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Political correctness

AINSWORTH: America's so-called "elites" are the cream that has curdled

March 24, 2022

Laura Ainsworth, Staff writer

Yesterday, we received a comment on our Substack edition by reader Marcia D:

Wondering …… why do we continue to call our “leaders and their minions” ELITE? They aren’t! You are so wonderful with words, how about coming up with something that describes our Hollywood snobs etc better. LOVE your newsletter.

Dear Marcia:

Thanks for writing and for your kind appreciation. When we use...that word...it’s almost always meant ironically, so from now on, whenever appropriate, we’ll try to use quotation marks to make that clear. I decided to look at the various dictionary definitions of the word to see how they might apply to our political and societal “elite.” Here are a few…

Oxford Dictionaries has two definitions of the word as a noun. Since the second one relates to the “elite” 12-point typeface, we’ll toss that and focus on the first one: “a select group that is superior in ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society.” This definition might apply if we were talking about, say, an “elite” fighting force, but it definitely does not apply when we talk about our political and cultural leaders, as (ironically) they have aptly demonstrated. Polls certainly bear that out.

Merriam-Webster shades the meaning of “elite” a little differently, offering several entries:

1) the choice part, or ‘cream,’ as in “the elite of the entertainment world.” No, that doesn’t fit our leaders at all. If they’re a choice, it’s not our choice. If they’re the cream, it has long since curdled.

2) the best of a class, as in “the superachievers who dominate the computer elite.” Sorry, no. If these leaders are the best we’ve got, we need to start thinking outside the box about where our leaders are going to come from. The ones in power now are not superachievers by any stretch of the imagination. I think some of them must realize this. Kamala Harris, for example, surely realizes on some level that she’s in over her head. Maybe that’s why she cackles uncontrollably --- to try to dispel her own panic.

3) the socially superior part of society, as in “how the French-speaking elite was changing.” No, that definition fits only if we look at how these leaders think of THEMSELVES. They are considered socially superior only within their own circle, perhaps in Hollywood or the Upper West Side. If this definition were modified to reflect that, it could work.

4) a group of persons who by virtue of position or education exercise much power and influence, as in “members of the ruling elite.” At last, here’s a definition that really does seem to fit, with a few caveats. First, we’ve got to put the word “education” in quotation marks, considering what a so-called Ivy League education means these days. And we’d definitely want to add the word “undue,” as in “undue influence.” Gee, wouldn’t it be nice to undo all that undue influence?

If used as an adjective, M-W’s definition is “superior in quality, rank, skill, etc., as in, “The elite chess players of today...hail from all over the world.” But while, tragically, our leaders do rank higher in power and influence than the rest of us –- that’s what makes them leaders, after all –- they only think they’re superior in terms of quality and skill.

Good lord, the President of the United States, arguably the 'elitest' of the elite, can’t even read a teleprompter, and that's too bad because he can't speak without one. If he were TRYING to destroy the country, I doubt he’d be doing anything differently. On the other hand, if that’s what he actually is trying to do, I take it back: he definitely has some skills. He's been in office little more than one year, and it's hard to watch the news at any given moment without thinking the words "hell in a handbasket."

Our (probable) next Supreme Court justice --- there's hardly anything more 'elite' than that lofty perch --- says she can’t even define what a woman is and doesn’t think her views on that or on CRT would be an issue for her as a justice. The bar has really been lowered.

Moving on, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines “elite” this way:

A group or class of persons considered to be superior to others because of their intelligence, social standing or wealth.

Again, our “elite” consider THEMSELVES to be superior in intelligence (some, I would call idiot savants) and, in many cases, social standing. Wealth, however, is a more objective standard that definitely does apply. To illustrate, I’ll use “elite” in a sentence: “Elites such as Mark Zuckerberg use their vast wealth and undue influence to buy elections.”

The Collins English Dictionary defines the noun “elite” like this:

The most powerful, rich, gifted or educated members of a group, community, etc.

Again, the same issues apply. This definition might work if we put “educated” in quotes and also, in quite a few cases, add just one letter to change “gifted” to “grifted.”

The Random House Kemerman Websters College Dictionary has several entries:

1) the choice or best of a group, class or the like. (NOPE.)

2) persons of the wealthiest class. (YES, generally that is true.)

3) a group of persons exercising authority within a larger group. (YES, indeed.)

Check your thesaurus, and you might see many of these synonyms for “elite”:

upper class, upper crust (I"d say it’s true, some of them are looking pretty crusty)

elect, chosen (Not by us, God knows)

cream, pick (Again, this cream is curdled)

intelligentsia (Hold on, ever hear the expression, "educated beyond one's intelligence"?)

beau monde, bon ton, high society, ‘smart set’ (Two words: Hillary’s pantsuits)

aristocracy, gentry, nobility (Two words: John Kerry)

technocrat (Well, we're definitely crawling with those)

selected (Editorial note: remember, they can be un-selected!)

I’m also reminded of the Cole Porter song, “You’re the Top.” You know, “You’re the top...you’re the Colosseum! You’re the top...you’re the Louvre Museum!” Except in the case of our “elite” leaders, I’d sing it this way:

“You’re a flop...you’re a big disaster

You’re a flop...you are not my master

You can censor me and de-monetize my words

But I’ll cause some blowback, I’ll go on Substack, I WILL be heard!

You’re a flop...just an Ivy Leaguer

You’re a flop...and your talent’s meager

As ‘elites’ you stink but you think that you’re tip-top

You are way down on the bottom, you’re a flop!

Republicans score important court victories

March 24, 2022

Mike Huckabee

Republicans scored a couple of important court victories this week. The Supreme Court rejected an attempt to replace the Wisconsin legislature’s voting district map with one drawn by the Governor that created an extra 7th majority black district. Defenders claimed this was necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

The SCOTUS ruled that this was in error. In Shaw v. Reno (1993), the Court ruled that under the Equal Protection Clause, districting maps that sort voters on the basis of race “are by their very nature odious.” Any state that draws districts based on race has to withstand strict scrutiny in proving that there’s a compelling state interest in doing so, and it must be “narrowly tailored” to comply with the Voting Rights Act.

https://utexas.app.box.com/s/7ca2iocqmaz9xk8xlklcwqrvisa842bu

The larger point here is that the Court reaffirmed that states can’t use the Voting Rights Act as a blanket excuse to gerrymander voting districts based solely on race. That can only be done in a very limited way, and they must have a solid reason for why it’s necessary.

The other court win came in Ohio, where federal District Judge Michael Newman ruled in favor of attorneys general from Arizona, Montana and Ohio in a lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas.

https://www.westernjournal.com/judge-hands-republican-states-big-win-biden-blocking-dhs-order/

Mayorkas issued a memo to ICE agents, ordering them to prioritize deportations of illegal aliens who pose a threat to national security or public safety, or who recently came to the US. As for the rest, he wrote, “In exercising our discretion, we are guided by the fact that the majority of undocumented noncitizens who could be subject to removal have been contributing members of our communities for years…The fact that an individual is a removable noncitizen therefore should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them. We will use our discretion and focus our resources in a more targeted way. Justice and our country’s well-being require it.”

As you might imagine, federal immigration law doesn’t include an exception for those who’ve managed to dodge deportation long enough (those he euphemically called "removable noncitizens.") The judge quite correctly ruled that Mayorkas was attempting to rewrite the law to make it more to his liking. He cited a quote from a 1952 SCOTUS decision that we should probably embroider onto samplers and send to DC to decorate the entire executive branch:

“In the framework of our Constitution, the President’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker.”

That’s a bedrock tenet of the Constitution that the Obama Administration regularly flouted and that Biden has continued. Whenever Obama didn’t like a law Congress had passed, his DOJ would simply refuse to enforce it; and when Congress refused to pass a law he wanted, even one he admitted he had no power to enact, he would go ahead and create it anyway by “executive order.” Too many times, activist liberal judges went along with the insane idea that somehow, Obama had the power to create laws by executive order, but Trump didn’t have the power to rescind those unconstitutional edicts.

Let’s hope that this ruling heralds a trend of judges putting the brakes on Biden’s attempts to continue lawless rule by executive order and ignoring laws that he took an oath to enforce.

Project Veritas shows how the Biden “Justice” Department did it

March 24, 2022

Mike Huckabee

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has released documents showing how the Biden “Justice” Department got around a judge that ordered them to respect the group’s First Amendment rights as journalists by obtaining secret electronic surveillance orders that were not disclosed to the court, requiring disclosure of "all content" of communications associated with Project Veritas’ email accounts, including attorney-client communications.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/aclu-doj-project-veritas-ashley-biden-diary

This is on top of the strong-arm raids they conducted against PV, including roughing up O’Keefe in his own home, and seizing computers and other items.

They were allegedly investigating the theft of Presidential daughter Ashley Biden’s diary, which in itself is extremely questionable conduct for an allegedly nonpartisan agency. On top of that, as O’Keefe told me in an interview, Project Veritas didn’t even have the diary. A tipster had given it to them, they couldn’t authenticate it, so they gave it to law enforcement to return to its rightful owner. But these latest documents show that the Project Veritas emails the feds were collecting dated back to January 2020, eight months before they even knew the diary existed.

This whole thing smells of the White House corrupting federal law enforcement to use it as a battering ram against political opponents, including journalists. It carries a strong whiff of bananas, as in “banana republic.” The stench is so bad that even the liberal ACLU spoke out against the targeting of Project Veritas, saying they’re “deeply troubled” by these reports, and that this could have serious consequences for press freedom.

Incidentally, I notice that they couldn’t defend Project Veritas’ basic First Amendment rights without doing a little groveling to their liberal donors by starting out with, "We deplore Project Veritas’ deceptions,” yet not naming any of those alleged “deceptions.” O’Keefe loves to point out that PV is constantly accused of being “deceptive,” but critics don’t explain what’s deceptive about their reporting, and they’re never lost a lawsuit.

But in the spirit of the ACLU, let me also say that I stand strong in defending the First Amendment rights of Project Veritas and all journalists, even the New York Times, in spite of how much I deplore their deceptions.

Related: Our “nonpartisan” FBI backtracks after being outed for celebrating the SCOTUS nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson.

https://freebeacon.com/politics/read-the-emails-advertising-fbi-event-to-honor-ketanji-brown-jacksons-nomination/

Today's Must-Read: “Invasion of the Fact-Checkers”

March 23, 2022

Mike Huckabee

“Invasion of the Fact-Checkers” by Jacob Siegel of Tablet magazine.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/invasion-fact-checkers

Siegel takes us through the history of fact-checking, and how it's devolved from an attempt to ensure news sources were trustworthy to what it’s become today:

“An institutional fixture with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding behind it, along with battalions of NGOs and formerly broke journalistic authorities who are more than happy to cash fat checks and proclaim that America’s ruling bureaucrats at the FDA, the CDC, the FBI, the CIA, the Fed—and the entire alphabet soup of government agencies—along with the ruling Democratic Party, are never wrong about anything, at least nothing important.”

He offers multiple examples (most of which will be familiar to readers of this newsletter) of times when the self-proclaimed “fact-checkers,” with their “tin badges and unearned air of authority,” declared stories that challenged Democrat narratives to be false, only to have them later revealed to be true – although the “fact-checkers” seldom outright admit that. Hunter’s laptop is only the tip of the crack pipe that these people must be smoking.

He also goes into the specific ways in which these “fact-checkers” operate to protect their masters, including a tactic I wrote about recently: the logical fallacy of the “appeal to authority,” or quoting cherry-picked alleged “experts” as if their opinions were objective fact.

This “partisan plot against reality,” as Siegel puts it, is necessary to protect “progressive” narratives because if they didn’t have an excuse to censor “misinformation” (usually, facts that disprove their hooey), everyone with any sense would see how ludicrous leftists ideas are, from defunding the police to giving free crack pipes to addicts to teaching kindergartners racism and graphic sex lessons to claiming men can actually become women just by saying they are. It’s such obvious insanity that when people see it clearly, they revolt. Even parents in ultra-liberal San Francisco voted out their “woke” school board members in a landslide.

Recently, I’ve seen commenters on my sites complain about why we even bother writing about this stuff. They despair that it won’t make any difference. But it already is. If enough people keep pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, or that the guy in a woman’s swimsuit is clearly a dude, it gives others courage to also speak up. And when truth reaches critical mass, it can no longer be denied, censored or bullied into silence by a tiny minority of radical fantasists.

Believe me, we deal with it every day. You’d be astounded how often our stories get labeled as “misinformation” by Big Tech and limited in their reach by Google, Facebook, etc. This despite the fact that my writers are diligent researchers who are scrupulous about getting details right, double-checking and citing sources for accuracy and making sure that quotes are verified and in context.

And if you think you can’t fight this, consider the following wonderful news: Mark “Bought the White House for Joe Biden” Zuckerberg thought that Facebook was so powerful that it could start censoring its own customers under the guise of “fact-checking misinformation.” After all, where else could they go? Turns out they could go to other social media sites, or spend their time more productively by working to elect Republicans.

The stock price of Facebook parent Meta Platforms recently took a tumble after it was reported that Facebook saw a drop of 500,000 daily active users, its first-ever quarterly decline. Keep arrogantly treating your users as if they’re a captive audience that you can freely abuse, and that trend will continue, as they flee to sites like Gab and MeWe that respect freedom of speech.

I’ve got one compound word for Facebook, Twitter and anyone who thinks it’s futile to keep exposing Big Tech's arrogance and censorship because they’re just too big to fail:

“MySpace.”

Anyone remember that? At one time, it was so big, it was the Blockbuster Video of the Internet. Now, it’s what Seth Meyers once called “the abandoned amusement park of the Internet.” If Facebook, Twitter, et al, think their biased “fact-checkers” will protect them from customer revolt, then that abandoned amusement park might soon become even larger. It can’t happen soon enough.

The deeper significance of Hunter laptop story, Part 2

March 23, 2022

Mike Huckabee

Part 1 observed that some of the names from Trump’s first impeachment, mostly from our own embassy in Ukraine, were the same as those involved in the Trump/Russia Hoax as revealed in special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Clinton/DNC attorney Michael Sussmann. We wondered why that might be.

Before we continue with that, here are a few updates on the Hunter laptop story:

Monday on Jesse Watters Primetime, investigative reporter Peter Schweizer reiterated what he’s said about Hunter being close to criminal indictment. He said The New York Times “got a lot of cooperation from Team Biden” before they ran the story on Hunter that included their admission that the laptop was, indeed, real. He says Biden’s team were “trying to position themselves.” Of course, this case isn’t really about Hunter but the President of the United States, and a criminal indictment would open up “that whole can of worms” concerning dad’s connections to dirty money and the associated tax issues and huge national security concerns.

https://noqreport.com/2022/03/22/the-ny-times-admitted-the-truth-about-hunter-biden-because-they-know-something-is-about-to-happen/

So, “does Hunter Biden become the sacrificial lamb?” Schweizer asked. “Does he end up taking a plea deal that might even mean jail time in order to protect his father?”

Also, Margot Cleveland has a new piece detailing eight Joe Biden scandals revealed in Hunter’s laptop that have been finally been confirmed in mainstream media as real. She echoes Schweizer, saying, “These scandals are not about Hunter Biden. They are about now-President Biden.” These are areas that an honest media would ask about, she says –- the implication being that they won’t. Her piece a must-read.

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/22/8-joe-biden-scandals-inside-hunter-bidens-macbook-that-corporate-media-just-admitted-is-legit/

Now, to Part 2. Yesterday, as a way to help understand Ukraine and the Bidens’ activities there, we recommended Chapters 2 and 8 in Dan Bongino’s book “FOLLOW THE MONEY: The Shocking Deep State Connections of the Anti-Trump Cabal. Let’s pick up there…

According to Bongino, the hard-working Ukrainian people are “desperate for honest leadership” but “have been consistently let down by a broken political class eager for power and riches.” Ukraine and Washington DC are the two centers of a group he calls Scandal Manufacturers of America (SMA), which dedicated itself to a takedown of Donald Trump. These people helped come up with the Russia Hoax, and later, when that failed to take him down, they assisted with his first impeachment. That’s why we see some of the same names in both.

(Side note: The New York Times caught some richly-deserved grief from Candace Owens when they accused her of copying “Russian state media” when she “advanced the idea that Ukraine is a corrupt country.” She informed them she’d learned of Ukraine’s corruption from The New York Times, offering as one example an NYT editorial called “Ukraine’s Unyielding Corruption.” We bring this up so as not to also be falsely accused of working on behalf of Putin when we point out the deep well of Ukrainian corruption.)

Bongino calls Paul Manafort “ground zero for all the manufactured Trump scandals.” Manafort was a consultant for Trump’s campaign and then the chairman, bringing with him tons of baggage from alleged dark dealings in Ukraine. What we have always wondered --- perhaps Bongino has the answer --- is this: exactly how did someone who was so notorious as a shady lobbyist get to BE chairman of Trump’s campaign? It was just soooooo convenient for Trump’s enemies to have Manafort, of all people, in that spot. So we suspect there’s more to this story. His baggage was made to order for anyone looking to derail Trump’s campaign. Rick Gates, Manafort’s business partner, was with the campaign as well, as deputy, and later became a cooperating witness for the special counsel in Manafort's trial.

Manafort lasted with Trump for about six months. Ironically, what brought him down –- in five days –- was FAKED evidence in the form of a “black ledger” of supposed payments from a pro-Russia political party. By continuing to hound him after he left, Trump’s enemies thought they might bring Trump down, too. The ledger had nothing to do with the Russia hoax; it was a red herring, to cast a cloud over the campaign and provide a pretext for ongoing investigation.

George Soros, probably the most influential man in Ukraine, is a big part part of this story, too. He gave $1 million to the humorously-named Democratic Integrity Project, headed by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI analyst and staffer for California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Jones had started the nonprofit (seems pretty profitable to me) after Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS approached him with the idea of forming the organization. Then, after filling its coffers to the tune of $7 million, Jones turned around and wrote a check to Fusion GPS for $3.3 million! I am not making this up. The same players keep turning up again and again.

Fusion GPS’s task: to research how Russia intelligence operations were affecting elections around the world. And they brought in Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta to help. Still not making it up, my friends. This was after Podesta’s and the DNC’s emails had been purloined (the narrative became that they were hacked by Russia) and published by Wikileaks, to the DNC’s embarrassment.

(Incidentally, John's lobbyist brother Tony was under investigation at that time for “cashing in” in Ukraine. He was paid $1.2 million to promote a plan conceived, ironically, by Manfort and Gates.)

Then there’s the story you know, the investigation of Burisma by prosecutor Victor Shokin until then-Vice President Biden got him fired by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee. By now everyone has seen the video of Biden bragging about it before a live audience --- without mentioning Hunter was on the Burisma board.

There’s much more, involving Soros and an investigation by Shokin’s replacement into a Soros-funded organization, the ironically-named Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC). This was when the new U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch (remember her from Trump’s impeachment?) gave the prosecutor a list of people not to prosecute, including a founder of AntAC. Second-in-command George Kent had already tried to discourage the prosecutor from investigating. According to reporter John Solomon, their message to Ukraine officials was this: “Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an American presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama.”

There are others in Ukraine tied to both the Russia hoax and Trump's impeachment. California Rep. Adam Schiff, running the impeachment, trotted out our diplomatic “experts” from Ukraine to talk about Trump and his “impeachable” phone call to President Zelenskyy. Those were Americans, our diplomatic corps, who'd been telling Ukrainian prosecutors who they could and could not prosecute and treating a Soros-funded organization like some sort of sacred cow. Soros supported Hillary and was Trump’s political enemy. He funded an organization conceived by Glenn Simpson. Something smells like bad borscht.

Of course, if our own FBI hadn’t withheld Hunter’s laptop, the justification for Trump’s phone call would have been clear.

Oh, the muck in the swamp gets deeper. Looks as though there will have to be a Part 3.

Supreme Court Update: The Questioning Continues

March 23, 2022

Mike Huckabee

Tuesday, questioning got underway in the Senate confirmation hearing of Biden SCOTUS nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson. As has become standard for these hearings, it was a made-for-TV production, except the shows produced for Republican nominees like Kavanaugh and Barrett resembled “American Horror Story” while the shows produced for Democrat nominees are more like “Queen For A Day.”

To draw a few “Goofus and Gallant”-like comparisons: Democrats grilled Kavanaugh about the meaning of in-jokes from his old high school yearbook that he didn’t even write. But they accused Republicans of racism for asking Jackson about judicial rulings that she did write.

Kavanaugh was expected to remember every detail of what he did every day when he was a teenager. Jackson claimed not to remember the basis of the Dred Scott Decision, one of the most important SCOTUS rulings in history, and that was fine.

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-supreme-court-nominee-says-not-quite-remember-basis-massive-scotus-decision/

With Kavanaugh, everything from his beer consumption to his personal diary was fair game for questioning. With Jackson, thousands of pages of documents have been withheld from Republicans, from records of her tenure on the US Sentencing Commission to her own probation rulings.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/outraged-republicans-allege-democrats-withheld-supreme-court-nominee-documents

Kavanaugh was falsely accused of being a rapist. Republicans were criticized for even asking Jackson why she routinely gave lower-than-requested or suggested sentences to child porn defendants.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ketanji-brown-jackson-responds-hawley-child-porn-comments-nothing-could-be-further-from-the-truth

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Other highlights of the day included Jackson saying that “Critical Race Theory doesn’t come up in the work I do as a judge.” Sen. Ted Cruz then read a quote from her saying that Critical Race Theory is part of her work as a judge.

https://instapundit.com/511014/

Jackson also claimed that she couldn’t define what a “woman” is...

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2022/03/23/ketanji-brown-jackson-excites-a-lot-of-comment-when-shes-asked-to-define-woman-n539723

…She doesn’t know when life begins…

https://www.lifenews.com/2022/03/22/ketanji-brown-jackson-has-absolutely-no-idea-when-human-life-begins-um-i-dont-know/

…And she thinks “illegal aliens” are simply “non-citizens.”

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/03/22/ketanji-brown-jackson-calls-illegal-aliens-noncitizens-senate-hearing/

I can only imagine the media reaction if a Republican woman had professed such shocking ignorance of issues she regularly deals with in her job.

Ironically, in this theatrical production, Jackson is playing the role of a conservative centrist who respects the Constitution, which I don’t find convincing, but she's getting raves from the media for her performance. Kavanaugh and Barrett actually were conservative centrists who respect the Constitution, and the same critics savaged them. So I guess claiming to be a conservative centrist who respects the Constitution is only praiseworthy if the media knows you’re acting.

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