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Occasionally I will come across an op ed truly brilliant and insightful. It is even better when it espouses what I have been saying in my less erudite manner.
The immediate article below, by Andrew Michta is absolutely brilliant and is a must read.
The American Experiment Is on Life Support
Neo-Marxists on the street and in institutions want to erase their opponents and deconstruct the country.
By Andrew Michta
Death to America!” is a common refrain from antifa rioters from Portland, Ore., to Kenosha, Wis. Children are in the streets calling for the country’s destruction while mobs of college kids trash public spaces, filming themselves as though part of a performance-art spectacle. Neither political party has been willing or able to end this anarchy. Extremism becomes more entrenched in American politics with each passing day.
These acts of violence encapsulate five decades of neo-Marxist indoctrination in American schools, colleges and universities. The left’s “long march” through the institutions is all but complete. Extreme intolerance has now replaced the liberal notion of negotiated compromise that is the sine qua non of democracy. America’s young, especially those raised in middle-class or affluent homes, have been so brainwashed that they no longer notice how absurd it is to call for the eradication of their own nation-state, and to do so in the lingo of Iran’s mullahs.
Their ignorance of history is the hallmark of the current crisis. Few seem able to grasp the complex, often painful, but on balance grand story of America—one that is an example of what a people committed to individual freedom can achieve. Instead, they have been indoctrinated to reduce American life to a racial binary of whites vs. “people of color.” It’s much like the communist binary of the bourgeoisie vs. the proletariat that the Bolsheviks used to seize power in 1917, with millions perishing in the totalitarian Soviet experiment that followed.
The violence suggests that tribalism based on group identity is poised to succeed the larger national community that for more than two centuries has protected and expanded freedom around the world. The American nation-state is a unique experiment, unparalleled in history: a political project that grew from an established Anglo colonial settler culture, and that forged a distinct national identity strong enough to acculturate the many ethnic groups that have immigrated, while preserving a strong sense of its unitary creed
The American nation has its dark sides, with slavery remaining a deep scar on its history. Nonetheless, the power of the American ideal offered millions something that no other culture could, namely the chance to reinvent and renew one’s life, advance one’s position, and create a better future for one’s children. The passionate nationalism of America has been rooted in the belief in exceptionalism as a people ordained for greatness, and that equality of opportunity under the law could constrain the base impulses of man.
Elites, especially the professoriate, bear much of the responsibility for this state of affairs. For decades in classrooms and lecture halls they laid the groundwork for the present moment. The politics of intolerance preached in nearly every realm of American life assumes that those in “flyover country” are in effect no longer fellow citizens, as they are incapable of grasping the shibboleths of the globalist international order. They are irretrievably from somewhere, and once stripped of their community—say, because their job was shipped off to Asia—they become internally displaced, with neither their views nor lifestyle deserving of elite respect. Those who speak on their behalf are dismissed as “populists,” all but unfit to be heard in polite society.
American free-market capitalism has been both the most destructive and the most creative framework for generating wealth and innovation. Yet historically, its destructive quality was tempered by the regnant nationalism of its people, one that ultimately superseded the idea of class. The Rockefellers, Fords and Carnegies—and more recently the Kennedys and the Bushes—saw themselves bound to their nation and the attendant principle of mutuality of obligation, giving back in money and service to the country that made their success possible. They saw themselves as Americans first, even though they had the means to be citizens of the world.
In contrast, America’s corporate elite today, especially its financial plutocrats on the East Coast and digital aristocracy on the West Coast, seem keener to work on “global problems.” The commitment to one’s country is seen as a sign of retrograde populism to be stamped out at the first possible opportunity.
Corporate elites have pushed a self-serving vision of a world of transnationalism unconstrained by local cultures and institutions, many of which took centuries to establish and consolidate. The new credentialed oligarchy—people simultaneously from everywhere and nowhere—feels an ever more tenuous sense of obligation to its fellow nationals.
The assault on the constitutional right of citizens to speak freely unless they affirm first the increasingly intolerant orthodoxy has been unrelenting. The nation’s freedom is being abridged by incessant charges of structural racism, white privilege, homophobia and intolerance, with few pausing to consider the effect on liberal traditions. Today the neo-Marxists control almost all areas of elite discourse in the U.S., and can thus cancel any opposition by hurling “populism” or “racism” at anyone who refuses to submit to their ideological line.
Mr. Michta is dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.
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The next three op eds espouse what I have been writing about for decades. They describe why the elites throughout our society and mass media have had a tremendous and successful impact on trying to wreck America and thus have become a serious and successful threat to our survival .
Most recently, I noted the despicable comment by NPR explaining why they did not see any merit in reporting about the Hunter and "Pop" Biden affair because it was not important Then we have Twitter and Facebook deciding what their users could see and not see.
Actually the police should be replaced by the mass media because the latter do such a great job of protecting.
Whether you realize it or not the government funds NPR which has become the enemy of our republic and bites the very hand that supports them. NPR should be totally defunded and the money saved can go to pay off our mounting debt.
Should Trump lose it will be because Trump Haters were able to wrap Covid 19 around his neck and the constancy of personality destruction was effective because Trump has proven to be his worst enemy.
Saving Private Biden
The press standard for 2020: No tough questions for the former vice president
In the thick of the 2016 presidential campaign, the front page of the New York Times handed down the word from on high: In the era of Donald Trump, press objectivity was a luxury America could not afford.
It turned out that biased press coverage wasn’t enough to keep Mr. Trump from winning. So for 2020 the press introduced a new corollary: Joe Biden must never be asked a tough question.
In the past the media’s competitive juices, plus a presidential candidate’s interactions with the American people along the campaign trail, would have rendered this impossible. But Covid-19 gave Mr. Biden the excuse to stay in his basement, and the press corps has run interference for Mr. Biden rather than tackle the story.
And not only the press. When the New York Post published texts and emails from the laptop, along with an explanation of how they came into the Post’s possession, Twitter and Facebook ran interference by suppressing the story—and the Post—on their platforms. The rationale appears to be that Mr. Biden can’t handle the questions and the American people can’t be trusted to handle the answers.
This see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil approach to Mr. Biden started with Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer who accused the candidate of having sexually harassed her in 1993, when she’d worked for him. When Julie Swetnick asserted in 2018—without any corroboration—that she witnessed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh participating in gang rapes at high-school parties, the Times ran the story the same day. But when Ms. Reade accused Mr. Biden of sexual assault, the previous believe-the-woman standard was given the heave-ho, and the Times waited 19 days to report it.
Meanwhile, Mr. Biden’s press conferences sometimes become a contest between reporters and the candidate to see who can hate Mr. Trump most. In August, after an anonymously sourced story in the Atlantic accused Mr. Trump of disparaging dead American soldiers from a World War I cemetery, the magazine’s Edward-Isaac Dovere asked Mr. Biden, “When you hear these remarks—‘suckers,’ ‘losers,’ ‘recoiling from amputees,’ what does that tell you about President Trump’s soul and the life he leads?”
Ed O’Keefe of CBS News noted Mr. Biden had said he was trying to restrain himself about Mr. Trump and then served up this hardball: “Aren’t there a lot of people out there who are supporting you or inclined to not vote for the president who would say, ‘Why isn’t Joe Biden angrier about all of this?’ ”
Or what about the Associated Press? In September it revised its stylebook to say reporters should use the term “unrest” instead of “riots” to describe the criminal violence in cities from Portland, Ore., to Kenosha, Wis. The AP now frowns on “looting” as well, urging greater sensitivity because President Trump has used the term.
It’s the job of the press to ask the hard questions and insist on answers, even at the risk of looking obnoxious. It isn’t biased, for example, to ask President Trump why, with polls showing more than half of the American people saying they are better off today than before he was elected, so many will still vote against him because they don’t like his personality and temperament.
But the toughness should apply equally. And no honest observer could say that, for example, of the recent and dueling town halls, where on ABC Mr. Biden had a leisurely chat with George Stephanopoulos while on NBC Savannah Guthrie savaged Mr. Trump. Not to mention the constant calls from reporters for the president to denounce white supremacists while studiously avoiding asking Mr. Biden about his condescending remark that anyone who doesn’t support him can’t be black.
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Media Watchdogs Aren’t Supposed to Guard Biden
If the Democrats win, will America’s free press become an instrument of state propaganda?
All Things, it seems, will not be Considered. In the long and dishonorable annals of journalistic cant, there have been few statements to compete with the one issued by National Public Radio last week explaining why it wouldn’t burden its listeners with any news about Hunter Biden.
“We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste our listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions,” said Terence Samuels, the network’s managing editor for news
NPR’s might have been the most bald faced exercise in dishonesty but it wasn’t the only one. The gatekeepers of truth in our national news organizations have come up with an anthology of justifications for ignoring the New York Post’s story about Mr. Biden’s financial aspirations—and his use of his father’s name to advance them.
It wasn’t important. It was unverified (unlike, say, the claim that the Trump-Kremlin condominium stole the 2016 election). It was that all-purpose response to any inconvenient truth: a Russian plot.
Yet the story was important. It didn’t conclusively prove that Joe Biden was in on the son’s deals. It did include important details suggesting that he was, and demonstrating how Hunter pushed his family connections to foreign-owned entities. And remember that the organizations now so squeamish about the Biden story were happy to publish innumerable allegations about President Trump, many of them on far flimsier evidence.
Most people have discovered they can live without NPR. Facebook and Twitter are different. They control the bulk of, respectively, the distribution of news to ordinary folks and the flow of news to journalists. When they decided to restrict access to the story, its visibility is dramatically diminished.
The construction of a media-and-tech wall to protect Joe Biden in the final days of the 2020 campaign has taken to a brazen new level the democratic problem of a society whose information flow is skewed heavily to one ideological pole.
Some of the old guard in these companies, especially in the traditional newsrooms, dismiss the idea. They defend their status as Mr. Biden’s praetorian guard on the grounds that Donald Trump is a unique threat to democracy and that they have been forced to take commensurately unusual measures.
David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, wrote the definitive call to arms on this soon after Mr. Trump took office, in a piece that claimed the country had entered a state of emergency—and that full-scale resistance was required. For journalists that meant being fair to both sides was out the window.
Once the media and tech companies have saved the country from Mr. Trump’s Fourth Reich, the argument goes, the Resistance will surrender its arms and go back to being fair-minded standard-bearers for truth.
Put aside for a moment the idea that what was normal before President Trump was media objectivity. If you believe that, I have a few thousand Barack Obama hagiographies to sell you.
But even a return to the actual status quo ante 2015 is fanciful.
For one thing, the old guard in these organizations who did at least operate to some recognizable standards are being eclipsed. Newsrooms are now hostage to narrow-minded post-teenage social justice warriors who have no time for the idea that there might be an alternative to their own Maoist ideology. Forget “objectivity.” Journalists have a moral purpose.
If they do hold Democrats accountable, you can bet it will be not to the standards of, let’s say, the median voter. It will be to the demands of critical race theory, woke norms and climate extremism. And all along, their allies in the tech companies will use their even greater power to keep to a minimum dissenting voices.
But even more important than the ambitions of the new Jacobins in the newsrooms is the new business model by which these companies operate.
It used to be that news organizations were dependent on advertising for their revenue. But since that went to digital giants, newspapers especially have become increasingly dependent on subscribers willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year. They have become essentially membership clubs of like-minded people. Those members won’t take kindly to being told the Democrats they support are flawed or corrupt or dumb.
So don’t think a defeat for President Trump will return the media to some kind of golden age of news reporting—if one ever existed. Having tasted victory, why would they stop there?
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The Dirty Deals of NPR Decades of gross bias and disinformation. Joseph Klein
National Public Radio (NPR) does not serve the American taxpayers who are paying its bills. Most recently, NPR did its part to shield Joe Biden from the fallout of the Biden family pay-for-access corruption scheme. That’s nothing new. NPR has long served as the leftwing progressive Democrat Party’s propaganda arm. Back in 2016, for example, NPR shilled for the disastrous nuclear deal pushed by the Obama administration, after receiving funding from a pro-nuclear deal advocacy group. It is long past time to end the gravy train and defund NPR.
On October 22nd, NPR’s public editor rationalized NPR’s decision to suppress coverage of the New York Post’s expose of the Hunter Biden e-mails implicating Joe Biden himself in his son’s business dealings. NPR’s managing editor Terence Samuel tweeted: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
The Media Research Center retorted: “How exactly is doing what is supposed to be your job of reporting and investigating a story with credible sources to be a ‘waste of time?’
David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent, tried to kill the messenger that broke the story on the e-mails which were reportedly recovered from Hunter Biden’s laptop computer. Folkenflik attacked the New York Post as “suspect” and speculated “whether those emails were somehow hacked and doctored, or completely fabricated.” Folkenflik repeated the baseless claim, debunked by the FBI and Director of National Intelligence, that the New York Post story may have been part of Russia’s disinformation campaign.
News flash to NPR: You are paid by the American people to report the news and let the people make up their own minds as to what stories constitute a waste of their time or are “distractions.” If we want Big Brother to tell us what we should listen to and read, we might as well move to Communist China.
In late August 2020, NPR’s Code Switch department gave Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting, a free platform to spout the leftist’s support for looting as a vital aspect of the Black Lives matter movement. There was no pushback from the NPR interviewer. “When I use the word looting, I mean the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot,” Osterweil said. “It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage…riots and looting are experienced as sort of joyous and liberatory.”
After the fact, NPR’s public editor, Kelly McBride, tried to clean up the mess created by this interview, writing that “a book author with a radical point of view far to the left was allowed to spread false information.” But it was too little too late. NPR allowed itself to be used to disseminate disinformation, which it has regularly done with a sharp tilt to the left. This was the same Kelly McBride who defended NPR’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop e-mails story.
Talking about spreading disinformation, NPR served as one of the principal mouthpieces pushing the Obama administration’s talking points in favor of the disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. NPR’s ombudsman criticized the network for accepting money from the Ploughshares Fund, which was part of the “echo chamber” of organizations, experts and reporters that the Obama White House had set up to positively shape public opinion on the Iran nuclear deal. The ombudsman took the network to task for “the large number of Ploughshares-funded analysts and experts who made it on the air to talk up the deal, without any acknowledgement of that by NPR.” However, while saying that “NPR’s money came from one side of a very partisan debate on a specific issue to fund reporting on a specific topic,” NPR’s ombudsman ended up exonerating NPR. She concluded that “NPR did not accept money to report favorably on the Iran deal.” If you believe that, you’ll believe anything!
Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, explained the echo chamber strategy in a 2016 article appearing in the New York Times Magazine. “In the absence of rational discourse,” Rhodes said, “we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this. We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.”
Ploughshares gave NPR $100,000 in 2015 “to help it report on the pact and related issues, according to the group’s annual report,” the Associated Press revealed. “Ploughshares has funded NPR’s coverage of national security since 2005, the radio network said. Ploughshares reports show at least $700,000 in funding over that time. All grant descriptions since 2010 specifically mention Iran.” Joseph Cirincione, Ploughshares’ president, appeared on NPR at least twice in 2015 promoting the nuclear deal negotiations.
George Soros’s leftwing Open Society Foundations have been major funders of both Ploughshares and NPR. In 2016 alone, the Open Society Foundations bestowed NPR with a $600,000 grant.
Back in 2011, NPR’s senior director of institutional giving at the time, Betsy Liley, was caught on video expressing a willingness to accept a $5 million donation from a fictitious Muslim Brotherhood front group called the Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust. She even suggested how NPR could help the group shield itself from a government audit. This was all uncovered in a sting operation conducted by the conservative Project Veritas organization to expose how far NPR was willing to subvert government oversight to fund its biased programming. The sting also caught Ron Schiller, who was then the president of the NPR Foundation and vice president for development, making an anti-Semitic remark. “Zionist influence” doesn’t exist at NPR, Schiller said, but “it’s there in those who own newspapers obviously.”
Liley was placed on administrative leave. Ron Schiller and NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation) resigned. But NPR continues to reek of anti-Semitism in some quarters.
Just last August, for example, a National Public Radio member station fired a Jewish meteorologist because he compared the Seattle riots and looting to Kristallnacht in a post on his own personal blog. Jewish residents and Jewish-owned businesses were being attacked in Seattle and the meteorologist was drawing on a notorious historical comparison to express his fears. Since NPR is publicly funded, its firing of the Jewish meteorologist for writing his thoughts on his own blog would appear to violate his First Amendment rights. As a writer for Get Religion put it, “What is appalling is that NPR doesn’t know the difference between legitimate speech and hate speech. Or maybe hate speech is whatever social justice workers disagree with at the moment.”
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 requires public broadcasters to operate with a “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” NPR has failed that test miserably for years. It does not deserve any further public funding. Let NPR go to Soros and other leftwing donors to stay afloat
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The Carlson interview occurred Tuesday, Oct. 27.
And:
Biden Begged Bobulinski To Keep Quiet — And He Has Proof
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Some light reading for you choir members:
The Biden Family:
Joe Biden and his first wife, Neilia, had three children: Hunter, Beau and Naomi.
In 1972, Neilia and Naomi, died in a car accident. Joe eventually married a woman named Jill (his current wife).
He already knew her because she had been Hunter's babysitter at the time of the car accident. (Yeah, THAT seems normal- marry the babysitter). They had a daughter named Ashley. Ashley lives 'a quiet life' and is frequently in and out of rehab for various substance abuse issues.
Now sadly, the sanest, most normal one of the 3 surviving kids, Beau, dies in 2015 from a brain tumor. He had been married to Haillie and they had 2 children, a boy and a girl named Natalie, who was 11 yrs old when her dad died.
Enter Hunter Biden, in 2015, to "comfort" his brother's widow. Mind you, Hunter is married at the time, to Kathleen Biden, since 1993. He starts screwing around with his dead brother's wife in 2015...his wife Kathleen finds out about it and they separate. Hunter moves in with his dead brother's wife, Haillie, and her two kids and they have a grand old time. He ultimately gets divorced from Kathleen in 2017. Meanwhile, he starts screwing around with a stripper, while still shacking up with his dead brother's wife, before his divorce is finalized, and gets the stripper pregnant. Haillie kicks his butt to the curb supposedly for this indiscretion in 2018. He denies the stripper's baby is his, although a paternity test proves otherwise and eventually marries a woman named Melissa in 2019 after knowing her for 6 days...
Does the tale end there? Why no, no it doesn't. That just sets the stage...
Enter the laptop from hell...loaded with emails, text messages, photos, child pornography, videos, and other sordid digital images of drug use and rampant weirdness....
Hunter Biden dropped the laptop off in Delaware, his home state, to get it repaired. It seems he dropped it in some water while in a meth-induced state of mind. He then neglected to pay the $85.00 repair fee and the laptop became the repair shop owner's property for non-payment. When the owner saw what was on it, he was ao disturbed that he contacted the FBI. No response. The DOJ? No response.
Eventually, it landed in Rudy Giuliani's possession and he turned it over to the Delaware State Police AFTER making 4 copies of the hard drive. Turns out, there's quite a lot of child pornography on there...much of it involving children on Hunter's many trips to China. The Chinese Communist Party uses this as a blackmail tactic... They supply the young girls, they film you, unknowingly, and then they can keep you "in line", while paying you the big $$$ to do their bidding, like lucrative deals with your VP father.
Millions of dollars were paid to Hunter Biden for favors with the US Govt while Joe Biden was VP under Obama.
For 8 years Hunter made the contacts and split the money with his father, referred to as the "Big Guy" in all emails detailing how their ill gotten gains would be split up amongst all the criminals involved.
Joe Biden sold out his country and used his son to do it.
But, IT GETS WORSE. Today, on the laptop, emails were released between Beau Biden's widow, Haillie, and Joe Biden in 2017 and more in 2018 when she and Hunter were still living together. They were casually talking about the continual "sexually inappropriate behavior" she had witnessed from Hunter toward her 14 year old daughter, Natalie, HIS NIECE!..She told Joe that she felt she had put her children in a dangerous situation by getting involved with Hunter Biden. Joe knew his son was screwing around with his niece and he advised his daughter-in-law to go to therapy.....No one went to the police and the abuse escalated. THAT is the main reason she broke off her relationship with Hunter. Among the pictures of Hunter having sex with young Asian children, there were hundreds of provocative pictures of a 14 year old girl, mainly topless, and hundreds more of Hunter Biden, in sexual poses with her, HIS NIECE. She was 14 yrs old and HE WAS 48!!
THE END.....but, is it? Nope. Rudy says there is more to come, primarily involving Joe Biden getting rich off laundering foreign money through our country, using his son as intermediary. Biden is as dirty and crooked as they come. Hillary looks clean compared to him. Now it makes sense why Obama REFUSED to endorse him as the DNC candidate until he was the last man standing!
And:
https://spectator.org/boom-
And:
https://thenationalpulse.com/
More to come.. stay tuned
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Ironically, should Trump not be re-elected it would not be because he was un-successful in accomplishing some major needed changes but because Democrats did not like him, could not gracefully accept their loss and believe they are entitled to retain power because of their superior policies and governance. These same hypocrites were shielded by the mass media who also hated Trump because he was able to make them look like the frauds and fools they have become.
Democrats love of America is evidenced by the two candidates they have nominated to defeat Trump.
One is the most liberal and radical current Senator and former Attorney General of California, except for the dumbest and most embarrassing, Mazie Keiko Hirono (WATCH: Sen. Mazie Hirono votes ‘hell no!’ on Amy Coney Barrett nomination and storms off of Senate floor) and a former VP who participated in possible sedition and now we learn has a cloud over his head because his son, Hunter, whom the mass media never heard of, is a shill for "the man" and apparently in bed with the Chinese among other cash dispensing nations.
On the other hand, should Trump be re-elected, the author of the article below warns us Trump is most likely to continue drinking his own bathwater because of his many success and that could be dangerous because it would reinforce his unorthodox manners, chaotic style of governance, blah, blah, blah.
I understand talking about Hunter Biden may not move the needle but should Biden win it will surface time and again and make anything he does suspect when it comes to China because the stench will not go away.
What in the World if Trump Wins?
In a second term, expect more chaotic, confident wheeling and dealing overseas.
Most second-term presidents look to make a mark in foreign policy. This is partly because a president’s political clout at home diminishes as the definitive end of his mandate approaches, while overseas a president has a relatively free hand even at the end of a second term. So commanders in chief often go looking for diplomatic breakthroughs. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both devoted great efforts to getting an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in their second terms. Barack Obama signed the Iran deal and the Paris Climate Accords. As unconventional a figure as Mr. Trump is, he is likely to look for trophy achievements overseas too.
Second-term presidents have another important trait: They tend to trust their instincts more. Getting elected once might mean you are lucky; getting elected twice must mean you are good. Mr. Trump has never been a shrinking violet when it comes to trusting his instincts. If he shocks the experts by holding the White House, he will be even more convinced that his methods and beliefs are right. Brimming with self-confidence and increasingly eager to make a mark in foreign affairs, Mr. Trump will return to his old agenda with new energy—and renewed contempt for the foreign-policy establishments here and abroad that despise him.
A second term would be at least as chaotic as the first. This is not simply because the president is undisciplined and indifferent to process and bases his decisions on intuition more than analysis. For Mr. Trump, chaos is more than a choice or even a habit. It is a tool for keeping ultimate control in his own hands. That a presidential tweet can at any moment reverse a policy that aides have labored over for months infuriates, alienates and not infrequently humiliates his subordinates, but Mr. Trump stays in control. Keeping your associates and adversaries alike guessing is, in the president’s playbook, a tactic for success. Officials can always be replaced; power needs to be conserved.
With most neoconservatives and traditional Republican internationalists gone, the GOP foreign-policy world consists largely of dovish restrainers in the mold of Rand Paul and hawkish unilateralists like Tom Cotton. The factions disagree over what an America First foreign policy should look like. For some Paulites even the challenge of China is not enough to justify another generation of a global defense and alliance policy. Japan has enough plutonium for thousands of nuclear weapons. Why should the U.S. pay the bills for Asian defense when Tokyo, Seoul and others have what it takes to contain Beijing on their own?
Cottonites believe that the China challenge and the continuing threat of terrorism, among other worries, require American tech and defense supremacy. They see forward defense as smarter than waiting for adversaries to attack the U.S.
Whatever his deepest instincts—which are probably more Paulite than Cottonesque—Mr. Trump likely sees keeping a balance between the two factions as part of his strategy for dominating Republican politics. He sometimes tilts one way and sometimes another, probably with the goal of keeping both sides competing for his favor. It has worked for him so far.
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Justice Barrett's selection as a Justice was never about her qualifications it was all about retaining power.
Should Biden win, packing the court is a strong likelihood, as when FDR tried and failed, because making the Court independent instead of a second legislative branch, as it has been for many decades, is anathema to Democrats. What they cannot accomplish through legislation, Democrats have been able to do through The SCOTUS.
We May Get a Conservative
Chief Justice
If Roberts joins the liberals, Thomas gets to assign the opinion.
Chief Justice Thomas” was the headline of an article I wrote in the Journal late in 2004. I urged President George W. Bush to elevate Justice Clarence Thomas if Chief Justice William Rehnquist retired the following year. Mr. Bush didn’t follow my advice when Rehnquist died in September 2005. But as Amy Coney Barrett dons her high-court robe, Justice Thomas may find himself filling an unaccustomed leadership role.
Over the past decade Chief Justice John Roberts emerged as a frequent swing vote when the associate justices divided 4-4 along familiar liberal-conservative lines. In numerous cases—most famously National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), which upheld ObamaCare—he cast his vote with the four Democratic appointees, although his opinions were sometimes less sweeping than theirs. In June Medical Services v. Russo (2020), the court voted 5-4 to strike down Louisiana abortion restrictions, but Chief Justice Roberts pointedly declined to join Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion repudiating the rules. Instead the chief justice made clear in concurrence that he was only adhering to a four-year-old precedent, from which he had dissented and with which he still professes to disagree
A charitable observer would say that Chief Justice Roberts is concerned about the court’s legitimacy and independence—that he wishes above all to avoid the perception that it responds to political pressure. An uncharitable one would say that in pursuit of that objective, he is creating not only the appearance but the reality of a political court. Either way, with a Republican-appointed majority of associate justices, the chief justice has lost this tie-breaking power.
That’s where Justice Thomas comes in. The chief justice is an especially potent swing voter, because he also has the power to assign authorship of the majority opinion, including to himself. That can help shape a decision’s scope and direction—usually, in Chief Justice Roberts’s case, by making it more tentative.
If the chief justice is in dissent, however, the assignment power falls to the most senior associate justice in the majority. Clarence Thomas is now the most senior justice, so he will assign authorship any time he is in the majority and Chief Justice Roberts dissents.
Justice Thomas is something of an anti-Roberts. His lone concurrences and dissents are usually not incremental but adventurous, urging colleagues to break new legal ground or rethink old precedents. In June Medical Services, he argued that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided and should be overturned—a position no other sitting justice has endorsed since Antonin Scalia died in 2016.
So what does Chief Justice Roberts do when the associate justices split 5-3 along familiar lines? If he joins the liberals and makes it 5-4, Justice Thomas gets to assign the majority opinion and perhaps induce the court to a bolder conclusion. If the chief justice joins the majority, he makes the assignment. The resulting 6-3 decision will likely be less sweeping, but it won’t be liberal. Those who hoped for a conservative chief justice 15 years ago may finally get one.
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Breaking: Hillary Clinton still fuming: ‘I was born’ to be president; it makes me ‘literally sick to my stomach to think’ of another Trump win
And:
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