I’m not a Donald Trump fan. From the start, I’ve detested him as a candidate but believed wholeheartedly in his “greatness agenda.” America first? Count me in. Build the wall? By all means. Straighten out trade. Reassert the national interest. Put China, North Korea, Iran, and Russia in their place. Make NATO pay up. Sounds good. Let’s go!
But let’s also not pretend. Trump is a marvelous entertainer but a poor politician. He was a mixed bag as president — great in some ways, terrible in others.
We know what a Harris-Walz administration will do, and that would spell disaster for the country.
He started no wars but failed to end any. (Maybe nobody could have.) The trade deals were good, the tax cuts were better, and the judges weren’t too bad — though Neil Gorsuch is no Antonin Scalia and Amy Coney Barrett is no great shakes.
Trump was not a good judge of character. At least half of his Cabinet undermined him at every turn, and a few were straight-up traitors. He could not manage the permanent bureaucracy, and in many ways the permanent bureaucracy managed him. And his deference to what my friend Lloyd Billingsley calls “white coat supremacy” during the COVID crisis was a downright disgrace.
Operation Warp Speed as Trump’s “greatest accomplishment”? Please. Even he doesn’t believe that any more.
But as my father often liked to remind me, “you can’t have nice things.” Or nice candidates. In the end, I was happy to vote for Trump in 2016 and I am happy to vote for him now, not because I think he can fulfill half of his promises but because I very much want Kamala Harris and all that she represents to lose.
In July 2016, I co-founded American Greatness, an upstart online journal with grand aspirations that has lately fallen on hard times. But I was an outlier at my own company at the beginning because I was the only one of three founders who was outspokenly and ostentatiously “NeverTrump.”
I know, I know. Stick with me here. It gets better, I promise.
Longtime readers of Blaze News know this company has published a variety of views on Trump over the years. Glenn Beck, Steve Deace, and Daniel Horowitz, among others, have been unsparing in their criticism of Trump at times. So I am not alone.
But we also understand the stakes. We aren’t going to sacrifice the country or our kids to vindicate some misbegotten or perverted sense of “honor.”
Politics often requires trade-offs. It’s important not to mistake policy preferences for high principles. Given the choice between deeply flawed and certain disaster, let us pray it remains true that “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”
When it came down to it, I voted for Trump in 2016, in cerulean blue California, because I despised his opponents more than I disliked him. My vote was a middle finger to his enemies … and to mine. That remains true today.
The fact is that they hate us. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and their confederates have spent the better part of eight years tarring Trump and his supporters as Nazis, fascists, “semi-fascists,” deplorables, domestic extremists, insurrectionists, and, most recently, “garbage.”
The very online left would say, “Well, if the shoe fits …” And I would say most of those people wouldn’t know a real fascist if a Blackshirt was kicking them in the face with a steel-toe boot while belting out “Giovinezza.”
Language is like currency. The late, great Lenny Bruce in his act more than 60 years ago tried to make the point that if you overuse a word — in his case, the N-word — you could drain it of its power. I’m not sure he succeeded in that case, but Democrats and leftists have done a fine job of taking the sting out of “Nazi” and “fascist.” Fascist, fascist, fascist. Nazi, Nazi, Nazi. All the time. They’ve debased the words. The barb is now worth less than a penny. It’s worth nothing at all.
Half the country, give or take, simply isn’t listening any more. The words no longer wound. They’re stripped of meaning. That’s been true for a while, I think. Eight years ago, when the claims were fresh, I wrote:
Enough of this. Snark will not do. Insinuation will not do. Conversation stoppers — “he’s a bigot,” “he’s a fascist” — absolutely will not do. “He’s a fascist” is not an argument. There can be no reasonable response. Over and over, reasonable people plead, “No, he’s not.” What they’re really saying is, “No, I’m not.” But who is listening? We’re called to be charitable. But what good is charity when the other side has made up its mind? The only fitting response is the middle finger. Or the back of the hand.
The politics of the middle finger are fine as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. We need a proper realignment. It’s been in the works for quite some time even if it’s been slow to manifest.
The “old” Republican Party — the party of Bush and Dole and McCain and Romney and McConnell and Ryan — abhors Trump and his America First agenda. Worse, these Republicans abhor and reject the base. Erstwhile “conservative” or “rock-ribbed” Republicans including Dick Cheney and Arnold Schwarzenegger have endorsed the obviously illiberal Harris. George W. Bush has stayed mum, but it’s not a stretch to think he’ll vote for Harris if he votes at all. She is the safe bet for establishment Republicans like him.
They would surrender their country to preserve their phony “honor” for … what? It isn’t honor at all. It’s self-interest. It’s a profound misunderstanding of politics. It’s a death wish. No, thank you.
Happily, their time has passed. They’re essentially Democrats now. They are finished, whether they realize it or not.
The realignment is real and it’s ongoing. The old left-right distinctions are losing their salience. But who knows where it will lead?
A dear friend the other day said to me, “I don’t want either one of them to win.” I sympathize, but too bad. You’re getting one or the other. The Vaunted Ron DeSantis Juggernaut never materialized, the Great NeverTrump Hope Nikki Haley flamed out (and ended up endorsing Trump anyway), and, tell me, who is the Libertarian Party’s candidate this year again?
On the eve of the 2016 election, I wrote, “For me, it isn’t a matter of Trump winning. All that matters is she loses.” Hillary Clinton was a criminal who said sinister things behind closed doors while peddling bromides and clichés to the public. She was wholly unacceptable, even if Trump was less than desirable.
My expectations for Trump are not much greater today than they were then. “Put not your faith in princes” (or Barrons), as the psalmist says. But the stakes are as great if not greater today than they were eight years ago. We know what a Harris-Walz administration will do, and that would spell disaster for the country.
We’re no longer having an argument. Our opponents have made it quite clear. When Harris speaks of “unity,” she means, for us, surrender and supplication. We have nothing left to discuss. If we have a decent chance at turning the country around for ourselves and our posterity, then like Trump or not, Kamala Harris must lose.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the House Judiciary Committee Monday that he now regrets the major role his company played not only in helping the Biden-Harris administration censor Americans' protected speech, but in suppressing critical information ahead of the 2020 election.
While unwilling to acknowledge its impact on recent American elections, Zuckerberg also indicated he will be terminating his "Zuck Bucks" scheme — ostensibly to alleviate some lawmakers' concerns about deep-pocketed partisans' election interference.
Although it's unclear whether Zuckerberg's admissions will be of any real-world consequence — impacting, for instance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s censorship lawsuit against the Biden-Harris administration — the committee nevertheless characterized his letter as a "big win for free speech."
Zuckerberg said in his damning letter addressed to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that in 2021, senior officials from the Biden-Harris administration, including the White House, "repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn't agree."
The committee has obtained ample evidence in recent months and years detailing the extent of Facebook's work with the Biden-Harris administration to silence criticism of the experimental COVID-19 vaccines, lockdown measures, and masking, along with other medically accurate information that undermined the Biden White House's preferred pandemic narrative, which it knew early on to be inaccurate.
'We own our decisions.'
For instance, an April 2021 email circulated by a Facebook employee, ostensibly on behalf of Zuckerberg and then-COO Sheryl Sandberg, noted that the Biden White House took issue with a "vaccine discouraging humorous meme," which it told the social media company to delete.
Blaze News previously reported that the verboten meme in question used the "Pointing Rick Dalton" template, borrowing a still from the 2019 film "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood," in which Leonardo DiCaprio's character points out something on television.
This meme, which the Biden White House wanted erased from the platform, was captioned, "10 years from now you will be watching TV and hear .... 'Did you or a loved one take the covid vaccine? You may be entitled ...'" and was apparently shared over 385,000 times.
Besides memes and medical facts, Facebook also dutifully censored content about the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, which is now the most credible account.
In his Monday letter, Zuckerberg admitted that despite knowing the "government pressure was wrong" and that his company could have told the Biden-Harris administration to pound sand, the company decided anyway to oblige the state, take content down, and censor users.
"Ultimately, it was our decision whether or not to take content down, and we own our decisions, including COVID-19-related changes we made to our enforcement in the wake of pressure," said Zuckerberg.
While Facebook was more than willing to comply with the Democratic administration's demands, Zuckerberg — possibly cognizant that he may soon be dealing with a Republican administration — indicated that the company is "ready to push back if something like this happens again."
Zuckerberg also acknowledged in his letter Facebook's suppression of an accurate report in the newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton ahead of the 2020 election.
"The FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election," wrote the Facebook CEO. "That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply."
"It's since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn't have demoted the story," added Zuckerberg.
Among the concerns raised in the New York Post's suppressed report was that a Burisma board adviser thanked Hunter Biden for introducing him to Joe Biden about a year before Biden allegedly extorted the Eastern European country as vice president to get the prosecutor investigating Burisma fired.
The report also hinted that Joe Biden, through his son and his own actions, may have been a compromised candidate and, at the very least, untruthful.
'Your enemies rigged the election and were rewarded with the White House.'
While Facebook worked to suppress the report, elements of the intelligence community antipathetic to President Donald Trump — including active elements of the security state — swooped in to shield Biden in the final weeks before the election, releasing a public letter on Oct. 19, 2020, asserting that the Hunter Biden laptop story had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation" intended to hurt the Democrat's candidacy.
Michael Morell, a former CIA deputy director, later testified to Congress that he organized the letter to "help Vice President Biden" but, more specifically, to help "him to win the election."
Zuckerberg assured Jordan in his letter that Facebook, having helped deliver to Biden a firm grasp on the 2020 election-time narrative and possibly the White House, has since changed its policies and process "to make sure this doesn't happen again," noting that content is no longer temporarily demoted while so-called fact-checkers decide whether it's fit for public consumption.
The Facebook CEO also addressed the contributions he made during the last presidential election to "support electoral infrastructure."
Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, dumped over $400 million into grants allegedly aimed at helping with election administration and voter accommodation. Critics have suggested that "Zuck Bucks" was alternatively a partisan scheme aimed at turning out more Democratic votes.
"They were designed to be non-partisan — spread across urban, rural, and suburban communities," wrote Zuckerberg. "Still, despite the analyses I've seen showing otherwise, I know that some people believe this work benefited one party over the other. My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a arole. So I don't plan on making a similar contribution this cycle."
"Zuck Bucks" may not be necessary in this election cycle, given that the federal government is actively working on fulfilling Biden's Executive Order 14019, which may prove far more effective at mobilizing Democratic voters.
While the committee called the letter a "big win for free speech," Blaze News columnist Auron MacIntyre noted, "No, a win occurs when your enemies pay a price. Is someone going to jail? Is someone getting impeached? Is anyone even getting fined? No, you just got a confession that your enemies rigged the election and were rewarded with the White House."
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Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) similarly suggested that the letter was too little, too late, writing, "Facebook may have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential race. Four years later, we get a letter saying 'sorry.'"
"Mark Zuckerberg comes clean and finally admits what everyone already knows he and META did to influence the 2020 election," wrote Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.)
Elon Musk responded to the letter, noting, "Sounds like a First Amendment violation."
Podcaster Patrick Bet-David speculated that there were three possible reasons Zuckerberg would have made these admissions: "1. He's being honorable[;] 2. He's done with the Dem party[; and/or] 3. He's getting ahead of a whistleblower."
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Failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris admitted on Wednesday that she knew every single attack she launched against President-Elect Donald Trump and his presidency was a bald-faced lie. More than twelve hours after Trump delivered a stunning blow to the regime and swept both the popular vote and Electoral College, Harris took the stage at Howard […]
This comes less than 72 hours after Trump avoided near-certain death by half an inch during an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.
If "Morning Joe" can't be trusted to deliver sound reporting on an issue that has no "two-sides," they surely can't be trusted on anything else, ever.
Fearmongering about ‘fascism’ is designed to distract Americans from recognizing the ideological poison that has infected our education system.
Biden's tariffs play on the good intentions of voters, but all they do is raise costs for consumers and businesses and undermine innovation.
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