“The assumption that spending more of the taxpayers’ money will make things better has survived all kind of evidence that has made things worse.” – Thomas Sowell
Parents vs Radical Left: Parents, independents, and moderate Democrats have had enough! They sent a strong message to politicians across this country that enough is enough.
The “leave us alone” coalition just wants to go ahead and live their normal lives without the government telling them what to do, when to do it, and defining the world their children “must” grow up in…under their perverted self-righteousness.
American voters let their voices be heard…
- Defunding the police is a bad idea
- Adding TRILLIONS of borrowed money to our nation’s debt for political pay off is a bad idea
- Open Borders that create an illegal immigrant surge that costs taxpayers BILLIONS is a bad idea
- Shutting down schools to placate teachers’ unions at the expense of our children is a bad idea
- Forcing Critical Race Theory on our children which fosters racism is a bad idea
- Indoctrinating our children to hate America is a bad idea
- Allowing biological men to compete in girls’ sports and use girls’ bathrooms is a bad idea
- Mandating masks and vaccines on children when the science is less than conclusive is a bad idea
- Calling parents who engage, complain, and stand up to radical school boards domestic terrorists is a bad idea
- Allowing radical protestors to burn our cities, destroy our institutions, and invade our neighborhoods is a bad idea
- Cancel culture limiting free speech and public dissent is a bad idea
- Lecture average Americans about pronouns, sexual norms, and challenging their right to their faith is a bad idea
- Having the IRS track every transaction over $600 (while Pelosi is worth $100million +) to make sure you’re not doing anything wrong?!?…is a bad idea!
The bottom line…parents matter, our children and grandchildren matter and yes, families matter.
Pelosi is a Lame Duck: After serving over 30+ years in Congress, Speaker Pelosi is a lame duck.
Moderate Democrats are being forced to cast horrible votes that their constituents don’t agree with. Younger members of Congress are being forced to risk their careers for some left-wing agenda. Representative democracy is challenged by the iron fist of an outgoing House Speaker…how long can that last?
After this last Tuesday’s elections across the country…many Democrats are looking for and hoping for change. Will they listen to the voters or die on the proverbial political sword for a radical left-wing agenda?!?
That is the question…
Biden’s Inflation: It’s here. Thanksgiving with your families will cost more this year.
It will also cost you more to travel to see your families to enjoy Biden’s inflation…thanks, NOT.
P.S. more spending, more borrowing, and more pork barrel political spending isn’t helping!!!
What’s Next?: If you want to understand where America really wants to go and what this election says about the 2022 cycle, read this memo from RGA Executive Director David Rexrode. He lays it out very well.
https://www.rga.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/VA-NJ-Election-Day-Memo.pdf
Big Week: It was a busy and big week, with lots of information below. I hope you take the time to review and consider how conservatives can better move forward!
All my best,
-Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
Youngkin wins big in Virginia, Saul warns about government price controls driving up drug costs, and Joe Biden doesn’t know what his Department of Justice is doing!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-youngkin-virginia-victory-midterms-2022-blueprint
–https://insidesources.com/congress-wants-to-negotiate-away-seniors-futures/
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House Passes Biden Infrastructure Bill After Hours of Negotiations
After a day of negotiations, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, sending it to President Joe Biden’s desk late Friday evening.
The measure includes some $550 billion in new spending that seeks to fund the construction of roads, bridges and highways, public transport, water infrastructure, as well as power and broadband infrastructure, and cyber security, among other initiatives. It passed the Senate in August.
The final vote was 228-206, with 13 Republicans joining Democrats in support of the bill. The Republicans were Reps. John Katko (R-N.Y.), Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Don Young (R-Alaska), Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), Fred Upon (R-Mich.), Don Bacon (R-Nebr.), Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Penn.), and David McKinley (R-W.Va.)
Six progressive Democrats—members of the “Squad”—voted against the measure. They were Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.).
House Democrats late Friday had reached an agreement to vote on the bill, as well as to set up a separate future vote on Biden’s ambitious $1.75 trillion budget bill, also known as the Build Back Better bill.
Pelosi Handing Death Sentence to 40 House Democrats
On Thursday afternoon, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was very visibly gesticulating on the House floor as she tried to line up votes among fellow Democrats for the $1.7 trillion reconciliation bill pushed by President Joe Biden and the left wing of their party.
To one Republican House member, however, Pelosi’s efforts amounted to the speaker making “her growing number of vulnerable Members in the House walk the plank.”
“Most of Pelosi’s browbeating occurred near the well of the House and was clearly visible on CSPAN,” Rep. Jim Hagedorn, R.-Minn., told Newsmax shortly after the House adjourned Thursday. “Pelosi was animated and pointing fingers, most likely demanding her growing number of vulnerable members ‘walk the plank’ one last time. One gets the impression this exercise has become more about Pelosi’s last gasp to wield power and project her leftwing bonafides on the way out of office, than doing anything constructive for America or protecting the careers of her members.”
Hagedorn likened the speaker’s vociferous lining up of Democrat members for the reconciliation bill to that for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in 2009.
The Big ‘Racist’ Fail in Virginia
Voters called ‘white supremacists’ elected a black Lt. Governor.
One salutary result from Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia Tuesday is the failure of Democratic racial demagoguery. Throughout the campaign Democrats and their media allies assailed Mr. Youngkin and his supporters as closet white supremacists. MSNBC’s Joy Reid said the issue of education and critical race theory is “code for white parents don’t like the idea of teaching about race.”
On PBS the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart said that if Mr. Youngkin won it would be because Republicans decided that “tap-dancing with white supremacy is their way back into power.” Terry McAuliffe was especially nasty as he closed his campaign this weekend, saying of his rival: “He’s run a racist campaign from start to finish.”
So what did all these racist Virginia voters do Tuesday night? In addition to electing Mr. Youngkin as Governor, they elected Winsome Sears as Lt. Governor. She will be the first African-American woman to be elected to statewide office in Virginia history. These same “racists” appear to have rejected Mark Herring, a Democrat who admitted he’d appeared in blackface. Instead they chose Jason Miyares, who will be Virginia’s first Latino attorney general.
Biden’s 2020 victory masks the GOP’s quiet dominance
Lost in the public obsession with former President Trump’s loss, grievances and threats to run again: Non-Trump Republicans have had a strong, yearlong run nationally beneath and around him.
Why it matters: Democrats control Washington and hold sway in most colleges and corporate suites, plus much of the mainstream media. But Republicans are thriving despite Trump’s tactics and antics.
Republicans kept their distance from Trump and won the governor’s mansion in Virginia — and almost won liberal New Jersey.
They picked up a dozen House seats in 2020 when almost everyone thought they would lose a bunch.
Republicans also picked up 154 state legislative seats in 2020 to take control of two new chambers.
These statehouse wins help them draw districts for 2022 that could net as many as 13 seats, according to a Democratic study.
Redistricting alone is expected to give Republicans the five seats they’d need to flip the U.S. House.
Ahead of January’s inauguration of Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, Republicans control 27 of the 50 state governor’s mansions.
In Virginia, GOP finds new playbook — not easily replicated
In a stunning victory in Virginia and a strong showing in New Jersey, the Republican Party has fashioned a playbook that could repair the GOP’s tarnished image in swing states and suburban districts across the nation.
But it is a formula that may be difficult to replicate on a broad scale in next year’s midterm elections.
Republican businessman Glenn Youngkin, virtually unknown a year ago, won the Virginia governor’s race early Wednesday by running away from the national Republican Party and its most prominent leaders — especially Donald Trump.
The Virginia Republican spent the closing months of his campaign avoiding the divisive issues that most animate Trump’s base, including the baseless prospect of election fraud. And Youngkin benefited from running against former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a political insider with a muddled message.
“Candidates matter,” Youngkin chief strategist Jeff Roe said. “We weren’t defined by Obama, we weren’t defined by Trump, we were defined by Glenn.”
Four lessons from Youngkin’s big win
Glenn Youngkin’s victory in Virginia on Tuesday has supercharged the view that Republicans have big momentum as we head into the midterm elections next year. Everybody loves a winner, and Youngkin, having put the latest “W” on the scoreboard for the GOP, will be the model Republicans will look to replicate over the next year.
Plenty of post-election punditry will try to say what did (or didn’t) give Youngkin the edge. Progressives largely seem to have decided that a combination of the specter of critical race theory paired with congressional Democrats’ inability to “go bold” on Joe Biden’s agenda is what sunk former Gov. Terry McAuliffe and the rest of the Democratic ticket.
But my take on the available data suggests that rather than a single unified theory of “what happened in Virginia,” Youngkin’s victory was fueled by a variety of factors.
Schools mattered — in more ways than you think. Education was a top-tier issue in the Virginia governor’s race. My polling showed Youngkin ahead by 15 points among K-12 parents in Virginia. Youngkin’s ads in major media markets hammered McAuliffe saying he didn’t think parents should tell schools what they should teach, while promising to raise education funding.
Yes, “critical race theory” was a concept Youngkin would touch on in statements and on Twitter, though you probably didn’t hear those words in a TV ad in a major market…
Republicans look to education as winning issue after Virginia successes
Republicans are looking to education as a winning issue ahead of next year’s midterm elections after putting it front and center propelled the party to a clear victory in Virginia Tuesday.
Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin spent much of his campaign focusing on how much control parents should have over what is taught in their children’s classroom. Youngkin’s focus on the issues came as Loudoun County, a Washington, D.C., exurb, became the epicenter of the nationwide fight centering on school boards.
According to CNN exit polls, roughly 25 percent of Virginia voters said education was their most important issue, second only to the economy.
The issue also may have played a role in the razor-thin New Jersey governor’s race that has yet to be called. Republican Jack Ciattarelli has slammed the idea of critical race theory being taught in schools and far outpaced expectations at the ballot box.
Conservative activists are predicting the win on education in Virginia to be the start of a movement akin to the Tea Party, which was key to massive Republican gains in Congress in 2010.
The strategists who made the ‘Youngkin Republican’
On this episode of Playbook Deep Dive, we take you into Virginia… where on Tuesday night, Glenn Youngkin celebrated his victory over Terry McAuliffe to become Virginia’s first Republican governor since 2009.
For the first time in 12 years, a Republican won the governorship in Virginia. And it wasn’t just any victory — to claim the seat, Glenn Youngkin had to beat Terry McAuliffe, former governor and Democratic royalty. Ryan Lizza digs into the narrow win with Youngkin campaign strategists Jeff Roe and Kristin Davison, and the mistakes they think McAuliffe’s campaign made. Plus, senior politics editor Charlie Mahtesian on the significant places Youngkin gained the most votes.
Network liberals go through ‘7 stages of grief’ over collapse of McAuliffe
The liberals on America’s networks ended up going through the “seven stages of grief” over Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s election collapse in the Virginia governor’s race, won by Republican Glenn Youngkin this week.
That’s according to a tongue-lashing that social media delivered as the anchors appeared stunned by developments Tuesday night.
The Daily Mail reported “liberal news hosts” were being “roasted” for their collective meltdown as reality hit.
“Hosts on MSNBC and CNN were unable to contain their shock at McAuliffe’s defeat, with Jake Tapper looking at a map of the election results and saying flatly: ‘Oh my God.'” the report explained.
And, it continued, “Commentator Joy Reid joined Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and launched an astonishing tirade against ‘dangerous’ Republicans, warning that voting for Youngkin – ‘a soft white racist’ – was a gateway to more ‘hardcore racism.'”
Border GOP lawmakers urge Dem leaders to pull immigration provisions from spending bill, citing migrant crisis
Democrats have been mulling various forms of protection for illegal immigrants in the Build Back Better Act.
epublican lawmakers from border states on Wednesday wrote to Democratic congressional leaders, urging them to pull controversial immigration provisions — including amnesty for illegal immigrants — from the Democratic spending bill before Congress, warning that it will exacerbate the crisis at the southern border.
The letter, led by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, and signed on to by every House Republican lawmaker in a border state, tells Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that “we cannot afford to create new incentives to illegal migration in the midst of this crisis.”
There were more than 192,000 migrant encounters in September, down only slightly from the more than 200,000 encountered in July and August. It means that more than 1.7 million migrants were encountered in FY 2021.
Really, the Polls Stole the New Jersey Gubernatorial ElectionJack Ciattarelli was robbed.
This is not a rant about machines programmed in Venezuela, dead people voting, midnight voter dumps, felons voting, phoney mailed ballots with forged signatures, vote harvesting, people illegally in the country casting ballots, people voting more than once, valid ballots being found uncounted in dumpsters, or counting envelopes postmarked after expired deadlines.
Rather, this is about a manifest election steal this past Tuesday. It happens too often, and it has to stop, but it takes too much intelligence by too many people to make it stop. Too many people just are not insightful enough to realize they are being bamboozled. They will be fooled again and again and again until they die and are buried, leaving behind genetic code to assure future generations of patsies. It is about the way that Left-oriented polls steal elections from Republicans.
Back in the late 1960s I volunteered, as a high schooler, for a guy running for New York’s City Council. I learned more about politics during those six months than I ever have since. Brooklyn effectively has only one contending party, the Democrats, so — if you have any brains — you register Democrat even if you are a conservative Republican, and then you work for and vote for the conservative Republican “Democrat” of your choice. Many one-party polities operate that way. Indeed, I soon will be publishing a series of articles urging Republicans in Ocasio’s district to change registrations away from the GOP — just registered Republicans in that one district — so they can vote her out in the Democrat primaries. That is when she can be kicked out on the rump of her $14,000 “Tax the Rich” Dress. By contrast, a Democrat in that district cannot be beaten by a Republican in a November election. Most voters there simply are not sophisticated enough to discern nuances between and among candidates; rather, they blindly vote party. (Oh, for the Critical Race Theory monitors who see Systemic Racism in every punctuation mark, the fools to whom I am referring are White people. And white, of course, consists of all colors.)
Early on, when in those teens, I learned that polls can be crazy wrong and thereby actually distort elections. Almost invariably, the polling mistakes favor Democrats and the Left. One would assume that, in a world of innocent mistakes, half the time the Left benefits, and half the time the Right. But when it comes to election polling, the mistakes almost always favor the Left. When the polls are distorted, the Democrat almost invariably ends up polling better than the final results. And so it was Tuesday in the Garden State.
Real Clear Politics tries their best — and I am a fan of RCP — to get numbers right by publishing averages of several respected polls, so that the voters can gauge the trends with greater accuracy. Thus, an outlier poll gets mediated by the mix. Going into election day, that RCP average had Democrat Phil Murphy beating Republican Jack Ciattarelli for governor by almost eight points. Such a gap is impossible to close, beyond any margin of error. Even for those of us who discount polls as biased towards the Left, an eight-point gap is profound, a borderline landslide in American elections.
All the power to the parents vs. Critical Race Theory
Raised during the 1960s era of systematic racism and consequential societal change, I have experienced the real-life impacts of our country’s world-changing mission statement: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” That is what makes recent attempts to institutionalize division and disincentivize parental involvement in the classroom all the more disturbing.
I grew up in a home of teachers. My dad was a college professor for more than 40 years, and my mom taught junior high. They were trusted to do what teachers throughout our history have always done: teach students to read, write, add, subtract, and think critically, nurturing the wellbeing of children at important stages of development along the way. To this day, I still remember the life lessons learned from both my parents and my teachers.
As a father of six and grandfather to 16, it has been my experience that success in the classroom and beyond is not just based on extraordinary teachers and a strong curriculum, but on robust parental involvement. Parents have and always will be invaluable advocates for their children, and we do not expect, nor will we tolerate, attacks to the contrary.
Parents’ passionate concerns and debate regarding the divisive practices of critical race theory, school safety and other education decisions that directly impact their children should be encouraged and supported, not attacked and disregarded. Recent actions by the federal Department of Education, Department of Justice, and activist teachers’ unions to intimidate and stifle the voices of concerned taxpaying Americans are shameful and harmful to students.
Democrats: If You Disagree With Us, You’re An Insurrectionist
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to back off from investigating parents is rooted in the belief that all dissent against the leftist establishment must be repressed.
For Democrats, Groundhog Day came nearly a month early this year. For them, like the character in the classic Bill Murray comedy, every day is Jan. 6. For them, every challenge to leftist orthodoxy, whether in the form of Biden administration policy or local school boards attempting to impose critical race theory, unreasonable COVID precautions, or transgender policies, is another day of insurrection.
They see insurrectionists everywhere. They see them in the media, where they demand that Fox News be canceled or demonetized because of its Trumpist heresies and refusal to treat a Capitol riot — in which the only person killed was an unarmed protester gunned down in cold blood by a police officer — as a new Civil War.
They see them in Congress, where anyone who challenged the 2020 results or resists the Democrats’ bills to ban voter ID laws and make permanent pandemic-based election changes that removed guardrails against cheating are seeking to steal not just the 2020 election but the ones yet to be held in 2022 and 2024.
Suburban Erosion Has Driven Biden’s State-by-State Popularity Decline
In most states, the change in sentiment about Biden among suburban voters tracks with the movement among all voters, showing the weight the former group carries statewide.
Some of the largest drops in Biden’s suburban support came in 2022 battlegrounds such as Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, Florida and Pennsylvania.
Declining suburban sentiment for Biden hasn’t weighed down vulnerable Senate Democrats to the same extent — except Mark Kelly of Arizona.
America’s suburbs helped fuel the Democratic Party’s electoral victories during Donald Trump’s presidency, but what these dense and educated enclaves giveth, they look primed to taketh away.
According to Morning Consult Political Intelligence tracking conducted this year in all 50 states, the erosion of support for President Joe Biden among suburban voters has driven the decline in the Democratic standard-bearer’s popularity across the map. These voters carry particular weight in states that will be key to Democrats’ chances of holding control of Congress after next year’s midterm elections, adding another hurdle to the already complicated work of holding the party’s slim majorities.
“He’s gotta go back up there, because what’s the alternative?” Democratic strategist Ian Russell said of Biden’s numbers in the suburbs. “He’s got to shore them up, or we’re going to have much bigger problems on our hands.”
What the numbers say
In the average state, 44 percent of suburban voters approved of Biden’s job performance in the third quarter of his presidency, down 6 percentage points since his first three months in office, while the share who disapproved increased 8 points to 52 percent. Taken together, this marks a 14-point decline in Biden’s net approval rating in the suburbs that helped deliver Democratic victories over the past four years, from Virginia’s governorship in 2017 to the two Senate runoffs in Georgia early this year.
Democrats hit panic button after Virginia collapse
A dismal performance by Democratic candidates in New Jersey and Virginia is sparking a sense of panic among Democrats who now view their Senate and House majorities as in serious peril in the 2022 midterm elections.
In Virginia, a state President Biden won by 10 points a year ago, Democrats saw former Gov. Terry McAuliffe fall to defeat in a state the polls suggested he had been leading months ago.
In New Jersey, a strong performance by little-known former GOP Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli against Gov. Phil Murphy (D) was too close to call. Democrats had expected Murphy to win easily.
Republicans immediately went on the offensive, announcing a new bid to go after swing-seat Democrats in the House. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said his party might be able to flip as many as 60 seats.
The GOP needs to flip a net of only five seats to take back the House majority. If they can gain one Senate seat, they’d take control of that chamber.
Both goals looked to be in reach after Tuesday.
A sobering reality hits Democrats after election losses
Democrats awoke Wednesday to a sobering reality. A year after celebrating victory in the 2020 elections, their slender congressional majorities are now even more at risk than they feared, and it is not clear that President Biden or his party has a workable plan to rebalance a political landscape tilting significantly against them.
Republican Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial election was not a total surprise. Nervous Democrats could sense it coming for weeks. But the full impact of the loss in a state that Biden won by 10 points just 12 months ago, along with a far closer gubernatorial race than anyone expected in New Jersey, which Biden won by 16 points, triggered alarms across the party.
Next year, the entire Democratic Party will face the voters, with Republicans more confident than ever that they have the issues, whether education, inflation or the border, as well as the strategy and a strong tail wind to drive Democrats from power in the House and Senate, and thereby short-circuit the final two years of Biden’s first term in office. How quickly Democrats absorb Tuesday’s results and begin to respond will determine how well they can hold down expected losses in the coming midterms.
It is always the case that too much can be read into the results of these off-year elections. Maybe it was just the patterns of history in Virginia, which for decades has seen the party that holds the White House lose the governorship. McAuliffe in 2013 was the lone exception. Similarly, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D), who was in a close race with Republican Jack Ciattarelli, faced a history of incumbent Democrats struggling to win a second term.
But Democrats would be foolhardy to underestimate what happened Tuesday. To lose a state like Virginia, which has been trending Democratic for a decade, and to struggle so much in New Jersey suggests that, unless things change, only the bluest of states or districts are likely to be safe in 2022.
The Russian Collusion Hoax: Durham and the Clinton Dossier
A new indictment continues the slow unraveling of a 2016 political scandal.
The nation argued for five years over the infamous “Steele dossier,” the document on which the Federal Bureau of Investigation relied to investigate Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. It should have been called the Clinton dossier.
Special counsel John Durham this week obtained an indictment of Igor Danchenko, a Russian who provided information for the dossier. Mr. Danchenko is charged with lying to the FBI, but the bigger story of the indictment is Democrats’ central role in every aspect of the dossier and the FBI investigation.
Never forget the original claim. According to the FBI, Democrats and the media, Mr. Trump harbored secret and nefarious ties with Russia. We knew that because—as Mother Jones explained in a 2016 article that became the reigning story line— Christopher Steele was a “credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the U.S. government.” He had come across “troubling” evidence of Trump collusion and brought it to U.S. law enforcement.
It took a year for congressional investigators to reveal the dossier had in fact been commissioned by the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, working for the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It took two more years for Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz to expose that Mr. Steele had relied on a Russian source who said he’d never expected Mr. Steele to present his info as facts, since most of it was “hearsay.” Two more years on, Mr. Durham’s indictment says this source—Mr. Danchenko—obtained material from a longtime Democratic operative who was active in the 2016 Clinton campaign. Clintonites here, Clintonites there, Trump “scandals” everywhere.
Navy must speed up shipbuilding, modernization to keep pace with China, Russia at sea, analysts say
China and Russia have dramatically accelerated their naval shipbuilding and modernization programs in recent years, while the U.S. has struggled to improve its own capacity for warfighting missions and been tagged with a poor readiness rating from national security analysts.
The Chinese have made particularly notable strides, engaging in a maritime buildup that made global headlines a year ago when Pentagon officials sounded the alarm that Beijing’s total fleet roughly 350 warships had surpassed the roughly 300 maintained by Washington.
The U.S. force still vastly outstrips China‘s in terms of real power projection. America, for instance, has 11 active aircraft carriers compared with just two that Beijing has brought online since 2012.
However, the Chinese Communist Party makes no secret of its goal to build a “world-class” military by 2050, and U.S. analysts are increasingly wary that Washington may struggle to keep pace with China‘s rapidly expanding shipbuilding operations.
“They’ve got a lot of shipyards and a lot of capacity,” says Brent Sadler, a retired U.S. naval officer and analyst with the Heritage Foundation. “They’re building lots of ships.”
Protecting Pravda
Media censorship is really monopoly protectionism—and the “unfair competition” is you.
It is bitterly ironic how America’s current corporate media embrace censorship—for others, of course. After all, the First Amendment’s recognition and protection of the unalienable right to free speech and the freedom of the press have long been rightly and ardently defended by those making a living in the industry. Their rationale was elementary: an attack on the free speech of one citizen was an attack on the free speech of all citizens.
Today, however, many of the most strident voices for censorship and self-censorship—including calls for the First Amendment to be radically curtailed—come from the left-wing, spoon-fed, regime-succored Pravda media.
What changed? Some, rather charitably, believe the Pravda media are enraptured with their regressive leftist ideology—which must be proselytized and protected at all costs, including the adoption of “accountability” (read “biased”) reporting—which impels journalists to ditch objectivity. This in turn spurs demands for both censorship and self-censorship to dispense with ideological inconveniences, such as facts and truth.
But in actuality, it is best to recall the cardinal rule of politics: follow the money. When one does, the Pravda media’s ignoble motive manifests: censorship is their protectionism.
Protectionism is usually implemented to preserve manufacturing industries, like automobiles and steel. The industries claim to be economically pressed by what they declare is unfair foreign competition, and demand the government provide subsidies, tax breaks, and/or barriers to market entry for their unfair competitors through tariffs and other policies to protect their jobs and profits. The politicians who support these policies are rewarded with endorsements, contributions, votes, etc.
Now ponder our Pravda media. It is also an industry, manufacturing “content” and bent on shaping and changing American public opinion. Yet, in this age of the democratization of information, the corporate media is facing pressure from what they deem to be unfair competition that must be stopped through government and industry action. That competition is you; and you must be silenced.
One of the aspects the Pravda media most despise is how the democratization of information eliminates barriers to entry for Americans in all walks of life, allowing their voices to be heard and to influence public affairs and policies. After all, what good is a pricey journalism degree if the dirty uncredentialed can undo all your propagandizing with a few viral lines on social media?
Do We Have a Constitutional-Conservative Supreme Court Majority — or Pols in Robes?
Recent Court actions should cause us to worry.
In a glum column last weekend, I related that Trump-appointed justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh had joined with the Supreme Court’s three-justice progressive bloc and its Machiavellian chief justice to deny a religious-liberty claim against an irrationally discriminatory state mandate — specifically, a plea to be exempted from Maine’s COVID-vaccine requirement, in the same way the state exempts those who claim to fear vaccination for medical reasons.
This was crushing news for constitutional conservatives who had fought so hard for the confirmations of Barrett and Kavanaugh against an unhinged progressive onslaught.
The result would have been easier to take had the justices tried, however unconvincingly, to argue that the claimants had a weak case on the merits. To the contrary, Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh did not contest the conclusion of the Court’s three originalists — Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — that the religious objectors had made a persuasive case. And, indeed, it would be difficult to imagine their doing so. The dissent authored by Justice Gorsuch pointed out that Maine’s mandate stifling religious liberty permits individualized exemptions for non-religion-based objectors. Just four months ago, in the Court’s Fulton v. Philadelphia decision, Justice Barrett stressed, in a concurrence joined by Justice Kavanaugh, that if a state law permits individualized exemptions, its burdens on religion will not survive unless the law satisfies the Court’s exacting strict-scrutiny test. In the Maine case, Gorsuch compellingly demonstrated that the state mandate could not conceivably pass strict-scrutiny muster.
