George Soros financed radical environmental groups partnering in this week’s “Global Climate Strike” to the tune of nearly $25 million, according to a new report.
At least 22 of the left-wing activist groups listed as partners in the Global Climate Strike received $24,854,592 in funding from liberal billionaire George Soros between 2000-2017 through his Open Society Network, Joseph Vazquez reported Thursday for the Media Research Center.
Though ostensibly ignited by the protests of 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, the Global Climate Strike has borne from the outset the indelible fingerprints of well-funded, radical environmental activists. As it turns out, much of the funding has been coming from professional disrupter George Soros.
Among the organizations receiving Soros funding were Fund for Global Human Rights, Global Greengrants Fund, 350.org, Amnesty International, Avaaz, Color of Change, and People’s Action. Each of these groups has climate-related agendas and goals spanning from reducing global carbon emissions to less than 350 parts per million and 100 percent “clean energy,” to the elimination of new fossil fuel projects and a “green civil rights movement.”
Other major donors have included Democrat presidential candidate Tom Steyer’s NextGen America as well as the Sierra Club, which has reportedly received millions from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The group 350.org, founded by Bill McKibben in 2008, has fought against coal power in India as well as tried to stop the Keystone XL pipeline in the U.S.
While kids were marching, singing, and twerking for the Global Climate Strike, a group of more than 500 scientists and professionals appealed to the United Nations for a long overdue, open debate on climate change.
“Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific,” the scientists stated in their declaration sent to the U.N. secretary general.
“Scientists should openly address the uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real benefits as well as the imagined costs of adaptation to global warming, and the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of mitigation,” they said.
The signers also insisted that public policy must respect scientific and economic realities and not just reflect the most fashionable trend of the day.
“There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm,” they noted. “We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050.”
“If better approaches emerge, and they certainly will, we have ample time to reflect and adapt. The aim of international policy should be to provide reliable and affordable energy at all times, and throughout the world,” they said.
The entire American left — the mainstream media, the environmentalist movement and Democratic politicians in particular — are celebrating the involvement of teenagers and even younger children in protesting the world’s “inaction” with regard to global warming.
And not just the American left, of course. The left throughout the world is celebrating. A 16-year-old Swedish girl whose contempt for adults is breathtaking is an international hero. Congressional Democrats invited her to testify in Congress, and the United Nations has likewise invited her.
The mayor and city council of New York City further politicized their city’s public schools by allowing students to skip school to actively participate in a global warming protest.
The message of young climate change activists is: “You adults aren’t doing your job. As a result, we have no future.” As a sympathetic reporter — are there any non-sympathetic reporters? — for the Los Angeles Times put it, “(T)eens are still waiting for a sign that their elders get it.”
The Times’ coverage is typical. It reported: “Underneath the activism lies a simple truth: Young people are incredibly scared about climate change. They see it as a profound injustice and an existential threat to their generation and those that will follow. …
“‘They do worry, and they worry kind of a lot,’ said Maria Ojala, an environmental psychologist at Orebro University in Sweden. …
“Arielle Martinez Cohen” — an 18-year-old Los Angeles activist with the youth climate group Zero Hour — “remembers reading a report from an Australian think tank that warned the human species could face extinction by 2050 if society doesn’t get its act together.
“‘I almost imagine, like, an apocalypse-type thing happening,’ Arielle said.
“Many young people say they can’t fathom bringing kids of their own into the world. …
“‘It’s not ethical. It’s literally a burning house,’ Lana said.
“‘That’s something that’s not realistic,’ agreed her twin sister, Yena.
“And how can they even think about college or contemplate their careers when faced with so much uncertainty?
“‘It’s something I feel every single day,’ Yena said. ‘I work really hard at school and I do all these things, and I’m like, “What am I working for? Do I have a future?”‘”
It is critical to remember that hysterias — such as Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, “endemic and systemic racism in America,” the heterosexual AIDS “crisis” in America and the “rape culture” on American college campuses — are to the left what oxygen is to biological life. No oxygen, no life; no hysteria, no left.
Apparently, however, the left-wing hysteria about global warming leading to the virtual extinction of life on Earth has not moved enough adults. Many adults who do not deny that the Earth is getting warmer — such as Danish writer and environmentalist thinker Bjorn Lomborg — do deny that the threat is “existential” and do believe that the left’s solutions, such as the Green New Deal, will damage the world far more than will carbon emissions. Proof that the left is hysterical is its unwillingness to promote nuclear power — a completely clean, non-fossil fuel-based source of power. It provides France with 70 percent of its energy. Anyone who really believes life on Earth is endangered would grasp at the nuclear power lifeboat. That they do not proves what many of us have believed from the beginning: The “existential threat” scenario is another left-wing falsehood used to whip up hysteria that will lead to the left’s control of the economy and society.
And that takes us back to the children: If you can’t sell your hysteria to adults, try kids. And that is what the left has done. After all, no one is as malleable or as easily indoctrinated as children.
Consider this: If the left didn’t tell them the world is going to end, they wouldn’t worry about it. They’d be enjoying their young lives, maybe even learning to appreciate that they live in the freest country at the most prosperous time in human history. Instead, thanks to leftists (who are children in adult bodies), they live in their grip of “existential eco-anxiety.”
This is but one more way in which the left abuses children (along with telling them they are neither boys nor girls but whatever they later choose to be; teaching them contempt for their country; and depriving them of the greatest source of morality, meaning, community and happiness — any of the Judeo-Christian religions).
It’s depressing, and it’s frightening.
The scariest movies are those featuring brainwashed children. This horror show is happening in real life.
Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in April 2018, is “The Rational Bible,” a commentary on the book of Exodus. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ speech to the 74th annual High-Level General Assembly meeting on September 24th was full of generalities about world problems the UN is purporting to deal with, in contrast to President Trump’s honest discussion of hard truths.
“We are here to advance the common good while upholding our shared humanity and values,” the secretary general said. “That vision united the founders of our Organization.” However, Secretary General Guterres’ concept of the UN “vision” today is of a globalist institution, which was not the founders’ original vision at all. The founders’ vision for a new United Nations was much closer to the one that President Trump has articulated. The United Nations was founded to bring sovereign nations together for the purpose of cooperating in the solution of common problems and taking collective action where warranted against aggressors’ threats to international peace and security. The United Nations Charter specifically recognizes the sovereign status of the member states. It stipulates that the United Nations does not have the authority “to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”
Three years ago, with the referendum of June 23, 2016, the British people decided with a percentage of almost 52% and with 71.8% participation the exit of Great Britain from the European Union. This great result was undoubtedly the first major, painful defeat for the under German-controlled European Union of banks and multinationals.
Here’s a horror show of a story that you’re probably not going to see on CNN anytime soon. A report emerged on Thursday indicating that the puberty-blocking drug Leuprolide Acetate (Lupron) has resulted in tens of thousands of serious “adverse reactions” in patients, including more than six thousand deaths. That’s bad enough, but it’s even more significant when you consider that this is one of the drugs being administered by doctors to so-called “transgender children” to unnaturally prevent their normal sexual development. And the testing done on the drug by the FDA for such applications appears to be thin at best. (Daily Wire)
More than 6,300 adults have died from reactions to a drug that is used as a puberty blocker in gender-confused children, Food & Drug Administration data reportedly shows.
“Between 2012 and June 30 of this year, the FDA documented over 40,764 adverse reactions suffered by patients who took Leuprolide Acetate (Lupron), which is used as a hormone blocker. More than 25,500 reactions logged from 2014-2019 were considered ‘serious,’ including 6,370 deaths,” The Christian Post reported on Thursday.
“Lupron is being prescribed off-label for use in children who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria despite the lack of formal FDA approval for that purpose,” the outlet explained.
You can do a search of the FDA’s incident reports here and enter the name of the drug (Lupron) to see their data.
Despite the possible adverse side effects, there are approved uses for Lupron, but it tends to be administered only for serious conditions. It’s useful in treating prostate cancer in men and endometriosis in women. For children, it is sometimes used to treat precocious puberty, a condition where children begin puberty at an unusually early age, but only for a short time.
The list of potential side effects for the drug is alarming. It includes breast disorders, malignant neoplasms, and psychiatric and nervous disorders. Stop and think about that for a moment. If you have a child that is already so confused that they are questioning their “gender identity” before they’ve even reached the age where their body is dealing with such issues, do you want to give them a drug that can produce psychiatric or nervous disorders?
To top it all off, the FDA has never formally approved the use of Lupron for treating gender dysphoria in children. Two years ago the agency announced that it was beginning a study of “nervous system and psychiatric events in association with the use of … a class of drugs including Lupron, in pediatric patients.” We don’t know the results of that study yet.
What adults, including transgender individuals, choose to do with their own bodies is their business as long as they’re willing to take responsibility for the results. But the experiments being performed on confused young children who have been convinced that they were somehow born the “wrong gender” are simply monstrous. Blocking the natural arrival of puberty in otherwise healthy children should be considered child abuse and medical malpractice to begin with. All of the questions raised in this report about one of the drugs being administered to do such things makes it all the worse.
Donald Trump understood from day one that he could never win the presidency talking the way politicians talk. And he could never win by “acting presidential.”
People came to love his hilarious campaign trail shtick where he stands upright behind the podium and woodenly pretends to “act presidential” as he struts around the stage like a toy soldier, muttering meaningless politically correct bromides. It is a still-hilarious shtick that drives crowds wild. But more important, it demonstrates just how utterly useless it would have been for Donald Trump to run as some kind of normal political candidate.
No, this was a man who was out to crash the gates of Washington. And in order to do that, he had to radically upend the way the game of politics is played. He had to start by changing the language.
Such a change would not be easy. And it certainly would not be popular among politicians firmly ensconced in Washington. The royalty of the American political scene— known variously as “the Establishment” or “the elites” or “swamp creatures”—closely guard the language that is spoken in politics. It is a powerful tool in maintaining their grip on power. And the political press slavishly enforces these rules of language. (If you don’t speak the language, you don’t play the game.)
These people have spent decades establishing this vocabulary and hounding from politics anyone who veers outside the proscribed lines. They are forever culling the herd of politicians for saying things that are stupid, thoughtless, strange, or outside the acceptable range of political orthodoxy. The result of this ever-vigilant speech police is a stilted, meaningless political vocabulary that’s poll tested and riddled with preposterous euphemisms that provide for an infinite number of acceptable phrases that Democrats and Republicans yell back and forth—never actually winning any arguments and not accomplishing anything tangible for the voters they claim to represent.
Speech codes are nothing new. They have been popular among tyrants, despots, and demagogues since the beginning of human politics. Such a speech code was made famous, of course, by George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949.
In Orwell’s fictional country of Oceana, the establishment “Inner Party” uses the official language of “Newspeak” to control the lower population of workers. The Inner Party uses all manner of media—two-way telescreens to microphones to spies—to enforce the Newspeak speech codes and report back any “thoughtcrimes” committed by the working proles. […]
The Lexicon of Lunacy
It is chilling to read 1984 today, seven decades after George Orwell published it. His ability to predict how established government authorities would use such “Orwellian” tactics to hold on to power is rivaled only by the ability of America’s Founders to ward off the very same abuses in some of their wisest elements of our Constitution.
In America, obviously, political leaders don’t enforce a “Newspeak” speech code and they certainly do not codify it. They don’t have a name for it at all, because to have a name for it would confirm its very existence. But others—outside the established “Inner Party”—do have terms for it. “Political correctness” is probably the most common description.
I call it the Lexicon of Lunacy.
The list of words, terms, and phrases in the Lexicon of Lunacy runs from the ridiculous to the deadly serious. Take the word “cisgender,” for example. I don’t actually know what it means but I know that we are supposed to use it when we are all tiptoeing around somebody’s severe midlife mental breakdown in which they decide to go under the knife to rearrange the sex organs God gave them.
Come to think of it, this is not at all funny. I feel genuinely sorry for anyone who finds himself, herself, or itself that thoroughly confused and lost in life. The only thing that could be worse would be if politicians decided to take that devastatingly depressing sorrow and weaponize it for political use.
Oh yeah, that has already happened.
So, how about this for an actually funny term from the Lexicon of Lunacy. “Overweight” has become a bad word because we don’t want to “fat shame” or “body shame” anyone. Instead we call the person “under tall.” Or, maybe “height- challenged.” Or “girth-oppressed.”
Those are funny. My children use them against me all the time.
Others are not funny at all.
The fuzzy term “pro-choice,” for instance, is the accepted euphemism for a political stance that favors killing a healthy, live human fetus that is living and developing in its mother’s body. In some cases, the term “pro-choice” can even mean the extermination and dismemberment of a healthy, growing fetus that might even be viable outside the womb. Who on earth hears of such a grisly procedure and thinks of the word “choice”? And, of course, the prefix “pro-”?
Less graphic but devastating in other ways are terms such as “free trade.” “Free trade” has become a mantra for hyperglobalization of the economy in ways that punish American workers, wildly enrich Wall Street and the captains of industry, and obliterate the ideals that have always separated America from the rest of the world.
Some of the best euphemisms, lies, and distortions in the Lexicon of Lunacy deal with illegal immigration. To be crystal clear, “illegal immigration” is when illegal aliens illegally enter our country without permission and illegally attempt to illegally reside and illegally work here.
Now, in the Lexicon of Lunacy, this activity is termed “undocumented.” And it is the only acceptable word to describe illegal aliens who are living illegally in the United States. Some of these illegal aliens illegally overstayed their visas to be living here illegally. Others illegally crossed the border to be living here illegally. Many of these illegal aliens also work in the United States illegally.
But, in our crazy political world, mentioning the word “illegal” in reference to “undocumented” people is considered hateful and even racist.
The problem with using the word “undocumented” is that not only does the term give the wrong impression, but it is a flat-out lie. “Undocumented” suggests illegal aliens have documentation that proves they are somehow here legally, but they just don’t have those documents on them at the moment.
No! If you are an illegal alien, documents proving you are legal do not exist! And if said illegal alien manufactures papers or documents to illegally and dishonestly suggest that he is somehow, in fact, here in the country legally, then he has committed additional crimes.
By browbeating people into using terms like “undocumented” to describe people who are actually “illegal aliens,” lawless leftists successfully push their dishonest agenda to erase what it means to be a citizen of the United States of America. It is their way of obliterating the sacred notion of “equal justice under law.”
Perhaps my favorite euphemism in the Lexicon of Lunacy deployed by American political establishment royalty is a term that is astonishingly dishonest and mercilessly subversive: “identity politics.”
The term, of course, describes a certain political strategy that is highly favored nowadays by Democrat politicians and the hacks they hire to do some of their nastiest dirty work. Republicans also use “identity politics” sometimes, but far less.
What is remarkable about “identity politics” is what an entirely accepted political strategy it has become today, sixty- six years after the Supreme Court declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. Even the great media titans talk about “identity politics” as if it were just some innocuous strategy for reaching voters.
In fact, it is not just another obnoxious example of political correctness. It is the most insidious betrayal of the civil rights movement in America, in which a color-blind equality was so valiantly fought for. “Identity politics” represents everything that noble leaders like Martin Luther King devoted their lives to fighting against.
“Identity politics” is a strategy that separates black people and white people and Asian people and Hispanic people into different groups, based on their ethnicity and racial “identity.” Democrats go even further by dividing men and women and gays and Muslims and Jews and Christians and assigning them all to different camps.
Then Democrats tailor specific messages for each of the groups, often playing one group off another. It is a vicious mockery of Martin Luther King’s plea for all Americans to be judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character. Yet it goes on openly and unapologetically in American politics today.
If public schools were doing it, it would be called “segregation.” If a town were doing it, it would be called a throwback to “Jim Crow” laws. If a storekeeper were doing it, it would be called “racial profiling.” If a regular person walking down the street were doing it, it would be called exactly what it is: racism. Yet, in the world of Democrat politics, it is considered mainstream political strategy.
Standing on the sidelines, observing all of this dishonest language concealing such deep corruption, listening to all the meaningless pablum from the Potomac swamp basin, was Donald J. Trump. And, like the brilliant salesman and master marketer that he has always been, Trump saw an opportunity to inject a little Hudson River honest, brash talk into the conversation. His amazing instincts clearly told him that voters all over would love it.
When Trump jumped into the presidential race in 2015, he was a well-known figure. He had been in the hot glare of the New York tabloid media for decades. Everything from the unveiling of golden buildings that bore his name to raunchy details about his various divorces made headlines. His business accomplishments in the real estate world and his success as a reality television star put him on par with a tiny handful of stars known around the world by one name.
But when Trump descended the escalator in Trump Tower that day, he had made political headlines more recently for something entirely different.
Four years earlier, Trump shocked the political world by launching a campaign questioning whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States. For the entire political-media establishment inside Washington, D.C., this merely proved that Donald Trump was some kind of crazy conspiracy loon. For these establishment people, it also proved Trump was a racist. […] But outside Washington, Trump simply proved he was willing to talk about things and ask questions about things that the entire political establishment had deemed unmentionable—even racist.
Having already demonstrated his unflinching willingness to go crashing wildly into the choppy waters of political incorrectness, Donald Trump was ready to announce his campaign for the presidency. From the first words, it was clear this would be a different kind of candidate running a different kind of campaign.
Donald Trump, accompanied by his wife Melania Trump, is applauded by his daughter Ivanka Trump, right as he’s introduced before his announcement that he will run for president of the U.S., Tuesday, June 16, 2015, in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
“Wow. Whoa,” he said, admiring the crowd cheering him from all sides and the balcony above.
“That is some group of people. Thousands,” he said.
That line still gets me. Literally, within the first ten words of Trump’s campaign—even before he actually announced his intentions—Trump was focused on crowd size. Much more on that later. But suffice it to say that in the years since Trump uttered those words, he has talked a great deal about crowd sizes, and it has driven his enemies absolutely out of their minds. Which, in turn, brings wild, lusty cheers from audiences who pack monster truck arenas to see their president perform.
After admiring the assembled crowd, he thanked them. He called it “an honor” to have them in “Trump Tower.”
Never. Stop. Selling.
I think it was along about that moment in his speech that I said to myself, This guy could be our next president.
His message was simple. Clear. Pro-American. He was selling something. He was telling a story. After seven years of bitter disappointment and the wasted opportunities of Barack Obama’s nerdy, professorial, lecture-some presidency, this guy could be just what America needs, I thought.
Quickly, Trump got back to the size of his crowd.
“This is beyond anybody’s expectations,” he beamed. “There’s been no crowd like this.”
Then he attacked. Ferociously.
Some of the Republicans who had already announced for president botched their kickoffs. The air conditioner didn’t work, or something. “They sweated like dogs,” Trump sneered.
Worse, their crowds were too small for the rooms they hired.
And then the kill shot: “How are they going to beat ISIS?” he asked.
“I don’t think it’s gonna happen. Our country is in serious trouble.”
It’s a fair point. If you cannot pull off a simple announcement speech on television, then how on earth can you possibly be expected to destroy the most diabolical and determined jihad of our time?
There is a larger point here as well. It has to do with language.
In the very first moments of his announcement speech, Donald Trump was declaring a pact with American voters. Earlier, he had proved his willingness to go wildly off script from establishment officialdom when he brazenly questioned Obama’s birth certificate.
Now he was promising to use the same scalding rhetoric and blunt honesty to expose and fix a whole host of grievous maladies facing regular Americans across the country.
Maladies that had crept into American society over the decades under the blind—or, often, encouraging—eye of political leaders in both parties.
Terrorism, globalism, “free” trade, illegal immigration, legal immigration. Trump was willing to be as belligerent as he needed to be in order to finally stand up to ISIS, China, Japan, Mexico, and the entire global world order.
Trump shrewdly understood in that moment that if political candidates were incapable of speaking bluntly about thorny issues, or if they shied away from harshly identifying America’s enemies, then there would be no hope for anything ever getting better.
Standing there in my office, watching this amazing spectacle unfold, it was that different way of talking that most gripped my attention. A wildly fresh vocabulary with sharp notes of brazenly impolitic honesty.
“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problem,” Trump said, just a few lines into the speech.
My goodness, I thought. Nobody in Washington talks like this. But it sounds like exactly what you hear just about anywhere if you leave Washington, D.C., or New York City.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you,” he said, karate chopping the air.
“They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”
On its face, this statement is technically true. Illegals from Mexico (and other places south of the border) come into the United States. They smuggle drugs into the country. They certainly commit crimes (including illegally crossing our border). And some of them are indeed rapists.
Trump was highlighting a real, destructive and expensive problem that a lot of American voters care deeply about. Yet almost nobody in Washington cares about fixing it.
Democrats are desperate to change the voting electorate. So, they want every warm body they can get into the country to hustle to the voting booth. Republicans, being more business friendly, are delighted to turn a blind eye on a process that floods our country with cheap labor.
The only group without a voice in this debate were millions of regular American voters. Until Trump announced his campaign.
Donald Trump announces his candidacy for the U.S. presidency at Trump Plaza on June 16, 2015 in New York City. (Christopher Gregory/Getty Images)
Donald Trump’s furious assault on the political establishment brought condemnations from every corner of it. Sure, those people were perfectly content letting political sleeping dogs lie. China ripping off America was no big deal for them. Free trade was going gangbusters for the stock market and Wall Street. Everybody who was anybody was making a killing off illegal immigration. Cheap nannies for all!
But the seething rebukes of Trump and his announcement speech were about so much more than just those issues. They were about Trump’s language, his rough-and-tumble demeanor, and his willingness to court such political upheaval.
In her memoir, former first lady Michelle Obama eviscerated the man who followed her husband into the White House for just this. Trump’s questioning of Obama’s birth certificate, she wrote, “was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed.”
Again, any hint of questioning Obama’s American loyalty was deemed racist. Such a questioner was not just called out as dishonest or stupid or uninformed. They were flat-out racist for questioning Obama’s alliances.
That was not all Michele Obama had to say about Trump and his style of politics. Trump’s birth certificate inquiry “was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks,” she wrote. “What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”
Wow. Perhaps Michelle Obama spoke too soon when she said that she was finally proud of her country once her husband got elected.
But I have to ask: What is more incendiary? Asking questions about where a political opponent was born? Or accusing a political opponent of deliberately and willfully trying to inspire “wingnuts and kooks” to assassinate the daughters of a president?
While we’re at it, what about a president who wades into local police issues around the country and his only contribution is to inject race into them? What about a president who goes around the world apologizing for America and giving long lectures about how America is exceptional, you know, like every other country on the planet is exceptional in its own way. In other words, nothing exceptional whatsoever about America. What about a president who belittles Americans for their “guns” and their “religion”?
After eight years of insufferable academia out of the White House, it should have been little surprise that American voters would be in the mood for something very different. They would be looking for a guy who speaks bluntly and paints vivid pictures. A guy who spent years savoring his time talking to the workers and tradesmen who built his buildings, and learned to talk like them. Above all, he was listening and listening and taking to heart what he was hearing.
Every now and then, some reporter churns a Trump speech through some word program on the Internet that calculates the grade level the speech was written at. As in sixth-grade level, meaning a sixth grader could understand it. And these simpering, obnoxious, arrogant asses somehow think that speaking so plainly is an insult, when Trump—along with American voters—knows it is actually the highest, most honest achievement there is.
Independent Authenticity Voter
Strangely, this was a counterintuitive gambit for some of the very same voters who wound up stunning the political establishment by voting for Trump—after having voted for Barack Obama. Twice! I call them the independent authenticity voters. They don’t much care about parties and don’t particularly like Washington politics. But every four years they generally turn out and vote. And when the noise of the campaign gets as loud as it does every four years, they are reminded of how much they despise politics and most politicians. But they mostly turn out and vote.
Overwhelmingly, they choose the lesser bastard. The least dishonest one. The one they think comes closest to being genuine and authentic. In 2008, that was obviously Barack Obama. His hopeful campaign about neither red America nor blue America but one red, white, and blue America resonated with these voters. Funnily enough, the late senator John McCain would have appealed to these very voters eight years earlier when he was still a true political “maverick” and before he got co-opted by Democrats and the media (I repeat myself) to kneecap Republicans at every turn. As bad as things were in 2012, President Obama still had enough authenticity left in the tank to beat the hopelessly repackaged Mitt Romney.
These voters yearned for someone authentic to be president. Most horrifying to mainstream political observers is the number of voters who voted for President Barack Obama—twice!—because they thought he was that authentic nonpolitician. Oh, how they were betrayed!
The accepted language of politics is defended by those who practice it as merely polite and responsible. And this is often true. I know many decent politicians and staffers and journalists who embrace polite language. And they are disgusted by anything else in the political arena.
If the 2016 election proved anything, it proved that Donald Trump was exactly right. There was, after all, a tremendous thirst out there for something different. Something new. Above all, something authentic.
So, from the very first lines of his announcement speech that day at the foot of his glass escalator, Mr. Trump proved to be impolitic. Unpolished. Dripping with authenticity. That guy you know who talks rough, who doesn’t own a set of church clothes but would be the first person you would call if you found yourself in a life-threatening situation and needed some really dirty work handled.
Trump knew at that moment that he had to break through all the soft, white noise of modern American politics. All the fake niceties of acceptable political speech. After all, it was a lie and had been for a very long time. Behind all those fake niceties were the raw, brutal realities of vicious politics played by the nastiest of operatives going back decades. They peddled in the most dishonest, soul-crushing, character-destroying sewage that you could imagine—but then wore nice seersucker suits at garden parties, talking all sorts of high-minded pleasantries.
Yuck!
Donald Trump saw all of this for exactly what it was. It was a fraud. Whether it was trade, immigration, wars, spending, or taxes—it was all a fraud. The American people were getting taken to the cleaner’s financially, and the American people were getting sold out as losers.
And Trump wasn’t even president yet! He was still just one of sixteen people vying for the Republican nomination. If you polled the media that day, every single reporter in all of politics would have given Trump a zero percent chance of winning the nomination, let alone the presidency.
After the speech was over, I called my office at the Washington Times and told my editor to scrap the column I had filed—that a new one was on the way. I endorsed Donald Trump, something I had never done before in a newspaper column. Because, after all, who gives a crap what I think about anything? But this was clearly something different. The speech was brilliant. It was daring, to be sure, but it also reflected an enormous amount of intentional thought. Trump had been listening very closely to voters. He had also been talking to some very smart people who clearly follow politics closely and understood the political landscape far better than any of the self-anointed geniuses inside the Beltway.
So I picked up the phone and called Steve Bannon, a friend who I knew liked to dabble in the more contrarian world of counterpolitics. We agreed the speech was great and, of course, Bannon told me he had been talking to Trump. A speech had been written. Bannon had seen it as late as the night before, he said. But the speech Trump delivered on live television to the country was entirely different than the one that had been prepared.
“Yeah, he didn’t read the speech,” Bannon marveled. “He got up there and just decided to wing it!”
Even at that point, Trump was not to be handled or scripted or managed or staffed. He was going on nothing but his own raw political instincts. And in the end, voters trusted Donald J. Trump to remain in character more than they trusted any politician to keep his campaign promises.
If you were to file a whistleblower report with the intelligence community inspector general, up until Sept. 24, the conduct you were blowing the whistle on officially had to be witnessed firsthand.
The “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form — the channel by which one reported such things — specifically stated that any kind of second-hand information about alleged wrongdoing wouldn’t do.
This appears to have changed at 4:25 p.m. on Sept. 24, when a new form was uploaded to the Director of National Intelligence’s website.
On the new form, individuals who “heard about [wrongdoing] from others” can also report it.
That date is pretty significant because it was just two days before the biggest whistleblower report in the intelligence community’s history was released to the public.
Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, reported Friday the firsthand knowledge requirement was canned sometime over the past year and change — and while it’s difficult to pin down when, evidence points to August.
“Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings,” he wrote.
“This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting.”
The change was first noted by researcher Stephen McIntyre, who said the revision and the timing was “something seriously strange.”
Here is something seriously strange. The Disclosure of Urgent Concern Form located earlier today at DNI is only two days old according to its pdf properties. https://t.co/l8foAAj2sCpic.twitter.com/0iwXTxcgIv
The previous form had a bold section with the header “FIRST-HAND INFORMATION REQUIRED.”
“The IC IG cannot transmit information via the ICPWA based on an employee’s second-hand knowledge of wrongdoing,” the form read.
“This includes information received from another person, such as when an employee informs you that he/she witnessed some type of wrongdoing.”
“If you think that wrongdoing took place, but can provide nothing more than second-hand or unsubstantiated assertions, IC IG will not be able to process the complaint or information for submission as an ICWPA.”
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That previous version notes it was approved on May 24, 2018. The new form, meanwhile, states it was revised sometime in August 2019 but it doesn’t specify a date.
That becomes important when you realize that the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — which included no firsthand knowledge about the call — was filed on Aug. 12.
Davis noted the report has plenty of references to knowledge that’s second-hand at best.
He wrote: “The Ukraine call complaint against Trump is riddled not with evidence directly witnessed by the complainant, but with repeated references to what anonymous officials allegedly told the complainant: ‘I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials,’ ‘officials have informed me,’ ‘officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me,’ ‘the White House officials who told me this information,’ ‘I was told by White House officials,’ ‘the officials I spoke with,’ ‘I was told that a State Department official,’ ‘I learned from multiple U.S. officials,’ ‘One White House official described this act,’ ‘Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me,’ ‘I also learned from multiple U.S. officials,’ ‘The U.S. officials characterized this meeting,’ ‘multiple U.S. officials told me,’ ‘I learned from U.S. officials,’ ‘I also learned from a U.S. official,’ ‘several U.S. officials told me,’ ‘I heard from multiple U.S. officials,’ and ‘multiple U.S. officials told me.’”
Up until the afternoon of Sept. 24, you likely wouldn’t be able to report any of this on the “Disclosure of Urgent Concern” form. It’s unclear when the firsthand knowledge requirement actually went away — as Davis noted, it could be anytime between May 24, 2018 and sometime in August.
This could all be a coincidence. But that would be a pretty massive coincidence.
It’s difficult to definitively state a causal relationship here, but the timing certainly makes it look as if some wider allowance was made for the specific complaint at some level.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the change wasn’t warranted or the whistleblower complaint wasn’t something that should have been examined, either — but if this is more than a coincidence, it puts the complaint and the initial decision not to release it in a new light.
An official with the Director of National Intelligence wouldn’t comment on when the revision to the form was made or what the reasoning behind it was when reached by The Federalist, either. That shouldn’t be a good augury for anyone.
There are plenty of answers that need to be provided in the wake of this whistleblower complaint.
Republicans and conservatives shouldn’t kid themselves: Some of them need to come from the president and those around him.
The intelligence community needs to provide some answers about this, too.
It would be edifying, for instance, to find out when this form was revised. I think a lot of people would also like to know what input prompted the change.
If those are questions the intelligence community can’t quickly and decisively answer, this report is looking swampier and swampier.
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In testimony before the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship on Thursday, former ICE Director Tom Homan criticized Acting Chairman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) for selectively noting immigration failures in the Trump administration but not disclosing that the Obama administration followed many of the same policies. “That’s dishonesty, it’s pathetic and it’s said,” he said.
Homan also criticized the Democrats overall for not working with President Trump to secure the border. When he said that, Jayapal cut him off with a pounding gavel, to which Homan responded, “this is a circus, this is a circus.”
Thursday’s hearing was labeled ”The Expansion and Troubling Use of ICE Detention.”
In a statement, House Judiciary Chariman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) said, ”Over the last seven months, this Committee has devoted considerable attention to the Trump Administration’s cruel policies at the border and its attempts to deter individuals from seeking asylum and other humanitarian protections from our nation. Today, we shift our focus to examining the impact of the Administration’s approach to immigration detention in the interior of the United States.”
During the hearing, Acting Chariman Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) criticized the Trump administration’s handling of thousands of illegal immigrants at the border, many of whom are being held in detention centers until their claims for political asylum in the United States can be processed.
At one point in the hearing, former ICE Director Tom Homan was asked if he wanted to address some of the points made by Jayapal. He said, “I’d like to respond to Acting Chairman Jayapal and your comment about the Trump administration moving money around for more detention beds. I’d like to remind you that under the Obama administration we did that most of the years he was president. We [DHS] moved money around – it’s called reprogramming.”
“We did that under the Obama administration and I don’t remember any hearings on that,” said Homan. “And I’d also like to remind you that under the Obama administration – you’re quick to point out the cages – they were built under the Obama administration. I was there.”
Women hold signs as people gather to protest the treatment of immigrants in detention centers during the “Lights for Liberty: A Vigil to End Human Concentration Camps” event in San Diego, California, on July 12, 2019. (Photo credit should read JAVIER TOVAR/AFP/Getty Images)
Homan continued, “Family detention — we had 100 family beds under the Obama administration and we built 3,000 more. When there was a surge in FY14 and FY15, Congress was quick to give all the money we needed to build detention facilities, get transportation contracts. We reprogrammed money out of the majority of the years he was president – that was fine.”
“If this is about transparency, let’s be factual about it,” said.
Jayapal replied that she did not like it under the Obama administration either, to which Homan said, “Well, be honest with the American people. You can’t point out faults in the Trump administration when it happened under the Obama administration. That’s dishonesty. It’s pathetic and it’s sad.”
A woman protests against the upcoming ICE raids and detentions of refugee asylum seekers at a vigil outside the main ICE detention center (background) in downtown Los Angeles on July 12, 2019. – Numerous vigils were held across the US as part of the Lights for Liberty movement’s campaign to call for an end to “inhumane conditions at the border” and the deportations of refugee asylum seekers. (Photo credit should read MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images)
Jayapal then repeatedly banged the gavel down to silence Homan. She refused to allow him to respond further.
Later, Homan was then given some time by a Republican member of the subcommittee. He said, “Look, you want to know why there are 50,000 people in detention? You want to know why there are a million illegal entries in the United States? You want to know why we have these issues? Because you have failed to secure the border.”
“You guys failed to work with this president to close the three loopholes we’ve asked for two years to close,” said homan. ”If you want to know why this issue exists, you need to look in the mirror. You have failed the American people by not securing the border and closing loopholes.”
At that point, Jayapal again cut off Homan’s time and repeatedly slammed the gavel for silence.
“This is a circus,” said Homan. “This is a circus.”
Earlier in the hearing, Homan criticized remarks made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) in June, when she compared the border detention centers to Nazi concentration camps.
“That comparison is 100% inaccurate and it is disgusting,” said Homan. “Now, forgive me, I didn’t think Nazi death camps had detention standards. I didn’t think they had health care. I didn’t think they had recreation, law libraries, visitation, three squares a day. It’s an insulting comparison.”
“This is a war against the highest noble man who has defended our country,” Academy Award-winning actor Jon Voight says in a Twitter video urging Americans to “stand with our President Trump” against Democrats’ “evil words crying for impeachment.”
“The left are afraid. Their power is lessening with every deal that is accomplished by Donald Trump,” Voight warns, adding that their anger has been steadily growing – and has reached a breaking point that they’re now resorting to “such evil” because they want to run American “like a corrupt ring.”
“How can a human being have such anger?” Voight asks. He then explains that it is because the Left “have no open heart of loving and seeing the truth.”
Voight closes by asking God to show truth to all Americans – and implores all Americans to, in the name of God, stand strong with Trump against “such evil among us.”
“I say: stand now with Trump. Let truth prevail. And, may God show all the truth: that we are truly a nation stronger because of our president.
“The left are afraid. Their power is lessening with every deal that is accomplished by Donald Trump.
“In the name of God, and his power for this nation, let us stay strong – and without such evil among us.”
War – this is war against truths. This is a war against the highest noble man who has defended our country and made us safe and great again.
Let me stand with our president – let us all stand with our President Trump – in the time of such evil words crying for impeachment.
This is a crime – that the left are trying to force. This is a disgrace by such ignorant followers that have no truth of what truly has been brought back to our country. We have gained greatness, we have gained jobs, we have gained more than any president has promised.
This radical left are destructive. Their codes, of what is supposed to be, are corrupt with lies, deceit and anger. And, we ask why.
We ask how: how can a human being have such anger toward the greatness of our country’s glory?
I’ll tell you why. Because, for so long, their anger has been growing, and with such deep pain, with no open heart of loving and seeing the truth.
The truth of what truly matters is the productivity of what was promised and what we, the people of the United States were promised – and have received.
And, what does the radical left do for such greatness? They want to destroy it. They want civilization to be run like a corrupt ring.
I say: stand now with Trump. Let truth prevail. And, may God show all the truth: that we are truly a nation stronger because of our president.
The left are afraid. Their power is lessening with every deal that is accomplished by Donald Trump.
In the name of God, and his power for this nation, let us stay strong – and without such evil among us.
.@AmbassadorRice: “Normally there is a full, verbatim transcript” of calls like Trump’s w/ the Ukraine president. Says he tried to “bury” it on a more secure server, but acknowledges the Obama Admin. sometimes did the same. pic.twitter.com/B6zZNbZsTG — Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 27, 2019 So basically they want to impeach Trump for making the conversations […]
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ speech to the 74th annual High-Level General Assembly meeting on September 24th was full of generalities about world problems the UN is purporting to deal with, in contrast to President Trump’s honest discussion of hard truths.
Three years ago, with the referendum of June 23, 2016, the British people decided with a percentage of almost 52% and with 71.8% participation the exit of Great Britain from the European Union. This great result was undoubtedly the first major, painful defeat for the under German-controlled European Union of banks and multinationals.
