Victor Davis Hanson

Joe Biden’s Race Against the Truth

By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
August 14, 2023

Joe Biden has about 17 months left as an elected politician—if he is lucky. That projection guides most of the inexplicable and shameless behavior of the Department of Justice and Biden himself. View Biden as in a race against the truth. Will he be physically and mentally able to complete his term and head to retirement before his decades-long crimes of corruption catch up to him?

Joe Biden’s serial yarn that he never knew anything about his son Hunter’s quid pro quo grifting with rich foreign grandees has been finally exposed as the old lie it always was.

Biden’s fallback untruth—that he never got involved in Hunter’s business—proved instantly laughable, given prior damning testimonies from Hunter’s business associates, from IRS whistleblowers, from the assertions of foreign beneficiaries, from Hunter’s laptop, and Joe’s own earlier loudmouth braggadocio about using threats of canceling U.S. foreign aid to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into corruption of the sort in which his son was knee deep. (Did not then-President Barack Obama know the nature of Biden’s corruption when he appointed him as point man on Ukraine)?

To his partners in corruption, Hunter referred to his father variously as the “big guy” as well as the recipient of “ten percent” of the leveraged income. And apparently, as a rather greedy pop, Hunter whined that Joe himself demanded half of all Hunter’s shake-down income from abroad—despite Hunter’s payment of many of Joe’s monthly bills incurred on his palatial lakeshore mansion.

At some point, even the corrupt leftwing media and DNC cannot continue to laugh off eyewitness testimonies, whistleblowers’ revelations, bank records, Hunter Biden’s computer messaging, Joe Biden’s phone calls and personal appearances, and the evidence from foreign beneficiaries.

And then there is simply the power of reason and logic.

Over the last five years of this hushed-up tawdry saga, Americans knew immediately that Joe Biden was lying in all his denials of any involvement whatsoever in the procurement of a large part of his income from abroad simply because no one in the entire Biden family had any business, investment, or energy expertise. In other words, as grifters without Joe, the Bidens had zero market value.

As energy consultants, financial investors, or international analysts, they had no qualifications—a fact known and remarked upon by their corrupt foreign partners. If any doubt about that, try to guess how much the prior cash recipients Jim or Hunter or Sarah or Hallie, or Kathleen Biden will be getting from foreign concerns for services rendered after Joe leaves office.

The Biden familial mediocrities had nothing to offer shady wealthy foreign interests other than they were not only related to the Vice President of the United States but also could guarantee that Joe Biden had no scruples whatsoever, and so even while in office he would call or meet his son’s associates to substantiate Hunter’s promises of favorable diplomatic or business treatment from the Obama—or a future Biden—administration. Note Biden seemed to have no worries whether his family’s lobbying of Ukraine, Russia, or China conflicted with the interests of his own country.

And so deals were cut, millions were rerouted to Biden accounts to avoid scrutiny, and the Biden clan got rich off Joe’s offices and his son’s rank criminality. Joe’s adjusted gross income on his 2016 return of $396,456 soared on his 2017 return to more than $11 million. No one knows whether these or any of Biden’s returns showed reported income commensurate with what either he actually received or with his lavish lifestyle, bank accounts, and his multiple expensive homes.

Rarely has any prosecutor enjoyed a more riveting confessional than Hunter Biden’s laptop that established his credentials as a drug addict who burned up millions of dollars on his various drug and sex addictions, while confirming that his father was central to the family consortium’s shake-downs. Without an obsequious media, a Democratic Senate, and a weaponized Department of Justice, all the Biden recipients of foreign cash would by now have been prosecuted, and likely found guilty of an array of felonies.

But like everything Joe and Hunter do to excess, they were not just shameless in their raking in money by using Joe’s senatorial and then vice presidential offices and likely presidential candidacy, but in covering up their crimes.

Nothing is more emblematic of that brazenness than Biden aide and future Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s phone call to a former CIA interim director to round up 50 intelligence “authorities” to lie on the eve of the 2020 debate and election that the laptop was likely “Russian disinformation.” To go to such extremes to leverage proverbially retired “wise men” to so blatantly misinform, disinform, and warp a presidential election reflects the paranoia of the Biden family over Hunter’s laptop confessional.

Enter Merrick Garland. Like Blinken, his job description entailed hiding the truth about Hunter Biden’s incriminating evidence. First, Garland had assured the nation that no special counsel was needed to investigate the Bidens’ influence peddling. And on spec, his lieutenant Delaware prosecutor David Weiss slow walked for years all investigations of Biden family wrongdoing.

The Biden Department of Justice since January 2021 assumed that with a Democratic House and an obsequious media, it could simply run out the clock on any of the many Biden crimes that were not sufficiently covered up. Any problematic data or testimony that eventually entered the public domain, would do so only after the statute of limitations had expired. This cover-up continued to work well for the first two years of the Biden administration.

But then the unexpected happened. First, the Republicans took the House in 2022 and suddenly could subpoena witnesses and documents over the objections of the media and Democratic congressional toadies.

Second, the Ukraine war broke out and refocused popular interest in the past Biden-Ukrainian profiteering.

Third, when Donald Trump announced his reelection candidacy, he was soon met with a cohort of weaponized leftwing prosecutors. Immediately he and his supporters legitimately pointed out that while he was being politically neutered by the left, his possible 2024 opponent Joe Biden was given de facto exemptions.

Finally, the congressional testimonies and whistleblowers grew so embarrassing, and the stark contrast between the government coverup of Biden’s crimes and the weaponized effort to destroy Trump so glaring, that even Biden’s handlers and Merrick Garland were forced to act—at least sort of.

So last week the DOJ flipped. It abruptly announced that after years of a deliberately stalled David Weiss investigation and the collapse of Weiss’s own phony plea deal before an honest judge, Garland would now appoint a special counsel, after all—again, sort of.

Garland then did something so outrageous that it eclipsed even his prior blatant politicization of his department. First, he violated the special counsel statute by hiring an inside government attorney—another apparent confirmation that Garland and Biden were paranoid that any legitimate outside counsel might well tap into a gold mine of Biden family felonies.

Second, he selected as independent counsel none other than David Weiss, the very prosecutor who had tried but failed to fool a judge into accepting a laughable Hunter Biden plea deal. Weiss’s only other alluring recommendation was that he had previously spearheaded and slow-walked the DOJ non-investigation of Hunter.

Third, by elevating the title—but not the mission—of Weiss in a manner that previously he promised he would not, Garland cleverly ensured that Weiss would likely not show up to testify before the House about prior and ongoing whistleblower allegations that prosecutor Weiss had blocked investigations concerning Hunter that otherwise might well have led to multiple felony indictments. Now as special counsel, Weiss will even likely refuse congressional subpoenas concerning incriminating Biden information on grounds they would prejudice or interfere with his special counsel inquiries.

How could Garland believe he could fool the American people with the veneer of a special counsel appointee and then violate the very spirit and text of the law about such appointments by naming Weiss?

Reason is not what guides the petulant Garland, who has never recovered from the trauma of being humiliated when his Barack Obama lame-duck supreme court appointment was recessed by a Republican Senate. Instead, Biden rescued Garland from bitter obscurity with the implied rationale, as Joe himself has mused openly to friends, that Garland should go after Trump, Biden’s past nemesis, and now his leading opponent in the 2024 presidential race.

What then is the long-term Democrat strategy that requires such short-term malodorous skullduggery?

Biden must be healthy and crime-free enough to finish his remaining term, but at all costs not run for reelection. A full one-term Biden prevents a 2023 or 2024 presidency of an utterly incompetent Kamala Harris and thus in addition her route to the 2024 Democratic nomination—and in theory perhaps even a longer presidential tenure.

Democrats will have enough trouble keeping Biden semi-coherent and upright over the 17 months without a string of indictments involving high crimes and misdemeanors from bribery to treason, if indeed Biden did alter U.S. policy at the bequest of his paymasters in China, Russia, Ukraine, or Romania.

In other words, Weiss was selected for his past loyal suppression of the Hunter investigation and his future further quashing indictments as special counsel. That fact almost ensures that Biden can finish his first term without an impeachment trial in the Senate or a forced Nixon-style resignation, given the enormity of his illegality.

Ensuring the viability of Biden’s next year-and-half will mean Kamala Harris does not inherit the presidency from either a physically or mentally incompetent Biden—or a president so reduced by bribery and racketeering counts that he is forced to resign.

Biden then will likely not run for reelection, pleading age rather than his own and his family’s blatant corruption. That will be another subtext for Weiss’s slothful investigation to be ground down into oblivion. Harris will not be president, and be reduced to just another wannabe 2024 primary candidate. She will likely, as in 2016, not win a single delegate.

By 2024, Democrats will be seeking a young Gavin Newson-like candidate. Harris will not be the nominee, much less President by default. And Joe will likely be so bewildered that Weiss in a few months “for the sake of the country” will not hound either an enfeebled ex-president or his dutiful son.

DOJ lawfare then works in two ways: by commission in neutering the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump after trying to ensure that he will win the Republican primary and nomination; by omission, in de facto suppressing momentum for Biden indictments and thus allowing the Biden family to be prison-free through 2024 and onto retirement—and thus sparing the nation a Harris presidency.

The Remaking of America
Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault

By Victor Davis Hanson

August 7, 2023
We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s or the 1930s. Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.

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

Here are 10 upheavals that the Left has successfully wrought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Attack on the Supreme Court. Once the Court achieved a more or less predictable conservative majority, the Left sought to diminish it in a variety of ways. It has called for packing the Court with leftist jurists to create a new 15-justice bench. Leftist law professors in the Ivy League, in neo-Confederate nullification and insurrectionary style, call for the nation to ignore Court rulings on abortion and affirmative action.

The Senate minority leader led a throng to the doors of the court, threatening justices by name: “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Protestors now mob the homes of individual justices hoping to intimidate them and alter their upcoming opinions—confident that the Department of Justice will exempt them from any legal consequences of such felonious behavior.

The media routinely accuses conservative justices of improper or illegal behavior, without worry about the emptiness of the charges. A traditionalist justice now accepts that a controversial ruling can result in media charges that he is corrupt, in shrieking protestors mobbing his home, in a mob assembling at the doors of the Court, in disruptions during Court hearings, in politicians issuing threats to his person, in congressional calls to alter the century-and-a-half make-up of the Court, and in Ivy League law professors urging the country to ignore majority decisions.

In sum, a conservative jurist must be careful where and when he goes out in public.

The Media-Democratic Fusion. If one were to listen during the last few years to NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, or CNN, or read the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, or the Los Angeles Times, then one would have believed the following:

A) Donald Trump worked with the Russians to throw and win the 2016 election. As part of that skullduggery, frolicking amid prostitutes he urinated on a Moscow hotel bed to spite Barack Obama. B) He was mentally incapacitated as president and should have been removed under the 25th Amendment. C) In 2020, his campaign once more worked with the Russians to create an exact replica of Hunter Biden’s laptop, replete with dozens of lurid fake photos and hundreds of cleverly doctored emails to smear the Biden family and aid his own reelection effort. D) Trump as chief conspirator preplanned a violent and armed insurrection that sought to storm and permanently occupy the government, violently hijacking the balloting and seizing the presidency—resulting in the murder of a Capitol police officer and the subsequent deaths of other traumatized officers.

E) For the last eight years, none of Trump’s political opponents have ever destroyed subpoenaed evidence, conspired to hire foreign nationals to compile false and lurid files on him to subvert his political campaigns, or used their political offices to help solicit foreign money for family lobbyists. F) Trump is the first major candidate and politician who allegedly overvalued his real assets to obtain a loan that he repaid; the first to have concluded non-disclosure agreements with potential embarrassing liaisons; the first ex-president to remove sensitive files to his personal residence; and the first to phone a state official to whine about the integrity of the vote count. G) He is the first losing presidential candidate or major politician to question an election result or to seek redress through government agencies to rectify the purported corruption of the balloting.

In sum, for the first time in American history, nearly all the major communication and journalistic networks have been fused with a political party. They believe the new role of the media is to advance a shared progressive cause, oppose and even defame common opponents, and feed their audiences things that are not, and cannot possibly be, true.

The Destruction of Common Law. By defunding the police in major cities, and by showering leftwing district attorney candidates with millions of dollars in campaign funding, the Left systematically eroded the law as we know it in our major cities.

As a result, downtowns are after-dark, no-go zones, as once great metropolises resemble veritable combat theaters. Cities are becoming depopulated as consumers and businesses no longer find it safe to conduct commerce. Criminals and homeless now routinely break the law with impunity. Public violence, defecation, urination, fornication, and injection do not even rate as misdemeanors.

The Left has redefined violent crime to such an extent that shoplifting is no longer actionable. Flash mobs that take over streets and swarm to loot stores are rarely if ever arrested. Security officers who apprehend thieves or intervene to stop violence are more likely to be prosecuted than criminals themselves. There is no longer any immigration law; it has been utterly destroyed by Joe Biden. Seven-million illegal entrants flood into the U.S. and, along with the Mexican government, make demands on their hosts to accommodate their illegality.

In sum, in blue states and at the federal level, leftwing prosecutors and justices decide to enforce or ignore statutes, pile up or reduce indictments, increase or decrease punishments not on what the law entails, or evidence directs, but on the race, class, or ideology of the perpetrator, usually in connection with the particular status of his victims. If asymmetry in race, class, or ideology is suggested, then the law must modulate in redistributive fashion to contextualize the crime and criminal as a victim rather than a victimizer. The result is the veritable destruction of law and order as we once knew it.

The Erosion of the Military. Rarely has the American people polled so little confidence in the U.S. military. It perceives the Pentagon mission largely one to greenlight social change through the rapidity of the chain of command, not necessarily to maintain deterrence, much less to win all its wars.

The Left has ensured that our armed forces are underfunded, short on munitions and weapons, and military officers are used to promote progressive social agendas. Officers expect to be promoted or stalled on the basis of their views on race and gender.

Those who traditionally died at twice their numbers in the general population in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan are ostracized and in near record numbers leaving, while their friends and relatives are no longer enlisting in the military.

Former Pentagon four-star officers violated the Code of Uniform Military Justice in attacking a sitting president with the harshest invective, invoking comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini, again predictably from a leftwing point of view.

The public expects the Joint Chiefs to be both appointed on ideological considerations, and from time to time even to free-lance to contact enemy counterparts should they feel a conservative president is dangerous to world peace.

There is no longer any social stigma or legal jeopardy for retired officers in working as defense contractor lobbyists or board members, after revolving from or soon back to the Pentagon.

Sexes. The heterosexual male and female, marriage, and the nuclear family are all to be suspect. There are three sexes or perhaps still more. English language pronouns are inadequate to reflect sexual diversity.

So adherence to such ossified languages is career endangering. An epidemic of childlessness, singlehood, and collapsing fertility rates are either of no national importance or illustrate the preferred non-nuclear family model. Powerful hormonal drug regimens and permanent radical sex-change surgery should be the choices of minors alone who know best when they choose to transition to another sex. Graphic sex manuals and drag queen shows with simulated sex acts can perhaps acculturate preteens to the dangers of growing up in an oppressive “normative” binary society.

Sex, but not race, is constructed, and thus a matter not of biology but of individual choice.

Race, Not Class. Racial inequality and lack of parity are due to “whiteness.” Racial quotas, segregated dorms, graduations, workshops, and safe spaces are exempt from civil rights statutes given they are necessary to achieve equity. Integration and assimilation are the opiates of the masses. Apartheid and segregation are misunderstood modalities, and thus, if enlightened, sometimes necessary corrective measures.

Reparations are to supersede ineffective affirmative action. Wokeness liberates us to see how race explains everything in America, past and present. At universities and in popular culture “proportional representation” of various ethnicities and races is no longer sufficient remedy.

Instead reparatory hiring and admissions are required to atone for prior generations of discrimination. It is taboo to suggest that cultural conditions not just race accounts for inequality. Everything from meritocracy to promptness to physical fitness is racist in nature, requiring DEI experts to expose and inform about the systemic nature of American racism.

Debt is a Construct. Modern monetary theory proved that annual deficits and national debt are just a state accounting challenge. So printing more money is an act that properly diminishes the value of existing capital improperly horded by parasitic profiteers. Spreading the ensuing cash wealth to the more deserving and victimized is long overdue social justice.

At any time, the national “debt” can be deconstructed by renouncing usurious bond obligations, appropriating private retirement accounts, or further inflating the currency—if governments are committed enough to social justice.

Universities. It is now heresy that universities should be places of disinterested inquiry and inductive investigation. They can properly instead become a valuable tool in ridding society of racist and sexist forces, platitudes about free speech and equality under the law, and the tyranny of private property, capitalist profiteering, and white, male heterosexual Christian oppression.

So the role of a university is to create a brief safe space in which graduates can leave with proper training about the terrible history of the United States and the ways in which it must be dismantled and then be rebuilt by the properly trained experts from the ground up. Counterrevolutionaries or deluded liberals and their quaint adherence to a racist and archaic Bill of Rights have no place on these islands of progressive resistance.

None of the above was true at the millennium; all are now—with more still to come.

About Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, The Case for Trump and the recently released The Dying Citizen.

August 06, 2023

Special Edition
The U.S. Is In Real Decline
No Kidding!
By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One: Energy – August 1, 2023

Far-called, our navies melt away;On dune and headland sinks the fire:Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional”

There is proverbially a lot of rot in any great nation, which accordingly can endure a lot of self-induced damage.

But has the U.S. exhausted its reserves? Britain after World War I denied that its empire was doomed and its standard of living unsustainable. The Soviet Union was in decline gradually, then abruptly by 1989 became doomed. In the fourth century AD, Rome had established a modus vivendi of incorporating non-Romans into the empire, defending its borders, and tamping down on corruption. A century later, the Western empire collapsed from internal decay and tribal invasions across the Danube and Rhine.

Affordable energy had been America’s strength. We are still the largest combined natural gas and oil producer in the world—but determined to forfeit that advantage on the world stage and at home damage the viability of the middle class.

We were once the premier nuclear-generated power nation as well. No longer. Joe Biden and his surrogates on the state level have systematically waged war on fossil fuels, precluding even the reasonable idea that oil, gas, and coal can serve as necessary transition fuels over the next half-century, guaranteeing the American standard of living until the advent of viable alternative and renewable energies.

The only time Biden focuses on oil and gas is before a midterm or general election when he hurriedly will either drain more of the strategic petroleum reserve or showboat a few more new federal energy leases.

A state like California has the highest taxed and the costliest electricity in the continental United States, mostly as a result of bragging that it is self-sufficient in daytime electricity production due to massive and heavily subsidized solar and wind farms. Yet it keeps mum that after dark it must import equally large amounts of fossil-fuel-generated power from neighboring states.

One of the most bizarre developments during the Biden years has been the complete exemption given massive and growing Chinese coal use, coupled with the furor over domestic natural gas production and use.

Think of the logic: we coax and ignore our Chinese enemies who are hell-bent on record dirty coal use while hectoring the mostly now green American public on their supposedly toxic use of clean-burning natural gas—as if we could persuade 1.4 billion Chinese to cease burning coal by showing them that 330 million Americans can sacrifice by not burning natural gas.

Here again, is the ancient bureaucratic principle in play of focusing on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding, as a way to square the utter inability to deal with the felony of law-breaking.

As the U.S. is pushed to embrace the massive use of electrical vehicles, the vast majority of which will be charging after commute hours and in the dark, the more it resists nuclear and fossil fuel power generation, the only sure ways of producing steady and reliable electricity when the sun goes down.

As the elite clamp down on gas cooktops, pizza ovens, and gas water heaters of the middle classes, it is silent on the use of private jets, or the energy consumption in huge homes over 5,000-6,000 square feet, of the Obamas-Al Gore sort.

In California, we are far more likely to blow up a hydroelectric plant on a manmade reservoir than to create a new one—on the theory that someday we will have clean energy in abundance, but for now, the middle classes must suffer for energy-consuming sins.

A final thought. The Left pushes mass transit as the cure-all for supposedly wasteful and consumptive automobile use. Yet it can offer no alternative to the car that any sane American would consider.

In California, its multibillion-dollar price tag “high-speed” rail is stagnating between Merced and Bakersfield. After a decade, not a foot of track has been laid, and no one yet can explain why anyone would wish to go over 100 mph an hour from Bakersfield to Merced.

The Bay Area’s once state-of-the-art BART rail system is in decay. The cars are increasingly unreliable, dirty, and crime-ridden.

BART either cannot or will not ensure the safety of its passengers, in the toxic manner of all major contemporary urban mass transit systems. Why? In part, because to enforce laws against turnstile-jumping, harassment of passengers, or various assaults in stations would be, in the Age of Post-George-Floyd, somehow inappropriate.

One does not have to be a conspiracist to see that the Left likes mass transit and hates cars for reasons other than energy-per-mile individual consumption. The more millions become captives of trains, the more unions control their very lives, the more the state alone can ensure their safety, the more the government can determine their travel and commute, and the more “equity” can be enforced.

Part Two: Racial Relations – August 2, 2023

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”

I say America is in serious trouble because the Left has attacked systematically all of the U.S.’s great strengths and advantages on the world stage. It apparently thinks it must dismantle the old America before it can create a “new” America, something like a European Union state, only far more radical and volatile.

One, we were the only multiracial constitutional state that had avoided the tribalism and violence of the Balkans, Rwanda, or the Middle East. Europe, for all its public grandstanding about ecumenicalism, has yet to have a black president or prime minister. The idea that Barack Obama could become a Russian or Chinese citizen and reach similar pinnacles of political power is absurd. (And for that matter, include Mexico and much of Asia and Latin America.)

Yet race relations in the U.S. are at a historic low. More than 50 years of affirmative action have morphed into woke extremism, or the idea of racially separate graduations, dorms, workshops, and safe spaces. When working out, keeping a reasonable weight, camping, or showing up on time are now deemed racist, then there is no more Civil Rights movement which has instead descended into caricature.

The more minorities reached parity with or exceeded the income of, the majority population, the angrier and more volatile racial relations became. The operative principle seems to be something like “Before we can have racially blind relations in the 21st century, we must first make up for the racism, largely in the South, of the prior two centuries by similarly fixating on race, but in reverse fashion of granting preference to nullify past bias.”

No one dares talk about the violence of the inner city that makes 19th-century Dodge or Tombstone seem tame in comparison. No one discusses the utter failure of the inner-city schools or the need for intact families and omnipresent fathers to ensure any chance at parity. Instead, there is the notion that if blacks appear in 50 percent of television commercials, such ecumenicalism will magically either curb gunslinging on Saturday nights in Chicago or improved math scores in the Detroit or Baltimore public schools.

Why do we obsess over the supposedly suggestive illiberal themes of Jason Aldean’s, “Try That In a Small Town,” when rap and hip-hop for decades have institutionalized violent misogyny, homophobia, violence against the police, anti-Semitism, and blanket anti-white lyrics?

Orwellian censorship, coupled with deplatforming, cancel-culture, ostracism, and shadow banning, make any reasonable discussion of race taboo. The Left—instead of the old 1960s agenda of integration and assimilation—leveraged race and tribalism to create permanent constituencies, nursed on grievance and victimhood, and expectant of endless government redress and largess.

In a strange development, the Left believes by according affirmative action and reparatory admissions and hiring to the African-American upper-middle class and wealthy and privileged, thereby the mostly neglected black underclass, trapped in the neglect and pathologies of the inner city, will somehow benefit.

After George Floyd and the defunding of police forces and the decriminalization institutionalized by the Soros-funded prosecutors, there was an epidemic of inner-city crime, as smash-and-grab and carjacking became commonplace and swarm shoplifting became quasi-legal.

The result is that while elites of all races are bonding as never before, the minority underclass is angrier and more separate from the mainstream than at any time in the last half-century. That reality is evident by the avoidance of entire swaths of urban America by liberal city-dwellers—even as the latter are prone to call “racist” anyone who describes honestly their segregationist behavior.

One sign of toxic racial relations can be found in online newspapers and internet news sites that report crime.

When a murder makes the news and the perpetrator is known to be black (55% of all homicide offenders constitute 12% of the population), the news site either does not describe the race of the murderer or mentions it only at the very end of the article—usually in dire contrast if the perpetrator is considered white.

Yet if one reads the following comment section (and published comments are increasingly rare despite usually being carefully censored of racist and foul language), the so-called reading public, often disguised by pseudonyms, appears utterly cynical. The posters express disgust with the dishonesty of the media, but also no longer show much sympathy for “root causes” or why blacks continue to murder others (mostly other blacks) at over four times their numbers in the general population. Oddly, the more leftwing media tries to censor the news to disguise racial disparity, the more the public resents its one-sided selective censorship and veers into outright hostility.

Part Three: Insecurity – August 4, 2023

Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus.
“We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them.”
Livy

There are unfortunately other barometers of U.S. ossification.

America’s great strength was also its security. We were protected by two oceans and a similar English-majority-speaking and constitutional state on our northern border. In the modern age, we used to insist on only legal immigration from an often corrupt and impoverished Mexico. No longer.

In just three years, the Biden administration destroyed the southern border, allowing seven million illegal aliens to enter without audit, despite a Covid epidemic, 100,000 American deaths attributable to the free importation of Mexican-produced fentanyl, and the multibillion-dollar cartels’ use of the border to levy fees on millions entering illegally.

The administration’s agenda seems to be homeostasis or symmetry. That is, when the southern United States resembles the poverty and corruption of Mexico, then illegal immigration will largely cease, given there would be no reason to emigrate to a place identical to one’s one, in terms of economics, security, and culture.

Aside from the border, the U.S. military is in decline. Its agenda is no longer just battle efficacy as a sure way to reaffirm deterrence, but a fast-track means to institutionalize a woke agenda, without the Sturm und Drang of federal and state legislative approval. Does the Pentagon have inestimable amounts of time, labor, and capital on its hands to indulge in exploring white rage, abortion on demand, pregnancy flight suits, and transgendered surgeries? Did it so well plan the flight from Kabul or the maintenance of artillery shell stocks, that it could indulge such hot-button social issues?

Whereas the Left used to harangue Pentagon nominees about their revolving-door defense contractor board memberships and lobbyist roles, today they grow mute on such conflicts of interests—if the official in question has demonstrated a faithful adherence to woke principles. And in circular fashion, that reality is known to officers up for promotions, who in turn make the necessary woke adjustments.

The discussion of future Joint Chiefs of Staff appointments center now not necessarily on their proven record of military excellence but on the degree they have been advocates of gay, transgendered, race, and gender agendas.

Unfortunately, this advocacy is not just positive, but negative as well. It entails an overt harangue about “white privilege,” “white rage,” and“white supremacy”—most famously voiced by Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in congressional testimonies—without supporting data confirming “systemic racism.”

The result of such fixations is a radical drop-off in enlistments, perhaps in aggregate reaching a 40,000-person shortfall in all the services. Stranger still, the military remains in denial, blaming the lack of interest in military service to out-of-shape youth, competition from a robust job market, gang affiliation, or criminal upticks—almost anything other than the creation of a hostile climate to the one demographic that has died at twice its numbers in the general population in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

There are other symptoms of our calcifying military. Our arsenals are emptying as a direct result either of our massive arms shipments to Ukraine or a multibillion-dollar abandonment of weapons in Afghanistan. And our defense industries shrink.

Whether Javelins, artillery shells, or missiles, the military is short of munitions and will be for years.

Our submarine fleet, once the hallmark of our naval superiority, is severely crippled and underfunded—a fact compounded by the dearth of shipyards. The entire navy is a shadow of its former Reagan-era strength. Our weapons systems in theory are unrivaled, but so expensive and scarce to be of dubious utility in a real war, given the rapid consumption of munitions—as we see from the insatiable rate of expenditure in Ukraine.

And while the military enjoys excellent leadership from the colonel level downward, our top brass has scant record of success. What was disturbing about Afghanistan was not just the humiliating flight and careless abandonment of an entire theater arsenal, but the lack of any repercussions for the culpable officers in charge, both in theater and in Washington.

The more wars we stalemate or lose—Iraq, Afghanistan, the Libyan bombing—the more there is little introspection about the causes of such defeats.

Can the U.S. restore its military in time? Only if it were to drop woke and return to meritocracy, stop the politicization of the services, spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, end the revolving-door profiteering of defense-contractor generals, and invest in war-production industries. The only way to recruit American youth is to stop berating millions of them for their purported sins, and get out of the abortion, transgendered, race, and sex virtue-signaling business.

The Case for a Special Counsel to Investigate the Bidens

To save the DOJ’s rapidly deteriorating reputation, it is high time for Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel.

By: John Yoo & John Shu

National Review

August 1, 2023

Consider this clarion call for a special counsel:

“There are certain extraordinary moments of crisis when the people’s faith in the integrity and independence of their elected officials is caused to waiver [sic]. These scandals tarnish the view that the Attorney General is an independent executive official who can be trusted to enforce criminal law in the high offices of the government. To restore the utmost public confidence in the investigation of criminal wrongdoing by high-ranking government officials, the appointment of a special prosecutor then becomes necessary. ”

It did not come from Senator Charles Grassley or Representative James Comer, even though both men continue to diligently investigate allegations that Biden administration appointees either slow-walked or interfered with Justice Department probes into Hunter Biden’s alleged crimes. Nor did it come from Republican presidential-primary candidates who have called for a special counsel after the collapse of Hunter’s sweetheart plea deal, apparently designed to grant immunity from very serious felony charges.

No, the above quote comes from President Biden himself, in a 1987 article in the North Carolina Law Review defending independent counsels, who at that time possessed far more powers than do today’s special counsels. Writing as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Biden argued that the executive branch could not be trusted to investigate and prosecute its own members. Instead of allowing DOJ to conduct such investigations, he argued, Congress could override the normal separation of powers and create independent prosecutors with unlimited budgets and no accountability.

Biden strongly supported the appointment of an array of special prosecutors to investigate those involved in the Iran–Contra scandal — cabinet members, DOJ officials, and even expanding to include Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. In a January 1987 interview, Biden stated that the Reagan DOJ, “at a minimum, gives the appearance of attempting to prevent certain information from coming to the fore,” and that, at worst, “someone tried to actively suppress an investigation.” In 2003, Biden and other Democratic senators sent a letter to President George W. Bush demanding a special counsel in the leak case involving CIA officer Valerie Plame. “We do not believe that this investigation of senior administration officials, possibly including high-level White House staff, can be conducted by the Justice Department because of the obvious and inherent conflicts of interests involved,” the letter declared.

But that was then, when Joe Biden was a Democratic senator, and this is now.

President Biden’s hypocrisy is stark; he has yet to even utter the words “special counsel.” He no longer defends or calls for them, even though today’s special counsels lack the independence of those created in the 1978 Ethics in Government Act and which ran rampant until 2000.

The Supreme Court upheld these independent prosecutors in Morrison v. Olson (1988) over Justice Antonin Scalia’s powerful dissent. Scalia memorably wrote that, while most separation-of-powers challenges come to the Court clad “in sheep’s clothing,” “this wolf comes as a wolf.” After Ken Starr’s independent-counsel investigation led to President Clinton’s impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice, Congress allowed the 1978 act to lapse. The DOJ replaced it with regulations for special counsels who, appointed by the attorney general, operate under the AG’s, and thus ultimately the president’s, direct control.

Those regulations state that the attorney general “will appoint a Special Counsel when he or she determines” that:

(1) “Criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted,”

(2) The DOJ’s “Investigation or prosecution of that person or matter would present a conflict of interest for the Department or other extraordinary circumstances,” and

(3) “It would be in the public interest to appoint an outside Special Counsel to assume responsibility for the matter.”

The regulations require that “Tthe Special Counsel shall be selected from outside the United States Government”; DOJ attorneys cannot serve as special counsels.

Attorney General Merrick Garland long ago should have appointed a special counsel to properly and fully investigate the allegations of criminal activities against Hunter Biden and the alleged involvement of other Biden family members, including Joe Biden. To save the DOJ’s rapidly deteriorating reputation, he should do so now.

Based on public information, there is more than sufficient evidence to support investigating Hunter Biden for tax evasion, filing false tax returns, money laundering, actions in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and other lobbying-related crimes, soliciting bribes, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, racketeering, and making false statements to acquire a firearm (which, incidentally, carries a potential ten-year prison sentence because of legislation supported by then-senator Biden). Any one of these should trigger a criminal investigation, let alone the combination of them.

Enough of a conflict of interest exists for Garland to appoint a special counsel. Indeed, investigating a president’s son along with the president’s siblings and other family members, plus perhaps even the president himself, is a conflict of interest so obvious that it barely requires stating. Hunter’s failed sweetheart plea deal in and of itself demonstrates that the DOJ gave Hunter preferential treatment. The DOJ’s weakness in the plea deal shows that it cannot overcome the conflict of interest on its own.

For example, Hunter was supposed to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors even though he tried to evade taxes or otherwise obstruct the IRS. The DOJ’s Criminal Tax Manual clearly states that cases like Hunter’s “Should be charged as felonies . . . to avoid inequitable treatment.” In August 2022, IRS investigators drafted a 99-page memo recommending both felony and misdemeanor charges against Hunter Biden, which the DOJ ignored. As IRS special agents Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler testified, the DOJ sabotaged their attempts to get evidence, blocked investigation of anything leading to or connecting with President Biden, and ran out the clock on the statutes of limitations for Hunter’s more serious Burisma tax issues. In fact, Shapley testified that “There should not be a two-track justice system based on who you are and who you’re connected to. Yet, in this case, there was.” Ziegler said in an interview: “Are we treating all taxpayers the same? In this case, no. I don’t think so.” That’s also true concerning the charge of Hunter’s false statements to acquire a firearm because there appears to be no other case where the DOJ granted pre-trial diversion. And, as DOJ attorney Leo Wise admitted in open court, there appears to be no other case where the DOJ buried broad immunity in pre-trial diversion paperwork instead of clearly stating the specific immunity terms in the plea agreement.

It makes no sense that Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate former president Trump when the DOJ has no conflict of interest, yet he refuses to appoint a special counsel when there is a painfully glaring conflict of interest in investigating the Bidens.

If Garland does not quickly appoint a special counsel, he will be opening himself up to the charge that the DOJ is protecting President Biden. Garland would also give Congress the grounds to believe that genuinely investigating and prosecuting Hunter would have revealed that President Biden and/or his family members either committed or knew of serious wrongdoing.

Failure to appoint a special counsel would give Congress the grounds to consider measures beyond oversight hearings.

John Yoo is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He served in the U.S. Department of Justice from 2001 to 2003. John Shu is a legal scholar and commentator who served in the administrations of Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush

Trumped Up

By: Judd Garrett

Objectivity is the Objective

August 3, 2023

In his Nobel Prize-winning book, The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about how the leaders of the Soviet Union weaponized the judiciary against their political opponents – oftentimes, sending them to Siberian Gulags for the rest of their lives on spurious trumped-up charges. Most of the time, the charges against political prisoners were ambiguous ‘conspiracies’, ‘crimes against the state’, and ‘suspicion of espionage’. And there was rarely just one charge. It was usually three or four charges levied against their political opponents. There were speech crimes, thought crimes, and crimes of association. After experiencing life in the Soviet Gulags, Solzhenitsyn wrote, The old proverb does not lie: “Look for the brave in prison, and the stupid among the political leaders!”

Yesterday, Donald Trump was indicted for the third time during an election season in which the polls have him as the frontrunner over the incumbent President, Joe Biden. And not coincidently, it is Biden’s DOJ that has indicted Trump twice. Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Donald J Trump has courage. The man is facing over one hundred years in federal prison, and not by an impartial judiciary, but by rabid partisans whose only goal is to use their vast power to see to it that Trump dies behind bars. And the surest way for Donald Trump to avoid that fate is to drop out of the Presidential election for if he does, these indictments will surely go away and be forgotten. But Trump fights on. He is not fighting for his over-inflated ego. He’s already a billionaire. He already has the President of the United States’ skin on his wall. He already received 74 million votes, the most legal votes by any candidate in our history.

He is fighting, not for himself, and not exclusively for us, the people. He is fighting for our country and future generations of Americans. Regardless of what you think of Donald Trump, and regardless of whether he is re-elected in 2024, defeated, or spends the rest of his life in jail, his greatest accomplishment as President, beyond the economy, oil independence, the Middle Eastern peace deals or the Chinese tariffs, is that he exposed the corruption that is Washington, D.C. He has shown the world that our national politics are no better than Venezuela or Cuba or Russia or even China. We just know how to put on a better face.

Our “elected” officials shroud themselves in the Constitution without the intent of following any of the principles to the letter or even the spirit in which they were written. They give grand speeches elucidating the high-sounding principles in our Constitution when it serves their purposes, and then completely ignore or defy those same principles when it’s politically expedient. Donald Trump has laid this all bare. He may be the least corrupt of the major political players in Washington, yet he is the one staring at over 40 indictments and 100 years in prison. That tells you everything you need to know.

The Bidens and the Clintons have been selling political influence to foreign agents for decades and no indictments are coming their way. Mitch McConnell has sold out America to China and his wife’s family for over 20 years, amassing a fortune of over $50 million, and not a word is said about it. Paul Pelosi has been trading stock off of inside information from his wife, former Speaker of the House, Nancy for years, making him a better stock picker than Warren Buffet, and growing their wealth to over $100 million, yet everyone shrugs. When are they going to do an investigation on how Barack Obama has amassed over $135 million since entering the White House?

Donald Trump is not part of the uni-party and is intent on exposing the uni-party, so he had to be destroyed. The uni-party puts up with Ted Cruz and Jim Jordan because they help to legitimize the facade of American democracy and debate, but if either gets too powerful or too popular or becomes a real threat, they will be crushed just like Trump. So, they will stay in their lane demanding change that will never come. Donald Trump could potentially bring that change or expose the corruption to a point that the change is inevitable, so he cannot be tolerated.

Special Counsel, Jack Smith’s recent indictment read just like some of those old Soviet indictments:

ü “A conspiracy to defraud the United States, by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat, the lawful federal government function…”

ü “A conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding…”

ü “Conspiracy against the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted…”

Listen to the buzzwords that do not mean anything – “obstruct”, “conspiracy”, “impair”, “impede”, and “corrupt”. All words that sound like something important but are wide open to interpretation. None of these words point to an actual overt crime that Trump committed, an actual act. They are thought crimes and speech crimes. Due to their timing concerning the 2024 election, these indictments by Jack Smith could easily be interpreted as election interference, and since a Presidential election is a “lawful federal government function”, Jack Smith could easily be charged with the same crimes he is charging Trump with – “conspiracy to defraud the United States, by using dishonesty, fraud” or “conspiracy against the right to vote”.

Jack Smith wrote those words, “conspiracy to defraud the United States, by using dishonesty, fraud…” So according to Jack Smith, Trump wanted to defraud the government by fraud? That would be like writing, ‘he conspired to murder someone by murdering him.’ Or ‘he planned on robbing the store by robbing it.’ When the best way that he can articulate the charges is filled with this much ambiguity and double talk, there is a very good chance that the charges are simply made up.

Smith also wrote in the indictment, “A conspiracy to corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding…” Is there a non-corrupt way to obstruct and impede a congressional proceeding? Of course, there is, just do it as a Democrat. You will never be charged. Isn’t that what hundreds of pro-abortionists did in September 2018, when they broke into the Capital and were pounding on the Senate Chambers doors during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings attempting to stop him from being confirmed? Not one of those people spent a day in jail for doing the same thing that Trump is falsely charged with and facing decades in prison for.

Solzhenitsyn also wrote, “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” And that’s all we can do, live in the truth, not “our truth”, but the truth. There are too many liars in the world who are living “their truth.”

Two Sets of Laws for Two Americas

By: Victor Davis Hanson

American Greatness

August 3, 2023

Two sets of laws now operate in an increasingly unrecognizable America.

Consider the matter of unlawfully removing and storing classified papers.

Donald Trump may go to prison for removing contested White House files to his home.

So far Joe Biden seems exempt from just such legal jeopardy.

But as a senator and Vice President with no right, as does a president, to declassify files, Biden removed and, as a private citizen kept for years classified files in unsecured locations.

Biden’s team strangely revealed the unlawful removals after years of silence.

It did so because the Biden administration found itself in the untenable position of prosecuting the former president for “crimes” that the current president committed as well—albeit far earlier and longer.

Impeachable phone calls?

Donald Trump was impeached by a Democratic House for delaying foreign aid until the Ukrainian government guaranteed that Hunter Biden and his family were no longer engaged in corrupt influence peddling in Kyiv.

In addition, the Left charged that Trump was targeting Joe Biden, his possible 2020 rival.

Yet Biden, with impunity, bragged that he had fired a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into his own son’s schemes by promising to cancel outright American foreign aid.

And the Biden administration’s Justice Department is now targeting Trump, currently the front-running challenger to Biden in 2024.

Election denialism?

Trump was indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith, in part for supposedly conspiratorially “unlawfully discounting legitimate votes.”

Will Smith then also indict Stacey Abrams? For years Abrams falsely claimed that she was the real governor of Georgia. She toured the country in hopes of “discounting” the state vote count.

Or maybe Smith was referring to the conspiracist and former president Jimmy Carter.

He alleged that Trump in 2016 “lost the election, and he was put into office because the Russians interfered on his behalf.”

Will Smith charge Hillary Clinton?

She serially libeled Trump as an “illegitimate” president.

Clinton hatched the Russian collusion hoax and bragged she joined the “Resistance” to continue her attacks on an elected president.

Or maybe Smith meant the Hollywood crowd.

Lots of actors cut commercials after the 2016 election—begging viewers to pressure the electors to ignore their constitutional duties to honor their states’ popular vote and instead swing their ballots to Hillary Clinton.

Was not that “insurrectionary?”

Or was Smith thinking of January 2005?

Then 32 Democratic House members and Sen. Barbara Boxer tried to nullify the legally certified vote in Ohio—to thereby elect the loser John Kerry.

How about destroying evidence?

Trump was also indicted for allegedly attempting to erase video material from his own cameras in his own house.

Yet Hillary Clinton with impunity eliminated subpoenaed communication devices and thousands of emails.

Violations of security? Trump was indicted for supposedly loosely talking about classified material to visitors at his home.

So will prosecutor Smith’s indictments also extend to Hillary Clinton? She sent classified documents illegally over her unsecure private server.

FBI Director James Comey memorialized a confidential presidential conversation.

Then he deliberately leaked what properly was a classified document to the media. It was all part of Comey’s Machiavellian gambit to prompt the appointment of a favorable special prosecutor.

What about subversion of the electoral process?

Donald Trump was indicted for supposedly undermining the election of 2020 by questioning the integrity of the balloting.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign illegally hired two foreign nationals Christopher Steele and Igor Danchenko to compile falsehoods about her opponent Trump.

Clinton hid her payments behind three paywalls.

Her team, along with the FBI, helped leak the counterfeit dossier to the media and high officials to undermine her opponent—and thus subvert the election itself.

Lying and perjury?

Two Trump aides and Trump himself are indicted for supposedly stonewalling federal investigators by claiming either amnesia or ignorance.

That tact is exactly what James Comey did 245 times while under oath before Congress.

What do former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former Director of the CIA John Brennan, and former interim FBI Director Andrew McCabe all have in common?

All three admitted they flagrantly lied either under oath to Congress or to federal investigators.

The three were never indicted for their false and perjurious testimonies.

We have now serially devolved from the 2016 election “Russian collusion” hoax to the 2020 election “Russian disinformation” laptop hoax, and down to the 2024 election weaponized indictments.

Out of pathological hatred or fear of Donald Trump, the Left has crafted one set of laws for themselves and another for all other Americans.

They smugly believe their own moral superiority grants them such a right to apply laws unequally—or to ignore them altogether.

To retain power at all cost, and to destroy a political rival, leftwing Democrats are systematically dismantling the constitutional foundations of the United States as we once knew them.

The Biden Presidency Is Unsustainable

By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
July 31, 2023

Imagine if Gavin Newsom was currently Vice President amid the final meltdown of the Biden family consortium.

Does anyone doubt that Biden would then either be forced to resign by Democratic politicos (for reasons in addition to his escalating dementia) or would be impeached and perhaps abdicate Nixon-style?

The presence of the now predictable mediocrity of Kamala Harris and the impossibility, given her race and gender, of removing her, for now, is about all that keeps a cognitively declining Biden still in office. The Left fears what she could do as president to the Democratic Party; conservatives are terrified of what she could do to the country.

Joe Biden’s bewilderment exempts his embarrassments from accountability in the way that Hunter Biden’s addictions excuse his past serial criminality. But the passes granted to both father and son would be now unsustainable with a viable Vice President in waiting.

Indeed, the Harris problem explains some of the current Democratic strategy.

Backroom leaks and growing insider rumors of Biden’s dementia confirm the portrait of an often befuddled president whom the public by now knows all too well.

The aimless House Democrats’ “how-dare-you-even-consider-an-impeachment inquiry” furor, coupled with their half-hearted efforts, along with the media, to refute the actual charges of corruption of the Biden family, suggest that he will not run for reelection—but also not be impeached much less convicted or removed under the 25th Amendment.

So the Harris dilemma explains a lot: finding a way to keep her out of current power until Biden somehow finishes his first term, and thus letting the Democratic 2024 primary candidates organically abort her presidential aspirations.

There are a few problems, however, with this strategy.

One, can Joe Biden finish his first term?

That would require his staff to shorten his already truncated workday for the next 18 months to about 2-3 hours of work per day.

He would have to be kept away from photo-ops with young (especially female) children, lest he turkey-gobbles the cheek of another victim to a worldwide audience.

He can no longer read off a teleprompter without slurring his words, losing his place, or going off extemporaneously on to topics such as “Vladimir” Zelenskyy, the “Iraq” war in Ukraine, or relief over the curing of cancer.

He cannot hold half-hour press conferences given his incoherence and his angry prevarications. He still insists incredulously that he never discussed the Biden family business with Hunter, although we may soon see transcripts, recordings, and affidavits that he was intimately involved in and profited from it.

The Strange Case of Hunter in the White House
Hunter is toxic and capable of leaving behind incriminating evidence or engaging in surreal behavior anywhere and anytime. Why would a former crack cocaine addict be brought into the White House, after which a bag of cocaine was for the first time in presidential history found abandoned in the West Wing?

(Partial answer: why and how would an addict leave an incriminating crackpipe in a rental car, simply abandon a laptop at a repair shop with evidence of his felonious behavior on it, or allow his illegally registered handgun to turn up in a dumpster near a school)?

An outside, disinterested observer who read the contents of the laptop and Hunter’s wounded-fawn protestations about his unappreciated role in enriching his father and uncle, or digested his unhinged recent career as a quid-pro-quo, paint-by-the-numbers artiste, selling high-priced junk in exchange for presidential flavors, would conclude that the Bidens are apprehensive of the unpredictable Hunter. Keep your friends close, but your explosive son even closer.

Of course, they fear Hunter’s recklessness, addictions, and greed—but more perhaps his ability to take down the entire Biden clan should they distance themselves too far from him or leak that the family’s corrupt schemes were birthed by the fall-guy Hunter alone.

Aside from Joe’s cognitive decline and Hunter’s volatility, no one believes anymore Joe Biden’s patent lies that he never discussed with Hunter his lucrative grifting career. Already, the untruth has transmogrified into he never did business with Hunter—and soon perhaps he never profited from the business he did and discussed with Hunter.

No matter, by year’s end there will be witnesses and hard data showing that Joe himself discussed pay-for-play schemes with foreign entities, of the sort he long ago boasted with previous impunity before a Council of Foreign Relations event.

This is no Whitewater, Trooper-gate, or Stormy Daniels scandal, but bribery of the sort explicitly outlined by the Constitution for removal from office:
“The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Selling influence to foreign-government-related enterprises is, of course, not just bribery but perhaps treason as well. And it involves other “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” among them tax fraud on unreported foreign income.

Moreover, it is arguable that the Biden shake-down consortium has altered the very nature of U.S. foreign policy. We will never know the full effect of the false Russian disinformation/laptop narrative, following the fake Russian collusion hoax, on Kremlin thinking. Nor can we explain why Joe Biden once urged Putin to lay off hacking humanitarian U.S. targets or suggested that a minor invasion of Ukraine would not elicit a U.S. response, or offered to airlift Zelenskyy out of Kyiv in the first days of the war.

Nor can we explain why China was never held accountable by Biden after new information entailed the role of the Wuhan lab in birthing the Covid virus, or for sending a spy balloon across the continental U.S. with impunity. Meanwhile, the administration’s crazy talk of partnering with a supposedly non-bellicose China seems unhinged.

Finally, given the first Trump impeachment, what is the Left now going to say to House Republicans—“You cannot in this country impeach a president merely for threatening to cancel foreign aid unless Ukraine fired a prosecutor looking into his high-ranking family’s illegal influence selling?”

Equality Under the Law?
The Democrats in their Trump derangement fits so lowered the bar for impeachment and special prosecutions, that not impeaching or removing Biden under the Left’s new standards seems almost ridiculous.

If Trump earned hysteria about 25th Amendment removal (to the point of taking and acing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment) for a halting gait on an occasion descending a ramp, how could a non-compos-mentis and chronically falling Biden not be so examined?

Moreover, Trump was impeached for:
1) asking a foreign leader to examine the corruption of the Biden family with Ukraine while he put a hold on approved foreign aid to Ukraine;
2) and at the time, it was possible that Joe Biden could have been Trump’s likely future 2020 opponent.

But in contrast, note that Biden:
1) issued an ultimatum that a Ukraine prosecutor would either be summarily fired, or aid would be ended. And he was fired!; and
2) Biden was only a possible general-election presidential rival when Trump called Zelensky; Trump is currently the front-runner against a putative Biden candidacy in 2024.

Biden has also done far more than ask Ukraine to ensure a political opponent was not guilty of corruption but rather sicced a special DOJ prosecutor on Trump for taking out classified papers in the manner that Joe Biden himself did years earlier, without the prerogative as a senator or vice president of declassifying such papers.

Harris Paradoxes
The open disregard for Kamala Harris is not just a Republican phenomenon. Her dismal popularity reflects that such disappointment in her is bipartisan. And now the likely machinations mentioned to keep her out of the presidency are undoing all the racial and gender pandering that explain her otherwise inexplicable appointment in the first place. At some point, the Democratic identity-politics base is going to pressure the party’s hierarchy to back off and back Harris or face charges of racism.

Oddly, the Left’s tolerance of Biden’s cognitive impairment also strengthens Harris’s case, especially among her diversity base. Kamala utters incomprehensible sentences; Joe cannot finish them. Kamala’s public declamations are kindergarten stuff; Joe’s are more nursery school level. In theory, Kamala can be coached and improve; Joe’s declines are at a geometric rate that is irreversible.

So if someone so cognitively challenged is currently President with the full assent of the Democratic Party, for what reasons does it turn its animus on a Vice President who is still relatively young and hale?

How odd that the Left knows that both the current President and Vice President should not be in either job after 2024; and yet its own prior pandering and rank politicking have made both almost impossible to remove. And how odder that the extra-legal measures the Left took to emasculate the Trump presidency are now the low standards by which an utterly corrupt Biden can be investigated, indicted, impeached, or forced to resign.