THE COLUMN: The Sting

If you knowingly sit down at a fixed poker game and lose your entire stash, would you also complain that some of the other players also cheated? If it was a friend who brought you into the game, would you then go to another one with him? And having lost all your money when you bet the farm, would you re-mortgage it and bet it all again on the chance that this time things would be different? If you're a Republican, the answer is: of course you would, because you just did and you're about to do it again.

If the national elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022 didn't teach the GOP a lesson or three, what will? From Donald Trump's surprise (though not a surprise to me) win in 2016, it's been mostly all downhill for the party of Lincoln, which has been thrice set back on its heels and sent to the power poorhouse. The day after Trump's election, the institutional Left launched its legal coup against Trump and as early as mid-February 2017 had claimed its first and most important scalp in Mike Flynn, the man who knew where all the bodies were buried during the Obama administration. Saddled with hostile incompetents such as Reince Priebus and Jeff Sessions, the Trump administration was kneecapped by its own naivete and betrayed by its two deadliest enemies, Jared and Ivanka Kushner, the twin vipers known around the West Wing as "the Democrats." By the time Trump was goaded by them and the media into firing Steve Bannon, the man who got him elected, MAGA was finished as a philosophical and governing force in the Oval Office. The rest, as they say, was commentary.

So from a position of power in January 2017, when the GOP under Trump held the White House and both branches of Congress; to the 2018 mid-terms, when Nancy D'Alesandro Pelosi, the pride of Baltimore, took over the House and unleashed not one but two impeachments against Trump; to the disaster of 2020, when the Trump forces refused to take the re-election campaign seriously and instead substituted supererogatory rallies in place of a brass-knuckles ground game; to the most recent congressional elections, in which the GOP barely recaptured the House but blew the Senate again, it's been one disaster after another. Why, it's almost been as if the fix has been in the whole time! 

It's not like there was no warning. Once the Democrats miraculously cleaned out the GOP in formerly red Orange County, Calif., in 2018 it should have been clear even to such notable dummies as Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy that the game was no longer being played on Game Day, but weeks and even months before, plus a few days after the polls had "closed." Early voting, "harvested" voting, "absentee" voting was a Tammany wet dream come to life: who doesn't like their chances on Election Day when more than half the votes are already in the bag and you know to an absolute certainty where they went? Add to this the unconstitutional changes to the voting laws rammed through in blue states during the Covid hoax, and the Dems were in the catbird seat long before Nov. 8.

The old joke used to be that the dead vote was critical in Democratic precincts but now this could literally be true, since the votes of dead people could already be in the can, not to mention the candidates themselves, well before election day. This is why, in the final weeks before the vote, the Democrats were exuding (in Mark Twain's famous words) "the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces." Polls? We don't need no stinkin' polls! Besides, why have a traditional one-man, one-day election—a binding snapshot in time—when you can have a permanently floating crap game, one in which you're always ahead no matter when it stops?

"Cheating" scream the die-hards on the Right, playing right into the hands of those who fixed the game in the first place. "Stop the steal!" they shout, when the steal is now part of the game. The "2000 Mules" of non-dispositive red-meat fantasy, whose presence is deduced from the arcana of cell-phone triangulation and the laws of probability, may or may not have existed, but the point is: they didn't matter. They were simply the fat ladies and strong men of the sideshows, meant to distract the gullible and easily panicked into ignoring the fact that their pockets have already been picked, their cars stolen and on their way to chop shops in Tijuana, and their home repossessed.

Thus, as I mentioned last week, there's no need for "cheating." Thanks to Tammany Hall's centuries-long perfection of electoral chicanery and the Republicans' willful blindness, the system has become the steal. Typical con men, the Democrats preach the "sanctity" of the vote when what they really lust after is the roundheels of the ballot. There are no virgins in this whorehouse, just the soiled doves of the media who gussy them up for the traveling salesmen and visiting firemen, and then collect their pimp money in the back alley from the bankers and the lawyers who like the system just fine the way it is.

It's a great racket: if you play your cards right, you can deal yourself a whole new hand at the closing bell and walk away with all the chips while you opponent impotently sputters in frustration. And should the marks finally catch on and start adopting some of your tactics, it hardly matters. California has already shown the way to eliminating the two-party system in its state elections via the "jungle primary" system, and just now solidly red Alaska has "elected" a Democrat to fill its lone House seat thanks to an enormity called "ranked-choice" voting. The mouthpiece of the Democrat machine, the New York Times, explains it all for you:

Mary Peltola, whose victory in a special election on Wednesday makes her the first Democrat in nearly half a century to represent Alaska in the House, won the contest for the remainder of Representative Don Young’s term with an upbeat campaign that appealed to Alaskan interests and the electorate’s independent streak.

But Alaska’s new voting system also played a big role in Ms. Peltola’s three-percentage-point victory over former Gov. Sarah Palin, her Republican opponent. Ms. Peltola, who will become the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress and the first woman to hold the House seat, won at least in part because voters had more choices. While more voters initially picked a Republican candidate, that didn’t matter. Given a second choice, many Republican voters opted for a Democrat — Ms. Peltola — over Ms. Palin... When voters have more choices, they’re less likely to vote along strict party lines, reducing polarization and giving independent-minded or more centrist candidates a better shot.

Bet you didn't know that elections will soon no longer be binary; pretty soon we'll have as many "choices" as Facebook has genders. So step right up, suckers and try your luck. Remember, until the country returns to day-and-date elections, between limited hours, in person only, with ironclad identification, there will be no end to this mischief. The Democrats, who boast of being "the oldest voter-based political party in the world," are simply better at it than anybody else. And if nothing meaningful is done, when the GOP loses again in two years, the 2,000 donkeys of the DNC will look at their "friends" at the RNC and say like Henry Gondorff to Doyle Lonnegan: "Tough luck... but that's what you get for playing with your head up your ass!"

THE COLUMN: The System Is the Steal

The nastiest side effect of China's gift to the world, Covid-19, was not the illness itself, nor the deaths (surely over-attributed) it caused primarily among the aged and infirm. Nor was it the unnecessary and unconstitutional lockdowns that accompanied the government-fueled, manufactured authoritarian panic, along with the arbitrary abrogation of fundamental constitutional rights, including those protected under the first amendment: freedom of speech, assembly, and the free exercise of religion—a national disgrace that will live in infamy, and which should never be forgiven.

Nor was it the incalculable economic destruction caused by this unholy concoction of Chinese bat-butt soup, liver of pangolin, and gain-of-function seasonings provided by Chef Boyarfauci, nor the loss of several years of schooling for America's increasingly ineducable youth. Nor even was it the semi-mandatory "vaccines" that don't fulfill any of the traditional metrics for real vaccines, including prevention of disease and its transmission or the granting of future immunity; now the argument has moved to whether they actually kill people, which isn't an encouraging trajectory for something billed as a panacea.

No, the worst damage has been to our political-electoral systems, as the results of the past two elections have made abundantly clear. Forget the nonsense about a "stolen" election; all elections are "stolen," if by stolen you mean that one side won and one side lost, and have been since George Washington Plunkitt was a pup. (For those keeping score at home, Tammany Hall, of which Plunkitt was an outstanding exemplar, was founded by Aaron Burr, the first Democrat Party vice president, national traitor, and murderer of Alexander Hamilton.) Whatever the election rules are—and under our unwieldy system, there are 50 different sets of them—the party that manipulates them best usually wins. And this of course gives the long-practiced Democrats an enormous advantage.

The fundamental principle of all American elections has been to determine as far in advance as possible how many votes the other guy is getting and then come crashing in at the end with overwhelming numbers of newfound votes to close the deal at the finishing bell. You can find them in storerooms, in the trunks of cars; sometimes they fall off trucks, mimeographed and marked in advance to save the poor voter's time. You do whatever it takes, more or less within the limits of the law, and then worry about penalties after the election is safely in the bag.

Permission vs. forgiveness: the fraud, dear Brutus, lies not in the machines but in our electoral system. There is only one way to ensure a free and fair election. But before we get to that, consider this:

Democratic norms are not perfectly realized anywhere, even in advanced democracies. Access to the electoral arena always has a cost and is never perfectly equal; the scopes and jurisdictions of elective offices are everywhere limited; electoral institutions invariably discriminate against somebody inside or outside the party system; and democratic politics is never quite sovereign but always subject to societal as well as constitutional constraints... There is much room for nuance and ambivalence... [and] bending and circumventing the rules may sometimes be considered “part of the game.”

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Part of the game? It is the game. There is no perfect "democracy." The system is, in fact, the steal. 

One of the Democrats' favored weapons a century ago was the Repeater, the man who voted in multiple districts under various names, a la today's college students, illegal aliens, single cat ladies with toxoplasmosis, and forgetful suburban wine moms. When the opposition (here called the Fusionists) tried to do the same thing, they would easily be caught out; one thing the GOP never has been any good at is being a criminal organization masquerading as a political party. It just doesn't have the talent for it:

The Fusionists make about the same sort of a mistake that a repeater made at an election in Albany several years ago. He was hired to go to the polls early in a half-dozen election districts and vote on other men's names before these men reached the polls. At one place, when he was asked his name by the poll clerk, he had the nerve to answer "William Croswell Doane."

"Come off. You ain't Bishop Doane," said the poll clerk.

"The hell I ain't, you—I" yelled the repeater.

Now, that is the sort of bad judgment the Fusionists are guilty of. They don't pick men to suit the work they have to do.

And what is that work? Why, winning elections, of course. Power and the lust for it is the only constant in political systems, even democracies. The Greeks were just as mad for dominance as any Roman consul; Periclean Athens was no idyll. Further, there is little or no proof that "democracies" are inherently superior to other forms of government, Churchill's silly formulation to the contrary notwithstanding. European democracies differ greatly from the American version, as do the Chinese and North Korean versions.

Nor is there any compelling practical argument in favor of universal suffrage; slaves, women, and male teenagers were not allowed to vote either in Greece or Rome, nor would they be for almost 2,000 years. Voting was generally limited to property owners, those with a financial stake in their society. As we'll see next week in my column about the history and effects of the 19th amendment, the expansion of a fetishized franchise ("sacred right," etc.) created at least as many problems as it solved. To the question of universal suffrage, "because" cannot be a satisfactory answer.

But unless the vote is given to toddlers, numerate chickens, or articulate dolphins, there are no more worlds left to conquer on the universal suffrage score. Covid, however, gave the Left whole new worlds to conquer: instead of expanding the franchise they simply expanded the time available to exercise it. Originally sold (as usual) as a "compassionate" and "fair" redress for the poor, the sick, the out-of-town, and those unable to read a calendar, mail-in and other forms of passive voting have now taken over the system:

The biggest issue for election administration in 2020 was the pivot to voting by mail throughout the country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying importance of de-densifying in-person voting. This need led many states to increase opportunities for voting by mail, ranging from expanding the accepted reasons voters could list for requesting a mail ballot, to mailing ballots to all registered voters. As a consequence of these changes, the rate of voting by mail in 2020 doubled from 2016.

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That's not the worst of it. Friendly judges across the land threw out challenges to mail-in/absentee ballots on the niggling grounds that they weren't properly executed; worse, "ballot harvesting" allowed dumps of completely untraceable "votes" into random drop boxes, and lax counting regulations (differing from state to state) meant the suspect ballots could be quickly mingled into the legitimate-vote population. Add to that the arbitrary decision regarding the latest moment that ballots could be accepted even after the real polls had closed and you have a recipe for a perfectly legal steal.

Voting for fraud, not for democracy.

So while you’re complaining about the results of the last two elections, remember that in many states votes were cast weeks or even months ago. Those votes heavily favored the Democrats, which in part accounts for the election of a bona fide rutabaga as the new senator from Pennsylvania. Further, as long as one side can mail in—or worse, "discover"—an unlimited number of ballots or votes on thumb drives of uncertain provenance, with little or no chain of custody, and the other side appears in person with ID to vote once on election day (as Republicans tend to do), the former is always going to beat the latter. No cheating necessary! The Steal is built into the system.

The only chance we have of recapturing our Republic is to return to real voting: one day, one man, one vote, in person, with identification, on a paper ballot, and getting a purple finger in return to prevent Repeaters. No early voting, no late voting, no drop boxes, no "curated" votes, no harvested votes, no absentee ballots for any reason other than active-duty military overseas. If you're sick and can't get to the polls, tough. If you've moved out of the country, tough. Anything else is not an election, but a rolling plebiscite whose parameters can be adjusted on a whim and which therefore renders elections functionally meaningless. And if you don't think so, ask yourself why, with control of the House of Representatives currently on knife edge, votes are still being counted in Democrat-friendly California.

Citizenship ought to entail at least as many responsibilities as it does benefits. There's no right to vote in the Constitution: it has to be earned, not demanded. It's not for everybody (nor does everybody even want it): it shouldn't be for wards of the government, the criminal, the insane. Nothing encourage indigency like being able to vote yourself a raise with other people's money.

If the franchise is really "sacred," let's start acting like it. The country would be a better place, the government would be more honest, and we'd no longer have to endure now-constant accusations of fraud from both sides. Who wouldn't vote for that?

Enemies of the People: Javanka

THE COLUMN: 'Alea Iacta Est'

In early 49 B.C., fresh from his conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar and his Thirteenth Legion approached a small river that separated the Roman province of Cisalpine Gaul from the Roman Republic's heartland. This stream, called the Rubicon, marked the political boundary of Rome's military might: no Roman general could bring men under arms into Italy. But Caesar, politically ambitious, was under threat. His eight-year campaign in Gaul had been deemed illegal by many in the Senate and there were calls for his head.

Further, one of his fellow members of the First Triumvirate, Crassus, had  been killed in a foolish, vanity fueled misadventure against the Parthians at Carrhae in 53 B.C., while Caesar's alliance with his  other triumvir, Pompey, had been shattered irreparably when his daughter Julia, Pompey's wife, had died in childbirth the year before. Although he was a hero to the people of Rome, Caesar knew his enemies in the Senate, led by Cicero, were plotting his downfall. What to do?

The only solution was to march on Rome and fight for power. Alea iacta est, he was supposed to have said as he led his troops across the muddy stream: "the die is cast." Thus began the civil war that destroyed the Republic and led to Caesar's own assassination in 44 B.C., paving the way for the rise of his grand-nephew, Octavius, to become Augustus, Rome's first emperor (he called himself, modestly, Princeps, or First Citizen), and thus establish the Roman Empire. Ever since, to "cross the Rubicon" has come to mean taking an irrevocable step, a daring gamble either to win or lose with the highest stakes depending on one throw of the dice.

Show me the man and I'll show you the crime.

With the raid on former president Donald Trump's private residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida last week, that's exactly what the Democrats have done.

The Democrats, a criminal organization masquerading as a political party, love to boast about their "firsts," and they are indeed impressive. Aaron Burr, effectively the party's first vice president, rose to political prominence via his control of Tammany Hall, the gold standard of American political corruption. He shot and killed Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers, and was later involved in a trial for treason, but of course skated, as Democrats are wont to do under our system of "justice."

A mere half a century later, Democrats had become the full-throated party of slavery. After their loss in the presidential election of 1860 to the new Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln, they reacted with typical class by declaring Lincoln an illegitimate president, seceding from the Union, and firing the first shots of the American Civil War at Fort Sumter in 1861. In the 1864 election campaign, in which the Confederate states did not take part, the remaining "peace" or "Copperhead"  Democrats ran one of Lincoln's own, failed generals (George McClellan) against him. And when that failed, they assassinated Lincoln a week after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. 

That's quite a record, and yet today's Democrats seem hell-bound to top it. Under the demented, corrupt hulk of non compos mentis called Joe Biden, they've destroyed the booming Trump economy, humiliated their own country with the summary abandonment of the Afghanistan war, turned loose the nation's criminals on a legally defenseless population, let loose the dogs of debt, inflation and commodity scarcity, blown up the supply chain, solidified the power of the Praetorian Deep State, weaponized the intelligence community and the FBI in the service of the Party, terrified the gullible via their reprehensible Covid scare tactics, crippled the domestic energy industry, injected the poison of Critical Theory into the national bloodstream, and castrated much of the Bill of Rights, including the first, second, fourth, fifth, ninth, and tenth amendments. As soon as they can figure out a way to quarter soldiers in your homes and apartments, you can bet they will.

For "our democracy," by any means necessary.

Now in the vengeful attorney general Merrick Garland—whose nomination to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama luckily died in the Senate in 2017 with the arrival of the Trump administration— we have the second coming of Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the secret police under Josef Stalin in the country Democrats long most admired, Soviet Russia. (They've since transferred their affections to Communist China.) Never before in the history of our Republic—a phrase conservatives ought to be using as a counterweight to the Democrats' deceitful "our democracy"—has the nation's chief legal officer ordered an armed raid on a former president, in this case on Biden's immediate predecessor and the leading contender for the GOP nomination in 2024. 

It's step of breathtaking audacity, but hardly surprising. Not for nothing is the Democrats' unofficial motto "by any means necessary." Since the days of Burr and Jefferson Davis and John Wilkes Booth, violence has always lurked just below the surface of their "higher" patriotism. Indeed, as the Sixties exemplified, it's part of their appeal. "The worst are full of passionate intensity," wrote William Butler Years in his widely quoted poem, The Second Coming, written in 1919. "Surely, the Second Coming is at hand."

A century on, it's still an apt image. The contemporary America Left, a strange hybrid of Protestant evangelism and Marxist atheist millenarianism, is fueled by the red-diaper-babyism that is the Frankfurt School's primary contribution to the realm of American arts, letters, philosophy, and mores. They're getting old now (Biden is 79, Garland is 69), and time is running out. Eternally marching under the banner of "progress" to a Promised Land that doesn't exist and will never arrive, the Left is in the midst of a long-planned (see Marcuse, Herbert, et al.) and daringly executed assault on the foundations of the United States, which latterly includes even a frontal attack on the Constitution itself. They were perfectly happy to enjoy the protections of that document when they needed them, but now that they don't, the hell with it. 

The key to understand the Left, pretty much from Rousseau on, is that they believe in an "arc of history," which amazingly bends toward their preferred transient policy prescriptions in the here and now. It's a kind of misplaced messianism, with an imminent savior ready to descend to earth to establish a new kingdom of heaven, one in which they will witness the destruction of their enemies, and over which they will rule for ever and ever, amen. "The country is on fire," Trump reportedly wrote to Garland in a message sent after the raid. "What can I do to reduce the heat?"

Agog at Gog and Magog.

The answer, of course, is: nothing. Their belief in the righteousness of their destructive cause is practically biblical, as is their hatred for the Gog and Magog of this story, Donald Trump, his benighted supporters, and his MAGA country, who stand in the way of Progress and therefore must be liquidated. Trump's surprise election in 2016 caught them with their pants comfortably down around their ankles, Clinton-style, but they instantly mounted a counter-counter-revolution via the "Russian collusion" hoax, the Ukrainian impeachment fracas, and their nimble corruption of the January 6 protests in the aftermath of the "fortified" Biden election. And yet they know their fingernail-hold on power can all disappear this fall, and the specter of an enraged Trumpzilla returning to stomp them into matchsticks in 2024 absolutely terrifies them. As it should.

Like Caesar, they're playing for keeps now. Either they complete their overthrow of the Republic or, in Ben Franklin's memorable phrase, they'll all hang together. The die is cast: "by any means necessary"? You ain't seen nothing yet.

The E.V. Market: Mandated, Not Demanded

Over at the Wall Street Journal, Allysia Finley has a piece about the oddities of the Electric Vehicle market, which is driven almost entirely by government mandate. In practice this has meant that "a parade of electric-vehicle startups" found themselves with multibillion dollar stock valuations despite the fact that "most had never sold a single car." "Fueled by cheap credit and political subsidies," -- after all, our governing elite are convinced that E.V.s are the way of the future -- "their stocks surged, only to crash."

China, "the world leader in electric-vehicle production and exports," is seeing similar problems:

Beijing has set aggressive production quotas for car makers and provided generous subsidies for buyers. China’s annual electric-vehicle production capacity has ballooned to 5.7 million vehicles... and is expected to hit 15 million in a couple of years. Yet concerns are mounting in China about oversupply of what the country calls new energy vehicles. “Reckless investments and disorderly efforts can be seen in the country’s NEV industry,” Lin Nianxiu, vice chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, warned in March. “We have too many EV firms,” Xiao Yaqing, minister of industry and information technology, said in September. Some 200 Chinese EV startups have launched in the chase for government subsidies. Many have struggled to scale up production, and some have gone bankrupt.

Both cases illustrate something instructive about the Electric Vehicle market, which is that, overall, it is built upon a desire to circumvent that basic organizing principle of economics, demand. This is a struggle even in China's "state capitalism" economic model, which is much more comfortable dictating to consumers, rather than responding to them, than America's ostensibly free market system is.

In America, E.V. companies like those mentioned above sprung up in response to Democrat-enacted policies whose object was to create an industry more or less ex nihilo, while also smothering the traditional, gas-and-diesel driven automotive industry. But with inflation soaring, and the cost of minerals like cobalt, lithium, and nickel (which are necessary for the production of E.V. batteries) rising, even government subsidies can't cover the cost of doing business. Finley quotes representatives for the E.V. company Canoo (which, she mentions, is currently able to produce only 12 cars per week) as saying that “substantial doubt exists about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern” in the next year.

A kid could grow old and die...

Oddly, the only companies who seem able to take advantage of the regulatory preference for E.V.s (apart from Tesla, which consciously sells itself as a boutique status symbol for wealthy virtue signalers) are the established automobile manufacturers, who are essentially supporting their electric lines by means of government subsidies on the one hand, and gas-powered cars on the other.

But even they are struggling with our new economic realities. Finley mentions that Ford's new electric pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, is currently selling for only $10,000 more than the traditional model, and they hope that scaling up production will allow them to further bridge that gap. But, once again, the cost of E.V. manufacturing is going up, not down. The great hope of Ford and the other major automakers is that the government will keep throwing money at them (they've been "lobbying hard" for Biden's "Build Back Better" bill) until a major breakthrough in battery technology makes E.V.s financially self-sustaining. Unfortunately for them, that's not how innovation works.

So how will they -- green politicians and automakers on the take -- keep their electric dreams alive? Finley suggests that it will be through a combination of carbon taxation, emissions mandates, and other forms of government intervention, which will have the effect of making traditional cars more expensive rather than bringing the cost of E.V.s down. Unsurprisingly, letting consumer preference -- demand -- sort out these problems seems never to have occurred to them.

We're becoming more like China every day.

Desperate Times Mean Desperate Measures

One sign that the Democrats are getting increasingly concerned about their potential losses in the upcoming midterm elections is that they're frantically trying to find ways to, at least temporarily, deal with the soaring price of gasoline. The president's decision to further deplete the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a prime example, but it isn't the only one. Here are a few others:

Da Mayor.

California deserves its own special mention here. Golden State governor Gavin Newsom recently unveiled an $11 billion relief package in the hopes of combating the state's highest-in-the-nation gas prices. The average price in California recently hit $5.88 per gallon, though it has passed the $6 mark in many areas. As the Wall Street Journal notes dryly, "Gasoline prices in California are often higher than in other states due to higher fuel taxes and stricter regulations." No kidding. More than $1 billion of the Newsom proposal comes from the gas tax reduction.

The biggest chunk of money, however, is allocated to issuing $400 debit cards for all registered vehicle owners (with a two-car maximum). Unlike the Chicago gas card plan mentioned above, which is directed towards middle and lower income residents, Newsom's plan has no income cap. Neither is it targeted towards the owners of gas-powered cars. Electric vehicle owners are also eligible. For some reason. The cost: a cool $9 billion. Newsom also called for $750 million to be spent on free (at the point of service) public transportation for three months and, this writer's personal favorite, $500 million to "promote biking and walking."

Now, all of these plans are expensive workarounds which ignore more straightforward solutions. They're also transparently self-serving, temporary in nature, and of questionable efficacy -- as Jinjoo Lee recently argued, the degree to which these temporary cuts "translate to lower pump prices partly depends on the size of the market and how strained a region’s refining system is." Still, as vacation season approaches and the war in Ukraine drags on, it is better than nothing.

And, more important, it is a refreshing sign of politicians' accountability to the voters. To see the opposite response, here's Steven Guilbeault, former Greenpeace activist, and (God help us) Canada's current Environment Minister, explaining his opposition to proposed fuel taxes in that country. He said, "All of these crises will go, but climate change will still be there, and climate change is killing people." Guilbeault's party just made a deal that keeps them in power until 2025. He's not accountable to anyone.

Democrats’ Energy Spousal-Abuse Syndrome

Listening to Democrats suddenly begging the oil and gas industry to increase domestic output resembles nothing so much as the serial spouse-abuser who promises to be good, only to resume their abuse as soon as the cops leave, all the while pining to shower their cheap mistresses (in this case solar and wind energy) with ever more expensive gifts.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, to whom Donald Trump’s famous epithet “low-energy” applies better and more literally than to any other target, is begging the oil and gas industry to ignore the administration’s repeated assaults, and to carry on as if Trump was still in office:

We are on war footing. That means [crude oil] releases from the strategic reserves all around the world. And that means you producing more right now if and when you can. I hope your investors are saying this to you as well. In this moment of crisis, we need more supply. [Emphasis added].

Would those be the same investors that the Biden administration and woke capitalists like Black Rock’s Larry Fink are trying to intimidate from investing in fossil fuel production? The same companies for whom the Biden regime has sought to raise the cost of capital (with partial success already) through administrative harassment, such as setting the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission after them? The same industry whose viability the Biden administration’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is trying to hobble with restrictions on new oil and gas pipelines? Never mind proposed or half-built pipelines such as the Keystone XL.

Granholm: Big Nurse is not happy.

There are ongoing efforts to shut down existing pipelines such as Enbridge’s Line 5 pipeline under a small stretch of Lake Michigan that transports more than 500,000 barrels of Canadian oil and petroleum products a day to the U.S. A court has temporarily stopped Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s attempt to close Line 5, and FERC has abruptly halted its anti-pipeline rulemaking. But the crazed anti-pipeline activists will be back. The Biden administration is “studying” the issue, which means attempting to find another means to shut down Line 5, and FERC will surely return to its strangulating ways.

Asking the oil and gas industry to produce more oil while preventing new pipeline construction and shutting down existing pipelines is like asking the auto industry to produce more cars and trucks while tearing up existing roads and prohibiting new ones.

Unknown to most consumers, pipelines are the most versatile part of the energy supply chain, as they transport much more than crude oil between refineries. They can transport a wide variety of distillate products in addition to crude oil—propane in the particular case of Michigan’s Line 5—which adds to the overall resiliency and adaptability to consumer and industrial needs from the energy sector; Line 5 provides over half of the propane supply to propane-dependent parts of rural Michigan, for example. Non-pipeline transport, chiefly trains or trucks, is more expensive and difficult to secure.

Still other administration actions display its fundamental hostility to domestic oil and gas production. The Interior Department is dragging its feet on new required five-year plan for oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Due in June, the plan is far behind schedule, and in the absence of the new plan no new leases can be processed. (Needless to say, Interior’s plans for offshore wind power leases are breezing through the department’s review process very quickly).

On the surface a neutral observer might think the Biden administration’s current energy policy is schizophrenic. It is actually mendacious, and rests on a cynical calculation that both the oil and gas industry and finance capitalists won’t play along in the long run. The great irony of America’s self-inflicted energy disaster is that profits for incumbent oil and gas producers are soaring, as are their stock prices. So naturally Democrats are going back to the Jimmy Carter playbook and demanding a “windfall profits tax” on current energy producers. In other words, please produce more, but don’t expect to get to keep any profits from expanded activity!

"Windfall profits" tax, anyone?

Oil and natural gas, like real estate, have been prone to boom and bust periods for more than 50 years, as large global price epicycles have delivered fat profits in boom times and inflicted severe pain during recessions and cycles of overproduction. Following the most recent wave of bankruptcies in oil and gas over the last decade, the domestic industry and its investors have at last become more disciplined about production and investment strategies. Neither producers nor investors are likely to be taken in by the administration’s temporary relief of the government boot on their neck. They know that once the current “crisis” has passed, the beatings will resume.

The last missing piece of this maddening puzzle brings us back to the opening analogy of oil and gas as the abused spouse of American industry. The oil and gas industry, with precious few exceptions such as Chris Wright, founder and CEO of the comparatively small Liberty Oilfield Services, does not defend itself against the green onslaught. Most of the oil and gas majors implicitly apologize for providing a product everyone uses, and promise to “do better” (that is, go out of business slowly) just as the abused spouse will internalize blame for the bruises her husband inflicts.

Not since Mobil Oil’s Herb Schmertz (ironically a liberal Democrat most of his life) fought back against the left in his famous “advertorials” in leading news publications in the 1970s and 1980s has the petroleum industry made a sustained defense of itself. A major oil company that tried this today would likely face an internal revolt from its woke millennial staff in the HR and public-relations departments. But until and unless the petroleum industry stands up for itself again, the abuse at the hands of the left will intensify until they are beaten out of existence.

CCCP Redux -- Who Will Stop Them?

As we daily slip further under the yoke of illegal, unconstitutional, authoritarian – but so far unopposed – Democrat usurpation of liberty and law via their unconstitutional Covid-CRT-Climate Party (CCCP) power grab, it's important to remember America's history. We've been here before.

If one were to define "slavery" objectively, the issue that kicked off our bloodiest war when Democrat slaveholders attacked free America (600,000+ Americans dead), that definition of slavery would include human beings -- Americans -- being forced to:

No difference exists between the above objective description of slavery and government today by the CCCP Democrats. Democrats are the party of slavery. They always have been. They always will be. It's the core of their ideology. It is what authoritarianism is about. It is what “rule by experts” is about, which is what Progressivism is. Democrats are "true believers" in slavery now, slavery forever.

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Democrat voters either a) agree with and are comfortable with slavery, or b) are ignorant of America as it exists today and thus  supporting “Progressive” slavery out of intentional ignorance; they don't want to know. Knowing would get in the way of their un-examined ideology. There is no "option c."

The difference between now and 1861? Today, the slave owners own the government and are using all the powers of the government - judicial, legislative, executive, law enforcement, medical, military to enslave Americans.

The similarity? Free states & governors can, in fact within their job descriptions, their superior role under our Constitution, and their constitutional duty, must resist slavery, as did free Americans waging war against Democrats 160 years ago.

Then, slavery was based on race; today it is based on the chimera of “climate change,” the racism of CRT, and the Covid-19 house arrest across the West and “unwise,” unconstitutionally-mandated “vaccines,” crushing the hopes, dreams and livelihoods of tens of millions, all the while contributing to massive and unexpected increases in non-Covid hospitalization and excess deaths, child abuse, suicide, spousal abuse, and massive decreases in education of our youth, our economy and prosperity, and our free future.

The effect of these policies is the destruction of the Western middle class which, at this point, can only be seen by those paying attention as the goal of the Progressive globalists enforcing this neo-slavery. These people aren’t dumb; what they are doing to us is intentional.

The question is: will Americans take any and all actions necessary to end slavery - again - in America? Is liberty, law, government of the people by the people and for the people, still worth fighting for, for ourselves and our posterity? Or will you really, as the globalist elites say, be “happy owning nothing,” not even yourself? The clock is ticking.

Joe Biden's War on Suburbia

For 50 years environmentalists have told Americans that suburbs are bad. They are boring and conformist. There isn’t enough friction between different groups and classes to make life stimulating or spur deep thoughts. Living in single family homes, spread over large areas, is wasteful. This ruins the land. They consume too much energy. They require automobiles, which take too much energy, cause terrible pollution, and require additional roads, which are ugly, and lead to more suburbs… and so on.

So you’d think that the most woke, hard-left presidential campaign in American history would have a plan to make American cities better for those who live there, including the poor, especially at this moment when the middle class is fleeing irresponsible, profligate and unsafe urban governance, bad schools, and the density that leads to the spread of disease, like, say, Covid-19.

You'd be wrong. Last month, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden announced his housing policy platform, to great cheers from the socialist, Bernie Sanders wing of his party. There will be no enterprise zones to foster job growth in neighborhoods where intergenerational welfare dependence is common. Instead, Joe’s plan relies on shipping the poor to those boring, energy inefficient suburbs.

The Biden policy, called AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing), is couched in terms of racial "fairness." In fact, it is a radical plan that would crush the ability of American citizens to choose what kind of community in which to live. It would destroy the attributes that make the suburbs the destination of choice for 52% of Americans. We know this because the policy is not new. AFFH was widely imposed, and somewhat less widely implemented, during the Obama administration, by radical Housing and Urban Development secretary Julian Castro.

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) is a legal requirement that federal agencies and federal grantees further the purposes of the Fair Housing Act. This obligation to affirmatively further fair housing has been in the Fair Housing Act since 1968 (for further information see Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, 42 U.S.C. 3608 and Executive Order 12892). HUD's AFFH rule provides an effective planning approach to aid program participants in taking meaningful actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination.

As provided in the rule, AFFH means "taking meaningful actions, in addition to combating discrimination, that overcome patterns of segregation and foster inclusive communities free from barriers that restrict access to opportunity based on protected characteristics. Specifically, affirmatively furthering fair housing means taking meaningful actions that, taken together, address significant disparities in housing needs and in access to opportunity, replacing segregated living patterns with truly integrated and balanced living patterns, transforming racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity, and fostering and maintaining compliance with civil rights and fair housing laws. The duty to affirmatively further fair housing extends to all of a program participant's activities and programs relating to housing and urban development."

The nut of AFFH is a redefinition of the longstanding definition of “fair housing.” Traditionally that term meant no discrimination by race, sex, or other unalterable human attributes. The Obama Administration, by fiat, decided that “fair housing” would henceforth include economic class, as if civil rights for African Americans is synonymous with access to live in places that individuals cannot pay for. So, if not many people of a certain ethnic group live in a certain suburb, either because they cannot afford it, or they prefer somewhere else, that demonstrates racial discrimination. The remedy is forced integration by means of building low income and Section 8 housing for the poor and very poor, with an eye on creating a racial mix too.

The unspoken, because obvious, nature of American suburban life, is that people gravitate to places with other people who share their values. Those include safety; quality of schools; access to appropriate job markets; proximity to particular religious and cultural institutions; and social comfort. Most Americans, of all races, say that their priority is finding the best quality of public education they can afford.

Because suburban housing is allocated by the market – what can you afford to pay? – neighbors have a comparable stake in preserving the schools, the environment, and other goods. This is codified in local zoning laws, designed by local representatives, to create or preserve a town’s density, leafiness, school quality, and nature and location of commercial strips. It is not an overstatement to say that the Biden policy literally decimates each mechanism for preservation of local character. In the process it severely mitigates freedom of association, and, property rights as we have known them.

How?

Land in those leafy suburbs with zoning for one-acre lots, and homes starting in the mid-six figures, is way too expensive on which to build taxpayer funded housing. Which means that local zoning laws cannot stand. So local control cedes to federal mandates. Then HUD requires your town to build high density apartments to house people with half or less the local median income. Coming from urban projects, they usually don’t have cars. Now your town needs public transportation. It needs a denser commercial area, so people can shop without cars. The schools will have to spend money on programs to accommodate children with different educational needs. You need a bigger police force, because studies show that crime follows Section 8 housing. Et voila: your community is quasi-urban; the value of your property is down; and your taxes are higher, because you are now obligated to pay for the needs of your new neighbors.

Why?

As the middle class has been pushed out of many cities, leaving behind the very wealthy and the poor, urban tax bases have shrunk. Urban/poverty policy types want to send the poor to middle and upper middle-class suburbs, because that’s where the money is. They want access to the suburban tax base, to fund the ever-growing list of quasi-socialist demands, to provide luxuries in the name of "fairness," whether or not people have earned it.

While they’re at it, Democrats are happy to destroy the culture of individualism fostered by one family, one house. People who earn their way into better communities often vote Republican. Low-income people in high rises, dependent on public transportation, want different things from government. It’s not an accident that they are importing enough Democrats to change suburban political outcomes.

Why does an energy website care about this issue?

The Biden housing policy it is a clear example of how the left, working through issue organizations, and ultimately through Democratic administrations, will use any excuse – any real or imagined social and cultural problem—to steer this country towards socialism. Fifty years of stated environmental policy, based on energy concerns, pollution, and efficiency, are tossed the instant a plan to federalize the suburbs appears.

Funny thing: the Democrats have not changed their stated views on the harm to the environment caused by cars and suburbs. Candidate Biden’s energy policy, released this past week, allots $2 trillion to avert the destruction of the planet by getting rid of carbon emissions, building higher density communities, and lots of new public transportation. Even if no one wants to live in cities. So they push endless spending, destruction of the communities citizens have created organically, and ever-increasing federal control of every aspect of how Americans live, while forcing the struggling middle class to pay for those who, for whatever reason, cannot earn their way up the ladder.

Because it’s never about what they say. It’s about accruing power, by destroying individual rights.

With US Election Looming, Whither Fracking?

Fracking has become a hot-button issue on the Left, and for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's good for the American economy, so right off the bat it's bad. For another, it has something to do with icky fossil fuel extraction -- a messy business involving melted dinosaur juice that no right-thinking Harvard grad would want to get involved with. For another, it's the brutal rape of almost virginal Mother Gaia; if there's one thing the Left embraces wholeheartedly it's the pathetic fallacy, which attributes human emotions to inanimate or insentient objects.

The Democrats, naturally, object to fracking because all of the above, and reasons. As with everything they despise, they want to ban it, outlaw it, forbid it, demolish it, and destroy it. For your own good, of course.

The senile cardboard cutout once known as former vice president Joe Biden says he doesn't want to ban fracking -- a sure-loser proposition in his birth state of Pennsylvania and a state he must win in November to have a chance of unseating Trump. Especially, as the coronavirus lockdown hoax passes, with the economy bouncing back sharply. But the ideological, sentimental crazies in his party (e.g. everybody else) don't want to hear talk like that. Over at Real Clear Markets, Steve Milloy has the story:

Fracking is a key issue in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan where hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs depend the largely state-governed process of producing oil from shale rock formations.

During the primary campaign, Biden flip-flopped back and forth on banning fracking, finally alighting on an intermediary position where he wouldn’t ban fracking outright but would act to limit it on federally-owned lands. After Biden had cemented the nomination, the firebrand [Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez was named as a climate advisor and installed on the Democratic National Committee’s climate advisory panel.

In early June, the DNC Environment and Climate Crisis Council issued a report that called for “legislation permanently banning fracking and enhanced oil recovery and initiate a managed phaseout of existing operations.” The purpose of the report is to “recommend a sweeping set of policies for inclusion in the new four-year 2020 Democratic Party platform, which will be approved at the August convention.”

While it is not uncommon for presidential candidates and their party platforms to often diverge, is the fracking fracture between Biden and the Democratic Council more significant? Of course it is.

Read Milloy's piece in its entirety, which goes on to argue that the feeble, demented Biden will be a pushover for the radicals. But that gives Trump an opening, not only in places like Pennsylvania (the keystone to winning the election; if Trump loses Penn., it's over), but also Ohio, Michigan, Indiana -- all of which Trump won in 2016. The big prize of New York State, even in its declining dotage, could also be put into play. Thug governor Andrew Cuomo has banned it in his state, but long-suffering western New York and the Southern Tier would welcome it. Biden may think he's got NYS in the bag, but even a strong feint by the Trump campaign in the direction of Rochester, Buffalo, and Elmira could force Biden to play defense.

Biden may deny he would ban fracking. But the question for voters should be, would it really be up to him? Panicked Democrats are now trying to back away from the DNC report calling for the fracking ban. A “senior Democrat familiar with the DNC’s workings” said to Reuters of the recommended fracking ban, “It’s a nonstarter.” About the Ocasio-Cortez-led DNC climate panel, the understandably anonymous source said, “Nobody takes them seriously.”

That will be disconcerting news to the likes of Ocasio-Cortez and all the Bernie Sanders supporters who, as it is, already have to hold their noses and vote for Biden.

If he cares about his country at all, Biden has a chance to put down the AOC rebellion and do the right thing. But of course he won't.