Trump’s Wide World

October 28, 2024

AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, THE WIDE WORLD OF TRUMP. New York — If you wanted to see living, breathing proof of former President Donald Trump‘s success in broadening the appeal of the Republican Party, you just had to look around his mega-rally in Madison Square Garden Sunday night. No, Trump did not draw hordes of fans from the deep-blue blocks of Manhattan surrounding the arena. Nearly everyone I talked to came in from Long Island, New Jersey, or the outer boroughs of the city, in particular the most outer of the outer boroughs, Staten Island. But if you were looking specifically for, say, Trump’s growing appeal to Latino voters, all you had to do was look around.

An extensive poll done last month by NBC News and Telemundo showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump by 54% to 40% among Hispanic voters. That 40%, should Trump actually achieve it, would equal the best Republican performance among Latino voters ever by President George W. Bush in 2004. (Remember that Trump won about 28% of the Latino vote in 2016 and about 32% in 2020. Both figures were significantly better than Mitt Romney and John McCain in the two elections before Trump.) The NBC-Telemundo poll showed Trump doing particularly well among male Latino voters, with whom Trump and Harris were tied, 47% to 47%.

These are extraordinary numbers, and they are particularly worrisome to strategists who have seen Harris’s support decline in some key areas of the Democratic Party coalition. They would find no solace at the Madison Square Garden rally.

Among the first people I met inside the Garden, as everyone waited for the program to begin, were Marc Vazquez and Engel Paulino, two friends from Brick Township, New Jersey. Vazquez’s family came to the New York area from Puerto Rico, while Paulino’s came from the Dominican Republic. Both are active in their local Republican Party.

Vazquez, who is 30 years old and works in marketing, explained that when he was younger, “I always believed I was a Democrat because that’s what my family identified as.” Republicans, he believed, were rich, out of touch, and didn’t care about people like him. Then, in 2014, around the time he turned 20, he started a business — it dealt with repairing phones and tablets — and found himself dealing with quite a few conservatives. They said all sorts of things critical of then-President Barack Obama. Vazquez found that frustrating and started doing some reading. “I realized they were right,” he said.

Trump joined the presidential race the next year. Vazquez was originally skeptical — initial skepticism is a common element of many rallygoers’ stories — but he was also intrigued by how much the media seemed to hate Trump. That is another common element of the stories. A lot of Trump supporters say they were originally struck by what they saw as a hostile media overreaction to Trump — in Vazquez’s case, it was over the issue of illegal immigration — and that it spurred them to take a closer look at Trump.

Vazquez found that he agreed with Trump on immigration. “It wasn’t about hate. It was about putting America first, making sure our laws were respected, and ensuring our communities were safe,” he said. Vazquez also found himself supporting Trump’s tax cuts, energy policies, deregulation, and more. He thought Trump “was focused on creating real opportunities, particularly for communities like mine, which had been overlooked by politicians for years.” In 2019, five years after he showed his first interest in politics, Vazquez joined the Brick Township Republican Party, in which he is now on the board. That’s how he ended up wearing a MAGA hat on the floor of Madison Square Garden, waiting for the biggest political rally in decades.

Engel Paulino wore a MAGA hat, too, a baseball cap turned backward, plus a “NEVER SURRENDER” T-shirt featuring the famous photo of Trump raising his fist after he was shot in Butler, Pennsylvania. (As an aside, I’ve covered a lot of Trump rallies, and I’ve never seen as much MAGA merchandise as I did Sunday night.) Paulino described living as a small child in the Dominican Republic, where his father had a furniture business. “A hurricane came by and destroyed the business, and my dad had a choice — either rebuild or listen to my mother and start a new life in the U.S.,” Paulino said. They came to New Jersey.

In New Jersey, Paulino recalled, “I watched my dad, as a truck driver, work 13-hour days. He would be gone for days at a time. He had a bed in his truck. And I watched him achieve the American dream. He went from a small one-bedroom apartment to a four-bedroom house in a matter of five to seven years.” His father is now a Pentecostal minister in Asbury Park.

Seeing his father’s work pay off had a deep effect on Paulino. He developed an interest in real estate and is now a realtor. He did not pay much attention to politics until Trump won the presidency in 2016. Like Vazquez, he was fascinated by the strong media antipathy to Trump. “I always wondered, ‘Why do they hate him so much?’” he said. He started paying more attention to politics and found that he agreed with what Trump was doing. He did some reading on the basic tenets of the Republican Party. “And most of those things I resonated with,” he said. “I believe in keeping the family together. I believe in having the opportunity to start your own business and grow. And I’m a Christian. I believe in protecting our religious views.” In 2020, Paulino voted for the first time, for Donald Trump.

Finally, Paulino said he strongly supports closing the U.S.-Mexico border. He also strongly opposes illegal immigrants receiving government benefits. “Americans should come first,” he declared. But he went on to add: “In my dad’s church, it’s a Hispanic church, there are a lot of illegals, there are a lot of immigrants. So, I feel for that community as well. I’m not ‘deport them all and get rid of them.’ I understand also from their perspective, especially the Dreamers, the ones who were brought to this country as a child, went to school here, and all they know is the U.S. I wish Trump was a little more lenient about that.”

As we talked, I heard a commotion behind me, and Paulino looked over my shoulder and said, “Oh, my gosh — I love her.” It was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), making her way through the crowd.

We parted ways, and the program began. Something happened early in the proceedings that would become the object of hugely negative news coverage. Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian and podcaster booked by the Trump campaign, did a kind of insult comic/roast routine that fell mostly flat with the audience. “There’s a lot going on,” Hinchcliffe said. “Like, I don’t know if you guys know this, but there is literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” The line did not get many laughs and quite a few groans, but it exploded on X. Trump detractors quickly denounced the rally as a “hatefest.”

It was a crude joke that led many to think: Why would the campaign book an insult comic for this event? It wasn’t a roast on cable TV. But there Hinchcliffe was, and the Trump adversaries who were ready to denounce the rally quickly made it Exhibit A in the night’s case against Trump. I texted Vazquez, with roots in Puerto Rico, and Paulino, with roots in the Dominican Republic, to see what they thought. Vazquez replied that he didn’t like what Hinchcliffe said but that “comedians often use exaggeration and sarcasm, and while this particular remark may have been harsh, it was intended as a joke rather than a factual statement.” As for whether it should be blowing up the internet, he noted that all of us encounter a wide range of material on the net, “and it’s up to individuals to decide whether to engage or simply scroll past content they find distasteful. We should be careful not to overreact to every comment, especially those intended to be a joke.”

As for Paulino, he wrote back later that night to say he is a comedy fan and knows Hinchcliffe’s style. “He’s known to be edgy — if you ever check out his show Kill Tony, you’ll see.” Paulino said when the comic made the “garbage” remark, he looked over at Vazquez and made a shocked face, and they both laughed. “Never thought about it again once he moved on to other jokes,” Paulino continued. “I honestly had no idea it would make headline news. It wasn’t until later I went on X and saw that AOC and Tim Walz were freaking out over it.” He saw the episode as something being blown out of proportion by anti-Trump media. “I have many Puerto Rican friends that will be voting for Trump,” he said. “I think it’s safe to assume Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke isn’t going to change that. No one at all is even talking about it in person. I’m still on the train with a lot of supporters. But for some reason, the internet can’t get over it.” The Trump campaign quickly issued a statement saying, “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

There were other vulgar moments in the five-plus hour rally. The New York radio personality Sid Rosenberg was pretty unpleasant, as was a businessman named Grant Cardone. But the striking thing about the episode was the way in which media coverage blotted out the vast majority of what was said during the evening — the talk about Trump’s record on the economy, on the border, on national security, and the criticisms of the Biden-Harris record on those same issues and more. Surely that would merit some discussion, wouldn’t it? Without ignoring what Hinchcliffe and a few others said, couldn’t the reporting have given a more complete account of a very long event?

Look at the headlines. The New York Times topped its main article with “Trump at the Garden: A Closing Carnival of Grievances, Misogyny and Racism.” The Washington Post headline was “Trump rally speakers lob racist insults, call Puerto Rico ‘island of garbage.’” Resistance programming like Morning Joe did what it always does in such situations. It all meshed well with the Harris campaign’s messaging on the rally.

The New York Times report had one thing right: “It was all a surreal scene.” Indeed, it was. Looking at the list of speakers, there was the name Scott LoBaido, described as a “live painter.” Sure enough, LoBaido, an artist originally from Staten Island with a lot of resentment against the Manhattan art world — he gave them the finger at the end of his routine — came onstage with a blank canvas and painted a picture of the American flag and Trump, all in the time it took to play a recording of “America the Beautiful.” Later, wrestler Hulk Hogan reprised his act from the Republican National Convention. Then, a man billed as a childhood friend of Trump, David Rem, pulled a crucifix out of his pocket and waved it as he praised Trump, criticized New York Mayor Eric Adams, and offered to campaign in Spanish for Trump in the swing states.

It was all evidence of the fact that, in his 78 years as a New Yorker, Trump has collected a colorful cast of characters around him. And, of course, he’s one, too. That’s one of the things that makes him interesting and has sometimes made it hard for him to fill the conventional role of president of the United States. The Madison Square Garden rally, a sprawling, audacious political achievement by a Republican candidate in one of the deepest blue places in the country, was also an achievement in showmanship because that’s just who Donald Trump is.

Congressman Jim Jordan

Congressman Jim Jordan
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Tim Walz- Byron York

August 21, 2024

THREE DECEPTIONS FROM TIM WALZ.

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is scheduled to address the Democratic National Convention in Chicago tonight. He will enjoy a wildly enthusiastic, rapturous reception. In the 15 days since Vice President Kamala Harris chose Walz to be her running mate, Democrats have celebrated Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as “America’s dad” and “America’s coach.” They have swooned over his Midwestern manner, his clothes, and even his taste in food. They have made him a hero for calling Republicans “weird” and extolling the “joy” that the Democratic Party is apparently feeling these days.

Walz has also developed a reputation as someone who cannot be trusted to tell the truth about his own biography. Here are three examples of Walz deceptions that have raised concerns in the last 15 days.

1) The IVF deception.
Walz has delighted Democrats with his attacks on Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), the Republican candidate for vice president. (Vance was the original target of the “weird” meme.) One of Walz’s criticisms is that Vance in June voted against a Democratic messaging bill called the “Right to IVF Act.” The bill was intended to gain publicity for Democrats attacking a since-overturned Alabama court decision that briefly, until it was reversed by legislation, declared frozen embryos to be persons. Vance noted that he, Vance, personally supports in vitro fertilization and no state in the country bans it. So he voted against the bill while also signing a statement in support of IVF.

It was a common Washington brouhaha. One party sees political advantage in drafting a bill that will never become law, written for the purpose of embarrassing the other party, and then attacks the other party for voting against it. In the case of IVF, it was particularly meaningless, because Vance fully supports access to IVF.

Nevertheless, Walz made the Vance vote an emotional highlight of his very first speech as a vice presidential candidate. In a highly personal account, Walz said he and his wife used IVF to conceive, and that their decision should be none of Vance’s, or anyone else’s, business.

“In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make,” Walz said. “Even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves, there is a golden rule — mind your own damn business. That includes IVF. And this gets personal for me and my family. When my wife and I decided to have children, we spent years going through infertility treatments. And I remember praying every night for a call for good news — the pit in my stomach when the phone rang and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn’t worked. So it wasn’t by chance that when we welcomed our daughter into the world, we named her Hope.”

The IVF story became part of Walz’s political appeal. In a podcast interview last month, he said of Vance, “If it were up to him, I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF and the things that we need to do reproductive. My kids were born through that direct — you know, that way.” On a number of other occasions, Walz made clear that he and his wife conceived through IVF.

Except they didn’t. This week, the New York Times reported that Walz and his wife used another method, known as intrauterine insemination, to conceive. It falls into the same broad category of fertility treatments as IVF, but with a huge difference: “Unlike IVF, IUI does not involve creating or discarding embryos,” the New York Times explained. “And so anti-abortion leaders are not trying to restrict the treatment.”

So, to summarize: Walz and his wife used a technique, IUI, that nobody opposes. But Walz saw political benefit in falsely alleging that Vance opposes a different treatment, IVF, which Vance does not, in fact, oppose. Then Walz embellished the accusation by giving a seemingly emotional personal account of his own use of IVF, which was false. Walz’s untruths left Vance mystified. “It’s just such a bizarre thing to lie about, right?” Vance said Tuesday. “There’s nothing wrong with having a baby through IVF or not having a baby through IVF. Like, why lie about it? I just don’t understand that.”

2) The DUI deception. In 1995, when he was 31 years old, Walz was stopped while driving 96 mph on a 55 mph road in Nebraska. He was drunk. He failed a field sobriety test, and then police took him to a local hospital for a blood alcohol concentration test, which measured 0.128, well above the legal limit. In court, Walz pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of reckless driving and paid a $200 fine.

Eleven years later, in 2006, Walz ran for Congress. When Republicans dug up the old arrest, the Walz campaign denied that he was drunk. From CNN: “In 2006, his campaign repeatedly told the press that he had not been drinking that night, claiming that his failed a field sobriety test due to a misunderstanding related to hearing loss from his time in the National Guard. The campaign also claimed that Walz was allowed to drive himself to jail that night.”

“None of that was true,” CNN continued. Walz got away with it for 12 years, until he ran for governor in 2018 and the issue resurfaced. He finally acknowledged that he had been drinking that night. In 2022, the arrest popped up again when a Republican-leaning news organization discovered that Walz’s alcohol level had been 0.128. At that point, there was no debating whether Walz was drunk or not and that his campaign defenses in 2006 had been false.

3) The National Guard deception.
This is the Walz truth issue that has received the most attention. Walz served in the Army National Guard for 24 years. In 2003, he was deployed to Italy to support U.S. military operations in Afghanistan in what was known as Operation Enduring Freedom. In 2005, Walz retired from the National Guard as he was preparing a run for Congress and his unit was preparing for deployment in Iraq.

The deceptions involve Walz making a number of statements suggesting he actually served in Afghanistan and that he carried a weapon in combat when, in fact, he was involved in support work in Italy. The second is that Walz has referred to himself as a retired “command sergeant major” when, in fact, he retired one rank below that, as a master sergeant.

These are hugely sensitive issues, and there seems no doubt that Walz said things that were designed to leave the impression that he had served in Afghanistan when he had not. And he flatly said that he retired at one senior rank when he had retired at a lower rank. On the other hand, a careful reading of some of Walz’s statements shows that he technically did not lie even as he left a misleading impression. In the words of a New York Times account that consulted four experts on military records, “All four said they do not believe Mr. Walz engaged in stolen valor, but that he did misrepresent his record at times.”

It’s also a fact that Walz served 24 years in the National Guard and was deployed overseas in service to the United States. In politics, as in American life in general, that is viewed as an admirable thing. So it can be hard to understand why Walz hasn’t been more clear about what, precisely, he did.

So those are three Walz deceptions. On Tuesday, Axios published a few examples of Walz misleading reporters — promising a report would be released when it was never even written, claiming that Minnesota’s pandemic school closures were less extensive than they actually were, and others. None of these examples, big and small, would likely be a huge problem for Walz. But put together, they might add up to something more. “Walz dissembling approaching critical mass — seems only a bit less than what got Al Gore the reputation as a congenital fibber,” journalist Mickey Kaus wrote. “Turns out there’s more than just the military/IVF/DUI stuff.”

It does seem clear that there should be more fact-checking of Walz’s statements. For example, even with all the attention paid to the National Guard matter, there is a lot we don’t know. And now that Walz is a candidate for vice president, there could be other honesty concerns that arise through normal journalistic scrutiny of his record.

One thing that can be said with certainty is that none of that will matter to the delirious delegates in Chicago tonight. The enthusiasm for “America’s coach” will be sky-high, and any questions about his truthfulness will await another time.

Our Revolutionary Times : Victor Davis Hanson

Our Revolutionary Times

By: Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness

May 30, 2024

Sometimes unexpected but dramatic events tear off the thin veneer of respectability and convention. What follows is the exposure and repudiation of long-existing but previously covered-up pathologies.

Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the October 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization.

Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so.

But the post-October 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed difference.

Masked left-wing protestors were unashamedly and virulently anti-Semitic. Students on elite campuses especially showed contempt for both middle-class police officers tasked with preventing their violence and vandalism and the maintenance workers who had to clean up their garbage.

Mobs took over buildings, assaulted Jewish students, called for the destruction of Israel, and defaced American monuments andanti commentaries.

When pressed by journalists to explain their protests, most students knew nothing of the politics or geography of Palestine, for which they were protesting.

The public concluded that the more elite the campus, the more ignorant, arrogant, and hateful the students seemed.

The Biden administration destroyed the southern border. Ten million illegal aliens swarmed into the U.S. without audit. Almost daily, news accounts detail violent acts committed by illegal aliens or their surreal demands for more free lodging and support.

Simultaneously, thousands of Middle Eastern students, invited by universities on student visas, block traffic, occupy bridges, disrupt graduations, and generally show contempt for the laws of their American hosts.

The net result is that Americans are reappraising their entire attitude toward immigration. Expect the border to be closed soon and immigration to become mostly meritocratic, smaller, and legal, with zero tolerance for immigrants and resident visitors who break the laws of their hosts.

Americans are also reappraising their attitudes toward time-honored bureaucracies, the courts, and government agencies.

The public still cannot digest the truth that the once respected FBI partnered with social media to suppress news stories, surveil parents at school board meetings, and conduct performance art swat raids on the homes of supposed political opponents.

After the attempts of the Department of Justice to go easy on the miscreant Hunter Biden but to hound ex-president Donald Trump for supposedly removing files illegally in the same fashion as current President Biden, the public lost confidence not just in Attorney General Merrick Garland but in American jurisprudence itself.

The shenanigans of prosecutors like Fani Willis, Letitia James, and Alvin Bragg, along with overtly biased judges like Juan Merchant and Arthur Engoron, only reinforced the reality that the American legal system has descended into third-world-like tit-for-tat vendettas.

The same politicization has nearly discredited the Pentagon. Its investigations of “white” rage and white supremacy found no such organized cabals in the ranks. But these unicorn hunts likely helped cause a 45,000-recruitment shortfall among precisely the demographic that died at twice their numbers in the general population in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Add in the humiliating flight from Kabul, the abandonment of $50 billion in weapons to the Taliban terrorists, the recent embarrassment of the failed Gaza pier, and the litany of political invective from retired generals and admirals. The result is that the armed forces have an enormous task to restore public faith. They will have to return to meritocracy, emphasize battle efficacy, enforce the uniform code of military justice, and start either winning wars or avoiding those that cannot be won.

Finally, we are witnessing a radical inversion in our two political parties. The old populist Democratic Party that championed lunch-bucket workers has turned into a shrill union of the very rich and subsidized poor. Its support of open borders, illegal immigration, the war on fossil fuels, transgenderism, critical legal and race theories, and the woke agenda are causing the party to lose support.

The Republican Party is likewise rebranding itself from a once-stereotyped brand of aristocratic and corporate grandees to one anchored in the middle class.

Even more radically, the new populist Republicans are beginning to appeal to voters on shared class and cultural concerns rather than on racial and tribal interests.

The results of all these revolutions will shake up the U.S. for decades.

Soon we may see Georgia Tech or Purdue degrees as far better proof of an educated and civic-minded citizen than a Harvard or Stanford brand.

We will likely jettison the failed salad bowl approach to immigration and return to the melting pot as immigration becomes exclusively legal, meritocratic, and manageable.

To avoid further loss of public confidence, institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the DOJ will have to re-earn rather than just assume the public’s confidence.

And we may soon accept the reality that Democrats reflect the values of Silicon Valley plutocrats, university presidents, and blue-city mayors, while Republicans become the home of an ecumenical black, Hispanic, Asian, and white middle class.

Civilizational Collapse Follows When Laws and Consequences Mean Nothing

Civilizational Collapse Follows When Laws and Consequences Mean Nothing

By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One – May 14, 2024

America is facing a number of existential crises—an open border, 30 million illegal immigrants, $36 trillion in debt, borrowing at the rate of $1 billion every 100 days, a suicidal war on gas, oil, and coal production, a recrudescence of premodern racial and ethnic tribalism, the destruction of deterrence abroad, blue state exoduses to red states, the implosion of America’s big blue cities, 1 million plus homeless people, a military that is woke, short recruits, warped by lobbyists and revolving door ex-4 star defense contractors, and a corrupt administrative state.

But amid such bad news, one common denominator seems to explain the collective suicide of America—the end of consequences, or the expectations that laws will never be enforced, threats never realized, and punishments negotiable. And we can extend that to include national debts not paid down and student loans never repaid—all to be rationalized by lies.

Punishment for breaking the law does not deter most people, whether the fear of shaming oneself and family or the reality of losing six months of freedom to a jail cell. But when there is no bail release, or an exemption of $950 for looting, then theft soars, and the law becomes a lie.

The criminal in a cost-to-benefit analysis figures his theft can be fenced for more profit than the chance of going to jail for stealing something that is not his. So even the enabler Rep. Adam Schiff becomes not safe as he robbed of the very clothes on his back. After serial profitable stealing, the criminal class has less respect for the authorities who empower them than for the rare mayor or district attorney who prosecutes them.

In other words, the longer the law is trampled, the more emboldened the criminal, and ironically the weaker and more impotent and more despised become the authorities who allow it.

Even the worst criminal in his dark heart yearns a bit for an adversarial relationship with the police and prosecutors, rather than being given free rein to run wild and so easily destroy civilization.

In a Road Runner/Mad Max/The Book of Eli world, even among the chaos there emerge criminals who try to reconstruct some sort of codes and laws. Even the Hell’s Angels amid their felonious creed live by codes, a low sort of law to create animal order among their ferity.

After all, to paraphrase Plato, even thieves must resort to some sort of protocols or law when they divide up equally the profits from their criminality—to prevent a free-for-all fight that might squander their loot.

Yet in a land without any laws and consequences, the criminal has too much competition, and so ironically functions better with fewer rivals in an ordered and lawful society. And so given that human nature innately has respect for strength and confidence, even the worst murderer has more respect for the hardest-nose penalty prosecutor determined to try, convict, and put him away for good than the buffoonish George Gascóns or Oakland’s Pamela Prices who destroy the distinction between lawfulness and illegality.

The same logic applies to campus unrest. The more mobs grow, as the rhetoric becomes sicker, and as the masked punks become more aggressive, so even more the college president issues serial platitudes. Usually, the president simply levels obviously empty threats, sometimes daily sermons that sort of praise the “courage” of the thuggish students, sometimes expressing worries that he might have to, just maybe, one day, sooner than later, enforce his own campus rules.

Have you sensed what might follow if just one brave campus president announced:

I may be fired, I might be hated by my faculty, but by God, I am going to enforce this campus’s rules and protect the freedom of passage and speech and communication of most of my hard-working students who are paying for instruction, knowledge, security, and the protection of the Bill of Rights. And so, anyone who breaks our campus laws will be arrested, immediately suspended, and face a hearing on permanent expulsion. Anyone who damages campus property, or who forces the university to clean up after his mess, will have the ensuing costs added to his tuition payments and be prosecuted for vandalism. Anyone who is not a student will be subject to arrest and prosecution for trespassing and unlawful entry. And anyone, who is a foreign student or resident immigrant, and breaks campus rules and laws, shall be summarily expelled and face deportation on suspension of his student visa.

We know that such a college president might be fired, would be certainly reviled in the media, spat upon by the faculty, but also canonized by the country and admired as a rare profile in courage.

And yet no one wishes to be martyred. So, the loud therapeutic talk continues without even a small twin of enforcement.

Part Two – May 15, 2024

In short, if Alvin Bragg or Letitia James or Fani Willis were to forsake lawfare and the publicity it earns, and instead treat the criminals in their big city with steep bail, speedy trials, and stiff sentences upon conviction, we know calm would return to urban America.

We know that truth because such a renaissance occurred in the 1990s when the power of the law returned and even the rock-thrower who broke windows, and the squeegee jaywalker who harassed motorists into forking over tips for his bad windshield cleaning, faced big fines and some jail time. The killer thought that if New York stooped to arrest a window-breaker, then it would surely go after the manslayer.

Just as lawlessness begets chaos, and a law unenforced becomes all laws unenforced, so too a law that has teeth spreads lawfulness, gaining respect from the lawful and earning fear from the lawless. And soon then safety, security, and happiness return.

Almost any current pathology is due to timidity and equivocation when simple rules and customs needed to be reenergized and revived.

Take transgenderism. What if our society encouraged a transgendered sports category, a third league between male and female? That is, a coach, a principal, a college president, a mayor, or a governor might simply have said:

“After 60 years of seeking parity between women’s and men’s sports, we are not going to allow biological males to wreck six decades of hard work, much less participate in contact sports where they might injure smaller and less strong female athletes.”

He would be canonized and begin a movement where reality returns and the rule of the absurd ends. Transgenderism would return to its status of the pre-hysterical 2010s when gender dysphoria was treated sympathetically as a rare disjunction between sex at birth and one’s natural affinity with the attributes of the opposite sex. In other words, we would go back to a world where transgenderism/trans-sexualism/gender dysphoria was an identifiable malady, but one affecting about .01 percent of the population, not a fetish of 10-30 percent of elite campus youth.

And our open border? Is it not yet another example of the destruction of the rule of law and the ensuing suicide of Western civilization?

In November 2020, the border was secure. Illegal aliens had been deterred by Trump’s resumption of building the wall, fear of deportation, a war on the cartels, and ultimata to Mexico to cease its own efforts to destroy its own northern border. We relearned the truth of Voltaire’s admonition—il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres—or Napoleon’s reported restoration of law and street order through “a whiff of grapeshot.”

Translated, that means if a new administration in its first 30 days began building a vast new wall, stopped catch-and-release, ended refugee status applicable inside the United States, and deported as a start 20,000 recently arrived illegal aliens, then would not the illegal immigrant come in fewer numbers, with legality, and more respect for his soon to be adopted homeland?

Would ex-admirals and retired generals become more circumspect about smearing their commander-in-chief as a “Nazi,” a “Mussolini,” and a “liar,” if Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (i.e., “Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”) was just enforced one time (applicable to retired and serving officers as well)? If the offenders were court-marshaled, then would we have a less weaponized military and fewer megaphonic officers?


Part Three – May 17, 2024

The people yearn for laws to regain their potency. They are sickened by statutes on the books that vaporize upon needed enforcement. They are tired of excuses and inaction. We feel the chaos everywhere from the trivial to the existential. How many times has Joe Biden threatened the Houthis? Is the Red Sea safely navigable—or not?

What does Joe mean when he virtue-signals “Don’t!”? Did his “don’t” stop Putin from attacking Kyiv? From Iran targeting Israel with missiles and drones?

I recently flew on a Southwest flight. I had purchased a first-class ticket to board and earned a second in line according to Southwest’s singular protocols. But first were the supposedly invalided. And there were 12 such that claimed serious maladies that not only required wheelchairs but also the accompaniment of their families. All told some 20 boarded first. And purchased first-class ticketholders were relegated to 6-7 rows in the rear.

I lingered before deboarding. Some 10 of the 12 walked out easily along with 7 or 8 of their relatives.

I said nothing, but just listened to the other passengers, who complained that there were zero rules to ascertain disability and their first-class tickets were a bitter joke. I thought silently that had all the stricken been apprised they could board first, but would have to disembark last, then some of the “disabled” might have thought of boarding with the majority.

Why does not one pay any attention to federal servants who swear under oath to tell the truth to Congress and federal investigators, and then summarily lie so boldly?

Again, there are no consequences. No consequences for once CIA Director John Brennan who with exemption lied twice under oath. So did Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. And with self-confessed impunity.

Add in Anthony Fauci and Andrew McCabe. How could James Comey seriously claim amnesia 245 times when interrogated by the House Intelligence Committee? How could “51 Intelligence Authorities” simply lie on the eve of the 2020 election by swearing the authentic Hunter’s laptop was likely a product of Russian disinformation? Did Leon Panetta or Mike Morrel suffer ostracism, ridicule, or public censor for boldly lying on the eve of a presidential debate and upcoming election?

If we just charged one government grandee with perjury who lied under oath, and if convicted jailed him, perhaps the truth would return to the government. Or for the public liars who prevaricate with impunity, what if we just ostracized them, as if lying was a cardinal sin?

If laws were enforced, if lying earned a perjury charge or at least social ostracism, then the order would follow. Deterrence would reappear, and the smash-and-grabber, the carjacker, and the knockout-game puncher would recede into the shadows.

A final note. Laws must not just be enforced but done so equally and symmetrically.

No one believes Trump would be prosecuted by Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis were he Biden and not Trump.

No one believes that the laws were enforced against arson, rioting, murder, mayhem, and looting during the summer of 2020. And yet illegal parading was charged against many of the January 6 demonstrators.

Some like Peter Navarro go to prison for refusing a congressional subpoena; other refuseniks like Eric Holder claim hero status. Does anyone believe if the evidence against the Biden conglomerate were comparably applied to the Trump clan, the latter would be similarly excused and exempt?

If a special prosecutor in 2017 found that Trump had removed classified files in the manner of Robert Hur’s findings of Biden’s illegality, then surely Trump would have been impeached, convicted, jailed, and removed from office.

In sum, when laws are not enforced, or enforced erratically, unfairly, and dishonestly, then there is no civilization. And so, we witness why America has become what it is: home of the unfree and home of the lawless.

BYRON YORK THE TRUMP TRIAL AND 2016 ELECTION TRUTHERS

May 17, 2024
Byron York’s Daily Memo

THE TRUMP TRIAL AND 2016 ELECTION TRUTHERS.

Former President Donald Trump and some Republicans famously rejected the results of the 2020 election. Trump called the election rigged. He encouraged the Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol that turned into a riot. And he and his supporters filed dozens of lawsuits to challenge Joe Biden‘s narrow victories in some key states. Trump lost them all. In the end, his legal effort to change the 2020 result was a resounding failure.
But Trump’s work was amateur hour compared to the lawfare practiced by Democrats seeking to undermine the results of the 2016 election, the one that made Trump president of the United States. What is perhaps most remarkable is that eight years later, it’s still going on.

The leading edge of 2016 denialism was, of course, the Russia investigation, which Trump calls the Russia hoax. Turbocharged by the Hillary Clinton/Democratic National Committee-financed Steele dossier, which was an actual hoax, the widespread political and media clamor for a criminal investigation of Trump overwhelmed the first months of his presidency and led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller in May 2017. Mueller’s search for Trump-Russia “collusion” — that was the popular term for the words Mueller actually used, “conspiracy” and “coordination” — ended two years later when Mueller admitted he could not establish that any conspiracy or coordination ever happened. Although a number of figures around Trump were charged with unrelated or process crimes, Mueller never charged Trump or anyone associated with him with scheming with Russia to fix the 2016 election.

After all the hysteria, speculation, media talk, and dark accusations, “collusion” was … nothing. Mueller partisans wanted to charge Trump with obstructing the investigation, but since Trump was president and actually cooperated to an extraordinary degree with the investigation, that went nowhere, too. Nevertheless, collusion die-hards still maintain that Trump conspired with Russia and that Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 election might have tipped the vote to Trump over Clinton. One of those die-hards is Hillary Clinton herself, who, in 2019, said, “You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.”

All that might seem like ancient history except for The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. Last year, Alvin Bragg, the elected Democratic district attorney of Manhattan — he was elected on a platform that included going after Trump — filed 34 felony counts against the former president, all based on allegedly false bookkeeping. Normally, those charges, even if warranted, are a misdemeanor, and these were long past the statute of limitations. But Bragg found a way to turn them into felonies.

What Bragg did was to charge Trump with falsifying business records “with intent to commit another crime.” The problem was that Bragg did not specify that other crime, although his prosecutors gave the judge “theories” about what they called Trump’s 2016 “election interference.” By the time of opening statements last month, prosecutors still had not settled on a specific secondary crime, but they had developed a full-blown conspiracy theory about the 2016 election. And it’s not some sort of narrative that critics characterize as a conspiracy theory — it’s a real conspiracy theory.
“This case is about a criminal conspiracy and a cover-up,” prosecutor Michael Colangelo said at the beginning of the prosecution’s opening statement. (You may know Colangelo’s name because he is the high-ranking Biden Justice Department official who joined Bragg’s team for the purpose of prosecuting Trump.) Colangelo continued: “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 election; then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.”
Colangelo went on to weave a tale in which Trump, then-National Enquirer chief David Pecker, and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen “formed a conspiracy … to influence the presidential election by concealing negative information about Mr. Trump in order to help him get elected.”
“You had three parts of this conspiracy,” Colangelo told the jury. “You had the agreement to run positive coverage; you had the agreement to attack his opponents; and then the core of the conspiracy was David Pecker’s agreement to act as the eyes and ears for the campaign in an effort to locate damaging information about the defendant and then take steps to try to bury it to help Trump get elected.” Reading this, you might notice one thing about this conspiracy: Nothing that Colangelo described was illegal. Maybe it was shady, maybe it was ethically challenged, but it was not illegal. And yet Trump is now facing 34 felony charges and a maximum sentence of 136 years in prison. This Democratic conspiracy theory has turned into something very, very serious.

“It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Colangelo said. And then, he added something heard from conspiracy enthusiasts everywhere: “We will never know, and it doesn’t matter, if this conspiracy was the difference-maker in a close election.” That, of course, implies that it might have been the difference-maker, thereby surely warming the hearts of Clinton and her dead-ender followers everywhere. And just in case any juror missed the point, Colangelo concluded his opening statement with, “As I said when I started, this case is about a criminal conspiracy and a cover-up, an illegal conspiracy to undermine the integrity of a presidential election.”

It’s worth noting that for all Colangelo’s talk, Trump is not charged with conspiracy. He is not charged with corrupting the election, whatever that might mean. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote: “Alvin Bragg … is trying to hoodwink the jury into believing that (a) it is a crime for a candidate for public office to conspire with others to suppress politically damaging information, and (b) that Donald Trump was charged with such a conspiracy in the indictment that has resulted in the ongoing trial. In point of fact, there is no such information-suppression conspiracy crime in the law and the indictment against Trump does not charge a conspiracy.” And yet that phantom accusation is the basis for elevating Trump’s alleged misdemeanors into a charge that could imprison him for the rest of his life.

In casual conversations recently, it has become clear that some Republicans have had a difficult time wrapping their head around what Bragg and Colangelo are doing. A 2016 election conspiracy? Didn’t that sort of thing end with Mueller? How could Democrats focus so feverishly on Trump’s 2020 election denial while doing some of the same stuff themselves, only on the much more serious level of trying to send Trump to prison? It might be hard to believe, but it is happening.

Why Are Pro-Hamas Rallies So Anti-Semitic, So Anti-American and So Obnoxious?

May 12, 2024

Special Edition

Why Are Pro-Hamas Rallies So Anti-Semitic, So Anti-American and So Obnoxious?

By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One – May 7, 2024



Our Guests

After seven months of pro-Hamas chaos, a good question arises over what exactly the anti-Semitic demonstrators won’t do?

· Crash Easter services at St. Patrick’s Cathedral?

· Interrupt Christmas celebrations?

· Deface the White House wall?

· Deface the Lincoln Memorial?

· Deface veterans’ cemeteries?

· Shut down commuter traffic on freeways?

· Block cars on key bridges such as the Golden Gate or in downtown Manhattan?

· Stop Jews from entering college buildings like the Hitler youth thugs who used to hold hands to block the entrance of Jews to the University of Vienna?

· Chase Jews and trap them in a college library?

· Call for endless repetitions of the October mass killing and rape of Israelis?

· Shout “Death to America” and hit and spit at police?

In truth, in the last seven months, there has been a steady escalation of such mindlessness, and we should expect more until the November election, as the spring and summer of 2024 looks like a replay of 2020. (One wonders then whether Kamala Harris will replay her role four years earlier of cheering on the street thugs when in 2020 she boasted: “I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop, and everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day”?)

Why are so many thousands of students, at our most pricey campuses, so anti-Semitic, nihilist, and ignorant?

We have suffered a perfect storm of events that explains both the street thuggery and the campus insanity:

Given our current open border and the 10 million who have crossed since Biden was inaugurated, we are now well beyond prior records of non-native-born American residents, reaching well over 15% of the population, and in actual numbers over 50 million.

Unfortunately, this record number of new permanent residents, naturalized citizens, green card and student visa holders, and illegal aliens often arrived from illiberal or corrupt regimes (e.g., Venezuela, Central America, the Middle East, China, the Caribbean, etc.). They entered without audit and at a time when the government and administrative state had abandoned the once successful melting pot of radical assimilation and integration.

In its place, America now encourages hyphenation, the “salad bowl,” and overt tribalism, on the theory that the millions fleeing their miserable homelands are arriving to an even more miserable new home, and thus have legitimate grievances against us, their new hosts (Translated that means they come as intended fodder for the Left, to warp census counts, to empower hard-to-authenticate massive mail-voting, and to grow the welfare state and its operators. Thus, rapid and government-assisted assimilation is not on the agenda.)

In the case of the universities, there are now nearly one million foreign students enrolled, many of them at expensive, elite campuses, which see them as cash cows paying the full, jacked-up, and inflated cost of tuition, room, and board.

Perhaps a third arrive from China. And a quarter-million are now from the Middle East, the vast majority on state-funded scholarships, often fed by oil revenues, and nearly all from illiberal regimes that neither hold scheduled elections, allow dissent and free speech, nor guarantee women equality under the law.

The result is Orwellian.

Foreign guests so often treat American magnanimity as softness to be exploited rather than reciprocated with mannered behavior. That is, the thousands who demonstrate on behalf of the terrorist killers of Hamas or shout “Death to America” would never be allowed to show such venom to their host/native countries back home.

Odder still, they seem to romanticize or glorify the very Middle Eastern nations that they apparently fled from and to which they have no desire to return. For if America were really as toxic as their chants and placards attest, then of course they would have scrammed home after October 7, to rally the cause in efforts to destroy the “Zionist entity.”

Instead, they hate us, their very hosts who offer them an education and freedoms never dreamed of in Iraq, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, Egypt, the Gulf monarchies, etc.

How strange that foreign women seem to dominate demonstrations aimed at the United States and Israel, again in a way unfathomable back in the Middle East. Do they ask why they are so prominent in the hated U.S., but so reclusive in the beloved Middle East? Is the subtext, “I loved being discriminated at home, and hate being liberated in the U.S.—and thus I won’t go home under any circumstances”?

Suggestions:

A. Deport any non-American who has:

1) entered and resides here illegally;

2) violates U.S. law;

3) is on a student or faculty visa and suspended from a U.S. campus;

4) forbid the deported a return to the U.S. for 10 years;

5) restore the prior Trump travel ban on illiberal regimes (e.g., North Korea, Iran, “Palestine,” Sudan, Somalia, etc.).

B. Reduce illegal immigration to zero, and cut back legal immigration to 250,000 per year, and only from countries that are constitutional and follow the rule of law.

If the next administration enacted those simple measures, two things would quickly follow:

1) howls of outrage, lawsuits, and tears as in “why won’t you let me stay and express my hatred toward you?”; and

2) all the demonstrations would soon end since even spoiled American citizen students would have no pet “authentic” pro-Hamas agitators in their midst to virtue signal and performance art their radical fides.

Part Two – May 8, 2024

DEI

The epidemic of Diversity/Equity/Inclusion ideology fuels much of the current violence on campus and in the street, and for two reasons.

One, we are now in our third year of reparatory admissions. That is, the SAT/ACT required admission exams have been absent on elite campuses for two or even three years. Racial quotas have severely curtailed the presence of so-called “white” and Jewish students. High-school GPAs are not comparatively ranked.

And the result is that tens of thousands of students are now present on campus, whom the universities just three years ago would have determined were not yet prepared to take and pass their curricula. (If not so, why then did the universities once upon a time have general GPA/SAT standards for admission in the first place?) To accommodate these new cohorts, many of whom the universities themselves prior to 2020 would have classified as “unqualified,” grades were inflated, course work water-downed, and new gut classes introduced.

At Yale, 80 percent of the undergraduate student body now receives As in their coursework. Why study for finals when you can shout banalities and be ensured an A? Such grade inflation in varying percentages is true at Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, etc. In general, it is likely now far harder to earn a B at Hillsdale College in an English literature class than an A at Yale or Harvard—or more difficult for most to pass an introductory coding or electrical engineering class at Georgia Tech than at Stanford.

Accordingly, lots of students can take ample time off from studying because studying is not really so needed to pass classes and to graduate. Gone are the days when students hit the books for 10 hours per day to satisfy rigorous science, math, and liberal arts classes in the general education curriculum. Note, then, how unworried the pro-Hamas demonstrators are that they are not studying for finals.

But DEI is more insidious still since its Marxist trademark is to divide the U.S. arbitrarily into oppressor/victimizer vs. oppressed/victimized. The bifurcation is not based on historical collective or individual suffering, much less on class or income criteria. Instead, superficial appearances or flimsy claims of being in part nonwhite qualify.

Once one is a DEI member, then immunity follows if charged with anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, or homophobia, on the theory that victims cannot be victimizers. And then the even creepier ensues, as DEI students root on Hamas, likely one of the most sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic cadres in existence. Add in the reality that there are fewer Jewish students on campus, and lots more from the Middle East, and thus for the cowardly and sheepish student (the majority), they make the necessary finger-in-the-wind demographic adjustments and join the radical majority.

Crazier still, rich kids, for the most part, pampered, spoiled, and entitled, who qualified as DEI, prance on campus as victims. The result is cartoonish. Isra, the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, now whines that she is without food and shelter, after being expelled from Columbia for violations of campus statutes.

The children of bicoastal professionals who can claim some DNA distance from whitehood, but without a history of any discrimination and beneficiaries of long privilege from their parents’ generous incomes, believe they are exempt from any consequences. Thus, when expelled or arrested, they cry, whine, and yell in the “I can’t believe this is happening to me” style.

Finally, note the masks. Every racist, nihilist, or violent street organization resorts to masks from the Klan to Antifa. Masks hide identity and empower lawlessness on the assurance authorities cannot identify perpetrators. But more importantly, they fuel the cowardly to shout and do things that they would not if easily identified by their peers. From the old Klan days, it was a truism that a racist town’s most cowardly on the daytime street might become the most nocturnally venomous if masked. So too with the pro-Hamas thugs.

Suggestions:

ü Enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling outlawing racial discrimination.

ü Reinstate the SAT for admission.

ü End DEI programs and bureaucracies on the rationale they are racist, exclusionary, and pointless.

ü Stop racially segregated dorms, safe spaces, and graduations.

ü Reinstate mandatory civic education into the general education curricula.

ü Make foreign nationals ineligible for U.S. student loans.



Part Three – May 10, 2024

A third component of the street and campus madness is the destruction of all deterrence abroad and at home by the Biden administration. The Middle East has concluded that the U.S. is in escalating decline. Biden is seen as decrepit and terrified of losing power and thus will do anything to prevent:

(1) Middle-East tensions that will disrupt oil supplies and spike gas prices before the midterms (he had already been emptying the strategic petroleum reserve on the eve of the 2022 midterms);

(2) defections from the relatively small but Electoral-College-important states with pockets of Arab/Muslim voters.

So, Iran’s surrogates with relative impunity have attacked American installations and personnel on over 170 occasions, given Afghanistan, the Chinese Balloon caper, Ukraine, and Biden’s pressure on our once staunch Israeli ally. The world sees Biden’s “Don’t!” as laughable. And, of course, it is risible, given neither Putin, nor Israel, nor Iran paid any attention to his garbled prohibitions. And that weakness resonates at home as well.

For protesters, they rightly feel their host is weak and desperate to appease Middle Easterners and their radical causes. They interpret Biden’s laxity as a green light for their own anti-Semitism and violence.

For a President Biden who claimed (falsely) that he ran for president in 2020 to stop another 2017 Charlottesville (demagoguing serially that fiasco and completely editing out Trump’s actual comments:)

“You also had some very fine people on both sides. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down, of to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name. You had people — and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists; they should be condemned totally — you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”

Biden can utter even a milk-toasty condemnation of virulent anti-Semitism, without “both sides” references to supposed attacks on pro-Palestinians—as if thousands of Jews are screaming “Death to Palestinians,” chasing Arabs into libraries, shutting down campuses, and spitting at police.

At home, post-George Floyd, there is a general sense in the big city that there are no consequences for crime. Outlawry is now a construct, an invention of wealthy white people to exploit the poor and nonwhite with invented crimes. The new rationale is that it is illegal to steal Nikes only because the privileged white hierarchy has no need to steal them, and so constructed laws against those who need to.

Or so critical legal theory goes.

Under a new no-bail system, the criminal, violent though he may be, expects to be out the same day as he is arrested. If he is even arrested. But even before the full onslaught of the George Soros prosecutors, most of the 14,000 arrested during the mayhem of the 2020 riots were excused and never tried. Quite differently from the less violent January 6 protesters (whose buffoonish “riot” did not last for 35 days and injure 1,500 police officers).

The message sent since October 7 to the pro-Hamas crowd is that it was highly unlikely they would be arrested if they violated either university or criminal codes. And if rarely arrested, they would be released quickly. And if quickly let go, they would likely never stand trial.

So, the anti-Semitism will continue, and so will the vandalism, the hate screaming, the assaults, the attacks on police—at least until one brave mayor, one principled college president, one maverick district attorney, concludes that he is for “civilization” and against its enemies, and so at the eleventh hour enforces the laws.

Once that happens other pro-Hamas sheep will follow suit and for a variety of reasons. Most of the protesters are cowardly careerists as we saw with the daughter of Rep. Omar, who no sooner was suspended than she went to her social media to weep about the unfairness of it all and the supposed maelstrom of meanness that now confronts her, despite her nepotistic leverage, her DEI credentials, her class privileges, and her elite university affiliation.

Finally, if Trump were to win in November, watch out for the ensuing four months as the Left will go berserk in the short time remaining to them before January 20.

Add up the massive immigrant population that sees the host as indifferent to assimilation and civics, the DEI conglomerate that assures students that admission is identical to graduation and they can be toxically anti-Semitic without consequences, and, finally, there is no deterrence, no fear of either the United States abroad or the laws at home.

Thus, given that perfect storm, the hate will continue until November.

If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government,then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.

Plato

Try a Little Honesty About Israel

Try a Little Honesty About Israel

Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
May 9, 2024

Scan news accounts of anti-Israel campus and street protestors. Read their demands and manifestos. Collate the confusion after October 7 from the Biden administration.

Here are ten of their most common untruths about October 7 and the war that followed.

“Progressive Hamas”: Gay and transgendered student protestors in America would be in mortal danger in Gaza under a fascistic Hamas that has banned homosexual acts and lifestyles. Anyone protesting publicly against Hamas or its allies would be arrested and severely punished.

Women are segregated in most Hamas-run educational institutions. Under the Hamas charter, women are valued mostly as child-bearers. By design, there are almost no women in high positions in business or in government under Hamas.

“Colonists and Settlers”: Students scream that Israelis are “settlers” and “colonists” and sometimes yell at Jewish students to “go back to Poland.”

But the Jewish presence in present-day Israel is deeply rooted in ancient tradition. Dating back at least three millennia, the concept of “Israel” as a distinct Jewish state, situated roughly in its current location, is ingrained in history.

By contrast, the much later Arab invasions of the Byzantine-controlled Levant and their arrival in Palestine occurred about 1800 years after the establishment of a Jewish Israel.

“Two-state Solution”: When student protestors scream “from the river to the sea,” that is not advocacy for a two-state solution. It is a call to eliminate the state of Israel—lying in between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea—and its 10 million Jewish and Arab citizens. The Hamas charter is a one-state/no-Israel agenda, which we saw attempted on October 7.

“Occupied Gaza”: Gaza was autonomous. The Israeli border is closed, but so is the Egyptian border. There have not been any Jews in Gaza for nearly two decades.

So on October 7, Gaza was not occupied by Israel. It was under the control of Hamas, designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization. After being elected to power in 2006, Hamas cancelled all subsequent elections and ruled as a dictatorship. Gaza forbids Jews from entering Gaza and has driven out most Christians. Israel hosts two million Arabs, both as Israeli citizens and residents.

“Netanyahu is the Problem”: The U.S. and Europe claim that the conservative government of Benjamin Netanyahu is alone behind the Israeli tough response in Gaza. Thus, both the EU and the U.S. are doing their best to undermine or even overthrow the elected Netanyahu administration.

Yet, most Israelis support Netanyahu’s coalition government’s agenda of destroying Hamas in Gaza. There is no evidence that any other alternative Israeli government would do anything differently from the present policies toward Hamas.

“Targeting Civilians”: After murdering nearly 1,200 Israelis on October 7, Hamas scurried back to Gaza and hid in tunnels and bases beneath hospitals, schools, and mosques. Its preplanned strategy was to survive by ensuring Gaza civilians would be killed. Hamas has indiscriminately launched more than 7,000 rockets at Israel, all designed to kill Jewish civilians.

Outside assessors have concluded that Israel has not inadvertently killed a greater ratio of civilians to terrorists compared to most other urban fighting conflicts elsewhere, and perhaps even fewer than American engagements in Mosul and Fallujah.

“Protestors Are Pro-Palestine”: Increasingly, protestors make no distinction between supporting “Palestine” and Hamas. Their chants often echo the original Hamas eliminationist charter and recent genocidal ravings of its leadership. Some protestors wear Hamas logos and wave its flag. Many cheered the Hamas massacre of October 7.

“Anti-Israel Is Not Anti-Semitic”: When protestors scream to Jewish students to “go back to Poland” or call for the “Final Solution,” or assault them or bar them from campus facilities, they do not ask whether they are pro-Israeli. For protestors, anyone identifiable as Jewish becomes a target of their anti-Semitic invective and violence.

“Genocide”: Israel has not tried to wipe out the Palestinian people in the fashion of Hamas’s one-state solution plan for Jews. Before October 7, some 20,000 Gazans a day requested to work in Israel—on the correct expectation of much higher wages and humane treatment.

If Hamas had come out of its tunnels, separated from its impressed civilian shields, released its surviving Israeli hostages, and either openly fought the Israeli Defense Forces or surrendered the organizers of the October 7 massacre, no Gaza civilians would have died.

According to Hamas’s questionable “genocide” figures, roughly 4 percent of the Gazan population died during the Israeli response to October 7. At least a third to almost half of those deaths, according to various international observers, were Hamas terrorists.

“Disproportionate Response”: Iran tried to send 320 missiles and rockets into Israel. Israel replied with three. Hamas launched 7,000 rockets into Israel and slaughtered 1,200 Israelis before the IDF responded in Gaza, often dropping leaflets and sending texts to forewarn citizens.

Israel has been disproportionate only in the effectiveness of its response. Hamas and its Iranian benefactor intended disproportionately to hurt Israel but utterly failed.

So Israel proved to be competent, and Hamas incompetent in their similar efforts to use disproportionate force.

‘The Most Secure Election in American History’ John Eastman

Dear members of the Palm Beach Republican Club,

This is long, but so worth a read. It is substantive and clearly explains what we Republicans are up against all over the country!”

April 27, 2024

Special Edition

‘The Most Secure Election in American History’

By: John Eastman

April 21, 2024

I would like to discuss some of the illegalities that occurred in the 2020 election and the proposed constitutional remedies that we thought we could advance.

I would also like to discuss the lawfare that is sweeping across the country and destroying not just the people that were involved in those efforts, but the very notion of our adversarial system of justice.

This fight and the dangers from it are much bigger than what I am dealing with personally, or what the hundred or so Trump lawyers who have been targeted in this new lawfare effort are dealing with. It seems that there is something similar going on here, albeit to a much less lethal degree, than what we are seeing with the October 7th attack on Israel, as that, too, was an attack on the rule of law.

The international community that will condemn Israel’s just response to these unjust attacks demonstrates a bias in the application of the rule of law that is very similar to what we are dealing with here.

These are not isolated instances. They go to the root of the rejection of the rule of law. One of our greatest presidents, Abraham Lincoln, gave a speech, the Lyceum Address, in 1838 talking about the importance of the rule of law.

When there are unjust laws, you have to be careful about refusing to comply with them because what you may lose in the process – the rule of law itself — is of greater consequence. He was not categorical about that, however, because the example he gave was of our nation’s founders and their commitment to the rule of law.

But think about that for a minute. What did our founders do? They committed an act of treason by signing the Declaration of Independence. They recognized at some point you have to take on the established regime when it is not only unjust, but when there is no lawful way to get it back on track. These matters frame our own nation in our own time.

Let us start with the 2020 election. What do we see and how did I get involved in this?

When President Trump, then candidate Trump, walked down that famous escalator at Trump Tower, one of the planks in his campaign platform was that we need to fix this problem of birthright citizenship. People who are just visiting here or are here illegally ought not to be able to provide automatic citizenship to their children. People laughed at him for not understanding the Constitution.

In his next press conference, he waved a law review article, and said there is a very serious argument that our Constitution does not mandate birthright citizenship for people who are only here temporarily or who are here illegally. That happened to be my law review article on birthright citizenship.

Then, during the Mueller investigation, I appeared for an hour on Mark Levin’s television show and said the whole Russia collusion story (which Trump rightly called the Russia “hoax”) was illegitimate – completely made up. President Trump thought that my analysis was pretty good, and invited me to the White House for a visit.

When the major law firms were backing out of taking on any of the election challenges, President Trump called me and asked if I would be interested. Texas had just filed its original action in the Supreme Court against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan — four swing states whose election officers had clearly violated election law in those states and with an impact that put Biden over the top in all four.

Two days later, I filed the motion to intervene in the Supreme Court in that action. The Supreme Court rules require the lawyer on the brief to have their name, address, email address and phone number.

Nobody in the country at that point really knew who Trump’s legal team was, but all of a sudden people had a lawyer and an email address. I became the recipient of every claim, every allegation, crazy or not, that existed anywhere in the world about what had happened in the election. It was like drinking from a fire hose.

I received communications from some of the best statisticians in the world who were working with election data and who told me there was something very wrong with the reported election results, according to multiple statistical analyses.

One group decided to do a counter-statistical analysis. They said the statisticians had misapplied Stan Young’s path-breaking work. Unbeknownst to them, one of the statisticians I was relying on was Stan Young himself.

Did you ever see the movie Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School? He has to write an essay for English class, the essay has to be on Kurt Vonnegut’s thinking, so he hires Kurt Vonnegut to write the essay for him.

The professor fails him. Not because it was not his own work – the professor hadn’t figured that out — but because, in the professor’s view, the work that Dangerfield turned in was not what Kurt Vonnegut would ever say. That is what I felt like with this supposed critique of the statistical work my experts were conducting.

Those were the kinds of things we were dealing with. I became something of a focal point for all this information. The allegations of illegality were particularly significant. I’ll just go through a couple of states and a couple of examples:

In Georgia, the Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, signed a settlement agreement in March of 2020 in a suit that was filed by the Democratic Committee that essentially obliterated the signature verification process in Georgia. It made it virtually impossible to disqualify any ballots no matter how unlike the signature on the ballot was to the signature in the registration file.

The most troubling aspect of it, to me, was that the law required that the signature match the registration signature. Secretary Raffensperger’s settlement agreement required three people to unanimously agree that the signature did not match, and it had to be a Democrat, a Republican and somebody else, so you were never going to get the unanimous agreement. That means no signature was ever going to get disqualified – and in Fulton County, election officials did not even bother conducting signature verification

Even more important than the difficulty of disqualifying obviously falsified signatures was that, under the settlement agreement, the signature would be deemed valid if it matched either the registration signature or the signature on the ballot application itself. That means that if someone fraudulently signed and submitted an application for an absentee ballot and then voted that ballot after fraudulently directing it to a different address than the real voter’s address, the signature on the ballot would match the signature on the absentee ballot application and, voila, the fraudulent ballot would be deemed legal..

How do we know that went on? Well, we had anecdotal stories. A co-ed at Georgia Tech University, if I recall correctly, testified before Senator Ligon’s Committee in the Georgia Senate. She said she went to vote in person with her 18-year-old sister. They were going to make a big deal about going to vote in person because the 18-year-old sister was voting for the first time. They did not want to vote by mail. They wanted to make an event out of it, get a sticker, “I voted,” and all that stuff. They get down to the precinct and the 22-year-old is told that she has already voted. They said she had applied for an absentee ballot.

“No, I didn’t,” she said. “Oh, Deary,” they said, “you must have forgotten.” Very patronizing. “No, I didn’t forget.,” she said. “We have been looking forward to this for months. I know I did not apply for an absentee ballot.”

They subsequently found out that somebody had applied for an absentee ballot in her name, had it mailed to a third-party address, not an address she knew. She never recognized it, didn’t understand it, and then she testified that she later learned that the fraudulent ballot was voted.

We had that kind of anecdotal evidence to prove that this change in the signature rules that Secretary Brad Raffensperger signed on to had actually resulted in fraud. The disqualification rates statewide, because of this change in the law, went down by about 46%.

Why is the change in the rules through a settlement agreement a problem? Article II of our Constitution, the Federal Constitution, quite clearly gives the sole power to direct the manner for choosing presidential electors to the legislature of the State.

When Brad Raffensperger, who is not part of the legislature, unilaterally changed the rule from what the legislature had adopted by statute, that change was unconstitutional, not just illegal.

Another alteration of the rules set out by the legislature occurred in Fulton County. Election officials there ran portable voting machines in heavily Democrat areas of Atlanta, which was contrary to state law.

Pennsylvania. One of my favorite cases comes out of Pennsylvania. The League of Women Voters, which claims to be non-partisan but is clearly anything but, filed what I believe was a collusive lawsuit against the Democrat Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Kathy Boockvar, in August of 2020.

The premise of the suit was that the signature verification requirement that election officials had been applying in Pennsylvania for a century violated the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment because voters whose ballots were disqualified were not given notice of the disqualification and an opportunity to cure the problem.

The premise of the lawsuit was that there was a signature verification process but that it violated federal Due Process rights. The remedy the League of Women Voters sought was to have the court mandate a notice and opportunity to cure requirement.

The Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania decided to resolve the lawsuit by providing something the League had not even requested. She decided, on her own, that Pennsylvania did not really have a signature verification requirement at all, so the request relief – notice and opportunity to cure – would not be necessary.

Unilaterally, she got rid of a statute that election officials in Pennsylvania had been applying for 100 years to require signature verification. She then asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to approve what she had done.

She filed what was called a Petition for a King’s Bench Warrant to ratify what she had done. If I ever bump into her, I’m going to say, “You know, you have not had a king in Pennsylvania since 1776, maybe you ought to change the name of that.”

The partisan elected Pennsylvania Supreme Court obliged. Not only is there no signature verification requirement in Pennsylvania, the Court held, but all those statutes that describe how election officials are supposed to do signature verification are just relics; they really do not have any meaning. So the Democrat majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, at the urging of the Democrat Secretary of the Commonwealth, just got rid of the whole signature verification process.

Then the court went on to say: And since there is no signature verification requirement, there is no basis on which anybody would be able to challenge ballots, so we are going to get rid of the challenge parts of the election statutes as well, and since there is no basis to challenge, the statute that requires people to be in the room while things are being counted, that really does not matter. It does not have to be meaningful observation. Being at the front door of the football field-sized Philadelphia Convention Center was sufficient even though it was impossible to actually observe the counting of ballots.

The statute actually requires that observers be “in the room,” but it was written at a time when canvassing of ballots would occur in small settings, like the common room of the local library, where being “in the room” meant meaningful observation of the ballot counting process. Obliterating the very purpose of the statute, the court held that being “in the room” at the entrance of the Philadelphia Convention Center was sufficient.

In other words, all of the statutory provisions that were designed to protect against fraud were obliterated in Pennsylvania. We ought not to be surprised if fraud walked through the door left open by the unconstitutional elimination of these statutes.

To this day, there are 120,000 more votes that were cast in Pennsylvania than their records show voters who have cast votes. Think about that: 120,000 more votes than voters who cast votes. The margin in Pennsylvania was 80,000.

Wisconsin. One of the people who has testified for me in my California bar proceedings was Justice Mike Gableman, former Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He was hired by the Wisconsin legislature to conduct an investigation.

His investigation efforts were thwarted at every turn, with the Secretary of State and others refusing to comply with subpoenas, etc. Nevertheless, he uncovered an amazing amount of illegality and fraud in the election. For example, the county clerks in Milwaukee and Madison had directed people that they could claim “indefinitely confined” status if they were merely afraid of COVID.

That is clearly not permitted under the statute, but voters who followed the county clerks’ directive and falsely claimed they were “indefinitely confined” did not have to submit an ID with their absentee ballot as the law required — again, opening the door for fraud.

Although the Wisconsin courts held that the advice was illegal and ordered it to be withdrawn, the number of people claiming they were indefinitely confined went from about 50,000 in 2016 to more than a quarter of million in 2020. The illegal advice provided by those two county clerks in heavily Democrat counties clearly had impact.

Election officials in heavily Democrat counties also set up drop boxes. They even set up what they called “human drop boxes” in Madison, which is the home of the University of Wisconsin. For two or three consecutive Saturdays before the election, they basically ran a ballot harvesting scheme at taxpayer expense with volunteers – whom I suspect were actually supporters of the Biden campaign — working as “deputized” county clerks to go collect all these ballots, in violation of state law.

How do I know it is a violation of the state law? The Wisconsin Supreme Court after the fact agreed with us that it was a violation of state law.

One last piece. Wisconsin law is very clear. If you’re going to vote absentee, you have to have a witness sign a separate under-oath certification that the person who is voting that ballot is who they say they are.

The witness has to fill out their name and address and sign it, under penalty of perjury. A lot of these came in with the witness signatures, but the address not filled in. The county clerks were directed by the Secretary of State to fill the information in on their own. In other words, they were doctoring the evidence.

They were doing Google searches to get the name, to fill in an address to validate ballots that were clearly illegal under Wisconsin law. All told, those couple of things combined, more than 200,000 ballots were affected in a state where the margin victory was just over 20,000.

Then in Michigan, we had similar things going on. We probably all saw the video of election officials boarding up the canvassing center at TCF Center in Detroit so that people could not observe what was going on. There were hundreds of sworn affidavits about illegality in the conduct of that process in Detroit.

Then there was one affidavit on the other side submitted by an election official who was responsible for legally managing the election. He said, basically, that everything was fine, it was all perfect.

The judge, without holding a hearing on a motion to dismiss, at which the allegations of the complaint are supposed to be taken as true, rejected all the sworn affidavits from all the witnesses who actually observed the illegality, and instead credited the government affidavit – without the government witness even being subject to questioning on cross-examination.

This is a manifestation of what I have described as the increasingly Orwellian tendency of our government. “We’re the government and when we’ve spoken, you’re just supposed to bend the knee and listen.”

That was just some of the evidence we had. In those four states, and in Arizona and Nevada as well, there is no question that the illegality that occurred affected way more ballots than the certified margin of Joe Biden’s victory in all of those states.

It only took three of those six states — any combination of three — for Trump to have won the election.

When I was coming out of the Georgia jailhouse after surrendering myself for the indictment down in Georgia, one of the reporters threw a question at me. He said, “Do you still believe the election was stolen?”

I said, “Absolutely. I have no doubt in my mind,” because of things like this and because of the Gableman report, because of Dinesh D’Souza’s book on 2000 Mules — that stuff is true.

People say, “Well, it’s not true. It’s been debunked.” No, it has not been debunked. In fact, there have been criminal convictions down in Pima County, Arizona, from the 2018 election, where people finally got caught doing the same thing that Dinesh D’Souza said they were doing.

Dinesh’s documentary was based on the investigative work conducted by Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote. Her team obtained, at great expense, commercially-available cell phone location data and identified hundreds of people who visited multiple ballot drop boxes, oftentimes in the wee hours of the morning, 10 or more different drop boxes. Then they got the video surveillance from those drop boxes (those that were actually working, that is), confirming that the people were dropping in 8, 10, 12 ballots at a time.

In Georgia, you are allowed to drop off ballots for immediate family members, but I think it is fairly clear that these folks – “mules” is what the documentary called them – were not family members. They were taking selfies of themselves in front of the ballot boxes because, as the whistleblower noted to Engelbrecht, they were getting paid for each ballot they delivered. In other words, this certainly looks like an illegal ballot harvesting scheme.

What has happened since then? Well, there is a group in DC, largely hard-liner partisan Democrats, Hillary and Bill Clinton crowd, but joined by a couple of hard-line never-Trump Republicans, or one, so they can claim they are bipartisan. The group is called The 65 Project, and it is named after the 65 cases brought by Trump’s team that supposedly all ruled against Trump.

Well, first of all, that mantra, how many have heard it?: “All the cases, all the courts ruled against Trump.” First of all, that is not true. Most of the cases were rejected on very technical jurisdictional grounds, like a case brought by a voter, rather than the candidate himself.

Individual voters do not have standing because they lack a particularized injury. Those were dismissed. There is no basis for claiming that there was anything wrong with the claims on the merits. It is just that the cases were not brought by the right people.

There was one case where one of these illegal guidances from the Secretary of State was challenged before the election. The judge ruled that it was just a guidance, and that until we get to election day to find out if the law was actually violated, the case was not ripe — and it got dismissed.

Then the day after the election, when election officials actually violated the law, the case gets filed again, and the court says, “You can’t wait until your guy loses and then bring the election challenge. It’s barred by a doctrine called laches.” This is the kind of stuff that the Trump legal team was dealing with in those 65 cases.

Of the cases that actually reached the merits –there were fewer than a dozen of them, if I recall correctly — Trump won three-fourths of them. You have never heard that in the New York Times. And the Courts simply refused to hear some clearly meritorious cases, such as one filed in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The majority in that case simply noted that it did not see any need to hear the case, over a vigorous dissent that basically said, “Are you nuts? This was illegal, and we have a duty to hear the challenge.”

Two years later, that same Court took up the issues that had been presented to it in December 2020, and it held that what happened was illegal. But by then it was too late to do anything about it.

The 65 Project was formed — I think I’ve seen reported that they received a grant from a couple of George Soros-related organizations of $100 million — to bring disbarment actions against all of the lawyers who were involved in any of those cases.

The head of the organization gave an interview to Axios, kind of a left-leaning Internet news outlet, and he said in his interview to Axios that the group’s goal with respect to the Trump election lawyers is to “not only bring the grievances in the bar complaints, but shame them and make them toxic in their communities and in their firms” “in order to deter right-wing legal talent from signing on to any future GOP efforts” to challenge elections.

Think about that. Our system works, in part, because we have an adversarial system of justice that supports it. If groups like the 65 Project succeed in scaring off one side of these intense policy disputes or legal disputes, then we will not have an adversarial system of justice.

We will not have elections in which we can have any faith, because if you do not have that kind of judicial check on illegality in the election, then bad actors will just do the illegality whenever they want, and we won’t be able to do anything about it.

They are not the group that brought the bar charges against me in California, but they did file a complaint against me in the Supreme Court of the United States. A parallel group called the States United Democracy Center is the one that filed the bar complaint against me in California. Nearly every single paragraph of the complaint had false statements in it.

The bar lawyers publicly announced back in March of 2022 that they were taking on the investigation. Under California law, investigations before charges are filed publicly are supposed to be confidential. But there is an exception if the bar deems that the lawyer being investigated is a threat to the public.

So the head of the California Bar had a press conference announcing that I was a threat to the public, and therefore they could disclose that they were conducting an investigation. Now, what is the threat to the public that I pose? What is the old line? Telling truth in an era of universal deceit is a revolutionary act? I guess that is the threat to the public they’re asserting.

That is the threat to the public. Telling the truth about what went on in the 2020 election. They gave me the most extraordinary demand. They basically said we want to know every bit of information you had at your disposal for every statement you made on the radio, for every article you published, for every line in every brief you filed. It took us four months.

I said, “We’re going to respond to this very comprehensively.” They say I have no evidence of election illegality and fraud. We gave them roughly 100,000 pages of evidence. 100,000 pages we disclosed to them. They went ahead and filed the bar charges anyway against us in January of 2023.

My wife and I, since 2021, have been on quite a roller coaster.

We came to the realization that my whole career, my education in Claremont, my PhD, my teaching constitutional law for 20 years, my being a dean, my being a law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, probably equipped me better than almost anybody else in the country to be able to confront, stand up against this lawfare that we’re dealing with.

This is our mission now. This is what we do. This is what I do around the clock, is deal with this.

I was teaching our summer seminar at the Claremont Institute. We do a series of summer seminars, one for recent college grads called the Publius Fellowship Program.

You may recognize some of the names of people that have gone through Publius. I was a Publius Fellow in 1984. Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin, Tom Cotton, Kate Mizelle (the judge who blocked the vaccine mandates down in Florida). We’ve had some pretty good folks.

We also conduct a program for recent law school grads called the John Marshall Fellowship. We were conducting a seminar on the Constitution’s religion clauses when the news of the Georgia indictment naming me as an indicted co-conspirator came down. We kept going on with the seminar. At the end of the program, the fellows always roast each other and make fun of each other, missteps they’d made during the week and things like that.

Well, this year, they roasted me a bit. One of the students noted that as FBI agents were rappelling down from the rooftop, Eastman kept talking about the Constitution’s religion clauses.

He recounted that, prior to the program, the students didn’t know what to expect when they accepted the fellowship offer to study with me (among others), given all that was going on. Then he said that what they witnessed on that night, when the indictment came down, was a demonstration of courage they had not seen before, and that it was contagious. He then recited a line from our national anthem – the one asking whether the flag was still flying. And he noted, with great insight, that if you listen carefully to the words, the question is not so much whether the flag still flies, but what kind of land it flies over? Is it still the land of the free and the home of the brave, or the land of the coward and the home of the slave?

I find more and more, as more Americans are waking up to what is going on, that courage is indeed contagious. People are looking for ways to help fight back. When they see somebody standing up with that kind of courage, it gives them courage to join.

There are people in every county in the country, with eyes on the local clerk’s office and verifying that, “When it says 28 people are living and voting in an efficiency apartment, we know that is not true and we’re going to get that cleaned up.”

I remain optimistic as people are awakening to the threat to our way of life. This is one of the cornerstones of our Declaration of Independence. We are all created equal. There are certain corollaries that flow from that.

This means that nobody has the right to govern others without their consent. The consent of the governed is one of the cornerstones of our system of government. Our forefathers exercised it in 1776 by choosing to declare independence, and 10 years later by choosing to ratify a constitution, and we exercise that consent of the governed principle in an ongoing way by how we conduct our elections.

Ultimately, we are the sovereign authority that tells the government which direction we want it to go, not the other way around.

Regularly, we are instead being given the following message: “We’re the government. We have spoken. How dare you stand up and offer a different view.” That has turned us from being sovereign citizens in charge of the government to subjects being owned by or run by the government.

That is not the kind of country I intend to live in. It is not the kind of country in which I want my kids and now my grandchildren to grow up. This is a fight worth everything you’ve got. That’s why we’re going to do as much as we can to win this fight. Thank you for your support and prayers.

Question: What happened after the 2020 election with Justices Thomas and Alito. They wanted the Supreme Court at least to hear the evidence, but were turned down. Why?

Dr. Eastman: One of the cases that was up there was one of the other illegalities that occurred in Pennsylvania. The Secretary of State unilaterally altered the statutory deadline for the return of ballots.

Pennsylvania, like most states, says, “If you’re going to mail in your ballot, it’s got to be received by the close of the poll so we’re not having this gamesmanship of being able to get ballots in after the fact.” She said, “Oh, we’re going to give an extra week.” The court said, “No, we’ll give an extra four days.”

That case was brought to the Supreme Court to block that clearly illegal action by the Secretary of the Commonwealth, agreed to by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. They asked for an emergency stay of that decision so the rule that had been in place would still be followed.

Ruth Ginsburg had died, there were eight people, and the court split four to four, which means the stay was denied. You had to have a majority. It was Thomas, it was Alito, it was Gorsuch, and it was Kavanaugh. John Roberts voted with the three liberals. Then when Amy Coney Barrett joined the court, I thought, “OK, we’ll get to five.”

When a motion to expedite in my case was filed in mid-December, we filed a cert petition from three of the erroneous Pennsylvania Supreme Court cases, we filed a motion to expedite, and that was denied. They didn’t even act on it.

Then February 12th of 2021, they denied the cert petition and the motion to expedite. The vote there was six to three on the ground that it had become moot. That meant Barrett and Roberts and Kavanaugh all voted to deny the cert petition. But it had not become moot.

The issue of whether non-legislative actors in the state can alter election law consistent with the Constitution remains an open issue. It should not be an open issue. The Constitution is quite clear, but there was a news account at one point reporting that John Roberts had yelled at Alito and Thomas, who had insisted they needed to take these cases. They were just like Bush versus Gore.

Roberts was reported to have said, “They’re not like Bush versus Gore. If we do anything, they will burn down our cities.” Which means the impact of what had gone on in the summer of 2020 in Portland and Kenosha and all these other places, had an impact on the Supreme Court declining to take these cases.

By the way, a little aside on that story to show you how distorted the January 6th committee, and particularly Liz Cheney was on the evidence.

At some point during the course of all this, the legislator in Pennsylvania who was conducting hearings on the election illegality in Pennsylvania wanted my advice on what the legislative authority was if they found that there was outcome determinative illegality or fraud in the election.

He sent an email to me at my email address at the University of Colorado, where my wife and I were teaching at the time.

I responded, “If there is clear evidence of illegality, that’s unconstitutional, and so you have the legal right, the legal constitutional authority to do something about it. If you think it altered the effect of the election, you should name your own electors.”

University of Colorado, contrary to their policy, disclosed that email publicly. Liz Cheney announced the email, said Eastman was pressuring the Pennsylvanian legislature to overturn the election, even though it was quite clear that my statement about legislative authority was specifically conditioned on a finding of illegality and fraud sufficient to have affected the outcome of the election.

The other gross distortion that came out of the J6 Committee involved an email exchange I had about whether to appeal the Wisconsin case to the Supreme Court. The campaign staff, money guys in the campaign said, “We’re trying to be good stewards of the funds we have. What are the chances that they’re going to take these cases? Is it worth filing these cert petitions?”

I wrote in the email, “The legal issues are rock solid. It therefore doesn’t turn on the merits of the case. It turns on whether the justices have the spine to take this on.” Then I said, “And I understand that there is a heated fight underway and whether they should take these cases. We ought to give the good guys the ammunition they need to wage that fight.”

Liz Cheney or someone on the J6 Committee puts out a portion of this email. They ignore that I say the legal issues are rock solid. They say instead that Eastman, knowing his case had no merit, was pressuring the Supreme Court to take the case and obviously had inside information from Ginni Thomas, because three weeks earlier, Ginni had sent me a note saying, “I heard you on Larry O’Connor’s show giving an update on the election litigation. Can you give that same update to my Zoom call group? By the way, what’s your home address? I need it for the Christmas card.”

That was the email. All of a sudden, Liz Cheney and the J6 Committee puts those two things together as if there was something nefarious about it.

My understanding that there is an intense fight underway at the Court was based exclusively on the news accounts in The New York Times about Roberts yelling at Alito for insisting that the Court needed to take these cases. The dishonesty, the combination of the dishonesty, the whole thing, this narrative is out there and it is the government narrative.

No matter how false the narrative is, we are supposed to just accept it or bend the knees. “It’s like, the government says, ‘We’ve increased your funds this year from four to three,'” and we’re just all supposed to accept it. This is lawfare, but it is support of totalitarianism, of authoritarianism.

The government has spoken, and we are all supposed to accept it as true, no matter how obviously false it is. I’m sorry, free people should not and never have and never will if they continue to be a free people tolerate that kind of thing.

Q: I have two questions. One, when Raffensperger did that in Georgia, was it expressly to defeat Donald Trump? Do you think he knew what the ramification of that ruling was going to be? The second thing is, in this upcoming trial, is there an opportunity to lay out publicly for a jury?

Is this a jury situation, the talk you just gave us? Because there has to be a moment where people pay attention to this, and so far it has not happened.

Dr. Eastman: So far it has not come, I agree. I mean, it has come, but in ways that are immediately shut down. We are laying out the case now in my California bar trial, which next week enters its eighth week. My defense of my California bar license will have cost us a half million dollars before all is said and done.

Being a full trial team for eight weeks, it’s gone on. It is insane, but we are laying out the case to the extent the judge permits. She has already blocked about a dozen of my witnesses, but I’ll tell you some of the stories. We have a guy named Joseph Freed, retired CPA, professional auditor, auditing Fortune 500 companies his whole career.

He said something doesn’t smell right here, and so he applied his tools of the trade to look at the elections and wrote a book called Debunked. It’s a brilliant book. I told my wife, “This is the book I would have written if I hadn’t been on my heels playing defense the last year.”

The book was written and published in January of 2023, so the judge ruled it was not relevant because even though it discusses all the evidence I had before me, the analysis he did was after the fact and I could not have relied on it, therefore it was not relevant.

Two days later, the government offers a witness to introduce into evidence government reports that were done in September 2022. My lawyer objected, “It’s not relevant on your prior ruling.” The lawyer for the bar actually said, “Well, these are government reports. They are different.” So the judge let them in.

Part of the problem is, trying to prevent the story from getting out, even in a trial where the rules of evidence are supposed to come to play. I don’t think they’ll be able to get away with that in the Georgia criminal litigation.

This full story probably will come out more clearly there and it will have a bigger viewership there than my California bar trial has had because Trump is one of the defendants. The California bar trial is exposing a lot of this.

A reporter for the Arizona Sun, Rachel Alexander, is doing a terrific job covering the case in daily articles in Arizona Sun, but she also she has a Twitter account.

What I’ve seen this far from the state trial judge down in Georgia is that he is going to hold the line on what the law is and what the law requires. That is a very good thing and we’ll be able to see it. Fingers crossed.

About Raffensperger, look, I don’t know what his motives are, all I can see is the consequences of them. There are the consequences of that, which should have been obvious on its face. More importantly, there is the continued falsity claims in his public statements, and I’ll give you one example.

One of the expert reports on the election challenge that was filed — which never got a judge appointed, by the way, for nearly a month, and by then it was too late.

One of the allegations based on an expert analysis was that 66,247 people had voted who were underage when they registered to vote.

Now, he goes out and does a press conference and says, “We checked, nobody voted when they were underage,” but that was not the allegation made by the expert. The allegation was that they registered to vote when they were 16. You have to be 17 and a half before you can register.

If they had not re-registered, that meant they were not legally registered and not legally allowed to vote. He routinely mischaracterizes the actual allegation in the case, deliberately lying. Whatever his motives were with whether he’s anti-Trump or not, he is clearly lying, and we ought not to give him any credence whatsoever.

Q: You had said before that President Trump had won three quarters of the real cases. I’m wondering what that means to win, what are the implications of that and what is correct, if anything? What, then, is the way forward?

Dr. Eastman: The way forward is a legal system. Now, the Trump cases that were won only involved small components like the statutory right in Pennsylvania to be there to observe the counting. They were blocking even minimum observation. The court ordered, “Yeah, you’ve got to let them into the room and observe.”

That was not one that was the grand enchilada on the outcome determinative issues, but he won the case. We won ultimately on the indefinitely confined ruling up in Wisconsin. They said that, “Just being fearful of COVID does not mean you’re indefinitely confined under the statute.”

It’s not as if the Wisconsin legislature didn’t have an opportunity to alter that. If they wanted, they determined, they considered alterations in the law as a result of COVID, made some, but this was not one of them.

What I have seen, and it pains me to say this, is that the level of corruption in our institutions, including our judicial institutions, is so pervasive now that it is troubling. Because many of these cases end up in the DC courts, I cannot imagine a stronger case for change of venue than those January 6th criminal defendants.

Yet their motions for change of venue were uniformly denied because they wanted this in the DC jury pool, which is like 95% hostile to Trump. This is not a jury of peers. This is not a jury that is likely to lead to a just and true result. This is a partisan political act, a loaded dice system in DC.

The same thing I think they were gambling on being true in Georgia, in Fulton County. But I don’t think the dice are as loaded there as they are in DC.