Better in their words…

America most certainly is at a cross-roads. Going after the former President – this is transparent authoritarianism. mrossol

Source: MS. DIVERSITY ☙ Tuesday, October 3, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Yesterday, former Fox News correspondent Tucker Carlson posted a deadly serious interview with constitutional scholar Victor Davis Hanson, and sparks flew. If you tend to get anxious when hearing serious people talk about how deep we all are in the tomato soup, then you might want to skip the video clip, which is on the long side anyway. If so, don’t worry, I have some comments below to give you the gist.

CLIP: Tucker Carlson and Victor Davis Hanson (33:50).

The two men framed their discussion around the first day yesterday in Trump’s trial in the New York “Business Fraud” Case. It was presided over by Judge Engoran, who last week issued a remarkable summary judgment order finding that, as a matter of law, Trump committed fraud by “overstating” the value of his very-difficult-to-estimate real estate properties on financial documents Trump used to obtain bank loans.

Loans that were all paid back, on time, with interest.

Imagine that you wanted to borrow $100 to buy supplies for your MAGA hat stand. I ask, “how’s business?” You say it’s great. Then I give you the $100, and a few days later you pay me back $120, just as agreed. I go away. Now the State of New York comes along and says, hey, when you said business was “great,” it wasn’t really “great,” it was only “okay.” You lied. Now we’re going to take your house.

That’s a simplification, but not an exaggeration. One of our democratic republic’s essential concepts is that the government can’t just take citizens’ property, not without proving a great reason or without paying just compensation. Governments only snatch people’s property and businesses in dystopian communist hellholes like Venezuela or Cuba, where private property always somehow finds its way into some pugnacious dictator’s grasping, bloody hands.

Under long-standing New York and common Law, “fraud” is normally found when the state proves four things: (1) the defendant knowingly made a falserepresentation, (2) to a victim who relied on the false representation, (3) the defendant intended the victim to rely on the false representation, and (4) because of that reliance, the victim was injured.

But the State of New York, applying an obscure, patently-unconstitutional statute that’s never been applied this way before, has stripped out all those common-law elements of proof of fraud except for the very first one: the false representation. I guess they had to keep at least one, and they picked the easiest to prove. It’s easiest to prove because all the the judge had to do were some back-of-the-napkin calculations and then say, yep, it was a false representation.

New York has jettisoned the four other fraud elements of: a victim, reliance, intent to deceive, and injury.

Even if the property values were misrepresented on Trump’s financials, whatever that means, by itself that is not fraud, and people should stop calling it that. Trump is being tried for only “lying” or “exaggerating.” And if that’s the standard, Katie bar the door.

In other words, if the government decides Trump lied or exaggerated, he loses. Period, end of story. Welcome to Venezuela, comrade. And no, you can’t also convict Joe Biden for lying. Why not? Because Judge Engoran will just decide Biden didn’t lie, silly. The judge is the gatekeeper who decides who lied and who didn’t.

Yesterday I saw some ignorant commentary from leftists arguing that, maybe there wasn’t a specific victim, but everyone collectively is the “victim,” because Trump’s misrepresentations will inevitably increase everyone else’s loan interest rates, or their insurance premiums, or something. But that’s just woke claptrap, of course, because Trump paid the loans back with interest, causing the banks and insurance companies to be even more profitable, which has the exact opposite effect as the silly leftists claimed.

Getting back to Tucker. The interview — which was framed around Trump’s first day in court — was much broader than that and remarkable in several ways. With Hanson in full agreement, Tucker soberly described our current political situation as a revolution in progress, a unique, defining moment in American history, an ultimate inflection point hurtling toward either salvation and redemption or complete destruction and dystopia.

I was shocked awake when, toward the beginning of the clip, Tucker even asked Hanson, “at what point do Americans take up arms?”  Hanson said Americans have been sleeping through the revolution, or mistakenly living in a cheerful fantasy that they can just stop paying attention to Hollywood and the NBA, cut cable, and move to a red state to escape the woke federal government’s grasping tentacles.

Hanson said it won’t work. It’s just delaying the inevitable. While VDH didn’t bite on “taking up arms,” not quite, he repeatedly said Americans have to do “everything possible” to stop it.

Here’s how Hanson ended his comments, which gives you the idea:

“Government can (now) go into a business — all of the business — and appropriate it, and destroy it, without cause. (They) think that’s not only good, but funny… ha ha. The idea is: we now have the power to do this. And because we have the power to do it, it’s moral and right, and if you don’t like it, what are you going to do about it?

And what ARE we going to do about it?

The only thing I can think of is, we’re going to have to humiliate and defeat these people at the polls. You’re going to have to have a 55% supermajority win to get anything done.

We’ve been complacent and culpable for allowing (the leftist spirit to take over our institutions). Now everybody according to their station is gonna have to say, you know what, there are TWO pronouns. I don’t care if you get angry. The date of this country is 1776. Got it? That’s what it is. And there is a border and we’re going to enforce it. And just say NO to all of these things and then welcome the opprobrium and the attacks that accrue accordingly, and welcome that as a badge of honor.

Because what’s the alternative? There is no alternative.”

I was on the fence about reporting Tucker’s interview, because while I doagree we need to do “everything possible” — that’s what I am doing, taking a vast amount of time from my successful law practice to scribble thoughts down for everyone every day — I  do agree with that part, but I don’t necessarily agree with the dark hints of pessimism infusing the interview.

Why not? For starters, because of American ingenuity. Self-reliance. Faith. Courage. Competitiveness. While these values have been scarred with marxist acid, blurred by government funding our enemies, and defamed as racist and patriarchal, they have never been destroyed. They still lie at the resolute heart of American culture. No Superman, no false Messiah, will appear from the clouds to save us. We don’t need Superman. We’re going to save ourselves.

The left is going to regret this Trump lawsuit. You’ll see.

💉 The Kansas City Star ran a pretty shocking story yesterday headlined, “Homecoming queen hopeful collapses on football field and later dies, Ohio school says.” Bre McKean, 17, a senior at Ohio’s Mapleton High School, had sudden, unexpected, and mysterious “medical emergency” while she was on the football field about to be crowned Queen at a homecoming football game last Friday, September 29th.

In other words, she was fine and then she suddenly and unexpectedly collapsed while being announced on the homecoming court. Despite receiving prompt emergency medical care, Bre died at the hospital the same night.

The rest of the game and the next day’s homecoming dance were canceled by the school district.

McKean was an athlete who played volleyball, softball and basketball at her school, where her father is the athletic director. No cause of death has been released, pending results of an autopsy. My money is on some kind of heart attack, what do you think?

You know, back in the old days, a tragedy like this would have caused the parents to go nuclear, testify before Congress, and form some foundation like “Justice for Bre.” But nowadays, the bereaved parents just move on, because Bre wouldn’t have wanted them to dwell on the past or something. It’s very weird.

🔥 On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by Alyssia Finley titled,  “How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science.”

You don’t say.

The piece begins describing how last month, to his great credit, respected climate scientist and director of Berkeley’s Breakthrough Institute, Patrick Brown, publicly admitted that he’d censored one of his own studies to remove facts tending to disprove the current climate theory, so as to improve his odds of getting published.

Specifically, in an essay for the Free Press, Brown confessed that he’d left out “key aspects other than climate change” from his paper about the cause of California’s wildfires, because the omitted details would “dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.”

Nature’s editor, Magdalena Skipper, lied and denied that the journal has anypreferred narrative. But she also didn’t invite Brown to add back the omitted data, either.

Next the op-ed cited a September 11th, 2023 paper published in the JAMA Network titled “Peer Review and Scientific Publication at a Crossroads.”The researchers described a burgeoning crisis in peer review, explaining that the ‘academic papers game’ is getting infested with all kinds of cheating, and wrote:

Many stakeholders try to profit from or influence the scientific literature in ways that do not necessarily serve science or enhance its benefits to society. The number of science journal titles and articles is steadily increasing; many millions of scientists coauthor scientific papers, and perverse reward systems do not help improve the quality of this burgeoning corpus.

In addition, deceptive, rogue actors, such as predatory and pirate publishers, fake reviewers, and paper mills continue to threaten the integrity of peer review and scientific publication.

Even outright fraud may be becoming more common—or may simply be recognized and reported more frequently than before.

This op-ed isn’t the first criticism of the so-called “peer review” process, which some top scientists have long argued has become hopelessly compromised, and captured by pharma interests. The biggest problem, and threat to all our well being, a problem which became painfully obvious during the pandemic, is that government actors dangle grant money in front of unethical whitecoats to obtain fake studies supporting the officials’ preferred policy narratives. Even worse, they all conspire to prevent inconveniently-contradictory papers from ever being published in the first place.

But that’s Science! So shut up! What do you know? I bet you don’t even havea white lab coat.

🔥 Yesterday California Governor Gavin Newsom surprised just about everyone by unexpectedly filling Dianne Feinstein’s empty Senate wheelchair with a woke, black lesbian and lifelong political termite from Washington, D.C.: Laphonza Butler. If that’s her real name.

Most people are focused on the facts that Laphonza runs the pro-abortion activist group Emily’s List, that she once backed a plan to abolish all bail in California, and that she isn’t even a California resident but is registered to vote in Silver Springs, Maryland, which is about as far as you can get from California without crossing an ocean.

In fact, just yesterday Laphonza appeared on the Washingtonian’s latest roundup of the most “powerful” lesbians, I mean women, in Washington:

Don’t get too hung up on the Maryland thing. There’s lots of empty U-Hauls lying around on the East coast having been dropped off by people fleeingCalifornia. If you think about it, it was a good move by Newsom, because he’s actually moving someone back for a change. Laphonza is a rare plus-one on the population scorecard.

More importantly, and probably not coincidentally, Laphonza adds a lot to a potential Newsom presidential run. She runs a massive fundraising operation (Emily’s List), which also cements Newsom’s pro-abort bona fides. As a former president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and a longtime “labor organizer” in Maryland and California, Laphonza can deliver the unions. She has existing connections to Newsom as a former partner at consulting firm Bearstar Strategies where she worked alongside Newsom’s top political advisors. She can help deliver the LGBTQ+ vote. And she has been one of Kamala Harris’s closest political allies since 2010, and most recently served on Kamala’s VP election committee.

If Newsom were running — why would anyone think that? — Laphonza is a pretty great political selection. She’s totally unqualified for the Senate, of course, but it didn’t take much to improve on the seat’s previous occupant.

🔥 Meanwhile, back in California, a dopey new bill overwhelmingly passed both houses of the state legislature yesterday and is now wandering lazily toward Governor Newsom’s desk. The new law will allow “Amsterdam-style cannabis cafés” throughout the state. Which is just what San Fransiscans need these days, to take their minds off the City’s out-of-control-crime problem, homeless epidemic, and controlled demolition.

The bill was proudly and openly modeled on pot cafés in Amsterdam, which are infamous for offering weed, coffee and other drinks, food, music, and other things that can’t be mentioned in a family blog.

I get the food part. I mean, they have the munchies, right? What do you want them to do? Starve to death?

But I do see a couple problems. I’m old enough to remember back when Californian Karens were busily outlawing indoor smoking because it was bad, or something. I guess indoor smoking is not so much of a problem anymore. Lung cancer? Secondhand smoke? Who cares! Second, serving coffee andweed? At the same time? Isn’t that mixing uppers and downers? Won’t something bad happen? Isn’t it like crossing the streams?

Finally, how well will signing this new law combine with Governor Newsom’s pivot to the center? Are Amsterdam-style drug cafés “the center” now?

After pot cafés, what will liberals want next?

In the end, despite all appearances to the contrary, California’s government just wants citizens to be happy. “Lots of people want to enjoy legal cannabis in the company of others,” bill sponsor Matt Haney (D-San Fran.) said in a statement. He continued, “There’s absolutely no good reason from an economic, health, or safety standpoint that the state should make that illegal. If an authorized cannabis retail store wants to also sell a cup of coffee and a sandwich, we should allow cities to make that possible and stop holding back these small businesses.”

Recreational marijuana was legalized for adults in California in 2016. I suppose this is the inevitable result. We’re all Amsterdam now.

Have a terrific Tuesday! I’ll be back again tomorrow morning for more delightful Coffee — and no cannabis, sorry. I know I’ve spoiled our beloved procrastinators, so here it is again, go ahead and do your multiplier now:

LINK: Click here to donate to Dr. Ryan Cole’s Fight for Freedom.

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