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Trump Changes Date of Tulsa Rally
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 11: U.S. President Donald Trump walks to Marine One in the rain on the South Lawn of the White House on June 11, 2020 in Washington, DC. Later today, President Trump was scheduled to meet with pastors, law enforcement officials and small business owners at a church in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 11: U.S. President Donald Trump walks to Marine One in the rain on the South Lawn of the White House on June 11, 2020 in Washington, DC. Later today, President Trump was scheduled to meet with pastors, law enforcement officials and small business owners at a church in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Sweden pro-refugees Getty
A young man has been arrested in the municipality of Österåker after allegedly luring a 12-year-old girl and her friend to an asylum home and raping her.
Portland riots (Nathan Howard / Getty)
PORTLAND, OR - AUGUST 10: A protesters slaps his shield while marching toward the Portland Police Bureau North Precinct on the 75th day of protests against racial injustice and police brutality on August 10, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. Crowd sizes began growing again last week as protesters regularly march on city and county law enforcement buildings. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
Seattle-Police-Chief-Carmen-Best-July1-2020-Getty-Images
SEATTLE, WA - JULY 01: Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best addresses the press as city crews dismantle the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) area outside of the Seattle Police Department's vacated East Precinct on July 1, 2020 in Seattle, Washington. Police reported making at least 31 arrests while clearing the CHOP area this morning. (Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)
jayapal
Jayapal
portland-rioters-burning-american-flag-getty
PORTLAND, OR - AUGUST 1: A protester burns an American flag in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse in the early morning on August 1, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. Friday was the second night in a row without police intervention, following weeks of clashes between federal officers and protesters in Portland. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
senior-citizens-grocery-shopping-los-angeles-ca-32020-getty
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 19: Seniors shop for groceries during special hours open to seniors and the disabled at Northgate Gonzalez Market, a Hispanic specialty supermarket, on March 19, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. Northgate Gonzalez Market is opening all of its Southern California locations one hour early, from 7:00-8:00 a.m., exclusively for senior citizens and disabled customers, amidst panic buying in some stores during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Hassan-Diab-submits-resignation-Lebanon-ap
In this photo released by Lebanon's official government photographer Dalati Nohra, Lebanese President Michel Aoun, left, receives a letter of resignation from Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab, at the presidential palace, in Baabda, east of Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, Aug. 10, 2020. Lebanon's prime minister stepped down from his job on Monday in the wake of the disastrous Beirut port explosion that triggered public fury, saying he has come to the conclusion that corruption in Lebanon is "bigger than the state." (Dalati Nohra via AP)
crisis for Hassan Diab
In this photo released by the Lebanese Government, Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab, gives a speech at the Government House in Beirut, Lebanon, Saturday, March. 7, 2020. Lebanon's prime minister said Saturday the government will suspend payment of $1.2 billion in loans, marking the crisis-hit country's first-ever default on its sovereign debt. (Dalati Nohra/Lebanese Government via AP)
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In July 2011 we reported that President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden’s economic recovery was the worst in US history.
Worst. Recovery. Ever.
Barack Obama’s economic recovery is even worse than we thought.
Click to Enlarge
(The Wall Street Journal)
The Obama-Biden recovery was the worst ever since the Great Depression.
The Wall Street Journal reported, via Memeorandum:
Two years ago, officials said, the worst recession since the Great Depression ended. The stumbling recovery has also proven to be the worst since the economic disaster of the 1930s.
Across a wide range of measures—employment growth, unemployment levels, bank lending, economic output, income growth, home prices and household expectations for financial well-being—the economy’s improvement since the recession’s end in June 2009 has been the worst, or one of the worst, since the government started tracking these trends after World War II.
Profits Thrive in Weak Recovery Bright Days for the Bottom Line Keeping a Watch on the Bellwethers In some ways the recovery is much like the 1991 and 2001 post-recession periods: All three are marked by gradual output growth rather than sharp snap-backs typical of earlier recoveries. But this recovery may remain lackluster for years, many economists say, because of heavy household debt, a financial system still damaged by the mortgage crisis, fragile confidence and a government with few good options for supporting growth.
There are bright spots. Exports, particularly of manufactured and agricultural goods, are improving, in part because of booming developing-country economies and the weaker dollar. They are expected to pick up in the second half of the year as the temporary shock fades from Japan’s earthquake and tsunami. In a hint of this, the Institute of Supply Management on Friday reported an uptick in manufacturing for June. Higher corporate profits, stock prices and business investment also are supporting the expansion.
More… This is frightening.
The Foundry posted this chart showing the weak employment numbers during the Obama years.
The St Louis FRED reports that July’s Unemployment is now down nearly 5% since the economy was shut down as a result of the intentional shut down due to the China coronavirus. The unemployment rate reached 14.8% and now it is down to 10.2%, a decrease of nearly 5% in only three months:
The FRED also reports that there are now 139.6 million Americans working. In April the FRED reported that there were only 130.3 working Americans. This increase in working Americans in only three months is record shattering. Nearly 10 million more people are working now than in April. The total number of Americans working is now more than any month since September 2014 and before:
Today the S&P 500 opened at 3,360.77 – this is now near its all-time high set in February this year. The markets are all nearly back up to all-time highs set in February this year!
The markets have never grown so much in such a short period of time. This is record breaking!
The post The Choice in 2020: President Trump Who Created the GREATEST Economic Recovery EVER vs. Joe Biden Who Was Behind WORST Economic Recovery Since the Great Depression appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
The Claremont Review of Books has just published its new (Summer) issue. Thanks to the editors, I reviewed the issue in galley to pick out four pieces to roll out this for Power Line readers today (essay by Michael Anton linked below), tomorrow (essay by Angelo Codevilla), and Thursday (two book reviews). As always, I encourage readers to become subscribers (subscribe here) for the absurdly low price of $19.95 and get online access thrown in for free.
We lead off with Michael Anton’s essay “The Case for Trump.” Subhead: “There’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.” The essay is adapted from Anton’s The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (forthcoming from Regnery Publishing). Anton is the author of the influential 2016 CRB essay “The Flight 93 election” and former Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications on the United States National Security Council. He is a most astute observer of the political scene.
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Fix for Mail-Ballot Flaws Is Voting-Integrity Safeguards
New AZ Poll Shows Trump Inching Ahead of Biden
China Has Become a Threat to World Peace
Beijing's Doublespeak in Hong Kong
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Here are some news stories that might be of interest. Most articles will be more or less summarized in the headline. You can skim the headlines and summaries, and click the links if they are of interest. Keep in mind, many of these reports are products of the Fake News, so although they will be what people are hearing and talking about, there is no guarantee any one of them is necessarily correct, and we have had cases of outright lies make it onto these pages, especially about President Trump.
No Q. You can see Q’s posts aggregated live, and new ones which may have gone live after our print deadline at http://www.qanon.pub
__________________________________
QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook, documents show.
More than 100 Black leaders and celebrities urge Biden to pick Black woman as VP.
Michelle Obama supporters urge Biden to pick former first lady as running mate in an open letter. This would make sense.
Court ruling involving Victoria’s Secret founder could spill more Jeffrey Epstein dirt. Judge orders release of correspondences from attorneys for celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz and Victoria’s Secret founder Leslie Wexner.
Mika and Joe do not look ebullient in this video as they discuss all the polls showing Biden winning. Looks like they are sitting by Sleepy Joe’s hospice bed as he begins his final decline.
Some other observations on the Epstein show Surviving Jeffrey Epstein – Epstein would ask some of the girls about their families, ostensibly as an ice-breaker. These were girls who were probably grabbed as opportunities without enough background, and he was doing a threat assessment, to see if their parents might be dangerous. I remember the daughter of some rich and powerful person a year or so back describing meeting Epstein, and him closing in on her, and immediately asking about her family, and once he saw her family was rich, he backed off and never did anything remotely inappropriate.
We are hearing about the American girls, but there were rafts of foreign girls who didn’t speak English funneled in from Europe as well that we have not heard so much about. They may have been the vast majority of the operation’s targets, and who knows where he handed them off to once they were groomed. My impression is, this was not a network that serviced Epstein and his friends, so much as Epstein was an employee preparing girls for the network to use throughout the world, while living under the assigned cover of a billionaire.
Jeffrey Epstein was banned from contributing philanthropically to MIT due to being a registered sex offender against minors, so Epstein bought influence at MIT by funneling the money through Bill Gates’s personal bank accounts and other rich associates. I almost get the impression they were funneling that money so they could determine what scientists were funded, and what research was being done, possibly to control and stifle scientific advancement in the non-Cabal world according to dictates from the network’s Management.
It looks like Acosta didn’t just back off from prosecuting Epstein when warned he was “with intelligence,” but rather he actively worked with Epstein’s lawyers to cater fully to them and Jeffrey. One participant said in an email with Acosta he was happy to have finally worked everything out for “reasons” he “will not put in this email.” I got the impression the person who wrote that was not normally an enthusiastic Cabal drone, but rather was made afraid by having to deal with this Cabal-related issue because now Cabal was lurking over their shoulder, and finally getting away from it would allow them to stop feeling afraid. And whoever it was just assumed Acosta would know exactly what he was talking about.
The show never mentioned that Acosta had said Epstein was associated with intelligence, and there was no mention of the Mossad rumors, so it was actively hiding the most interesting part of the story – that there was much more than Epstein. It also made a hard effort to connect Epstein and Donald Trump by showing some document with “Trump Organization” at the top as they talked about Epstein’s flight logs, implying Trump flew on Epstein’s plane (even though he never did), and showing pictures of events with Epstein and Ghilsane posing next to Trump for a photo-op, and with Trump giving the State of the Union in the backdrop. So the show is as much cover-up as anything. It is also sad to see the girls all surrounded by Cabal lawyers, not understanding they are still not free and plotting their own courses
A model target was moved by Ghilsane into an apartment owned by Epstein’s brother, where Epstein kept models he was grooming. This girl said she was very uneasy there because she always felt watched and listened to, so much so she moved out. Obviously in retrospect the whole building was probably put up with cameras and microphones, and any guys who dated those models and went home with them were giving up video, and if the models married rich later, their husbands could be leveraged with the threat of public release of videos of their wives sleeping with other guys in their younger model days.
Most fascinating may be that neither Epstein nor Ghilsane appear to have had any real skill beyond grooming kids. Epstein supposedly didn’t even know calculus when he taught it briefly. An investor in the area Epstein claimed to operate claimed if there had been somebody as big as Epstein claimed to be, he would have known of him, and he never heard of him. He said if Epstein was investing, he might have been blackmailing $500 million dollar sums from billionaires he entrapped, to put in an S&P 500 Index fund, and taking a cut of that, but he was not doing anything like he claimed. And yet here were these two people, Jeffrey and Ghilsane, maybe 115 or 120 IQ’s, with little actual schooling in any skill, and they were living the billionaire lifestyle, complete with multiple private jets, private islands, multiple elite-level residences, personal chefs cooking first class meals just for them, and every pleasure anyone could possibly want in this world. But at the end of the day, they were just employees. Which makes you wonder, what is it that is really at the top of this thing? What are they being used to produce for the people at the top?
Seattle City Council approves plan to defund police department, slashes jobs and salaries.
Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best to resign after defunding of department. Local Police Chief needs to be an elected position, like Sheriff. Once they are under the thumb of a mayor or other political cuck, you’re finished.
California sees a massive increases in shoplifting, grand theft, receiving stolen property, forgery, fraud, and writing bad checks after turning all of them into minor misdemeanors so long as you don’t steal more than $950 per day through them. I now wonder if this was the start of trying to degrade the US experience to stymie Donald Trump’s reelection.
Donald Trump leaves abruptly during a press conference after a shooting outside the White House. Sounds like a 51 year old black guy wanted to get killed by Secret service from reports. He approached an officer, told him was armed, walked away, made a drawing motion, and then assumed a shooting stance opposite the officer, who plugged him in the torso and put him down, wounded.
Lebanese prime minister announces resignation of government.
Marco Rubio looks to extend period for casting Electoral College votes, giving states more time to select electors. Inherent to Rubio’s action is the assumption that mail-in voting is a given, and thus we will not know who won for some time. This will give Cabal time to try and make up votes and adjust the outcome. Historically Republicans would win on election night, only to see the margin whittled away as time went on and recount after recount happened, until the Democrat was ahead, at which point the vote-counting would stop. So this definitely will work to Cabal’s advantage.
Facebook threatens ‘climate-change extremists,’ insisting on a policy ‘that will prevent the public from ever countering radical viewpoints,’ like the idea the planet’s temperature may not be entirely due to man’s activity.
Wall Street’s many campaign donors are lining up behind Joe Biden, according to the New York Times. If it is true, (and it may not be), it is just a measure of how fixed the system is, and how the fixers don’t want to lose control.
Fox News looks at what happens if the election fails to produce a clear winner. Short answer – the House selects a President, however each state’s raft of representatives gets only one vote, so all of California gets one vote, just like Wyoming. Presently there are 25 overall Republican states, 24 Democrat states, and one tied state. But a number of them are only one swing vote away from switching, and they say to expect horse-trading.
Massive fire breaks out in a British industrial park. No idea if it is involved, but Cabal will have some sort of central control centers/data-farms hidden somewhere, and if Cabal is being taken down, they will be targeted.
Braves’ finances hit hard, with a 95% drop in revenue. And they didn’t even kneel. But by all means, lets keep players on other teams kneeling.
In one Indian state, Ivermectin is to replace Hydroxychloroquine in treatment of Covid-19 patients.
Chinese firms delisting from the NYSE and Nasdaq amid growing US pressure.
Another round of layoffs at Warner Brothers, including a bloodbath at DC comics. Cabal funds must be getting short if they can’t keep subsidizing their lesbian midget non-binary anti-cis-hetero superhero space romance graphic novels.
Space Force members called ‘Space Warfighters’ in new doctrinal publication.
Stocks extend winning streak to 7 days as Trump signs executive orders for coronavirus relief.
Trump signs bill to expand funding, eligibility for housing grants for disabled veterans.
No Q.
President Trump’s twitter feed (May not display properly on the main blog, unless you load this brief’s page by clicking on the title):
Don Jr’s Tweets (May not display properly on the main blog, unless you load this brief’s page by clicking on the title):
This might be part of an interesting strategy to force vote by mail:
If schools and churches remain closed, buildings which are normally used as polling places, where are we gonna vote on Nov. 3?
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) August 11, 2020
Media attack on NYPD is pretty complete – they wrote articles about callous cops standing by as a girl was injured in a girl gangfight raging nearby, but left out the violent crowd attacking them as they advanced into it:
#FactsMatter https://t.co/D561pL8tM5
— NYC PBA (@NYCPBA) August 10, 2020
NEWS: Ghislaine Maxwell's attorneys ask for her to be moved to the general prison population.
Maxwell has spent 40 days in solitary confinement under 24-hours surveillance. Prison guards take notes on everything she does.
— Ivan Pentchoukov (@IvanPentchoukov) August 11, 2020
BREAKING: Ex-Justice official says Durham could exploit a loophole in the department's rule, memorialized in memos dating to 2008, that allows for action closer to the election as long as it's not taken "FOR THE PURPOSE OF" affecting an electionhttps://t.co/DL0yeJmLz9
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) August 11, 2020
BREAKING: None of the Justice Department's "Election Year Sensitivities" memos contain any language specifically prohibiting prosecutors such as Durham from announcing case developments or issuing reports of findings within "60 days" of an electionhttps://t.co/Ez8w2pR26Z
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) August 11, 2020
Swecker says he's confident his old colleague Durham has uncovered crimes. And the lack of media leaks coming from Durham's office is a telltale sign he is building a serious corruption case.https://t.co/DL0yeJmLz9
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) August 10, 2020
BREAKING: Swecker named former FBI attorney Kevin Clinesmith — as well as former deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe — among officials most vulnerable to possible criminal charges in Durham’s investigation of the investigators.https://t.co/DL0yeJmLz9
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) August 10, 2020
-Microsoft is only western company China permits to operate inside its borders (Bing, LinkedIn)
-Founder of Bytedance is Microsoft Alumni
-Microsoft’s site says: “our most complete subsidiary and largest R&D center outside the United States is in China.”https://t.co/EHcl3HI98C— Bowen Xiao (@BowenXiao_) August 10, 2020
FEC Commissioner: 'Substantial Chance' We Won't Know Winner On Election Night
This confirms many Americans’ fears about mail-in ballots: the winner likely won’t be declared on election night — and she said “this is okay” that we may have delayed results.https://t.co/m01roT89km
— Sara A. Carter (@SaraCarterDC) August 10, 2020
“No Gun”#ChicagoRiots pic.twitter.com/wyuSyzdB3U
— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 11, 2020
Cities must start deploying their SWAT units to these looting sites or looters will become more and more emboldened. Zero tolerance for looting https://t.co/0q4xsNcxJl
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) August 10, 2020
Gov. Cuomo has rejected calls for an independent investigation. Why is that? https://t.co/AblR0iK7N5
— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) August 11, 2020
According to the Daily Beast, misgendering is violence but looting, rioting and stealing is not. You can’t make this shit up. https://t.co/sI32RLgyjA
— Chris Barron
BREAKING: Health officials have now determined the COVID-19 death rate for those under 70 years old is just 0.04% — less than the common flu
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) August 11, 2020
BREAKING: Democrats fear a positive "October Surprise" economic report showing GDP rebounding just before the election. The initial report on real GDP growth in the third quarter is due to be released on Oct 29, and early forecasts show growth rocketing back at a 15% annual clip
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) August 11, 2020
AG Barr Is On The Front Lines, Fighting the 'Resistance' Fundamentally Set On Changing America Forever
Our nation is witnessing this unrest in major cities by groups, like Antifa, which Barr described this Sunday on Fox as utilizing "guerrilla warfare"https://t.co/pMgrdIqCTd
— Sara A. Carter (@SaraCarterDC) August 10, 2020
It's the site where the tide of the Civil War turned https://t.co/S9vXGLOJxP
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) August 11, 2020
Spread r/K Theory, because you can’t claim to be of science if you call a boy a girl.
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During a recent appearance on CNN, Nancy Pelosi admitted that China would rather have Biden elected president in November.
Does she realize this is not a good thing? Does she know Trump has been making this point for weeks?
She has a real talent for saying the quiet part out loud.
The Federalist reports:
Nancy Pelosi Admits ‘China Would Prefer Joe Biden’ Be Elected
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) publicly admitted that she is aware of China’s preferences for the elected President of the United States in this November’s election.
“China would prefer Joe Biden,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
While Pelosi recognized that China prefers that Trump lose the November election, she claims that the threat they present is “not equivalent” to the interference conducted by Russia.
“Russia is actively, 24/7 interfering in our election,” she said. “They did so in 2016, and they are doing so now.”
See the video below:
"China would prefer Joe Biden." – Nancy Pelosi pic.twitter.com/gI1RHmFNOu
— Francis Brennan (@FrancisBrennan) August 9, 2020
Does Pelosi have any idea how this sounds?
Nancy Pelosi admits that our intelligence concluded China prefers Joe Biden be President over Trump. Voters need to ask themselves why China wants Joe. China sent us COVID and lied about how dangerous it was so they could hurt us. Now they want Joe. Why? pic.twitter.com/VhKVt71EGZ
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) August 9, 2020
…they already know they can bribe his son. pic.twitter.com/z6sjoy44yD
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) August 10, 2020
Nancy Pelosi said, “China would prefer Joe Biden” to be president.
Here's why:
-Biden led the effort to grant China “Most Favored Nation” status & supported their membership to the WTO
-Biden was the leading pitchman for the TPP which would have killed 450k U.S. jobs
— GOP (@GOP) August 10, 2020
China would obviously prefer Joe Biden.
They could walk all over him and the rest of America as a result.
Cross posted from American Lookout.
The post Nancy Pelosi Admits China Wants Joe Biden To Be Elected President (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
It’s not just statues and American history that are under attack. The most essential ideas from America’s founding are under siege and on trial.
Robert R. Reilly, the director of the Westminster Institute and widely published author, joined “The Right Side of History” podcast to discuss his new book “America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding.”
Reilly discusses the deeper origins of the American Revolution—rooted in Western thought, philosophy, and religion—and explains why America’s current success and survival depends on embracing those ideas rather than abandoning them. Listen to the interview on the podcast, or read a lightly edited transcript:
Jarrett Stepman: We are now joined by Robert R. Reilly, the director of the Westminster Institute and widely published author who has a new book, “America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding.” Thank you so much for joining us.
Robert Reilly: Delighted to be with you.
Stepman: Obviously, your book is quite timely right now, as we’ve seen so many attacks, I think, on America and what it stands for really coming from seemingly all sides. We’ve had a summer of attacks on statues and a lot of, I think, inability from especially America’s elite to really defend what this country is all about.
You really break down, in your book, in such a great job, what has made the United States good, great, and successful, and in a large part because of its connection to a larger Western tradition. And you define this Western tradition based on three cities: Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, which I thought was very interesting. Can you explain what exactly that means?
Reilly: Yeah, sure. I tried to examine what were the necessary presuppositions for there to be such a thing as the American founding. In other words, what was the lineage of the ideas that made such a thing conceivable in the first place? And that lineage took me back to ancient Athens, ancient Israel, and the dawn of Christianity, because each of them contributed something indispensable.
To date, monotheism was a startlingly unique revelation amidst the sea of polytheism and pantheism, simply extraordinary that the Jews said that their God was one, startling enough right there. No. 2, that their God was transcendent, that is outside the world, though through his providence, he could act in the world.
Second of all, that he was all good, that everything he made was good. And the one thing he made especially well was man who, as Genesis says, was made in God’s image and likeness.
Well, that was quite a revelation, again, unique in the ancient Middle East, and it imbued man with a certain dignity and an inviolability which is quite extraordinary. In fact, I think you could say any claim to human rights today, in some sense or another, is owing to that revelation in Genesis that people are made in God’s image and likeness.
From ancient Athens, you have philosophy, reason, the gifts of the Greeks, in that they thought that reason is capable of apprehending reality and its essence, of knowing what it really is. As distinct from simply having opinions about things you could know the truth of them. And this truth was not, let’s say, contingent. This is, you could come to know what’s true everywhere at all times for all people.
And one of those most important things you could come to know is, what is good and what is bad? What is just and what is unjust?
How could you come to know these things? Because you could apprehend the nature of man and what virtue is as opposed to vice, and how the end of man is in the perfection of his nature, which is rational, and therefore his apprehension of the good and of the ultimate good, which is God, defines the end of that nature.
That was, again, a startling contribution that broke the grip of tribal man on his conception of things.
If you want to know what tribal man looks like, look at what the United States is devolving in today with all of the identity politics that it’s based on race, or it’s based on gender, it’s based on anything but the common apprehension that we all are human beings and share the same nature, and also have within us the image and likeness of God, which is the source of the respect which we owe each other.
Anyway, that’s jumping ahead. And then, Christianity enters the picture, universalizes the truths of the Jewish religion because Judaism, let’s say, had a universal God, but in still a tribal religion. Christianity has a universal God and is a universal religion. Anyone can be a Christian.
It enhanced that understanding of the sanctity of man, due to the image and likeness of God in him, makes him the object of God’s infinite love, and states the ultimate end of man—which is to share in God’s life—is reached outside of the political order, that the political order does not contribute to man’s salvation.
Each person has an individual relationship with this transcendent God and is to reach his destiny through his faith in him and the gift of God’s grace.
The state is forever devalued after the advent of Christianity. The state can no longer subsume the total man. This, to say the least, was revolutionary.
The “Our Father” was a revolutionary prayer. For Christ to say, “My kingdom is not of this world,” was revolutionary. To say that, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar, and … to God what is God’s,” was also shocking.
It’s said the people who heard Christ say this were amazed by it, and well, they might have been, because no one had said it before. And it too, … once again, it meant there was a secular realm and there was the sacred realm. And it was on the basis of this teaching that eventually within the West, the notion of dual sovereignty grew up, or what was called the two swords, the secular sword and the spiritual sword.
And you had the same individual under these dual sovereignties. And this is what first created the space for the development of constitutional rule.
That’s probably too long an answer, but it’s such a profound subject. All of these ingredients had to be there for the development of democratic, constitutional government and all of the principles without which it won’t develop.
And that, of course, begins with the equality of mankind, the understanding that sovereignty is invested in the people, that God doesn’t directly appoint a king or a ruler of some kind. Rather, it is that that ruler is consented to by the people, if that ruler is to be legitimate.
Therefore, the requirement of consent is a natural development from the apprehension of the equality of all people and the notion of popular sovereignty. Out of this come the other things that what touches all must be approved by all. They must have the opportunity to consent in all the things which affect them.
This turns into the right to vote, the right to representation, and also, by the way, something that was universally accepted by the time of the Middle Ages was the right to revolution, should the ruler turn into a tyrant.
And you find then, in the, say, 12th century, early 13th century, the development of ecclesiastical corporations, church organizations, which are ruled by these principles, the religious orders, like the Dominicans, church councils, and the early development of parliaments, not only in England but on the Continent.
Stepman: That was great. I think what’s very interesting is how these ideas were coming together very much in the Middle Ages, that you actually had a degree of liberty and limitation on the power of secular authority, so to speak, that you do have that dual sovereignty.
But something that I think is very interesting that you bring up is the rise of absolutism, starting really in the 16th century. How a lot of monarchies and governments started to become unmoored, in a sense, even from the law, and how that influenced the mind and thought of the Founding Fathers when, of course, the United States was created.
Can you explain that transition and how that influenced the Founders?
Reilly: Yeah. I think that that was, of course, a very profound transformation that began in the late Middle Ages with, let’s call it a distorted theology, which led to a distorted metaphysics, which inevitably affected political order.
Now, let’s just quickly take that at the theological level.
Thomas Aquinas voiced what was the general opinion in the understanding of God, that in him the will follows upon the intellect. In other words, reason rules. God is, above all things logos, which means reason. So reason rules, and the will executes what the reason has conceived.
Now, William of Ockham famously flipped that relationship and said, “No, no, the will rules and reason follows.” So the traditional notion, the notion at the heart of the Middle Ages, was the intellect.
The intellect directs the will. The will then acts in accord with reason. When you get this down to the human level, it means that rational laws are first conceived and then enforced.
Now, when you flip that relationship and say, “No, God is pure will and power, unbound by anything, certainly unbound by any rational notion that man may have,” that he is not really understandable, because God can will anything, the result of this when it’s devoted to the human level is that … This is called, by the way, the technical name in theology is voluntourism.
So you have a voluntourist God, an imitation of a voluntourist God. Man’s reason then becomes the servant of the will rather than its director. So the will rules, the primacy of the will, not the primacy of reason. Now, that becomes the foundation for absolutism in the political realm.
First of all, in the divine right of kings, as expressed by Robert Filmer and James I in England, was that the sovereign is absolute, receives his powers from God alone, God directly appoints him. There is no popular sovereignty or consent of the people. The ruler is accountable to no one except God.
The ruler is above the laws he makes for his people. He is unaccountable. He cannot be held to account. There is no right to revolution. Of course, there’s no right to consent or representation. And therefore the ruler can rule arbitrarily according to his will. He is not held to reason. Law is no longer reason. It is simply the expression of the ruler’s will.
Now, this development was aided by the fracture of Christendom, when Martin Luther, who was under the profound influence of William of Ockham, decided to dissolve all the church corporations and left man at that time no longer under the dual sovereignty of both church and state.
The church was dissolved as an effective organization, so the prince became the head of the church. Understandably so, this considerably enhanced the power of the ruler.
It is to the prince that Luther turned for the reform of the church. Luther posited that the ruler was directly appointed by God. There was no right to revolution against the ruler, at least for a good deal of Luther’s teachings. He later changed his mind, but one can see how the rule of absolutism was enhanced by this.
You then have a secular form of absolutism proposed by Thomas Hobbes in England, who sort of dispensed with the religious side of it, except insofar as he made the head of the state the head of the church also.
He also made the ruler absolute on secular grounds, with his conception of the state of nature of man be a war of all against all. And the only way this war could be stopped is by having an absolute sovereign with absolute powers who also would rule without the consent of his subjects.
Now, these notions together were repugnant to the American colonists when they became subject to rule without their consent. At that time in the 18th century, starting in the 1760s, the British Parliament asserted in the Declaratory Act that they could rule the colonies in all matters whatsoever, unconstrained and without the consent of the colonists.
Those colonists understood themselves as possessing the rights of Englishmen, No. 1, when—through the royal charters—they had such rights.
But when there was no appeal on the grounds of English constitutionalism to some remedy, to the absolute rule under which they were placed by Parliament and George III, they saw that they had to make a higher appeal, and that higher appeal was to the rights of man based upon natural law, and that ruling them without their consent, it was offense against justice, and it defined tyrannical rule, against which they had the right to revolution, which they then exercised.
So to understand the colonists and the way they talked and the things to which they appealed, you have to see as they were reconnecting themselves with that ancient lineage, with that ancient heritage, and restoring the primacy of reason, restoring the rule of reason and the understanding of man as a rational creature whose consent in his rule was required by his very nature.
And therefore you find the magnificent articulation in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence that lays out those principles under the laws of nature and of nature’s God, and that man is endowed by his creator with certain inalienable rights. That’s very powerfully a natural law document.
So the American founding was a restoration. It required a revolution for that restoration to take place, and then they gained themselves the opportunity, for the first time in history, through reflection and choice, founding a regime based upon those principles. That’s the uniqueness of the American founding.
It was also unique in its constitutional makeup of the dual sovereignty of federalism, of the role of the federal government and the autonomy of the states in certain matters.
Stepman: Following up on that, I wanted to ask about, you talked about how the principle of constitutional rule sort of emerged in the Middle Ages, was rejected for a long time, up until the founding.
There were several times throughout the existence of the United States that there were factions who in some way rejected it, be that I guess maybe the Confederacy, maybe an emergence of the Communist Party, even in the 20th century.
I wonder if you could maybe reflect on how what we’re seeing today, not just with these massive demonstrations and rejection of history, but even this rejection of having a free flow of debate, how what we’re seeing today, is it unique from previous rejections of constitutional rule?
Reilly: Well, yes and no. Obviously, the principles of [the] United States as articulated in the declaration and instantiated for the most part in the Constitution were controversial from the beginning. That’s why there was a war.
They were generally accepted within the United States, but of course, within the United States, there was that sort of original sin of slavery. We make sure to say, however, that slavery existed everywhere. Slavery was the norm. In human history for millennia there was slavery.
So the existence of slavery was not unique. What was unique was the articulation of principles which led to the elimination of slavery. First and foremost, the statement that all men are created equal, which, by the way, though, it is an ancient principle. It’s not a new one.
So it was hoped that evil institution would slowly die out within the new United States. It was eliminated rather immediately. In the 10 years between the declaration and the Constitution, all of the states north of the Mason-Dixon line and north of the Ohio River either eliminated slavery outright or put in place measures that led to its elimination.
And of course the Northwest Ordinance, which set forth how the new territories would be ruled, that constituted a large part of the Midwest and the Upper Midwest, forever forbad slavery. And the Constitution provided for the opportunity to pass a law in 1807 or 1808 that would forbid the foreign slave trade. And indeed, when at that time, the United States Congress passed a law banning that trade, and 12 years later, they made it a capital offense.
So there was a general understanding. Certainly it was understood at the time of the founding that slavery was an evil, by almost everyone. The point was what to do.
Slavery was an institution that had existed from time and memorial. “How is it that we do get rid of it?” Unfortunately, that, of course, was a problem that was only finally resolved with a brutal Civil War, in which the founding principles of the United States were defended and finally applied universally. …
Again, that took considerable time through the civil rights movements and other things that black Americans could finally assume all of the rights which men by their nature have.
That’s not the only source of contestation over the principles. Certainly in the 20th century, we know rather dramatically that the equality of all men was explicitly rejected by Nazi Germany, which was based upon a race theory of history and the superiority of the Aryan race and the necessity to eliminate Jews and enslave Slavs and Gypsies and so forth. It couldn’t have been a more direct denial of principle of equality.
And the other expression of that, which turned out to be far more damaging because it lasted so much longer, was that of the Soviet Union and the communist assertion of a class theory of history, so all people were not created equal in the Soviet Union.
The proletariat was superior. And of course, the vanguard of the proletariat, which was the party, exercised absolute power and the kulaks and the bourgeoisie were physically eliminated, clergy was physically eliminated, etc. Excuse me.
By the way, you see an early premonition of these things in the French Revolution, which I, in one chapter of the book, compare to the American Revolution to show how different they were.
The French Revolution was the manifestation of the radical enlightenment principles that man could be perfected through his own means, and usually those means required the absolute power of the state and the elimination of Christianity.
The French Revolution undertook a brutal de-Christianization campaign in France through the confiscation of church properties, the exile of priests and nuns, the execution of priests and nuns, the elimination of crosses in graveyards, on church steeples, etc. The idea being that man, of course, was alienated from his own self by this religion, which made him a slave, you see, as Rousseau said, and therefore you’d be liberated if he could get rid of it, and get rid of it they tried to do.
… You invite the tremendous contrast between the American and French Revolution by simply asking, would such a de-Christianization campaign have been conceivable in the American colonies at the time? And the answer is of course not.
It was inconceivable. In fact, from most of the pulpits, the Revolution was preached. There was a tremendous compatibility … between reason and faith in the United States, as they were opponents in the French Revolution.
The American Revolution was not on the basis of a project to reach man’s perfection. It was a revolution made by almost a unanimously Christian population that knew that man was not perfectible through his own powers, that man is a sinner, that man must engage in contrition, that he must turn to God for forgiveness.
He doesn’t obtain any of these things through the state. Rather, the state must be kept on its own reservation to allow man’s religious life to be conducted freely. It wasn’t a project of self-perfection. Therefore, it didn’t make itself the enemy of Christianity or any other religion.
Therefore, you can look at such a simple thing as the dates on the American founding documents, 1789 for the Constitution, 1776 for the declaration. Not true in revolutionary France. They started with the year zero. You see, they were restarting history, or history was truly beginning with their secular project for man’s divinization.
Nothing could be more alien to the American Revolution, but you see in the French Revolution a foretaste of what would come later in the national socialist and the international socialist revolutions, which were in their different ways also secular projects for man’s perfection, but at least as man as they conceived him as the class man or the classless man, classless society, or the supremacy and universal rule of the Aryan race.
Stepman: Why do you think it is that the American Revolution was just a real exception among revolutions? Most revolutions ended in some sort despotism, the way the French Revolution did.
Reilly: Well, I think that’s because of the principles on which it was founded, which were anti-despotic, which did not allow for despotism.
The French Revolution, its principles more or less inevitably ended in despotism. It required despotism for its success. That was completely opposite to that of the United States.
And of course, you could point to the same thing in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the communist revolution in China. The first thing they have to do is get rid of religion. The enemy is religion. Anything that points man to a transcendent, which means to a standard higher than that standard set by the state, is the enemy of the state and the state’s project cannot be reached or executed without the elimination of religion.
Again, the United States was quite the opposite. It was a founding by largely Christian people who wanted a state that was compatible with how they conceived their spiritual life to be and that they wanted a state that was constitutionally reigned in in terms of their free exercise of religion.
And today the United States is being transformed into a Leviathan, which is the name Thomas Hobbes gave to this absolute sovereign that he proposed, and that can be seen in the attempted restrictions on the exercise of religion in the United States by certain sectors of the American government, whether federal or state.
They think that the suppression of religion, or at least it’s restriction, is necessary for their progressivist view of the uses of government, because they’re more in tune with the French Revolution than the American one and they think the state should be the vehicle for the transformation of man into whatever view of man they have.
Just to give you a little taste of it, I live in the Commonwealth of Virginia and the COVID virus has been an interesting experience in what it has revealed about the character of certain of our rulers and how they use the close to absolute power they have assumed for themselves in light of this virus.
And here, I’m not speaking against any sensible precautions taken to deal with this virus, but the governor in this Commonwealth assumed upon himself the power to say what was an essential activity that would be allowed to continue and what were nonessential activities that wouldn’t be allowed to continue, at least for a period of time.
And quite surprisingly, the exercise of one’s religion was found nonessential, so close the churches, close the synagogues. However, abortion was found to be an essential service. That must be permitted, but the exercise of your religion wasn’t.
I think that reveals something special in the character of certain political rulers in the United States and what Leviathan will look more and more alike, the more powers that are assumed by the government.
Stepman: Absolutely. And that kind of leads to my final question here, which is, America really is on trial in many ways right now, maybe even Western civilization in general. It seems that the ideas that you’ve written about in this book really have few defenders in this country’s leading intellectual and academic institutions.
I think [in] many cases, quite shamefully, the American left appears to be going almost completely in this kind of 1619 Project route, defining America as fundamentally racist and rotten and going really full bore into the identity politics, really the almost tribal ideas that you define in your book that’s very pre-modern in a lot of ways, but it also seems that there are some on the right even who have gone after the founding.
I think, notably, Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame, criticizing the founding as being the basis for you see the modern radicalism today and maybe the individualism and liberalism in modern America.
Can you address that and talk about is there any validity to this and explain also why you say that ultimately the founding is where we need to get back to, not a rebuke of the founding?
Reilly: Yes. I think you hit the nail on the head there that the problem we are facing today in identity politics is the retribalization of people.
Retribalization means they no longer accept the principle that all people are created equal. It’s precisely a rejection of that, and they need to take a good hard look at what tribal life was like.
The 1619 Project is so suffused with ignorance that it is interesting, just for that fact. The claim that the English brought slavery to the United States is true insofar as they restrict it to black slavery.
True enough, they brought black slaves, which they obtained in Africa from other black tribes that had first enslaved the people whom they bought to bring to the American colonies, but there was already slavery here, widely practiced amongst the Native Americans. They led tribal lives.
And as was the practice in tribal life everywhere, it didn’t have to be on the American continent. You could find it in the ancient world. You can find it today in the Middle East, in remote parts of Africa and South America. Where there’s tribal life, there’s almost always slavery and wars with the opposing tribes, the victor takes the members of the other tribes as slaves and the American Indians practice slavery. Slavery was already here.
Quite amusingly, the Supreme Court made this recent decision that the eastern part of Oklahoma ought to be given back to the tribes of that area. According to some ancient treaty, the other side of the question was that at the time of the Civil War, those tribal areas sided with the Confederacy. Why? Because the tribes, they had slaves and they wanted to keep them.
Keep in mind that tribalism almost is always accompanied with slavery. Why? Because the tribal mentality has no means through which to apprehend that all people are created equal. For them, slavery is a perfectly natural development.
As these people in the United States embrace tribal identities, whether it’s based on race or it’s based on some kind of transgenderism or what, but whatever particular identity they think trumps everything else, they’re descending into tribal life.
Now, the fact is there’s very little opposition to this from the intelligentsia of the United States, whether it’s in the media or the academy or at the upper reaches of the business world, because all of these people’s minds have been corrupted for several generations of miseducation, in which theories supporting this kind of thing and denying the principles of the American founding have been taught.
Progressivism itself, from John Dewey, from President [Woodrow] Wilson, they’re all denials of the principles in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. They get in the way so they must be got rid of, you see.
One thing I want, I could quote and if you’ve looked at the book, you’ll see the incidences of the number of times the American Founders said the principles on which we are basing our enterprise have a transcendent source and they are immutable. Human nature is immutable. Therefore, these truths apply at all times to all people everywhere.
Now, if you believe that, if you accept that, you get to keep the republic, which the American Founders gave us. If you deny those principles, you don’t get to keep it because it can’t possibly survive in the absence of them. Those principles are denied in American progressivism. Obviously, they are denied in any form of moral relativism, of cultural relativism, and so forth.
I can just give one example that kind of helps make the whole thing clear. From President Barack Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope,” let me read you this sentence: “Implicit in the Constitution structure, and the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth. The infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or -ism and any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single on alterable course.”
The truth does not set you free, the truth enslaves you. So you must deny this truth. There are no transcendent immutable truths. That’s exactly what President Obama is saying. The rejection of absolute truth. I mean, it’s stunning to see it sort of in naked type, a statement so antithetical to the founding principles of the United States. When it reaches the highest office of the land, you know that we’re in trouble.
Stepman: Absolutely. Well, Robert, thank you so much for joining us on “The Right Side of History.” This is incredibly enlightening and I think, also, incredibly important for Americans now who believe very strongly in what this country stands for but are faced with an incredible challenge that comes from some of the most powerful institutions in this country.
It seems that you’ve done a great service to the many Americans who right now are looking for information for better understanding when they see and hear these attacks occurring so often.
I do recommend to listeners in our audience to pick this book up and grapple with the philosophy and the ideas that have been passed down to them by the founding generation that we have inherited and to better be able to articulate to our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues what makes us special.
Again, thank you very much, Robert, for joining us and talking about these things.
Reilly: You’re very welcome. As dire as the situation is, as bleak as it looks, we do have a path forward, and that is to return to the founding principles of the United States, to recapture these immutable transcendent truths by which we ought to conduct our lives.
Thanks very much for the opportunity.
Stepman: You’re quite welcome. And again, the name of the book is “America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding.” Thank you so much.
Reilly: Thank you. God bless you.
The post A Defense of Our Founding Ideas appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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As noted here, a prisoner released from an Alexandria, Virginia jail due to the Wuhan cornavirus killed the woman who testified against him on sexual assault charges. There had been no cases of the virus in that jail. In another local case, a Montgomery County, Maryland man released from jail for the same reason stabbed a 63 year old man to death.
These stories prompted Fox 5 Washington to take a poll. Viewers were invited to say whether prisoners should be released from jail because of the virus.
This kind of poll isn’t scientific, but the results left little doubt about public sentiment. At the time I saw the station’s report on the poll, about 500 people had voted. 98 percent of them said they oppose releasing prisoners because of the virus. And remember, this poll was of viewers in the D.C. area — one of the most liberal parts of the country.
Liberal, but not stupid. At least on this issue.
Unfortunately, judges and policymakers have no regard for public opinion on matters of crime and safety. In a 2015 poll, 1008 adults were asked the following question:
Thinking about the criminal justice system, which comes closer to your view — that we have too many drug traffickers in prison for too long, or that we don’t do enough to keep drug traffickers off the street?
By a 58-30 margin, respondents chose the right answer: “We don’t do enough to keep drug traffickers off the street.” Yet, a few years later, Congress voted overwhelmingly to reduce sentences for drug traffickers.
In a well-functioning democracy, legislators would not think seriously, given public sentiment, about enacting legislation that reduces the time drug traffickers spend in prison. In a well-functioning justice system, judges would not think seriously about releasing dangerous prisoners due to the corornavirus, especially prisoners in jails where there have been no cases.
But in our democracy and justice system, the elites are more than willing to cram unpopular policies down the public’s throat, and to place the public’s safety at risk in the process.
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The news of Best’s resignation came one day after dozens of businesses were looted once again.
On Tuesday evening after news of her resignation leaked, Chief Best emailed Seattle police officers explaining her decision.
“It was a difficult decision for me, but when it’s time, it’s time,” Best wrote. “I am confident the department will make it through these difficult times. You truly are the best police department in the country, and please trust me when I say, the vast majority of people in Seattle support you and appreciate you.”
Best said that the mayor has appointed Deputy Chief Adrian Diaz as the interim Chief of Police.
#BREAKINGNEWS: Chief Carmen Best just emailed her resignation notice to Seattle police officers. pic.twitter.com/Y8y7etOXvU
— (((Jason Rantz))) on KTTH Radio (@jasonrantz) August 11, 2020
Q13 reports, “the council on Monday approved proposals that would reduce the police department by up to 100 officers through layoffs and attrition. Chief Best was vocal in her oppostion to the cuts, which came after councilmembers pledged to redirect money from SPD to community programs amid calls from protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis.”
The budget cut will slash nearly $4 million from the department’s annual budget — and the councilmembers promised to cut even more in 2021. The 7-1 vote faced objections from the city’s police chief, mayor and the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild.
As Gateway Pundit previously reported, one council member, lunatic socialist Kshama Sawant, voted no because the cuts did not go far enough.
The post Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best Resigns Following City Council Vote to Defund Police appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
Calls are mounting quickly to cancel the 2020 presidential debates, three of which are scheduled to take place between September 29th and October 22nd.
Some hide behind claims that coronavirus concerns make the staging of a debate too risky, though these are generally the same people who have endorsed mass protests and riots for the past three months straight. Others, such as former Clinton White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart, advise that “trying to debate someone incapable of telling the truth is an impossible contest to win.”
In general, the consensus both Right and Left is that this is a position of fear: either fear that three controlled debates will be the final straw to break the COVID camel’s back, or fear that Biden might be trounced in a toe-to-toe contest with Trump—both on stage and, consequently, at the polls.
But there is more going on here. The more extreme debate-skeptic proposals tip the Left’s hand, and reveal concerns far more substantial than Joe Biden’s apparent senility. Funnily enough, so do the less extreme proposals: we ought to pay attention to the compromises offered, and consider what they reveal about the cancel camp’s priorities.
Just look at Alex Shephard’s anti-debate diatribe at The New Republic. Its headline leaves little doubt about its goal: “Let’s Cancel Presidential Debates Forever.” Forever. This isn’t about protecting the political prospects of one nominee who struggles to project a strong (or even competent) image. This is about fundamentally changing the way we elect presidents, and the way we conduct our politics.
This may seem like an overreaction, especially given the televised debate’s relatively recent arrival to the American political scene: everyone remembers from history class that the first were held in 1960 between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy; some readers may even remember watching the 1960 debates live. But what this late date fails to tell us is that TV debates, while new in form, are merely the modern means of delivering something that the American electorate has always needed: a reminder that politics is a flesh-and-blood affair, that in the president we are electing not a party but a person.
We hear a lot of panicked rhetoric about personalism in politics these days. The supposed cult of personality built up around Donald Trump is viewed with a kind of fearful horror, thought to be a novelty and hoped to be an aberration. But American politics—especially presidential politics—have been intensely personal from their earliest days. The first presidents, up through Monroe, were giants: men whose names were known, whose personalities were legendary, whose fierce performances in the debates on the Constitution would all have been remembered on the days of their elections.
Much of the mid-19th century, too, was marked by presidents whose personalities—and histories of conflict—defined both their campaigns and their tenures. Jackson, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, and even the short-lived Harrison (all but the politico Polk accomplished military men), were all elected far more on their reputations than on any platform. This is all to say that a politics of spectacle, performance, and persona is not a novel outgrowth of cable news and TV debates: it is a grand American tradition as old as the presidency itself, and inseparable from it.
In fact, it was really only in the second half of the 19th century, as the power and scope of the federal government expanded rapidly, that the presidency became more about the party than the person. It was then that the first generation of American technocrats found their way into the Oval Office: men like Grover Cleveland and Chester Arthur, who were capable policy-men and administrators, but who would have mustered roughly the same energy on a debate stage as a wet mop.
With a few deviations whose last name was Roosevelt—who were actually not so much deviations as combinations, simultaneously policy-men and personalists—this pattern continued almost uninterrupted until 1952, when national hero Dwight Eisenhower—a man with practically no policy at all—swept the electoral vote against technocrat Adlai Stevenson.
It was immediately after Eisenhower’s eight years in the Oval that Richard Nixon, his vice president, was defeated narrowly by the charismatic Jack Kennedy—not coincidentally, in a campaign that included the first-ever televised debates. Suddenly, with the back-to-back election of two charismatic figures over two policy-minded ones—Eisenhower had defeated Stevenson again by an even wider margin in 1956—America had reentered an age of presidential politics defined by the personal.
Once televised debates became a permanent fixture of the campaign in 1976, this historic transition became even more pronounced. In virtually every election since, the candidate who has won the election has been the obvious winner in the debates. This is not to say that elections have been won because debates have been won; it is simply to observe that the factors that contribute to debate victory—sharpness, image, projection of strength, etc.—have become decisive factors in our presidential elections, and the debates provide the people with an opportunity to evaluate candidates based on these factors.
Why the opposition, then? The personalist revival has been rising in tandem with an inverse trend: the constant expansion of powerful party establishments, and the extension of entrenched ideologues into nonprofits, into academia, into every corner of government and public life. This establishment, on the left and right, is the cozy home of the technocrats of our time. Call it the swamp, call it the deep state, call it whatever—this blob of technocratic and bureaucratic power is a serious counterweight to power of the chief executive, and not by accident. And in 2020, both the presidency and the so-called deep state are just about as powerful as ever.
Establishment pol Joe Biden’s primary win over the dully demagogic Bernie Sanders might be considered an intraparty victory of the technocratic element over the personalist. Donald Trump’s meteoric rise to the top of the GOP is exactly the opposite. In order to secure their measured success and expand it into a long-term political program, progressive technocrats must defend Biden from Trump’s tornado of personal energy.
Protecting Biden from debate, even catapulting him into the Oval Office—these are just steps along the way. “Cancel presidential debates forever” points to a much more ambitious agenda: one in which platforms, establishments, data—a billion things that make no sense and bear no interest for the average American voter—eclipse the presentation and persuasion of a bona fide human being as a candidate for office. In turn, these things will eclipse the importance of the person even in the office. The new technocrats want FDR’s administrative leviathan, without his human touch.
This is made apparent by the plans offered in the name of compromise. There is a massive push from the left to institute some form of real-time fact-checking if the debates are to go on at all. We cannot have any illusions about just whom a quasi-factual live analysis, overseen by a less-than-impartial mainstream media, would serve to benefit. It would not, as its proponents suggest, offer an unbiased counterbalance to erroneous claims by the debaters. It would simply offer an inhuman, coldly analytical counterbalance to the human narrative presented by the candidates. That’s a hell of a win for the technocrats.
Or we can just get rid of audiences, for good. Shephard writes that the presence of an audience contributing authentic reactions as the debate proceeds “underlines the fact that what is happening is a spectacle, not anything of substance.” Like Walter Mondale’s claim, brought up in a 1984 debate, that “President Reagan offers showmanship, not leadership,” it’s a silly mistake to think that the two are mutually exclusive—and it’s suggestive of a dry, sterile view of politics and human affairs on the part of the accuser. It has apparently not occurred to these people that a quadrennial contest for occupation of the most powerful office in the history of mankind might just be worthy of a little spectacle, a little drama, a little fight—and that some members of the public might be entitled to a ringside seat.
The anti-personalists would be perfectly happy to literally remove the great mass of people from this decisive moment in the political process, leaving two men alone to talk policy in an otherwise empty room, overseen by a panel of bureaucrats authorized to enforce the approved version of reality over and against any possible objections. Makes you wonder what they’ll do with the government, if we let them take a crack at it.
The post Why the Technocratic Deep State Hates Debates appeared first on The American Conservative.
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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks during a news conference at the State Department in Washington,DC on June 10, 2020. - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pledged a probe Wednesday into complaints that foreign news crews covering the street protests against racism and police brutality were mistreated. Australia, for instance, is investigating a US police attack on two Australian television journalists outside the White House last week."I know there have been concerns from some countries of their reporters having been treated inappropriately," Pompeo told a news conference. (Photo by Andrew Harnik / POOL / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW HARNIK/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
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Ohio Gov. John Kasich on Tuesday vetoed legislation that would have banned abortions in the state after as few as six weeks after conception -- or anytime a fetus' heartbeat can be detected. Kasich and anti-abortion advocates believe a law allowing abortion after such a short period of time might easily be defeated in appellate courts. File Photo by Molly Riley/UPI
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VIDEO: More than 200 Attend ‘Back the Blue’ Rally in North Carolina
In June of 2018 The Gateway Pundit posted an article identifying unredacted words in previously redacted texts between corrupt cops Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two individuals supposedly having an affair and key players at the top of the FBI involved in spying on candidate and then President Trump.
The discovery came from an individual on Twitter who was later removed from Twitter, named Nick Falco, who identified a word uncovered in a Senate text that was previously redacted by the corrupt DOJ.
In our post we noted that hidden in the information released by the Senate at that time were unredacted Strzok–Page texts that showed that the FBI initiated actions to insert multiple spies in the Trump campaign in December 2015.
As we reported previously, according to far left LA Times, Comey stated in March of 2017 under oath that the FBI investigation into the Trump – Russia scandal started in July 2016.
Intelligence expert Tony Shaffer tweeted Falco’s tweet –
I'd call this evidence of collusion and wrongdoing… https://t.co/CcTrao5bZE
— Tony Shaffer (@T_S_P_O_O_K_Y) June 4, 2018
Falco’s tweet (soon taken down by Twitter) stated that the texts released from corrupt FBI investigator Peter Strzok to corrupt FBI attorney Lisa Page state the following :
BOMBSHELL- From DECEMBER 2015–The word LURES is redacted by FBI but not OIG; OCONUS LURES; OCONUS= Outside Contiguous US LURES= In this context LURES = SPIES – multiple – Is this an admission that the FBI wanted to run a baited Sting Op using foreign agents against Trump?”
1) BOMBSHELL- From DECEMBER 2015–The word LURES is redacted by FBI but not OIG
“OCONUS LURES”
OCONUS= Outside Contiguous US
LURES= In this context LURES = SPIES – multiple
Is this an admission that the FBI wanted to run a baited Sting Op using foreign agents against Trump? pic.twitter.com/OtLxlOEGsV
— Falco (@Nick_Falco) June 4, 2018
We provided additional information showing that Obama’s spy, Stefan Halper, was awarded a contract in September of 2015.
We also pointed out that the problem with Obama spying on Trump before July 2016 is that it was against FBI rules and contradicted public statements:
Retired assistant FBI director for intelligence Kevin Brock also has questions. Brock supervised an agency update to their longstanding bureau rules governing the use of sources while working under then-director Robert Mueller. These rules prohibit the FBI from directing a human source to perform espionage on an American until a formal investigation has been opened – paperwork and all.
Brock sees oddities in how the Russia case began. “These types of investigations aren’t normally run by assistant directors and deputy directors at headquarters,” he told me. “All that happens normally in a field office, but that isn’t the case here and so it becomes a red flag. Congress would have legitimate oversight interests in the conditions and timing of the targeting of a confidential human source against a U.S. person.” -The Hill
President Trump tweeted out a follow up to our post the next day undoubtedly referring to our report:
Wow, Strzok-Page, the incompetent & corrupt FBI lovers, have texts referring to a counter-intelligence operation into the Trump Campaign dating way back to December, 2015. SPYGATE is in full force! Is the Mainstream Media interested yet? Big stuff!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2018
The mainstream media was interested. They were interested in accusing President Trump of tweeting a conspiracy story. The fake news media denied the fact that spying on candidate Trump occurred in spite of evidence showing this happened and then slammed the President and the Gateway Pundit for posting the tweets from Nick Falco.
Wikipedia calls the above story a conspiracy and the Gateway Pundit a conspiracy media outlet. However, they don’t call CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, ABC, The New York Times, Washington Post, and the many other far-left sites conspiracy outlets for pushing the Trump – Russia collusion for more than two years.
The liberal media and Wikipedia omitted the facts. For example, they state that the texts were released previously, yes they were but, THEY WERE REDACTED. Wikipedia is far-left when it comes to US politics!
We now know, for instance, that corrupt DOJ attorney and number four at the DOJ, Bruce Ohr, set aside time to meet with Christopher Steele in his calendar in early October of 2015. Steele is the alleged author of the fake Steele dossier used to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, transition team and Presidency. Ohr’s calendar shows this meeting :
Based on his calendar and his wife Nellie’s testimony, we know that Bruce Ohr lied in front Congress. Ohr lied about Nellie’s start date with Fusion GPS. The demoted and disgraced DOJ attorney Bruce Ohr stated in his testimony before Congress that Nellie started with Fusion GPS in November of 2015:
In her filing with the court, she requests that the US government provide her and her client, General Mike Flynn, documents related to Deep State spy Joseph Mifsud from an event in late 2015 –
Notice that Powell refers to “302s” regarding the dinner event in 2015 that General Flynn attended, which means that the FBI was interviewing Mifsud as early as 2015 and knew EXACTLY who Mifsud was. Notice also that the timing of this event was at the same time as Strzok’s text in December of 2015!
Today Judicial Watch released more text they received from a FOIA request that provide more support:
Judicial Watch today released 168 pages of records from the U.S. Department of Justice including a handwritten timeline of meetings going back to 2015 connected to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and Steele/Fusion GPS, as well as a list of records the DOJ sent to Congress related to their investigation into the FISA warrants involving the Clinton-funded dossier.
The post Trump and TGP Were Right: Obamagate Started in 2015 – Judicial Watch Provides More Support for this Today appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
An 11-year-old girl was beat, slapped, punched, kicked and shocked with a stun gun after she was assaulted by five other girls in Harlem last night.
The girl was beaten and bloody but the New York Post said police let the violence play out.
Wouldn’t you think the violent girls would get the blame for this?
The New York PD later responded to the media attacks with a video.
Despite one newspaper's account, our officers who came to the assistance of an 11-year-old girl being assaulted in Harlem on Sunday did not stand by. They were met by a large crowd that hurled projectiles at them and had to reposition, then called for additional officers. pic.twitter.com/aeZ1zNnqrJ
— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) August 10, 2020
Mike Cernovich has it right.
Imagine if the mainstream news just reported honestly 20% of the time!
Think of what a change that would be.
Imagine the lies the press gets away with with no one is watching.
Is even 10% of "news" real? https://t.co/AKzpSzuZZQ
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 11, 2020
The post NY City Police Pelted by Mob with Ice Bottles and Projectiles After They Come to Rescue Little 11-Year-Old Girl from Assault in Harlem (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
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