculinity and Lockdown with the Devil, a novel published by Our Lady of Victory Press. He is a writer at Catholic Family News, LifeSiteNews and is the host of the Conservative talk-radio show, The Kennedy Report. He is married with four children and lives in Ontario, Canada.