CNBC’s Financial Confidence Survey, conducted in partnership with Momentive, found most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
More women than men admit feeling financially stressed.
Joe Biden and a loon said the economy is great. Only 8% of Americans agree with them. CNBC did a recent survey on people personal finances. Only 8% aren’t worried or stressed out. 70% are totally stressed. The rest are somewhat stressed.
Majority living paycheck to paycheck. Two biggest worries are Inflation and the Economies instability. 59 and 43%. You even have a loon from California claiming they’re able to buy more fried chicken and flavored drinks.
OXFORD, Pennsylvania —Despite the wealth of information at our fingertips in the information age, there is a glaring emptiness that plagues us in our storytelling.
We remove nuance and replace it with sensationalism. We shun original stories because they stray too far from the pack. In the process, we miss the beauty, pain, and magic, the simplicity and grace of simple, real-life stories about the ordinary lives of people who work the soil to make America possible. The result is that we lose touch with who we are as a nation.
Bill Hostetter was sitting in the banquet hall of the massive Spooky Nook sports facility in Manheim, Pennsylvania. He was surrounded by hundreds of other farmers, as well as agriculture scientists who do research and development work for the nation’s food supply. They all traveled from across Pennsylvania to attend the annual PennAg banquet, which honors outstanding leaders in the agricultural community.
The Hostetter family has been operating their grain farm for three generations.
(Salena Zito)
Seated to Hostetter’s left was Russell Redding, Pennsylvania’s secretary of agriculture. The lights dimmed as the program began with a video recalling the Hostetter family’s impact in this country; despite most of the audience having experienced the same things, his story of sacrifice, hard work, loss, and success brought much of the packed room to tears. That included Hostetter, who had never seen the video before.
Hostetter, along with a team of research scientists from the Pennsylvania Animal Diagnostic Laboratory System, was here to accept Distinguished Service Awards for their contribution to America’s food supply. PADLS scientists keep track of zoonotic diseases, working hand in hand with farmers to ensure their farms can continue providing a reliable food supply.
Without both the grit of the farmer and the training of these hardworking scientists, we would not have that food on all of our tables every day. Yet their respective contributions are unevenly understood.
Without the hard work of the scientists at the PADLS lab, who work around the clock tracking the avian flu, its ravages could have been significantly worse than the 4 million birds lost locally last year. Hostetter’s impact on our lives is less visible, less understood especially by reporters, who are often drawn more to science than to farming. Science is something they were taught in school; farming was not. Science brings new gadgets to their lives and makes things easier. Farming, without which they could not live at all, is too far removed from where they live and what they do.
Hostetter explained that his father, Wilmer, and his mother, Joyce, started their family’s grain business in 1977, when Wilmer built a grain elevator to support the grain business he had started 10 years prior.
Before that, his parents had a well-respected dairy farm, known not just across the country but also internationally for breeding quality dairy cows.
A truck in a long line of trucks carrying signs in support of Barry Hostetter drives past the entrance of his farm.
(Salena Zito)
Bill said that he, along with his brothers Barry, Bernie, and John, were all involved with the business right from the start as kids. “I learned it literally from the ground up, working long days at the pit, unloading corn trucks and sweeping out the grain bins,” he said.
To this day, he said, he does not ask anyone working around the grain elevator to do anything he hasn’t done.
Hostetter Grain started here in Oxford with a 95,000-bushel storage bin in the spring for the wheat harvest, followed by a 95,000-bushel bin for the corn harvest.
Today, it owns three elevators outright and holds lease agreements with six other elevators with a total capacity of more than 8 million bushels.
“I remember my father and I standing out in the parking lot taking a look at that first bin and saying, ‘That’s a big bin,'” he said. “We were really concerned about filling it. Now, with all the elevators we have and the relationships we have, we fill that 95,000-bushel bin by 9:30 Monday morning.”
Hostetter said that his is a world of trust and relationships. “If you think about what we do, we write grain contracts that could value well over a million dollars, all done with a simple conversation over the phone, followed up by a one-page contract, either by mail or email,” he said. “And it works.”
If it were any other industry, it would be a much more complex transaction, with multiple layers of lawyers, pages of contracts, and hundreds of emails. In the faster, often sterile world outside of agriculture, where relationships are not cultivated, texting is preferred. Handshakes are improbable. It is good to be reminded, then, that there are still places in this world not so detached from the people and things in which they deal.
Hostetter, 64, said that no matter who he is working with in the industry — the producer or the end user — it is a great industry to be part of. “We work with salt-of-the-earth people,” he said, “honest people, trustworthy people.”
For those who would look at this assessment as naive, Hostetter is not that. There is something to be said about anyone who has spent an entire career dealing with transactions this way, and has not only grown the business, but has been arguably very successful. In fact, he now looks forward to his nephews — Jared, Eric, and Jason — taking over from him.
“I guess the greatest accomplishment was not only growing the business but now having it ready for the next generation to lead it forward — the third one in my family to take my parents’ risk into the future,” he said.
Hostetter’s life has not been without loss. Three years ago, his then 60-year-old brother Barry was battling late-stage pancreatic cancer. Like Bill, Barry was in the family business, and like Bill, his list of civic involvement in the community was long. He served on the Chester Co. Holstein Club, the Chester-Delaware County Farm Bureau Board, the Oxford Zoning Hearing Board, and the board of directors for the Lighthouse Youth Ministry in Oxford for over 30 years.
The Hostetter Farm.
(Salena Zito)
Because of Barry’s dedication, the community wanted to let him know what he had meant to them. His health took a sudden turn for the worse, and within days, local farmers volunteered to coordinate the local township, fire company, county sheriff’s department, state police, and PennDOT to close down the road leading to the Hostetters’ house. They put a call out to local farmers who worked with the family and hoped that a few trucks would show up for the prayer parade they wanted to offer for Barry.
Instead of a few trucks, several hundred grain trucks, tractors, and farm vehicles from several different states and surrounding counties came out to offer prayer for the Hostetter family. Many of them taped homemade signs of hope, love, and appreciation to the sides of their vehicles as they lined the road for miles and for hours for Barry.
“The sight of those trucks that just went on and on, and the effort it took to make that happen, with many of them traveling over the back roads to get here, was humbling,” Hostetter said, his voice cracking as tears welled up. “You never really know the impact you have on others. You just try to do your best every day.”
“Barry, well, he sat in his pickup on the farm, waving at everyone,” Bill said. “Barry passed not long after that, but he was able to see the impact he had had on other peoples lives, and he really, really enjoyed that day.”
Hostetter explained that his wife Melissa was also injured in a car accident in 1999. This left her with a spinal cord injury and wheelchair-bound at a young age.
“I admire overcomers, and her zest for life is powerful,” he said.
Hostetter lost his father Wilmer in February.
“He and my mother are the biggest influences on life,” he said. “It was such a great loss. Still ask myself every day, ‘Well, what would my father do in this situation?’”
Then, he smiled. “Why would anyone want to know my family’s story?” he asked. “There are thousands, millions of families like mine across this country.”
A partial answer may lie within a speech given 45 years ago by Paul Harvey at that year’s FFA Convention, when he described the hard work, sacrifice, and sense of community farmers and ranchers have passed down for generations in this nation.
The people who form the backbone of our country, often working from sun-up to sundown, caring for the land and their livestock, placing food on all of our tables, have stories of their own. We need to tell more of those stories.
Progressives today making the same mistakes as those who did in the 20th Century.
It also shouldn’t surprise anyone that Nazi Germany embraced wage controls, Social Security, public schooling, a government-managed economy, a military-industrial complex, and other programs that have long been central to the American progressive program.
A quote by Hitler regarding the importance of public schooling, one of the main German socialist programs that progressives imported to the United States, should be contemplated by every American who enthusiastically supports the idea that the state should be responsible for the education of people’s children.
And how about some of the famous people who early on had no issues with the Nazi’s. Chamberlan, FDR, Ford, Joseph Kennedy, and those below.
Ezra Pound was a famous modernist writer who was prominent during the early 20th century among writers such as T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway in Europe, who he edited and collaborated with. After World War I, Pound had moved to Italy in apparent defiance to the UK and struck up support for Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator. Pound met Mussolini in 1933. He spent years before and during World War II broadcasting on Rome Radio in support of Mussolini and Hitler and against Jews.
Pound was arrested when Italy fell to the Allies and would be charged with treason by the US. During this period, he spent three weeks in an outdoor cage before suffering a mental breakdown. He reportedly called Hitler “a saint” when talking to reporters and had asked to record one last radio broadcast which, among other things, would ask for leniency toward Germany. Pound would spend 13 years in a psychiatric hospital in the US before returning to Italy, where he still harbored anti-Semitic views.[1] He died in 1972, leaving behind a literary legacy which is revered but a personal legacy which is full of controversy.
The assertion that the man behind one of the most famous and loved companies in the world harbored pro-Nazi sympathies is extremely controversial and somewhat shocking. However, there are reports that Disney was linked to a few events in the 1930s which were essentially US Nazi Party meetings. In the period before the war and the full atrocities of Hitler’s regime were known, there are smatterings of information that suggest elitist groups in the US and the UK held views similar to those of the Nazis, and Disney seems to have been one of them. In a book called Hitler’s Doubles, it is said that Disney was attending pro-Nazi meetings prior to the war.[2]
It is also known that Disney had hosted Leni Riefenstahl and gave her a tour of his studios. Riefenstahl was the director of Nazi propaganda films Olympia and Triumph des Willens. Disney’s company was criticized for this move. Disney would go on to create anti-Nazi films such as Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi, which somewhat muddies the waters. We will probably never know the true nature of his Nazi links.
Edward VIII is perhaps the most visible and remembered person on this list who had pro-Nazi sentiments. His abdication of the throne in 1936 was caused by his marriage to the American Wallis Simpson, which caused a constitutional crisis, but it was said that he also had too close a connection with Adolf Hitler. Hitler was fond of Edward VIII, and his abdication in 1936 was seen as a blow to the relations Hitler hoped to keep with the UK. In 1937, the then-duke and duchess (Simpson) visited Nazi Germany and are famously pictured with Hitler during this visit.
During World War II, Edward was seen as a risk to the future democracy of the UK, as Hitler had plans to reinstate him upon successful invasion of England. He was made governor of the Bahamas during the war to keep him out of the way. There are numerous accounts of Edward professing his support of Hitler and his policies, with suggestions that he and his wife were fascists. It remains an awkward and contentious point of history in the monarchy of the UK.[3]
Henry Ford is an American pioneer who revolutionized the motor industry with the first assembly line for cars in the early 20th century, but some links exist between the man and the Nazi regime. In 1920, he gave an interview to New York World in which his anti-Semitic views were apparent, calling the “International Jew” a “threat” and accusing them of being behind World War I. The New York Times would also publish an article that suggested Adolf Hitler had a large picture of Henry Ford up on his office wall—in admiration of Ford.[4] This admiration is made clear when Hitler actually name-drops Henry Ford in his book Mein Kampf, calling Ford a “single great man” who “still maintains full independence” from the Jewish threat.
In 1938, only a year before Hitler would invade Poland, Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest medal possible for a person of non-German origin, with Ford being the only US citizen to receive the award. Ford’s name and collection of articles The International Jew was also brought up during the Nuremberg Trials after the conclusion of World War II as an influential piece of anti-Semitic rhetoric. Ford died in 1947.
Charles Lindbergh was made famous overnight in 1927 when he successfully manned a plane from New York to Paris and won the Orteig Prize. His life was also struck by tragedy in 1932, when his infant son was kidnapped and murdered in a ransom attempt which was widely covered in the US media, being dubbed the “Crime of the Century.” He is perhaps remembered least for his outspoken rhetoric against entering the war against Nazi Germany and for his pro-Germany actions.
In June 1936, Lindbergh visited Germany on behalf of the US government in an effort to learn more about how far German aviation had come. Lindbergh also sat near Hitler during the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Summer Olympics but, by all accounts, did not communicate with him.[5] After this, Lindbergh became a pariah in the US, as he called for neutrality and nonengagement in the war with Germany, often attracting German American Bund (a US pro-Nazi organization) members to his speeches. Lindbergh was careful never to admit to Nazi sympathy, and to some extent, he may not have been a sympathizer, but his position was confusing for the US public, and his reputation undoubtedly suffered from it.
Charles Coughlin, commonly referred to as Father Coughlin, was a Roman Catholic priest who used radio before World War II to reach millions of listeners to his doctrines. Coughlin expressed interest in fascist governments, including the Third Reich, in an apparent contrast to communism and Jewish control of banking. In November 1938, Coughlin effectively spoke out against Kristallnacht when asserting that Christian persecution came first. After this controversial broadcast, he became an outcast from mainstream radio and began to receive followers who were anti-Semitic, to the extent that public protests were carried out.
After World War II broke out, he was forced out of radio by the US government and was also made to stop publishing his newspaper, Social Justice. He was to cease all political activity and perform only parish duties. Coughlin denied his anti-Semitic views throughout his active political life, but there is a wealth of facts (including some evidence that suggests Coughlin received funding from Nazi Germany) that point to him being sympathetic with Hitler’s regime.[6]
4 Cliveden Set
The “Cliveden set” was a name given to a group of wealthy individuals who would regularly meet at Cliveden, a home in Buckinghamshire that was the residence of Nancy and Waldorf Astor in the interim period between the World Wars. The group, who were dubbed the Cliveden set in 1937, were one of the most controversial of the period. They seemed to be deeply anti-Semitic and had considerable influence on some of the highest members of the British government. They also seemed to have connections with some high-ranking officials of the Nazi Party and were known in the US. Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of the UK from 1937 to 1940, was said to have been influenced by the group.
However, in more recent years, it has been discovered that the Cliveden set may have been misunderstood and were on a list of people who would be immediately arrested on the successful invasion of Britain by Germany. The Cliveden set were often written about by Claud Cockburn, the editor of The Week, and his shaming of the group is disregarded today as biased. It might be called “fake news” in 2019. It remains unclear if the group were really pro-Nazi, but they seem to be linked forever in history to being pro-German.[7]
Sir Oswald Mosley is probably the most obvious Nazi sympathizer on this list. Mosley was a British politician who had failed to be elected in his constituency in 1931, despite being a convincing speaker. After visiting Mussolini in Italy in 1936, he became convinced that fascism was the best alternative to communism and that Britain needed to embrace it.[8] He founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. The BUF targeted Jewish neighborhoods with Mosley’s Fascist Defence Force (nicknamed the “blackshirts”) but remained popular with some strands of followers in England. Mosley would perform the Nazi salute to his blackshirts, who, in turn, performed it back. In 1936, Mosley married Diana Guiness in the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Hitler in attendance.
During World War II, Mosely attempted to convince the British government to accept Hitler’s offerings of peace, but he would be arrested and placed under house arrest. Mosely had extremely strong verbal skills, and this was considered dangerous in a turbulent time in Britain. However, public opinion on Mosley dipped after Nazi Germany began the Blitz on London. He spent the majority of World War II under house arrest, and after the war, he pursued trying to drive Europe to become a single state.
The architect Philip Johnson, known for designing the Glass House in which he lived in Connecticut, was an active supporter of Hitler’s Third Reich prior to the outbreak of World War II. Johnson was linked with Father Charles Coughlin and the anti-Semitic newspaper Social Justice, writing articles for them. Johnson was also known to have traveled to Nazi Germany to report on the huge rallies that were organized, including the annual Nuremberg rally. He was said to have been enthralled by them and made contacts with key Nazi officials during his visits.[9]
In 1940, the FBI would uncover Johnson’s involvement in driving German propaganda to the US “on the Nazis’ behalf.” Johnson would refer to the destruction of Warsaw as a “stirring spectacle.” He was undoubtedly a Nazi sympathizer, but Johnson would try to distance himself once World War II broke out. Years later, in 2018, The New Yorker wrote that Johnson still professed admiration for Hitler as of 1964 by calling him “better than Roosevelt.”
Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, may not be a name you have heard before, but he was a groundbreaking journalist who was fundamental in the creation of the UK newspapers the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. To this day, his family have control over the newspapers and have had an influence on British politics due to this. During the years between the World Wars, Rothermere corresponded with Hitler and would publish articles in his newspapers that essentially promoted fascism. He was also supportive of Oswald Mosley and his BUF. To have a man in such an influential position as Rotheremere openly supporting the Nazi regime must have been deeply concerning.
Rotheremere also paid an annual fee to Stephanie von Hohenlohe, a notorious German spy who was watched by British and American authorities and eventually arrested. This fee was said to be in the aim of promoting Nazi Germany and helping Rothermere get closer to influencing Hitler.[10] In 1939, he wrote a book, My Fight to Rearm Britain, in which he detailed his fight for increased spending on defense and resources needed to protect the country. Regardless, he was heavily linked with the Nazi party in their earlier days, as many English aristocrats seemingly were, yet held such an influential position that it can only be regarded a miracle that many others were not persuaded by his publications.
What’s with these blue states and their hatred for the 2nd Amendment? Recently California had their pro Nazi gun control law thrown out by the Liberal 9th Circuit. Now Washington and Colorado both passed the same type of anti 2nd Amendment laws. Why?
I guess it’s going to take another trip to the Supreme court for the Progressives to get it in their thick skulls that the majority of the people and courts are ready for it? Pro Gun.
Just the other day Illinois had this happen. U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn issued a preliminary injunction on Friday against the state’s Protect Illinois Communities Act (PICA), which Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed into law in January to ban the sale and distribution of assault-style weapons, high capacity-magazines and switches that convert handguns into assault-style firearms. The ruling comes after another federal judge rejected a request to block the law earlier this week.
US President Joe Biden holds his notes while answering a question during a press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House after a meeting with South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol April 26, 2023, in Washington, DC (Getty Images)
Joe Biden has held the fewest press conferences and interviews of any president since Ronald Reagan. And now we’ve learned that when he is allowed to take questions, they appear to be pre-selected, approved by White House staff and agreed to by reporters in the White House pool.
Yesterday, while appearing alongside South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol, Biden fielded a question from Courtney Subramanian of the Los Angeles Times. A photojournalist captured a notecard in Biden’s hand that showed an avatar of Subramanian, the words “Question 1” and a pre-written text of the question she asked the president.
So how does a question from a White House reporter make it to the president of the United States’ hands before she even asks it? One would think the White House itself, most likely the comms shop that works directly with them, has to be involved making preselection demands of reporters. Then reporters would have to be willing to go along with this, which violates all sorts of long-standing ethics about speaking “truth to power.” Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted, “No WH reporter would ever tell me what question they intended to ask POTUS. It would be unethical — not to mention soft — to do so.”
This should be a legitimate scandal for this White House, as they try to push an eighty-year-old president onto the country for a second term while it appears he cannot answer questions without a cue card. Subramanian should explain who at the White House she’s coordinating with, and her bosses at the LA Times should say something, too. Yet so far, no explanation has been offered. Subramanian herself is refusing to answer inquiries and the LA Times has simply gone silent on the matter. The White House isn’t accountable, either, because they are clearly in cahoots with the people who should be holding them accountable.
If reporters are openly coordinating with this White House to help shape a positive narrative for President Biden — something widely suspected but never as directly proven as it was yesterday — then this is cause for a legitimate crisis of confidence in an industry meant to hold powerful people responsible. During the Trump administration, the public was browbeaten over just such a scenario.
This incident goes beyond Subramanian or this White House and affects every reporter in the briefing room and their colleagues — who appear to retain very little professional respect for what their job is and why they are supposed to be sitting in that chair in the first place. It’s their silence, and their lack of accountability, that suggests this isn’t just a random one-off thing that happened to keep this president focused and preventing him from wandering off again only to be corraled by a staffer in an Easter Bunny costume.
Reporters, starting with Courtney Subramanian and the LA Times, can either answer for this or sit and watch as distrust in their industry rises to new levels every week. As they portray themselves as heroic truth-tellers, their actions have proven them to be nothing but narrative-pushers for an unpopular president who seems to need his hand held at every step: both by his own staff and the shameless journalists going alone with the charade.
Invest in More Cops
A lesson from Europe. City Journal Photo.
Devon Kurtz is the director of public safety policy at the Cicero Institute. He also mentors formerly incarcerated people and leads a Quaker ministry group at a prison in his home state of Vermont.
How’s this for per capita? Invest in More Cops A lesson from Europe.
After the election of Brandon Johnson as mayor of Chicago, many are bracing for more of the same kinds of negligent public-safety policies preferred by his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot. Johnson has made it clear that he will not invest in more police resources or officers, claiming that neither will make Chicagoans safer. He’s wrong, of course. Johnson and other progressive leaders might take a lesson on better public-safety policies from an unlikely source: Europe.
The U.S. and its peers in the European Union each spend roughly 1.2 percent of GDP on public safety, but the U.S. is much more violent. Americans are more than seven times as likely to be murdered than Europeans. More than 60 percent of American inmates committed violent offenses, compared with roughly 40 percent of European inmates. Nearly one-third of people released from American prisons go on to commit a violent offense within the first five years. Given these higher violence levels, America’s public-safety resources are spread far thinner than those of the European Union, undermining our ability to fight crime effectively.
So, what is Europe’s secret? One possible answer: police. Europe spends five times as much of its GDP on policing as on prisons. America, meantime, spends a mere 1.5 times as much on policing as on prisons. As a result, Europe has more than twice the total number of police officers as the U.S., despite only having 35 percent more residents.
Other metrics show in stark terms how under-policed America is compared with its European peers. America has roughly 198 officers per 100,000 residents—down 18 percent since the late 1990s—whereas Europe has 333 officers for every 100,000 residents. Comparing officer levels with violent-crime levels reveals an even more concerning statistic: Europe has 396 police officers per homicide; America has only 32.5.
These data show plainly that America has far fewer officers to handle far more violent crimes than other developed nations. Contrary to the popular progressive narrative, little evidence suggests that America is overpoliced. In fact, the United States is woefully under-policed, and we have the crime rates to show for it.
Of course, criminologists have long known that investments in police are an effective way to cut crime—and far more efficient than prisons, which are necessary but blunt (and costly) tools for fighting crime. University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt estimated that one dollar spent on police is 20 percent more effective at reducing crime than a dollar spent on prisons. In another study, he found that expanding police departments reduced violent crime by 12 percent and reduced property crime by 8 percent. Berkeley law professor Frank Zimring concluded that increasing the number of police officers per committed homicide contributed significantly to New York City’s 80 percent drop in crime over two decades. Notably, Zimring finds that much of New York’s police-driven reduction in crime came without substantial increases in prison populations.
Progressive politicians are choosing a dangerous course in refusing to invest in policing. At the heart of this ideological delusion is a gross miscalculation of the social costs of crime and policing. Advocates for shrinking police departments point to America’s outlier levels of officer-involved shootings compared to its peers. Unjustified police violence is contemptible and should be punished, but it is statistically quite rare. Its scale pales compared with the social costs of crime in the U.S.: 21 times as many people get killed in criminal homicides as are killed in officer-involved shootings. When including only unarmed individuals killed by cops, that figure grows to a multiple of 715. And the racial disparity among homicide victims is twice as severe as that among victims of police shootings. In 2021, roughly 27 percent of people killed by police were black; in 2019, 52 percent of homicide victims were black.
Despite worries about police violence, more than eight in ten black Americans want a strong police presence in their neighborhoods because crime is a pervasive and dangerous problem. Europe’s example suggests that having more cops may actually reduce the use of force, in addition to reducing crime. Progressives should extend their fondness for Europe to an embrace of its policing policy, which appears to get better results than America’s.
If blacks kill at nine times the rate of whites in Kansas City but die of homicide at only six times the rate of whites in Kansas City, what makes up the difference? Blacks killing people outside their own race. That disparity applies to non-lethal as well as to lethal violence. In 2021, 87 percent of all non-lethal interracial violent crimes committed between blacks and whites in the U.S. were black-on-white—480,030 incidents with a black offender and white victim, and 69,850 incidents with a white offender and black victim, or seven times as many black-on-white as white-on-black incidents of interracial non-lethal violence. In other words, whites have more to fear from blacks than blacks from whites, a fact contrary to the race-hustle narrative.
The distribution of interracial violence means that an “X-ing while white” meme is a more appropriate way of representing racial crime patterns. Recent instantiations of the “while white” meme would include: “accosting shoplifters while white” (California Home Depot employee fatally shot while trying to prevent a theft); “reporting on a crime while white” (Florida journalist fatally shot working the scene of a homicide investigation, cameraman critically injured in same shooting); “riding the subway while white” (two 19-year-old females punched and robbed on Times Square subway by larger group of females wearing dayglo green body suits); “bicycling while white” (California emergency room doctor run over and fatally stabbed by man who reportedly had complained about “white privilege”); “jogging while white” (young Memphis mother abducted, raped, and killed); “walking downtown while white” (Minneapolis man thrown to the ground, stomped on, stripped of pants, run over with a bicycle, hit with planters, and robbed by group of teens); “holding on to one’s wallet while white” (Minneapolis man beaten unconscious after refusing to give up his wallet in attempted robbery); “walking in school hallway while white” (New Jersey ninth-grader punched, kicked, and hit with water bottle in high school, later commits suicide); “existing in school while white” (Florida girl beaten in head by five females); “riding a city bus while white” (57-year-old female hit in the head with an unknown object on a Queens bus by two teenage girls and a third individual); “riding a school bus while white” (12-year-old boy in Virginia choked by female classmate).
If any of these incidents had had black victims and white perpetrators, there would have been a national, if not international, uproar. Every news outlet would be covering the emergency of white supremacy and Joe Biden would have given another of his speeches about the stain of white racism on America’s soul.
“While Asian” is another potentially fertile meme: “wearing jewelry while Asian” (California victims had jewelry forcibly torn from their necks); “possessing property while Asian” (California victims targeted in robberies; suspects tried to run over arresting officer with a loaded firearm and extended magazine in their car); “grocery-shopping while Asian” (two California women violently robbed at an Asian supermarket); “riding subway while Asian” (three Asian boys and a girl attacked by four girls on a Philadelphia subway train; Asian girl punched, stomped on, and shoved in the head against subway door).
(Other “while Asian” incidents are chronicled here, including a 75-year-old man fatally knocked to the ground and robbed while taking his morning walk in Oakland; an 84-year-old man fatally knocked to the ground in his driveway; a 67-year-old man kicked to the ground, dangled upside down, beaten, and robbed in a San Francisco laundromat; and an 88-year-old great-grandmother, beaten so brutally as to be unrecognizable and discarded next to a recycling bin.)
In virtually none of these “while Asian” incidents was the race of the suspects reported, because those suspects were black. The media not only omit a detail that would be automatic if the suspects were white but also compose a racial narrative about anti-Asian crimes and anti-Asian hate crimes that is wholly false: that it is whites who are the threat to frail, elderly Asians.
“While Hispanic” incidents would include: “defending one’s girlfriend while Hispanic” (Minneapolis man pistol-whipped and shot in chest for yelling at someone harassing his girlfriend); “working the cash register while Hispanic” (25-year-old female grocery store clerk beaten in Bronx by two females following argument over recyclables). “While trans” would include: “waiting for light rail while trans” (trans individual beaten by five individuals at Minneapolis light rail station; brain matter found on ground). But because the perpetrators in these attacks were black, the violence is taken as a matter of course.
The anarchy in American cities is carefully de-raced, whether the flash mobs that routinely maraud in shopping malls and down Chicago’s Magnificent Mile; the looters who plunder convenience stores and jewelry stores; or the Miami spring breakers who rape and kill. To name a suspect’s race when that suspect is black is virtually taboo, no matter the race of his victim. Let a white person assault or kill a black person, however, and the entire story will be about race.
This double standard and the fiction that blacks are under daily risk of their lives from whites do no one any good, least of all the victims of black crime. The Journal of the American Medical Associationrecently reported that in the first 18 months of the coronavirus epidemic (read: the post-George Floyd era) black juveniles 17 and younger died of gun homicide at 100 times the rate of white juveniles. If that death rate were due to whites shooting blacks, we would have heard about every one of those shootings. In fact, almost none were widely reported because they were overwhelmingly committed by other blacks. The race activists were silent; Biden was silent; the media were silent; the Black Studies professors were silent. Merely mentioning black-on-black crime guarantees the accusation of racism, as if facts are racist.
And so, with debate silenced about how to overcome the inner-city culture that spawns this dreary parade of drive-by shootings, those shootings continue unabated. This past weekend, six people got out of a car in the heart of Hollywood in Los Angeles and unleashed gunfire at a man and a woman standing in front of a convenience store. Less than a day earlier, shooting broke out at a Hollywood nightclub. Earlier in April, a 37-year-old was shot in the head on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. On the other side of the country, in Baltimore this past weekend, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the groin, a 55-year-old was shot in the face while sitting in a vehicle, a 23-year-old man was shot in the back, a 25-year-old man was shot in the lower back and legs, a 19-year-old man was shot multiple times in the leg, and a 44-year-old was shot in the knee, all in separate incidents. On Monday, two men were shot. Ho-hum. Because Baltimore does not have the cachet of Chicago, this quotidian mayhem gets even less attention than Chicago’s.
Millions of blacks are walking around believing that whites hate and fear them so much that blacks are at daily risk of their lives from that hatred. This belief is the rankest fiction. Yet it is embraced and amplified by almost every mainstream American institution. We exist mentally in a counterfactual, alternative reality when it comes to race and crime. That alternative reality further poisons race relations, incentivizing more anti-white violence. It creates fertile support for the dismantling of law enforcement and of the meritocratic standards that are said to prop up white supremacy. It is time to unflinchingly pierce that fiction with the truth.
Fauci retcons the pandemic in laughable NYT interview. The doctor, once again, proved himself a master of illusion and obfuscation. Article was found here.
The New York Times published an extensive interview with Anthony Fauci on Tuesday, and the doc still shows little remorse. To his credit, Times reporter David Wallace-Wells did not let Fauci off easily — there was no Joe Biden treatment in this one.
Fauci, as usual, showed himself a master of illusion. Take his assertion that “only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly.” Really? Well that depends on what you mean by “vaccinated”. If that means you got the first shot — the only one that actually provided transmission protection — then the US actually did quite well, with 80 percent receiving at least one dose. Germany, Luxembourg and Austria are at 78 percent, and progressives’ favorite Scandinavian country, Sweden, sits at 76 percent. Even if you assume he meant “fully vaccinated” with the latest jab, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Baltic states are all pretty darn close to the US’s 68 percent.
He plays the same game with the lab leak theory. Asked about the “lab leak versus natural origin” debate, Fauci said, “until you have a definitive proof of one or the other, it is essential to have an open mind. And I have been this way from the very beginning, David, notwithstanding the criticisms to the contrary.” Is that so? Cockburn certainly does not remember that, and neither, apparently, does Doctor Robert Redfield, the CDC director at the time, who claims that Fauci slammed the door shut on the lab leak hypothesis pretty early on.
And that’s not all! Fauci, in response to an inquiry about gain of function funding, claimed:
[A]ll of the intelligence groups agree that this was not an engineered virus. And if it’s not an engineered virus, what actually leaked from the lab? If it wasn’t an engineered virus, somebody went out into the field, got infected, came back to the lab and then spread it out to other people. That ain’t a lab leak, strictly speaking. That’s a natural occurrence.
Let’s unpack that marvelous trickery. There is some limited truth that intelligence agencies agree that the virus was not “genetically engineered,” as the DNI reported in 2021 that “most agencies also assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered”. The first wrinkle, obviously, is that this assessment is from “most agencies” and is “low confidence.” The second wrinkle is that “two agencies believe there was not sufficient evidence to make an assessment either way.” Not exactly a resounding renunciation of an engineered virus. It is not clear to Cockburn how the agencies have shifted their opinions, if at all, on the topic since 2021, though we may know soon once the intelligence is declassified.
Further, his definition of a lab leak is comically oversimplified. For Fauci, the way it could be a “lab leak” is if the scientist caught the virus from some natural source and then infected his or her colleagues. Admittedly, Fauci gets points for creativity: he effectively coopts the lab leak theory to confirm his own belief that that virus spread from a natural origin point.
Now on to the pandemic response. Fauci complained that “I happened to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations [lockdowns],” that he only “gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.” If he did not want to be the “personification” of pandemic policy, then maybe he should not have played into the panegyrics — like going on the cover of InStyle magazine. And anyway, Fauci can’t claim to have been a mere bystander — he knew very well that his and the CDC’s recommendations were taken and used to enact a very particular set of policies.
Fauci would like to think that public health institutions can look “at it from a purely public-health standpoint. It was for other people to make broader assessments — people whose positions include but aren’t exclusively about public health.” The problem here is that public health institutions are, by their very nature, inseparable from the “broader assessments.” Public health must deal with the public — shocking, but it’s true — and that means there is an interface with policy. That is what makes public health a messy, difficult thing to wrangle with, because you cannot simply make the calculations and run; you have to make the calculations and then mold them into recommendations that are workable for the society to which they will be applied. That did not happen, not because of maliciousness, but because of human error. That is all people want Fauci to admit — actually admit, not massaging an admission with obfuscation and deflection.
By far the most irritating for Cockburn, though, is the moralizing and grumbling about the public’s skepticism of the public health establishment and its recommendations. At the beginning of the condensed interview, Fauci mentions the “smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that’s palpable politically in this country.” The irony is that Fauci is at the epicenter of the crisis that caused that very “smoldering anti-science feeling.”
Take the mask debacle. At the beginning, in March 2020, Fauci argued that masking was unnecessary, that “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.” The argument — which, it turns out, was correct — was that masks were not effective enough to wear. Underlying that contention, though, was what those in government felt was a noble lie: the masks were not recommended not because they did not work, but because they wanted to make sure healthcare workers had access to them, primarily the N95. Then, all of a sudden, the guidance did a 180 and masks were not only protective, but mandated. Even when evidence began to pour in that cloth and surgical masks were not effective enough to warrant mandating them, nothing changed. This is why there is a crisis of trust, a “smoldering anti-science feeling”; it is not so much anti-science as it is skepticism of government claims to science.
And then there was the lockdown policy. The doctor said in the interview that “somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. Like 85 percent of the hospitalizations are there.” Why was that the case? It happened because the public health establishment failed to communicate. Fauci would likely disagree: “Did we say that the elderly were much more vulnerable? Yes. Did we say it over and over and over again? Yes, yes, yes.” Fair enough, but the public health institutions paired those warnings with policy recommendations that said the contrary. Why was he suggesting that students still be masked mid-2021? Why were the teachers’ unions so involved in crafting school reopening processes? Where was Fauci when a voice of reason was needed in the school reopening process? He can point to a few meek comments, but where was the pandemic warrior he likes to portray himself as? It was this kind of behavior that helped produce an “anti-science feeling” in the country; it was a lack of honesty, a lack of consistency and the appearance of foul play.
Does Fauci deserve all the blame? Of course not — but nor does he get to exonerate himself either.
Apparently, though, he does not feel he has anything worth exonerating himself of. When Wallace-Wells asked Fauci if the idea that gain-of-function research may (however unlikely and improbable it may be) have had some relation to Covid-19’s origins, weighed on him, the doctor was both defensive and dismissive. “Now you’re saying things that are a little bit troublesome to me. That I need to go to bed tonight worrying that NIH-funded research was responsible for pandemic origins.”
“Well, I sleep fine, I sleep fine”, he added, before defending the research as “not conceived by me as I was having my omelet in the morning. It is a grant that was put before peer review of independent scientists whose main role is to try to get data to protect the health and safety of the American public and the world.” Whatever the facts are in this case, the response is a microcosm of the broader problem: Fauci cannot seem to accept any culpability, it is always someone else’s fault — the politicians, the Republicans who “don’t like to be told what to do,” or the “independent scientists” — and rarely his own.
Cockburn, more than anything else, would just like to see Fauci show — even if it’s feigned — some understanding of the concerns his critics bring to the table, some recognition of his own faults. That would require introspection, though, and despite all of his skills, that one is conspicuously lacking.
Maricopa county, 4th most populous in the country.
Welp, now we know why they didn’t want to have their records audited!
A new report says at least 222 noncitizens have registered to vote in Arizona’s Maricopa County since 2015.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation said that the federal motor voter law that allows people to register to vote at their local motor vehicle offices is partly to blame for the problem.
For 30 years, foreign nationals have been getting registered to vote.
“Motor Voter leads to problems for immigrants across America. Signing the wrong form at the DMV can haunt you years later when your naturalization process switches to deportation. For 30 years, foreign nationals have been getting registered to vote. Congress must modernize Motor Voter to reflect the technologies and demographics of today,” said J. Christian Adams, the foundation’s president.
Adams said that 222 noncitizens disclosed to local officials that they were on the rolls. Of those, at least nine voted in federal elections. The 222 names in Maricopa County are of people who self-reported as noncitizens. How many others have NOT reported? Mr. Adams said immigrants seeking citizenship often come forward and acknowledge that they are on the rolls because one of the questions on the naturalization form is whether they ever were illegally registered. Lying on that form can quickly earn deportation.
In a report in The Washington Times, Adams said there is no way to know how many other noncitizens are on the rolls in Maricopa County, which the Times said was America’s fourth most populous county.
The problem with Motor Voter is that some states have offered registration to everyone — even noncitizens who, under federal law, are not eligible to vote in national elections.
Among the most significant hiccups was Pennsylvania, where officials discovered that the motor vehicle system allowed over 11,000 noncitizens who had sneaked onto voter lists.
How many Foreign nationals?
Adams said the issue is not how many noncitizens vote but that there is not enough protection written in the motor voter law to prevent noncitizens from getting on the voting rolls in the first place.
“When you have a failure in the system, whether or not it’s rampant doesn’t matter when it involves foreigners voting in American elections,” he said.
“If this problem had been detected 10 years ago, or maybe 15 years ago, I think there would have been a quick bipartisan fix in Congress,” he said. “But the Democrats have become so radicalized now about every voting issue in Congress.”
A new law that took effect April 7 puts the label “noncitizen” on driver’s licenses issued to those who are not American citizens while also requiring ID to be shown at a polling place.
“I can tell you from my experience at the attorney general’s office that while voter fraud cases are indeed rare, the overwhelming majority of such cases involve noncitizen voting, sometimes even at the BMV through the motor-voter program; circumstances would then cascade when the application proceeds without catching that the applicant was a noncitizen, and the individual would eventually be sent a notice of their neighborhood polling place and be encouraged to cast a vote, leading some to do so and eventually being identified as an illegal noncitizen voter,” said Dan Tierney, a representative for Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.
Virginia recently found 18,990 deceased voters on its rolls by checking death records that went back to 1960.
“I knew that there was something there, but I didn’t know that it was this big,” Virginia Elections Commissioner Susan Beals said.
HHS whistleblower Tara Lee Rodas testified today in front of the house Judiciary Committee. Rodas told Congress that today in the United States children will work at slaughter houses, factories, and restaurants to pay their debt to the smugglers, traffickers and cartels.
And… The US Government has become the “middleman” in a large scale multi-billion dollar child trafficking operation, run by bad actors seeking to profit off the lives of children.
Tara explains in detail the disgusting abuse of migrant children by the Joe Biden regime.
There have been over 5 million illegal aliens, including migrant children, who have flooded across the US Southern Border under Joe Biden’s watch.
