“Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt.” —Samuel Adams (1749)
IN TODAY’S DIGEST
Mark Alexander
We can now verify that Joe Biden, in his 47 years as a statist Swamp Rat, created at least one constituent job — a very lucrative position for Hunter Biden, the underboss of Joe’s family crime syndicate.
At the same time the Bidens were arranging side deals for big bucks with the Red Chinese, Joe sat by as millions of American jobs were lost to cheap China labor — the jobs Donald Trump has worked tirelessly to bring home. While President Trump was negotiating fairer trade terms with China, the ChiComs were placing their bets on a future Joe Biden presidency.
As Thomas Gallatin wrote last week, the emails tying Joe Biden directly with pay-to-play Ukraine and China quid pro quos have cracked the Biden facade, and Joe’s career of corruption is becoming more apparent by the day. But there was no coverage of that corruption from the Demos’ Leftmedia talkingheads, other than repeating the Biden campaign claim that it was all a “smear campaign.” Of course, Big Tech dutifully censored the reports so they could not be circulated on social media.
Predictably, in the “town hall” softball pitches to Biden last Thursday, not a word was asked about the scandal. Political analyst David Marcus declared, “Let me be blunt — George Stephanopoulos’s failure to ask Joe Biden about this bombshell New York Post story is the most egregious example of journalistic malpractice that I have ever seen, and that’s a very competitive category these days.”
But if Biden is not asked by the partisan Demo moderator of the next presidential debate this Thursday night, I can assure you Trump will ask him, repeatedly. It will be interesting to see how Biden attempts to throw off the scent ahead of that dueling confab.
We have been rightly cautious about the veracity of Hunter Biden’s emails, and I continue to maintain 10% skepticism. Likewise, Senator Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, asked the FBI to verify the hard drive communications: “As the first step in our due diligence, committee staff contacted FBI officials and asked for confirmation of certain facts in an attempt to validate the whistleblower’s claims and assertions. Unfortunately, several days later, the FBI responded that it would not confirm or deny any information identified by the committee even though several of our questions were not related to the possible existence of an ongoing grand jury investigation.”
That notwithstanding, for the MSM to black out news about the communications while claiming they were “unverified” is inexcusable. After breaking the story, the New York Post’s editorial board noted: “The New York Times and Washington Post reporting that built vast hysteria over ‘Russiagate’ in the administration’s first days [was] all rooted in ‘opposition research’ commissioned by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, or … Clinton partisans in the Obama administration. … Desperate for Biden to win, they want to sink the [Ukraine and ChiCom] story with innuendo rather than actually report on it. Don’t ask too many questions, and you can dismiss it all as ‘unverified.’”
The fact that the “Russia collusion” fabrication was wholly unverified certainly didn’t stop the Leftmedia from immediately and endlessly pushing that leftist narrative for the next three years.
The difference between that fabrication and the Biden emails — and it’s a BIG difference — is that Fox News has now verified one of the most damaging emails tying Joe Biden to an access-for-profit scheme with the ChiComs. In one email, there is a reference to a percentage of the ownership profits: “10 held by H for the big guy.” Another party copied in that email has now verified its authenticity and confirmed that “the big guy” is Joe Biden.
And former federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani, now President Trump’s personal attorney, says that before he released any of the emails to The Post he had already verified dates and context with a confidential informant. Additionally, according to Beth Baumann, “Based on what’s known, Giuliani stated Hunter Biden should be in prison for failing to register as a foreign agent, which is what Paul Manafort went to jail for.” According to Giuliani, Hunter Biden had no such registration either. Oh, by the way, neither did Joe Biden.
Giuliani promises there are more communications to come.
Meanwhile, sticking with the script, when Biden was finally caught off guard and asked about the emails directly, he replied: “It’s another smear campaign.” As commentator Laura Ingram notes: “This is how they get away with it. It’s a ‘smear campaign’ when there’s an email trail, but it’s good journalism when it’s suppositions set up by the deep state, as in [the fake Russian dossier].”
If they can’t spin the hard drive coms as a “Russian fabrication,” Biden and his Demo/Leftmedia machine will endeavor to spin this as a “Hunter Biden” problem. But as seasoned political observer John Hinderaker makes clear, “Of course, the issue isn’t Hunter — a sad, drug-addled case — but rather the light that the documents shed on the corrupt career of Joe Biden. The Post’s documents show a level of corruption that is remarkable even by Swamp standards.”
According to President Trump, “That’s a laptop from hell. A giant trove of emails show Hunter Biden making deals, setting up meetings with his father Joe, and using the office of the vice president for a for-profit cash machine. … People think of Joe Biden as a nice man. He’s not a nice man. He’s a corrupt man. … Joe Biden is and always has been a corrupt politician. Joe is far more corrupt than Hunter. The Biden family is a criminal enterprise.”
Finally, as I wrote last January, and other sources now agree, Democrats impeached Trump in an election year for what Joe Biden actually did. There is now additional corroborating evidence of Biden’s corruption. And House investigators want to know why, if the FBI had the Biden hard drives last December, this was not made known during the impeachment inquisition.
Douglas Andrews
For the last couple of weeks, the mainstream media has been trying to tell us that Joe Biden is pulling away from Donald Trump, and they’ve been trumpeting his lead in the polls as proof. But no sensible person believes these polls.
The Biden camp certainly doesn’t believe them. On Saturday, his campaign sent out a three-page memo with a warning to staff and supporters: “The reality is that this race is far closer than some of the punditry we’re seeing on Twitter and on TV would suggest.”
Calling the race “neck and neck” in critical battleground states, the memo continued, “If we learned anything from 2016, it’s that we cannot underestimate Donald Trump or his ability to claw his way back into contention in the final days of a campaign.”
Yesterday, even the Trump-addled scribes at The Washington Post began to reach for the Maalox. “Biden leads Trump. So did Hillary Clinton. For Democrats, it’s a worrisome campaign déjà vu,” went the Post’s headline.
“The polls,” they wrote, “are once again delivering feel-good boosts to Democrats: Joe Biden beats President Trump by 10, 11 or 12 points nationally, depending on the day. His edge in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin averages eight. Propeller-heads promise better than 4 in 5 odds of a new president next year. But then the partisans remember they have been here before, four years ago this week. The conflicting emotions can be overwhelming.”
Those “conflicting emotions” no doubt plague every Biden staffer who happens to get a glimpse of a Trump campaign rally. Yesterday, for example, he drew a huge and enthusiastic crowd in Carson City, Nevada, where he riffed for 90 minutes or so in the late afternoon sun about the booming economy, the “Chinese Plague,” and the “criminal enterprise” otherwise known as the Biden family.
So this was Carson City, but it might just as well have been Sanford, Florida; or Greenville, North Carolina; or Janesville, Wisconsin; or Muskegon, Michigan. Wherever he goes, the people show up en masse. And yet his opponent, Joe Biden, can’t seem to draw flies.
Trump is working to increase his support from suburban women, and there’s little doubt he’ll outperform his 2016 numbers with blacks and Hispanics. And he’ll have one last face-to-face crack at Joe Biden, when they square off in their final debate on Thursday in Nashville. There, it’s our expectation that if deeply compromised debate moderator Kristen Welker doesn’t ask Joe Biden some tough questions about the incriminating evidence found on his son Hunter’s abandoned MacBook laptop, Donald Trump will.
Lastly, we don’t want to give the impression that polling is uniformly unreliable. One pollster, for example, actually got things right in 2016. He had Trump winning both Michigan and Pennsylvania when no one else did, and he actually predicted Trump winning 306 electoral votes (he got 304), when all the big-name polling “experts” had Hillary Clinton winning in a rout. And just who was this prescient pollster? Robert Cahaly of the Trafalgar Group.
As National Review’s Rich Lowry notes, “As a general matter, [Cahaly] discounts national polls. First, because the race for the presidency is won state by state, not on the basis of the national vote. Second, because all the methodological difficulties involved in getting a balanced, representative sample in a state poll of 1,000 people are magnified in a national survey. ‘It’s easily skewable at that point,’ he says. ‘You start making assumptions.’”
Thus, between now and Election Day, when you hear the Leftmedia giddily promoting the latest poll showing Biden up by a healthy margin, don’t believe it. The 2020 race, just like the 2016 race, will be won in the battleground states, not in California or New York or Illinois. And in the battleground states, Trump is trending.
“We cannot become complacent because the very searing truth is that Donald Trump can still win this race,” wrote Biden Campaign Manager Jen O’Malley Dillon in the aforementioned memo, “and every indication we have shows that this thing is going to come down to the wire.”
Yes it will, and yes he can.
Thomas Gallatin
Giant social media companies grew into what they are today precisely because they created platforms allowing users to easily, freely, and widely express their opinions, thoughts, and views. Thus, it’s more than ironic that they are now squelching and controlling the very thing that gave them their existence: free speech.
One of Big Tech’s primary means of speech control is the “fact-checker,” which in practice serves only as an opinion monitor. Even the concept of a “fact-checker” is dubious on its face. It presumes as not only plausible but common that which our nation’s Founders recognized as impossible — a wholly unbiased arbiter of truth. Wisely, our Founders recognized the folly of those who would in the name of “truth” seek to control and limit unwanted speech, hence the existence of the First Amendment and its protection of our God-given right to freedom of speech.
The First Amendment’s speech protection makes no caveats or evaluations of what type of speech is to be protected. Indeed, all speech, regardless of its factuality or “truthfulness,” is to be not only allowed but protected. The rise of social media and mainstream media “fact-checkers” is therefore a direct assault on this fundamental freedom, not because it challenges the views and opinions of others but because the “fact-checker” is being used as a tool by the powerful to justify silencing views and opinions they reject. And the examples of Big Tech’s abuse of Americans free speech via “fact-checkers” are pilling up.
One of the latest incidents comes from Facebook, which censored an ad from the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List this past Friday over the claim that the ad had been fact-checked as false by “independent fact-checkers.” The trouble is that the ad, which claimed that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris support abortion “up to the moment of birth” as well as support taxpayer funding of abortion, was in fact true.
More troubling still was who the “independent fact-checker” was that erroneously labeled the ad “partly false,” giving Facebook the cover for censorship. The culprit was the relatively new media outlet The Dispatch. Created just last year by long-time Beltway political pundits Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, the media site is little other than a bastion for Beltway establishment never-Trumpers to ply their trade under the “conservative” banner. The question is, no matter how anti-Trump one may be, if “principled conservative” is what one claims, how can one make a mistake of this magnitude on such a foundational conservative policy position like being pro-life?
After three days of blowback, Hayes finally ran damage control by admitting the fact-check was “not justified,” dubiously blaming it on a publishing and editing error. Too late; the damage was done. However, what was most disconcerting to those who didn’t know was Hayes’s acknowledgement that The Dispatch is one of Facebook’s cadre of “independent fact-checkers.” That a media organization would have internal fact-checkers is not the problem; in fact, that’s good business practice. That a media organization touting itself as conservative and committed to preserving American values and principles would be party to an organization that works to actively silence Americans’ speech is outrageous. But it shows the extent to which Trump Derangement Syndrome can affect people.
Arnold Ahlert
“I want to start by making something very clear: We don’t consider political viewpoints, perspectives, or party affiliation in any of our policies or enforcement decisions. Period. Impartiality is our guiding principle.” —Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey speaking to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Twitter Transparency and Accountability, September 5, 2018
That above assertion is, quite simply, a bald-faced lie. Last week in equally infuriating and painfully transparent measures, Dorsey and his partner in suppression, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, made it plain that the special exemption they’ve been given by Congress, whereby they are considered neutral “platforms” rather than “news publishers,” is an utter sham.
Nonetheless, due to the calculated and bipartisan impotence of Congress, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been bastardized beyond recognition. The most relevant part of the section is as follows:
Section (c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of —
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to, or availability of, material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).
Are sentient Americans opposed to believe it was nothing more than “good faith” that precipitated censorship of a news story published by the New York Post, one of the largest and longest continually published newspapers in the nation? A story that could affect the outcome of the presidential election?
Perhaps Hunter Biden’s crack use and illicit sex was “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, or harassing,” but it’s not a stretch to realize the key phrase was “otherwise objectionable.” That phrase, of course, is itself a highly objectionable and flexible phrase that allows members of Congress to wax indignant about social media double-standards and outright censorship — while doing absolutely nothing about it.
Yet note the insidiousness in play here. Twitter begins by censoring the New York Post story, and then actively undermines it by promoting and trending a Washington Post story that supposedly refutes it. If this contemptible feedback loop sounds familiar, that’s because similar machinations were employed by a thoroughly corrupt FBI, which leaked stories to the media and then used those stories to justify obtaining FISA warrants against members of Donald Trump’s team.
Moreover, The Washington Post wasn’t merely content to advocate for censorship. It also wholly mischaracterized what it labeled a “stunning policy reversal” made by Twitter, whereby the social media entity will “remove content only if it’s directly posted by hackers or those acting in concert with them.”
Yet even as it made that ridiculous assertion, the WaPo noted the NY Post story would still be blocked by Twitter “under a policy that prohibits sharing people’s personal information.”
Again, a bald-faced lie. “No similar standard was applied when the New York Times published Trump’s tax returns, even though anyone who had legal access to them is likely to have broken the law in sharing them with the Times,” National Review’s editorial board rightly asserted.
Thus, some personal information is “more equal” than others.
That “more equal” is a phrase coined by George Orwell is quite apropos. “If anybody is around to write history in a generation or two, October 14th 2020 will go down as the first day of a new Year Zero,” columnist Mark Steyn warns. “Yesterday, with less than three weeks to go in a national election in a settled democratic society with an ostensibly free press, the woke billionaires of the social media cartel decided to freeze and/or cancel the Twitter/Facebook accounts of the President’s press secretary, the Trump campaign, Republican Senate candidates and Republican House members. So America is now formally a one-party state, at least as far as fair access to media platforms is concerned.”
What will be done about it? Last Thursday, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced that his agency will attempt to clarify the breadth and meaning of Section 230. “Social media companies have a First Amendment right to free speech,” he wrote. “But they do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters.”
Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) agrees. “Twitter and Facebook’s editorial decisions to block the New York Post’s story, while allowing the President to Iran to issue death threats against United States service members, do not meet the narrow content moderation protections granted to platforms under Section 230,” he stated.
Buck made those assertions in a letter to the Department of Justice — calling for an investigation of social media censorship.
Who’s kidding whom? Calling for a DOJ investigation is a pathetic deflection of responsibility, whereby members of Congress apparently believe they can dump this problem on U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr. Barr’s track record of investigations may be many things, but above all, they are decidedly interminable.
Which may be precisely the point, and nothing illuminates it better than the reality that a photo of a federal subpoena reveals the FBI has had the laptop computer allegedly owned by Hunter Biden since last December.
In short, the notion that the FBI couldn’t verify whether or not Hunter Biden owned that computer, and in turn, the accuracy of the NY Post’s story over the course of 10 months, is utterly preposterous. Moreover, it suggests that Big Tech has nothing to worry about with regard to government regulation of its de facto totalitarian practices.
Thus, as columnist Emily Jashinsky writes, “two of the world’s most powerful corporations are nakedly using their massive influence to interfere in the election on behalf of the Democratic Party. And they’re getting away with it.”
Not just getting away with it, but thumbing their nose at Congress in the process: Facebook and Twitter employed these tactics only a week after the the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law released a report summarizing the findings of seven hearings and 1.3 million documents. Its conclusion? Four companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — “have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.”
And just like oil barons and railroad tycoons, Big Tech should be broken up. The alternative is plenty of talk but no action, due the inevitable disagreements arising from the different interpretations of Section 230. Disagreements regarding “special immunity” that will continue, even as Big Tech ramps up its censorship of anything a handful of billionaires find ideologically objectionable. The same billionaires who have “surveilled other businesses to identify potential rivals, and have ultimately bought out, copied, or cut off their competitive threats,” as the report further asserts.
Break them up — before they have the power to completely eliminate that argument itself from being publicly disseminated.
Robin Smith
Women on the Left are so contentious with such intolerance that they’ve destroyed their own credibility by mocking and degrading the very thing they claim to support.
Harsh?
During the Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the bilge and bile spewed from all leftist quarters, including feminists who seems to be triggered by a truly accomplished woman. Barrett is an extraordinary jurist, a brilliant scholar, a faithful wife, and a loving mother of seven children — two of whom are adopted from Haiti and one of whom has Down Syndrome. Barrett fulfills the construct of an empowered woman having it all. But darn it, she wasn’t supposed to be a Christian conservative female powerhouse!
Some leftist women are working to bludgeon the reputation of a stellar judge and are mocking Barrett’s life of faith. Toronto Star writer Heather Mallick insulted Barrett over her answer about her independent thinking. Mallick scoffed, “She should be called ‘Judge Amy Father Husband’ because she is named after the men she has obeyed all her life as a Handmaid in this nutty People of Praise religious cult that Democrats are too polite to mock. This is why Dems lost to Trump last time. Courage up, people.” Evidently, it takes “courage” to hatefully mock someone’s faith, intact family, and accomplished position as a federal judge.
Feminist author Lauren Hough vulgarly tweeted, “It’s a very weird thing to watch these old creeps congratulate a handmaid on her clown car vagina.” She continued sarcastically, “You can tell a lot about how a judge will rule by her fertility so I’m glad she’s already proven hers because the cervix check really shouldn’t be done live. But I’m excited for her to share her casserole recipe and some stain-removal tips.”
These bitter, biting words meant to publicly shame and maim might be difficult to understand when we remember the proclamations of groups like Emily’s List, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL in their fundraising pitches: “elect! more! women!” Except that we know what they’re really saying is, “Elect only women who think and act like us.”
Vice President Mike Pence treated Senator Kamala Harris as an equal in the VP debate on October 7. Indeed, according to CNN, Harris spoke for 38 minutes and 48 seconds compared to Pence’s 35 minutes and 22 seconds. Despite this, Harris repeatedly played the victim card with exaggerated facial expressions of eye rolling, scoffing, and head shaking to go along with repeated demands that she not be interrupted. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos laughably singled out VP Pence for “mansplaining.” The victimhood narrative was fulfilled, leaving leftist women satisfied.
Contrast that with the decorum of Amy Coney Barrett in her Senate hearings as she matter-of-factly addressed questions — even the stupid ones — directly and within the confines of judicial temperament and canons. Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar interrupted Judge Barrett to accuse her of having “cut a deal with the president” related to ObamaCare. Senator Harris, with delicious irony, tried to manipulate Barrett to get a response on “a very contentious matter.” When Barrett responded with a frank “it’s inconsistent with the judicial role,” Harris moved into an angry feminist version of “mansplaining.” The senator and Democrat VP nominee then launched into a lecture of the illegitimacy of the Senate hearings. For shock value, Hawaii Democrat Mazie Hirono asked Barrett if she had ever “made unwanted requests for sexual favors or committed any verbal or physical harassment or assault of a sexual nature.”
Because of Barrett’s partisan affiliation, leftist women see no problem with being contentious and intolerant as they seek to destroy Barrett by mocking and degrading the very thing they claim to support — a successful and accomplished woman.
Why? Amy Coney Barrett and all other strong, conservative Christian women serve as the rebuttal to the notion that only the Left represents women and any issues of substance for the female gender. When leftists don’t get the result they want, like the 2016 presidential election, the response is to attack the legitimacy and move from dismissal to disruption.
Hell truly has no fury like a leftist woman scorned.
Thomas Gallatin
Mainstream media outlets loathe the fact that the majority of Americans no longer trust them as sources of unbiased and nonpartisan news. This resulting distrust in the MSM has pushed many Americans to find their news from alternative sources online and across social media — something we in our humble shop have provided, by the way, since 1996.
Well, that’s not acceptable, say the gatekeepers of information. The German Marshall Fund (GMF), a think tank founded in Washington, DC, in 1948 with the objective of helping European nations combat the disinformation efforts of communists, has released a report ironically promoting the suppression of information. This is, of course, the same strategy communist nations used to squelch inconvenient ideas in their own populations.
As The Wall Street Journal editorial board observes, “Naturally, the report has a solution: Stop Facebook users from seeing content that rudely challenges elite views. The authors conclude that ‘de-amplifying — or adding friction to — the content from a handful of the most dangerous sites could dramatically decrease disinformation online.’ Presumably Facebook can swap in unimpeachable sources like CNN.”
The MSM, which has increasing become little other than the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party, loudly laments the fact that social media has allowed for the growth of alternate, often conservative, media outlets. Thus, the call for statist control of the news media and suppression of conservative voices.
The fault for the American people’s loss of trust in the MSM has everything to do with the fact that the MSM has become filled with activist “journalists.” These operatives see the promotion of a leftist agenda rather than the objective sharing of the news as their primary purpose. They see their jobs as working to change the world rather than communicating facts without regard to who they may hinder or help. That dereliction of duty created a vacuum conservative news organizations sought to fill, and now the Left’s response is to silence us rather than compete in the realm of reporting and ideas.
Douglas Andrews
It’s not hard to imagine Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer yukking it up with her staffers as they propped up the trendy “8645” sticker on the table next to her in preparation for a “Meet the Press” interview.
Before going live, they probably let NBC’s Chuck Todd and his producers in on the joke, too. After all, what’s a little call to violence against the president between and among Trump-haters?
On the shelf just behind Whitmer and her 8645 message was a vanity license plate with an utterly contradictory message: “RESPECT.” Respect for whom, Gretch? Certainly not for President Donald Trump or his supporters. Whitmer, with her nationally televised call to “86” our 45th president not only displayed her contempt for Trump but also for the more than two million Michigan voters who went for Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016 and put the state in the Republican column for the first time since 1988.
Whitmer is, of course, the same thin-skinned governor whose feelings were hurt a day earlier when, at a Trump campaign rally in nearby Muskegon, the president said, “You gotta get your governor to open up your state, okay? And get your schools open.”
When the crowd spontaneously broke into chants of “Lock her up,” Trump responded, “Lock ‘em all up.” To which Whitmer tweeted, “This is exactly the rhetoric that has put me, my family, and other government officials’ lives in danger while we try to save the lives of our fellow Americans. It needs to stop.”
During the interview, she continued her disingenuous attack, telling Todd, “It’s incredibly disturbing that the president of the United States, 10 days after a plot to kidnap, put me on trial, and execute me — 10 days after that was uncovered — the president is at it again and inspiring and incentivizing and inciting this kind of domestic terrorism. It is wrong. It’s got to end. It is dangerous. We do not tolerate actions like he is giving comfort to. And that’s why we all have to be in this together.”
As we’ve noted, that plot was not what it seemed.
After Whitmer’s MTP rant, the Trump War Room was quick to denounce her: “Governor Gretchen Whitmer displayed an ‘86 45’ sign during her TV appearance,” they tweeted. “86 can be shorthand for killing someone. Whitmer is encouraging assassination attempts against President Trump just weeks after someone sent a ricin-laced package to the White House.”
Republican National Committee Rapid Response Director Steve Guest went a step further, tweeting out a screenshot of Google’s definition of “86,” which included a call for “killing someone.”
Hey, what’s good for the goose is good for the governor. And once again, we find Democrats guilty of the exact same behavior they accuse Republicans of.
Patrick Hampton
Growing up in the 80s and 90s, black men like myself developed an admiration for then-real estate mogul Donald Trump. Back then, he was a public icon. He had all the pretty women and what appeared to be limitless money. You saw him at all the boxing matches. He even made cameos at sporting events and in movies. We bought the books and listened intently to his interviews about his approach to wealth.
Overall, we thought Trump was cool. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that many of us wanted to be the next “black” Donald Trump. Every entertainer and entrepreneur seemed to follow suit, giving him credit in rap songs and looking forward to taking “selfies” with the self-made man.
So it’s no wonder that President Trump is gaining much more support from black male voters who are rekindling their longtime affinity for the former real estate giant. Exit polls from the 2016 election suggest that 13% of black men voted for Trump — more than any Republican in modern election history.
It’s no surprise that rapper Ice Cube was willing to sit down with the Trump White House to discuss his “Contract with Black America” — a plan that included a $500 billion “capital infusion” for black communities. Eyeing what the rapper put on the table, the Trump administration followed up with the Platinum Plan, which met Ice Cube’s largest demand. Senior Advisor Katrina Pierson credited the rapper for his willingness to discuss a solution.
While loudmouth “activists” like LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick only seem to have complaints, a huge influencer in Ice Cube comes forward — with his dislike for Trump and all — to bravely make demands on behalf of his community.
This is because men — real men — are naturally wired to be protectors and providers, going through any means necessary to make change happen. For Ice Cube, it wasn’t a Twitter war or a campaign of hate that helped him bring his plan to fruition. Instead, it was showing up at the table — face to face with a sitting administration — to hold all parties accountable, hypocrisy free.
Leadership like this is what inspires black men, because we honor responsibility, strength, and a well-thought-out plan just as the next man does. Perhaps Ice Cube saw these qualities in President Trump. This was probably evident after coming to both parties only to be deferred by Biden’s campaign. With checkbooks in hand, the Trump administration put pen to paper and made the deal that will pave the way for black entrepreneurship and economic success. It would be a plan that would — as Joe Biden claims in his alliterative slogan — #BuildBackBetter.
Ultimately, this “Trump-Cube Contract” represents the many things black men have wanted from America. But most importantly it embodies the willingness for two men across party and racial lines to meet in the middle. In this case, Ice Cube played the Trump Card and black America won.
Jordan Candler
Top of the Fold
- Supreme Court will hear Trump appeal to exclude illegal immigrants from census (CNBC)
- Hypocritical obstructionist Nancy Pelosi gives Trump 48-hour deadline to compromise on COVID relief (The Daily Wire)
Politics
- NBC debate moderator partisan cheat took father to Obama’s Christmas party and family donated thousands to Democrats including Joe Biden (Washington Examiner) | Video surfaces of moderator “tipping off” Hillary Clinton campaign on interview questions in 2016 (The Daily Wire)
- Biden town hall attendees identified as ex-Obama speechwriter, wife of prominent Democrat (Fox News)
- Chris Coons says his “mind is open” to packing the Supreme Court (Washington Examiner)
- Biden granddaughter “couldn’t agree more” that Joe will implement “agenda of the far left” (The National Pulse)
The Latest on COVID-19
- Cases surge past 40 million infections worldwide (Fox News)
- Ten counties account for 22% of fatalities, 11% of population (The Daily Signal)
- Study: 1/3 of excess deaths were not due to the coronavirus (Washington Examiner)
Annals of the “Social Justice” Caliphate
Around the Nation
- San Diego changes school grading practices to eliminate behavioral factors (The San Diego Union-Tribune)
- Protesters fill casket outside nursing home with thousands of copies of Andrew Cuomo’s new book (Washington Examiner)
- Time to pay the piper: Chicago ranks “rattiest” city for sixth year in a row (actual rats, not politicians) (Washington Examiner)
- Feds withheld $4 million from 9/11 health program over NYC debts (National Review)
Business & Economy
- After a reprieve, a wave of evictions expected across U.S. (Reuters)
- Midwest derecho in August was historically costly, with damage reaching $7.5B (Fox Business)
National Security
Other Notables
- Gretchen Whitmer caught with controversial sign after claiming “lock her up” is inciting “terrorism” (The Daily Wire)
- French teacher beheaded after showing caricatures of Muhammad (The Daily Wire)
Closing Arguments
For more of today’s editors’ choice headlines, visit Headline Report.
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Debate Moderator Once Tipped Off Clinton Aide — “I’m going to ask you about Flint.”
Staring Into the Abyss With Fr. Ed Meeks — One courageous priest’s Sunday morning homily.
For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.
For the record: “Let me be blunt — George Stephanopoulos’s failure to ask Joe Biden about this bombshell New York Post story is the most egregious example of journalistic malpractice that I have ever seen, and that’s a very competitive category these days.” —David Marcus
When Biden was finally asked about the report, he said, “I have no response. It’s another smear campaign. Right up your alley.” As Laura Ingraham notes: “This is how they get away with it. It’s a ‘smear campaign’ when there’s an email trail, but it’s good journalism when it’s suppositions set up by the deep state, as in [but fake Russian dossier].”
Friendly fire: “Are we really not supposed to care that the dumped emails in 2016 were, you know, real? Amazing how many members of the press currently spend their time worrying about preventing the public from accessing true information.” —Matt Taibbi
Non compos mentis: “We can do this; you can ban chokeholds. But beyond that you have to teach people how to de-escalate circumstances, de-escalate. So instead of anybody coming at you, and the first thing you do is shoot to kill, you shoot them in the leg.” —Joe Biden (There are numerous reasons why this is a terrible idea.)
And last… “Democrats interrupted Judge Barrett 78 TIMES. Zero cries of sexism or ‘mansplaining’ from the media.” —Ronna McDaniel
For more of today’s memes, visit the Memesters Union.
For more of today’s cartoons, visit the Cartoons archive.
“The Patriot Post” (https://patriotpost.us)
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