I listened to Biden deliver his evasive SOTUS. It was a lot of grandpa delivered demagoguery. It was more Biden Blibitry, too long and full of economic inconsistencies. It was a missed opportunity to rise to the occasion instead, he chose to soar to the floor. Perhaps he has been spending too much time in the basement. Pure nonsense Still a captive of the radicals who control his party.
This was a speech that deserved to be torn up by Pathetic Pelosi.
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Soros Throws Support Behind Ukraine, Says We Must Do Whatever Is Required for Them
(TargetLiberty.org) – Meddling billionaire George Soros can usually be relied on to choose the wrong side in any dispute, but for once he might have decided to do the right thing. The ultra-liberal financier is calling on western leaders to help Ukraine resist the ongoing Russian invasion.
Last Thursday, hours after Russian tanks rolled across the border to begin their assault on Ukraine, Soros launched a series of tweets condemning the invasion and calling on western countries to do “whatever is in their power” to support Ukraine. He praised Ukraine for resisting “countless acts of Russian aggression” and warned if the Russian attack succeeds it will send the message that nations can be created or destroyed by force.
Soros makes a good case for supporting Ukraine, comparing the invasion to the 1944 siege of Budapest by the Red Army or the blockade of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serbs in the early 1990s – but does he also see it as a chance to push his globalizing agenda? Soros funds several groups that campaign for mass immigration, and they’re already demanding western countries open their borders and allow in millions of Ukrainian refugees.
Is Soros using a crisis to achieve his own goals?
Copyright 2022, TargetLiberty.org
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De Santis may not become the next president but it would be sad if he does not run and win.
If Trump truly cares for America more than he cares for himself, he would stand aside, not challenge de Santis and let this bright , qualified and proven young man run and win.
Contrast De Santis' speech with Biden's SOTUS.
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Black Rifle Coffee represents Middle America
By Salena Zito
MANCHESTER, Tenn. — If there’s a person and company that could serve as the antidote for consumers weary of the progressive activism that has dominated corporate America for the last few decades, Evan Hafer is that guy, and Black Rifle Coffee is that company.
Started in Mr. Hafer’s garage in 2014 with a mission to serve premium coffee and culture to people who love America — a sentiment he never shies away from — the company’s core mission is something Mr. Hafer says many people, including himself, find lacking in corporate America’s messaging to consumers.
He’s not wrong. Our cultural curators — in corporations, Hollywood, academia, government and other institutions — all began their drift leftward exactly 51 years ago when CBS made a tectonic cultural shift in prime time TV by removing just about every show with a tree-lined street in it.
The great “rural purge,” as it was called, was a self-admitted kneel to corporate advertisers whose research showed newer, edgier programing would attract a more urban and intellectual audience — an audience with big buying power. But the new programming made their loyal audiences uncomfortable: Largely gone were intact families, corniness, dirt roads, faith, distinct accents and patriotic themes.
Americans started their own slow drift — away from their connection to the cultural curators, whose abandonment of traditional tropes didn’t stop with TV programming, as corporations, academia and institutions began to wade into social justice activism.
Mr. Hafer contradicts that model. Since launching eight years ago, Black Rifle Coffee Company has gone from being a primarily direct-to-consumer business (with over 200,000 monthly subscribers) to kiosks in gas stations, tactical stores, firing ranges and Bass Pro Shops across the country. Dozens of new stores are about to break ground in several states across the country.
When Mr. Hafer took the company public on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this month, he did it in a way true to himself and his mission — with over 100 employees, many of them veterans, standing shoulder to shoulder with him as he rang the bell. “We had found it difficult, at times, to go out and get capital to grow the company, so for us to be on the New York Stock Exchange is such a really good precedent for future center-right entrepreneurs to go out and do the same thing,” said Mr. Hafer.
The capital they raise from the initial offering will go back into the company, he said, to grow it so that people will often have a choice between a Starbucks and a Black Rifle.
Mr. Hafer explained that Black Rifle Coffee Company is a deeply purpose-driven business, with much of its energy dedicated to veterans, first responders and police officers. “When I think about purpose and I think about creating something, I’m really trying to create a positive and inspirational culture,” he said.
Mr. Hafer famously pledged in 2017 to hire 10,000 veterans when Starbucks pledged it would hire 10,000 refugees. He said he is on his way to meeting that goal: “I said at the time it would take me between six and 10 years to get there, and I — we — are on track to do that by year ten. Right now, we are at 500 veterans, give or take, which when I made that promise, I had 63 employees.”
At his coffee roasting facility — located halfway between Nashville and Chattanooga — it was hard to find any employee who wasn’t a veteran.
“I always tell people you have to have big, hairy, audacious goals; one of the reasons that we went public was to be able to meet that goal,” said Mr. Hafer.
His love of coffee had its roots in trying to meet a barista in his first semester in college in Seattle. That meeting never panned out, but Mr. Hafer did fall hard for coffee. “I loved everything about it, from the different ways to brew it — like having an espresso or using a percolator or a French press or a Chemex — to the ways you roast it,” he explained in an hour-long interview.
Mr. Hafer soon found his love of coffee rivaled his youthful wanderlust: “I really wanted to go out and become a Green Beret; I wasn’t one of those guys that wanted to join because I wanted my college education paid for — I wanted to serve; I also really wanted to jump out of planes and live in the mountains and have an adventure.”
He took his coffee beans and his pour-over with him.
Mr. Hafer went on to the CIA as part of his military career; after seven and a half years in combat zones and 43 deployments, he was fried, he said — but he also loathed the idea of leaving his friends. “The military was my tribe, my community; it was everything to me, and it is hard psychologically to leave something that you’re so proud of and then the people that you love, almost more or deeply than family.”
He found a way through, creating something meaningful and with purpose in the process — spurred by a flash of inspiration. “I was working in a range, teaching other CIA and Special Forces guys how to shoot better. And I was roasting coffee on the back tailgate of the truck. I had my service rifle there, which is like this little black rifle, and a coffee roaster. And they were both on the back tailgate of the government truck. And I was like ‘Oh, Black Rifle Coffee.’”
Which, he said, “was about the same time that the CIA told me, ‘You should probably look for another job.’ … I was one of the guys that, after Benghazi, was really was trying to demand accountability. They don’t really like that.”
The plan was to sell enough coffee to build up enough capital to build a coffee shop/gun store/bookstore concept he had always had in the back of his mind. “In my first year, we did $1.3 million in gross revenue from my garage, as a part-time job. And by the end of the first year, I was like, ‘This is going to be big. I’m just going to stop everything.’ So I finished my enlistment, my final enlistment with the military. I quit the agency, and I went chips-in, basically. Full-time on Black Rifle.”
By the next year, with partners Matt Best and Jarred Taylor, Black Rifle went from $1.37 million to $8 million in gross revenue — “basically out of a dingy little shop in Salt Lake City in an industrial area where I was sharing space with a lawn mowing service and a snow removal service,” Mr. Hafer said.
By year three, the company went from $8 million to $32 million in gross revenue — and Mr. Hafer realized he’d tapped a market for premium coffee. Last year — six years in — the company did $232 million gross.
It isn’t just about premium coffee: It’s a lifestyle company now, with gear, a magazine dubbed “Coffee or Die” and an investigative blog devoted to military and first responder coverage.
“It would’ve been really easy for me to stay less connected and just be a direct-to-consumer coffee company; the margins are great, the profits are great, and I’d make a lot of money,” Mr. Hafer said. “But for me to go out and build thousands of coffee shops, that’s going to make a real dent in the universe. We have to have places where people feel comfortable who aren’t progressive — where they can go and drink coffee and share stories and aren’t burdened by what I think is typically a bunch of politically correct nonsense.”
The numbers — and the recent Wall Street success — show he’s on to something.
One of the big problems in American businesses today, Mr. Hafer said, is owners don’t know their customers: “I’m providing a level of respect for people when they enter our shops, something people have gotten used to not feeling for far too long.”
Click here for the full story.
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Sounds impressive:
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2022/02/28/meet-the-veteran-immigrant-muslim-american-running-to-defeat-ilhan-omar-n2603911
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Too many liberal Jews in the Boston area for their own good:
Boston: Jewish leaders asleep in the face of anti-Israel school curricula |
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Anti-Jewish (and anti-American) curricula are spreading across the country in the guise of “ethnic studies” — a derivative of critical race theory, which classifies Jews as “privileged whites.” But Jewish leaders in Boston are failing to educate the community about this looming danger.
Massachusetts public school students may soon be learning that their Jewish classmates are “privileged white people” who support an “apartheid” colonial entity in Israel.
Too many Jews and Jewish leaders are reluctant to confront the problem. They fear alienating their political allies. Ignoring this insidious curricula will have severe long-term consequences for the Jewish community. We need strong, proud, and courageous Jewish leaders, who are neither ideologically conflicted nor morally confused, to protect our community.
Please send this article to your local Jewish leaders, including rabbis and heads of the ADL, AJC, JCRC, and Federations. Ask them why they are not informing their communities about the dangers to Jews inherent in critical race theory and its offspring, “ethnic studies.”
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Soros is about to lose billions as one of the largest investors in Ukraine and one of the most powerful non-Ukrainians.
Soros Throws Support Behind Ukraine, Says We Must Do Whatever Is Required for Them
(TargetLiberty.org) – Meddling billionaire George Soros can usually be relied on to choose the wrong side in any dispute, but for once he might have decided to do the right thing. The ultra-liberal financier is calling on western leaders to help Ukraine resist the ongoing Russian invasion.
Last Thursday, hours after Russian tanks rolled across the border to begin their assault on Ukraine, Soros launched a series of tweets condemning the invasion and calling on western countries to do “whatever is in their power” to support Ukraine. He praised Ukraine for resisting “countless acts of Russian aggression” and warned if the Russian attack succeeds it will send the message that nations can be created or destroyed by force.
Soros makes a good case for supporting Ukraine, comparing the invasion to the 1944 siege of Budapest by the Red Army or the blockade of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serbs in the early 1990s – but does he also see it as a chance to push his globalizing agenda? Soros funds several groups that campaign for mass immigration, and they’re already demanding western countries open their borders and allow in millions of Ukrainian refugees.
Is Soros using a crisis to achieve his own goals?
Copyright 2022, TargetLiberty.org
And: KAREN HURVITZ-OPINION US Jewish leaders asleep in the face of anti-Israel school curricula If “Ethnic Studies” is not exposed as viciously divisive and stopped, a large proportion of Massachusetts children, like those in California, will be “learning” that the Jewish state is inherently racist and cruel. In an Feb. 1 article, I described how state-wide guidelines about teaching the Middle East had been changed in 2018 to tilt heavily against Israel. Massachusetts public-school teachers were told to instruct their students, among other things, about “Palestinian loss of land and the creation of refugees by Israeli military action,” and that there had been a “diverse mix of cultures (e.g. Jews, Palestinians and Arabs of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Druze backgrounds) in the region in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.” ….Even before the guidelines were changed, Newton students were taught that Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine and Tel Aviv the capital of Israel; that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is definitively not a clash of civilizations or religions, but merely a border dispute, heavily hinting that it could easily be settled by risk-free Israeli concessions; and that the Palestinians, not the Jews, are the truly indigenous people of Israel. CONTINUE +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ American skullduggery of the first magnitude:
Putin’s Victims in Guatemala The U.S. Embassy allowed the little dictator’s persecution of the Bitkov family. By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
Vladimir Putin’s decision to drop bombs on Kyiv last week sent shock waves through Europe and the U.S., as intended. But at home, things aren’t going so well for the little dictator with big ambitions.
Among other things, Mr. Putin’s aggression with his neighbors has sparked a renewed Russian outcry against corruption that is gaining world attention. Perhaps it can help Igor Bitkov, his wife, Irina, and their daughter, Anastasia, who more than a decade after escaping the dictator’s grip in Russia remain in legal limbo in Guatemala.
In a country where politicians readily acknowledge that the U.S. wields enormous power, it is worth asking why the State Department refuses to help a family targeted by Mr. Putin’s crime ring regain their freedom.
Russians aren’t rallying around the flag since the invasion of Ukraine on Thursday morning, as Mr. Putin may have expected them to do. Many are telling pollsters that they reject the military strikes against their neighbor. Some have even gone to the streets shouting, “No to war.”
The crackdown on these protesters is business as usual for Mr. Putin. But repression can’t reverse a growing hatred of the Kremlin boss, whose estimated wealth is at least in the tens of billions of dollars.
Russians know Mr. Putin didn’t come by his wealth honestly. His business model is a combination of knee-capping, extortion, dungeons and murder. His courts are a farce. In the Journal a few days before the invasion, Russia scholar David Satter quoted a former constitutional-court judge who put it this way: “Any official can dictate any decision in any case.” Ask opposition leader Alexei Navalny, last week given a show trial in a Russian penal colony for daring to expose Putin graft.
The Bitkovs had a successful paper-and-pulp business in 2008 when Putin henchmen offered to buy 51% of the company. The Putin political machine also asked Irina to become a party representative for Kaliningrad. The Bitkovs said no to both opportunities. Shortly thereafter, their 16-year-old daughter was kidnapped. They paid a ransom of $200,000 and got her back after she had been held for three days and raped.
The family lost their company to Mr. Putin and fled. They eventually sought refuge in Guatemala in 2009, only to be arrested by local authorities in 2015 at the behest of a Putin-owned bank working with the U.N.’s International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG.
As absurd as that sounds, it actually happened: A U.N. body deputized to fight corruption in Guatemala took instructions from Putin cronies to go after and lock up a refugee family. Worse, the U.S. Embassy continued to endorse the commission’s work.
The then-U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, Todd Robinson, worked closely with CICIG even as it became clear that the commission was violating the civil liberties of its targets, including the Bitkovs. Because the U.S. was the largest financier of CICIG, the family appealed to the embassy to protect their rights. They got no results.
There was never any credible evidence to support Russia’s accusations—filed with Guatemala’s attorney general—that the Bitkovs had stolen from the Putin-owned VTB Bank. But the bank had its own problems. In 2018 the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on its chairman, Andrey Kostin.
VTB Bank’s wild claims about Bitkov fraud went nowhere. But Russian proxies in Guatemala also had gone to CICIG and asked it to investigate the family for allegedly using false identity documents.
Mysteriously the U.S.-backed commission never investigated the law firm that had secured those documents for the Bitkovs in exchange for what it said were legal fees. It’s also notable that one of the lawyers inside Guatemala’s migration office, who signed Anastasia’s temporary residency card and many other false documents, was hired by the Guatemalan attorney general’s office in 2014. In its investigation of the crime ring she was not investigated.
The Bitkovs were victims of a human-trafficking operation inside Guatemala’s migration office, not members of it. In 2017 a court cited Guatemalan and international law when it ruled that as migrants they weren’t liable for using the papers that the migration office had issued to them illegally. In April 2018 the constitutional court upheld that decision.
Three months later the same court arbitrarily reversed its decision. The Bitkovs are still fighting in court for their freedom while there are outstanding arrest warrants for an unknown number of officials who allegedly violated the law to obey CICIG.
At least four of those are fugitives being harbored by the U.S. That’s because the American left still believes in the CICIG model as a way to advance its causes abroad wherever its agenda isn’t winning at the ballot box. It wants to hide the fact that the commission not only failed but morphed into a tool of the thuggish Mr. Putin and unsavory characters in Guatemala. This is embarrassing for the State Department but by refusing to admit its errors, it is compounding them. +++++++++++++++++
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