“A wise and frugal government … shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” —Thomas Jefferson (1801)
IN TODAY’S DIGEST
Nate Jackson
The good news is that the U.S. economy added 245,000 jobs in November, while the headline unemployment rate dropped a notch to 6.7%. The fuller measure of unemployment sits at 12%. The bad news is this represents a significant slowdown in job growth after the gangbusters reports following the reopening of the economy, and November’s report falls far short of predictions. All the ground we lost in March and April has not yet been made up — we’ve recovered only 12.3 million of the 22 million jobs lost.
The primary factor behind the slowdown is still COVID restrictions. Many states, counties, and cities are still imposing varying degrees of lockdown. Governors Gavin Newsom (California), Gretchen Whitmer (Michigan), and Andrew Cuomo (New York) have been legendary for their tyrannical regulations (not to mention gross hypocrisy), and such lockdowns in huge states make recovering jobs that much more difficult. Restaurants, for example, are often relegated to outdoor dining only and that’s not exactly a welcoming feature as temperatures plummet. (Where’s global warming when you need it?) Hence, fewer jobs are coming back. In fact, the areas of food service and retail actually lost jobs in November.
The elephant in the room, of course, is the presidential election. The November jobs report isn’t the first one since the election, but it is the first to include data from after it. Given the presumption that Joe Biden will take office in January, businesses began planning accordingly. Biden has already named much of his economic stagnation team, which bodes ill for the two recoveries President Donald Trump helped to fuel, even if the second remains incomplete.
Moreover, Biden and his team are likely to push for a major hike in the federal minimum wage — to $15 an hour. That sounds really great and “long overdue” as one leftist economist put it. But try telling the restauranteur who can only seat at 25% capacity outside that he has to pay his workers twice as much for a quarter of the work. The real world doesn’t work the way leftist pinheads with cushy jobs in think tanks seem to assume it does.
Between the way Democrat politicians have exploited the pandemic to wreck the economy and the Biden administration’s plans to kneecap business owners with tax and wage hikes and to tie them up with regulatory red tape, the American economy may be in for a tough winter. Biden’s “dark winter” comment might be right after all, if for different reasons.
Thomas Gallatin
For those who don’t know, there are a pair of runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 that will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. And irrespective of how things work out in the presidential election, the fact of the matter is that, for freedom-loving Americans and for the preservation of the American Republic as we know it, Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue need to secure at least one of the two seats.
In light of this reality, the open mud-slinging that has erupted between President Donald Trump and Republicans in Georgia is, to put it mildly, quite disturbing. While Trump should express his legitimate concerns over potential election fraud, his hammering of Republicans like Governor Brian Kemp does little to build consensus among party faithful in support of the president’s efforts to investigate election fraud, nor does it energize Georgia Republican voters to turn out for the runoff.
Epitomizing the madness of this political fratricide are the statements from Trump-backing attorneys Lin Wood and Sidney Powell, who, in attempting to make their case of massive election fraud, have literally called on Trump supporters in Georgia to boycott the Senate runoff. Thankfully, Donald Trump Jr. called out the insanity of this suggestion, stating, “I’m seeing a lot of talk from people that are supposed to be on our side telling GOP voters not to go out & vote for [Kelly Loeffler] and [David Perdue] Senate. That is NONSENSE. IGNORE those people. We need ALL of our people coming out to vote for Kelly & David.”
To be clear, Trump has endorsed both Loeffler and Perdue and will be stumping for them in Georgia today. Yet the question many Republicans are asking is whether Trump will stay focused on campaigning for Loeffler and Perdue or devolve into rancor over the Democrats’ efforts to steal the election while accusing Georgia Republicans of not doing enough to stop it. Ginning up anger over the Democrats’ efforts to rig the election is fine so long as he also pushes hard for voters to get out and prevent the Democrats from moving forward with their radical agenda. Attacking fellow Republicans only hurts that message.
Trump’s recent statement regarding Georgia’s secretary of state serves as just one example of why Republicans are so nervous. Trump wrote, “Georgia Secretary of State, a so-called Republican (RINO), won’t let the people checking the ballots see the signatures for fraud. Why? Without this the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless. Everyone knows that we won the state. Where is @BrianKempGA?” How does saying “the whole process is very unfair and close to meaningless” encourage conservatives to vote in the runoff?
In any case, likely in an effort to generate a little team spirit, Governor Kemp has (once again) called for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to conduct a signature audit of mailed ballots.
It behooves Trump to do his best to ensure the GOP holds onto the Senate, especially if he has his eyes on 2024. As The Wall Street Journal editorial board writes, “Mr. Trump is already sounding like he wants to run again in 2024, and his stolen-election claims sound like an opening bid for campaign donations. At least for now he can say, with justification, that he helped the GOP gain seats in the House and avoid a rout in the Senate. But that narrative changes for the worse if the GOP loses in Georgia after Mr. Trump divided his own party to serve his personal political interest. He needs a GOP Senate nearly as much as Mr. McConnell does.”
Douglas Andrews
If you saw our tribute from Mark Alexander earlier this week, you already know that the great Walter Williams has passed away.
Professor Williams, whom Alexander called “a fine gentlemen, an Army veteran, an American Patriot, and scholar of the first order,” was, of course, also a teacher. And given the damage that a Biden administration would do to the educational advances that conservatives have made during the Trump years, we thought it worth contrasting these two educational worldviews.
As The Wall Street Journal’s Madeleine Ngo reports, “Joe Biden has vowed to bring sweeping changes to education and to reverse some of the civil rights-related moves made under President Trump. The current education secretary, Betsy DeVos, sought to bolster school-choice programs, proposed cuts to public-school funding and called for swift school reopenings during the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Biden, meanwhile, has said he wants to expand resources for public schools and has pledged to appoint a teacher to head the Education Department.”
Regarding those rotten public schools and the civil rights-based, freedom-driven concept of school choice, Department of Education spokesperson Angela Morabito said, “There is no one less powerful and more marginalized than the student trapped in a failing, government-assigned school with no way out.”
Former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan, though, says those policies are going to “fundamentally change.”
Biden himself has pledged to reinstitute the Obama administration’s rules on “transgender” students and bathroom choice as well as its awful “guilty until proven innocent” Title IX sexual-assault directive. And he’s likely to do the same with racist Obama-era guidelines that encouraged the use of race in college admissions and that directed schools to count by race when punishing students for misbehavior.
Biden also said, tellingly, during a presidential victory speech earlier this month, “For American educators, this is a great day for you all. You’re going to have one of your own in the White House, and Jill’s going to make a great first lady.” Notice how he addressed American educators and not American parents. Which cohort do you think has a greater stake in the education of our nation’s children?
In addition, Biden has called for “more stringent guardrails for charter schools,” which is euphemism soup for slashed funding and more onerous regulations.
Professor Williams had always been more than a bit dubious of leftist do-gooders like Duncan and Biden, especially as it pertained to inner-city blacks. “I think that the Democrats have been very successful in portraying themselves as the caring people,” he said, “when, if you look at the effects of the Democratic Party on black people, I think it’s horrible, it’s horrendous. For example, if you ask the question, ‘In what cities do blacks live under the worst conditions — in terms of crime, rotten education, poor services?’ — these are the very cities that have been run for decades by Democrats.”
Why do we have a sense that the Good Professor had a lot more street cred here than Arne Duncan and his ilk?
Professor Williams’s second-to-last column, which we posted Wednesday, is titled, sadly but fittingly, “Black Education Tragedy Is New.” In it, he discussed the often-ignored truth that black educational underachievement hasn’t always been as disastrous as it is in today’s inner cities.
“Should we blame this education tragedy on racial discrimination or claim that it is a legacy of slavery?” he asked. “Dr. Thomas Sowell’s research in ‘Education: Assumptions Versus History’ documents academic excellence at Baltimore’s Frederick Douglass High School and others. This academic excellence occurred during the late 1800s to mid-1900s, an era when blacks were much poorer than today and faced gross racial discrimination.”
He didn’t believe that this awful disparity is preordained. “You can bet the rent money,” he said, “that white liberals and high-income blacks would not begin to accept the kind of education for their children that most blacks receive.” Williams pointed to a rise in violence and a drop in respect as root causes: “First- and second-graders telling teachers to ‘Shut the f— up’ and calling teachers ‘b—h,’” as he put it.
“Years ago,” he concludes, “much of the behavior of young people that we see today would have never been tolerated. … Today, unfortunately, we have replaced practices that worked with practices that sound good and caring. And we are witnessing the results.”
Biden’s “solution”? More of the same, but with gusto because the teachers unions will have “one of their own” in the White House. And if black parents don’t like it, well, he might say “you ain’t black.”
Nate Jackson
We’ve noted more than once that Joe Biden’s foreign policy will not only be very different from Donald Trump’s but will undo much of Trump’s stellar success. You’ve also heard it said that personnel is policy. So here’s a look at the personnel Biden wants to bring (back) to the swamp.
“We have no time to lose when it comes to our national security and foreign policy,” Biden said when discussing the Obama retreads populating his foreign policy team. “I need a team ready on Day One to help me reclaim America’s seat at the head of the table, rally the world to meet the biggest challenges we face, and advance our security, prosperity, and values.”
Well, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said of Biden, he’s been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” So it’s unlikely he’ll pick the right people for his team.
Not all the players have been announced, and we’re a long way from January 20 in any case. But let’s start with the State Department, where Biden has tapped Tony Blinken to replace Mike Pompeo.
Blinken served as deputy national security adviser and deputy secretary of state in the Obama administration and is a lefty from Barack Obama’s Lead From Behind™ School of Diplomacy. Blinken embraced the Iran nuclear deal. He pushed for more American troops in Syria and backed Obama’s disastrous misadventure in Libya. He’s a Russia-collusion hoaxer. Like Biden, he has unexplained ties to China. Yet as with so many creatures of the Left who are wrong on virtually every issue, Blinken is failing upward to the serve as one of the president’s most prominent Cabinet officials.
Jake Sullivan is Biden’s choice for national security advisor. He was Biden’s NSA during the last administration, and before that he was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. He too was a fanboy of the Iran nuclear deal — in fact, he was said to be “instrumental in shaping” that deal. On Clinton’s bogus Steele dossier, Sullivan was a true believer: “I believe that [the Steele dossier] is perfectly appropriate and responsible if we get wind or people associated with the campaign get wind that there may be real questions about the connections between Donald Trump, his organization, and Russia that that be explored fully. At this point, we’re finding out more and more that’s deeply troubling.”
Indeed we are.
For Homeland Security, Biden is looking to Alejandro Mayorkas. Senator Tom Cotton warns: “Alejandro Mayorkas was found by Barack Obama’s Inspector General to be guilty of selling Green Cards to Chinese nationals on behalf of rich, democratic donors.” But we can trust him to run Homeland Security.
As for the United Nations, the ambassadorship will go to Linda Thomas-Greenfield. She’s more concerned with social justice and putting America in its place (which is down a few pegs) than she is in advancing our interests internationally. As she herself wrote, “The contours of a new agenda for diplomatic reform have to flow from a sensible reinvention of the United States’ role in the world. … U.S. diplomacy has to accept [this] country’s diminished, but still pivotal, role in global affairs. It has to apply greater restraint and discipline; it must develop a greater awareness of the United States’ position and more humility about the wilting power of the American example.”
“Diminished.” “Wilting.” If that doesn’t describe Biden’s foreign policy (or pretty much anything else), we don’t know what does.
Speaking of diminished and wilting, however, Biden has tapped John Kerry to serve as his climate czar, a position that does not need Senate confirmation but will be part of his national security team. Lumping climate with national security gives you an idea of leftist priorities.
On a final note, given that China is our number one national security threat, the most alarming thing about Biden’s team — and Biden himself — is the rampant and deep ties to China and the people at every level, all the way up to the “Big Guy” himself.
Thomas Gallatin
The surest sign that an elected official is more motivated by power than principle is when they blatantly flout the very rules they impose on others. It’s the classic authoritarian attitude of “rules for thee but not for me.” And Democrat officials across the country have been demonstrating this hypocritical authoritarian attitude in spades ever since the coronavirus pandemic hit.
California Governor Gavin Newsom just issued a new stay-at-home order (that the LA County sheriff, among others, will not enforce). We’ll see how well Newsom does in following his own rules this time. Remember, just before Thanksgiving, Newsom was observed dining mask-less at the ritzy Napa Valley establishment The French Laundry, celebrating a birthday party just hours after he had released more COVID guidelines on mask-wearing and restricting social gatherings to three households or fewer. At least Newsom offered an apology after being caught, which is more than can be said of most other Dem officials busted breaking their own rules. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed the salon owner after she was caught violating local shutdown rules.
Back to The French Laundry. On the very next night after Newsom was caught, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who has cultivated a public reputation as a stickler for COVID rules, was seen dining at the establishment sans mask and not social distancing. Her spokesman defended her actions by saying that she had not technically broken state rules. However, she certainly broke the rules she’s imposed on San Francisco, banning any dining at such establishments.
Moving down the California coast to Los Angeles, we find that County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, a Democrat, provides yet another blatant flouting of rules after she was caught dining at an outdoor restaurant immediately after issuing a directive banning outdoor dining. Her excuse? Well, she had to get in one last meal at her favorite dining establishment prior to her edict going into effect. But isn’t it serious? Why, yes. She insisted when announcing the new rule, “This is a serious health emergency and we must take it seriously. The servers are not protected from us, and they’re not protected from their other tables that they’re serving at that particular time, plus all the hours in which they’re working.” Evidently, Kuehl believed the virus would be transmissible only after her edict went into effect.
Before leaving the Golden State, let’s not ignore Senator Dianne Feinstein’s failure to practice what she preaches, as she has regularly been spotted speaking to colleagues on Capitol Hill without her mask, even as she decrees, “Wearing masks in public should be mandatory. Period.”
Then there’s the case of Denver Democrat Mayor Michael Hancock, who hopped on a private jet to fly down to Mississippi to spend Thanksgiving with his daughter. No big deal — it was a private flight — right? Just pay no attention to the fact that, just 30 minutes prior to his flight, he sent out the following message: “With the continued rise in cases, I’m urging you to refrain from travel this Thanksgiving holiday. For my family that means cancelling our traditional gathering of our extended family.”
But even in deep-red states, Democrat elected officials’ hypocrisy abounds. In Texas, Austin Mayor Steve Adler in November admonished city residents via a video message in which he lectured, “Stay home if you can. This is not the time to relax. We are going to be looking really closely. … We may have to close things down if we are not careful.” Except Adler wasn’t in Austin when he delivered that appeal. He wasn’t even in the Lone Star State. Nor was he in the U.S. Adler was, in fact, down in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, where he had gone to vacation with his family after having just attended his daughter’s wedding in Austin.
Moving east to the Bayou State, Democrat Governor John Bel Edwards wrote just before Thanksgiving, “Always wear your mask if you are around people not part of your immediate household.” Except for him. He was photographed at a Baton Rouge Country Club mingling with other diners — without a mask.
On the East Coast, in the City of Brotherly Love, restauranteurs aren’t getting much love from Mayor Jim Kenny, whose policies have shut down restaurants in Philadelphia. But Kenny, whose appetite for fine cuisine must be satiated, saw no problem in traveling over the border into Maryland to dine at an establishment on the Chesapeake Bay. His jaunt provoked the ire of Philadelphia chef Marc Vetri, who wrote on social media, “Glad you’re enjoying indoor dining with no social distancing or mask wearing in Maryland tonight while restaurants here in Philly close, suffer and fight for every nickel just to survive. I guess all your press briefings and your narrative of unsafe indoor dining don’t apply to you. Thank you for clearing it all up for us tonight.”
Either these hypocrites don’t believe the virus is dangerous, or they don’t give a rip about potentially spreading COVID to their constituents. And the result of this hypocrisy will be more people ignoring their warnings. As National Review’s Jim Geraghty observes, “If another bunch of fat-cat politicians try to decree that no one should get together for Christmas, and that everyone should stay out of restaurants and church and so on, the reaction from much of the public will be a metaphorical middle finger, and that reaction will be entirely deserved. Elected officials didn’t start this pandemic with a ton of trust and respect for their authority, and the worst among them have destroyed what was left in the past few weeks.”
Ever wonder why conservatives have never been big on Big Government?
Mark Alexander
Ahead of the critical release of the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed vaccines, there was more evidence this week of what we already know: Red China concealed information about the CV19 pandemic, and that concealment significantly increased the spread of the virus worldwide.
According to global health expert Yanzhong Huang, the latest leaked Wuhan files from the Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control add to what is already known about the ChiCom suppression of information regarding the onset of the virus.
Huang notes: “It was clear they did make mistakes — and not just mistakes that happen when you’re dealing with a novel virus — also bureaucratic and politically motivated errors in how they handled it. These had global consequences. You can never guarantee 100% transparency. It’s not just about any intentional cover-up, you are also constrained with by technology and other issues with a novel virus. But even if they had been 100% transparent, that would not stop the Trump administration downplaying the seriousness of it. It would probably not have stopped this developing into a pandemic.”
Andrew Mertha, director of the China Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, concluded: “China had an image to protect internationally, and lower-ranking officials had a clear incentive to under-report — or to show their superiors that they were under-reporting — to outside eyes.” He added that the under-reporting of deaths “appeared to be a deception, for unsurprising reasons.”
Meanwhile, in the deadly wake of the ChiComs’ willful and grossly negligent cover-up of the China Virus, the Demos’ Leftmedia cover-up of Joe Biden’s nefarious ChiCom influence-peddling scheme remains in blackout status.
Brian Mark Weber
The 2020 election may bring new leadership to the White House in January, but the problems plaguing cities and towns across America remain unchanged.
Like a scene out of a dystopian novel, youth gangs roam the streets toppling statues, breaking windows, and attacking innocent bystanders. Theirs is a world turned upside down by a revolution devoid of morals or principles.
Yet while millions of Americans watch in horror at the unraveling of our social fabric, we tend to avoid the hard questions. It’s not that we don’t care, but maybe we’re fearful that decades of broken families really have contributed to our current state of affairs.
As Stanley Kurtz writes at National Review, “Because the family has been seen since approximately forever as society’s foundation, it makes sense from the traditional point of view that family decline would have pervasive social effects. Yet no one dares discuss it.”
We don’t discuss it because our culture has been changed in part by the unending onslaught of TV shows, movies, music, and books that mock traditional families, celebrate single-parent households, encourage a life of decadence, and reward selfish pursuits.
Across the board, we’ve failed to defend our way of life in the face of a multi-pronged attack that’s ripping apart the ideals and institutions we long believed in. These days, we’re fearful of speaking out and defending what we’ve always held so dear.
But defending a way of life is only possible if we believe in that way of life. Having been taught by our popular culture to think Western and Christian values are oppressive and destructive, too many young people want to tear down the entire system.
Increasingly, the breakdown of the American family seems to be the culprit, and Mary Eberstadt of the Faith and Reason Institute believes the loss of fathers, faith, and patriotism are to blame. As Eberstadt notes, “Some people, mainly on the left, think there’s nothing to see here. They’re wrong. The vast majority of incarcerated juveniles have grown up in fatherless homes. Teen and other mass murderers almost invariably have filial rupture in their biographies. Absent fathers predict higher rates of truancy, psychiatric problems, criminality, promiscuity, drug use, rape, domestic violence, and other less-than-optimal outcomes. Here’s another pertinent, albeit socially radioactive fact: Fatherlessness leads to a search for father substitutes. And some of these daddy placeholders turn out to be toxic.”
Eberstadt also points out that many of the extreme ideologues pushing critical race theory on the Left, and white nationalism on the Right, are products of fatherless homes. She notes that the lack of a father, or the presence of a dysfunctional father, also leads to a lack of faith in God, increased anger toward social and political systems, and sexual promiscuity.
Kurtz agrees, adding, “The ever-growing number of Americans who pursue education post-high school, and the ever-lengthening number of years during which they do so, is now driving the delay of marriage and, with it, family decline.”
It’s an interesting take on a complex issue, and collectively we’ve certainly created the perception among young people that college is the best path toward a good life. But there has to be more to the decline of families than sending kids off to college. After all, thousands of American soldiers spent years in Europe fighting world wars, but they came home ready and able to embrace marriage, family, and God.
In the end, it’s hard to deny that millions of fatherless children have been lost. It may be too late to save them, but we have the power in our hands and in our hearts to make sure the next generation enjoys the benefits of a home centered on the values that have served us so well for so long: God, family, and country.
Douglas Andrews
With apologies to female Patriots everywhere, there’s a hilarious scene in the movie “As Good as It Gets” in which Jack Nicholson, who plays a well-known novelist, is approached by a star-struck young female reader. “How do you write women so well?” she gushingly asks.
Distracted, impatient, and in no mood for banter, Nicholson replies, “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability.” Then he gets on the elevator and off he goes.
Why do we share this sexist clip? Because it perfectly captures our thoughts on the “diversity consulting” industry. There’s no reason to it, nor any accountability. And yet it’s thriving, raking in millions of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars, thanks to the Diversicrats and their outsized influence in all levels of government.
Take the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium, for example. It’s a social justice nonprofit — or an “equity consulting firm” for those who’d rather call a guy who pumps gas a “petroleum transfer technician” — that’s funded entirely by our taxpayer dollars. As The Washington Free Beacon’s Chrissy Clark and Joe Schoffstall report, the consortium “conducts ‘anti-racist audits’ for corporations and schools, often in partnership with far-left groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The consortium was recently awarded a lucrative contract by Maryland’s largest school district and works with educators across 15 states.”
P.T. Barnum might never have said “There’s a sucker born every minute,” but if he did, he was no doubt thinking about the sort of chump who’d pay good money to be told he’s a racist. Thank you, sir. May I have another?
Would that these racial-grievance grifters were limited to bilking the government. At least then we’d know where our tax dollars were being wasted. But, as Clark and Schoffstall write, “Equity firms have profited greatly from the burgeoning anti-racist movement in academia. The MAEC was awarded a $454,680 contract with the Montgomery County Public School district to conduct an ‘anti-racist audit’ of the school’s policies; in nearby Loudoun County, a similar consulting firm raked in $422,500 in two years. Prominent diversity consultants, such as White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, make nearly $13,000 for a speaking gig on college campuses.”
It pains us to say it, but regular readers of The Patriot Post know all about Racist Robin, a white woman who’s somehow overcome her pallor to become one of the nation’s most successful race hustlers. Our Thomas Gallatin covered her lucrative two-hour shakedown of the University of Kentucky back in July, writing, “DiAngelo promoted her latest ‘woke’ work, the obtusely titled White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism.” As Gallatin dryly noted, “No one ever told DiAngelo that racism has been one of the most widely and repeatedly discussed issues in this nation since the civil-rights era of the 1960s.”
All isn’t lost, however. City Journal’s Christopher Rufo, for one, doesn’t believe that taxpayers should be funding the indoctrination of government employees via “divisive pseudosciences” such as critical race theory, and President Donald Trump seems to agree.
In September, the president issued a lengthy and detailed executive order banning federal contractors from teaching “this malign ideology [that] is now migrating from the fringes of American society and threatens to infect core institutions of our country.”
Executive orders are, of course, orders rather than laws, so a future administration could simply undo Trump’s anti-anti-racist EO. But at least we’d get a good sense of how that future administration believes our hard-earned tax dollars should be spent.
Michael Swartz
It often seems that the trouble popping up in far-off places eventually comes home to roost. Few Americans devote much thought to Nigeria — aside from an occasional joke about its all-too-frequent email scams — but after a kidnapping that involved a rescue from SEAL Team 6, that African nation is attracting a little bit of our international spotlight.
While that abduction involved an American living in the next-door nation of Niger who was then brought across the border, the concern about his safety arose because of the increasing frequency of kidnappers selling their captives. As The Military Times reports, “Concern grew quickly after the kidnapping that an opportunity to rescue [hostage Philip Nathan] Walton could become much more dangerous if he was taken by or sold to a group of Islamist militants aligned with either al-Qaida or ISIS and American special operations commanders felt they needed to act swiftly before that could occur, said one counterterrorism official briefed on the hostage recovery operations.”
Walton was one of the lucky ones. As our Louis DeBroux pointed out back in June, more than 50,000 Africans have been murdered in Nigeria over the last decade. Most of these victims were Christians who died at the hands of Islamic-associated groups, Boko Haram being the most infamous. (DeBroux also notes the still-unsolved 2014 kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls by the group that the Obama administration addressed with a social media hashtag.) Last week, that same group was blamed for a one-day massacre of 110 farmers around the city of Mauduguri in northeast Nigeria, the area where Boko Haram is most prevalent.
Even more chilling was the kidnapping and murder of Michael Nnadi, an 18-year-old seminary student who was abducted with three other students last January. The reason why Michael was executed but not one of the other three? “He did not allow me any peace,” said his Muslim captor. “He just kept preaching to me his gospel. … I did not like the confidence he displayed [in his faith], and I decided to send him to an early grave.” In other words, he was killed for being a devout Christian.
Unfortunately, the prevailing attitude in Nigeria seems to be either a shrug of the shoulders or hollow lip service. “Some in the government of Nigeria, which notoriously lacks the rule of law, have been complicit in the attacks,” observes The Heritage Foundation’s Patrick Tyrrell. “Data on cellphones inadvertently left behind by the killers identified owners of the phones as government insiders. Police are also complicit, according to reports. Some police stations haven’t responded to brutal anti-Christian violence even when loud gunfire and screams are clearly audible from less than a mile away.”
The fact that our government felt compelled to call in SEAL Team 6 seems to be a vote of no confidence in the Nigerian government.
It’s no secret that we’ve been doing battle in some form with radical Islam for most of the last 40 years, ever since the Iranian Revolution and the accompanying hostage crisis of the Carter administration. But while we’ve focused on the hot spots of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan — much of which was derided as “blood for oil” by the Left — the age-old battle between Christians and Muslims occurs in many other places as well. Nigeria’s situation, where Christians tend to dominate in the southern half of the nation while Muslims prevail in the north, has put the lie to the Left’s phony “coexist” mantra. Nigeria is becoming a war zone, and the more well-armed Islamists are the aggressors.
Despite its successes in other areas of diplomacy, the Trump administration made little progress in dealing with the issues in Nigeria. Unfortunately, the Obama-era retreads who are poised to populate a Biden administration have an even worse track record of success. Thus, it’s not out of the question that Nigeria’s problems could become ours before too long.
At Nnadi’s funeral, Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah bemoaned the fate of his brethren: “Our nation is like a ship stranded on the high seas, rudderless and with broken navigational aids. … Nigeria is on the crossroads, and its future stands precariously in a balance.”
Nigeria’s plight serves as a reminder that the Long War we’ve been fighting exists on many fronts, and at a moment’s notice we may become involved once again.
Jordan Candler
Election Debrief
- Wisconsin Supreme Court refuses to hear Trump campaign legal challenge (National Review)
- Ousted House Democrats warn party against moving too far left (Washington Examiner)
Government & Politics
- Joe Biden names Brian Deese, an Obama-era henchman, as top economic ecofascist aide (NPR)
- Biden set to push job-killing minimum wage hikes (Washington Examiner)
- Maxine Waters’ campaign paid her daughter $240,000 over 2019-20 election cycle (Fox News)
Apparently, this is the Democrat modus operandi. Ilhan Omar has paid her husband’s firm millions.
- Senate (very) narrowly confirms Christopher Waller to serve on Fed’s board (AP)
- Supreme Court backs California ministry on “draconian and unconscionable” COVID rules (National Review)
- DNI John Ratcliffe says they can’t declassify all of Russiagate’s secrets (Washington Examiner)
Leftmedia
Health
- Biden to call for 100 days of masks after inauguration (Fox News)
Memo to Biden: Most Americans already wear a mask and have been for a good chunk of 2020.
“Theater of the Absurd” Headline Award
- One in every 800 North Dakota residents is now dead from COVID (Daily Mail)
Behold, the textbook definition of manufacturing bombastic news.
Genes of Steel
- 102-year-old New Yorker who also lived through the 1918 flu pandemic and is a cancer survivor beats COVID twice (Disrn)
National Security
- More than 1,000 visiting researchers affiliated with the Chinese military fled the U.S. this summer (The Washington Post)
- U.S. imposes severe travel restrictions on Chinese Communist Party members (NPR)
“The restrictions target holders of business (B-1) and tourist (B-2) visas, reducing the travel documents’ maximum validity to one month, down from the current maximum of 10 years. … The Chinese Communist Party has more than 90 million members, effectively making the State Department visa action the Trump administration’s most sweeping and direct attack on the party.”
Business & Economy
- DOJ sues Facebook for discriminating against American workers (National Review)
- Data shows Americans couldn’t resist Thanksgiving travel (AP)
- OPEC and allies agree to gradually increase production (CNBC)
Annals of the “Social Justice” Caliphate
- Chicago sees massive spike in police-targeted shootings (Free Beacon)
- Oppressed LGBT minority actor Ellen Page transitions to evil white male (Not the Bee)
- Ever wondered what your Privilege/Marginalization score was? There’s a worksheet for that! (Not the Bee)
Double Standards
- San Francisco to bar tobacco smoking in condos and apartments — but marijuana will remain legal (Disrn)
- AOC roasted for selling “Tax the Rich” sweatshirts for $58 (The Washington Times)
Based on AOC’s ideology, shouldn’t this shirt be free? In any case, Jim Treacher makes a great point: “AOC is never going to make a shirt for jerks like me, because nobody ever became powerful by leaving people alone.” But hey, the price could be worse. At least it’s nowhere near the $10,000 it costs for a can of “Tax the Rich” caviar.
Stranger Than Fiction
- Politician named after Adolf Hitler wins election in Namibia (Daily Mail)
On a Lighter Note…
- Department of Transportation cracks down on type of emotional support animal allowed on planes (Disrn)
As the article states, “The new rule will put an end to what had become a widely-abused loophole allowing passengers to bring a wide array of different creatures aboard, including peacocks, pigs, and snakes.” Allow comedian John Crist to demonstrate.
- This poor Amazon driver got chased off by hens (Not the Bee)
- Jurassic gator devours hunters’ ducks before they can retrieve them (Not the Bee)
- This video will make you never want to drive over a bridge again (Not the Bee)
- Twenty-five pups that won the “Grumpy Dog Photo Challenge” paws down (InspireMore)
Closing Arguments
- Policy: Rx for America’s dysfunctional health insurance system (Manhattan Institute)
- Policy: Fiscal federalism during the COVID pandemic (AEI)
- Humor: Gretchen Whitmer casts spell on Michigan so it’s always winter and never Christmas (The Babylon Bee)
For more of today’s editors’ choice headlines, visit Headline Report.
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How the Media Stole the Election — A plethora of votes would have gone against Biden had voters simply been informed.
Obama Speaks Out Against ‘Defund the Police’ — Or does he?
Humor: Guy Who Loves Christmas Inflatables — “One is one too many and one more is never enough.”
For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.
Insight: “The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force.” —Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
For the record: “Policies should never entice students into greater debt, nor should they put taxpayer dollars at greater risk. There are too many politicians today who support policy that does both. We’ve heard shrill calls to cancel, to forgive, to make it all free. Any innocuous label out there can’t obfuscate what it really is: wrong. The campaign for free college is a matter of total government control. Make no mistake: It is a socialist takeover of higher education.” —Education Secretary Betsy DeVos
Upright: “Lin Wood and Sidney Powell are totally destructive. Every Georgia conservative who cares about America MUST vote in the runoff. Their ‘don’t vote’ strategy will cripple America.” —Newt Gingrich
Dezinformatsiya: “On Monday, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem buried her grandmother, who was among 13 to die over a two-week period at a top-rated nursing home swept by COVID-19. … The number makes clear the lunacy of Noem’s downplaying of the pandemic and her continued refusal to impose a statewide mask mandate.” —The Daily Beast’s Michael Daly, who admits, “The 98-year-old grandmother, Aldys Arnold, is said by Noem’s office to have tested negative for the virus.”
Non compos mentis: “I have two words for MAGA Nation: Don’t Die. Your love of and loyalty to Trump isn’t worth your life. With 73 million of you refusing to wear a mask and to social distance, there’ll be no way to eradicate this disease. And a lot of you are going to die. … Why are you doing NOTHING to stop this slaughter? What will it take for you and I to join, arm in arm, to kill Covid-19? … Look at it this way — if millions of you die off, that’s a lot less Republican voters — and that means we win every election from here on out!” —Michael Moore
Village idiot: “Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back — and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.” —UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres
And last… “If you can loot businesses, burn down buildings, [and] engage in protest, you can also go to a Christmas party.” —White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany
For more of today’s memes, visit the Memesters Union.
For more of today’s cartoons, visit the Cartoons archive.
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