With a recent tweet, Rep. Eric Swalwell could have not done a better job of exposing himself as a fatuous ignoramus if he tried.
In the wake of the collapse of the Russia Hoax, Democrat villains seem to be rushing to unmask themselves for the thuggish phonies so many of them are.
Nobody bet more on the hoax than Rep. Eric Swalwell, whose unsupported claims of “evidence” that President Trump is a “traitor” would embarrass any normal person. But there is very little about Eric Swalwell’s politics that is normal, including his weird candidacy for president.
Swalwell needs to distract the public from thinking about his false claims on Russia, and so reverted to a favorite tactic of Dems: pretending to be the advocate for a large group of people that can be portrayed as victims. So, he went for the single biggest demographic slice of the American people: women:
There’s only one problem with this. The Constitution also does not use the word “man.”
Tucker Carlson exposed the buffoonery of a lawyer who apparently has never read the Constitution with economy last night. This needs only about a minute of your time:
With a recent tweet, Rep. Eric Swalwell could have not done a better job of exposing himself as a fatuous ignoramus if he tried.
In the wake of the collapse of the Russia Hoax, Democrat villains seem to be rushing to unmask themselves for the thuggish phonies so many of them are.
Nobody bet more on the hoax than Rep. Eric Swalwell, whose unsupported claims of “evidence” that President Trump is a “traitor” would embarrass any normal person. But there is very little about Eric Swalwell’s politics that is normal, including his weird candidacy for president.
Swalwell needs to distract the public from thinking about his false claims on Russia, and so reverted to a favorite tactic of Dems: pretending to be the advocate for a large group of people that can be portrayed as victims. So, he went for the single biggest demographic slice of the American people: women:
There’s only one problem with this. The Constitution also does not use the word “man.”
Tucker Carlson exposed the buffoonery of a lawyer who apparently has never read the Constitution with economy last night. This needs only about a minute of your time:
Angela Merkel has again defended her decision to open the borders in 2015, insisting welcoming the influx of more than a million third world migrants was “not a mistake”.
Speaking at a town hall dialogue in Brandenburg on Tuesday evening, the German Chancellor said the move was necessary against the backdrop of an “extraordinary situation” in the form of conflict in Syria and Islamist terrorism in the Middle East.
Her decision to suspend the Dublin Regulation on asylum with her announcement that “refugees” were welcome — moves which triggered an unprecedented wave of third world migration to Europe — were “not something to disown”, she told the audience.
“If there were mistakes made in the context [of the 2015 crisis], taking people in was not one of them,” Merkel insisted, adding: “The mistake was not going in advance to places hosting lots of refugees, like Lebanon and Jordan, to see how people were doing there.
“Therefore we have since learned about helping refugees locally,” she said — as if no-one had advocated such a policy previously.
The German politician’s opening of EU borders was greeted with an outpouring of praise from left-neoliberal international media outlets, many of which — along with global bodies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — gushed that the move was sure to boost German prosperity.
Report: Merkel Govt May Have Let In Thousands of War Criminal Migrants https://t.co/QHb57134kw
But despite the government’s splashing out tens of billions of euros per annum on housing, welfare, and integration for newcomers since the crisis, 65 per cent of the “refugees” who arrived to Germany in 2016 are still not in work, as Breitbart London reported in January.
Results of a large-scale study by the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), which interviewed 7,500 migrants, were branded “sobering” by local media after revealing how 20 per cent of employed migrants were only working “mini-jobs”, while even refugees in full-time employment earned a median salary of just 1,564 euros (£1,371) gross per month.
Germany has also seen a rise in violent crime since the influx, with the country’s Interior Ministry last year admitting that asylum seekers, refugees, and illegal immigrants carried out at least 447 killings and attempted killings in 2017.
AUSCHWITZ — The first-ever U.S. delegation to the March of the Living annual Holocaust memorial arrived at Auschwitz on a somber Thursday morning, bringing several ambassadors and envoys in a show of solidarity against antisemitism.
“I couldn’t be more proud of the unprecedented commitment of this administration to fight against antisemitism,” U.S. Special Envoy to Combat and Monitor Antisemitism, Elan Carr, told reporters outside the infamous concentration camp.
U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell joined the first-ever U.S. delegation to the March of the Living annual Holocaust memorial at Auschwitz (Joel Pollak/Breitbart News).
“There is no administration, no president, no Secretary of State that have ever committed themselves to this extent to fight against antisemitism, to protect the Jewish people, and to support the State of Israel,” he added.
The delegation included U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, and Ambassador to the Holy See Calista Gingrich, among many other ambassadors.
Gingrich told Breitbart News of the impact the delegation is hoping to make: “lt’s so important that we come here and honor the people who perished, and make sure that it never happens again.”
Thousands of participants, including youth activists from all over the world, joined survivors and diplomats for the three-kilometer walk from the Auschwitz concentration camp to the Birkenau death camp.
U.S. antisemitism envoy Elan Carr speaks to reporters at Auschwitz and praises President Trump’s record fighting antisemitism (Joel Pollak/Breitbart News).
Paul Packer, Chairman of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, told Breitbart News: “To join U.S. ambassadors for the first time ever shows the commitment that the Trump administration has to the words, ‘Never Again,’ and to making sure that all our allies know the words of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism.
“Not only will the U.S. make sure that the Holocaust never happens again, but the U.S. will make sure all our allies know that antisemitism and anti-Zionism will not be accepted, either.”
U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland Ed McMullen told Breitbart News that he felt “truly overwhelmed.
“This is beyond anything that I imagined.”
US Ambassador David Friedman greets Holocaust survivor Edward Mossberg, 93, who wears his original concentration camp uniform every year for the March of the Living and was awarded Poland’s Order of Merit (Joel Pollak/Breitbart News).
Edward Mossberg, 93, a Holocaust survivor who lost all of his family in the death camps, and who has participated in the annual march for two decades, told reporters that he was there to honor the dead.
“It is never forgotten, and it is never forgiven. Because you know what? We have no right to forgive.
“Only the dead can forgive.”
The U.S. delegation visits one of the surviving gas chambers at Auschwitz (Joel Pollak/Breitbart News).
“For me, this is just deeply moving and really hard to deal with,” Ambassador Grenell told Breitbart News as he walked through the museum at Auschwitz.
“I can’t stop thinking about the individual faces and the stories, what they were thinking in this moment.”
U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell examines the barbed wire enclosure at Auschwitz (Joel Pollak/Breitbart News).
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
In Venezuela, after 20 years of Chavista Socialist economics, the people are starving, inflation is at 1.3 MILLION percent, the economy has collapsed and people are eating from dumps and garbage cans.
Venezuela had one of the most successful economies in Latin America 20 years ago. Then Hugo Chavez was elected into office and implemented his Socialist policies. The rest is history.
But on Wednesday Democrat mouthpiece Rep. Ilhan Omar blamed the United States for the crisis.
Ilhan hates America. She deeply hates America.
Omar told Democracy Now that the USA “lead the devastation” in the socialist country and is “bullying” Maduro – a man who starves, butchers, shoots and runs over his own people.
The junior Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, has an opinion about anyone and anything, just ask her. Rep. Omar provided a clear example of her understanding U.S. history regarding a key framer of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin, based on the fact that the image of the inventor, statesman, author, and innovator, is on the U.S. one-hundred dollar bill. Of course, she didn’t have much interest anything he represented, her reference to him was a means to an end – perpetrating anti-semitic rant, “…all about the Benjamins baby” in reference to Jews and their supposed ominiscent political power in America. Let us also not forget about her insensitive reference to the 3,000 innocent souls who perished on 9/11/2001 as a result of Islamist terrorism.
Now Ms. Omar has tried to tie the plight of Venezuelans to President Trump. The obvious does not matter to Ms. Omar — that the pain and suffering in that country now revolting against a socialist dictatorship started much earlier and escalated during the last presidential administration. President Obama did almost nothing for Venezuelans, and didn’t speak out much, either. President Trump has openly acknowledged Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, as have heads of state from more than 50 other countries. Our president has been using diplomacy to encourage the illegitimate dictator, Nicolas Maduro, to take his money stolen from the people and run. If it were not for corrupt Russians encouraging him to stay, Maduro would have left weeks ago. It does not matter to Ms. Omar that Venezuela had suffered massive annual inflation before President Trump placed sanctions on the Maduro regime. Why did Maduro block passage into Venezuela the millions of dollars of medical aid and food aid that the Trump administration shipped to the border with Colombia?
What could the motive be of this junior representative to be so vocal about a subject she clearly knows nothing about? Why does she declare, “…America will no longer be a country of white people…” It’s strange stuff, given that she represents Minnesota, a state which American history shows became the home to a proud group of Americans of Viking heritage. Chalk it up to another group to offend.
That’s not all she’s about, either. President Trump is considering categorizing the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) are joined at the hip, are they not? Ms. Omar is a big supporter of CAIR. Is Ms. Omar projecting her bigotry on others to cover a façade of hatred for the country that opened arms to her from that paradise, Somalia? She called President Trump’s action on the border a “fake emergency” regardless of the countless number of people, including Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security under Obama, a serious crisis. She offends and she offends.
Thank God, congressional terms last only two years and Representative Omar could never be president. She might not even make it past two years in Congress.
The junior Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, has an opinion about anyone and anything, just ask her. Rep. Omar provided a clear example of her understanding U.S. history regarding a key framer of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin, based on the fact that the image of the inventor, statesman, author, and innovator, is on the U.S. one-hundred dollar bill. Of course, she didn’t have much interest anything he represented, her reference to him was a means to an end – perpetrating anti-semitic rant, “…all about the Benjamins baby” in reference to Jews and their supposed ominiscent political power in America. Let us also not forget about her insensitive reference to the 3,000 innocent souls who perished on 9/11/2001 as a result of Islamist terrorism.
Now Ms. Omar has tried to tie the plight of Venezuelans to President Trump. The obvious does not matter to Ms. Omar — that the pain and suffering in that country now revolting against a socialist dictatorship started much earlier and escalated during the last presidential administration. President Obama did almost nothing for Venezuelans, and didn’t speak out much, either. President Trump has openly acknowledged Juan Guaido as the legitimate president of Venezuela, as have heads of state from more than 50 other countries. Our president has been using diplomacy to encourage the illegitimate dictator, Nicolas Maduro, to take his money stolen from the people and run. If it were not for corrupt Russians encouraging him to stay, Maduro would have left weeks ago. It does not matter to Ms. Omar that Venezuela had suffered massive annual inflation before President Trump placed sanctions on the Maduro regime. Why did Maduro block passage into Venezuela the millions of dollars of medical aid and food aid that the Trump administration shipped to the border with Colombia?
What could the motive be of this junior representative to be so vocal about a subject she clearly knows nothing about? Why does she declare, “…America will no longer be a country of white people…” It’s strange stuff, given that she represents Minnesota, a state which American history shows became the home to a proud group of Americans of Viking heritage. Chalk it up to another group to offend.
That’s not all she’s about, either. President Trump is considering categorizing the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) are joined at the hip, are they not? Ms. Omar is a big supporter of CAIR. Is Ms. Omar projecting her bigotry on others to cover a façade of hatred for the country that opened arms to her from that paradise, Somalia? She called President Trump’s action on the border a “fake emergency” regardless of the countless number of people, including Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security under Obama, a serious crisis. She offends and she offends.
Thank God, congressional terms last only two years and Representative Omar could never be president. She might not even make it past two years in Congress.
The media has chosen, so far at least, to ignore more anti-American comments from U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). In an interview May 1, Omar attacked the U.S. for being the reason why its citizens were starving and getting mowed down in the street by its socialist government regime. Her absurd and anti-patriotic comments are just the latest she’s made attacking the country she’s supposed to be serving, and ABC, NBC and CBS continued to ignore them on their Thursday morning shows, today.
President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released about 8,200 border crossers and illegal aliens into the interior of the United States in the past week, federal data confirms.
The latest Catch and Release totals obtained by Breitbart News reveal that between April 23 and April 29, about 8,200 border crossers and illegal aliens have been released into the country with only a promise to return months, and sometimes years, later for their immigration hearings.
The Catch and Release process often entails federal immigration officials busing border crossers into nearby border cities and dropping them off with the hope that they show up for their immigration and asylum hearings. The overwhelming majority of border crossers and illegal aliens are never deported from the country once they are released into the U.S.
Today, there are anywhere between 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living across the country — the majority of which are concentrated in states like California, New York, Florida, Texas, and Illinois.
Over the past seven days, 8,200 border crossers and illegal aliens have been released into San Diego, California; El Paso, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; and San Antonio, Texas. This dictates that about 1,200 border crossers and illegal aliens are being released into the U.S. every day.
In just a week, Phoenix has had to absorb about 1,000 border crossers and illegal aliens. Likewise, El Paso has been forced to absorb about 3,700 border crossers and illegal aliens over the last seven days, while San Antonio has had to absorb 2,950 border crossers and illegal aliens in the same time period.
Since December 21, 2018, the Trump administration has released 161,200 border crossers and illegal aliens into the interior of the U.S. — the majority have been dropped off in San Antonio, where 65,150 have been released, and El Paso, where 53,000 have been released.
Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach has exclusively detailed at Breitbart News three executive actions that Trump administration and DHS officials could take to immediately end catch and release — including creating additional detention space where immigration court hearings can be quickly heard. Kobach has also warned that wage hikes for America’s blue collar and working class will not continue if illegal immigration levels keep soaring.
At DHS’s current rate, about 40,300 border crossers and illegal aliens are released into the interior of the U.S. every month and more than 10,000 are being released every week.
By the end of the year, DHS will have released more than 480,000 border crossers and illegal aliens into American communities should Catch and Release continue — in addition to the projected half a million illegal aliens who will successfully cross the U.S.-Mexico border this year, undetected by federal officials.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
Border agencies should provide even more help to Central American migrants, top Democrats said in response to the White House’s emergency funding request to manage the migration inflow.
The support for migrants came after the White House asked for $4.5 billion to help process the growing flood of economic migrants from Central America.
“As a country, we must do more to meet the needs of migrants – especially children and families – who are arriving in increasing numbers,” said a statement by Rep. Nita Lowey, chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee. She urged the administration to speed up the release of the migrants:
However, the Trump administration appears to want much of this $4.5 billion emergency supplemental request to double down on cruel and ill-conceived policies, including bailing out ICE for overspending on detention beds and expanding family detention. Locking up people who pose no threat to the community for ever-longer periods of time is not a solution to the problems at the border.
“This crisis is one largely of the Trump Administration’s own making,” claimed Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. His statement also urged the border agencies to release the migrants at a faster pace into the U.S. labor market:
We will not appropriate more funds that will add to the chaos and make the problem worse … this request holds a number of non-starters – such as doubling down on the Administration’s cruel and failed policies including mass detention. There is no reason to lock up thousands who pose no threat, especially in an already-strained system.
Thompson said Democrats were ready to provide more aid to the foreign migrants: “House Democrats understand that there is a humanitarian crisis at the border, and we stand ready and willing to provide necessary resources to help fix this challenge and alleviate the suffering of thousands.”
Lowey declared Democrats as guardians of the nation’s values. “House Democrats take seriously our responsibility to uphold our values and secure our borders,” Lowey said.
The growing wave of migrants is forcing down Americans’ wages in U.S. blue-collar workplaces and is weakening education for Americans kids in blue-collar schools.
The Democrats’ opposition to border security reflects the pro-migration views of their coalition, which includes wealthy progressives and poor, government-dependent families.
Almost 80 percent of Democrats oppose policies which hinder the growing inflow of cheap labor from Central America. Most will change their views when the Dem nominee asks, but this opposition will hurt Democrats in Midwest 2019/20. https://t.co/EFW5uJIDRo
The migration flow and the resulting humanitarian crisis is rapidly overwhelming the ability of the Federal Government to respond. Only halfway through this fiscal year (FY), the U.S. Border Patrol has apprehended more than 360,000 migrants. This is over 187,000 more than during the same period in FY 2018, and just 35,500 below the number apprehended for all of FY 2018.
The $4.5 billion request asks for $1.1 billion for the Department of Homeland Security’s border operations.
The request says the agency needs the extra $1.1 billion to implement Congress’ direction to shelter, house, feed, and register the growing wave of economic migrants. In March, for example, 100,000 migrant adults and children pushed their way through Congress’ catch-and-release loopholes to get into the United States, just one month after Democrats refused to include any border reforms in the February 2019 spending bill. The request says:
U.S. Border Patrol personnel no longer have the ability to identify, process, and transport all ofthose apprehended at the border to safe and secure facilities designed to house them, but have instead been increasingly pressed into providing critical humanitarian, medical, and transportation services for this population.
The request also asks $2.8 billion to shelter the growing number of young migrants — Unaccompanied Alien Children — who are being brought northwards by coyotes which are hired by the children’s’ relatives and parents who are already living in the United States. Many of the UAC’s parents are using Congress’ 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Act to bring their children up from Central America.
The requested $2.8 billion will provide shelter for up to 23,600 UACs simultaneously, while the federal government passes the children from the coyotes to the illegal-immigrant parents. The migrants’ children will then be allowed to use U.S. schools, despite the impact on the children of blue-collar Americans. Very few of the migrant children and youths are placed in the schools used by the children of congressional legislators, immigration lawyers, and progressive activists.
The request said the agencies would have to cut educational and recreational programs for the migrants unless Congress approves the extra spending:
There is a significant likelihood that the UAC program will exhaust all of its resources in June. If Congress fails to provide HHS this additional funding, the expected continuation of current trends may require HHS to divert significant resources from other programs that serve vulnerable populations – such as refugees and victims of trafficking and torture. In addition, UAC services that are not necessary for protection of human life, such as education and legal services, as well as recreational activities, would likely need to be canceled or scaled back.
The UAC migration is being boosted by the 2019 spending plan, which bars federal agencies from using information gathered in the UAC program to identify and deport illegal migrants.
The 2019 DHS spending bill provides $1.4 billion for the border wall – and also encourages migrants by promising aid, busses & legal advice/shields, plus favorable future media coverage & Dem cheerleading. Overall, GOP gains on $ and Dems gain on policies https://t.co/rxFzl8Fas0
The budget request also asks for $377 million to fund Pentagon and National Guard support programs for the border agencies.
Nationwide, Trump’s “Hire American” push has helped nudge up wages by reducing the inflow of legal and illegal workers.
Here’s another set of good consequences from Pres. Trump’s Hire American economic-and-immigration policy: Career shifts and wage gains for blue-collar women: https://t.co/2LCdKsZrhD
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including roughly 1 million H-1B workers — and approximately 500,000 blue-collar visa workers. The government also prints out more than 1 million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas.
This policy boosts economic growth for investors because it ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap foreign white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations. It also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment from the heartland to the coasts, explodes rents, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
Indiana restaurant workers are gaining wage increases, training & better conditions from employers in Pres. Donald Trump’s “Hire American” low-immigration, tight-labor economy. Meanwhile, biz lobbyists & progressives urge more migration. https://t.co/iHpN38MaQD
In a recent interview with Austrian media, populist Austrian Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache alluded to the impact of mass migration and demographic changes on the country, saying his party would fight against “population exchange.”
The Freedom Party (FPÖ) leader spoke on a wide array of topics leading into the European Parliament elections set to take place later this month, and among them was his party’s long-standing anti-mass migration policy, Kronen Zeitungreports.
“We are continuing our journey of our home country of Austria, the fight against population exchange, as our people expect,” Strache said, alluding to what French writer Renaud Camus has referred to as the “The Great Replacement” — a theory of the replaceability of goods, services, and people themselves for economic and other purposes.
When pushed by the interviewer about the term, which is often negatively associated with right-wing and populist thinkers by the media, Strache said, “That is a concept of reality. We do not want to become a minority in our own homeland. That is legitimate and honest and deeply democratic. Those who are not left today are automatically defamed as right-wing extremists.”
“Only where someone tries to enforce his political goals by force, it is right-wing extremism,” he added noting that such behaviours do not fit into a democratic system.
Austrian Vice Chancellor: Pro-Migration Activists ‘Responsible’ for Killer Migrants https://t.co/dwkVam386J
Strache is not the first politician or major figure to speak about demographic shifts in terms of population exchange. In France, mayor of Beziers Robert Ménard was fined after mentioning the term in connection to the growing number of Muslim pupils in local schools in 2016.
French Archbishop of Strasbourg Luc Ravel also spoke of the term, saying, “Muslim believers know very well that their birthrate is such that today, they call it … the Great Replacement, they tell you in a very calm, very positive way that, ‘one day all this, it will be ours’.”
Among the general population, at least a quarter of French people say they believe in the Great Replacement and the idea that elites are purposely using mass migration to replace indigenous Europeans, which has been termed as a conspiracy theory by many in the mainstream press.
The Population Division of the United Nations haspreviouslypublished papers “consider[ing] replacement migration for eight low-fertility countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, United Kingdom and United States) and two regions (Europe and the European Union)”, as a possible solution to the supposed “challenges of declining and ageing populations”.
A Quarter of French Believe ‘Elites’ Using Mass Migration to ‘Replace’ Native Europeans https://t.co/dr2IQVqPQf
With the economy booming and showing positive signs across the board, it’s something of a mystery why so many people continue to insist that everything is terrible and the world is about to end. That’s the issue being tackled by our friend Andrew Malcolm this week at his new home, Issues & Insights. (Be sure to check out the rest of the site as well. They have quite the stable of reporters and analysts.) The answer is probably to be found in perceptions rather than facts, as so often happens in politics these days.
After the weak growth of that endless Obama reign of error, along comes a New York billionaire businessman who leads a Republican Congress to pass historic tax cuts aimed at the middle class. Almost immediately, as Trump predicted, economic growth took off.
The ranks of employed Americans reached historically high levels while unemployment – even in historically high sectors like Hispanics and blacks — dropped to historic lows, 3.8% nationally. In a tightening labor market, wages grew for the first time this century.
And yet virtually every single major polling organization consistently finds more Americans disapprove of the tax cuts that benefitted them than approve. It’s 49 to 40 in Gallup, 49 to 36 in Pew, 43 to 34 in Monmouth.
Democrats won the tax-cut message battle saying it benefitted mainly the wealthy.
How did that happen? As Andrew points out, a casual study of what cable news and the major newspapers consider newsworthy probably has a lot to do with it. The President himself touts economic growth virtually every time there’s a microphone in front of his face or when he starts on a Twitter binge. But a 3.2 percent annualized first-quarter growth rate doesn’t seem to be “news” to most of the Fourth Estate, so you don’t have those numbers drilled into your head on a daily basis. Thus, when the pollsters come calling, people are saying that the tax cuts only benefited “the wealthy” in many cases.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the leader in the Democratic primary polling race, former VP Joe Biden, is out there repeating lies about the tax cuts. His recent attempt to undercut the economic effects of this policy was so bad that even the Washington Post fact checker had to award him four Pinocchios for it.
But on top of obvious media bias, I suspect Trump is battling something broader and more difficult to define. I’ve definitely sensed a growing tendency toward pessimism, cynicism or doom and gloom among political activists on both sides of the aisle these days. Jokes about how stupid or insane 2018 was were quickly replaced with snide comments about how “that’s so 2019.” I’ve been guilty of it myself.
Perhaps we’ve managed to condition ourselves to expect something awful to happen every day to the point that we’re unable to recognize the good news when it comes along. It’s as if we’re perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop. By all metrics, we are living in what should be considered one of the more encouraging and hopeful periods the country has experienced in years. We should make an effort to focus on that for a while and just brighten up a little.
