Photo:Evan Vucci / AP

Volumes will be written about the scene in this picture.

Donald Trump was a great man even before a would-be assassin’s bullet hit his ear as he began to speak on Saturday, July 13, 2024, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, attended by tens of thousands of his passionately enthusiastic supporters. If the bullet had hit his head a centimeter further forward, or further back, or further up, it would have killed him. He ducked down, and when he rose again it was to the towering height of a political martyr. He raised his fist high, shouting his defiance, “Fight!”  – and won a permanent place among the greatest men in history. 

Despicable “Democrats” – and Leftists of every stripe – will try to bring him down. Corrupted institutions of the federal state will “investigate” the attempted assassination and find the victim guilty and themselves blameless.

But try as they will they cannot reduce his stature by so much as a centimeter.

*

Excerpts from Mark Steyn’s comment (italics and ellipses in the original):

Let’s cut to the chase – the US Secret Service: In on it? Or just totally crap?

And yet and yet… it’s hard to believe even these guys could be this crap.

A goofball barely out of high school hatched a plan to have Donald Trump’s head explode in close-up on live TV – and, wittingly or otherwise, the world’s most flush money-no-object security state did their best to help him pull it off.

What’s the old line? When seconds count, the police are minutes away? Not at a Secret Service event: even when the police are on site in massive overwhelming numbers, they’re still minutes away.

Not long before shots rang out, rallygoers noticed a man climbing to the roof of a nearby building and warned local police, according to two law enforcement officials.

One local police officer climbed to the roof and encountered Crooks, who pointed his rifle at the officer. The officer retreated down the ladder, and Crooks quickly took a shot toward Trump…

Uh-huh. Actually, over half-a-dozen shots – hitting the target, killing retired fire chief Corey Comperatore, and gravely wounding two others.

Thomas Matthew Crooks took his AR-15 to a political rally. And the reason he was permitted to do so is because he was ‘outside the security perimeter’ …yet still within range of the candidate’s head.

Does that make sense even by the arseholian standards of the federal government?

No. Even in rinky-dink no-account third-rate basket-cases, it’s understood that the first job of a protection detail is to establish where the lines of fire are, and neutralise them.

Can the failure to do that really be accidental?

Yet from the decision to demarcate the easily accessible rooftop as “outside the security perimeter” all else follows. Once it was determined by the Secret Service that the building with the spiffy line of sight was beyond their purview it ceased to be of any interest to them. So that fell to local law enforcement – and a village constable shinning up the ladder.

On Saturday, America came within an inch and a second of crossing a very dark Rubicon. As Trump reveals to Michael Goodwin in The New York Post:

The doctor at the local hospital, which has a trauma center, told him he’s never seen anyone survive getting hit by an AR-15.

Indeed. Because that’s what just happened. In 1981 Reagan was hit by a revolver; forty-three years of ever more extravagant security protocols later, a loser whose greatest accomplishment was a cameo in a BlackRock ad was able to hit the head of a president with his AR-15.

And this startling fact is of less concern to a corrupted American media than the fact that a few “loud bangs” at a Trump rally might provoke, ooh, a violent backlash from the crazy Maga types…

*

Kurt Schlichter writes (in part) at Townhall:

We already know the investigation is going to be a complete cluster because there’s apparently nobody in charge. The FBI is doing some stuff, the state police is doing some other stuff, and the Secret Service seems to be in full CYA [Cover Your Ass] mode. So, we’re not going to get any information about what really happened. We’re going to get lies, and the administration is going to issue some report assuring us that it did the very best job it could, and that Donald Trump was really at fault for getting in the way of those bullets. …

What’s the political effect of this going to be? More cynicism, all of it justified, by the American people. Yet another vaunted institution has failed to perform its job adequately. We’re getting used to it. When institutions are headed by quota queens selected for their adherence to Marxist ideology rather than competence, and when they prioritize their ridiculous ideology over the job the institution is supposed to do – whether it’s the Secret Service, the FBI, the military, the NFL, the DMV … – you’re going to get failure. And we’re tired of failure.

It doesn’t have to be this way. America doesn’t work anymore. That’s why you see social media filled with video clips of people living joyously in the amazing 80s. This nostalgia is because America worked back then, and it does not work now. Joe Biden represents the failed present. The secret of Donald Trump is that he represents both our glorious past and a future where things work, and if you screw up, you hear that “You’re fired.”

And that’s why Donald Trump’s glorious defiance on stage, lifting his fist and refusing to give in, was so inspiring. He is the avatar of our vision of ourselves as Americans. They attempted to kill him, but they really wanted to kill us and, for one of us, they succeeded. It won’t work, though. They can lie about us and create fake scandals. They can try and silence us. They can try to frame us in kangaroo courts. They can try to murder us. But we’re not going to quit. We’re not going to surrender. We’re going to win.

Raise your fists, patriot. America will be great again.

Will Donald Trump’s re-election to the presidency of the United States save us? Save America? Save the world? Or not?

Mark Steyn – in our judgment the best contemporary journalist – makes a case for no, but concludes with a sort of yes.

We quote him in part:

A governing party of a serious nation so indifferent to elementary maxims of prudence that it’s prepared to invent out of whole cloth crimes with which to convict the leader of the opposition is not one you’d want to bank on to keep us from stumbling into, say, a third world war.

The ruinous Democrats invented a crime-without-a-name to charge Donald Trump with, and then declared him guilty of it.

True, “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. But not this much.

So … right now there is no law in America, and, in consequence, no politics. So there is no point in pretending you enjoy benefit of either, and in doing so you’re just part of the problem. …

Oh, and I see that “former federal prosecutor” William Otis has just filed a column headlined “Why a Trump Conviction Will Be Reversed”. … [H]is legal reasoning would be fine if America were a land of laws, but unfortunately it’s a land of men …

Meanwhile, back in what passes for reality in the courts of New York, the exciting bit having concluded, we are now back to the leisurely proceduralist folderol: The corrupt Judge Méchant [sic – Steyn deliberately mis-spells Merchan’s name to make the point with the French word that he is wicked – ed] has scheduled sentencing for July 11th. … Let me see now, July 11th is, oh, a mere six weeks away, which torpor is also very familiar to me: my own verdict came down in February,* but the various post-trial motions keep getting kicked down that endless road.

July 11th is also, as it happens, four days before the GOP convention is due to start in Milwaukee. So, at a time when the presidential nominee should be practising his acceptance speech in front of his bedroom mirror, he will be a thousand miles away waiting to hear whether he is to be belatedly taken down.

Thus, Judge Méchant will have once again subordinated the election calendar to the caprices of his filthy courtroom.

In theory, Trump has been convicted of a crime and could be headed to gaol. Also in theory, his term of confinement could be put on hold pending the outcome of his appeal. But they didn’t do that with Peter Navarro, did they? And it seems highly unlikely to me that they would have gone to all this trouble for a fine and a suspended sentence. They want him dead. …

How will the people react to whatever happens on July 11th? Riots in Milwaukee? One can’t help noticing that, since the brutal January 6th prosecutions to the fullest extent of the law and then bulked up with “terrorism” charges by DC judges just as bad as this New York guy, there is little appetite for what Orwell called “turbulence”.

But, either way, Democrats figure that, however Trump supporters react, they can make this work for them …

So, right now, they’re making their plans for July 11th. Is anyone on the other side?

I will add one final thought born of my own experience. I am about to begin my thirteenth year in the foetid septic tank of the District of Columbia courts. My finances are ruined, and so is my constitution. By the latter, I mean my health, not the United States Constitution, which is already dead. By contrast, I’m just about hanging on, although I very much doubt I will live long enough to be vindicated at the Supreme Court. Which is bad news for my heirs and relicts. As one of the lawyers taunted me last year, “This doesn’t end with your death.”

I’m sad about that, and would much prefer to devote the time that remains to playing music and enjoying the sunsets. I am worn out, and bitter about the books I’ll never get to write because of the way American litigation has consumed what should have been my most productive years. I have a theological objection to suicide, but would not be averse to dying in my sleep.

And that’s just with two rinky-dink cases on the go.

Trump, on the other hand, is barraged at all turns – here, there, state, federal, civil, criminal. He has been subjected to all manner of indignities – such as, just this week, having to sit in the crappy courtroom while the jury deliberates, which Judge Irving did not force me to do in DC. …

Yet [the treatment of Trump by the court and the verdict] have … made him noble and heroic.

The mega-rich guy from Mar-a-Lago and Miss Universe and Trump Tower and The Apprentice decided to dedicate his final years to doing something for all those forgotten men in towns no one knows where all the factories got shipped to China and replaced by meth labs. And in return the worthless US establishment – the guys who took America’s post-war dominance and gave it away to the Politburo in return for “ten per cent for the big guy” [Joe Biden] – set about destroying him: a half-billion appeal bond in New York, an eviction from the ballot in Maine, a lawyer forced to cop a plea and turn state’s evidence in Georgia…

As I said, I’ve got just two lousy cases, and I’m ruined by it – because utter ruination is the difference between the American legal system and the rest of the west. I have no idea how Trump withstands the assault – a Gulliver besieged by litigious Lilliputians on all sides.

Much of the United States – certainly the bits that matter – is now institutionally evil, and I am not sure that evil can be reversed, whether we’re talking about the bodily mutilation of middle-school girls or the sacrifice of a generation of a distant nation’s men in the meat-grinder of the Ukraine war. On America’s watch, the entirety of western civilisation is sliding off the cliff, and very fast – which is all anyone will remember about it.

And yet any alternative to the Uniparty consensus is not to be permitted, and must be hunted down and crushed. There is no future in the post-constitutional polity the Democrats are constructing. “Decline” is a choice … America’s death will be bloodier and more convulsive than anything seen in post-imperial Europe. Check back with me in ten years, and see who’s right.

For the moment, the Dems are, as always, three steps ahead. A lot can happen between now and July 11th, and much of it is undoubtedly already underway.

So … It is now absolutely essential that Trump be elected president.

***

*The case of Michael Mann versus Mark Steyn can easily be found on the internet.

Jillian Becker    December 12, 2022

Can you trust your doctor to be qualified in Medical Science? Or was he awarded his degree because he scored a pass in Diversity Studies?

Beware! The latter is more likely now to be the case.

“Medical schools and medical societies are discarding traditional standards of merit …,”  Heather Mac Donald writes in an authoritative and important article at City Journal which we quote in part.

Why are they doing that?

“… in order to alter the demographic characteristics of their profession.”

Virtually every major medical organization—from the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC) to the American Association of Pediatrics—has embraced the idea that medicine is an inequity-producing enterprise. The AMA’s 2021 Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity is virtually indistinguishable from a black studies department’s mission statement. … Physicians must “confront inequities and dismantle white supremacy, racism, and other forms of exclusion and structured oppression, as well as embed racial justice and advance equity within and across all aspects of health systems”. The country needs to pivot “from euphemisms to explicit conversations about power, racism, gender and class oppression, forms of discrimination and exclusion”.  (The reader may puzzle over how much more “explicit” current “conversations” about racism can be.)

In other words, the policy-makers of the profession, being convinced that Blacks are innately less  intelligent than Whites and Asians, are lowering standards and introducing new criteria of evaluation by requiring skills in hitherto unrelated subjects (such as “communication and interpersonal skills”), in order to have more black doctors. Their motive is impeccably virtuous. Blacks must be saved from feeling inferior.

(It doesn’t apparently strike them that by lowering standards to achieve this aim they are declaring their firm belief that Blacks are inferior.)

Of course they never say they think Blacks are less brainy than Whites and Asians. They claim that the reason Blacks generally score lower in exams is because they are subjected to race prejudice and discrimination.* They are therefore less healthy, and therefore less able to study.

In accordance with the idea that racism causes racial health disparities, they are changing the direction of medical research, the composition of medical faculty, the curriculum of medical schools, the criteria for hiring researchers and for publishing research, and the standards for assessing professional excellence. They are substituting training in political advocacy for training in basic science. They are taking doctors out of the classroom, clinic, and lab and parking them in front of antiracism lecturers.

If this is not done, the medical school’s existence may be terminated:

Faculty are responsible for teaching how to engage with “systems of power, privilege, and oppression” in order to “disrupt oppressive practices”. Failure to comply with these requirements could put a medical school’s accreditation status at risk and lead to a school’s closure.

These exotic ideological obligations cannot be shrugged off by the trained doctor once he has his degree and starts practicing his profession:

According to the AAMC, newly minted doctors must display “knowledge of the intersectionality of a patient’s multiple identities and how each identity may present varied and multiple forms of oppression or privilege related to clinical decisions and practice”.

Research will be well funded – provided it is spent  on advancing the ideological doctrine:

They have shifted billions of dollars from the investigation of pathophysiology to the production of tracts on microaggressions.

Funding that once went to scientific research is now being redirected to diversity cultivation. The NIH and the National Science Foundation are diverting billions in taxpayer dollars from trying to cure Alzheimer’s disease and lymphoma to fighting white privilege and cisheteronormativity.

Which means that “white privilege” and “cisheteronormativity” (translation: being of European extraction and sexually normal) are worse afflictions than Alzheimer’s disease and lymphoma.

Private research support is following the same trajectory. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute [HHMI] is one of the world’s largest philanthropic funders of basic science and arguably the most prestigious. Airline entrepreneur Howard Hughes created the institute in 1953 to probe into the “genesis of life itself”. Now diversity in medical research is at the top of HHMI’s concerns. In May 2022, it announced a $1.5 billion effort to cultivate scientists committed to running a “happy and diverse lab where minoritized scientists will thrive and persist” in the words of the institute’s vice president. “Experts” in diversity and inclusion will assess early-career academic scientists based on their plans for running “happy and diverse” labs. Those applicants with the most persuasive “happy lab” plans could receive one of the new Freeman Hrabowski scholarships. The scholarships would cover the recipient’s university salary for ten years and would bring the equivalent of two or three NIH grants a year into his academic department. If an applicant’s “happy lab” plan fails to ignite enthusiasm in the diversity reviewers, however, his application will be shelved, no matter how promising his actual scientific research.

The HHMI program and others like it amplify the message that doing basic science, if you are white or Asian, is not particularly valued by the STEM establishment. How many scientific breakthroughs will be forgone by such signals is incalculable.

It is a sad and dangerous policy for all of us frail mortals. A “doctor” well trained in the recognition of unconscious racism but not necessarily in biochemistry and pathology cannot be relied on to make an accurate diagnosis. As the author says, “The proponents of the systemic racism hypotheses are making a large bet with potentially lethal consequences.”

[The doctrine] that health disparities are necessarily the product of systemic racism has devalued basic science and encumbered medical research with red tape. The fight against cancer has been particularly affected. White and Asian oncologists are assumed to be part of the problem of black cancer mortality, not its solution, absent corrective measures. According to the NIH, leadership of cancer labs should match national or local demographics, whichever has a higher percentage of minorities.

As in all ideologies, logic is dispensed with, and the dogma does not stand up to critical scrutiny:

The AMA’s Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity sneers at “discredited and racist ideas about biological differences between racial groups”. If race does not exist, as received wisdom now has it, then the racial makeup of clinical trials should not matter.

But it matters more than anything else to the Embedders of Racial Justice and the Advancers of Health Equity.

In May 2022, a physician-scientist lost her NIH funding for a drug trial because the trial population did not contain enough blacks. The drug under review was for a type of cancer that blacks rarely get. There were almost no black patients with that disease to enroll in the trial, therefore. Better, however, to foreclose development of a therapy that might help predominantly white cancer patients than to conduct a drug trial without black participants.

In another case, in which applicants competed for a grant –

… the runner-up possessed a research and leadership record that far surpassed that of the winning candidate. But he lacked the favored demographic characteristics.

Much talent is being lost to medical science because of “anti-racist” bigotry.

[T]he diversity push is discouraging some scientists from competing at all. When the chairmanship of UCLA’s Department of Medicine opened up, some qualified faculty members did not even put their names forward because they did not think that they would be considered …

The HHMI program and others like it amplify the message that doing basic science, if you are white or Asian, is not particularly valued by the STEM establishment. How many scientific breakthroughs will be forgone by such signals is incalculable.

***

Footnote:

*Heather Mac Donald provides these figures and facts about medical school admissions:

In 2021, the average score for white applicants on the Medical College Admission Test [MCAT] was in the 71st percentile, meaning that it was equal to or better than 71 percent of all average scores. The average score for black applicants was in the 35th percentile—a full standard deviation below the average white score. The MCATs have already been redesigned to try to reduce this gap; a quarter of the questions now focus on social issues and psychology.

Yet the gap persists. So medical schools use wildly different standards for admitting black and white applicants. From 2013 to 2016, only 8 percent of white college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs [grade point averages] and below-average MCAT scores were offered a seat in medical school; less than 6 percent of Asian college seniors with those qualifications were offered a seat … Medical schools regarded those below-average scores as all but disqualifying—except when presented by blacks and Hispanics. Over 56 percent of black college seniors with below-average undergraduate GPAs and below-average MCATs and 31 percent of Hispanic students with those scores were admitted, making a black student in that range more than seven times as likely as a similarly situated white college senior to be admitted to medical school and more than nine times as likely to be admitted as a similarly situated Asian senior.

Such disparate rates of admission hold in every combination and range of GPA and MCAT scores. Contrary to the AMA’s Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity, blacks are not being “excluded” from medical training; they are being catapulted ahead of their less valued white and Asian peers.

All those who with their votes or their assistance in the ballot-cheating got the Democrats into power, are guilty of destroying the America that was free, prosperous, ruled by law, and protected by a well-trained well-equipped military.

Now we are not only poorer, but impeded in all we do. Travel? You may need certification. Learn? Only approved topics and authorized dogma. Start a business? Get a license.

Every institution on which we used to be able to rely, has been corrupted, weakened, or destroyed.

The presidency was captured by fraud. A duly elected Republican president was twice impeached for no offense, no crime, while the offenses or crimes he was accused of were openly and brazenly committed by his accusers, including the fraudulent official who succeeded him by crookery.

We can no longer rely on the rule of law. Real insurrectionists who torched city centers, looted, murdered, threatened governmental authority, go unpunished, while people who walked into the Capitol and out again a few minutes later are imprisoned without trial for a year, ill-treated, and finally threatened with long prison sentences if they don’t confess to criminal acts they never performed – which will send them to prison anyway. The initiators of the “Russia-collusion” hoax – Hillary Clinton and her political lieutenants – have not been called to account. Applicants for legal immigration are kept waiting for years, while illegal aliens pour over the border unimpeded and are immediately given housing, schooling, health care, and even voting rights.

The House of Representatives is the staff quarters of a vindictive old woman. The Senate can be toyed with by a moronic vice-president.

The Supreme Court  is under threat of extinction. The junta in power wants to turn it into a rubber-stamping bureau that will support one party rule forever. 

Victor Davis Hanson writes at the Daily Signal:

Court-packing—the attempt to enlarge the size of the Supreme Court for short-term political purposes—used to be a dirty word in the history of American jurisprudence.

The tradition of a nine-person Supreme Court is now 153 years old. The last attempt to expand it for political gain was President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed effort in 1937. FDR’s gambit was so blatantly political that even his overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress rebuffed him.

Yet now “court packing” is a law school cause celebre. It is hailed as a supposedly quick fix to reverse the current 5-4 conservative majority.

Recently, a rough draft of an opinion purportedly overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion in all 50 states was leaked to the media by someone inside the court.

That insider leak of a draft opinion was a first in the modern history of the Supreme Court. It violated all court protocols. Yet it was met with stunning approval from the American left.

The leaker either intended to create a preemptive public backlash against the purported court majority in the hope that one or two justices might cave and switch under pressure—or to gin up the progressive base to fend off a likely disaster in the November midterm elections.

The recent leak, however, is consistent with a left-wing assault on the court that has intensified over the last five years. Democrats have gone ballistic ever since former President George W. Bush’s and especially former President Donald Trump’s appointees solidified a conservative majority.

During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in 2018, protesters stormed the Senate chambers in protest. …

Later in spring 2020, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., whipped up a protest crowd right in front of the Supreme Court. He directly threatened Justices Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh:

I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

What exactly did Schumer mean by “you will pay the price” or “you won’t know what hit you”?

Who or what would hit the two justices—and how exactly?

But it is not just the court the left is targeting. Long-standing institutions and even constitutional directives are now fair game.

At the 2020 funeral of Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., former President Barack Obama crudely proposed bringing in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states—and with them likely four left-wing senators.

Obama’s “eulogy” also damned the 180-year-old Senate filibuster. Yet as a senator, Obama himself resorted to the filibuster in an effort to block the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

The Electoral College is under continued assault, especially since Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 were elected without winning the popular vote.

The Founders’ arguments for the Electoral College are never mentioned. But the drafters of the Constitution felt it forced candidates to visit rural areas. They believed it would discourage European-style multiple splinter parties. It made voter fraud more difficult on a national scale. And it emphasized the United States of America. That is, America today is 50 unique states that are represented as such in presidential elections.

The Biden administration also narrowly failed to push through a national voting law. Such legislation would have superseded the states’ constitutional rights to set most of their own balloting protocols in national elections.

So what is behind leaking Supreme Court drafts of impending opinions, or seeking to pack the Supreme Court with 15 justices, or ending the Senate filibuster, or adding two more states to the 60-year-old, 50-state union, or curtailing states’ rights to set their own balloting procedures, or trashing the Constitution’s Electoral College? …

And how can Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas openly negate federal immigration law? How can he welcome millions to cross illegally the southern border?

The answers are obvious.

The hard left had detoured from the mainstream of American voters onto a radical trajectory. So it will never find 51% public approval for any of its current extremist and crackpot initiatives.

Instead, it sees success only through altering the rules of governance or changing the demography of the electorate—or both.

Has any institution not been deliberately spoiled? Is any activity, if not yet prohibited, left free of government regulation?

The banking system has become so byzantine that quite simple transactions, such as sending a payment abroad, takes days or even weeks to complete.

The schools and universities have been changed into indoctrination seminaries.

The mainstream media are as meekly submissive to the junta as a silly woman to a domineering husband.

The police are defunded, demoralized, weakened, disarmed, reduced in number, abused –  even murdered with impunity.

As for the army …These quotations are  from How Obama and Biden Destroyed the Greatest Military the World Has Ever Seen by Daniel Greenfield.*

Under Biden [“Biden” being the name of the president and so of the administration, though the man himself is senile and does not make the decisions propagated in his name], genocide and terrorism have become cultural norms that we are bound to accept.  (p.4)

China might beat us in the hypersonic weapons race, but America’s top military brass were determined to pull out all the stops to make sure they had the most diverse arrangement of incompetent radicals, preferably in senior leadership positions, to establish their progressive credentials. (p.10)

Obama didn’t just leave the military smaller in size, but smaller in spirit, its leadership class no longer dedicated to national security, but to the identity political agendas of the radical Left. (p.11)

Obama remade the military just as he remade the nation, from a team based on individual worth into a broken system divided by the intractable gulfs of oppressors and the oppressed. No military organization can function that way and no nation can survive that way.  (pp. 11, 12)

Long before the Taliban entered Kabul, the moral struggle had already been lost in Washington D.C. While the Taliban were carving up Afghanistan, the nation’s military leaders were busy implementing racial quotas, imposing implicit bias training, and teaching military personnel to hate their country through critical race theory. (pp.12,13)

There has been no accountability for the political leaders and military brass who wrecked the military. And none for those who were responsible for our defeat in Afghanistan. Patriots are being driven out while the disloyal leaders responsible for purging them and enabling the Taliban remain in charge. (p.62)

All that at a time when the US is faced with a more dangerous threat of attack than the nation has ever had to confront before.

Quotations from an article  by Judith Bergman at Gatestone:

China is putting up satellites at twice the rate of the United States and fielding operational systems at an incredible rate.

Look at what they [CCP) have today…. We’re witnessing one of the largest shifts in global geostrategic power that the world has witnessed.

The Chinese are building up their military capabilities in space, cyberspace, and in the conventional force. It’s all happening at the same time.

There is now as well the added probability of China and Russia engaging in military coordination…. a strategic partnership of “no limits” and with “no forbidden areas” in an agreement that they said was aimed at countering the influence of the United States.

Meanwhile, the Left has already captured and destroyed the free republic of America. It no longer influences the world for the better. It is ripe and ready for Chinese Communist conquest. 

Can the free republic be resurrected? Can America be saved?

*Published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, PO Box 55089, Sherman Oaks, CA 91499-1964

Britain’s great conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, said: “Britain was created by history, America was created by philosophy.”

What were the principles of America’s foundational philosophy?

• Freedom: freedom of the individual, and so, logically, freedom of conscience, speech, publication,  assembly; property ownership and a free market.
• The rule of law under which all are equal.
• Government by the people themselves to protect their freedom with the rule of law, and with military strength against foreign enemies.

All those principles are now being abandoned by usurping powers, to be replaced with contrary ideals.

The systems and institutions that proceeded from them are being corrupted and turned from their intended purposes to serve opposite ends.

Victor Davis Hanson writes at Townhall:

Conservatives now have lost their former traditional confidence in the administration of justice, in the intelligence and investigatory agencies, in the nation’s military leadership, in the media, and the criminal justice system.

Freedom is much diminished, especially with the forced quarantine and masking of the healthy in an epidemic of Covid flu, and threatened penalties for those who refuse vaccination.

The rule of law is scoffed at by those who should enforce it.

As Victor Davis Hanson says:

The American criminal justice system also used to earn the respect of conservatives. Prosecuting attorneys, police chiefs, and big-city mayors were seen as custodians of the public order. They were entrusted to keep the peace, to prevent and investigate crime, and to arrest and prosecute criminals.

Again, not so much now.

After 120 days of mostly unchecked riot, arson, looting, and violent protests during the summer of 2020, the public lost confidence in their public safety agencies.

District attorneys in several major cities – Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and St. Louis – have often predicated prosecuting crimes on the basis of ideology, race, and careerism.

In the current crime wave, brazen lawbreakers enjoy de facto immunity. Mass looting goes unpunished. Indictments are often aimed as much against those who defend themselves as against criminals who attack the innocent.

Government by the people has been corrupted by electoral fraud. And the military cannot be relied on to protect the nation:

Mention the military to conservative Americans these days, and they unfortunately associate its leadership with the disastrous flight from Afghanistan. Few, if any, high-ranking officers have yet taken responsibility – much less resigned – for the worst military fiasco of the last half-century.

Instead, President Joe Biden and the top generals traded charges that the other was responsible for the calamity. Or both insisted the abject flight was a logistical masterpiece.

Never in U.S. history have so many retired four-star admirals and generals disparaged their president with charges of being either a traitor, a liar, a fascist, or a virtual Nazi, as occurred during the last administration.

Never has the proper advisory role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff been so brazenly usurped and contorted.

Never has the secretary of defense promised he would ferret out alleged “white supremacists” without providing any evidence whatsoever of their supposedly ubiquitous presence and dangerous conspiracies.

Worse, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff informed the hostile Communists who govern China that he would warn them if President Trump decided to attack their country with nuclear weapons.

Victor Davis Hanson concludes:

No one yet knows what the effect will be of half the country losing faith in the very pillars of American civilization.

Does it mean that the experiment of creating a nation from a benign philosophy has failed?

… from triumph to abasement.

“So, the Left won its Pyrrhic victory,” Victor Davis Hanson writes at American Greatness.

Having control of the White House and both Houses  of Congress, what have the Democrats accomplished with all that power?

Their priority was to undo what President Trump had done.

What followed was a concerted effort to destroy the Trump record.

What had Trump achieved? Most importantly –

The greatest level of combined annual natural gas and oil production in any nation’s history, record low minority unemployment and near record peacetime, general unemployment, a border secure and illegal immigration finally under control, and a New Middle East in which Israel and its Arab enemies concluded neutrality pacts. China was put on notice for its past mockery of global norms. Inflation was low, growth was good. “Stagflation” was still a rarely remembered word from the past. …

Then came the rule of the Left and –

Within eight months the following was finalized [by the Democrats]:

Joe Biden utterly destroyed the idea of a border. Some 2 million were scheduled to cross illegally in the current fiscal year. The sheer inhumanity of deplorable conditions at the border surpassed any notion of the “cages” Donald Trump, in fact, had inherited from the humanitarian Barack Obama.

A war almost immediately broke out in the Middle East, once Biden distanced the United States from Israel and rebooted the radical Palestinian cause.

The Taliban defeated the 20-year effort of the United States in Afghanistan, in the most humiliating withdrawal of the American military in over 45 years. Tens of billions of dollars of abandoned military equipment now arm the Taliban and have turned Afghanistan into a world arms mart for terrorists.

Whereupon –

Iran is emboldened and speeds up its nuclear proliferation efforts.

China brags that the United States has been Afghanistanized and will not defend its allies, Taiwan in particular.

At home, gas prices have soared.

Prior trillion-dollar deficits now seem financially prudent in comparison to multitrillion-dollar red ink.

The nation is more racially polarized than at any time in the last half-century.

A bleak and venomous woke creed has outdone the hate and fear of the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as it wages war on half the nation for various thought crimes …

With Biden came not just woke polarization, stagflation, a subsidized ennui that erodes the work ethic, and selective non-enforcement of existing laws: wors, still, we got a bankrupt ideological defense of these insanities. Critical legal theory, critical race theory, and a new monetary theory were all dreamed up by parlor academics to justify the nihilism.

And among the shocks administered to Americans as their country fails and falls, acts of treachery and deeds of corruption:

Did America ever believe that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would trash his commander in chief as Hitlerian to journalist hitmen, or allegedly denounce news organizations as “terrorists”, or interrupt the chain of command on a prompt by the Speaker of the House, or warn the Chinese military that he believed there was enough instability in the White House to justify a promise to warn of any impending U.S. military action against Beijing deemed offensive? …

With Biden, China is now omnipresent in the halls of power. A task of our chief COVID advisor, Anthony Fauci, seems to be to deny repeatedly that his stealthy funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan virology lab in China had anything to do with the likely accidental release of a likely human engineered and energized coronavirus. Americans still cannot even imagine that their government might have helped subsidize the plague germ that has wrought such havoc upon them.

Meanwhile the president’s son still owns a 10 percent cut in a communist Chinese government-affiliated financial venture, apparently due to his prior drug-addled record of financial mismanagement. The media still insists Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation”, while his paint-by-numbers art is auctioned off to foreign lobbyists expecting a return of the old days when Hunter and Joe grandly arrived on Air Force Two to do their bidding.

All who voted for Trump are declared to be “white-supremacists’ and “terrorists”. Peaceful protestors are labeled “insurrectionists” and locked up without charge as political prisoners, while  violent protestors are called “peaceful”. The “peaceful” rioters, arsonists, and killers are alone exempted from having to wear masks in obedience to the absurd restrictions imposed on the rest of the nation in the time of pestilence, on the grounds that their ideological correctness sanitizes and immunizes them.

Our esteemed retired military and civil libertarians who had damned the mere thought of using federal troops to quell the prior four summer months of continuous rioting were suddenly happy to see 25,000 federal soldiers patrol Washington to hound out fantasy second-wave insurrectionists. …. There were now to be good federal troops deterring mythical violent domestic extremists, but bad federal troops who should never stop real, ongoing mayhem in the streets.

When there were –

120 days of continuous rioting, looting, and arson. In the election-year summer 2020, federal courthouses and iconic buildings were torched. Nearly $2 billion worth of property was destroyed and 28 were killed. Yet Vice President Kamala Harris rallied the public to help bail out the arrested. … The weeks of “spontaneous” mayhem magically vanished after November 3, 2020 [when Biden “won” the election]. Note that esteemed medical professionals argued that BLM protestors who flooded the streets were exempt from quarantine, social distancing, and mask requirements, given their higher morality.

Convicted criminals have been let out of prison by the thousands. The innocent are punished. The guilty go free – and are rewarded.

America’s undoing has taken less than a year.

Fertile, mineral rich, naturally glorious, splendidly developed, constitutionally orderly South Africa, with equality under the law and a relatively free economy, is fast becoming just another African hellhole.

It is now in a sharp and probably irreversible decline caused by the misrule and corruption of the ANC (African National Congress), which has been in power since exclusive white rule ended in 1994.

Its first black president, Nelson Mandela, was a communist who saw the sense of keeping the country capitalist. It seemed set fair to prosper – even though free enterprise was hampered by labor-protection laws made to conciliate the powerful trade unions.

The ANC, Mandela’s party, promised jobs and good housing for all. But unemployment grew, largely because of the laws protecting black employment, and shanty-towns remained, worsened, and proliferated.

As the ANC continued to rule in callous arrogance (and still does), the power-stations became unreliable and electricity cuts ever more frequent; roads were not repaired; water-supplies and the postal service became unreliable; hospitals were closed; education was rotten. The government looted the country. Civil servants and politicians took bribes for favors. (Recently, Covid relief money never reached anyone to provide relief, it simply “disappeared”.)

Mandela was succeeded in 1999 by Thabo Mbeki, whose deputy president for six years was Jacob Zuma. Mbeki dismissed him in 2005 because his reputation had become scandalous for rape and corruption. Zuma was nevertheless elected leader of the ANC in 2007, and as such became president of South Africa in 2009. His presidency ended in 2018 and Cyril  Ramaphosa’s began.

After he left office, sixteen criminal charges were brought against Zuma for fraud, racketeering, money-laundering in connection to illegal arms-dealing. He tried to get them struck down but failed. He refused to appear before a commission investigating government corruption when ordered to do so by the Constitutional Court. So on June 29, 2021 he was sentenced to 15 months in jail for contempt of court and given until July 7 to turn himself in. When he did not, the police went to his home to arrest him. They found huge crowds of his supporters surrounding his house.

Jani Allan, ex-South African journalist now living in the US, describes the scene, writing at RT:

Thousands of his supporters traveled at the weekend to Zuma’s home village of Nkandla in Kwa-Zulu Natal, to form a human shield to prevent him from being arrested … Zulus wearing traditional garb and carrying shields and knobkerries toyi-toyi’ed and sang ‘struggle’ songs.

But Zuma surrendered to the police and was taken to jail.

On July 9 , the high court of  the province heard and rejected his challenge to the fifteen-month sentence, which he brought on the grounds that he was 79 years old and jailing him in the midst of the Covid epidemic was tantamount to a death sentence.

Protests against his imprisonment erupted, and quickly became violent. Looting, arson, and massive destruction followed, not only in the province of KwaZulu-Natal but also in Guateng, in and near Johannesburg.

R. W. Johnson, emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, who lives in South Africa and has written extensively about it, writes at Quillette:

The explosion of violence followed the jailing of former President Jacob Zuma on a charge of contempt for refusing to appear before the Commission of enquiry into the wholesale looting of the state which took place under his presidency. Nobody seriously doubts that Zuma stole millions, probably billions of Rands and he still faces a long list of charges for racketeering, money-laundering and sundry other crimes. But Zuma still has a large following among his Zulu followers and effectively threatened to make the country ungovernable if the government dared to jail him. …

Once the rioting and looting of shops and hijacking of trucks on the highway began, with the police clearly scared and ineffective, word rapidly spread that you could go “shopping without money”, creating huge excitement among the ranks of the millions of poor and unemployed Zulus who inhabit the townships and squatter camps around Durban and Pietermaritzburg, and from there spreading into every small town of the province. Most of the looters and miscreants were unconcerned about Zuma’s fate. They simply heard along the grapevine that trouble was going on and realised that opportunity was staring them in the face.

They flocked in huge numbers to the shopping malls and began to loot them. Quickly the spree spread to Johannesburg, home to many more Zulus—though many others joined in. It was a whole-of-community thing: most of the looters were poor and on foot but not a few arrived in cars, sometimes very expensive cars. Some even came with vast trailers to haul away freezers, fridges, and cookers. Huge queues of cars swamped the freeways, all heading for the malls, and other forms of criminality blossomed—protection rackets, attacks on and thefts from other motorists, anything that offered a quick buck.

In a sense this had been coming for a long time. When the ANC was first elected in 1994 its posters promised “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” but paid little heed to that once they were elected. In 1995 the average number of unemployed, according to official figures, was 1,698,000 or, if one took the expanded definition of unemployment, including those who had given up looking for a job, the figure was 3,321,000. With only a few exceptional periods to the contrary, that figure has grown steadily and hugely to surpass 11.4 million today. Since the unemployed have little or no income, this has also meant a huge growth in both poverty and inequality. The ANC has routinely deplored poverty and inequality but it has generally tried to pretend that this is part of the “apartheid inheritance”. As the figures show, this is the opposite of the truth.

If you assume that each of those 11.4 million has two or three dependants, we are talking of households comprising 30 million people—half the entire population or even more. They are, for the most part, sitting in shacks, cold, hungry, without alcohol (banned as part of the COVID lockdown), insecure, with nothing to do and with almost no hope of a job. It is a picture of pure misery. These are the greatest victims of ANC misrule. Many of them are young people who have never worked in their life and who have given up hope that they ever will. For the young women among them prostitution is almost their only hope of an income. One looter, when interviewed on TV, frankly admitted that he stole every day because otherwise his 15 year old sister would “have to sleep with a grandad”. 

In practice the plight of the unemployed and poor has been ignored. The government is far more concerned with the “haves” within its coalition—the BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) capitalists, the public sector workers and the trade union bosses. …

Government is attentive to the trade unions of those in work but all it has for the unemployed is crocodile tears. … South Africa’s tight labour laws greatly privilege those in employment, giving the unemployed little opportunity to compete for jobs. Moreover, the huge weight of endemic corruption together with inept policy choices means that South Africa is now in its seventh consecutive year of falling real per capita incomes. People are getting steadily poorer and COVID lockdowns have increased the misery, costing many jobs.

If people who are ignored and treated like this are told that the time has arrived for shopping without money, how can one be surprised that they respond in such numbers and with such enthusiasm? That sort of shopping is fun and exciting and you end up with food, drink, and a new TV. …

There are also clearly political elements trying to make the country ungovernable by attacking key pieces of infrastructure—there have been attacks on reservoirs, over 120 attacks on electricity sub-stations, and the road leading to the Sapref refinery in Durban (which produces one third of all South Africa’s petrol) has become so dangerous due to continuous attacks on vehicles that the refinery has had to close down completely. Already there are huge queues at garages and a major fuel crisis is building. Moreover, as soon as a shop, warehouse, or factory has been looted it is set on fire. None of these crimes produce money and the destruction of such buildings is bound to cost jobs and lead to many more people going hungry in future. …

There is general indignation that the police have been so passive, usually just standing by and watching the looting going on. They are, of course, hugely outnumbered, though they are armed. There are many cases of the police themselves operating protection rackets and demanding “favours” from the public. …

Ramaphosa finally ordered 2,500 troops in to support the police but they make no difference: they too stand passively by as looting goes on, for the government is clearly terrified of the optics of a black government firing on poor black people. In any case, South Africa is a big country and the troops are far too thinly spread. Yet the looting goes on day after day and right before the government’s eyes the country is being destroyed, investor confidence is being undermined, and any hope of South Africa emerging from its economic crisis is vanishing. While only two provinces are affected, Gauteng is the country’s economic heart, producing 40 percent of its GDP, and Durban is the major port. The highway between Durban and Johannesburg is the country’s main economic artery and that has been closed for many days now.

With the forces of law and order so weak and inactive, vigilante militias have sprung up to protect many suburbs and, typically, to protect their local mall or supermarket on which that suburb depends. Often these vigilante groups are multiracial but usually they depend on white ex-members of the security forces. They are armed and determined to stop looting spreading to their homes. …

Already food and fuel shortages are developing. No one is going to resupply malls that have been burned or, indeed, any shop that is vulnerable to looting. So even if the looting stops as the looters run out of targets, there is bound to be a major hunger crisis—which could drive people to even more desperate acts: the big worry is attacks on private homes. But ATMs have been destroyed, pharmacies ransacked, and drink shops pillaged so there will be shortages of medical and other supplies as well. …

The Rand has dropped sharply and could fall more.

What the riots point to is the colossal failure of ANC governance. It has emphatically not brought a better life for poor Africans.

The outlook is for terrible crises of hunger, and shortages of fuel and medical supplies. A great deal of social infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed—some 400 malls were attacked, including many pharmacies. The ANC is more divided than ever and the economy has taken an enormous blow. Without doubt real incomes will continue to fall.

This is what the ANC has achieved after 27 years in power. … For years in opposition it boasted of how it would improve the life of the African masses, but it has found that the task of governance was a whole lot more difficult than it imagined and it is steering South Africa steadily towards the status of a failed state.

Update

Breitbart reports:

South Africa’s “looting death toll” from violent rioting reached 337 on Thursday July 22, 2021. Public health officials confirmed 79 deaths in Gauteng province and 258 in KwaZulu-Natal.

On our Facebook page – from which we were recently suspended for two months – we were constantly asked to give “just one example” of election fraud to support our contention that the Democrats cheated their way to victory in the November 2020 election.

There were many, we presented a lot of them, but none was accepted as proof by our critics.

Here is one more – but they won’t see it. At least, not on our Facebook page. We don’t plan to go back there except to direct our ten-thousand-plus followers to another discussion site which – fortune favoring us – we will soon have up and running.

The Western Journal reports:

Suzi Voyles is no stranger to elections.

And after monitoring voting in Atlanta-area Fulton County, Georgia, for two decades, Voyles said that the highly contentious 2020 election proved to be unlike any other.

Voyles testified that as she thumbed through a stack of mail-in ballots last November, strangely “pristine” ballots printed on stock paper different from the others seized her attention.

What did these ballots have in common?

Voyles testified that each ballot contained uniformly filled-in ovals, and every one presented an identical crescent-shaped “void” inside them — indicating the ballots weren’t filled in with pencil or pen, but rather by toner ink.

“Every single ballot was absolutely identical and they appeared to be printed with some sort of marking device,” Voyles said. “And the fact that there was a little eclipse in an oval that was void in exactly the same spot in all these ballots, we didn’t see any differentiation — even when it came to the Senate candidates or when it came to some of the referendums on the back.”

“Everything was precisely the same. I’ve never seen that before in 20 years,” Voyles said. She added that these suspicious ballots had no creases or folds indicative of other mail-in ballots extracted from envelopes.

Voyles wasn’t alone in her testimony.

According to RealClear Investigations, at least three other Fulton County poll workers reported that they encountered the same enigma in other stacks of absentee ballots and have joined Voyles in “swearing under penalty of perjury that [the ballots] looked fake.”

Eight months later, we see the same suspicion resurging in the Republican stronghold that unexpectedly flipped blue for the first time since 1992.

Using affidavits to convince a state judge to warrant a closer inspection of ballots for potential illicit election activity, election integrity advocates assert that Biden’s late surge of 12,000 votes was manufactured — and for good reason.

“We have what is almost surely major absentee-ballot fraud in Fulton County involving 10,000 to 20,000 probably false ballots,” Garland Favorito, poll watcher and a lead petitioner in the case against fraudulent ballots, told RealClear Investigations.

“We have confirmed that there are five pallets of shrink-wrapped ballots in a county warehouse,” he added, reiterating his claim.

As questions surrounding the legitimacy of the 2020 election outcome continued in Georgia, as well as other states, Superior Court Judge Brian Amero ordered on May 21 that 147,000 ballots be unsealed and asked that officials guard the warehouse containing these ballots until an inspection date could be set, according to the report.

Unfortunately, the warehouse’s security was breached only eight days later.

According to Favorito, “The front door was [found] unlocked and wide open in violation of the court order.”

County officials did confirm that security motion detectors were triggered shortly after deputies left the premises, but said the room containing the ballots was never breached or compromised. [!]

Still, Favorito — and likely many others — would not be convinced and Favorito seeks to obtain security footage to supplement the investigation, the report states.

Still, all of the contention brewing in the Peach State appears to reaffirm many suspicions that have arisen since Nov. 3 — and may validate Voyle’s bombshell claims.

We can’t allow our officials to ignore their obligation to ensure fair, ethical elections for all Americans.

If we do, we have surrendered the most integral aspect of our republic.

Here are some extracts from Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia entry, showing that with all the many accusations of his being engaged in corrupt dealings, no evidence has ever been found that even a single one of them is true!

According to Adam Entous of The New Yorker, Biden and his father established a relationship in which “Biden wouldn’t ask Hunter about his lobbying clients, and Hunter wouldn’t tell his father about them.”

Biden served on the board of Burisma Holdings, one of the largest private natural gas producers in Ukraine, from 2014 until his term expired in April 2019. Since the early months of 2019, Biden and his father have been the subjects of unevidenced claims of corrupt activities in a Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory pushed by then-U.S. President Donald Trump and his allies, concerning Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s anti-corruption efforts there on behalf of the United States during the time he was vice president. United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that proxies of Russian intelligence promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about the Bidens “to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration”. 

In December 2020, Biden made a public announcement via his attorney that his tax affairs are under federal criminal investigation. The New York Times and CNN, citing sources familiar with the investigation, described the investigation as having started in late 2018 and being related to potential violations of tax and money laundering laws and his business dealings in foreign countries, principally China.The Wall Street Journal reported that Biden had provided legal and consulting services that generated foreign-earned income, citing a Senate Republicans’ report that says millions of dollars in wire transfers from entities linked to Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming were paying for such services.The New York Times reported that according to people familiar with the inquiry, FBI investigators had been unable to establish sufficient evidence for a prosecution of potential money laundering crimes, including after the seizure of a laptop purportedly belonging to Biden, and so the investigation progressed onto tax issues.

From 2013 to 2020, Biden served as a member of the board of the China-based private equity fund BHR Partners, of which he acquired a 10% stake in 2017 at a discount. The founders of BHR Partners included Biden’s Rosemont Seneca Partners investment firm (20% equity), along with US-based Thornton Group LLC (10% equity) and two asset managers registered in China. The Chinese-registered asset managers are the Bank of China (via BOC International Holdings-backed Bohai Industrial Investment Fund Management) and Deutsche Bank-backed Harvest Fund Management. The BHR Partners fund invests Chinese venture capital into tech startups like an early-stage investment in Chinese car hailing app DiDi and cross-border acquisitions, in automotive and mining, such as the purchase of a stake in Democratic Republic of Congo copper and cobalt producer Tenke Fungurume Mining.

In September 2019, while President Trump was accusing Hunter Biden of malfeasance in Ukraine, he also falsely claimed that Biden “walk[ed] out of China with $1.5 billion in a fund” and earned “millions” of dollars from the BHR deal. Trump publicly called upon China to investigate Hunter Biden’s business activities there while his father was vice president. Hunter Biden announced on October 13, 2019 his resignation from the board of directors for BHR Partners, effective at the end of the month, citing “the barrage of false charges” by then-U.S. President Trump. According to his lawyer, Biden had “not received any compensation for being on BHR’s board of directors” nor had he received any return on his equity share in BHR. Biden’s lawyer George Mesires told The Washington Post that BHR Partners had been “capitalized from various sources with a total of 30 million RMB [Chinese Renminbi], or about $4.2 million, not $1.5 billion“.^[31]

Biden joined the board of Burisma Holdings owned by Ukrainian oligarch and former politician Mykola Zlochevsky, who was facing a money laundering investigation just after the Ukrainian revolution, in April 2014. Biden was hired to help Burisma with corporate governance best practices, while still an attorney with Boies Schiller Flexner, and a consulting firm in which Biden is a partner was also retained by Burisma.

Biden served on the board of Burisma until his term expired in April 2019, receiving compensation of up to $50,000 per month in some months. Because Joe Biden played a major role in U.S. policy towards Ukraine, some Ukrainian anti-corruption advocates and Obama administration officials expressed concern that Hunter Biden having joined the board could create the appearance of a conflict of interest and undermine Joe Biden’s anti-corruption work in Ukraine. While serving as vice president, Joe Biden joined other Western leaders in encouraging the government of Ukraine to fire the country’s top prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who was widely criticized for blocking corruption investigations. The Ukrainian parliament voted to remove Shokin in March 2016.

Former President Donald Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed in 2019, without evidence, that Joe Biden had sought the dismissal of Shokin in order to protect his son and Burisma Holdings. Actually, it was the official policy of the United States and the European Union to seek Shokin’s removal.

We do wonder how the European Union came to be perturbed by Shokin’s doings. Is it possible that Joe Biden told them things that caused their uneasiness?

There has also been no evidence produced of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden in Ukraine. The Ukrainian anti-corruption investigation agency stated in September 2019 that its current investigation of Burisma was restricted solely to investigating the period from 2010 to 2012, before Hunter Biden joined Burisma in 2014. Shokin, in May 2019, claimed that he was fired because he had been actively investigating Burisma, but U.S. and Ukrainian officials have stated that the investigation into Burisma was dormant at the time of Shokin’s dismissal. Ukrainian and United States State Department sources note that Shokin was fired for failing to address corruption, including within his office.

In July 2019, Trump ordered the freezing of $391 million in military aid shortly before a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which Trump asked Zelensky to initiate an investigation of the Bidens. Trump falsely told Zelensky that “[Joe] Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution” of his son; Joe Biden did not stop any prosecution, did not brag about doing so, and there is no evidence his son was ever under investigation. The United States House of Representatives initiated a formal impeachment inquiry on September 24, 2019 against Trump on the grounds that he may have sought to use U.S. foreign aid and the Ukrainian government to damage Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Ukrainian prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko said in May 2019 that Hunter Biden had not violated Ukrainian law. After Lutsenko was replaced by Ruslan Riaboshapka as prosecutor general, Lutsenko and Riaboshapka said in September and October 2019 respectively that they had seen no evidence of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.

During 2019 and into 2020, Republican senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley investigated Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma, as well as allegations that Democrats colluded with the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2016 election. American intelligence officials briefed senators in late 2019 about Russian efforts to frame Ukraine for 2016 election interference. Johnson said he would release findings in spring 2020, as Democrats would be selecting their 2020 presidential nominee, but instead ramped up the investigation at Trump’s urging in May 2020, after it became clear that Joe Biden would be the nominee.Trump tweeted a press report about the investigations, later stating that he would make allegations of corruption by the Bidens a central theme of his re-election campaign. Johnson decided in March 2020 against issuing a subpoena for former Ukrainian official Andrii Telizhenko, a Giuliani associate who had made appearances on the pro-Trump cable channel One America News, after the FBI briefed him about concerns Telizhenko could be spreading Russian disinformation. The State Department revoked Telizhenko’s visa in October 2020, and CNN reported the American government was considering sanctioning him as a Russian agent. CNN reported that Vladislav Davidzon, the editor of Ukrainian magazine The Odessa Review, told CNN that in 2018 Telizhenko offered him money to lobby Republican senators in support of pro-Russian television stations in Ukraine. When Johnson released the final report on the investigation, it contained no evidence that Joe Biden had pushed for Shokin’s removal in order to benefit Hunter or Burisma.

In June 2020, former Ukrainian prosecutor general Ruslan Riaboshapka stated that an audit of thousands of old case files he had ordered in October 2019 had found no wrongdoing by Hunter Biden. Riaboshapka was described by Zelensky as “100 percent my person” during the July 2019 call in which Trump asked him to investigate Biden.

Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, an associate of Rudy Giuliani with links to Russian intelligence, released in May 2020 alleged snippets of recordings of Joe Biden speaking with Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko during the years Hunter Biden worked for Burisma. The recordings, which were not verified as authentic and appeared heavily edited, depicted Biden linking loan guarantees for Ukraine to the ouster of the country’s prosecutor general. The recordings did not provide evidence to support the ongoing conspiracy theory that Biden wanted the prosecutor fired to protect his son. Poroshenko denied in June 2020 that Joe Biden ever approached him about Burisma.The United States Department of the Treasury sanctioned Derkach in September 2020, stating he “has been an active Russian agent for over a decade, maintaining close connections with the Russian Intelligence Services”. The Treasury Department added Derkach “waged a covert influence campaign centered on cultivating false and unsubstantiated narratives concerning U.S. officials in the upcoming 2020 Presidential Election” including by the release of “edited audio tapes and other unsupported information with the intent to discredit U.S. officials”. Close associates of Derkach were also sanctioned by the Treasury Department in January 2021. United States intelligence community analysis released in March 2021 found that Derkach was among proxies of Russian intelligence who promoted and laundered misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about Biden “to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration”.

Two Republicans on a Senate investigation committee in 2020 claimed that Russian businessperson Yelena Baturina, the wife of former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, wire-transferred $3.5 million in 2014 to an investment firm linked to Hunter Biden. The report cited unspecified confidential documents. The report gives no indication that Hunter Biden personally accepted the funds.Biden’s attorney denied the report, saying Biden had no financial relationship with the woman and no stake in the partnership that received the money, nor did he co-found the partnership. However, Trump’s White House spokeswoman Alyssa Farah repeated the claim, and in a press conference President Trump repeatedly claimed that Biden received millions of dollars from the former mayor’s wife. 

With all that lack of evidence, and all accusers turning out to be liars and/or Russian agents, it is hard on the poor man that reports still keep emerging which cast doubt on his innocence.

From the Western Journal:

It’s the [Hunter Biden] laptop that just keeps on giving.

According to a report published Wednesday by the New York Post, emails found on [it] show that now-President Joe Biden’s son brought his father to a dinner with Ukrainian, Russian and Kazakhstani business associates in Washington during Biden’s tenure as vice president.

While previous emails found on the laptop had hinted at meetings between some of the shadier associates Hunter Biden picked up during his time on the board of the Ukrainian energy holding company Burisma, the report throws serious doubt on Joe Biden’s claim he had little knowledge of his son’s business dealings in Eastern Europe.

The meeting took place on April 16, 2015, in the so-called “Garden Room” at Cafe Milano, a restaurant described in a 2017 New York Times article as “the Georgetown restaurant where some of the world’s most powerful people go to be noticed but not approached. “

The importance of the date is that it came one day before one of the more controversial emails found on the infamous laptop, where Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi thanked Hunter Biden for an introduction to the then-vice president.

The guest list prepared by Hunter three weeks before the Café Milano dinner included Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, corrupt former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov, who since has died. Baturina wired $3.5 million on Feb. 14, 2014, to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, a Delaware-based investment firm co-founded by Hunter and Devon Archer, a former adviser to Secretary of State John Kerry. [But] Archer told Hunter that Baturina wouldn’t be attending; “Yelena doesn’t want to steal Yuri’s Thunder, so she’ll be in town to meet with us but doesn’t want to come to dinner,” he wrote in a March 20 email. “That was just her thoughts. We could insist.”

“Obviously save a seat for your guy (and mine if he’s in town),” he added.

In a reply, Hunter said, “I think your guy being there is more trouble than it’s worth – unless you have some other idea.”

“Ok – the reason for the dinner is ostensibly to discuss food security,” Hunter wrote in a March 26 email, according to the Post. “Dad will be there but keep that between us for now. Thanks.”

The reported dinner is yet another complication to the official Joe Biden line: “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” Biden said in October of 2019.

And yet there are the emails, the golf outing with a Burisma executive in 2014, this dinner and other red flags.

As The Wall Street Journal noted in an Oct. 15 editorial, a Senate report found multiple Obama administration officials knew about Hunter Biden’s work with Burisma and that one official emailed colleagues saying that “the presence of Hunter Biden on the Burisma board was very awkward for all U.S. officials pushing an anticorruption agenda in Ukraine.”

It is not kind to recall that Joe Biden “bragged that he got chief Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who once investigated Burisma, fired as a precondition for international aid in 2016 when the then-vice president was the Obama administration’s point-man on Ukraine”. (The crime of which  President Trump was accused without evidence and for which he was impeached.)

In fact, Hunter Biden’s Wikipedia entry is one long exoneration, explaining away crimes he’s been accused of. His life seems to have consisted of little more than doing things that look unethical or positively criminal. But all of them, you see, can be explained. Every one of them. Explained.

For more about all these unevidenced accusations and others against Joe and Hunter Biden see our posts: The Biden scandal, October 17, 2020 (here), and The Bidens: models of decency, October 27, 2020 (here).

The press and CNN report – or don’t report; Wikipedia asserts; you judge.