Trump Announces at a Georgia Campaign Rally That Audi Will Build a New Auto Factory in the State

From Newsmax.com (Oct. 25):

President Donald Trump on Saturday announced that Audi will build an automobile plant in Georgia as he tries to deliver on his promise to bolster American manufacturing in the final days before the midterm elections.

Speaking at a campaign rally in Perry, Georgia, where he sought to boost Republican candidates, Trump said Audi — the German luxury brand owned by Volkswagen — would commit $4.2 billion in nearby Macon to begin construction on a plant that will produce 200,000 cars a year.

“Think of that. 200,000 cars a year. That’s incredible,” Trump said, crediting his aggressive and unpopular tariff policies for the company's decision to build the plant.

The announcement seemed timed to offer a last-minute boost to Republican candidates in the battleground state, including Rep. Mike Collins, who is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff. Trump has spent October campaigning in reliably Republican states as the party tries to hold onto its majorities in the House and Senate. Trump won Georgia in 2024 after losing it in 2020.

Trump was joined on stage by Gernot Döllner, the chairman of the board of management at Audi, who said the plant would be producing “our biggest and most premium SUVs.”

“This is a long-term investment, because we believe in the American market,” he said.

Audi, in a news release, said the plant — its first in Georgia — would create approximately 4,500 jobs and that construction was scheduled to begin in 2027, with production beginning in the early 2030s.

Republicans are bracing for losses in the Nov. 3 midterm elections as they contend with an unpopular president and an electorate that is angry over high costs and the ongoing war in Iran.

At the rally, Rick Jackson, the Republican candidate for Georgia governor, thanked Trump for the plans.

“Thank you on behalf of Georgia for putting the biggest economic deal in Georgia history right here today," he said. [source]

Call it a win! 

Another win:

DOJ touts major drops in crimes amid enforcement surge, 31% decline in aggravated assaults across US

The Problem with “Predictive” Theories of Economics

From David Gordon on Mises.org (Sept. 17, 2020):

Kay and King are not Austrians, but in this important book, they lend aid and comfort to several key points of Austrian economics. Kay teaches economics at Oxford, and King, who was formerly governor of the Bank of England, teaches at NYU. (King in an earlier book, The End of Alchemy, that I had occasion to review warns against the dangers of fractional reserve banking in a way that will delight admirers of Murray Rothbard.)

Austrians hold that the dynamics of the market depend on profit-seeking entrepreneurs, whose judgments of appraisement are of necessity subjective, irreducible to monetary calculation. As Joseph Salerno explains,

Mises presents a penetrating critique of the Walrasian view that, in the plans of producers, prices substitute for knowledge of the economic data or, rather, for entrepreneurial understanding and appraisement of future variations of these data. Mises’s critique is grounded on the incontrovertible fact that “The prices of the market are historical facts expressive of a state of affairs that prevailed at a definite instant of irreversible historical time.” As such, realized prices can never serve as an unambiguous guide to production; which is always aimed at supplying a market of the more or less remote future involving a different configuration of the eco­nomic data.

Mises’s argument depends on the distinction, made famous by Frank Knight, between risk and uncertainty. In a situation of risk, the actor knows the possible outcomes and can apply the probability calculus to them. In a situation of uncertainty, he cannot do so, either because he cannot use the probability calculus or because he does not know all the possible outcomes. He must rely on his judgment about the particular case. Mises calls this the distinction between class and case probability. He says in Human Action about case probability: “Case probability means: We know, with regard to a particular event, some of the factors which determine its outcome; but there are other determining factors about which we know nothing. Case probability has nothing in common with class probability but the incompleteness of our knowledge. In every other regard the two are entirely different.”

Mainstream neoclassicals do not accept this distinction. Milton Friedman says, “[I]n his seminal work, Frank Knight drew a sharp distinction between risk, as referring to events subject to a known or knowable probability distribution, and uncertainty, as referring to events for which it was not possible to specify numerical probabilities. I’ve not referred to this distinction because I do not believe it is valid….We may treat people as if they assigned numerical probabilities to every conceivable event.” If Friedman is correct, a key tenet of Austrian economics is wrong; entrepreneurial appraisement must exit the scene.

Mises acknowledges that you can say things like “I think there is a 50 percent chance the Republicans will win the coming election.” But this is just an expression of how confident you feel about this, and it is meaningless to use probability calculus here. He says,

On the eve of the 1944 presidential election people could have said:…(c) I estimate Roosevelt’s chances as 9 to 1….This is a proposition about the expected outcome couched in arithmetical terms. It certainly does not mean that out of ten cases of the same type nine are favorable for Roosevelt and one unfavorable. It cannot have any reference to class probability. But what else can it mean? It is a metaphorical expression….For the comparison is based on a conception which is in itself faulty in the very frame of the calculus of probability, namely the gambler’s fallacy. In asserting that Roosevelt’s chances are 9:1, the idea is that Roosevelt is in regard to the impending election in the position of a man who owns 90 per cent of all tickets of a lottery in regard to the first prize. It is implied that this ratio 9:1 tells us something substantial about the outcome of the unique case in which we are interested. There is no need to repeat that this is a mistaken idea.

Knight has an amusing comment on this issue. He says, “The saying often quoted from Lord Kelvin…that where you cannot measure, your knowledge is meagre and unsatisfactory; as applied in mental and social science is misleading and pernicious…the Kelvin dictum very largely mean[s] in practice, if you cannot measure, measure anyhow!”

Friedman has an answer to this objection. It does not matter, he says, whether people actually do assign probabilities to every conceivable event. This is just an assumption economists make, and what counts for a good theory is not the realism of its assumptions. Rather, a good theory is one that generates good predictions.

Kay and King reject this view, and here they again render Austrian economics a service, though, to reiterate, they themselves aren’t Austrians. The method of Austrian praxeology is deductive, and unless your premises are true, you have no guarantee that the conclusions you deduce from them are also true. Thus, Austrians must reject Friedman’s position.

Kay and King reject Friedman’s methodology because there is almost never clear evidence that the predictions of a theory are false. You can always adjust something in the theory to make it come out true, and that is what all too many economists do:

Friedman’s article [on methodology] appeared in a brief period of intellectual history in which a version of Popperian falsificationism—the idea that a hypothesis acquires scientific status only if there is a possibility that it might be refuted was in fashion….The decisive rejection of this falsificationist view is encapsulated in what philosophers know today as the Duhem-Quine hypothesis: such refutation is rarely definitive, because any test requires a range of auxiliary assumptions, and it is always possible to argue that these assumptions have not been fulfilled.

There is an additional point that strengthens the argument against Friedman. It isn’t clear that his claim about probability estimates generates any predictions at all. If you make a series of bets that don’t conform to the principles he sets forward, he can show through what is called a “Dutch-book” argument that you will lose money. But that is hardly a prediction that anyone will in fact make a series of bets of this kind. [read more]

16 promises Trump kept before the midterms--and four he hasn't

From Glenn Beck.com (Oct. 20):

Here are the accomplishments that stand out.

1. He secured the border

Remember when we were told securing the border was impossible without Congress?

In December 2023, there were nearly 371,000 encounters at the border. This March, southwest border apprehensions were approximately 8,300 for the entire month.

2. He delivered on mass deportations

Trump promised the largest deportation operation in American history, and so far he is delivering. His administration has dramatically expanded removals over the past two years, although he hasn't reached the million-deportation target. But there are still two years to go.

3. He unleashed American energy

Remember the Green New Deal? The pressure to shut down coal plants, restrict drilling, and move away from natural gas? That’s dead and gone.

America is now producing roughly 13.8 million barrels of oil a day; Trump has put domestic energy production at the center of his economic strategy.

4. He's bringing manufacturing back

Trump promised to rebuild America's manufacturing base, and in response, companies from across America and the world have announced plans for new factories and investments, with roughly 309,000 manufacturing jobs projected from announcements this year.

5. No tax on tips became law

Trump signed legislation providing a federal income tax deduction for qualifying tips. He also delivered a deduction for qualifying overtime pay. After years of hearing politicians promise tax relief for working Americans, voters can point to an actual law.

6. Violent crime is falling

The murder rate is on pace to reach a historic low. According to the FBI, "the 2025 murder rate of 4.1 per 100,000 inhabitants is tied with 1955 and 1956 for the lowest murder rate," and that 2024 to 2025 shows the largest year—to—year decline in violent crime rates since the FBI began tracking in 1936. That’s fewer funerals, fewer grieving families, and fewer empty chairs at Thanksgiving. We all have a lot to be thankful for this year. [read more]

80% of promises kept is a pretty good record!  As for peace and secure elections, that will take the other participants to get their act together and be responsible.

How Government-Owned Streets Prevent Effective Law Enforcement

From Mises.org (Sept. 12, 2020):

“Your right to swing your arms ends where another person’s nose begins.” While this widely attributed quote sounds ostensibly libertarian in terms of respecting self-ownership, it’s actually quite misleading. One need not abide some lunatic swinging his arms about near one’s face, being forced to tolerate it as long as no physical contact is made. Rather, property owners may establish rules regarding the conduct of those who choose to enter their property, including prohibitions against swinging arms near other people’s faces. Individuals may then decide what rules they are willing to tolerate when they enter another’s property, and competition between property owners enables them to determine what bundle of rules various consumers prefer.

This is not the case on so-called public property—that is, land areas controlled by the state such as streets, roads, parks, government buildings—even if that state were perfectly constrained by a written constitution. In The Structure of Liberty, Randy Barnett articulates this problem well:

A society that includes extensive public property holdings is faced with what might be called a dilemma of vulnerability. Since governments enjoy privileges denied their citizens and are subject to few of the economic constraints of private institutions, their citizens are forever vulnerable to governmental tyranny. Therefore, freedom can only be preserved by denying government police agencies that right to regulate public property with the same discretion accorded private property owners. Yet steps to protect society from the government also serve to make citizens more vulnerable to criminally inclined persons by providing such persons with a greater opportunity for a safe haven on the public streets and sidewalks and in the public parks. (p. 220)

Barnett further notes that no one can be barred from public space controlled by the state; there is free access for everyone, even convicted criminals as long as they have served their sentences. Anyone must be tolerated up until the point they violate the criminal code. Some libertarians may think this is well and good since it limits the police’s authority to intervene. However, as Barnett explains, this leads to a tradeoff: we may be more free from arbitrary police enforcement, but we are also more vulnerable to victimization. Such constitutional constraints are not only restrictions on the police, but on everyone else as well: rules that would be enforced if public property were in the private domain cannot be enforced by private actors.

In this sense, on public property the rules of conduct are socialized. The unpleasantries of witnessing activities that might otherwise be prohibited on private property (depending on the intended purpose of that property), such as solicitation, panhandling, or protesting, must be tolerated on public property. The police are legally constrained in enforcing rules against such activities, as they are constitutionally protected or laws prohibiting them have been voided for vagueness by the US Supreme Court.

The manifestations of this problem are viscerally illustrated in the ongoing mostly peaceful protests/riots. While the US Supreme Court has opined that local governments can constitutionally impose some restrictions, such as requiring a permit if certain conditions are met, protestors are to be otherwise free to assemble, hold their signs, and chant. They are not free, however, to engage in the acts associated with rioting, such as vandalism, looting, and arson, among other crimes.

As such, protesting on public property is analogous to the supposed right of someone to swing their arms as long as they don’t hit someone in the face—it must be tolerated up to the point it becomes a riot. This presents a problem for police—they are prohibited from interfering with masses of people apparently peacefully assembling, but once those masses are assembled they are difficult to contain after they decide they want to hit another person’s nose by rioting.

Owners of shops and small businesses adjacent to the state-owned streets where mobs are allowed to gather are simply out of luck in terms of preventing such assemblies or receiving compensation from the state for failing to prevent such foreseeable consequences (though the lack of compensation may change if lawsuits in Seattle, among other cities, are successful). If violent mobs were allowed to assemble on private property with the similarly predictable outcome of the destruction of neighbors’ property, would we not consider the property owner who allowed it to be at least partially liable? Would it not also be reasonable for neighboring property owners to seek an injunction if this behavior continued night after night? A private property owner is not bound by the First Amendment to the US Constitution: they may exclude protestors no matter how peaceful they are.

In light of these considerations, the fact that riots are able to continue month after month would likely be impossible but for the institution of “public property.” If the streets where the mobs assemble were privately owned, assemblies that would likely result in property damage or even inconvenience for everyday people would be prevented from gathering together in the first place. Protestors blocking the streets, as well as the vehicle-protestor collisions resulting from them, would become a thing of the past. Property owners would be able to nip riots in the bud by preventing masses of people intent on rioting from assembling. There would be little need for masses of riot police, flanked by armored vehicles from war zones, staring down mobs of protestors, waiting for them to cross the line so that pepper spray, rubber bullets, and batons can legally be unleashed on them.

This is yet another example of why the privatization of streets is of interest for reasons of police reform alone. (Indeed, riots themselves are partly responsible for the militarization of police.) The failure of government policing to secure the streets not only leaves us more vulnerable to criminal victimization, but government is worse than useless when they criminalize the private defense of property. “Taking back the streets” ought to mean privatizing them and enabling property owners to defend their property. This would be the surest way to end the riots. [source]

Riots is what the far-Left wants, so the gov’t owning the streets serves the Left’s purpose.

The Winning Message for the GOP: Order Is Compassion

From Glenn Beck.com (Jan. 23):

There is a lie quietly poisoning this country. It says that if Republicans win, someone else must lose. That prosperity is a zero-sum game. That order requires oppression. That freedom is chaos.

That lie is why we are divided. And it is wrong.

America has won before—not by redistributing what existed, but by creating more than anyone believed possible.

When America creates, the middle class grows, the poor rise, and the future opens. Not because government hands it out—but because it gets out of the way where it should, and stands firm where it must.

If Republicans want to win—and if America is going to survive this moment—then the path forward is not rage, not revenge, not tribalism. It is competence, courage, and clarity.

Start here: People don’t feel poor because they’re lazy. They feel poor because life has become artificially expensive. Housing costs more because we stopped building. Energy costs more because we strangled supply. Healthcare costs more because we allow closed systems and cartel behavior. Education costs more because we replaced skill with bureaucracy and debt. So the winning message isn’t “tax cuts for the rich” or “government handouts for the rest.”

The winning message is this: We are going to make America affordable again.

That is not redistribution; that is liberation from scarcity engineered by bad policy.

Republicans win when they say: We will build homes again. We will permit energy again. We will let trades matter again. We will reward work, saving, and risk again. And we will do it openly, legally, and fast.

Because real wage growth doesn’t come from mandates—it comes from abundance.

Now let’s talk about order, because without order, nothing else matters.

Order is not authoritarian, cruel, or oppressive. It is the first civil right.

Republicans must say it plainly: You cannot have freedom where violent criminals rule the streets, where drug cartels run open markets, where law-abiding citizens are treated as suspects and criminals are treated as victims.

This is not about race. This is not about class. This is not about politics. This is about right and wrong.

Republicans win when they draw a bright line: Peaceful protest is protected. Speech—even ugly speech—is protected. But violence, arson, trafficking, intimidation, and sabotage will be punished—every time.

Not selectively. Not politically. Not performatively. Law applied evenly is not tyranny. It is the foundation of a republic.

Now immigration—because this is where fear is used against truth.

Republicans do not win by demonizing the desperate. They win by isolating and removing the dangerous, swiftly, lawfully, and visibly. Violent criminals, gang members, traffickers, and repeat offenders, all arrested with warrants, processed with due process, and deported or imprisoned under the law.

No raids for headlines. No profiling. No chaos. Just boring, relentless enforcement—the kind that restores trust because it respects the Constitution while protecting the innocent. That is how Republicans win without becoming what they oppose.

Now, the future, because a party that only talks about the past will lose it.

Artificial intelligence will define the next century. Republicans must refuse two equal and opposite failures: Blind acceleration without safeguards or fear-driven paralysis that hands the future to China.

The winning position is this: America will lead AI—but with brakes, audits, and accountability at the highest levels.

Not government ownership or innovation-killing bureaucracy, but secure development, clear thresholds, protection against weaponization, surveillance abuse, and catastrophic misuse. And at the same time, AI education, worker training, productivity tools that lift every American.

Republicans win when they say: The future will not be owned by a few companies or a distant bureaucracy—it will be built by a free people with guardrails, not chains.

Energy. This is the quiet pay raise.

Republicans must say it without apology: Cheap, reliable energy is pro-worker, pro-family, pro-environment, and pro-national security.

Oil and gas now. Nuclear now and next. Grid modernization. Domestic minerals. Long-term innovation.

Not because we reject the future—but because you don’t reach it by kneecapping the present.

And finally—this is the most important part—how do Republicans get Americans to believe again?

Not with slogans or insults. Not with “owning” anyone. They win by governing like adults in a burning house. By telling the truth in full sentences. By applying the law equally—even to allies. By admitting trade-offs. By fixing things people can feel in their daily lives—lower bills, safer streets, more opportunity, and less chaos.

When people feel their lives improving, unity stops being a fantasy. Because unity is not agreement; unity is shared benefit.

So here is the message Republicans must carry—not as politicians, but as stewards of a republic: We are not here to punish half the country. We are not here to redistribute decline. We are here to make America affordable, safe, productive, and free again—under the Constitution, under the law, and for everyone willing to work, build, and live in peace.

That is how Republicans win.

And that—quietly, stubbornly, lawfully—is how America wins too. [source]

Good advice.  Make sense too. Safety is one of mankind's basic needs. Without it you cannot have other higher needs. Got to have stability. GOP needs to heed Beck’s advice.

American Wins!

• US Murder Rate Headed for Record 1-Year Drop
• Border Patrol completes full year with no catch and release of migrants
• BREAKING: President Trump Announces Massive Oil Deal with Venezuela – “BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!”
• Trump: US Will Refill Strategic Petroleum Reserve Using Venezuelan Oil
• EPA: Biden-Era Emissions Rules for Coal and Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants Repealed
• Americans Are Wealthier Than 30 Years Ago. Here's the Data To Prove It.
  
• ADP: Private Sector Added 90,000 Jobs In September, Much More Than Expected
  
• GDP Revised Up To Show Stronger Growth In First Half of Year
  

And the GOP says there is no issues to run on. Really?

7 Ways DSA Plans To Turn America Into A Third-World Communist Country

From The Federalist.com (July 17):

The group that dictates the tenor of the Democrat Party has radical plans for America, which include getting rid of the presidency and the Supreme Court. The Democratic Socialists of America is a far-left organization that appeals to the struggle of the working class while pushing far-left candidates. The organization has recently unveiled a new platform that would destroy the American system and radically remake it.

DSA candidates are currently surging in America, winning major elections across the country. Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier — both DSA members — won their Democrat primaries in New York City, making them almost certain to win seats in Congress. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is also a DSA member, and he has pushed far-left policies since taking office in January.

Abolish the Presidency and Supreme Court

According to the DSA’s platform, “we need a new political system.” This new political system involves remaking the American government and electoral system.

“Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” the platform states. This change would help these socialists secure their objective of “creating a real democracy.”

This is part of an effort to give more power to Congress, thereby creating a more “democratic” system. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., showed her disdain for America’s system of government when she introduced articles of impeachment against Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Accusing Thomas and Alito of failing to disclose their financial information and declining to recuse themselves from cases they purportedly had a personal interest in, Ocasio-Cortez called on Congress to impeach them from the court. Her justification was that “Congress has a legal, moral, and democratic obligation to impeach,” according to a press release.

Replace the Constitution

In its introduction to the platform, the DSA quietly slipped in one of its most radical proposals: creating a new United States Constitution.

“We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic,” the platform’s introduction states. This is not the first time the DSA has attacked the Constitution, either. An earlier statement published on the DSA website reads: “The Constitution establishes a political order explicitly designed to enshrine rule by elites.”

In a recent attempt to recruit members, a DSA caucus called the Marxist Unity Group attacked the Constitution because “it was made by rich landowners who owned slaves, and it was designed to protect their power, not give ordinary people a real vote. Back then, the Founding Fathers were kind of like the billionaires of today.” [read more]

DSA stands for Destructive Socialists of America. ☹️ Just steps to concentrating and growing power. When they say they want to abolish the Senate, they are just wanting a parliamentary system of gov’t like Israel and the European countries have.

Along the same lines:

• The Problem With DSA Democrats Isn’t Socialism, It’s Third-Worldism
• Democratic socialism could cost the US a staggering $200 trillion, report reveals: ‘Closer to Soviet-style communism’
• There Is No Such Thing As A Moderate Democrat Anymore
  
• America Flirts with Democratic Socialism

44-Year-Old Hoarder Left Behind Treasure Trove Worth Up to $5 Million After Passing Away

From Western Journal.com (Oct. 10, 2020):

Hoarders are notorious for calling themselves “collectors,” and claiming that their hoard is made up of valuable items. Many times, those items turn out to be trash — worse than worthless — but, every once in a while an antique or box of items will turn out to be worth something.

The only way to know if a group of items are a “collection” and not a landfill in progress is to call in the experts. And one man in England is incredibly glad he did.

The man’s brother was a 44-year-old bachelor computer programmer who died suddenly last year, according to Metro.

That man had spent over a decade filling up every part of his three-bedroom house in Nottingham floor to ceiling with stacked boxes, bags and packages, earning him the title “Britain’s Biggest Hoarder.”

When he ran out of space, he filled up 24 bins outside and rented two garages and a neighbor’s backyard. Eventually, he had to stay elsewhere because there was nowhere for him to live at his home.

When he passed and his brother was tasked with cleaning up the hoard, the brother very nearly just had it all thrown out — but decided to get it evaluated first. Enter Terry Woodcock of Unique Auctions in Lincoln. With decades in the business, Woodcock was astounded at what he found.

“This collection is beyond belief,” Woodcock said, according to Metro. “I met the man’s brother at the house and he was just as shocked as I was. He had no idea his brother lived like he did. His house and garage were literally crammed full of items.”

Apparently, the deceased bachelor had taken to ordering items online and was hoping to sell them one day to fund his retirement. Lots of vintage electronics, piles of rare comic books, old science kits, Beatles memorabilia and countless other collections were found stacked haphazardly in every space he owned.

According to Metro, it took eight men and three vans more than six weeks just to clear the house, let alone open packages and research the value of items.

But the estimate of what the items could be worth is absolutely staggering: between £500,000 ($650,000) and £4,000,000 ($5,200,000).  [read more]

Nice.

Top 10 takeaways from Anthony Fauci's hearing in front of Senate committee

From Just the News.com (July 29):

Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, where he was grilled about his work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The former NIAID director refused to answer lawmaker questions throughout the hearing, invoking his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, despite having a presidential pardon that covered his work during the pandemic.

Despite Fauci's refusal to answer questions, the hearing was filled with major revelations and accusations.

Here are the top 10 major takeaways from the Senate hearing:

1. Fauci applied for government grants for himself/got government employees to do it for him

Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley revealed during the hearing that Fauci allegedly used federal employees while he was NIAID director to apply for government grants on his behalf for his work during the pandemic.

"You got rich while people were dying," a heated Hawley said. "You were using federal employees with taxpayer money to apply for and solicit cash prizes for you personally. Cash prizes totaling over a million dollars."

Hawley said he has evidence of the applications for cash prizes that Fauci received, including the Dan David award and the Smithsonian award.

"You actually wrote to people and said, 'Do you think maybe I'd qualify?' And you got cash for all of this. And it wasn't just one or two employees, was it? In fact, you used eight separate federal employees on federal time using federal resources to solicit cash awards. Isn't that true?"

Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment in response.

2. Ron Johnson alleges Fauci covered up evidence ivermectin works

Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson accused Fauci during the hearing of covering up alleged evidence that the controversial prescription drug medication ivermectin actually is effective against the coronavirus.

“You said there was no evidence," Johnson said. "There were all kinds of evidence. Loved ones had to go to hospitals, had to sue hospitals ... So I want to know, to what extent were you involved in sabotaging Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin?”

Johnson highlighted studies that found there were 60-70% effectiveness rate against the virus. Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment again in response.

3. Moreno asks why Fauci hired a criminal defense attorney

Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno questioned why Fauci would hire a prominent criminal defense attorney if he had done nothing wrong when it came to the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that the attorney was someone a client hires if they are in "deep s***."

"Let me tell you who David Schertler is for the audience," Moreno said. "He's a high-profile criminal attorney. He's represented some really great people like Senator Bob Menendez ... And there's an article here in the Washington Free Beacon that talks about why you would hire a guy like David Schertler. The comment is, 'if you're in deep s***, that's who you call.'"

4. Rand Paul confirms plans for Fauci contempt vote

Another top moment related to the hearing comes after Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul confirmed that he plans to hold a contempt vote against Fauci for pleading the Fifth in order to dodge answering the panel's questions.

"We believe... he didn't need to hide behind the 5th Amendment and that maybe the 5th Amendment doesn't attach when you have a pardon in place," he told reporters. "The question on contempt will be voted on and then there's the question of whether or not the Department of Justice will take that up."

5. Senators question legality of 5th amendment plea

Several senators also questioned whether Fauci could even plead the Fifth since he was pardoned by former President Joe Biden before he left office last year.

"You don't have any rights under the Fifth Amendment, because you've been pardoned, as you very well know," Hawley said. "As the Supreme Court has been clear for a century or more. Brown vs. Walker, 1896, 'when he has been pardoned he may not stand upon his privilege.'

"You know that. Your lawyers sitting behind you now, shifting nervously in their chairs, they know it. This isn't about the Constitution, this isn't about the law," he continued. "This is about contempt, contempt for this body and contempt for the American people." [read more]

The other takeaways:

1. Rick Scott tells Fauci how lockdowns hurt his own family
2. Hawley claims Fauci wanted to be 'Sun god of science'
3. Paul presses Fauci on alleged deletion of federal records
4. Fetterman regrets partisanship over lab leak theory
5. Fauci's lawyer booted from the hearing

More stories and a video on the hearing:

• Fauci Hearing and Diary Leave More Questions Than Answers
• Anthony Fauci, The ‘Covid Czar,’ Ticked Off The Wrong Moms
• Fauci gave off ‘signals of deception’ during Senate hearing, body language expert says
• Here's what the Fauci hearing is really about
• Fauci CAN'T Plead The Fifth If Congress Does THIS [video]

Why Progressives Love Government “Experts”

From FEE.org (June 9, 2022):

In twenty-first-century America, ordinary people are at the mercy of well-paid, unelected government experts who wield vast power. That is, we live in the age of the technocrats: people who claim to have special wisdom that entitles them to control, manipulate, and manage society’s institutions using the coercive power of the state.

We’re told these people are “nonpolitical” and will use their impressive scientific knowledge to plan the economy, public health, public safety, or whatever goal the regime has decided the technocrats will be tasked with bringing about.

These people include central bankers, Supreme Court justices, “public health” bureaucrats, and Pentagon generals. The narrative is that these people are not there to represent the public or bow to political pressure. They’re just there to do “the right thing” as dictated by economic theory, biological sciences, legal theory, or the study of military tactics.

We’re also told that in order to allow these people to act as the purely well-meaning apolitical geniuses they are, we must give them their independence and not question their methods or conclusions.

We were exposed to this routine yet again last week as President Joe Biden announced he will “respect the Fed’s independence” and allow the central bankers to set monetary policy without any bothersome interference from the representatives of the taxpayers who pay all the bills and who primarily pay the price when central bankers make things worse. (Biden, of course, didn’t mention that central bankers have been spectacularly wrong about the inflation threat in recent years, with inflation rates hitting forty-year highs, economic growth going negative, and consumer credit piling up as families struggle to cope with the cost of living.)

Conveniently, Biden’s deferral to the Fed allows him to blame it later when economic conditions get even worse. Nonetheless, his placing the economy in the hands of alleged experts will no doubt appear laudable to many. This is because the public has long been taught by public schools and media outlets that government experts should have the leeway to exercise vast power in the name of “fixing” whatever problems society faces.

The Expert Class as a Tool for State Building

The success of this idea represents a great victory for progressive ideology. Progressives have long been committed to creating a special expert class as a means of building state power. In the United States, for example, the cult of expertise really began to take hold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it led directly to support for more government intervention in the private sector. As Maureen Flanagan notes in “Progressives and Progressivism in an Era of Reform,”

“Social science expertise gave political Progressives a theoretical foundation for cautious proposals to create a more activist state…. Professional social scientists composed a tight circle of men who created a space between academia and government from which to advocate for reform. They addressed each other, trained their students to follow their ideas, and rarely spoke to the larger public.”

These men founded new organizations—such as the American Economics Association—to promote this new class of experts and their plans for a more centrally planned society. Ultimately, the nature of the expert class was revolutionary. The new social scientists thought they knew better than the patricians, religious leaders, local representatives, and market actors who had long shaped local institutions. Instead,

Progressives were modernizers with a structural-instrumentalist agenda. They rejected reliance on older values and cultural norms to order society and sought to create a modern reordered society with political and economic institutions run by men qualified to apply fiscal expertise, businesslike efficiency, and modern scientific expertise to solve problems and save democracy. The emerging academic disciplines in the social sciences of economics, political economy and political science, and pragmatic education supplied the theoretical bases for this middle-class expert Progressivism.

The Progressive impulse for expertise-based rule was perhaps exemplified by the Progressive transportation planner Emory Johnson, who advocated for a strong federal executive branch that would be resistant to political pressure while relying on the supposedly “scientific” judgments of government planners and other bureaucrats. Johnson

explicitly took up the question of the role of expertise in the American state…. he maintained that success relied upon what he termed “executive functions.” He sought to empower the federal government’s executive branch as experts’ natural home.1

In the Progressive view, business leaders and machine politicians lacked a rational and broad view of the needs of society. In contrast, the government experts would approach society’s problems as scientists. Johnson felt this model already somewhat existed in the Department of War, where Johnson imagined the secretary of war was “quite free from political pressure and [relied] on the counsel of the engineers.” Johnson imagined that these science-minded bureaucrats could bring a “really economic and scientific application” of policy. [read more]

Why Do Some Countries Stay Poor?

From Peter Jacobsen on FEE.org (Aug. 23, 2023):

Accounting for "The Wealth of Nations."

This week for Ask an Economist, I have a question from a reader named Mark. He says,

“I’ve worked with immigrants that recently moved to the US, and workers still living in their native country and working for me remotely.

My experience is that they’re on average, much harder working and more skilled (even in technical fields) than my American colleagues. The foreigners work hard, making no excuses, grateful for the work, and take every opportunity to better themselves. Americans, on the other hand, demand much higher wages, complain about the work, and make little effort to improve themselves.

Since the people from many of these poor countries are better workers, why are their home countries so poor? Immigrants on average start more businesses and do better in the US than US born citizens. With all their skills and ambition, it seems their home countries ought to be significantly richer than the US cities, yet this isn’t the case. What’s the cause of these countries’ poverty?”

Mark asks perhaps the single-most important question in the history of economic thinking. Why do some countries grow rich while others stay poor?

A Long History of Answers

In 1776, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published perhaps the most influential work in the history of political economy: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

This book, usually referred to as “The Wealth of Nations,” tries to answer the question Mark poses. Since then, wealthy countries have grown much wealthier, some poor countries have grown wealthier, but there are a substantial number of countries lagging behind.

Before we get into the right answer, we should spend some time talking about some popular wrong answers.

Economist Bill Easterly has done a great job chronicling some of these wrong answers in his book The Elusive Quest for Growth.

Easterly’s point in the book is simple. Throughout the late 20th century and into the 21st century, the United States and other countries have attempted to trigger economic growth in poor countries. These attempts have failed.

Easterly discusses three failed panaceas which experts believed would trigger development: investment, population control, and education. Before looking at each once, though, consider the unifying theme here. Developed countries tend to have higher levels of investment, lower birth rates, and more education. From this, experts have tried to infer that if these conditions are replicated in poorer countries, then development will follow.

This strategy has failed. It turns out these factors are more a consequence of growth than a cause. Let’s look at each failed panacea.

1. Investment

In the 1950s, experts began to believe that simply having machines and financial capital to take on big projects would make countries rich. This belief, ironically, was based on the (false) success of the Soviet Union. Soviet production numbers were going through the roof, and for decades economists believed they would overtake the US. Why?

The Soviet Union was industrializing through forced savings. By reallocating private resources to large industrial investments, it appeared the USSR was able to shock the economy into early industrialization. It turns out that this growth was illusory, as economist Murray Rothbard rightly predicted, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But the Soviet Union fooled many economists in the 1950s, so the model of centrally planned growth via investment took off. The belief was that because poor countries were in such dire situations, citizens had no ability to save. Without saving there is no growth. A vicious cycle was preventing growth.

So developing countries could fix this by giving the required investment for countries to have sustained growth. This investment would increase incomes, which would increase savings, and spur on permanent natural growth. Easterly calls this the financing gap approach.

The approach failed, though. Models failed to live up to their predictions, and poor countries were not made rich via air-dropped investments. The reason for the failure is the same reason noted by Rothbard in his analysis of the Soviet economy. Production is a means to the ends of consumption. If your production is not linked meaningfully to the well-being of consumers via the knowledge of prices, profit, and loss, then it will not lead to any sustained growth.

Central planners attempted to create production for its own sake, leading to the misallocation of capital and natural resources. Investment alone is not enough—you must have the right investments.

2. Education

A natural next plan for development experts was education. If increasing production via physical capital was not enough, maybe increasing knowledge or human capital would do the trick. Easterly chronicles how education development policy dominated from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The results did not bear out on this either. Easterly chronicles how study after study finds little to no correlation between education and economic growth. One study shows that as the education explosion happened in poor countries, the growth rate of income in these countries actually fell. This is exactly the opposite of what we’d expect if education theories were true. Another study found that for countries that grow 1% faster than average, education could only explain 0.06% of that in terms of growth in human capital.

Easterly points to several other types of studies which show a simple, consistent result: education does not create economic growth.

……

The Best Answer

So if all these answers are wrong, what is the right answer? Let’s go back to Adam Smith, and take a look at his famous conclusion. Why do countries become rich according to Smith?

“Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

Smith is arguing that the ultimate cause of growth in a country stems from its institutions. In other words, the rules that govern your daily economic activity are at the bottom of the different growth outcomes we face in our world.

Another way to frame this is that in order for a country’s economy to grow, the citizens need economic freedom or access to private property rights.

When people have private property, they can use, sell, or rent out their property. This leads to a few results. First, people have an incentive to maximize the value of their property. If you own a house, you want to keep it in good condition because letting it fall apart means you lose some money. Private ownership incentivizes responsibility.

Furthermore, when people are able to sell their goods, prices form for those goods. Prices reflect the value of a good or service relative to other things, and embody societal knowledge about the good. When an oil rig breaks down in the ocean, oil becomes more scarce. We don’t have to be told oil is more scarce to curb our consumption. The rising price causes us to curb consumption whether we know it or not.

Prices also allow firms to do accounting to determine their profit or loss. If a firm makes a profit off of a sale, this tells them consumers valued the final product more than the value of the inputs used to create it. This process of transforming less valuable inputs into more valuable outputs is at the center of economic growth. To paraphrase the economist Peter Boettke: without ownership of the various goods used in production, there can be no markets for them. Without markets for these goods, there are no prices. Without prices, there can be no economic calculation.

So institutions which are economically free are the cause of economic growth. The data bear this out. Economists James Gwartney and co-author Robert Lawson pioneered the Fraser Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the World Index.” The Index measures how free the economies of different countries are and uses that information to examine the connection between freedom and flourishing. What they find fits perfectly with the theory here. Economically free countries are richer and healthier than unfree countries.

Economist Peter Leeson also examines the evidence in a paper titled “Two Cheers for Capitalism?” His conclusion?

“According to a popular view that I call ‘two cheers for capitalism,’ capitalism’s effect on development is ambiguous and mixed. This paper empirically investigates that view. I find that it’s wrong. Citizens in countries that became more capitalist over the last quarter century became wealthier, healthier, more educated, and politically freer. Citizens in countries that became significantly less capitalist over this period endured stagnating income, shortening life spans, smaller gains in education, and increasingly oppressive political regimes. The data unequivocally evidence capitalism’s superiority for development. Full-force cheerleading for capitalism is well deserved and three cheers are in order instead of two.”

In The Elusive Quest for Growth, Easterly has one other insight that merits our attention on this question. Easterly points out how much of the United States government’s focus on development in the late 20th century was really an attempt to win allies against the Soviet Union.

This is extremely ironic, considering that the US government was essentially incorporating Soviet style central planning to attempt to bring about growth in these developing countries.

Instead, it would have been better to follow a US-style pursuit of economic growth. Institutions which enable economic growth are the true driver of wealth creation. Once you enable individuals to freely compete and cooperate, the power of human ingenuity does the rest. [read more]

Food for thought. Lessons the Left never gets--especially the "easy taxes" part.

Trump drops election integrity bombshells, urges passage of SAVE America Act

From Just the News.com (July 16):

On Thursday at the White House, President Donald Trump addressed the nation and presented new evidence detailing multiple security breaches in elections he said were concealed by a self-proclaimed "shadow government" and the Biden administration.

"Another official inside the FBI wrote that she was running 'a shadow government' to keep intelligence about China's election meddling from becoming known," he said, during a primetime address from the White House.

The Chinese hacked while the Democrats denied

According to Trump and subsequent documents to be released Thursday, in the spring and summer of 2020, the intelligence community (IC) began detecting the Chinese illegal acquisition of voter databases. At the time, the number of voter files was in the tens of millions.

The documents reportedly reveal that there was a concerted and conscientious effort by the IC not to tell the president (Trump at the time), Congress, or the American people.

Because nothing was done by former President Joe Biden's administration to stop the Chinese activities, the number of voter files hacked went from 10 to 20 million in 2020 to roughly 220 million by 2023.

China targets Trump to damage the election

Furthermore, evidence shows that China was activating certain interference methods to specifically target Trump, as the IC was telling Trump and the American people the opposite.

The IC report, declassified and released by former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines, concluded that China did not interfere, as it “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”

Since the spring and summer of 2020, on at least five occasions, intelligence reports have revealed that U.S. election voting machines could be hacked by a foreign power because of specific vulnerabilities.

In the summer and fall of 2020, the IC watched a foreign adversary, Venezuela, move from theoretically hacking the machines to creating a practical plan that would accomplish it. The plan was apparently so good that a post-election hand-audit would not have been able to detect that the ballots had been changed.

The same vulnerabilities used to hack the machines and change ballots were recently tested by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which determined that those vulnerabilities still existed, according to that July report.

Roughly 278,000 non-citizens were found on voter rolls

To further investigate, DHS purchased 30 voter registration databases, which are available for purchase commercially, that Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice Harmeet Dhillon was unable to compel states to hand over.

DHS was unable to purchase those files from California, New York, New Jersey and a handful of other states. Through their investigation, they found that in mid-sized states, roughly 278,000 non-citizens are currently on voter roles. The non-citizens were identified through foreign social security numbers or foreign drivers' licenses.

Democrats fabricated ballots in Michigan to make quotas in 2020 elections

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has also interviewed numerous subjects who were canvassers hired by GBI Strategies. The Democratic National Committee is one of the largest funders of GBI Strategies, a Democrat-aligned voter registration and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) organization.

During the 2020 election, GBI reportedly received payments nearing $5 million from campaigns and committees. These canvassers, who were illegally paid per ballot, were allegedly instructed that if at the end of the day they had not met their quota of ballots signed and received, to sign ballots themselves.

According to the documents to be released, the Biden DOJ blocked the FBI from indicting anyone in these matters for four years following the 2020 election. Reportedly, the FBI and the Michigan State Police never investigated beyond Michigan and slow-walked any further probes.

Amanda Head is White House Correspondent for Just The News. You can follow her here. [source]

Of course, the Chi-Coms wanted Biden to win. Just like Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to win too. Both candidates are easy to manipulate. One other thing, Senate pass the SAVE America Act already.

Other articles on the speech:

• Trump’s Declassified Docs Detail Massive Michigan Voter Registration Fraud
• Thousands of non-citizens registered to vote in NJ due to software error, governor says
• Analysis: The Many Times Noncitizens Popped Up On Voter Rolls
• If the government was a company, it would’ve faced lawsuits for data breach of millions of voters
• Trump’s Speech Sends Beijing, And China-Watchers, Into A Frenzy
• After Birthplace Citizenship Ruling, China Won’t Need Hackers To Meddle In US Elections
• Intel Agency Assessed China Planned To ‘Encourage’ Violent BLM Riots To Hurt Trump In 2020

How Bad Were Recessions before the Fed? Not as Bad as They Are Now

From Mises.org (June 28, 2022):

With a recession looming over the average American, the group to blame is pretty obvious, this group being the central bankers at the Federal Reserve, who inflate the supply of currency in the system, that currency being the dollar. This is what inflation is, the expansion of the money supply either through the printing press or adding zeros to a computer screen. It has gotten so bad that in the last twenty-two months, 80 percent of all US dollars in existence have been printed, from $4 trillion in January 2020, to $20 trillion in October 2021.

This is always how recessions start: the expansion of easy money, the creation of bubbles, and heightened prices caused by the devaluation of the currency supply. But recessions occurred long before the Fed’s establishment in 1913.

Were these market failures, as many are taught to believe, or were they still the fault of a central bank or government policy? How bad were pre-Fed recessions? Did they rival the Great Depression or 2008?

The Continental Dollar

During the days of the American Revolution, the Continental Congress convened to figure out how to finance the Revolution. In June 1775, Congress issued six million paper currency notes known as continental dollars in order to pay for the new army and the supplies needed to fight a war. Those who supported the Revolution would jump in line to support this new fiat currency, as it was the patriotic thing to do.

By 1780, the amount of continentals in circulation had reached 241 million, and the continental had done its damage. The patriots who bought into the fiat dollar suffered the most, while people like David Hall, who by order of Congress was permitted to print out fiat bills, and the Loyalists, who kept their gold and silver specie were able to stay financially afloat.

The continental was turned back en masse, as it now held no value. Those who trusted the continental over gold were left with nothing. Certain Founding Fathers, after witnessing people’s livelihoods ruined by fiat paper money, decided to make provisions to make sure this mistake would not happen again.

Article 1 Section 10 of the US Constitution states:

No state shall make any thing but gold and silver coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.

This section would be violated throughout US history, from the Civil War to 1933, when President Franklin Roosevelt confiscated US citizens’ gold and prevented them from exchanging the dollar into gold.

It’s clear what caused the failure of the continental: Congress and printing presses. This, however, would not be the last economic problem that would face America, the next major downturn came in 1819.

The Recession of 1819

After the War of 1812, state-chartered banks and the Second Bank of the United States (SBUS), which was established in 1816, expanded the money supply. Murray Rothbard’s book The Panic of 1819 notes how these state banks expanded the amount of banknotes from $46 million to $68 million in 1815. The problem was that banks printed more paper notes than there was gold specie to back them.

In fact, from 1817 to 1818, the SBUS expanded credit by 57 percent, outdoing the credit expansion in 1815–17, when it expanded credit by 25 percent. This credit expansion caused prices to rise in certain areas of the economy, such as agriculture and shipbuilding. All of these markets received the biggest loans that were granted by SBUS branches and state banks.

Eighteen eighteen spelled trouble for both the state banks and the SBUS: the money supply fell by 10 percent and there was a credit contraction of 41 percent. Foreigners and other citizens started to trade in their banknotes for specie, and many state banks refused to convert paper to gold as their gold reserves ran dry, as did the SBUS reserves.

Thomas Jefferson, who warned against central banking, gave his thoughts in a letter to John Taylor in 1816. Jefferson states:

And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; & that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

His suspicion was confirmed when in 1819 a recession ignited by the inflationary policy and agriculture and turnpike workers’ wages fell 60–80 percent.

Despite this bank failure, markets were allowed to handle the recession, or the readjustment period. Because of this, the economy bounced back quite quickly. At the start of the recession, gross domestic product per capita only fell 1.1 percent, but from the latter half of 1819 until 1824, GDP per capita grew 1.5 percent. This was before urbanization, so many still lived on farms. Even though wages fell, the recession was still nowhere as bad post-Fed recessions like the one in 1929.

The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 put a 55 percent tax on all foreign imports, this practically eliminated all exports. Agriculture suffered the most. Tens of thousands of farms were closed and sold for as low as $50. At the beginning of 1920, there were 28,885 banks, and by 1933, roughly fifteen thousand remained, the Federal Reserve Board of 1937 noted that two-thirds of these banks were in towns with less than twenty-five hundred people and that the majority failed.

Wages may have dropped in 1819, but the economy bounced back. It did not drag for sixteen years, nor did thousands of farms and banks fail. [read more]

Florida woman forced to forfeit lotto prize after USPS loses ticket

From Fox News.com (Sept. 30, 2020):

A Florida woman says she was forced to forfeit her lotto prize after the US Postal Service lost her winning ticket in the mail.

Sue Burgess, of Hernando County, said she was thrilled to discover earlier this summer that she snagged $1,000 in the state’s Second Chance Lottery game, news station WFLA.

“I was elated. It was like winning a million dollars to me,” Burgess told the outlet.

But at the time, she couldn’t claim her winnings at any of the local lottery offices since they were closed due to the pandemic.

She followed the state lottery’s instructions and went to the post office to send in her ticket via certified mail, the outlet reported.

Burgess said the ticket, however, never made it to the lottery office in the one-week time frame required to claim the prize.

Her tracking information last showed the ticket in transit on Aug. 12 at a Tallahassee post office, WFLA reported.

“They said, ‘We have not received this ticket.’ They said, ‘No ticket, no prize,’” said Burgess, whose prize money went to an alternate winner.

Burgess said she’s frustrated because she could’ve left her ticket in a dropbox at a local lottery office, but she believed that certified mail was the safer and more efficient option.

“That’s why you choose certified mail,” Burgess said. “With COVID, I understand the mail is a little bit slow. But for safety sake, certified mail usually has priority.”

Six weeks later, the winning ticket is still unaccounted for.

The USPS apologized to Burgess and said it’s working with the state lottery to help her cash out her prize.

“We apologize to this specific customer for any inconvenience they may have experienced,” the postal service said.

“In this specific instance, we are continuing to work with the lottery office to confirm receipt of the mailpiece.”

The Florida Lottery said it’s not responsible for mistakes made by the postal service, though it will make an exception for Burgess and pay out her prize if the package shows up postmarked by the original deadline, WFLA reported.

“Ms. Burgess’ situation is an unusual circumstance and, to our knowledge, no other winner has experienced a similar issue,” the lottery said.

“Because the Lottery did not receive Ms. Burgess’ ticket within the seven-day claim period, an alternate winner was selected and paid. However, if Ms. Burgess’ package arrives at Florida Lottery Headquarters with a date stamp prior to the original expiration date, our Claims Processing department will process and pay her claim.” [source]

That’s too bad. I hope the Lottery finally receives her ticket.

EXCLUSIVE: George Soros Gave $250K to British Group Working To Censor Conservative News Sites and ‘Kill Musk’s Twitter’

From Free Beacon.com (Nov. 17, 2025):

The left-wing philanthropy funded by George Soros, Open Society Foundations (OSF), bankrolls a British nonprofit that works to censor conservative news websites and social media companies, including through a plot to "kill" Elon Musk’s X by pressuring advertisers and investors to boycott the company.

OSF gave $250,000 last year to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) for "general support," according to the Soros charity’s grant database. The CCDH, under the guise of stopping "the spread of online hate and disinformation," has pressured social media companies’ investors and advertisers to censor supposed "disinformation" or other content it deems to be offensive.

The organization, founded by former Labour Party operative Imran Ahmed in 2018, has also pressured tech companies to pull advertisements from the conservative websites the Federalist and the Daily Wire over allegedly racist content.

The grant, which has not been reported, could resurrect a longstanding battle that Musk has waged with both the CCDH and Soros. Musk has accused Soros of "crimes against humanity" and funding groups involved in violent protests across the country this year. And he has called the CCDH a "criminal organization" and said he was "going after" the group’s donors over its efforts to harm X’s finances.

Last year, the CCDH quietly organized a campaign to "kill Musk’s Twitter" by pressuring advertisers to cut ties with the company, according to memos published by Racket News. The CCDH, which the watchdog group Capital Research Center calls a "UK-based censorship advocacy group," met with 16 congressional offices to discuss Musk’s lawsuit against the organization, and held "policy engagement" meetings with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.). The nonprofit also lobbied American policymakers toward the creation of an "independent digital regulator," according to Racket News.

While the CCDH has criticized most social media companies for failing to curtail extremism, the organization has been particularly hostile toward X since Musk purchased the site, formerly known as Twitter, in October 2022. Musk, who pledged to end censorship on the platform after purchasing the site, sued the CCDH in July 2023 over a report from the group that claimed hate speech had spiked on X since Musk’s takeover.

The revelation of the Soros grant helps answer longstanding questions about the CCDH’s funding. In 2023, Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) subpoenaed the CCDH for a list of its donors as part of an investigation of the firm’s alleged collusion to censor social media platforms.

The CCDH does not voluntarily disclose its donors. But some organizations have revealed contributions to the nonprofit. The Skoll Fund, the private philanthropy of former eBay president Jeff Skoll, gave $415,000 to the CCDH in 2023, according to tax filings. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a donor-advised fund that manages charitable contributions on behalf of anonymous donors, contributed $403,175 to the CCDH in 2023. The CCDH received $2.1 million in revenue in 2023, the year of its most recent tax filing.

The grant revelation comes as the Trump administration sets its sights on the Soros operation and the CCDH. President Donald Trump called over the summer for Soros and his son Alex, the chairman of OSF, to be investigated for allegedly funding violent riots across the country. The Soroses have denied the allegation. [read more]

The Spooky Dude drama continues...

More Soros stories:

• Soros-Funded PAC Aims to Turn Texas Blue
• Report: Soros Family Pours $103 Million Into Midterms

The Remaking of America

From AM Greatness.com (Aug. 7, 2023):

We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s or the 1930s. Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.

The Revolution began under the Obama administration that sought to divide Americans into oppressed and oppressors, and then substitute race for class victimization. It was empowered by the bicoastal wealth accrued from globalization, and honed during the COVID lockdown, quarantine-fed economic downturn, and the George Floyd riots and their aftermath. The Revolution was boosted by fanatic opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump. And the result is an America that is unrecognizable from what it was a mere decade ago.

Here are 10 upheavals that the Left has successfully wrought.

Free expression. In large swatches of American society—particularly the corporation, the media, the government, the public schools, and the university—it is suddenly dangerous to speak freely. At a DEI workshop, politely object that “whiteness” does not account for all the challenges of “marginalized peoples,” and you will become either ostracized, reprimanded, or perhaps fired.

Suggest to a class that man-made climate change and the state remedies for it, are still under debate—and your career and livelihood are endangered. In 2020, state that Covid lockdowns would do more eventual damage than the virus—and your career was through. Express doubt that there are more than two biological sexes, and if an athlete or high school principal you will be shunned or rendered professionally inert.

The government, in league with social media, censors the news. “Liberal” universities often first require McCarthy-era type “diversity” statements for one to be hired. Commissars review syllabi to spot incorrect or improper speech or insufficient DEI zeal.

The Left now seeks to modify the First Amendment, and its empowerment of “hate speech,” defined as most anything impeding the progressive project. The state and the universities properly issue word lists of approved vocabularies.

The old ACLU or Sen. Church Committee would now probably be deemed rightwing. The methodologies of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover are the preferred models, once they were rebooted to the right cause.

The Weaponization of Justice. Administrations and their efforts to stock the justice department with supporters come and go. But in the last decade the Left has viewed the Department of Justice as a political extension of the party—whose unchecked power must properly be directed to hurt enemies and help friends. No wonder Eric Holder described himself as Obama’s “wingman” and became the first Attorney General to be held in contempt for ignoring a congressional subpoena.

Never in U.S. history have the Department of Justice and sympathetic state and local prosecutors indicted a leading opposition candidate and likely nominee of one of the two major parties, and at the beginning of a presidential campaign. Donald Trump is currently charged with nearly 100 felonies by at least two prosecutors. He likely eventually will be hit with more than- 500 indictments, from four prosecutors, every one of the latter with a long record of either leftwing associations or Democratic service.

The mass murderer Charles Manson faced less legal exposure. No one believes Trump would have been indicted on such counts—most of them involving allegations from years past—were he not running for President.

One count that Donald Trump is not charged with is bribery, or taking money while in office, a crime cited as impeachable in the Constitution and germane to the accusations that Joe Biden and his family raked in millions from foreign governments due to the improper use of his prior Vice Presidency. For what reason did Joe Biden lie that he never discussed his son’s business? Why did Hunter complain to his daughter that Joe demanded half of his own grifting income? Why would a Vice President serially call disreputable American grifters and foreign corrupt oligarchs? Can Joe’s lifestyle ever be reconciled with his reported income?

Given such asymmetry in the application of the laws, conservative or even apolitical Americans are apprehensive that any political prominence will draw the attention of government in effort to either indict or bankrupt them with legal expenses.

The last four FBI Directors have either admitted they lied under oath, or preposterously under oath claimed ignorance or amnesia about events directly under their control. Or they simply stonewalled subpoenas and testimonies about alleged FBI crimes.

The former CIA Director admitted to lying twice under oath. The FBI hired social media corporations to suppress election-cycle news deemed unhelpful to the Left. The agency, along with Democratic operatives, helped hatch the election-cycle conspiracy of the 2015-2016 Russian-Collusion hoax, and the 2020 Russian disinformation laptop hoax. The FBI played a central role in many of the 2024 indictments. In other words, the FBI along with the DOJ, has sought to warp three presidential elections in a row.

On the prompt of a Joe Biden campaign official (and now Secretary of State) and a former interim CIA director, 50 former intelligence officials lied to the electorate that an authentic but incriminating Biden computer was a likely Russian plant—a fact known to be lie but not disclosed as such by the FBI. [read more]

This is the blueprint how the Left is radically transforming America. Another great article by VDH.

US payrolls rise by 172,000 in May, topping expectations

From NY Post.com (June 5):

America’s labor market delivered another pleasant surprise in May as employers added far more jobs than expected, though the strong numbers could give the Federal Reserve another reason to hold off on cutting interest rates.

US employers added 172,000 jobs last month while the unemployment rate held steady at 4.3%, according to Labor Department data released Friday.

Employment remains a bright spot in the economy — with an average of 188,000 jobs gained each of the past three months — after a disappointing 2025. Last year, employers largely held off on growing their workforces amid uncertainties about US tariff policy and cuts to the federal government, experts said.

“Consumers are still spending, businesses are still hiring, and the job market remains one of the strongest pillars holding up the economy,” Sung Won Sohn, professor of finance and economics at Loyola Marymount University, told The Post.

May’s payroll gain easily topped economists’ expectations for roughly 80,000 new jobs and came after the government revised March and April hiring figures higher by a combined 93,000 jobs.

President Trump appeared to tie the numbers to his long-standing calls for interest rate cuts.

“With a great Jobs Report, like just announced, stocks should go up, not down. That’s the way it was for 200 years. Growth does not mean inflation! How else can a Country attain GREATNESS???” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

Stocks dropped, though, as investors took the strong jobs numbers to mean the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates high through the rest of the year.

The Dow closed down 695 points, or 1.4%. A tech selloff prompted the Nasdaq to decline 4.2% — ending its worst week in over a year — while the S&P 500 dropped 2.6%

The stronger-than-expected employment numbers suggest the labor market remains remarkably resilient despite concerns about slowing economic growth and uncertainty facing businesses.

With the World Cup coming to the US this summer, job gains were concentrated in leisure and hospitality. They added 70,000 positions in May. Local government added 55,000 jobs, while health care payrolls increased by 35,000.

The financial sector was one of the few weak spots, with 22,000 jobs shed.

Still, Sohn said the breadth of hiring in May was encouraging because job growth was not concentrated in a single industry.

“The key point is that job creation was not limited to one tiny corner of the economy,” he told The Post.

Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% in May and were up 3.4% from a year earlier, matching economists’ expectations.

The unemployment rate has now remained in a narrow range between 4.3% and 4.5% since July 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The report arrived days after separate Labor Department data showed job openings climbed to 7.62 million in April, the highest level since May 2024 and a sign that demand for workers remains intact even as hiring has slowed.

The increase in openings was driven overwhelmingly by professional and business services, a broad category that includes many white-collar jobs. Openings in the sector jumped by 668,000 positions in April, accounting for roughly 90% of the nationwide increase.

But the April surge in job openings has yet to translate into a major hiring boom.

While employers posted more jobs, Labor Department data showed employment in professional and business services was little changed in May, suggesting companies may be searching for talent while remaining cautious about expanding payrolls. [source]

More winning!

Trump signs $70B bill to fund Homeland Security Dept. through 2028

From Yahoo.com:

June 10 (UPI) -- President Donald Trump signed a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security's immigration enforcement agencies through 2028 after months of battles to prevent it from happening.

"This morning I'm thrilled to sign the Secure America Act to immediately and fully fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of my term, so we won't have to be talking about it anymore," the president said in the Oval Office.

The Senate passed the $70 billion funding package on Friday, and the House approved it on Tuesday.

Democrats fought the funding for months, refusing to agree to the bill unless there were reforms to the organization after two American citizens -- Renee Good and Alex Pretti -- were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis earlier this year. But the measure was passed via reconciliation, which only requires a majority vote instead of 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

"We'll give the heroes of ICE and Border Patrol -- and that's what they are, they're heroes, what they have to go through to keep us safe -- the support and resources they need to defend our borders, protect our homeland and to keep America safe," the president added He also gave House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., credit for passing the bill with a slim majority in the House.

"Despite Democrat efforts to shut down ICE and Border Patrol, Republicans have now fully funded these agencies through President Trump's entire second term to the tune of nearly $70 billion," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., in a statement. "Thanks to President Trump, our border has gone from its weakest point to its most secure point in less than two years." [source]

Good. Now, if the Senate can get its act together and pass the SAVE bill so President Trump can sign that into law.

Islamic extremists disguised as military separated Christians from crowed, slit their throats: bishop

From Christian Post.com (Oct. 7, 2022):

Suspected Islamic extremists disguised in military uniform gathered a crowd of people in Mozambique’s Nampula province, then separated the Christians from the group and tied their hands before slitting their throats, a Catholic bishop said.

Bishop Alberto Vera Aréjula of Nacala told the Catholic group Aid to the Church in Need this week about the killings that occurred last month as was told to him by one of the Christian survivors who managed to flee.

The survivor told the bishop that the terrorists were dressed in military uniform and they gathered people saying they were there to save them.

“When they were all gathered, they started asking who is Muslim and who is Christian. Those who identified as Christian, they started tying their hands behind their back and they cut their throats,” the bishop was quoted as saying.

The bishop said the killings took place on the night of Sept. 6 and the following day, and that “11 people were murdered in total and they left a trail of destruction and a lot of fear.”

On Sept. 6, an 83-year-old Italian nun, Sister Maria de Coppi, was killed in Chipene city when gunmen stormed a Catholic mission compound and set fire to buildings, including the church and hospital, according to reports.

The attack lasted five hours as the militants ransacked and burned the Diocese of Nacala’s mission church, school, health center, dwellings, library and vehicles, Aid to the Church in Need reported earlier.

Aréjula said he knew the nun, “and she was the image of a mother, she was really helping everyone with simple love and humility.”

“Sister Maria de Coppi was a nurse who would help malnourished children in a little room where there was milk and flour, and they destroyed that room as well.

According to reports, the gunmen were likely running away from security forces from Mozambique, Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community.

At least 24 countries have sent troops to support the fight against insurgents in Mozambique, whose army has been accused of being corrupt and having 7,000 “ghost soldiers,” according to the BBC.

Islamic State-affiliated insurgents in northern Mozambique, a Christian-majority country, have internally displaced more than three-quarters of a million people, according to the United Nations.

In the coastal province of Cabo Delgado, Islamic extremists have been exploiting the crisis after a civil war started in 2017. The area is rich with gas, rubies, graphite, gold and other natural resources. Protesters demonstrated at the time against what they say is profits going to an elite in the ruling Frelimo Party, with few jobs for local residents.

“In 2017, jihadist insurgents began in the Cabo-Delgado province, winning over some locals due to the fact that they gave back resources to villagers from the government and killed no one,” the U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern reported earlier. “This did not last, however, as IS started setting fire to Christian villages, and killing those who lived there.”

Cabo Delgado is a mostly Muslim region where at least 300 Christians have been killed for their faith, according to ICC. There have also been over 100 attacks on churches in the area.

In March 2021, the United States labeled Islamic State-Mozambique as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists.” ISIS-Mozambique is also known as Ansar al-Sunna and known locally as al-Shabaab. The group reportedly pledged allegiance to the Islamic State as early as April 2018 and has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians.

In November 2020, Islamic State-linked militants beheaded over 50 people, including women and children, and abducted others in weekend raids in the Miudumbe and Macomia districts of the Cabo Delgado province.

Last December, Human Rights Watch revealed that insurgents had enslaved more than 600 women and girls, many of which had been abused and sold as sex slaves for as low as $600. [source]

Pure intentional evil.