Biden's Radical Agenda, Another Russia Hoax Exposed, Silencing The Truth

by Gary Bauer: Biden's Radical Agenda
The left and its media allies spent four years haranguing Donald Trump as a dictator and a threat to our norms and values. Joe Biden campaigned as a uniter, promising a return to normalcy.

As usual, the left's narrative was completely wrong and the exact opposite of the truth. We're about three months into the Biden/Harris Administration, and these first few months tell us a lot if we are discerning and connecting the dots.

One of the first things Joe Biden did when he took office was remove Donald Trump's pro-life protections, forcing taxpayers to subsidize abortions. That alone tells you how extreme this administration is. (Today, the Biden Administration is expected to repeal Trump's ban on federally funded fetal tissue research.)

Then Biden opened the border, creating a massive crisis. Experts believe that a record two million illegal aliens will enter the country this year.

The first bill that Biden and Pelosi introduced in Congress was H.R. 1 -- a federal takeover of elections in your state. It bans popular voter ID laws in all 50 states. Why would they do that? The answer is obvious. It's easier to cheat if you outlaw voter ID.

Now they are attempting to seize control of the Supreme Court by changing the number of justices from nine to 13. Adding four more liberal activists to the Supreme Court is exactly what Biden needs to remove the court as a check against the left's radical agenda.

But that's not all. They are advancing legislation to make Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico states, adding four more leftists to the Senate.

And they're working hand-in-glove with the tech titans to censor conservatives on social media, silencing opposition voices. (See below.)

My friends, it's the left that is attacking our norms, traditions and our freedoms – just as it always does. It's the left that wants to fundamentally transform America!

All these actions are more reminiscent of communist China than they are of American traditions. In fact, if a previously free nation anywhere else in the world started doing these things, we would denounce them and put them on a watch list of nations threatening the freedom of their people.

Another Russia Hoax Exposed
Remember the outrage last year when a leaked report suggested that Russia had paid bounties to the Taliban to kill American troops in Afghanistan? Democrats in Congress and the media used the report to hammer Trump for being soft on Russia. Joe Biden raised the issue during one of the debates.

The Pentagon said at the time that there was no corroborating evidence. Intelligence officials added that President Trump wasn't briefed on the report because "it was unverified."

Besides, it's absurd on its face. The Taliban never needed financial inducements to kill Americans! Their radical Islamic creed was enough to cause them to kill "infidels."

Well, the intelligence community that it has "low confidence" in the accuracy of the report. Translation: It was garbage.

Sadly, it was just another example of the weaponization of our intelligence agencies against Donald Trump and conservatives.

This is a serious problem. We need strong surveillance of our enemies. But the left and its Deep State allies seem to think that conservatives are the enemy!

Remember the dozens of so-called "intelligence experts" who all said that the Hunter Biden laptop story was "Russian disinformation"? NPR and the social media tech giants used that claim to shut down the story. Well, they were wrong! (Here and here.)

Over the years, I have developed strong relationships with the leaders of pro-defense, national security groups. I am taking the initiative to reach out to them to develop strategies for exposing corruption and political abuses within our intelligence community.

Silencing The Truth
The Big Tech leftists are once again doing the bidding of their left-wing allies in Big Government. When the New York Post did some real journalism and exposed the sudden riches of a Marxist Black Lives Matter leader, Facebook banned the story, making it impossible to share.

When Project Veritas and James O'Keefe did some real journalism and exposed a CNN director talking about how CNN manipulates the news, targets conservatives and spreads "propaganda," Twitter banned O'Keefe.

My friends, this is censorship plain and simple. Big Tech leftists are working with Big Government leftists to silence conservative speech and opinions, to hide the truth and to protect their left-wing friends.

As I noted above, they did it repeatedly during the campaign and it had a major impact. Big Tech interfered in our election, and it is restricting our freedoms today.

Another Race Hoax
Another way the left is silencing speech is by weaponizing race. If you're pro-life, you're racist. If you support voter ID laws, you're racist. If you believe in border security, you're racist. The left has weaponized race to shut down debate because no decent person wants to be called a racist.

One result is that we have seen an epidemic of fake hate crimes in recent years. The most notable was the case of Jussie Smollett. But this is a real and dangerous phenomenon in the educational system, which is firmly in the grip of the left.

This morning, I watched as Avery Severson described the shocking ordeal she experienced after trying to form a conservative student group at her high school.

As she got close to meeting the school's requirements, rumors began spreading that Severson was sending racist messages to a black student. Black students and some teachers staged a walkout in protest.

Local police began investigating. The FBI was brought in. The atmosphere was so tense that Severson had to be escorted between classes for her own safety.

Eventually, it was proven that Severson never sent the messages. She was innocent. The whole thing was a hoax. But the school launched a coverup, telling Severson she couldn't talk about the case. It wasn't clear from her interview if anyone was ever held accountable.

This is beyond despicable! Just imagine what her life must have been like. How many of her friends turned on her and abandoned her?

If you have a child or grandchild who is well-grounded in the conservative Christian worldview, encourage them to form a Christian student club or conservative student club at their school. Sooner or later, they're going to have to learn how to defend their values. If your child is involved in a such school club, drop us a note about their experiences.

Good News

• The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Ohio's pro-life law that protects unborn children with Down syndrome. The Sixth Circuit will soon take up an appeal of Tennessee's informed consent law.
• House Republicans are attempting to force a vote on legislation that would protect babies who survive botched abortion attempts. I am pleased to report that the effort is being led by GOP Whip Steve Scalise and Rep. Kat Cammack, a conservative, pro-life freshman endorsed and supported by CWF!
• The Wisconsin Supreme Court rolled back liberal Governor Tony Evers's authority to impose lockdowns.
• Montana joins Florida, Idaho, Texas and Utah in banning "vaccine passports."
• GOP governors in Arizona and Nebraska have declared their states to be Second Amendment sanctuaries.
• Arizona joins Georgia in banning private, dark money groups from funding and taking over official state and local election functions.
• Republican state attorneys general are stepping up legal challenges to the Biden Administration's overreach. (Here and here.)
• A new poll by liberal media outlets finds overwhelming public opposition to woke corporations and sports teams attempting to dictate cultural and political values.
• Dozens of conservative organizations, including my public policy group American Values, have signed a public statement pledging to refuse corporate contributions from biased Big Tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter. We will not be bribed by Big Tech to surrender our liberties!

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Can the Great ‘Awokening’ Succeed?

Wokeism is creating a future group of politically incorrect Trotskyites on a proverbial rendezvous with a Mexican ice ax, given that by birth they will never be woke enough for the new Stalinism.

Victor Davis Hanson

by Victor Davis Hanson: We all know that we are living in revolutionary times. The origins, ascendence, values, laws, and future of the United States are all under assault by self-described, though accurately described, revolutionaries.

It is a Jacobin, Bolshevik, or Maoist moment. All aspects of life, well beyond politics, are now to be ideologically conditioned. Everything from kindergarten messaging, cartoons, workplace reeducation, and television commercials to college admissions, baseball games, and the airlines are to be “fundamentally transformed” along racial lines.

Long gone is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a colorblind society.

Gone, at least at the state level, is confidence in the melting pot of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage (although mixed marriages and multiracial children are at an all-time high).

Gone are even the affirmative-action doctrines of proportional representation and disparate impact. (Yet the two mandates were always arbitrarily applied, in the sense that the U.S. Postal Service and the professional football and basketball leagues never paid much attention to racial quotas based on demographic percentages, which apparently only applied to white and Asian “overrepresentation” elsewhere).

Wokeism, however, is essentially tribal. It seeks to identify particular nonwhite constituencies, unite them not by identical class, not by similar skin color, not by collective similar history, not by shared experience, not by mutual cultural affinities, not by longstanding historical alliances, but simply by two premises:

1) Those of the woke collective are either claimants to being “nonwhite,” and thus victims of racism, or they are architects and supporters of the wokeist agenda, and:

2) they can thereby all either directly leverage reparatory concessions in hiring, admissions, careers, compensation, and general influence or ensure the revolutionary guillotine exempts themselves.

A cynic might add that much of this new racialism is a product of globalteering, and seeks to cater to huge foreign markets—China especially—by both “looking more like the world,” and delighting America’s critics, while appeasing far less moral audiences and consumers abroad than a perceived shrinking market at home. Still for the woke revolution to succeed, a number of experiments will have to go their way.

Merit Was Always a Sham?
Wokeism assumes that merit was mostly an arbitrary white construct. Its use was to insist on ethnocentric and culturally exclusionary criteria to ostracize the Other. Otherwise, “merit” had not much relation with real competency.

Is that allegation true? We shall soon see.

But note first that few are saying to keep bar-exam grading static, or SAT minimum scores for admission the same, and thereby instead create a Marshall Plan effort in the inner-city to stop the violence, turn failed schools into stellar academies, and honestly critique single-parent households, illegitimacy, and inordinate criminality—as an effort to ensure African American youth are not just qualified, but better qualified meritocratically than those who are deemed to hold these monopolies.

Instead, take the United Airlines idea that it won’t necessarily train the most qualified would-be pilot candidates. Now it will target applicants by racial groupings and, by fiat, limit white males to 2,500 of 5,000 slots in its pilot-training schools. If a non-white applicant has less prior experience with flight, scores lower on a test, or compiled a less than competitive high school or college record, it won’t matter then. These were all always useless benchmarks apparently.

In today’s age of computer-driven avionics, the prerequisite ability to do math, to know something about navigation, to understand computers, or to have the proper temperament to fly a plane doesn’t really matter. The fact that thousands will enter pilot training, and soon aircraft controlling, in part on the basis of their gender or race, will not in any way affect the safety or efficacy of travel.

We will know fairly soon the answers to this woke experiment by two criteria: Will pilot error, whether fatal or incidental, increase? And will our elites, whether in Air Force One, or in their own Gulfstreams, follow suit and hire pilots on the basis of their diversity first, and avionics record second.

We can ditto race-based criteria now used at the corporate and financial level, in high-tech, the military, entertainment, education, and in likely everything from movie roles to book contracts to national awards.

Again, such emphases assume that our current managers, professionals, and directors of the last 50 years were heretofore racists or were hired by racists. Or at least they satisfied artificially constructed high standards that bore little relation to actual skills required on the job.

Or, they must no longer enjoy percentages in the workplace simply representative of their demographic percentages, but rather in reparatory fashion become underrepresented rather than just demographically correct.

To sum up, in other words, if there were similar race-based/diversity criteria applied to the current meritocratic NBA, would it matter all that much?

If African American athletes were by protocol and statute kept to between, say, 12-20 percent of the NBA player roster, to reflect the black 12-13 percent of the U.S. population, would it make that much difference?

Would the starting L.A. Lakers five, with one African American forward, one white player, a Latino guard, an Asian center, and a Punjabi shooter be all that less exciting, skilled, or successful a team? Are the current standards that accept or reject an NBA player constructed or weighed to favor African Americans that can be judged by their “overrepresentation”?

In the logic of wokeness, would the resulting appeal of a team—that “looks more like” a multiracial America—makeup in diversity, unity, cohesion, equity, inclusion, and appeal what it lost in sheer abilities to make plays, dribble, shoot, rebound, dunk, or block? Were the all-white racialist and exclusionary teams of the 1940s really no different in skill and ability than the purely meritocratic 2021 teams? Of course not.

Again, we are going to find out, and in a number of professions, what happens when traditional meritocratic standards are replaced by woke guidelines.

Some Racism Is Not Racism
Wokeism assumes asymmetry. That is, it assumes, for recompensatory purposes, that the spirit of slavery remains, that the hatreds propelling Jim Crow from 1879 to 2021 are very much alive, that the civil rights movement of “equality of opportunity” of the last 55 years was more or less a noble dud. And the result is wokeism’s doctrine that reparatory bias is not bias. Or if it is, the people will understand, Animal Farm-style, why some discrimination is good and different from other discrimination that is bad or why some prejudice is more tolerable than other prejudices.

If asymmetrical wokeism then operates with a necessary and correct imbalance accepted by most, then there will be nothing wrong. There will follow no backlash, no social chaos, in using race to denigrate others collectively.

There will be nothing wrong in ad nauseam using “whiteness,” “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” and “white terrorists’” in pejoratively stereotypical terms—collectively to apply to all 230 million deemed whites‚ whether the unemployed welder or the part-time junior college instructor or Bill Gates—in a way that it would be terribly wrong to talk pejoratively and collectively in terms of any other group.

If one collates all the things that have been said over the years about whites in general by Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, or Maxine Waters, and yet more recently in more sophisticated fashion by the new generation of racialist-obsessed intellectuals such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Damon Young, or Elie Mystal, and then switched the terms white to black, would there be any outcry that it was becoming wrong to deductively extrapolate from individuals collective values and beliefs, and then, in circular fashion, reapply them to individuals as an innate trait?

We shall soon discover whether this tenet of wokeism—asymmetrical use of collective stereotyping—is widely accepted by 330 million Americans. We will soon see one of three consequences from this unapologetic woke racial generalizing:

1) The American people are so inured to their hateful origins and history, that they do not mind at all when whites are collectively demonized as enjoying positions they never earned and thus logically should not continue to enjoy.

Or, 2) Given that no one objects to stereotyping 230 million people, no one objects to anyone stereotyping others on the basis of race, in the manner that once fostered the civil rights movement.

Or, 3) We will all for survival, as Rwanda, the Balkans, and Iraq teach us, group together by first-cousin affinities and tribes. Recalling Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, we will freely stereotype, denigrate, and separate from other groups on the premises that our particular generalizations and deductions are the one and only true and accurate typecasting.

Dr. Frankenstein and His Woke Monster
What made a 90 percent white population of the late 1950s and 1960s finally sicken of racial bias? Many things—protests, boycotts, the force of moral persuasion. But three things stand out.

One, segregation and bias were always contrary to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

Two, these assumptions of racial prejudice were not predicated on any discernible science, logic, or coherent basis other than tribal bias, hatred, and ignorance.

Three, racial unfairness robbed the United States of critical talent by ignoring merit and substituting pseudo-scientific tribal affinities.

Yet by the emerging 1960s did anyone really believe that Perry Como de facto had a better voice than Harry Belafonte or Sammy Davis, Jr., that Sidney Poitier must be a less gifted actor than Frank Sinatra, that Hank Aaron was innately less impressive than Roger Maris, or that Senator Edward Brooke was less competent an American senator than Senator Herman Talmadge? Again, no.

Wokeness is returning to such tribal separation and crackpot categorization on the one assumption that its arbitrary rules will not alienate Americans as they finally did in the past.

So, how are we to believe that non-whites can pick the race of their future roommates in colleges without audit or complaint? Farm aid shall be doled out to all except whites? Welfare in Oakland must exclude poor white recipients? Vaccinations will be targeted to non-white groups first? Will 330 million Americans grow to accept that racial typology will govern all state policy—in following a noble and successful historical precedent?

In each mass shooting, we shall broadcast the horror only if the shooter is white and his victims not so, but mute the story if the opposite should be true?

For noble purposes, criminal suspects shall not be identified by race unless they are white? It will be fine in advance to announce the gender and race of a vice-presidential candidate that mostly alone will determine the selection? We will massage data, and suppress or publicize statistics depending on their usefulness to the woke movement?

If blacks are disproportionately responsible for hate crimes against Asian Americans, we will keep still, or better yet nobly lie that whites are.

Such wokeness assumes that the Eastern Europeans never tired of their ministry-of-truth propaganda, that the cynical Soviet citizen never ignored Pravda’s assertions, or that Cubans really believe the Castro communique.

Wokeness is either unaware of, or unconcerned with, the seething religious, caste, and racial tensions that plague India, or wrecked Lebanon, or unwound Yugoslavia. That is, the woke believe their Byzantine books of race-based exceptions, exemptions, and absolutions will convince 330 million Americans that segregation, or official untruth, are permitted, given historical circumstances and the common good.

But they will not.

Finally, wokeness takes for granted that its elite white Dr. Frankenstein architects will always control the prejudicial woke monster they created—on the assumption that one will never devour its creators. But history suggests ideologies often do just that.

Over the last two weeks, many of America’s most elite colleges seem to have deliberately restricted white admissions to around 30-40 percent of their incoming classes—on the altar of diversity and post-George Floyd wokeness. Yet, not every high-earning, bicoastal white liberal can give $10 million to Yale or Stanford or sire a likely future Major League Baseball star.

For the woke white elite, then, it will be hard to find some exemption from the rules that 70 percent of the population will be artificially recalibrated to 30 percent of the successful admissions.

A white liberal may have said “Who cares?” when hard-working Asians who represent six percent of the U.S. population were deliberately restricted to no more than 30-40 percent of the nation’s “best” colleges. But now? Will he really preen, “Bravo, my super-prepped, hyper-achieving prodigy got rejected at all the good schools and I’m so proud he took one for the woke team?”

Or what happens to the wannabe woke CEO who offered every sort of humiliating “unearned” confession, but nevertheless was still of the wrong color? Or what will be the mindset of the progressive, white male lieutenant colonel who found that his loud wokeness was mostly useful in preparing him to better understand why he should not be promoted to brigadier general?

It is OK for woke whites to be constantly accused of “unearned privilege” as long as their bicoastal billets were tolerably reduced by just 20 percent due to racial gerrymandering. But does their magnanimity extend to a 30-40 percent white jizyah, that cuts so close to progressive homes?

Will the brilliant actress in a blockbuster classic mumble, if even just privately, that she was the wrong color to be nominated as best actress?

Sure, some may feel that these are elite psychodramas. But for that reason, they will become mostly the angsts of the Left. The liberal white elite class engineered a system of woke racialism that they assumed rested on some sort of unspoken 70 percent White/12 percent Black/10 percent Latino/six percent Asian, and two percent “other” formula that would always still leave them plenty of spoils while the unhappy consequences fell instead on Dotty the Deplorable, Charlie Chump, Cliff the Clinger, and Irene Irredeemable. They did not sign up for a 30-40 percent white allotment that cuts into the white woke; that is, the good and the morally superior whites.

So this, too, will be another of wokeism’s greatest tests, when elite writers, professors, actors, lawyers, newsroom grandees, and CEO magnificoes learn that they, too, can be of the wrong color under the new tribal prejudice they fostered.

Wokeism is creating a future group of politically incorrect Trotskyites on a proverbial rendezvous with a Mexican ice ax, given that by birth they will never be woke enough for the new Stalinism.
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Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian at the
and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. H/T American Greatness

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Letting Hunter Biden Off Is A Message To Us Peasants

by Kurt Schlichter: The fact that the loser spawn of Grandpa Badfinger is thumbing his coke-caked nose at the justice system represents not merely the tacky machinations of a crusty pol protecting the family Fredo. It has a deeper and more cynical purpose – to show us that our overlords are unaccountable and that the law is now merely another implement in the regime’s toolkit of oppression. They are telling us that they and their scumbag progeny can do whatever they want, but that we can’t.

In the short term, this is infuriating. In the long term, it could bring down the system our garbage ruling caste inherited.

They are throwing it in our faces, thinking it’s a good plan to force us to submit.

Right now, hundreds of Americans are being prosecuted for trespassing inside their own Capitol building, and eager agents of the American Stasi are salivating at the idea of charging them with “sedition” for doing exactly what hordes of leftist dirtbags did in the past. Of course, none of the leftist dirtbags were shot dead while unarmed by some cop whose name we still don’t know. That’s another message. If you are a petty criminal dying of a self-inflicted fentanyl overdose while you resist arrest, we’ll know the name of the cop unlucky enough to be the guy arresting you when you expired. But cap an unarmed female vet for climbing through a window? Shhhh. That’s a secret.

President Asterisk came out and announced that his administration was going to be cracking down on those terrible gun people even as his Snortunate Son got a pass for lying about his drug addiction on his background check. Think you would catch a break? Maybe if you were in a blue big city – weirdly (okay, not weirdly – by design) the inhabitants of Democrat Petri dishes don’t get charged for this kind of gun crime.

It’s more than just helping out a relative or catering to commie voters. It’s a demonstration of power. They can make the rules and break the rules, or break the rules over their enemies’ heads.

You are their enemy. The law is not designed to stop crime or save lives but to create another way to keep you in line, frightened and defenseless.

This dual-track justice system is nothing new – it’s been going on for a while. We saw it with Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, whose classified info antics would have sent any of us off for a stretch in the stony lonesome. Not her. She didn’t miss a single goblet of her screw-top Trader Joe’s chardonnay. Those of us who handled classified info understand at a gut level just how appalling this whole thing was.

There’s no leeway for people like us, no bending over backward and then around again into a knot to explain the crimes away when a peasant screws up, even by simple oversight. But she is special. She did it on purpose, got caught, and all the best and the brightest made sure she skated.

Why?

Again, it’s not merely that she’s connected and she called in some favors. There’s a method to their mendacity. They want us to know that the law is but a weapon to be used against you if you step out of line.

Andrew Cuomo was taking liberties with lib girls (who pretended to be astonished that he acted just like every other lib potentate) when he wasn’t taking thousands of lives of old people killed in COVID hotboxes. He’ll walk. You wouldn’t.

DC teen sociopaths kill a hardworking guy while stealing his car. They got a deal. You wouldn’t.

But a patriot comes to Washington and walks through the Rotunda – lock him up forever!

Yet when some BLM/Antifa pustule tries to set fire to a federal courthouse? Case dismissed – for him, her, or whatever its nonbinary pronoun is this week.

Gee, maybe our intrepid, licensed, registered regime journalists will call out this outrageous corruption. Oh right, no they won’t. In fact, instead of being attracted to this reeking pile of corruption that was just begging for exposure, the media grown-up maggots instead went and started buzzing around Ron DeSantis.

Does anyone imagine that if Don Jr. had been a meth-mouthed pervert who got kicked out of the Navy on his first day for drugs and who had filled out a false background check for a gun that this would not have been the first question to President Trump? Did it even get brought up to Asterisk, much less in any of Huffer Biden’s interviews for his new zillion-dollar book, “My Ghostwriter Wrote This So My Loser Family Could Get Yet Another Laundered Pay-Off?” Surely you jest. I just hope he had the class to buy the swooning reporters dinner first and to wear protection.

So, the prosecutors won’t prosecute and the reporters won’t report, though they’ll all babble endlessly about the importance of our sacred institutions even as they set them aflame. This is unsustainable. What will we citizens do?

First, they’ll vote for harder and harder core right-wingers. Self-preservation will require pummelers over policy wonks. Thought Trump was a monster? Get a load of what’s coming. The time of such puff-people as Asa! And Kristi! And Nikki! is ending. We’ll demand Genghis Khan. And we’ll get him.

Then look for us to do the same when we get back in power. Hey, new rules, as well as self-preservation. But do two wrongs make a right?

Probably not, but just try explaining how this stuff suddenly stopped being okay when we start doing it back at them. Good luck with that.
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Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) is a Los Angeles trial lawyer, a veteran with a masters in Strategic Studies from the United States Army War College, and a former stand-up comic. Article shared via TownHall.

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The Three Puppeteers

Biden is an empty vessel filled with whatever rhetoric the radical left-wing wishes to advance.
Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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Biden’s ‘Back To Normal’ Is Not What Voters Were Promised

by Dan K. Eberhart: President Joe Biden went to great lengths on the campaign trail to argue his first 100 days in office would “be far more than just signaling a shift in tone” from the Trump administration. He vowed to unify the country and be president of all Americans.

After the terrible events of Jan. 6, many voters, regardless of political affiliation, were willing to take the incoming president at his word. Yes, Biden’s coalition of Democrats and uber-progressives backed some pretty radical ideas – defund the police, open borders, Green New Deal, reparations.

But this was “Middle Class Joe,” and after a year of being stuck at home due to the pandemic, a return to normalcy sounded pretty good. Biden’s pledge to work in a bipartisan fashion with Congress was reassuring. In fact, his inauguration speech focused on creating “the most elusive of things in a democracy: unity.”

Now, more than halfway through the traditional honeymoon period for new presidents, there’s increasing disappointment in the substance and tone coming from the White House. Democrats focused on maintaining their slim hold on the Senate and House in the midterms next year should worry.

It turns out the olive branch Biden talked about extending to Republicans was really the club of executive power. From the moment he entered the Oval Office, Biden dropped the bipartisan unity shtick and seized the executive pen.

Biden’s decision to go it alone so early in his presidency will make it almost impossible to pass his ambitious agenda on immigration reform, climate change and health care, at least legislatively.

Biden signed more than 50 executive orders in his first 40 days – twice as many as the three preceding presidents. Many of those orders were about scoring points in the culture wars, including orders on transgender rights, open borders, and climate change, and not about restoring the economy, jobs or stopping the pandemic.

More than 20 of Biden’s executive actions reversed policies adopted by Trump, including canceling infrastructure projects like the Keystone XL pipeline and restoring the birds nest of regulations that have made infrastructure development nearly impossible. The hashtag #BidenKilledMyJob has been trending on Twitter for weeks.

Biden defended his assault on Trump’s agenda by saying he was eliminating bad policy, but policy created by executive action dies by executive action.

Even the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill is a partisan monstrosity that passed both chambers without a single Republican vote. Only 1% of the entire package goes toward vaccines, and only 5% is focused on pandemic-related public health issues. The rest is spending on bailouts for cities and states, and the environmental and social justice priorities of the progressive left wing.

It’s not clear whether Biden is unable or unwilling to rein in the progressive excesses of his coalition, but Republicans, and many centrist Democrats, feel they are being run over.

Absent the constant social media posts, Biden’s first two months in office have been as partisan and ideologically driven as the administration he replaced.

Biden ascended to the White House at the perfect time. Not one but two vaccines were being rolled out and the economy was tightly wound with pent-up demand, but he is wasting the opportunity to unite the country around a common desire for economic flourishing.

The current state of affairs is just fine with the progressives in the rickety Biden coalition, of course. They cheer his use of executive power and efforts to erase the past four years. But all the woke virtue signaling and disregard for the concerns of red state residents comes at a price.

Voters tired of Trump’s style, but many of the policies adopted under his watch remain popular. If Biden believes otherwise, he misreads the electorate.

Voters didn’t sign-on for the progressive policies of the 21st century left. If that’s what they wanted, they would have chosen Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Biden’s sharp-left turn is setting the stage for Trump or one of his acolytes to return to the White House in 2024.

Trump won the White House in 2016 because many voters felt they no longer had a voice in their own country. Biden promised to be their president, too. He may not now be calling them “deplorables,” but he isn’t listening to them either. So much for unity.
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Dan K. Eberhart is CEO of Canary, an independent oilfield services company in the United States, and Executive Director of Eberhart Capital. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona and shared this I&I article.

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Israel Has Made It; Now It Needs To Grow Up.

Caroline Glick: At independence, Israel was little more than a spark of light – a tiny spark – in the Jewish world. From a total of 11.5 million Jews alive on the 5th of the month of Iyyar in the Jewish year 5708, (May 14, 1948), only 650,000, or 6% lived in Israel. In contrast, the day Israel was founded, some five million, or 43% of world Jewry were living in the United States.

Fast forward 73 years and that little spark of light is now the sun in the Jewish solar system. With 6.9 million Jews out of a total of 14.9 million, not only is Israel the largest Jewish community in the world by far with 47% of world Jewry living within its boundaries, by 2030, the majority of world Jewry will be living in the Jewish state.

As for America, although half a million Jews immigrated to the US since Israel was founded, the total number of Jews in America stands today at a mere 5.7 million. American Jewry has been reduced to just 38% of the world Jewish population. The implications are straightforward. Since 1948, virtually all of the growth in the Jewish world population has happened and is continuing to happen in Israel.

Israel’s transformation into the center of the Jewish world isn’t just a question of demographics. Most Torah learning that is happening in the world is happening in Israel. Most Jewish literature is being written in Israel. Jewish advances in everything from medicine to economics and business, to science, engineering, culinary arts, visual arts and more are happening in Israel. Jewish history is being researched in Israel and is being made in Israel. Israel is the present of the Jewish people and the future of the Jewish people.

Aside from everything else, this state of affairs exposes the manifest stupidity of the claim that anti-Zionism is anything other than anti-semitism.

Although Israel’s position at the center of the Jewish world is undeniable, it has gone largely unnoticed by most Israelis. Most of the Israelis who are engaged with Diaspora Jewry continue to act as though Israel – with a per capita GDP higher than Japan’s – is an underpopulated, impoverished backwater that cannot survive without the support of our wealthy and more secure brethren in America, Australia or France.

So too, most Israelis are unaware of the revolution the country has brought to Judaism itself. In the space of three generations, Israelis have taken their grandparents’ practices from the ghettos of Europe and the melachs of North Africa and Arabia and turned them into a dynamic, living, breathing creed. Judaism is the rhythm of life in Israel.

In every neighborhood, village and town, the Judaism that is lived in Israel has an electric vibrance. Israeli music, fashion, customs, prayer, settlement, religious studies, agriculture, and cooking are separately and together expressions of a spiritual renewal the likes of which no one imagined, or planned.

It is the organic outgrowth of the reunification of the people of Israel and their faith in their land. Few have noticed any of this or considered its spiritual and cultural significance, let alone recognized its potential.

The reformation of Jewish life is not Israel’s only huge achievement that has been largely overlooked and underappreciated by the people of Israel. They have also largely missed the transformation of Israel’s global position. The ongoing domestic debate regarding the goal of Israel’s policies in relation to Iran’s nuclear program is a testament to this lack of national self-awareness.

Since Iran’s military nuclear program was revealed to the world by an Iranian opposition group in late 2002, a debate has raged in Israel about who is responsible for preventing Iran from getting the bomb. In 2002, the immediate response of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his then deputy Ehud Olmert was that that dealing with Iran’s nuclear program was America’s responsibility.

True, they acknowledged, Israel is the first on Iran’s target list. And true, Iran’s leaders have all committed to annihilating Israel. But since Iran’s nuclear program threatens the region – and indeed the world as a whole, responsibility for dealing with this existential threat belongs to superpower America, not to tiny Israel.

This view became the near-consensus over the years in the IDF General Staff. Israeli generals’ counterparts in the Pentagon promised them that Israel could count on the US. Today this view is promoted most powerfully by former IDF chief of general staff and current Defense Minister Benny Gantz. Gantz gave summed up this position succinctly on Monday in remarks he made at a joint press appearance with visiting US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

In Gantz’s words, “The Tehran of today poses a strategic threat to international security, to the entire Middle East and to the State of Israel, and we will work closely with our American allies to ensure that any new agreement with Iran will secure the vital interests of the world, of the US, prevent a dangerous arms race in our region and protect the State of Israel.”

Notably, like Olmert and Sharon before him, Gantz put Israel last on his list of concerns despite the fact that Iran’s ayatollahs have made it abundantly clear that Israel is their primary target. Moreover, Gantz’s statement made clear that he rules out the option of Israel acting independently as a regional power to secure its very existence.

Both philosophically and practically, Gantz’s approach disavows strategic independence, and through it, actual independence for Israel. In other words, his approach is a pure distillation of anti-Zionism.

Since 2002, the most prominent and powerful advocate for a different approach to Iran’s nuclear program has been Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s view is that Israel is solely responsible for its security. Consequently, Israel is responsible for ensuring that the genocidally antisemitic Iranian regime never acquires military nuclear capability. This view has been subjected to brutal and continuous assault by the other side, which has castigated Netanyahu’s approach as incendiary and warmongering.

Netanyahu repeated his position in his press appearance with Austin on Monday. “My policy as prime minister of Israel is clear – I will never allow Iran to obtain the nuclear capability to carry out its genocidal goal of eliminating Israel.”

Those wishing to pass the Iran buck to America often claim that Israel has no strategy for dealing with Iran. But the operation at the Natanz nuclear installation last weekend, and others which have occurred over the past several years and have been attributed the Mossad by foreign sources all make clear that Israel has a very clear strategy for preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Facing Iran’s nuclear advances, Israel is implementing a strategy of undermining Iran’s progress. To carry it out successfully, Israel has developed impressive independent strategic capabilities. These have allowed Israel to carry out creative and daring discrete attacks on carefully chosen targets that have cumulatively blocked Iran’s nuclear advances.

Israel’s strategy of delaying and subverting Iran’s nuclear advances is geared towards achieving the goal that like the Obama administration before it, the Biden administration claims to aspire to achieve. Both leaders’ nuclear diplomacy has been represented as a means to delay Iran’s nuclear progress as well.

The difference is that the Obama-Biden approach to Iran is based on appeasement and trust. The Obama-Biden team are willing to take the ayatollahs at their word when they say they will scale back their nuclear activities. In exchange for Iran’s “word of honor” they are happy to legitimize Iran’s nuclear program, regional aggression, ballistic missile program and terror sponsorship worldwide. Moreover, they are willing to pay Iran billions of dollars in the form of sanctions relief and permit Iran to reenter the global economy in exchange for that “word of honor.”

Israel’s strategy, in contrast, delegitimizes Iran’s nuclear program, its regional aggression, sponsorship of terror and ballistic missile program while actually blocking Iran’s path to the nuclear finish line. Israel also trusts the Iranian “word of honor.” Israel believes that the likes of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his underlings are serious when they commit to destroying the Jewish state.

It’s possible that there is a better strategic approach to Iran’s nuclear program than the one that Israel has adopted. But so long as the powerful clique of security brass and leftist politicians continues to reject the Zionist approach of developing strategic independence that Netanyahu advocates, the “delay and block” strategy now being advanced is the best that Israel can do.

Amazingly, even this modest strategy has reaped massive payoffs which in turn have increased Israel’s strategic independence. Israel’s willingness to operate independently, even to a limited degree has sufficed to convince its neighbors, including Saudi Arabia that they can trust Israel more than they can trust the US to protect the region from a hegemonic, nuclear-armed Iran.

The Abraham Accords that were signed last year are an expression of the faith that Israel’s neighbors have in the Jewish state. In other words, the operations attributed to Israel in Iran – like the one at Natanz last weekend – have sufficed to transform Israel into a regional power and foster peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors to the east. Yet in the face of this massive achievement, Gantz and his fellow former generals and leftist politicians continue to say that what has already happened before our eyes will never and can never happen.

As Israel turns 73, the time has come for the people of Israel to realize that Theodor Herzl was right. We willed it. Our freedom and independence in our reconstituted homeland wasn’t a dream. The challenge Israel faces today is for us to recognize our accomplishments and dare to take our place as the center of the Jewish world on the one hand, and as an independent, sovereign state in the full sense of the word on the other. The sooner we do both, the faster and more effectively we will ensure our future in our land for generations to come.
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Caroline Glick is the Senior Contributing Editor of Israel Hayom and the Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Israel Security Project. For more information on Ms. Glick's work, visit carolineglick.com.

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Keep Nine to keep the Independent Judiciary

by Rick Manning: Congressional Democrats have introduced legislation that would add four more justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, boosting the number of justices on the bench from nine to 13, as Democrat congressional leaders are going all-in on packing the Supreme Court.

This is just more evidence that the very slender, far-left Democrat majority intends to seize and maintain power using any tactic available, even if it means destroying the independence of the judicial branch of government.

Given that court packing is now actively in play, every GOP Senator and House Member along with any rational Democrat members of Congress must push back by cosponsoring the Keep Nine constitutional amendment by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), S.J. Res. 9, and Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), H.J. Res. 11.

The Keep Nine amendment has more than 100 House cosponsors among and has gained unanimous support from the Republican National Committee, along with support from Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), chair of the liberal Republican Governance Group as well as the support of Freedom Caucus Chairman, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) and Republican Study Committee leader Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.). This broad-based conference-wide support demonstrates there is no disagreement about the need for the Keep Nine amendment which simply states, ‘The Supreme Court of the United States shall be composed of nine Justices.’

To date, not a single Democrat member of the House or Senate has cosponsored the amendment even though one of its original supporters was former Representative Colin Peterson (D-Minn.).

This is important because Keep Nine is not a partisan issue. Recent polling by John McLaughlin shows that the Keep Nine amendment enjoys 62-18 percent support. Among voters with an opinion, overwhelming majorities of both Republicans and Democrats support the Keep Nine amendment.

While many politicians are likely to publicly express skepticism about court packing that is not enough. Americans expect action rather than hollow words and there simply is no excuse not to cosponsor Senator Cruz and Representative Johnson’s amendment.

Americans for Limited Government strongly urges each Member of Congress, regardless of partisan affiliation, to reject this blatant politicization of the Supreme Court by taking a stand opposing court packing by cosponsoring the Keep Nine constitutional amendment. You cannot say you oppose court packing and not cosponsor of Keep Nine, a clear, straightforward amendment to the Constitution to prevent current and future attempts to politicize the Court by manipulating its make-up.

LETTER AMERICANS FOR LIMITED GOVERNMENT SENT TO MEMBERS OF CONGRESS URGING THEM TO COSPONSOR THE KEEP NINE AMENDMENT.
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Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is President of Americans for Limited Government (@LimitGovt). Article also on The Hill.

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Radically Changing America!

Editorial Cartoon by Gary Varvel

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Tags: Editorial cartoon, radical Changing America, Gary Varvel

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Had Obama Not Played the Race Card, George Floyd Might Be Alive

by Larry Elder: George Floyd might be alive had former President Barack Obama not, for eight years, consistently play the anti-cop race card.

Despite receiving more white votes than 2004 Democratic candidate John Kerry, Obama said: “The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives — you know, that casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it. … Racism — we are not cured of it.”

Obama’s own presidential victory demonstrates that America is not “systemically racist.” In 2007, Gallup found that fewer Americans (5%) said they would not vote for a Black person than said they would not vote for a woman (11%), referring to his nomination rival Hillary Clinton. The same Gallup poll found that 24% and 42% of Americans, respectively, would not vote for a Mormon, referring to Mitt Romney, or for a person who would be 72 years old when he became president, referring to Sen. John McCain.

Early in Obama’s first term, an incident in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gave him a golden opportunity to defuse the lie that the police engage in “systemic racism” against Blacks. The Cambridge police briefly arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a Black friend of Obama, in his home. Gates, back from a trip, couldn’t open his front door and reportedly asked his driver to help. A neighbor, observing two people she did not recognize trying to force open the front door of Gates’ home, called 911. The cops arrived and politely asked Gates to exit the home so the police could determine ownership. Instead, Gates mouthed off and was briefly arrested.

Obama said, “The Cambridge police acted stupidly.” But the Cambridge Police Superior Officers Association and the Cambridge Police commissioner insisted the officer simply followed protocol. Obama’s statement infuriated officers all across the country and set up a template for the Obama administration: Cops systemically engage in unlawful anti-Black racial profiling.

Suppose Obama had not insultingly denounced the Cambridge police. Suppose, instead, Obama had said: “I’ve just spoken to my friend, professor Gates. I reminded him that he is a role model and that his behavior with the Cambridge police officer, who was merely doing his job, was unacceptable. We need to understand as Americans that officers typically have a difficult job. Yes, there are bad cops, but for the most part, they’re trying to do their best. And contrary to popular perception, the police, in recent years, have killed more unarmed whites than Blacks. It is a lie, not supported by the evidence, that cops are killing Blacks just because they’re Black. This is not your grandfathers’ America. It is our job as civilians to be respectful, polite and by all means comply. Comply; you won’t die.”

Suppose Obama encouraged Blacks to comply with the police and that if one feels mistreated, to get a name or badge number and sort it out later. Eric Garner died after an encounter where New York City cops arrested him for selling cigarettes. Had he not resisted, he would likely still be alive. Jacob Blake was shot several times by the Kenosha, Wisconsin, police when they suspected him of reaching for a knife. Had Blake complied, he would not be in a wheelchair today. Would that have encouraged Black suspects like George Floyd to respond differently to an encounter with the police?

Obama knows the statistics and studies. He knows there is no evidence of anti-Black “systemic racism” on the part of the police. But the political Obama knows that Black anger and resentment translate into Black votes. How many routine police encounters with Blacks escalate into something far more serious because young Blacks believe the “systemic racism” lie pushed by Black Lives Matter and their sympathizers?

Polls rate Barack Obama as one of the most admired people in America, particularly among Black Americans. Out of office, he maintains respect, power, stature and influence. As president, he could have saved lives by putting truth over politics. He chose not to. As a former president, he still can.

Mr. Obama, tell the truth. Save lives. It’s not too late.
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Larry Elder (@larryelder) is a best-selling author and radio talk-show host, an American lawyer, writer and radio and television personality who is also known as the "Sage From South Central." To find out more about Larry Elder. Visit his website at LarryElder.com for list of other articles.

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Dems Pave a Gavel Road to Court-Packing

by Tony Perkins: Now we've heard it all. Democrats, who were already the butt of jokes for calling childcare "infrastructure," have done us one better. According to House liberals, court-packing is too! In a tweet, Congressman Mondaire Jones, a New York liberal declared: "Supreme Court expansion is infrastructure." Like a lot of people, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) couldn't believe their eyes. "You just can't make this stuff up," she shook her head. And unfortunately, Democrats aren't. They're on the march to expand the court -- no matter what they call it.

Apparently, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) isn't interested in whatever conclusions the president's phony commission on the courts comes to. Her party is ready to pack the court -- and pack it now. In a bombshell new bill, radical Democrats in both chambers are demanding that we increase the number of Supreme Court justices to 13, a move that's designed to blunt the impact of Donald Trump's appointments. Led by Jones, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) in the House and Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the effort is an obvious payback to far-Left groups who think activist judges are the only ones who can do all their radical bidding.

"Republicans stole the Court's majority," Markey argued, "with Justice Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation completing their crime spree. Of all the damage Donald Trump did to our Constitution, this stands as one of his greatest travesties." If Democrats wanted to light a fire under the GOP, they succeeded. Republicans exploded in pushback, calling the idea "delusional." This "goes against everything we believe as Americans," House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy fired back. And it also, he pointed out, goes against what Joe Biden said he believed as a senator. "This just goes to show how far the Democrat Party has moved." We're talking about "overtaking a branch of government simply to have your control over a nation. It must be the scariest thing I've ever heard them do." Are there no common-sense or moderate Democrats left, he wondered?

The ones who are must be seething. This power play puts them in a horrible position heading into 2022. In case the Left hadn't noticed, the courts are a driving issue for voters, and swing districts won't take kindly to Democrats trying to blow up another established institution. Frankly, GOP strategists say, this is a "gift." "And making it a bill... means we get to [put] moderate House Democrats on the record," a former staffer of the National Republican Senatorial Committee pointed out. For conservatives, who've already had record-breaking quarters for fundraising, this will only add to their momentum.

Thanks to Left's overreach in Georgia, the border crisis, the trillions of dollars in spending, and corporate woke-ism, the Republican base is already motivated. This is like adding dynamite to an inferno. Back in 2016, the Supreme Court was one of the biggest reasons people said they voted for Donald Trump. Five years later, they still have major concerns about the Left's ideas for turning the bench into a super legislature. Last October, almost 60 percent of the country opposed the Democrats' push for court-packing. In fact, it was such an unpopular idea that Joe Biden wouldn't even tell the American people where he stood. "You'll know my position when the election's over" was his non-answer.

Now we know. Biden and his party plan to "spit in the face of judicial independence," Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) warned -- an agenda so far Left that even the late Ruth Bader Ginsberg didn't support it. Nor does fellow liberal Justice Stephen Breyer. The court's authority, he argued, "like the rule of law, depends on trust -- a trust that the court is guided by legal principle, not politics." There's already growing suspicion about government institutions, he pointed out. And in the court, the perception that justices are "liberal" or "conservative" would only get worse.

Is the threat real? Yes, it is a threat. It's like playing with a loaded gun, it could go off. But I think Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the Democrats are holding this and the legislative filibuster over the heads of Republican senators to force them to approve radical measures like HR 1 and the Equality Act or else they will pull the trigger.

"If you don't (fill in the blank on whatever issue), we will blow up the filibuster and pack the court." Yes, Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have made some reassuring statements lately about the Senate's rules, but the reality is, they're under a tremendous amount of pressure from ruthless party bosses to go along with this radical makeover of our institutions.

In the meantime, conservative groups like Judicial Crisis Network plan to bring the heat with a million-dollar ad buy calling out the Democrats' absurd plan. Back in Congress, Republicans are moving forward with a constitutional amendment that would freeze the Supreme Court's number at nine. "Imagine if we reduced the number to five and just kept the Republicans," Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked his friends on the other side of the aisle. "You guys would go crazy." But crazy is what this whole idea is -- and deep down, what's left of the rational wing of the party knows it.
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Tony Perkins (@tperkins) is President of the Family Research Council . Article on Tony Perkins' Washington Update and written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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A Dangerous Power Grab, The Left's Extreme Agenda, Much Needed Perspective

by Gary Bauer: A Dangerous Power Grab
Most of you reading this report aren't lawyers. But you don't have to be a lawyer to appreciate the importance of the Supreme Court.

The justices are the final word on everything from our freedom of speech, our Second Amendment rights, the right to life, and even our freedom of religion. We just won an important case on religious liberty last week, but it was a very close 5 to 4 decision.

That's why it's so disturbing to see the radical left and many Democrats in Congress attacking the Supreme Court for standing in the way of their radical agenda.

Last week, Joe Biden announced that he was appointing a commission to study packing the court or expanding the number of justices. But liberal Democrats aren't waiting for Biden's commission to complete its work.

They unveiled legislation today adding four more justices to the Supreme Court, justices Joe Biden would appoint who would all be liberals. (See below.)

Why four? Well, on most issues there is a 6 to 3 conservative majority. Adding four more liberals suddenly creates a left-wing majority of 7 to 6. This is a raw power grab plain and simple.

Democrats tried this once before. But Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to pack the Supreme Court was so unpopular that no president has ever tried it since. Polls shows that this radical idea is still overwhelmingly unpopular.

Liberal icons like Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer oppose packing the Supreme Court because it turns the court into a political football that can be manipulated at whim by the majority in Congress.

By itself, this assault on the independence of the Supreme Court is terrible and dangerous for our country. But it is just the latest of many radical efforts by the left to obliterate all checks and balances in order to seize power and fundamentally transform America.

The Left's Extreme Agenda
Let me remind you of what the left is doing right now.

• They want to eliminate the filibuster so they can ram through their radical agenda in the Senate with a bare majority of votes.
• They want to make Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico states, adding four more liberals to the Senate. They want to pack the Supreme Court.
• They want to nationalize all election laws in ways that only benefit the left.
• They are letting hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants pour into the country at the same time they are trying to ban voter ID laws. What does that tell you?!

Any one of these issues by itself would be a huge game changer. But Democrats are aggressively pushing them all!

My friends, I am begging you to redouble your efforts to be active and engaged citizens.

• Contact your members of Congress today at 202-224-3121. Tell them to oppose any legislation to pack the Supreme Court.
• Share this report with friends and family members. Make sure they know what Biden and the Democrats are doing.
• Please support our work as generously as you can so we can fight back against the radical left!

Speaking Of Extreme. . . Their legislative agenda isn't the only example of the left's extremism that's on full display in Washington, D.C. Joe Biden is packing the federal bureaucracy with extremists every single day.

One of them, Kristen Clarke, had a rough hearing before Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. Ironically, Biden nominated Clarke to lead the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

But she has dabbled in anti-Semitism and peddled racist theories about black supremacy. And Clarke publicly supported ex-Women's March leader Tamika Mallory, a supporter of Louis Farrakhan.

On matters of policy, Clarke opposed the equal application of voting rights laws, condemned voter ID laws, repeatedly attacked religious liberty (here, here and here), and supported the extreme "defund the police" movement.

Clarke has no business in the Justice Department at all, much less leading the Civil Rights Division!

But that's not the worst of it. She's on many progressive short lists for Biden's first Supreme Court appointment, and he has promised to appoint a black woman.

Some Much Needed Perspective
Officer Kim Potter was released from jail yesterday after posting $100,000 bond. She's facing manslaughter charges and 10 years in jail. Barricades were erected around her home, which is also under police protection, as protesters are now carrying pigs heads on stakes.

The vile imagery is clear: The mob wants Potter's head.

A jury will decide Potter's fate. The violent mob should not be tolerated. The Thin Blue Line is the only thing that stands between civilized society and mob "justice," which is no justice at all.

It is important to hold our peace officers to high standards of professional conduct. At the same time, we must keep these events in perspective. The left-wing narrative of "systemically racist police shootings" is demonstrably false.

Here's what you need to know:

• There are at least 10 million arrests every year. That's more than 27,000 arrests every day, virtually all of them are for the good of society.
• In the overwhelming majority of cases involving the deadly use of force, it is justified. One study of officer-involved shootings found that "55% of the victims were white, 27% were black, and 19% were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95% of the civilians shot by officers were attacking police or other citizens; 90% were armed with a weapon."
• Another study found that "officers were slightly more than three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects."
• According to Heather Mac Donald, a Justice Department study of the Philadelphia Police Department found that black officers were 67% more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect.
• One Harvard study found no evidence of racial bias in police shootings. The black professor who conducted the study called the findings, "the most surprising result of my career."
• According to the Washington Post database of police shootings, 18 unarmed black people (and 24 unarmed white people) were shot by police last year. Are we going to allow the media and the left to prejudge every case? Are we going to have riots 18 times a year?
• "Unarmed" doesn't always mean innocent. In some cases, officers are being physically assaulted. In other cases, an attacker is struggling for the officer's weapon.
• Mac Donald also notes that "A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer."
• Over the past decade, 511 police officers have been murdered in the line of duty. As columnist Terry Jeffrey put it, that's almost one a week, every year for the last ten years.

How many of their names do you know? And how many riots have occurred because a police officer was shot and killed?

Fighting For America First
I am pleased to report that there is a major effort underway to build an infrastructure to support and sustain the America First movement that Donald Trump inspired. The foundation of that effort, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) was launched this week.

Serious people are involved in AFPI, including dozens of former Trump Administration officials. The organization is led by Brooke Rollins, who was President Trump's Domestic Policy Advisor – the same position I held in the Reagan White House.

I was pleased to be part of a select group to receive a private briefing about the launch of the America First Policy Institute. I assure you that Campaign for Working Families will be working closely with AFPI in the weeks and months ahead to fight for an unapologetically pro-family, pro-life, pro-America First agenda!

In related news, former Vice President Mike Pence is recovering after having a heart pacemaker implanted yesterday. The routine surgery was successful and Pence is expected to fully recover. Please keep the vice president and his family in your prayers.
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Gary Bauer (@GaryLBauer)  is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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How to Start a War

Joe Biden, or those around him, seem determined to upset the peace they inherited.

Victor Davis Hanson

by Victor Davis Hanson: Wars often arise from uncertainty. When strong powers appear weak, truly weaker ones take risks they otherwise would not.

Sloppy braggadocio and serial promises of restraint alternatively trigger wars, too. Empty tough talk can needlessly egg on aggressors. But, mouthing utopian bromides convinces bullies that their targets are too sophisticated to counter aggression.

Sometimes announcing “a new peace process” without any ability to bring either novel concessions or pressures only raises false hopes—and furor.

Every new American president is usually tested to determine whether the United States can still protect friends like Japan, Europe, South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan. And will the new commander-in-chief deter America’s enemies Iran and North Korea—and keep China and Russia from absorbing their neighbors?

Joe Biden, and those around him, seem determined to upset the peace they inherited.

Soon after Donald Trump left office, Vladimir Putin began massing troops on the Ukrainian border and threatening to attack.

Putin earlier had concluded Trump was dangerously unpredictable, and perhaps better not provoked. After all, the Trump Administration took out Russian mercenaries in Syria. It beefed up defense spending and upped sanctions.

The Trump Administration flooded the world with cheap oil to Russia’s chagrin. It pulled out from asymmetrical missile treaties with Russia. It sold sophisticated arms to the Ukrainians. The Russians concluded that Trump might do anything, and so waited for another president before again testing America.

In contrast, Biden too often talks provocatively—while carrying a twig. He has gratuitously called Putin “a killer.” And he warned that the Russian dictator “would pay a price” for supposedly interfering in the 2020 election.

Unfortunately, his bombast follows four years of a Russian-collusion hoax, fueled by a concocted dossier paid for by 2016 candidate Hillary Clinton. Biden and others swore Trump was—in the words of Barack Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper—a “Russian asset.”

If Biden seeks to provoke a nation with 7,500 deliverable weapons, he is certainly not backing up his rhetoric with force.

He has cut military aid to Ukraine. And Biden may well decrease the Pentagon budget.

He seems to have forgotten that Trump was impeached for supposedly imperiling Ukraine, when in fact he sold to it the very weapons Biden and others in the Obama Administration had vetoed.

While Biden was talking loudly to Putin, his administration was serially humiliated by China. Beijing’s diplomats dressed down their American counterparts in a recent meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. They gleefully recycled domestic left-wing boilerplate that a racist America has no moral authority to criticize China.

If Trump was unpredictably blunt, Biden is too often predictably confused. And he appears frail, sending a message to autocracies that America’s commander-in-chief is not fully in control.

Biden has not, as he promised, demanded from China transparency about the origins of the COVID-19 virus in Wuhan. By summer, that Chinese-birthed plague may have killed 600,000 Americans.

More disturbing, as Russia puts troops on the Ukrainian border, China simultaneously flies into Taiwanese air space, testing its defenses—and the degree to which the United States cares.

For a half-century, American foreign policy sought to ensure that Russia was no closer to China than either was to the United States.

Now the two dictatorships seem almost joined at the hip as each probes U.S. responses or lack thereof. Not surprisingly, North Korea in late March suddenly resumed its firing of missiles over the Sea of Japan.

In the Middle East, Biden inherited a relatively quiet landscape. Arab nations, in historic fashion, were making peace with Israel. Both sides were working to deter Iranian-funded terrorists, like Hezbollah and extremists in Syria, the West Bank, and Yemen.

Radical Palestinians were no longer beneficiaries of U.S. aid. Iran itself was stagnating by sanctions and recession. Its arch-terrorist mastermind General Qasem Soleimani was killed by U.S. bombing.

The United States left the Iran deal that was a prescription for certain Iranian acquisition of a nuclear weapon. The theocracy in Tehran, the chief sponsor of terror in the world, was in its most fragile condition in its 40 years of existence.

Now U.S. diplomats bizarrely express an interest in restoring cordial relations with Iran, rebooting the Iran deal, and dropping sanctions against the regime. If all that happens, Iran will likely get a bomb soon.

More importantly, Tehran may conclude that the United States has distanced itself from Israel and moderate Arab regimes. One of two dangers will then arise. Either Iran will feel it can up its aggression, or its enemies will conclude they have no choice but to take out all Iranian nuclear facilities.

Biden would do well to remember ancient American diplomatic adages like speaking softly while carrying a big stick, keeping China and Russia apart, being a no better friend—or worse enemy—and letting sleeping dogs lie.
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Victor Davis Hanson (@VDHanson) is a senior fellow, classicist and historian and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution where many of his articles are found; his focus is classics and military history. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. H/T American Greatness

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