“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” —John Adams (1770)
IN TODAY’S DIGEST
Douglas Andrews
In a hard-hitting interview with lefty “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert, and with a non-medicinal doctor sitting confidently by his side, Joe Biden said that the investigation into his pure-as-the-driven-snow son Hunter is being “used to get me” and is “foul play.”
We’re sorry if we don’t seem sympathetic. Even if what Biden says about “foul play” is true — and it ain’t — it wouldn’t be the first time a politician’s family had been used against him. Why, we seem to recall a sitting president who’s had a similar experience.
As we learned just last week, the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware is investigating Hunter’s “tax affairs” — not his tax evasion, mind you; just his affairs. And it’s believed that there might be something more to it than just a little tax hiccup — something about, oh, influence peddling with China, and something about his dad being compromised by it. As our Mark Alexander recently wrote, “Despite three years of fake allegations that Trump was in the Kremlin’s pocket, the October revelations about the ChiCom links to Joe Biden, via Hunter Biden, are direct, and the allegations are verifiable. The evidence affirms that the ‘Big Guy’ was picking Beijing’s pocket — but with its full knowledge and complicity, and an understanding that he would thus end up in China’s pocket.”
Squeaky Clean Joe isn’t worried, though. “It is what it is,” he confidently told Colbert. And then, in a remark that no doubt deeply offended his former boss, Biden said of his son, “He is the smartest man I know, I mean, in pure intellectual capacity. As long as he’s good, we’re good.”
Sometimes, though, even really smart crooks get caught.
“There have been growing calls among Republicans,” writes Naomi Lim in the Washington Examiner, “for a special counsel investigation into Hunter’s foreign business dealings and taxes, an idea which President Trump reportedly favors, to provide the inquiries added protection against Joe Biden moving to squash them. Trump tweeted on Thursday he has ‘NOTHING’ to do with the potential prosecution of Hunter Biden. The elder Biden has stood by his son, releasing a statement through aides that reiterated how he was ‘deeply proud’ of him for fighting ‘through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger.’”
Yeah, those vicious personal attacks are the worst, especially when they’re directed at one’s son.
Whether President Trump’s next attorney general will appoint a special counsel here is yet to be seen, but Hunter’s dad wants us to know that his whole family is turning over a new leaf. “My son, my family will not be involved in any business, any enterprise that is in conflict with or appears to be in conflict,” he proclaimed earlier this week with a straight face.
That announcement, though, might not satisfy folks like Senator Tom Cotton, who’s calling on Biden to hold a press conference and start leveling with the American people — many of whom voted for him without knowing a thing about his family’s secretive business dealings with our nation’s number one geopolitical foe.
“I’d like Joe Biden to come clean entirely about what was going on with, not just his son, but his brother and his sister,” said Cotton. “His entire family has trading on his name and his public life for 50 years.”
Thomas Gallatin
Be prepared for illegal immigration to become a major issue again, as the incoming Joe Biden administration will initiate a new surge of illegal aliens attempting to cross the U.S. southern border. In fact, it’s already started. New caravans have begun forming in Central America anticipating the reversal and loosening of effective border-enforcement policies enacted under President Donald Trump — policies Biden has pledged to undo.
On Biden’s chopping block are two of the Trump administration’s most successful policies aimed at stemming illegal immigration. The Washington Examiner’s Byron York explains, “The first policy is known as Title 42. Adopted to deal with the coronavirus emergency, it allows U.S. authorities to quickly return illegal crossers to Mexico instead of holding them in detention in the United States. The second policy is the Migrant Protection Protocols, which allows the U.S. to require that asylum seekers wait in Mexico while their cases are adjudicated, rather than allowing them to live in the U.S. during that (often very long) period.”
By ending these policies, Biden would effectively reinstitute Barack Obama’s abysmal “catch and release” asylum policy, which in all practicality created a de facto “legal” immigration system, as there was little to no effort to ensure asylum seekers ever showed up for their scheduled court appearances.
Biden will be able to easily reverse many of Trump’s immigration and border policies due to the fact that much of the Trump administration’s work was accomplished via executive order, not by congressional legislation. While Trump was often stymied by leftist “resistance” judges (or institutional-minded justices) preventing him from quickly and easily reversing Obama’s EOs such as DACA, there’s little reason to anticipate that Biden will meet similar judicial resistance.
(Speaking of the courts, The Wall Street Journal reports, “A divided Supreme Court dismissed a challenge to President Trump’s plan to exclude illegal immigrants from congressional reapportionment.” Reapportionment is precisely why Democrats want them coming in, so this is good news — at least for the moment.)
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, argues that the Biden administration will slow-walk its reversal of Trump’s immigration policies, perhaps often doing so in the dead of night so as not to draw too much public attention. Plus, it’s unlikely that those migrants who have waited for Trump to leave office will continue to wait. As previously noted, caravans are already forming in Central America anticipating a wide-open border per Biden’s campaign promise.
Biden and the Democrats, who have increasingly adopted the radical open-borders agenda, are gambling that by tacitly embracing the party’s hard left, they can grow a future voter bloc that will outstrip any losses from their traditional voting base — union workers and black Americans who are hurt by wage and job competition.
However, in order for this to work, Democrats will need to avoid another massive immigration border crisis, while at the same time making headway on their ultimate objective — the amnesty and enfranchisement of millions of illegal aliens. Biden can blame COVID for any decrease in wages and job opportunities that disproportionately impacts low-income Americans whenever a massive influx of illegal-alien workers enters our economy. Whatever lies ahead, it’s worth noting that, thanks in large part to Trump’s aggressive border enforcement and immigration policies, lower-income Americans saw their employment and wages rise faster and at a higher rate than at anytime during Obama’s tenure. Sadly, Biden would undo this progress, and all on the false claim of taking an “ethical” stand on immigration.
Nate Jackson
When President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, he had a serious foreign policy mess on his hands from eight long years of Barack Obama’s blame-America malfeasance. Trump, the Art of the Deal businessman and foreign policy novice, reversed course with a novel approach: “America First.” And boy did it pay dividends.
As Obama left office, Mark Alexander aptly summed up the lowlights of his terrible legacy:
Under his tenure we witnessed the “Russian Spring” in Crimea; his hollow “Red Line” in the Syrian sand; the Middle East meltdown in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Jordan and Gaza; his political retreat from Iraq — discarding all the blood and treasure spent there to establish stability; the Benghazi cover-up ahead of the 2012 election; the dramatic resurgence of al-Qa’ida; Obama’s reference to ISIL as the “JV team”; and the rise of the Islamic State and an epic humanitarian crisis in the Middle East.
While Obama claims to have ended wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, American troops are on their way back into both theaters. …
Obama heralded his Iran nuke “deal” as one of his greatest foreign policy achievements: “I shut down Iran’s nuclear weapons program without firing a shot.” The fact is, his acquiescence and coddling of Iran resulted in the re-emergence of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, which is now metastasizing into Western Europe and North America.
Additionally, Obama and Kerry took a parting shot at Israel, undermining our historic relations with this essential Middle Eastern ally.
Moreover, Obama subjected our nation to the Paris Climate Agreement and flung the doors open wide for a wave of illegal immigration, both of which threatened our security and our economy.
Progress on just two or three of these problems would have been laudable, but the Trump administration — particularly Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — significantly moved the needle on every one of them.
Despite Obama literally scoffing at the idea that Russia was our biggest geopolitical foe, he then accused and investigated Trump for supposedly “colluding” with the Kremlin to win in 2016. Trump has always had an unfortunate penchant for saying flattering things about thug dictators like Vladimir Putin, which made the charge believable for some. But in practice, Trump thwarted much of Putin’s plans. He fueled energy exports that undercut Russian dominance in Europe. He also gave aid to the Ukrainian military against Russian aggression — as he humorously put it in one of his debates with Joe Biden, “While he was selling pillows and sheets, I sold tank busters to Ukraine.”
Donald Trump was impeached for talking to the Ukrainian president; Joe Biden actually offered the quid pro quo.
In the Middle East, Trump redoubled U.S. efforts to defeat ISIS, and though it is not gone, it is a shell of its former self. One might even finally be justified in calling it a “JV team.” He stabilized the U.S. response in Syria and Afghanistan. His record isn’t perfect, primarily because he very much values the “deal” even if it’s with the untrustworthy Taliban and, too much like his predecessor, he often seems more interested in “ending” wars than winning them. But the Middle East is a far quieter place today than it was in 2017.
That’s largely because Trump, Pompeo, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have driven several peace agreements between Arab nations and Israel. (You know, the same Netanyahu who Obama regularly insulted and tried to defeat electorally.) This Israeli-Arab coalition is a huge hinderance to Iran’s designs on regional hegemony, and is thus an engine of peace. As it turns out, keeping the quarter-century-old American promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem was a sign of alignment and backing for Israel that spoke volumes to its Arab neighbors.
It’s safe now to laugh at John Kerry’s 2016 declaration that “there will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world.” His successor, Mike Pompeo, almost certainly is.
Did we mention that, for all his Middle East work, Trump has been nominated multiple times for the Nobel Peace Prize?
Obama won it; Trump deserves it.
Also, as promised, Trump pulled the U.S. out of Obama’s bogus Iran nuclear deal and his ill-advised Paris agreement.
Joe Biden promises to rejoin both, and to generally reverse Trump’s foreign policy.
A notable mention goes to Trump’s termination of Iran’s leading terrorist, Qasem Soleimani.
To the consternation of the establishment, Trump saw NATO as another festering problem — an alliance of European deadbeats who weren’t pulling their weight but were instead mooching off the might and wealth of the United States. No more, he said. Four years later, more NATO nations are pulling their weight in terms of defense spending. Trump’s transactional view of American defense spending and responsibilities is not the traditional conservative approach, but his out-of-the-box thinking changed this status quo for the better.
In fact, that goes to a larger point: American leftists routinely grouse that we’re “less respected” in the world than when “citizen of the world” Obama was “leading from behind.” Well, the globalists might like us less, but that’s because they know we’re no longer a pushover and a sucker. Like and respect aren’t always synonymous.
On top of all of that, Trump moved to secure America’s economic interests abroad, including reworking NAFTA into the USMCA. His boasting was typically hyperbolic, but the new agreement does modernize and improve trade with our North American neighbors.
Trump’s tariffs against China were not our preferred solution, and they had the unintended consequence of higher consumer prices for Americans and necessitating bailouts for farmers due to the inevitable retaliation. But this president rightly took on China in a way that none of his predecessors did, including challenging the blind loyalty to “free” trade with China at all costs — costs that sent American jobs and wealth to China.
Importantly, the designation of greatest geopolitical threat now goes indisputably to China, which much of the world views more negatively now thanks to both the China virus and Trump’s work to destroy the ChiCom facade. That includes pulling U.S. money and credibility from the World Health Organization, which everyone now knows is a Chinese puppet.
Just a reminder: Joe Biden is in Beijing’s pocket, too.
Speaking of Chinese puppets, Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in order to block the Hermit Kingdom’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. The verdict is mixed: North Korea is still an unstable menace, but it’s also no longer regularly threatening U.S. ally Japan.
Trump’s failure with China is his silence in the face of its totalitarian actions to crush freedom in Hong Kong.
On immigration, Trump began building his wall (though it remains far from what he promised), and he generally made progress in a number of areas to tighten the border and the process so that the flood of illegals crossing our border slowed significantly. There is much work yet to be done, and, unfortunately, Biden will likely undo much of Trump’s progress. But that doesn’t take away from Trump’s earnest efforts to solve a problem the rest of Washington was content to treat as a campaign fundraiser.
Trump might only be a one-term president, but his achievements in foreign policy — again, due in no small measure to Pompeo — are matched by precious few. As Bruce Thornton put it, “Trump, like the ‘amiable dunce’ Ronald Reagan, understood that the establishment’s narratives were endangering our security and interests. He brought some practical wisdom, common sense about human nature, and real-world experience to foreign policy, and recalibrated it with a few simple, Reaganesque principles: We win, they lose; America’s interests are paramount; and we should always be ‘no better friend, no worse enemy,’ a foundational principle of foreign relations that Obama had turned on its head.”
Indeed, Trump challenged and changed a lot of Beltway groupthink, and the end result is that America is stronger on the world stage than it was four years ago.
Mark Alexander
Representative-elect Burgess Owens (R-UT), the Black former NFL star whose victory over a Utah Demo boosted the number of House seats flipped by the GOP, has come out swinging against the radical elitists and leftist cadres who are core supporters of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Owens protested that the Biden-Harris “elitist class” is composed of people who live a “life of luxury,” including “the NAACP, the Black Caucus, and Barack Obama.” He says, “Many of them [are] millionaires and then telling the rest of us how this country doesn’t work.”
Regarding the Biden-Harris cadres of Marxist “Black Lives Matter” haters and their “antifa” supporters, Owens declared: “Whether it be antifa, a terrorist group, whether it be BLM, a terrorist group, I tell you one thing they have in common with the KKK: They’re cowards and bullies. They hide their face. They go out every single night. They do it in gangs. Their goal is to destroy things, to intimidate people, to hurt people, and to do all the things that are totally against the American way.”
Contrary to Biden’s “dark” vision of America, Burgess reiterated: “The team of Republican conservatives is all about hope, freedom, opportunity, and looking at each from the inside out, and not the outside in. The other side is all about divisiveness. It divides with color, with gender, with wealth.”
On his personal life, Owens said, “As someone who came out of the NFL and lost everything… If I can do it, you can do it. That’s the difference in the conservative message and those who are in the socialists and Marxists area. They want to keep you hopeless, so they get the power, and they get the benefit of you not believing in yourself.”
On cultural shifts, Owens said, “When I was growing up, 70% believed and committed to family. We now have close to 80% who believe it’s no big deal to have kids and not take care of them.” And that, he believes, as do we, is the root cause of most of our nation’s social ills.
Brian Mark Weber
Leave it to the state to create a problem that it can then promise to fix.
This is how government keeps on growing. We’re conditioned to look to our representatives for answers, who in turn devise solutions that create more programs and redistribute more wealth to fix the problems they created in the first place. Before long, we’re looking at $27 trillion in national debt and a government that controls our healthcare, our blow dryers, and our lightbulbs.
Case in point: Governors across the country continue to shut down schools in fear of COVID-19, despite the twin facts that our youngest are the least likely to catch or spread the virus and that they need interaction with teachers and classmates for their own emotional and psychological well-being.
Parents looking over their child’s shoulders and seeing the faces of 20 students on a Zoom call chatting with their teacher may look like education, but it’s a poor substitute. And the depth of the problem goes far beyond lost time.
According to CNBC, “It’s all taken an unthinkable toll on children — a social, emotional and academic ordeal so extreme that some advocates and experts warn its repercussions could rival those of a hurricane or other disaster.”
The story highlights a range of negative effects of the shutdowns, including an increase in the number of mental health-related visits to emergency rooms, millions of children facing hunger, students failing basic academic assessments, pupils missing significant class time, and children with physical or emotional disabilities being left even further behind than where they started.
According to a report issued by Bellwether Education Partners, the vast majority of students missing school since March are those learning English, those who are homeless or in foster care, or those struggling with disabilities.
“The long-term consequences of this crisis,” according to the report, “are difficult to estimate without seeming hyperbolic. Once a student leaves school, it is difficult to reenter. One study of a large, urban district found that two-thirds of high school dropouts never reenrolled, and among those who do, about half drop out again. Circumstances that might push a student out of school today are very different, but even if all of the currently missing students return to school as soon as they are allowed to do so, months of missed opportunities for learning could mean permanent setbacks.”
Grade-school students aren’t the only ones affected by the shutdowns. University students continue to learn by sitting in classrooms connected to their professors, who lecture to them from homes or faculty offices. Increasingly, student surveys reveal that they feel disconnected and even cheated, given that most colleges and universities haven’t lowered tuition for online learning.
These setbacks may only show up on test scores and class grades for now, but in the long term the loss of skills and knowledge will likely have a larger impact on our society and our economy.
These are all real concerns created out of thin air by elected officials hungry for power and relevance. Is it any wonder that these same officials want more government funding, more intervention, and more oversight to “fix” the problems they’ve created? If we’re not vigilant when we emerge from these lockdowns, our schools will be even more under the boot of Big Government.
Unless Americans stop looking to the state to solve all our problems, we’ll never escape from the cycle of dependency, and we’ll never be free from those who keep falsely claiming to serve our best interests.
Michael Swartz
It was once sung that if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere. And most of the millions who actually lived in New York City were making it just fine — until the pandemic hit.
Since then, however, things have become drastically different.
A recent study by a “location analytics company” called Unacast estimated that the New York metro area had an outflow of 3.57 million people, which seems extremely high. However, they also estimated an inflow of 3.5 million people, leaving a net loss of 70,000 based on opt-in smartphone data.
Perhaps more important to this narrative, though, was the study’s estimate of $34 billion of net income loss for the city. Simply put: Those who were moving out were more well-off financially than those who were coming in. (Other anecdotal data on year-over-year rents this past fall supports that theory, too.) And while they weren’t going too far — nearly half simply relocated to other areas of New York and New Jersey — the fact that they’d left the city behind meant they were no longer contributing to its tax base.
While this study by Unacast was a clever way to bring attention to itself, it also brought up a salient point echoed in other circles: The bright lights of our big cities seem to have dimmed lately.
Perhaps the primary reason for this exodus was the COVID-induced worker repositioning that companies were forced to make in order to keep their employees healthy. Once workers became more accustomed to doing their jobs from home, many realized that there was no reason to remain in an urban area being hollowed out by pandemic-induced closings of bars, restaurants, sports venues, and other popular gathering spots. As long as they had a reasonable Internet connection, there was nothing wrong with relocating to a second-tier large city like Syracuse or Scranton. And while rents are plummeting in midtown Manhattan — much to the chagrin of developers and government alike — they’re going in the opposite direction in the second-tier cities that have needed this sort of break for awhile.
However, libertarian author Kristin Tate takes the economic reasoning farther. “It is easy to blame the deluge on the coronavirus, but in reality a unique combination of factors heralded the end of the growth in places like New York while introducing population booms in medium-sized cities and suburbs across specific regions of the country,” she writes, adding to the blame, “a plethora of new taxes and regulatory schemes that soak middle- and high-income earners.” Thus, she concludes, “The decline of liberal cities in blue states during a crisis is perhaps the clearest judgment on a raft of poor tax and regulatory policies.”
Regarding these “schemes” Tate refers to, for many years the fiscal appetites of large cities had been fed by wealthy residents who weren’t really hurt by the tax bite because they were able to fully deduct the toll from their federal tax bill. However, the limitation of the SALT (state and local tax) deduction included in the GOP tax cuts in 2017 made higher local taxes less appealing to those who lived in big urban areas in blue states. (Tate later points out that these refugees are moving to formerly red states but, unfortunately, are seemingly voting for the very same tax policies from which they moved away.)
Furthermore, while retirees from the large metro areas have for years been using the high home values and equity they had built up back home to sell out and move to cheaper housing in places like Florida, the Carolinas, or coastal Delaware, the pandemic has helped to broaden that market to telecommuters. In some cases, those who couldn’t afford to buy a house in the New York metro may have received their big break thanks to telecommuting — they can now afford a nice new house just a few hours away, which would have cost them twice as much in the metro area.
Yet while leaving the city has become sensible for fiscal reasons, there’s also an added feeling of security for families who’ve left riot-torn urban areas for smaller towns. There’s much less worry about “autonomous zones” and protests for defunding the police, and the neighborliness and the close-knit community bring a peace of mind that money can’t buy.
The Wuhan flu will one day pass, but we’re unlikely to return to the old normal — for bad and good. If it means Americans return to small-town values where family and community count for more than making lots of money and acquiring lots of stuff, we can count that as a gain.
Douglas Andrews
“Every great cause,” said philosopher Eric Hoffer, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Hoffer wasn’t speaking about the Department of Education, but he could’ve been. How else to explain a 4,000-employee cabinet-level department, earnestly created by Jimmy Carter in 1979, which has continued to grow and gobble up taxpayer funds while cranking out an inarguably inferior product and being viciously resistant to reform?
If our Department of Ed were a car, it’d be a Trabant, but with porcupine spikes.
Don’t touch!
None of this, though, is the fault of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, an outsider who was vilified by the Left before her first day on the job — an outsider who, nonetheless, fought the good fight for fundamental civil rights like school choice and due process.
DeVos, whose younger brother, Erik, founded the private security firm Blackwater USA, came to Washington from a wealthy and patriotic family with high hopes for enacting educational reforms and addressing our nation’s deplorable achievement gap. She’ll leave next month unbowed, but with a realist’s view of the forces arrayed against meaningful educational reform in this country.
“DeVos, a longtime champion of school choice and critic of traditional public-school systems, was greeted by an unrelenting fusillade of criticism from the very beginning,” writes National Review’s Frederick Hess. “Most who’ve previously filled her office have been treated gently by the press and politicians. But her nomination had barely been announced before the New York Times ran a scathing critique blaming her for the state of Detroit’s schools, even though she’d never held any position with power over education in the city (or Michigan, for that matter).”
Perhaps DeVos should’ve known what she was in for from the start. Confirmed by the Senate on a 51–50 vote, hers was the first time in U.S. history that a cabinet nominee’s confirmation was decided by the vice president. Republicans should remember this, er, spirit of cooperation when they’re deciding whether to confirm Joe Biden’s cabinet picks. For a sense of the kind of classless and coordinated hostility that DeVos faced throughout her tenure, check out this interview.
Reflecting on that experience, says DeVos, “confirmed my belief that entrenched interests were going to do their best to protect the status quo, their power, and their jobs no matter what.” Indeed, she added, “It’s been truly disheartening to see just how far some people in Washington and elsewhere will go to distract from the abysmal results of ‘the system’ and protect their power.”
It’s no doubt disheartening, too, when the mainstream media takes what a cabinet secretary says and maliciously twists it into something it isn’t. Take, for example, her remarks from an all-staff meeting on Tuesday: “Be the resistance against forces that will derail you from doing what’s right for students,” she said. “In everything you do, please put students first — always.”
Please put students first — always. And yet, as The Federalist’s Jonah Gottschalk reports, “The left-wing media sphere swarmed. The articles cherry-picked the word ‘resistance’ out of her full statement and used it to falsely claim that DeVos was orchestrating some kind of insurgency against Joe Biden. The irony, of course, is that numerous U.S. Department of Education staffers have participated in the organized leftist ‘resistance’ against the policies of the duly elected President Trump.”
Secretary DeVos didn’t need this. She could’ve easily and more comfortably continued her educational activism and philanthropy from a safe distance, away from the Beltway media and The Mob. But, like a true Patriot, she answered the call. “Parents today are more aware of what their children are — or are not — learning,” she says. “And they’re more aware of who’s standing in the way. More than ever before, they are raising their voices for more options, for more choices, for freedom.”
Betsy DeVos made a difference, and she did so despite the nonstop slings and arrows. And for that, we owe her our thanks.
Thomas Gallatin
“I don’t want to see more people borrow money they can’t afford to pay back … nor do I wish to pay it back for you,” Mike Rowe wrote in a recent social media post. He also addressed the flawed, irresponsible, immoral, and unjust “college loan forgiveness” policy supported by many leftist Democrats, including Joe Biden.
Rowe, the former “Dirty Jobs” host who has long been an advocate of the blue-collar worker, challenged the notion that higher education is the only means for people to attain rewarding, fulfilling, and lucrative careers. Of this latest forgiveness push, he said, “My reasons for opposing student loan forgiveness are not a secret. I’ve written at length on this page about the fundamental unfairness of doing such a thing — especially to the millions of Americans who have paid their college debts, and sacrificed much to do so.”
Rowe went on to say that a major factor in his opposition to student loan forgiveness is the fact that it’s essentially a wealth redistribution scheme — except that it redistributes wealth from the poor to the rich. He quoted National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who calls it “welfare for the wealthy” and explains: “The majority of student debt is held by relatively high-income people, poor people mostly are not college graduates, and those who attended college but did not graduate hold relatively little college-loan debt, etc. As the New York Times puts it, ‘Debt relief overall would disproportionately benefit middle- to upper-class college graduates.’ Which ones? ‘Especially those who attended elite and expensive institutions, and people with lucrative professional credentials like law and medical degrees.’”
Williamson gets to the root of the issue when he dubs it “a pure culture-war issue.” And indeed it is. Those on the debt forgiveness bandwagon are all for wealth redistribution and “equity” without any genuine concern for individual liberty and the personal responsibility that comes with it. They view higher education as a “right” and therefore the cost should be covered by the government (read: taxpayers). It’s pure socialism that, if left unchecked, will bankrupt the country. Mike Rowe, whose biggest calling card is working hard to earn what you get, is right on target to fight against it.
Jordan Candler
Election Debrief
- North Carolina regulator Michael Regan to lead EPA (NPR)
- Native American Rep. Deb Haaland — who smeared Covington students — to lead Interior Department (AP)
- Biden’s tapping of third House Democrat further narrows Pelosi’s majority (National Review)
- Georgia conducting statewide “signature match review” of absentee ballots (Daily Wire)
Government & Politics
- Newly declassified texts reveal FBI spied on Fox News during Crossfire Hurricane (American Greatness)
- Parting shots: Tulsi Gabbard introduces another pro-life bill that bars abortion for pain-capable babies (Disrn)
Health
- FDA panel recommends Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine (NPR)
National Security
Big Tech
- Google hit with new antitrust lawsuit from 38 state attorneys general (ABC News)
“This is the third major antitrust lawsuit leveled against the social media giant since October, after the Department of Justice announced a suit, and a coalition of ten Republican state attorneys general announced a suit Thursday over ads.”
Second Amendment
- Kamala Harris is calling for “commonsense” gun control. She means confiscation. (Washington Examiner)
- ATF decision could lead to biggest gun registration, turn-in effort in American history (Free Beacon)
- Smith & Wesson sues New Jersey — for FIRST Amendment violations (Free Beacon)
Around the Nation
- Minneapolis city council members revise history, now claim they never advocated defunding police (Daily Mail) | Meanwhile, Minneapolis developers shy away from city projects after unrest and calls to defund the police (Washington Examiner)
- California’s population growth rate at record low (CNBC)
The article says, “While it’s fashionable to blame California’s taxes and policies for its recent exodus, state officials say the more likely culprit is the pandemic and the migration patterns of the state’s large community of international immigrants.” Of course they’d deflect by saying that.
Double Standards
- Rutgers prof claims “language matters,” then compares “death cult” GOP to “fecal matter” (Campus Reform)
- North Face accused of virtue signaling for refusing oil-and-gas firm’s jacket order (Washington Times)
“The vast majority of The North Face hoodies, coats, gloves, snow pants and other apparel, as well as tents and backpacks, are made with nylon, polyester and polyurethane — all of which come from petroleum. Fleece jackets are also polyester.” D’oh!
- Carbon footprint of world’s wealthiest should be aggressively reduced, “experts” say (Daily Mail)
We’d prefer they instead aggressively reduce their hypocrisy, whether that be by word or deed.
Annals of the “Social Justice” Caliphate
- North Carolina governor establishes “Gender Expansive Parents’ Day” (Disrn)
Censorship
- Instagram censors post for linking Joe Biden’s 1994 law to mass incarceration (NY Post)
Cancel Culture
- The author of a book on cancel culture just got canceled for tweeting a fact about Islam (Not the Bee)
Non Compos Mentis
- Ilhan Omar says her father died of coronavirus because of Trump’s “criminal neglect” (Fox News)
“Theater of the Absurd” Headline Award
- Biden advisers warn Trump mass vaccine timeline may be too optimistic (NBC News)
Managing editor Nate Jackson quips, “Well, they were right about Trump not having a vaccine by the end of the year, so… oh. Wait.”
On a Lighter Note…
- Texas police officer buys struggling homeless man a new wheelchair (Fox 4)
- Watch this lady go to war with a raccoon stuck in her Christmas tree (Not the Bee)
This gives a whole new meaning to “O Christmas Tree.”
Closing Arguments
- Policy: Eight education choice wins in 2020 (Daily Signal)
- Policy: Critical Race Theory, the new intolerance, and its grip on America (Heritage Foundation)
- Humor: New Tesla to run exclusively on liberal tears (Babylon Bee)
For more of today’s editors’ choice headlines, visit Headline Report.
The Patriot Post is a certified ad-free news service, unlike third-party commercial news sites linked on this page, which may also require a paid subscription.
‘Dr.’ Jill Biden Isn’t a Real Doctor — Liz Wheeler provides some reminders of what evil sexism actually looks like.
Lincoln Removed From San Francisco School — Cancel culture is a pernicious can of worms that spreads like wildfire.
‘Family Guy’ Takes on Identity Politics — But Michael Knowles explains how Seth MacFarlane still falls short.
Humor: Harry Potter With Guns — “You’re a little scary sometimes.”
For more of today’s columns, visit Right Opinion.
Upright: “There’s a new word for 40 million people in this country: Non-essential. And it’s crazy. … During this pandemic, I’ve seen firsthand that everybody is essential to somebody, even if you’re just working to pay your own bills. So something is going on here that is fundamentally upside-down. And the fact that these policies are now being instituted by leaders who have shown themselves to be the very definition of rank hypocrisy is, I’m afraid, going to lead us into a place where it’s going to be very difficult to get the poop back in the goose.” —Mike Rowe
A blind squirrel finds a nut: “The Warp Speed project appears to be a dramatic success. I pray that it will be. Although I’ve been a frequent critic of this administration, I want to give them credit for organizing this effectively, and delivering a vaccine in a timely way, almost amazing timely way in this pandemic that we face.” —Senator Dick Durbin
A forewarning: “Let me be clear: I need Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in the United States Senate to get this done.” —Joe Biden in a new Georgia ad
Non compos mentis: “It’s not, ‘You should wear a mask.’ It should be mandated to wear a mask.” —CNN’s Don Lemon (“Don Lemon himself does not need a mask since he usually has his foot in his mouth.” —Keith Koffler)
And last… “To be fair, Pete Buttigieg is not unqualified to be Transportation Secretary. Anyone is qualified, because the truth is, being a bureaucrat takes very little knowledge or skill.” —Allie Beth Stuckey
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For more of today’s cartoons, visit the Cartoons archive.
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