28 Million Reasons Not to Trust a Mail-In Election

by Tony Perkins: “No idea.” That was the only answer state and local officials had.

When a federal elections commission started asking questions, not one person had any explanation for the 28.3 million mail-in ballots that have gone missing since 2012. As far as they’re concerned, 1 in 5 absentee votes just vanished.

No one knows if it’s fraud, system failure, general ineptitude, or a combination of all three. What we do know is that Democrats want us to trust this same process—on a national scale—this November. Thank you, but no thank you.

Four elections. At least 7 million missing votes each.

By way of comparison, Mark Hemingway at RealClearInvestigations points out, Hillary Clinton won the 2016 popular vote by 2.8 million. “But nearly six million unaccounted mail-in ballots were never counted in 2016—more than twice her margin in the popular vote.”

If that doesn’t rattle you, consider this: according to the federal Election Assistance Commission, these are all low-ball estimates.

For starters, the 28.3 million missing ballots doesn’t include the number that were “spoiled, undeliverable, or came back for any reason.”

Making matters worse, not every area of the country reported back with their statistics—including major cities like Chicago. In other words, this is just the tip of the malfunctioning iceberg.

And these problems, analyst Logan Churchwell shakes his head, aren’t getting much attention. First of all, they’re embarrassing for election officials—and secondly, “people just aren’t paying attention.” But they’d better start.

With Democrats trying to use the coronavirus to push America toward its endgame of universal mail-in ballots, voters need to wake up to the gamble they’d be taking with democracy.

Already, two liberal senators, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Ron Wyden of Oregon, are trying to capitalize on people’s fears with what they call the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020. But frankly, Americans ought to be more afraid of the chance they’d be taking with their vote.

On “Washington Watch,” Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., who worked as an election official for two decades, said he has plenty of concerns about the idea—not the least of which is the incredibly short timetable to get a new process up and running.


One is just a very practical reason that adjusting from whatever system you have to a system with big changes is hard to do. It’s hard to do in any election, [but] it’s particularly hard to do in a presidential election. And two is, while I think ultimately how a state conducts its elections should be left to the state, not the federal government, I have concerns if you don’t have real safeguards on who gets to cast that ballot, and who actually receives the ballot, and who collects the ballot.Democrats, he goes on, are talking about a system with no witnesses, no voter ID, no certainty that your vote would even be delivered. “These are things that any rational person should be concerned about.”

Now, obviously, the traditional absentee ballot is fine for people who are physically incapable of going to the polls because of illness or military service, etc. “But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about people getting ballots without even asking for them. Or two, asking for them and getting them without any accountability as to whether they come back or not.”

Those are the scenarios, we know from ballot harvesting in more lenient states, that are ripe for abuse.

In California, anyone can “walk into an elections office and hand over truckloads of vote-by-mail envelopes with ballots inside,” Townhall explains — ”no questions asked, no verified records kept.”

In 2018, there were stories of Democrats all across the state knocking on doors to either “help” people vote or pick up their ballots for supposed delivery. What’s to stop someone from trashing those ballots? Or, as officials in Texas discovered, vote for you?

“The harvesters sit around and fill these out by the hundreds, often by the thousands,” said one political consultant.

The reality is, Democrats are only forcing this issue because they think it’ll help them win.

As the Family Research Council’s Ken Blackwell points out, it opens the door to “voter fraud and coercion … [and gives] partisan activists absolute control over physical ballots.”

Does a mail-in balloting system guarantee your vote won’t count? No. But even The New York Times admits that the possibility for fraud “is vastly more prevalent than in-person voting … “

We cannot let anyone exploit this crisis, Blackwell argues, to take away the integrity of our elections. “This pandemic may seem like it’s changed everything, but it has not changed the rules of our constitutional republic. Let’s keep it that way.”
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Tony Perkins (@tperkins) is president of the Family Research Council and his article was shared on The Daily Signal.

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Flynn vs. The FBI, More de Blasio Blunders, A Progressive Competition, Fighting Radical Islam

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: Flynn vs. The FBI
Yesterday was a dark day for the FBI. Attorneys for Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn released notes from a top FBI official which strongly indicate that the Bureau had no case against Flynn and was looking to entrap him.

The notes were written by Bill Priestap, the former chief of counterintelligence at the FBI, following a meeting with then-Director James Comey and then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Priestap wrote:

"What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired? . . . If we get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act, give facts to [Department of Justice and] have them decide. If we're seen as playing games, [White House] will be furious."

Clearly, the FBI was "playing games." As Sen. Lindsey Graham put it, the notes "reek of criminal misconduct." The president has every right to be furious, and the American people should be too!

Last night, Trump tweeted, "What happened to General Michael Flynn, a war hero, should never be allowed to happen to a citizen of the United States again!"

Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley described the notes as "a chilling blueprint into how top FBI officials not only sought to entrap [Flynn], but sought to do so on blatantly unconstitutional, manufactured grounds."

This wasn't just a few rogue agents. It went straight to the top.

You may recall that fired FBI Director James Comey bragged in an interview with Nicolle Wallace that he took advantage of the chaos in the early days of the Trump White House. Comey said there was usually a procedure that had to be followed involving the White House Counsel's office, and he knew the Trump White House wasn't up to speed yet.

The FBI agents told Flynn he didn't need a lawyer present at the interview, and later determined that he did not attempt to deliberately mislead them. Nevertheless, they prosecuted him.

So Comey succeeded in ruining Flynn's life. We may never fully know the psychological impact on his family. But wait. . . It gets worse.

It is hard to believe that current FBI Director Christopher Wray or others at the Bureau were unaware of these notes. Yet they didn't have the decency to expose them. Once again, it seems that the Bureau's top brass put the FBI's reputation ahead of the pursuit of justice. There is still a lot of swamp that needs draining.

Why The Focus On Flynn?
It's no secret that Obama loyalists hated Michael Flynn. He was an outspoken opponent of Obama's nuclear deal with Iran and his politically correct approach to radical Islam. The Deep State was determined to neutralize and punish him.

But I think it goes beyond Flynn. It is impossible to conclude that the reason for entrapping Flynn was anything other than an effort to cause the downfall of the new president. Let's connect the dots:

• The FBI framed Flynn for a perfectly legitimate conversation with the Russian ambassador.
• That fed into the false narrative that "Russia stole the election."
• When Trump rightly fired Comey, that led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and a two-year inquisition that produced nothing.
• But the left bitterly clung to its false narrative of foreign influence, and used a leaked phone call with Ukraine's president to launch another investigation, which culminated in this year's impeachment trial.

While the media and the left are obsessed with Trump and Russia, we should be far more concerned about the meddling of the Deep State. We must not forget about the rampant abuse of the FISA court to illegally spy on American citizens.

And while the coronavirus has dominated the headlines lately, we're still learning about what happened in 2016 (here and here), and the Durham investigation is still ongoing.

By the way, here's what Attorney General William Barr said about Durham's work during a recent interview:

"My own view is that the evidence shows that we're not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here. . . what happened to [President Trump] was one of the greatest travesties in American history.

"Without any basis [the FBI] started this investigation of his campaign, and even more concerning, actually is what happened after the campaign . . . to sabotage the presidency."

De Blasio's Blunders
In recent days, there have been infuriating reports regarding conditions in New York City's subway system. During the coronavirus crisis, vagrants, drug addicts and petty criminals have essentially taken over the subway system. They are sleeping in cars, defecating on the platforms and urinating everywhere.

This would be horrific enough if no one was using the subway. But some people are still using the subway system: police officers, fire fighters, doctors and nurses going to their jobs, many working at hospitals to care for the sick and dying. They are dodging human excrement on the platforms and avoiding these vagrants as they try to go to work.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has had plenty of time to hold press conferences lashing out at President Trump. He attacked Hassidic Jews for attending a funeral, even though they were wearing face masks.

The mayor needs to shut his mouth unless he is announcing a plan to recapture the subway system from the vagrants who now occupy it so New Yorkers can safely use the subways they are paying for.

This is just another example of the left's perverse priorities. Progressives are telling us that it is a crime to go to church or to demonstrate outside of an abortion clinic during the pandemic. But I assume there are laws against indecent exposure even in New York City.

A Progressive Competition
Is it me or does there seem to be a competition between liberal Democrat governors over who can act more like communist China in how they oppress their citizens?

While most states are moving to relax quarantine orders, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently extended her stay-at-home order until mid-May. After getting pushback from the legislature, Gov. Whitmer defiantly declared, "I'm not going to engage in political negotiations with anybody."

She also shut down a drive-in movie theater, even though the owner had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure safety by exceeding social distancing guidelines.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom apparently couldn't stand the idea of people catching a few rays on the state's beaches. He's issued an order closing all beaches and public parks.

The country is getting a good lesson in federalism right now. When it comes to public health emergencies, governors have more power than the president, especially when it comes to draconian "stay-at-home" mandates and the mass shuttering of businesses. And I don't think it is any coincidence that conservative governors are moving to reopen faster than their liberal counterparts.

Elections have consequences.

Fighting Radical Islam
For years, many European countries have tolerated radical Islamists operating freely within their borders. For example, while Hezbollah's military wing was banned, a number of European countries still allowed its political wing to raise money and recruit members.

I always thought that was a bizarre dichotomy. A political entity that has a military wing is obviously outside the norm of decent political activity.

In the better late than never category, Germany finally decided to ban the political wing of Hezbollah. When German officials publicly announced the decision, they raided several radical mosques associated with the Iranian-backed terror group.
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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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About Those Press Conferences

by Victor Davis Hanson: President Trump seems increasingly ambivalent about the utility of the daily and sometime marathon press conferences. He should be — and for reasons besides just their length and frequency.

First, Trump gets bogged down into long, back-and-forth jousts with the touché Washington press corps. His impromptu skills, honed both as president and in his years on television, usually ensure him tactical victories. He is not peremptory but retaliatory in his put-downs.

Fine. Most Americans don’t especially like the Washington press corps. So they don’t mind them earning the repartee that their rude provocation deserves.

But Trump’s victories are becoming Pyrrhic.

Anyone who watches the entire press conference sees the context, and why the president is legitimately upset with the constant “gotcha” attempts while the nation has more serious concerns. But few in the nation do watch all of them. Instead the public gleans bits and pieces of them as carefully edited sound bites delivered by print and television media.

The result is that winning against a provocative Jim Acosta rarely delivers a strategic victory. Trump’s retorts are cut and pasted into network news sound bites designed to make him sound petty at a time of national uncertainty and indeed panic.

Good news: The virus seems to be more widespread but less lethal, and here earlier, than once imagined, while its infectiousness is nearing its peak if not descending in many places. But this good news is lost amid the media stridency. Instead, the public gets 20-second distortions in the evening news that Trump wants us to drink Lysol.
Second, the coronavirus is not just a medical challenge, at least not anymore.

How Americans will fare also hinges on the economy, our national security, and the viability of the Constitution.

Trump, then, needs to allow Doctors Fauci and Birx their five minutes, but only their five minutes — especially given the media’s gambit of trying to entrap both in some sort of “adult-in-the-room,” scientific put-down of the supposedly clueless president at their side.

Trump should shift some of the medical focus to include a rotating cast of other experts. And he should emphasize that, in making decisions as president, he takes account of all sorts of inputs beside medical modeling and theories about the trajectory of the virus.

On some days, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs or the secretary of Defense could reassure the nation that it remains secure despite challenges ranging from viral outbreaks on warships, to Chinese and Iranian efforts to exploit the crisis, to the status of North Korea.

Attorney General Barr should make regular appearances to remind the nation — and its governors — that we still have a First and Second Amendment, and the need to integrate public-health concerns and constitutional freedoms.

The secretary of the Treasury or the other chief economic advisers should continue to weigh in with equal regularity on the plan to restore prosperity.

The point, then, is that in a 30-minute press conference, Trump should be the conductor but not overtly the main attraction. Paradoxically, in this way, he’d gain stature and become the implicit main attraction, as all presidents should be.

The conference should be a symphony of expertise, not a cacophony of media egos. A press-conference paradigm might run something like this:

• Press conference begins.
• Trump offers a five-minute summary of all the data — medical, economic, financial, military, legal — that he is adjudicating.
• Next, Vice President Pence, in three to four minutes, touches on these concerns in more detail.
• Then each expert steps forward for four to five minutes and offer a concise update of what, if anything, has changed in the last 24 hours.
• After 25 minutes, the press gets five to ten minutes of questions, directed to all the presenters. Trump as the conductor calls on the questioners and directs them to the relevant members of his team.
• Trump then wraps up the 30-minute conference, with a synopsis of one or two minutes, concluding, “Our team may see you tomorrow.”

A final suggestion. What Americans want to learn from the government is increasingly not what the Washington press corps wishes to pry out from Donald Trump.

So why, in a national crisis, do we hear from only a handful of the usual suspects, whose tired agendas and overt methods are now banal?

Why not return to the earlier Trump paradigm, especially in our new age of Skype and Zoom, to include reporters from the heartland and rural America, who would give some balance in their concerns beyond those of the New York and Washington corridor? Indeed, perhaps outsiders, reporting from different states, might even offer more light than heat about how the nation assesses, and wishes to help, the Eastern Seaboard?

Cannot there be a stable of 20–30 or so reporters from Salt Lake City, Bakersfield, Des Moines, El Paso, and Biloxi, some of whom in each conference can pose questions that will probably be different from those of the Washington press corps — itself an increasingly ossified concept in a post-viral and remote brave new world?

It is in the interest of the nation as well as the president to diversify the press conferences, shorten them, keep them to tight schedules — and to not let them become monotonously hijacked by those with little if any expertise other than in parroting “I told you so” and “I got you.”
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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 McIntosh Enterprises.

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Why Are We Still Burning Corn In Our Cars?

by Tom Balek, Contributing Author: The price of oil futures fell to negative territory last week and remains anemic at around $17 per barrel today. We have such an oil glut that there is no place to put it any more.

Thanks to fracking, new oil exploration in other parts of the world, and OPEC's erectile dysfunction, oil is no longer a scarce, expensive energy source. The world has enough oil to last for centuries.

Still, we have farmers planting, growing, and harvesting corn so we can add 10% ethanol to our gasoline. We turn our auto factories upside down and add thousands of dollars to the price of each car and truck to meet stricter EPA minimum gas mileage targets. We subsidize alternative "renewable" energy sources and devices despite having essentially solved carbon-based pollution.

Short-term, the COVID-19 pandemic has shut down the demand for oil. But that is temporary and doesn't address the bigger issue. Let's face it, oil is and will continue to be the best energy solution on earth for a long time to come.

So how does it make any sense to suppress the production and use of oil as an energy source? Two answers, the same ones that can be applied to every seemingly irrational political and cultural issue: money, and power.

Our kids still come home from school (when it is actually open) in tears from dire predictions about their world being destroyed by evil, smoke-belching big businesses and mom's gas-guzzling SUV. Never mind that those end-of-the-world predictions never seems to come true.

Leftist politicians just can't let go of the "global warming" hoax and the power it gives them over a frightened populace. They know their bubble could burst at any second. They have no choice but to continue promoting subsidies for windmills, solar panels, electric cars and so many other technologies that will NEVER be comparable to the common-sense fuel that God designed and made plentiful for our use: oil.

But back to corn. This week farm lobbyists are asking Congress and the Trump administration for billions of dollars in Coronavirus aid. Some of the request may be legitimate, as the ag sector has been harmed by government decisions such as the COVID-19 shutdown and foreign trade negotiations. But part of their justification is that demand for corn continues to fall because demand for gasoline is down.

Instead of letting the free market determine how our acres of productive land are used, such as growing the foods needed for people and livestock, we are actually considering paying farmers because they have to plant corn which is no longer needed in light of low demand for gasoline. What the hell kind of logic is that?

Let's tell our leaders that it's time to end the ethanol requirement, and subsidies that prop up dumb alternative energy industries and the corruption that inevitably goes with them.
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Tom Balek (@TomBalek) is a fellow conservative activist, blogger, musician and contributes to the ARRA News Service. Tom resides in South Carolina and seeks to educate those too busy with their work and families to notice how close to the precipice our economy has come. He blogs at Rockin' On the Right Side

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CAGW Names Porker of the Month: House Majority Whip James Clyburn

Rep. James Clyburn
April 2020
Porker of the Month

(Washington, D.C.) – Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) named House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) our April 2020 Porker of the Month for trying to take advantage of the coronavirus crisis to promote a radical agenda.

On March 19, 2020, Rep. Clyburn called the COVID-19 pandemic “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” By “our vision,” Rep. Clyburn meant the House Democrats’ attempt to take advantage of the crisis to shove frivolous expenditures into the $2.2 trillion CARES Act and make permanent changes to many wasteful programs.
When he introduced the emergency spending bill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) warned, “Anything that doesn't address that pandemic, it seems to me, should not be considered.” In spite of that reasonable request, Rep. Clyburn and House Democrats leveraged the bill to include items like a $25 million bailout for the Kennedy Center, which subsequently fired its staff. They continue to hold up needed spending like additional funds for small business payroll protection in an attempt to add even more unrelated projects and programs.

CAGW President Tom Schatz said, “Majority Whip Clyburn should be ashamed for trying to exploit a global pandemic to advance Democrats’ radical agenda. In 2008, Rahm Emanuel said, ‘never let a crisis go to waste.’ Rep. Clyburn and House Democrats are taking his words to the extreme by spreading their contagious spending plans at a steep cost to taxpayers. They need to stop playing dangerous political games during an unprecedented healthcare and economic crisis. It is disgraceful that Rep. Clyburn would pursue an agenda that will not save lives or help revitalize the economy.”
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Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government. For more than two decades, Porker of the Month is a dubious honor given to lawmakers and government officials who have shown a blatant disregard for the interests of taxpayers.

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China's 'Confucius' Espionage and Propaganda Institutes

. . . The Confucius Institutes: cultural exchange or communist accommodation?

by Arnold Ahlert: On April 21, the London Times reported that Sweden closed the last remaining Confucius Institute in that country. “The Chinese government in 2004 launched Confucius institutes at various foreign universities, with the stated goal of promoting Chinese language and culture,” explains columnist Zachary Evans. “However, U.S. officials have stated that the institutes are a propaganda tool meant to enhance China’s ‘soft power.’” Really? Then why are we still allowing 86 Confucius Institutes to operate in the United States?

That’s the most recent number compiled by the National Institute of Scholars, and a list provided by that website reveals a number of high-profile universities have embraced Chinese propaganda for years. Among them are UCLA, Purdue, Stanford, George Washington University, Wesleyan, Michigan State, Tufts, UNC Charlotte, Rutgers, Oklahoma, Temple, Columbia, several campuses of the University of California (UC), and a host of others.

Even more insidious, numerous K-12 public school systems around the nation have also embraced these propaganda mills. In addition to Confucius Institutes, there are “Confucius Classrooms” that ostensibly teach language, operating in more than 500 elementary, middle, and high schools.

These entities remain embedded in American educational institutions despite the alarm having been sounded at least two years ago. “With more than 100 universities in the United States now in direct partnership with the Chinese government through Confucius Institutes, the U.S. intelligence community is warning about their potential as spying outposts,” The Washington Post reported in 2018.

A year later, the Senate issued a scathing bipartisan report by a Homeland Security subcommittee stating that, without major changes, Confucius Institutes operating on American college campuses should be shut down.

The report asserted that Chinese expansion of the aforementioned K-12 Confucius Classrooms is a top priority for the regime. Moreover, it noted that, despite an Education Department mandate requiring that colleges and universities report foreign gifts of $250,000 or more from a single source, nearly 70% of schools that received such amounts from Hanban — a Chinese Ministry of Education affiliate that runs Confucius Institutes — didn’t comply.

The report further noted that Hanban provides colleges between $100,000 and $200,000 in start-up costs, and a large amount to teaching supplies. It also chooses a director and teachers at no cost to the university. Those teachers sign contracts pledging not to undermine China’s national interests, and the Chinese government gets to approve approve every teacher, event, and speaker at the institutes. “Such limitations,” the report says, “attempt to export China’s censorship of political debate and prevent discussion of potentially politically sensitive topics.”

No kidding. Nonetheless, and despite the reality that China has “stifled” U.S. efforts to establish “American Cultural Centers” on Chinese college campuses, the report concluded that American schools should continue to partner with China. “Partnering with foreign universities offers students unique international learning experiences and enhance research opportunities,” it stated. “U.S. schools, however, should never, under any circumstances, compromise academic freedom.”

Earlier this year, this writer documented one of those “research” opportunities involving Harvard professor Charles Lieber, who was arrested for lying about payments he’d taken from yet another China-enhancing effort known as the “Thousand Talents Plan.” That researcher-recruitment effort paid Lieber hundreds of thousands of dollars to help China become proficient in cutting-edge science.

As for compromising academic freedom, who’s kidding whom? On far too many American campuses, academic freedom is a sham and has been for quite some time. Moreover, in a long, detailed article for the Harvard Crimson, columnist Matteo N. Wong makes it clear China is part of the mix: Harvard was willing suppress a speech by Chinese dissident and human-rights lawyer Teng Biao to accommodate China’s Communist government.

The most important sentence in the Washington Post’s 2018 article? The paper noted the threat Confucius Institutes “pose to the ability of the next generation of American leaders to learn, think and speak about realities in China and the true nature of the Communist Party regime.”

Last Sunday, Americans got a great indication of that threat. That was the day Microsoft founder Bill Gates defended China’s response to the Wuhan virus, pushing back against allegations that the Communist regime covered up the threat. “That’s a distraction,” Gates insisted. “I think there are a lot of incorrect and unfair things said.”

What about America? “Some countries did respond very quickly and get their testing in place and they avoided incredible economic pain,” Gates said. “It’s sad that even the U.S., where you would expect to do this well, did this poorly.”

The overwhelming majority of countries have been economically devastated, Bill. And isn’t a “distraction” when whistleblowers in China sounding the alarm were arrested, censored, and “disappeared,” or when a study reveals that a more honest approach by the regime might have prevented approximately 95% of the infections that have spread worldwide?

Gates is hardly an outlier. Ever since the pandemic began, a wholly corrupt media has moved heaven and earth to blame President Donald Trump, not just for his administration’s response to the virus but for the virus itself. The Democrat Party has taken the same approach, accusing the president of “xenophobia” and “racism” for enacting a travel ban and then accusing him of not enacting an effective enough one. Even spineless Republicans are getting their pound of flesh: The National Republican Senatorial Committee released a strategy memo that seeks to blame China for the pandemic, but tells candidates “don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban.”

In 2019, former FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to Congress that Confucius Institutes “offer a platform to disseminate Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party propaganda, to encourage censorship, to restrict academic freedom.” Yet they remain welcome in America’s educational institutions.

In October 2019, this writer asked a simple question: So, when it comes to America and China, who’s changing whom? That column documented the myriad of interests, from the NBA and academia to multinationals and Big Tech — and everything in between — for whom patriotism and national security take a distant back seat to profits and power. How many of those same entities are either headed for bankruptcy or attempting to garner government bailout funds for themselves? How many will even consider completely cutting ties with Communists thugs — as opposed to obfuscating or making phony promises about business and cultural “realignment?”

“We cannot outsource our independence,” President Trump stated on April 20. Oh yes we can, if enough Americans are indoctrinated by Chinese propaganda masquerading itself as “cultural exchange.”

It’s time we recognized entities like the Confucius Institutes for what they really are: The most devious part of a globalist agenda that no longer hides its contempt for American exceptionalism. That’s a pandemic far worse than the Wuhan flu.

Here’s hoping a majority of Americans will demand an equally determined eradication of it.
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Arnold Ahlert is a political analyst who writes for the Patriot Post.

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Atheists Elicit An Amoral Ethics

by Bill Donohue: Do human beings possess natural rights, rights given by God that all governments must respect? Or is this plain nonsense?

A recent Pew Research Center survey shows how this philosophical question comes into play in real-life settings. If ventilators are in short supply, whom should we service first? Those who are most in need at the moment? Or those most likely to recover?

The answer, like so many ethical issues, turns on religion. The majority of those who are religiously affiliated say those who are most in need of a ventilator should take priority, while the majority of the unaffiliated (mostly agnostics and atheists) say those who are the most likely to recover should get it.

Similarly, when questioned about the role of religion in one’s life, religious Americans favor giving the ventilator to those in need at the moment; those for whom religion does not play a role prefer giving it to those most likely to recover.

On a related issue, a Pew survey in 2013 found that religious Americans were the least likely to say suicide is a moral right; the unaffiliated were the most likely to support it.

A 2018 Gallup poll disclosed that euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide varied widely on the basis of religiosity: religious Americans were the least likely to support these options; the unaffiliated were the most likely to support them.

In 2010, the British Medical Journal found that atheist and agnostic doctors, as compared to those who are religious, were almost twice as likely to decide, by themselves, that it is proper to hasten a person’s death if the patient is very sick.

To put it differently, those who are not religious are more likely to devalue the sanctity of human life. This is not a desirable outcome for anyone, especially the vulnerable.

This all traces back to natural rights. Those who take their religion seriously are more likely to believe in natural rights: they believe all humans possess equal rights, and that they cannot be overridden on the basis of utility, or what works best overall. So when ventilators are in short supply, those who are most in need deserve to get them—we are all equal in the eyes of God. Their rights should never be subordinate to those who are the most likely to live.

Those who believe otherwise embrace a utilitarian ethics.

Atheists embrace the utilitarianism as espoused by Jeremy Bentham. The British philosopher maintained that morality was best served by providing for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Such a philosophy advantages the powerful and the healthy—it can be used to justify slavery and euthanasia—which is why it is fundamentally an amoral ethics.

Bentham called natural rights “nonsense upon stilts.” Not surprisingly, he was an atheist. For him, the idea that innocent human life is sacred was chimerical. What counts, he believed, was serving the best interests of the majority of people, even if it comes at the expense of others.

Atheism is amoral because its ethics devolves to the individual. It’s all about me, not we. It is this kind of thinking that allows irreligious doctors to decide whether their patients should live or die. Ironically, even atheists who are sick would not want to have such a physician.

Society prospers morally when we have more religious persons, not less. This does not mean that all atheists are immoral or that all religious persons are moral. But it does mean that society, as a whole, is better off, generally speaking, when it is populated by people of faith, and not their atheist counterparts.
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Bill Donohue (@CatholicLeague) is a sociologist and president of the Catholic League.

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Creepy Crooked and Corrupt . . .

. . . Hillary Clinton is endorsing Joe Biden because she shares his same values, like assorted sexual assault scandals?

Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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Silicon Valley’s Control Virus . . .

. . . The tech industry’s Chinese surveillance solution to the Wuhan virus.

by Daniel Greenfield: Silicon Valley was both the epicenter of one of the country’s first Wuhan Virus outbreaks, hosting the 2nd case in California and the 7th in the country, and of the technological tools of the lockdown, from contact tracing and drone tracking, to the virtualization of everything from education to socialization.

The tech industry represents the apex of both globalization and repression. On its massive campuses, foreign workers likely played a role in spreading the virus even as their industry became the public face of fighting the virus by unleashing a new wave of censorship and surveillance against Americans.

Before long, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg could be seen warning that the social media giant would delete any protests against the lockdown, YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki declaring that any videos that contradicted WHO would be deleted, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates speculating about immunity passports.

And Google and Apple came together to build a contact tracing system that would track everyone.

Silicon Valley’s titans and monopolies want to be the heroes of this pandemic, but the only things they have to offer are the totalitarian tools of surveillance that have destroyed public trust in the industry.

Santa Clara County has, as of this writing, experienced nearly 100 deaths. A Stanford study last month speculated that there were 48,000 infected. Even as Silicon Valley has helped spread the Wuhan Virus, it has its own form of immunity. Barbers can’t work online, but interface designers can. Tech industry stocks may have taken a beating, but unlike countless small businesses, they will bounce back.

And the virus culture of lockdowns and social distancing, wholesale civil rights violations and the elimination of privacy is trending the tech industry’s way. The massive databases of the huge monopolies are making it a lot easier for the authorities to track lockdown scofflaws. The creepy visions of an automated posthuman society have become the default response to the virus across America.

Social distancing is completing Silicon Valley’s vision of a world of isolated people who can only connect to each other through the mediation of their services. The brave new world in which Facebook is family, Twitter is politics, and Google is reality is a lot closer than ever before in the new Safer at Home society.

While the tech giants have much to say about what people can and can’t do, they have little to say about the origins of the Wuhan Virus and how Santa Clara County ended up with its own pandemic.

"China did a lot of things right at the beginning, like any country where a virus first shows up," Bill Gates told CNN. In a Washington Post editorial, he described Microsoft China as a model of whose "roughly 6,200 employees", "about half are now coming in to work."

China is more than the tech industry’s partner: it’s the future. The social credit system and surveillance society, the skyscrapers and robotics, the high-speed rail and the massive factories are more than just TED talks, they’re a grim chrome-plated reality. The censorship, surveillance, and propaganda deployed by Silicon Valley in response to the pandemic was a Chinese solution privatized in an American fashion.

Gates, like other Silicon Valley technocrats, has to keep spreading the myth of Chinese expertise in battling the Wuhan Virus, not just because Microsoft needs the approval of the Communists, but because the Peeps are to tech industry technocrats what the Soviet Union with its collective farms and planned economy was to the New York and Chicago academics of nine decades ago. The future.

That’s why Democrats have spent the last generation mumbling that we should be more like China. Perhaps not the forced abortions, organ trafficking, or camps, but they do make the trains run on time. And California can’t even manage to build a train. It’s no wonder that Silicon Valley looks westward even as it uses the pandemic to unleash technodystopian solutions worthy of three William Gibson novels.

The one thing that China’s Xi and Gates’ corporate culture in Redmond could agree on is that people are stupid and need to be told what to do. Most will never do what they’re supposed to unless they’re manipulated, prodded, and even bullied into doing what the masters of the universe think they should.

That’s exactly why the tech industry’s monopolies have created a toxic culture that has infected our culture, poisoned our politics, and is depriving us of our civil rights. Its number dot zero web divides and conquers, fragmenting our society along algorithmic lines, creating crises for its own profit, and then brutally stamping on the consequent conflicts with its unseen machinery of surveillance and censorship.

Silicon Valley isn’t fixing the pandemic with its control freak responses, instead it’s worsening it. The tech industry might have learned from its Chinese cohorts that censorship doesn’t inspire confidence, it creates distrust, manufacturing a consensus by silencing everyone who disagrees spreads paranoia.

In a dissentless culture, everyone echoes the propaganda, but no one really trusts or believes anything.

Control, surveillance, and suppression don’t solve problems. They just convince members of the elite that the problem is under control. That’s what the Communist elite accomplished in China. Their lies, intimidation, and likely killings aren’t fooling the people in the affected areas, just their bosses.

That’s also how Silicon Valley works. Instead of proverbs from Mao’s Little Red Book, there are buzzwords. But they all serve the same function, ghost cities and vaporware, phantom industries and fake economics, entire Potemkin realities built on lies that fall apart when you pull back the curtain.

Who really needs this level of control and deceit? Thieves and liars. The bigger the con, the harder you have to grip the tiger so it doesn’t eat you. That’s as true in China as it is in California.

Communist China’s dirty little secret is that it doesn’t work. Its fake economy is built on massive thievery and fraud. If the United States ever stopped buying its own stolen property back from the Commies, along with the rest of the world, the whole thing would collapse as badly as Mao’s sparrow hunt.

American technocrats who insist that we imitate China are falling for a fraud. And every time the Democrats try to sincerely imitate a fraud, the whole thing fails miserably on them like all their high-speed rail projects that never get off the ground and only do one thing at high speed, spend money.

High-speed rail, like an internet run by a handful of monopolies, seems very appealing to control freaks. But the American model is two cars in every garage and a decentralized web that has room for everyone. The pandemic solution championed by American technocrats envisions one lockdown for everyone and one token ring to bind them all. People, both Commies and dot commies often assume, are interchangeable. What holds true in New York will be just as true in South Carolina or Wyoming.

The Wuhan Virus is a wake-up call about globalization and centralization. America isn’t just a gear in a global machine, and states aren’t interchangeable parts in a national puzzle. Americans are as individualistic as their communities. We’re not glowing dots to be herded by drones, barked at by public safety announcements, and lied to for our own good by dot com and gov public-private partnerships.

The tech industry’s monopolies have built a dystopian culture that has divided neighbors, families and a nation. It’s time to break up the dystopia, end the monopolies, and rebuild the American community.
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Daniel Greenfield (@Sultanknish) is Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an investigative journalist and writer focusing on radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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Biden VP Selection Echoes Decision Democrats and FDR Made in 1944

Victor Davis Hanson

by Victor Davis Hanson: Few Americans can remember past vice presidents such as Charles Curtis, Charles Dawes or Thomas Marshall. In more recent memory, almost no one can recall vice presidential nominees who lost such as William Miller, Sargent Shriver or Lloyd Bentsen.

John Nance Garner served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president for two terms (1933-41), but he nonetheless described his eight years as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Except “spit” was a euphemism used in place of Garner’s profane slang for urine.

Garner was edged out of the job when leftist Henry Wallace replaced him.

But later, as World War II raged in July 1944, the frail Roosevelt was visibly suffering from a host of ailments during his third term. Rumors swept Washington that FDR was increasingly unable to meet the demands of the presidency.

After all, Roosevelt was 62, a paraplegic, smoker and social drinker who suffered from congestive heart failure. For nearly 12 years he had already endured the most stressful presidency in history, guiding the country through both the Great Depression and World War II.

Still, Democrats were convinced that FDR was their only hope in November 1944. Party bosses were confident that he could win an unprecedented fourth term over staid Republican nominee Thomas Dewey.

As a result, the Democratic vice presidential nominee that year was thought likely to be the next president — and far sooner than later.

Vice President Wallace had strong socialist sympathies. Southern Democrats and moderates were terrified that if Wallace remained in office, he would frighten away enough voters to ensure Roosevelt’s defeat. Or, worse still, Wallace might become America’s first de facto socialist president — right when Americans were starting to fear their wartime communist ally the Soviet Union.

Wallace had fought hard to stay on the ticket. But his inner-party opponents pushed even harder for more moderate Missouri Sen. Harry Truman to take his place.

Truman finally beat out Wallace at the July convention and was nominated vice president. Roosevelt, as expected, won the presidential election for a fourth time. But, as feared, he died less than three months into his new term. The relatively unknown Truman became an unlikely president.

Yet Truman surprised the country with nearly eight years of responsible leadership. He finished the war, dropping the world’s first two atomic bombs to defeat Japan without an invasion, and then faced down the Soviet Union to launch the Cold War.

A President Wallace might have done things quite differently — or far worse.

The Democratic Party is facing some of the same melodramas over the nomination of its vice presidential candidate for 2020.
As with FDR in 1944, the 77-year-old Biden seems frail at times. He also seems frequently confused. There is concern in some corners that if elected, he might not be able to fulfill his duties.As in 1944, the United States is facing an ongoing existential crisis, as the coronavirus threatens to kill thousands more Americans and do trillions of dollars more damage to the economy.

In such an ordeal, the Democrats believe that their likely nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, can win the November election.

As with FDR in 1944, the 77-year-old Biden seems frail at times. He also seems frequently confused. There is concern in some corners that if elected, he might not be able to fulfill his duties.

That unspoken fear has turned the selection of a Democratic running mate into a drama not seen in decades.

Like Roosevelt, Biden is seen as a coalition builder, and not as left-wing as most of the failed Democratic primary candidates.

Disheartened Bernie Sanders supporters are pushing for a progressive running mate. But the party establishment feels that Democrats already dodged the socialist bullet when Sanders’ campaign finally collapsed.

To placate radical Democrats, Biden has promised that his running mate will be either a minority, a woman or both — and likely far more left-wing than he is.

Moderates are worried that Biden has already moved hard left, and if he goes even further with a progressive vice presidential pick, the Democratic ticket may well lose to Donald Trump. Privately, they would probably prefer as either their presidential or vice-presidential nominee a known commodity such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The idea of a far-left politician such as former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams as a potential president in the midst of the coronavirus panic might terrify some establishment Democrats, and perhaps many Americans as well.

Just as it was 76 years ago, when the presidential nominee’s health was failing and Henry Wallace was maneuvered off the ticket, we may well see a fight to ensure that a radical candidate is not selected as a Democratic running mate.

This year, as in 1944, the VP job seems something more than a bucket of warm spit.
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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.  Article shared on FoxNews.com.

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Flynn Attorney on Explosive New Documents: There's More Coming and It Gets Worse

General Michael Flynn

by Katie Pavlich: During an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity Wednesday night Sidney Powell, a top attorney representing General Michael Flynn against the FBI, said explosive new documents showing agents framing her client are only the beginning.

"The documents I've seen so far in addition to the ones you have in your hands now are even more stunning. It's just absolutely appalling what these agents and then the Special Counsel operation did to General Flynn. It's abuse of their authority at every turn," Powell said. "These documents weren't easily discovered. The emails have been in the FBI the whole time but the handwritten notes, as I understand it, may not have been. We still do not know who the author of those is. They're devastating evidence of lengths they were willing to go to dsiregard all prior protocols, all prior rules, their standard practice in other cases to warn of 1001 violation. All of that. None of that applied to General Flynn. They only had special violations of every protocol known for him because they were determined to take him out."

"I can’t thank Attorney General Barr and Mr. Jensen and Mr. Durham enough for having the integrity and fortitude to get to the bottom of this because that’s what it takes," she continued.

Powell has asked U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan to vacate the case.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy broke down the new documents and said it's clear FBI agents put Flynn in a perjury trap.

"I think what we're seeing is a meticulously planned out scheme to try to get a 33-year combat veteran of the United States to say something inaccurate so that they'd have a basis to charge him with false statements or otherwise get him fired," McCarthy said. They did not have a legitimate investigative reason for doing this. There was no criminal predicate. There was no reason to treat him as a criminal suspect."

"For years a number of us have been arguing that this looked like a perjury trap. We're now seeing the paper trail start to catch up with what common sense has said for a longtime," he continued.

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Katie Pavlich (@Katie Pavlich) share article at Town Hall.

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Vote by Mail?

by Kerby Anderson: The latest polls show that a majority of voters (58%) favor reforming our election laws so everyone in America can vote by mail. An additional percentage (9%) back a one-time exception this year because of the pandemic.

Having the entire nation vote by mail is not a good idea, but it will take some convincing arguments to sway the current push for nationwide voting by mail. In fact, there are already five states (Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah) that already conduct elections entirely by mail.

Why is voting by mail dangerous? First, the voter rolls are notoriously in bad shape. One study concluded that there are more voter registrations in 378 US counties than there are citizens of voting age in that county. Some voters have moved away. Others are registered more than once. Voters who have died are still on the rolls.

Mailing out ballots to the entire nation means that hundreds of thousands (or more) are arriving at homes for people who no longer live there or who are registered at more than one location. There is great potential for voter fraud.

Second, universal voting by mail raises significant security questions. These ballots are the only kind that are being marked without any supervision from election officials. People can engage in election fraud. Voters might even be intimidated into voting a certain way.

If someone is disabled or concerned about the virus, they can vote by absentee ballot in a majority of states. That has always been the case. Most all states allow early voting, which would allow citizens to vote when there isn’t a crowd at the polling place.

I think having the entire nation vote by mail is a bad idea. But I realize that it appears that most Americans want to move ahead with it anyway.
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Kirby Anderson is an author, lecturer, visiting professor and radio host and contributor on nationally syndicated Point of View and the "Probe" radio programs.

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Joe Biden’s Dr. Death

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, professor of Health Care Mgmt
Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

by David Harsanyi: Ezekiel Emanuel has some unsettling beliefs.

Does Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel believe Joe Biden would be better off dead?

That would be a peculiar position for Biden’s chief adviser on medical issues and a member of the candidate’s Public Health Advisory Committee to take. But if we accept the reasoning behind Emanuel’s infamous 2014 essay, Biden is nothing more than a resource-sucking shell of himself who should stop trying to prolong his life.

I suspect that if one of Trump’s advisers on coronavirus had once taken to the august pages of The Atlantic to reason that men who reach the age of 75 are useless to society, the press would be vigorously exploring and amplifying his position. Reporters have rarely bothered to bring it up with Emanuel, who is constantly on TV — or with Biden, who is now “sheltered in place” and trying to prolong his life.

It’s quite simple: Does Emanuel believe that Biden, aged 78 on Inauguration Day, is faltering or declining, or in a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived? Does Emanuel consider Biden to have been robbed of his ability to contribute to work, society, and the world? Does he believe that Biden will now be remembered as feeble, ineffectual, and even pathetic? Is Biden’s creativity, originality, and productivity pretty much gone? Surely a younger person, according to Emanuel’s own societal prescription, would be better prepared for the job.

While some of us believe age is catching up to Biden — time waits for no one, etc. — we still believe his life is more than political aspirations. Does Emanuel?

In his essay, Biden’s high-achieving adviser, one of the architects of Obamacare, judges the value of a life by the number of books a person can write or the number of technocratic laws they can help pass or the number of times they can climb Kilimanjaro. Did you know that the average age that Nobel Prize–winning physicists make their great discoveries is 48? Really, after that our feeble minds are “constricting of our ambitions and expectations.”

At 65, Emanuel promises to stop attempting to actively prolong his life. No more colonoscopies and no more flu shots, he assures us. “And if there were to be a flu pandemic,” he writes, “a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs.” Does Biden’s scientific advisor believe that it is the moral responsibility of older Americans to deny themselves potential coronavirus vaccines? If not, why not?

Of course, Emanuel claims to be speaking only for himself, calling his view “a personal preference, not a policy proposal.” But is his logic not universal? Would it not apply both to every man over 75 and to Americans who suffer from cognitive disorders and other disabilities? After all, they consume precious resources that could be used by the vibrant young people chasing their first Nobel Prize.

This kind of zero-sum thinking often lurks within the environmentalist movement, and elsewhere on the Left. Yet if an AIDS patient in 2005 had adopted Emanuel-like thinking, he might have missed out on incredible technological advances that now allow people like himself to live long, fulfilling lives.

The media don’t ask Emanuel about any of this. They do, however, treat him as a leading expert on COVID-19.

On March 27, Emanuel, who is chairman of the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said on Morning Joe that at the current rate of spread, there would likely be 100 million Americans infected by the coronavirus in a month. Americans had begun lockdowns and social distancing and wearing masks by March 27th. (Yesterday was the one-month anniversary of Emanuel’s prediction, and he turned out to be somewhere in the vicinity of 99 million cases off. I haven’t won a single Nobel Prize and I bet I could offer a forecast that comes within 99 million people of being correct.)

But Emanuel, and other Obama-era figures such as Andy Slavitt — who cited predictions that a million Americans would be dead of coronavirus — are given lifetime special status as reliable experts no matter how wrong they are.

A number of liberal pundits have accused anyone who suggests reopening the economy of trying to selfishly sacrifice their grandparents to the gods of Wall Street. When the Texas lieutenant governor argued that old people should volunteer to die and save the economy, it was a national story. But here we have a leading adviser to the presumptive candidate of the Democratic Party who once argued, before there was any crisis, that the elderly were an encumbrance of the young.

Now, I’m not particularly offended by Emanuel’s argument. It’s a provocative one about the complicated subjects of medicine, suffering, and age. People should be able to make counterintuitive and unsettling arguments about the world without getting dragged forever. But if the people who offer anti-humanist thought experiments — the same people who were dramatically wrong about a real-life crisis — are involved in crafting real-world policy, they should, at the very least, be asked to explain their position.
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David Harsanyi @davidharsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist and the author of “The People Have Spoken (and They Are Wrong): The Case Against Democracy.” This article was shared by National Review.

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Lockdown and Shut Up

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: “I think it’s a shame,” HBO comedian Bill Maher told Dr. David Katz, “that people like you who sound reasonable — maybe it’s not the exact one true opinion you hear somewhere else — has to go on Fox News to say it.”

For years, I have told liberal friends that they miss important stories by not paying attention to Fox, because most other TV media eschew non-progressive perspectives they oppose (but perhaps fear we might support).

Last month, Katz wrote a New York Times op-ed, entitled, “Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?” Rather than the current lockdown strategy, the physician advocates “a middle path” where “high-risk people are protected from exposure” and “low-risk people go out in the world.”

Once upon a time, social media promised regular folks a chance to communicate and even organize without government interference or media filters.

Not so much these days.

Last week, I decried Facebook removing posts informing people about planned anti-lockdown protests, reportedly “on the instruction of governments” in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska because those protests might violate “stay-at-home orders.”

This week, YouTube removed a video that you and I must not see, with California Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi explaining why they think the lockdowns are bad policy.*

“Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations,” clarified YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “would be a violation of our policy” — and will be blocked.

Our society’s first principle is freedom of expression.

The idea? Unfettered information will best lead us to the truth.

Increasingly, our social media and news outfits no longer trust us with information not heavily controlled by them.

Which means we cannot trust them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Paul Jacob (@Common_Sense_PJ) is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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Government Should Stop Promoting Unemployment During COVID-19

by Jarrett Stepman: American prosperity always has relied on the fact that we are the most productive people in human history.

Unfortunately, some short-term Band-Aids for the widespread economic distress caused by the coronavirus lockdowns may have substantial negative effects that make it harder for Americans to get back on their feet.

While much of what is in the CARES Act passed by Congress will be important in mitigating the damage of the COVID-19 pandemic, some provisions already are creating bad, unintended consequences.

One problem has been the federal unemployment insurance that gives unemployed Americans $600 a week no matter what they were making before they lost their jobs.

A coffee shop owner in Harlan, Kentucky, explained why it’s hard for small businesses to retain staff right now.

“The very people we hired have now asked us to be laid off,” wrote Sky Marietta, who owns the shop with her husband, Geoff, according to NPR. “Not because they did not like their jobs or because they did not want to work, but because it would cost them literally hundreds of dollars per week to be employed.”

The federal government is offering $600 a week on top of state unemployment benefits, which means that for many, being unemployed is more lucrative than staying at work.

“You also have to think [of] the benefit of not having to go to work, especially during a pandemic,” Marietta said in her interview with NPR. “It’s not that we don’t wish that we could pay our employees at that level all the time. You’re always wanting to pay your staff the best you possibly can. But to be put in a position where you can’t compete with them being at home, unemployed, it’s really tricky. It’s a really difficult situation to be in.”

Other issues have cropped up too.

For instance, when Jamie Black-Lewis, owner of the Oasis Medspa & Salon and Amai Day Spa in Washington state, received two forgivable loans through the new federal Paycheck Protection Program, she said she thought it was a godsend to help retain her 35 employees who had their pay halted.

However, she said, the loans actually made many of her employees angry. The reaction she got was a “firestorm of hatred about the situation,” Black-Lewis said, according to CNBC.

Why?

Because these employees figured out they can make more money from unemployment than employment.

“It’s a windfall they see coming,” Black-Lewis said of unemployment in the CNBC interview. “In their mind, I took it away.”

The problem is, again, the extra $600 that people receive per week through the federal program, set to continue through July, can exceed what they’d make otherwise.

In a paper for The Heritage Foundation published Tuesday, Drew Gonshorowski and Rachel Greszler laid out what this looks like nationally:
The median full-time worker in America (who earns $933 per week, or $48,500 per year) would earn about 15% more from unemployment insurance—an additional $2,300 over the course of four months of unemployment—than if he had remained employed. The lower that workers’ earnings are, the greater financial incentive they will have to collect unemployment insurance instead of staying employed.

A full-time minimum-wage worker would receive 157% more from unemployment—a total of $7,900 more over four months—than from employment. Part-time and low-wage workers would benefit the most. Someone working 10 hours per week at the minimum wage—perhaps a high school student with a part-time job—would receive 778% more, or a total of $9,800 extra, over four months of unemployment than she would [in] remaining employed.While the temporary nature of this program—for now—may mitigate some of the long-term negative effects, consider this: What’s going to happen to businesses that stay open or try to reopen in coming months but can’t retain employees?

Some business owners may simply use the increased unemployment benefits as an excuse to lay off workers, but many simply won’t be in business much longer.

When the enlarged unemployment benefits run out, countless Americans will find no work to return to. In many cases, they potentially also will be severed from health care coverage, which in America is typically tied to employers.

So, back on the dole. Not good.

This unemployment provision, created in a time of unquestioned crisis, reveals the fundamental problem of making it more lucrative not to work than to work.

Yet, some have suggested that an expanded version of these payments become a permanent part of the American system. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently suggested that in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, America should consider a minimum income guarantee.

As Gonshorowski and Greszler recommend, changing the unemployment benefit so that it doesn’t exceed 100% of a worker’s previous wages could help prevent abuse of the system and ensure we aren’t encouraging people to abandon their jobs.

More than that, we must reject calls to make such a system a permanent feature of American life.
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Jarrett Stepman (@JarrettStepman) is a contributor to The Daily Signal and co-host of The Right Side of History podcast.

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Tags: Jarrett Stepman, The Daily Signal, Government, Should Stop Promoting, Unemployment, During COVID-19 To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!