Too Far: Polls are showing Americans across the country believe the Democrats have gone too far. Liberal policies on mask mandates, boys playing in girls sports, defunding the police, and the list goes on. Voters will remember.
Parent Revolt – Grandparents Are Backing Them Up: As the parent’s revolt sweeps across this country, grandparents are backing up their children with their votes. Children matter…to parents and grandparents. The numbers are starting to show it. The left has gone too far and they try to ignore and/or dismiss legitimate concerns. Well, parents and grandparents vote. If left wing politicians are NOT willing to listen to their concerns, maybe they’ll start hearing them when they are thrown out of office?!?
Russiagate turns into Clintongate: The Clinton campaign spied on the Trump campaign AND on the President of the United States. Clintongate is far worse than Watergate…yet the mainstream media all but ignores this revelation?!?
The idea that a candidate, any candidate, is permitted to spy on another campaign, spy on the White House, break the law and have the mainstream media ignore it…speaks volumes as to why the American people no longer trusts the mainstream media.
This is the biggest political scandal of the decade…yet crickets from Clinton’s media allies.
Democrats on Higher Prices/Inflation: Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi says, “The fact that people have jobs always contributes to an increase in inflation and that’s a good thing.”
The Democrats have been saying what they think for years and ONLY changing their rhetoric and policy right before elections…to fool voters. Will we be fooled again?!?
2016 Russian Hoax: So basically, it wasn’t Vladimir Putin interfering in the 2016 elections, it was Hillary Clinton. Clinton has made Nixon and Watergate look like child’s play.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
In this week’s video rewind- Peggy Noonan warns the GOP to govern from the center, Congressional Republicans eye ambitious agenda if they regain power, and the Misery Index returns from the Carter years!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/594452-gop-eyes-ambitious-agenda-if-house-flips
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Republicans, Stand Against Excess
Be the party of the big center—of normal, regular people—against the forces of ideology assailing them.
The Reagan Foundation and Institute inaugurated a series of speeches last spring on the future of the Republican Party. It is called “A Time for Choosing” and has been a great and lively success, with speakers from all corners of the party. Monday night I spoke, at the Reagan Library, and this week’s column is adapted from my remarks:
America is in a crucial, high-stakes moment. Since 2020 we have been roiled over the pandemic, wokeness, crime, inflation, the schools, illegal immigration. The Democratic Party has stood for, or failed to oppose, many unpopular policies. The Republican Party seems poised to rise.
So what is the job of the Republican Party at this time?
It is to be sane. It is to stand against excess. It is to put itself forward as worthy of leadership. It has to be centrist in its mood and attitudes, and in its internal understanding of itself.
Thirty-two years ago, in my first book, “What I Saw at the Revolution,” I addressed the party and said: “This is the future. You’re a working-class party.” I still believe this but would no longer cast the argument in the language of class. It is too limited and has an aggressive undertone. The Republican Party should see itself too as the party of parents, who in the face of bullying and indifference need someone to stand with them. It should be the party of the unprotected, of regular people—the party of strivers who don’t want to be oppressed, creators who don’t want to be thwarted, store owners who shouldn’t feel constantly afraid of crime or regulation or governmental fees.
The party should retain its ancestral beliefs—for power being held closest to the individual and the family, and radiating out from there to county, state and nation. In the century-old formulation the party was meant to be Main Street, not Wall Street or any other center of concentrated power—big business, big tech. Really anything that begins with “big.”
But an enduring party’s stands must reflect and address the needs and demands of its era. The pressing challenges America now faces aren’t those of 1970 or 1980. A great party must be in line with the crises of its time.
Be prudent stewards, keep your eye on the long run, cultivate economic growth, defend free markets, but make peace with the welfare state. Your own voters did long ago…
…The Republican Party should stand against excess on all fronts—excessive regulation, excessive controls, excessive rejiggering of cultural norms. The Democrats right now are in love with excess—spending new trillions without care, even when that gives rise to inflation.
A great party can’t be a cult. Cults are by definition marginal, not of the majority. Donald Trump brought new voters in, it’s true, and the party would do well to hold them by taking good stands. But don’t forget the votes he lost. He never came close in two tries to winning the popular vote, he lost once-Republican suburbs, in 2020 he lost Arizona and Georgia, dooming Senate candidates and giving control of the chamber to the Democrats. As long as he dominates the scene the party will not succeed nationally.
How sad that would be when the problems we face are piled so high.
To his friends and followers I would say, put America first. Don’t be a cultist, be a patriot. Help your country, let go of old obsessions. Go forward with a spirit of repair and lead this wounded country.
A Trump-free 2024 race would trigger Republican chaos: ‘Everybody is running.’
Whether Donald Trump will run again is an open question that even people close to him and the most seasoned strategists don’t agree on.
If he does run, the broad consensus is that he’ll win the nomination again. But if he doesn’t, that means others might actually have a chance. And so voters should buckle up for a crowded Republican primary.
“If he doesn’t run, everybody is running. I mean everybody,” said Jeff Roe, who managed Sen. Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign and GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s 2021 campaign in Virginia. “It would not surprise me to have 20 legitimate candidates.”
Alex Conant, a founding partner at the public affairs firm Firehouse Strategies, predicted even more Republicans would run for president than when he was communications director for Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016. At the time, 17 major candidates vied for the title of GOP nominee.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris created this crime wave, now they must fix it
It’s time to hold criminals accountable and provide meaningful support for law enforcement.
As a former prosecutor, FBI Special Agent and Chair of the North Carolina Crime Commission it is heartbreaking to witness the Biden administration’s swift reversal of over 30 years of crime control and violence reduction strategies. According to FBI data, the 2021 murder rates were just slightly lower than the rates in 1996 during the crack epidemic. Many cities such as LA, Chicago and New York hit levels not seen since the 1990s. Jen Psaki’s breezy dismissal of this crime epidemic in a recent podcast shows the Biden/Harris administration still doesn’t get why Americans don’t feel safe.
As they shelter behind their gates, guards and guns, the rest of the country fend for themselves in the face of skyrocketing violent crime rates. Every day, senseless violent assaults and homicides are committed by recidivist offenders who should be in prison, yet Biden panders to a progressive base who undermine law enforcement by defunding police, implementing “no cash bail” and refusing to prosecute lawbreakers. These policies have deprived police of the strategies and tools necessary to actually prevent crime.
Biden was mute as the leftist DA in LA published his list of crimes he would not prosecute. Following suit, the Manhattan DA undercut police by refusing to prosecute a litany of crimes, including resisting arrest, thus inviting offenders to resist. Such policies contributed to a record 73 officers murdered in 2021, even as a cop shooter with a prior arrest for a gun crime was released on bond in NYC. In the words of the widow of slain NYPD Detective Jason Rivera: “The system has continued to fail us. We are not safe anymore.”…
… Biden has cited a “deep sense of distrust towards law enforcement” even as he sows that distrust. When asked if there was systemic racism in policing Biden responded: “Absolutely…it’s real. It’s genuine. It’s serious.”
On Biden’s watch officers are leaving the profession at an alarming pace because they were denied the public support, tools, funding, tactics and mission to do the job. Biden allowed them to twist slowly in the wind. Neither Biden nor Harris attended the funeral for NYPD Detectives Rivera and Mora. Americans can see behind the curtain. It’s time to fix it. Start by holding criminals accountable and providing meaningful support, not undermining, those whose sole mission is to protect others.
The left is losing its war on parents …and grandparents!
The parents’ revolution has notched another win.
This week, three members of San Francisco’s Board of Education — Gabriela López, Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga — suffered overwhelming defeat in a recall election brought by angry parents who felt they were more concerned with lefty politics than with children’s welfare. The parents’ case was strengthened by the fact that they were, well, right.
Siva Raj, one of the recall organizers, said, “The city of San Francisco has risen up and said this is not acceptable, to put our kids last.”
As COVID raged, the school board paid more attention to renaming schools — it wanted to rename Abraham Lincoln HS because its namesake didn’t show “that black lives ever mattered” to him — than educating kids. Again and again, the board placed woke politics before its actual job. (Collins had even accused Asians of using “white supremacist.
When parents objected, they were ignored, called racists or worse. And not just in San Francisco. In Loudoun County, Va., teachers and administrators ran a secret group aimed at taking action against parents who opposed their system’s commitment to critical race theory. One of them, school-board member Beth Barts, resigned her position after her role came out. Others face recalls organized by angry parents.
What some have called the “parents’ revolt” is spreading across the country, with parents in numerous other jurisdictions organizing around school-board elections and education policy. (Many more, of course, are quietly voting with their feet, taking their kids to private school or homeschooling rather than submitting to the diktats of woke and incompetent educational authorities.)
Democrats prioritized illegal immigrants throughout the pandemic
Throughout the pandemic, Democrats prioritized benefits for illegal immigrants above the problems and restrictions facing citizens and legal residents. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York recently offered a reminder of that.
Ocasio-Cortez boasted about how Democrats fought “tooth and nail” to include illegal immigrants in COVID-19 “relief” and stimulus packages and how she helped “huge amounts” of illegal immigrants get those federal benefits in her district.
Democrats did indeed fight tooth and nail to make sure illegal immigrants were included in their bloated stimulus bill. While families and businesses were reckoning with the effects of lockdowns, Democrats did not encourage lockdowns to be eased or lifted to make things easier for them. Instead, they made inflation worse with an unnecessary, bloated spending bill, one that was sure to add those who overstayed their visas to the list of beneficiaries.
Ocasio-Cortez, when she is not palling around with elitists at the Met Gala, is bragging about this because this is how Democrats signal to their voter base that they care. That base is not Hispanics or even legal immigrants, but well-off white liberals, the kind who place “hate has no home here” signs on their lawns and use the term “Latinx” so that they can show how inclusive they are.
This is the same reason Democrats were enforcing lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions on citizens and legal residents while not even bothering to test the thousands of illegal immigrants who cross the border every day thanks to President Joe Biden’s lax border policies. For months, you had to show proof of vaccination if you wanted to eat in a restaurant. If you crossed the border illegally with a bogus asylum claim, you could simply walk right in, without so much as a mask or a temperature check.
Another Democrat says the quiet part out loud regarding parental rights
It’s Wisconsin Democratic state Rep. Lee Snodgrass’s turn in the barrel.
Snodgrass is under fire this week after she argued parents have no right to question what their children are taught in public school.
She really said this.
“If parents want to ‘have a say’ in their child’s education,” Snodgrass said in a since-deleted tweet, “they should home school or pay for private school tuition out of their family budget.”
In other words, if lower-income families want a “say” in what their children are taught in public school, they should consider not being lower income — as if parents lose their right to input by virtue of the fact that the school is publicly funded.
This is known as saying the quiet part out loud. Stop being poor, you nosy, know-nothing parents!
Democrats’ COVID mask hypocrisy shows contempt for average Americans and they will pay in November
Democrats’ loosening of mask mandates is purely political.
Democrats and double standards have always gone hand-in-hand. But they’ve never been quite as blatant as we’ve seen during the pandemic.
Last week, photos surfaced of Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams grinning maskless while a classroom full of masked children sat behind her. Two days later, Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin snapped a mask-free selfie at a campaign event while her masked constituents sat in the background. And just over the weekend, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and a host of other celebrities were spotted without masks at the Super Bowl in LA, where an indoor mask mandate is still in effect. Just two weeks earlier, Garcetti was criticized for posing maskless with California Gov. Gavin Newsom at an NFL playoff game.
Those are just the most recent examples. Democrats have been flouting their own rules since the beginning of the pandemic — and they’re often repeat offenders. The message is clear: Mask mandates only apply to regular Americans, not the elite Democrats who put the mandates in place. The hypocrisy is the point.
Durham’s Jaw-Dropping Revelation
One characteristic of Russiagate bombshells is that the mainstream press simply doesn’t cover them. That stands in contrast to the breathless coverage given to the original investigations, even as they never delivered the promised goods.
So it is with the latest jaw-dropping revelation from the Durham investigation. Special Counsel John Durham, of course, is scrutinizing the origins of the Obama administration’s Trump/Russia probe — a probe that holdover officials at the FBI and other government national-security agencies extended into the Trump administration, even as Donald Trump was the sitting president of the United States and, at least nominally, the chief executive to whom those agencies answered.
In a court submission last week, Durham alleged that a tech executive, who was supposed to be helping the government combat cyber threats, used his privileged access to Internet data — specifically, domain name system (DNS) traffic between servers — to mine contacts between Russia and facilities connected to Donald Trump. The information, Durham says, was taken out of context and distorted to suggest that Trump might be a clandestine agent of Vladimir Putin’s regime. Alarmingly, some of the Internet traffic mined in early 2017 was generated by the Executive Office of the President — the White House. That is, the tech executive, who has been identified as Rodney Joffe, was monitoring then-President Trump, trying to portray him as Putin’s mole.
In other words: He was spying on the president of the United States with the aim of harming his ability to govern the country.
Turns out the real threat to ‘norms’ was the Hillary Clinton campaign
From the perspective of several years ago, it’s the stuff of an implausible political thriller or a conspiratorial YouTube account. One presidential campaign spies on another as part of a broad effort to get government agencies to pick up the baton and launch a high-stakes investigation of the new president that hampers his first years in office and consumes massive public attention.
Where could such a thing happen? Maybe Brazil or Equatorial Guinea? Well, we now know it happened in these United States.
The latest from special counsel John Durham is that a tech executive connected to the Hillary Clinton campaign mined internet contacts between Russia and the entities connected to Donald Trump in a search for material to try, as Durham put it in a court filing last week, to “establish ‘an inference’ and ‘narrative’ tying then-candidate Trump to Russia.”
Durham’s probe is a righteous effort to get to the bottom of a matter that deranged American politics for two solid years but has been derided or ignored by the mainstream press, with baleful consequences.
Russiagate did more than its share to undermine the norm that losing campaigns should accept the result of free and fair elections and to erode confidence in institutions at the highest levels of our government. One way to minimize the harm is to insist on accountability. The people who were most invested in Russiagate for the longest, though, are least interested in revisiting its origins, let alone in apologizing for their own credulousness or malice.
Democrats Accuse Their Opponents Of ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ While Openly Supporting Racial Discrimination
The left is rolling back the progress we have made in making discrimination unacceptable in our culture and society.
The “Jim Crow” label is being thrown out a lot these days by those on the left, including Joe Biden. They use it to smear those who dare oppose their radical policies.
Yet if that label comes close to fitting anyone today, it’s the left. They are the ones who have implemented a discriminatory racial-spoils system in government and academic institutions throughout the country. Democrats’ racial preferences have much more in common with Jim Crow than what Biden likes to call “Jim Crow 2.0,” referring to benign Republican efforts to ensure election integrity.
Let’s start with President Joe Biden’s announcement that he will consider only a black woman for the U.S. Supreme Court. This is something no private employer is allowed to do: disregard all other qualified job candidates to make a hiring decision based solely on race and sex.
In virtually every other context, such odious behavior would violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans racial and sex discrimination in employment and many other facets of everyday life, including education. That law not only made racial and sex discrimination unlawful, it helped change American society to make such discrimination morally unacceptable, as it should be.
The law does not apply to a president for constitutional reasons, but by ignoring it and engaging in such a discriminatory practice, what is the example Biden is giving the nation? Does he want us to believe that discrimination on the basis of race or sex is acceptable if it serves political ends, even though it means other individuals are hurt despite their outstanding credentials?
That’s not really judging individuals based on the “content of their character,” as Martin Luther King Jr. hoped, is it? Americans know that’s wrong. An ABC News/Ipsos poll finds that 76 percent of American adults say Biden should consider all qualified candidates. This shows just how much we have achieved in the almost 60 years since the Civil Rights Act was passed, and just how far we are from the Jim Crow era.
Democrat Takeover Of BLM Means A New Multimillion-Dollar Hub For Race Hustling
‘Black Lives Matter,’ the organization and slogan that trumps every argument, is now explicitly owned by Democrats.
he Black Lives Matter plot thickened this week with some particularly partisan developments after a longtime Clinton family ally and a top Russia hoaxer essentially took over the organization.
According to recent filings as reported by The Washington Examiner, Marc Elias, a Democrat lawyer known for funding the bogus Steele dossier while he was general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, looks to be representing BLM’s Global Network Foundation through his law firm. Additionally, Minyon Moore, a top Clinton ally, is now on BLM’s board of directors.
In other words, the corrupt Democrat establishment has effectively taken over a major left-wing organization committed to radical left-wing policies and race-hustling.
This might not seem like a big deal. It’s not like BLM was a neutral or centrist entity that’s suddenly going to be run by Democrats. On the contrary, the organization, which is under intense scrutiny right now for leadership corruption, shady finances, and disclosure delays, has long been upfront about its extreme aims. Its founder admitted the group’s embrace of Marxism, and its webpage used to broadcast its disdain for the traditional nuclear family.
The problem arises in the stickiness of the “Black Lives Matter” name and what it means that figures within the Democrat establishment now explicitly own that brand.
The genius and frustration of the Black Lives Matter organization has always been that by virtue of its very name, it cannot be easily battled, for it’s irrefutable that black lives do indeed matter. In dubbing itself “Black Lives Matter,” the organization grants legitimacy to its actions and those of its broader movement — including even the violent riots carried out by its followers. What’s more, it automatically retains a rhetorical edge on its opponents: Only racists would argue with “Black Lives Matter,” they shout over their critics.
Russia Will Not Stop at Ukraine
The current confrontation is not only about Ukraine; it is also about Moscow’s attempt to stifle Georgia’s sovereign choices.
Late last year, Russia formally issued its extraordinary demands, effectively describing any further NATO enlargement in the post-Soviet region as a red line. Moscow is demanding legal guarantees on reversing NATO’s open-door policy and the decision of the Bucharest Summit of 2008, according to which Ukraine and Georgia will eventually become members of NATO. Moscow is furthermore aiming to achieve a new settlement in Europe by requesting NATO troops and missiles in Eastern Europe to be scaled back.
The tone and substance of the Russian demands provide no grounds for optimism for a diplomatic solution. In the meantime, Russia continues to amass up to 127,000 troops along Ukraine’s border and has started to move its troops and military hardware into Belarus for joint drills. The day after a recent round of intensive negotiations concluded in Vienna, Ukraine was hit by a massive cyber attack targeting major government websites and leaving a message for the Ukrainian public that they should expect worse to come. As diplomacy seems to be failing, the probability that Russia will move in and invade Ukraine once again seems high…
… Both in 2008 and in 2014, the West underestimated the Russian threat. If Russia can get away with aggression yet again in Ukraine, it will fundamentally shift the European security order. European leaders’ flirtation with the Kremlin over the years has resulted in Russia imposing unprecedented demands for security guarantees, including requesting the departure of NATO forces from EU member states such as Romania and Bulgaria and an end to NATO’s open-door policy. The future of Ukraine is now entangled with the future of European security. With Russia testing Western unity, this could be the last chance for the West to unite and stand up against Russian aggression.
NATO Needs Ukraine
It is now apparent to any candid observer that Ukraine needs NATO. But it is also true that NATO needs Ukraine.
According to some accounts, at the Tehran conference of Allied leaders in 1943, Winston Churchill told Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin that the pope wanted a voice in any post-war arrangements regarding Poland. To this, Stalin reportedly replied, “Oh really? How many divisions does he have?”
Vladimir Putin is probably asking the same question about NATO right now. The answer is: not many.
As a result of a series of decisions made during the Clinton, Bush, and, especially, Obama administrations, NATO has virtually disarmed itself. At the end of the Cold War in 1989, the United States had some 500,000 troops stationed in Western Europe. Now, we have 30,000, with practically no tanks. The British have removed virtually all their forces from the continent. Germany — which is showing itself increasingly unreliable in any case — has cut its army from twelve divisions down to four. The cold fact of the matter is that the only serious NATO ground force east of the Rhine is the Polish Army, which has 180,000 active-duty servicemen. It’s not enough.
But then there is Ukraine, which has 450,000 active-duty servicemen, more than all NATO forces east of the Rhine combined. If properly armed, and backed up by Anglo-American air and sea power, they could be formidable, and consequently, very valuable.
We need to be realistic. Nuclear deterrence is dead. During the Cold War, we were able to deter a Warsaw Pact invasion of West Germany by threatening nuclear war if they tried it. But no one believes that the United States would do anything like that today. If Russia moves into the Baltic States or even Poland, the United States is not about the push the thermonuclear-war button, and Putin knows that. Consequently, the only way to be able to deter war is to be strong enough to defeat a conventional attack by non-nuclear means. That requires an army.
Russian Demographic Losses Tighten the Noose Around the Kremlin
Population growth trends are destiny only over the long term, scholars have long insisted. But five years ago, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) demographer Nicholas Eberstadt warned in the research study “Russia in Decline” that the country’s demographic decline is imposing increasingly “unforgiving constraints” on the choices the Kremlin faces (see Jamestown.org, September 13, 2016). If anything, those constraints have become even narrower since that time. The Russian population contracted by more than a million in 2021, the most since 2000, for a variety of reasons and not limited to the COVID-19 pandemic, as the Kremlin likes to insist and many in the West uncritically accept (Deutsche Welle—Russian service, January 30, 2021; Nakanune.ru, November 23, 2021; Vedomosti, December 26, 2021). Indeed, it is these other causes that are likely to prove far more significant in the future, even when the pandemic is finally overcome.
The Russian Federal State Statistics Service’s (Rosstat) demographic figures released at the end of January 2022 are devastating. They show that deaths in Russia in 2021 exceeded births by 1,040,000, nearly double that measure in 2020. Thus, deaths grew year on year by 15.1 percent, to 2,440,000, and births fell 2.3 percent, to 1,400,000. This gap is larger than in any year since 2000. It was partially compensated for by the influx of immigrants, but the combined figure still showed a net decline in the Russian population last year of 688,700. Additionally, the Russian government’s statistical arm projected that decreases among the indigenous population (not counting immigrants) would continue throughout the 2020s, albeit slowing over time. The first year Rosstat projects any growth—55,700—will come only in 2030. Given this agency’s history of boosterism and falsification, there is little likelihood that the predicted declines in the coming decade will be as small as the official statistics suggests or that growth will return at the levels forecast (Rosstat.gov.ru, RBC, January 28, 2022)…
… The Kremlin is increasingly worried about these trends not only because of their impact on the economy—there may soon not be enough working-age Russians to boost economic growth—but also because of their implications for national security, with large parts of Russia becoming depopulated. As Putin recently put it, “146,000,000 people for such an enormous territory [as the Russian Federation] is completely insufficient” (TASS, December 23, 2021). Nevertheless, the Kremlin leader has not come up with any policy that would radically change the grave pattern Russian government statisticians and demographers say is becoming ever more dominant.
Interesting Historical Map… The utopian 1920s scheme for five global superstates
Unity is strength: This 1920s map divides the world among just five superstates. The map was produced by count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, who devoted his life to European unity. This utopian map may have inspired George Orwell’s dystopian world in 1984.
If the geopolitical dreams of a 20th-century Austro-Japanese aristocrat had come true, this is what the map of the world would have looked like: dominated by no more than five super-states.
Now mostly obscure, count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (1894-1972) is remembered mainly as the hero and villain (respectively) of the two fringes of the never-ending debate about European integration.
And that’s a shame, because Coudenhove-Kalergi cuts quite an intriguing figure. Not only is he the one who proposed Beethoven’s Ode to Joy as Europe’s anthem, he also served as inspiration for Victor Laszlo, the fictional resistance hero in Casablanca.
On his father’s side, Richard was the scion of an Austrian noble family with roots in Flanders and Greece and branches all over the rest of Europe. His mother, Mitsuko Aoyama, came from a wealthy Japanese family of merchants and landowners.
New Hampshire Is the Freest State in America. Here’s Why
The Free State Project has brought numerous wins to the Granite State as well as a new culture of individual liberty.
When the CATO Institute put out their 2021 rankings for Economic and Social Freedom in the 50 States, there was one winner in both categories overall—New Hampshire.
The self-proclaimed “Free State” took both categories after being overtaken by Florida in 2020. But how did it get there? What led New Hampshire, a state surrounded by Blue States and metropolitan progressives, to become the most free according to a libertarian institute. The answer is very simple: the Free State Project.
Put simply, the Free State Project is a migration movement founded in 2001 by Jason Sorens with the goal of moving 20,000 libertarians into the state of New Hampshire to change the political climate. To date, the project has brought in more than 2,000 self-identified libertarians, and it has already led to great successes in the state. Although comprising only a small number of the legislators (forty or fifty of the 424 total legislators), Free Staters exist in all parties and control enough seats to act as the swing vote. Both parties need to cater to the libertarians and liberty lovers in order to get bills passed. As a result, the project has already had incredible success at implementing libertarian policies.
Conservatives Accused Of Making Liberals Look Bad By Simply Sharing Things Liberals Believe
Conservatives across the nation have been accused of “pouncing” and “seizing on” weaknesses in liberals’ policy positions for simply reading a list of the things liberals actually believe without changing the content or commenting on it in any way.
“Conservatives are really trying to make us look bad here,” said Senator Chuck Schumer. “By simply reading a list of the policy positions we actually hold, they’re trying to paint us as crazy, far-left politicians with unhinged ideas.”
President Trump was recently criticized for pretty much stating exactly what Democrats said in their own words about infanticide, a move that was widely panned by the left as a “hit job.” This “dirty trick” of telling people what the left actually believes has prompted liberals to take action against these kinds of smears.
Senator Kamala Harris quickly proposed new legislation that would bar conservatives from smearing Democrats by simply communicating the exact positions they hold. The “Anti-Pounce Act of 2019” would provide for a fine and jail time for anyone on the right who accurately depicts the things that Democrats believe. The legislation would include language stating that even if Democrats are caught on video or audio saying something crazy, Republicans may not use this to prove that the left actually believes these crazy ideas.
Russia’s Propaganda & Disinformation Ecosystem – 2022 Update & New Disclosures
New revelations and a structural update to our chart.
In April 2021, our team published an overview of the Russian propaganda and disinformation ecosystem—the media networks, outlets, and websites that often toe the Kremlin line, spread Russian propaganda or disinformation, and even, in some cases, take direction from Russian intelligence services or the Russian state.
While our 2021 chart was imperfect, it attempted to outline the environment in which Russian propaganda and disinformation flourish online and target audiences around the globe. In this updated 2022 chart, we’ve added elements to better reflect several components of Russia’s sustained propaganda and disinformation campaigns. The new depiction further illustrates the breadth and depth of outlets linked to Russian intelligence services and offers a global context for the Kremlin’s information operations. We’ve also color-coded each of the outlets’ primary language in our chart.
Amid Russia’s military buildup at Ukraine’s borders and recent reports from the U.S. and allies of Moscow’s plans to use disinformation as a pretense for an expanded incursion into Ukraine, we’re providing a broader, more comprehensive view of the channels through which such disinformation flows.
