Month: September 2020

Authored by Lee Camp via Counterpunch.org,

The completely fair super awesome trial of Julian Assange continues in the U.K. as I write this. It’s a beautiful blend of the works of Kafka, Stalin and Joseph Heller.

Seeing as Julian is kept in a glass container in the courtroom, like a captured cockroach, maybe Kafka wins the day.

The court clearly must keep Julian in that giant Tic-Tac container because he’s undoubtedly as dangerous as Hannibal Lecter. If he weren’t in there, no one would know when he might lurch forward and PUBLISH SOMETHING THAT’S TOTALLY TRUE!

What they’re deciding in this trial is whether Assange should be extradited to the United States, or “kidnapped” as the kids call it these days.

If he is lovingly black-bagged by our government, they have promised he will face 175 years in prison if convicted by another super rad show trial presided over by an American government puppet judge. (A puppet judge is just like a real judge but they’ve got the government so far up their backside they can taste the Cheetos.)

Countless excitable activists out there say this persecution of Julian Assange is unheard of. They’re acting like no journalist has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. They’re acting like it’s unprecedented for the U.S. to go after a journalist who’s not even a U.S. citizen and has never operated his organization from the U.S. They’re acting like it’s ridiculous to add on new superseding indictments days before the trial begins.

But all the people saying that are… um… correct. Yeah, they nailed it. (Sorry for the buildup – I thought that paragraph would come out differently.)

Two Journalists

Right now, one journalist, Julian Assange, is on trial while being held in a maximum security prison in London. Another journalist, Bob Woodward, is in a very different situation. The liberal Establishment is preparing to chisel his likeness out of a small boulder and display it next to the Lincoln Memorial. They love him because he got President Donald Trump to do interviews wherein Trump, as always, sounds like a lying buffoon. Among other things the president admits he knew Covid-19 was “deadly stuff” back in at least February, but played it down anyway.

But this is nothing new. Every time Bob Woodward puts out a book, the mainstream media fan-girls all over him. Myriad kings and queens of televised logorrhea describe him as a “veteran reporter,” a “famed reporter,” or “synonymous with investigative journalism!”

So what’s the difference between liberal-hero journalist Bob Woodward and dastardly evil villain cannibal-pedophile Julian Assange (who Hillary Clinton famously said we should drone bomb)?

Well, Julian is on trial for obtaining and disclosing classified information from the U.S. government. Liberal superhero Bob Woodward would never do such a thing like that! …Oh, that’s right. He actually said in his own online journalism class —

“I have rarely found a significant story where there isn’t a document. …Often you can’t get it because it’s classified but… it’s there, and if you can get somebody to assist you, it will indeed help you with your story. …The hardest documents [to get] are intelligence documents. …And I’ve had them and printed them.”

Hmm, so the icon of investigative journalism actually brags about printing classified information. Well, maybe the difference between Assange (currently being fed to the lions) and Woodward (currently being lionized) is that Assange supposedly pressured people into giving him classified information whereas Woodward would never do that. For Bob the information just arrives at his door unsolicited.

…Oh, wait a second. On video Woodward recently said,

“Documents rarely just arrive in the mail out of the blue. …You have to go to human beings and say, ‘Will you give it to me?’ You say, ‘Come on, let’s talk. Let’s, uh, not be chickenshit about this.’”

Soooo, the guy that has the entire mainstream media licking his shoes has been involved in obtaining and publishing classified information, and in fact pressuring sources into supplying him those documents? Wow. Bob Woodward and Julian Assange are exactly the same except Assange has actually not been proven to have pressured sources into giving him documents.

And there’s one other difference between the Almighty Bob Woodward and the so-called servant of Lucifer, Julian Assange.

Nothing WikiLeaks has ever published has been proven false. Not one sentence. Whereas, the outlets Woodward works with like The Washington Post and The New York Times publish false information all the time.

They said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; they said Kim Jung-Un killed his girlfriend while she was still alive; they published 16 anti-Bernie Sanders stories in the span of 16 hours while trying to sink his candidacy. They said China imprisoned millions of Uighurs based on extrapolating from the accounts of EIGHT PEOPLE! They are utter garbage when compared to the unassailable record of WikiLeaks. But when needed, legacy media like The Washington Post and The New York Times bend over for the national security state. That’s the real difference.

Julian Assange actually stood up to the U.S. and U.K. empires by publishing their war crimes. Woodward hasn’t really done that since President Richard Nixon was in office. Most big-time American journalists back down to the State Department when push comes to shove. Those who don’t — like Seymour Hersh, Robert Scheer, Chris Hedges and a few others — are never allowed in the pages of the mainstream media again.

The next time you see a mainstream media talking-head fawn over Bob Woodward, just remember that if they had any backbone, any moral core, they would be fawning over Julian Assange instead.

*  *  *

(The jaw-dropping video clips of Bob Woodward were discovered and put together by Matt Orfalea. You can watch his work here.)

Lee Camp is the host and head writer of the comedy news TV show “Redacted Tonight with Lee Camp.” This is a chapter from Camp’s new book “Bullet Points & Punch Lines,” which features an intro by Jimmy Dore and a foreword by Chris Hedges. Grab a copy at LeeCampBook.com.

The province of Ontario, Canada is implementing strict new public health measures to help ‘stop the spread of COVID-19,’ which includes last call at 11 p.m. at bars, a province-wide shutdown of all strip clubs, and a requirement that all businesses adhere to recommendations and instructions issued by the Office of the Chief Medical Officer of Health in regards to screening for the virus.

“Over the past five weeks, Ontario has experienced an increase in the rate of new COVID-19 cases. Private social gatherings continue to be a significant source of transmission in many local communities, along with outbreak clusters in restaurants, bars, and other food and drink establishments, including strip clubs, with most cases in the 20-39 age group,” reads the release.

Strip clubs are not the businesses most guilty of reckless COVID-19 spread, but in terms of where we want to spend our risk budget as a province…

— John Michael McGrath (@jm_mcgrath) September 25, 2020

“Last week our government took immediate action to respond to the recent rise in COVID-19 cases, by setting new limits for certain social gatherings and organized public events across Ontario. As the number of cases have continued to rise, it is evident that despite the tremendous efforts of Ontarians further action is required to prevent the spread of the virus,” said Health Minister Christine Elliott. “On the advice of Ontario’s public health officials, we are moving forward with these measures to help keep Ontarians safe by limiting the potential for exposure in locations where the current risk of transmission is higher, and to avoid future lockdowns. Protecting the health and wellbeing of Ontarians will always remain our top priority.”

So, as of now, there’s nothing going on in the champagne room.

Authored by Charis Farrell via The Gatestone Institute,

It seems that criticizing the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) and their plan to disrupt and steal the 2020 presidential election can be dangerous.

Michael Anton, a former Trump administration official and now of the Claremont Institute, published an article titled, “The Coming Coup” that seems to have caught the attention of TIP co-founder Nils Gilman. According to the journalist Natalie Winters:

“Gilman, who serves as Vice President of Programs at the Chinese Communist Party-linked Berggruen Institute, took to Twitter to express his desire that Anton be executed in the same fashion as Robert Brasillach.

“Specifically, he insisted ‘Michael Anton is the Robert Brasillach of our times and deserves the same fate.’“

I’ll save you the effort of searching for Brasillach — he was a French author and journalist who advocated for the fascists and was executed by firing squad in 1945. So — the leadership of TIP has spoken. Now you know their thinking, their motives and their true objectives. It seems Gilman wants Anton executed.

Gilman’s tweet is a refreshingly frank declaration. All the usual pretense and guile are set aside. No virtue signaling, no coded language, no projection, no dog whistles to the party faithful and the stenographers at WaPo, CNN, et al.

The brutality and viciousness of Marxism and its adherents is on display. Those that may have held reservations or harbored some doubt on my analysis of what TIP really had in store for the election now have their answers. I would rather have been wrong.

Oh, to have been “backstage” at the June “war games” of TIP! One can only guess at the fevered imaginings that had to be cooled and edited into the 22-page report. What sort of Bolshevik fantasies floated about the Zoom-connected strategy sessions? If Gilman advocates executing someone by firing squad for daring to question TIP, what other penalties and extraordinary measures were discussed by the supposed bipartisan arbiters of the electoral process?

How is this “normal?” Where is the 24/7 news media reporting on Gilman’s conduct? Go ahead and do a news search on Gilman and this tweet. It won’t take long — there is virtually no reporting, other than the Twitterverse. What does that tell you? Are you disturbed by how your news information is “curated?”

What about questions and comments to other leaders of the TIP operation? One is always left wondering about the proverbial shoe being on the other foot. What would the reporting look like if a Trump advocate or leader of a similarly situated group on the other side of the political spectrum had tweeted the same thing about an opposite number? I think you already know the reactions and the answers.

More broadly — how long does the American public put up with this sort of unchecked lethality? What about the not-so-thinly veiled calls for execution by firing squad of one’s political opponents? When does the favored elite stop getting a pass for unlawful, unethical conduct? When does the reaction stop being, “Oh, well!”? Is there a gag level? A breaking point? Do Gilman’s fantasies have to be acted upon before people understand the dangers of this sort of vicious thinking and communication?

I am a strong supporter of the First Amendment, even on occasions when people get out on thin ice or test the limits of what is “acceptable.” Gilman’s tweet is something else. There is the tweet itself — which is a repulsive and dangerous smear against Anton and a call to violence — but there is also what it means against the backdrop of what TIP is all about, how it is organized, funded, promoted in the media, and used as a rallying point by the Left for disruption of a presidential election.

You already know what TIP plans to do in the coming election. You can read Anton’s analysis. Now you have the real, unvarnished thinking of TIP co-founder Gilman. Gilman likes execution by firing squad. Election Day is coming. TIP wants it to be Election Season. Beware of how much else they want that comes to fruition. It could be dangerous.

So far, scientists have figured out that being male, elderly, and having underlying medical conditions can all raise risk factors for patients. But even patients who check all these boxes don’t always experience serious symptoms. Scientists suspect that several factors influence severity, including pre-existing levels of inflammation, natural immunity levels, and the amount and strain of virus that starts the infection – along with variations in patients’ genetic makeup.

As has been previously reported, many patients suffer the worst of the symptoms for COVID-19  due to an immune system overreaction called a “cytokine storm”. As Dr. Fauci once explained, while “too little immunity is no good”…“too much immunity is really, really bad”.

Now, researchers have discovered the role of a critical protein which could open the door to a new potential COVID-19 treatment.

Studies comparing reactions to COVID-19 in siblings have unearthed an interesting detail: the availability of a substance called interferon. Interferons are signaling proteins that help orchestrate the body’s defense against viral pathogens; they’re used to treat diseases like Hepatitis C.

A growing body of evidence, including twin landmark studies published Thursday in the journal “Science” showed that “insufficient” interferon levels may be a dangerous precursor to a serious infection.  As one researcher explained, the data suggest the virus uses this “one big trick” to slip past the body’s initial defense systems.

“It looks like this virus has one big trick,” said Shane Crotty, a professor in the Center for Infectious Disease and Vaccine Research at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California. “That big trick is to avoid the initial innate immune response for a significant period of time and, in particular, avoid an early type-1 interferon response.”

The research highlights the potential for interferon-based therapies to expand a range of non-vaccine-related treatments, like Gilead’s remdesivir and convalescent plasma.

Research shows the timing of medical intervention is also critical.

“We think timing may be essential because it’s only in the very early phase one can really battle the virus particles and defend against infection,” said Alexander Hoischen, head of the genomic technologies and immuno-genomics group at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen that analyzed the DNA of the two sets of brothers.

Then again, some people are believed to have trouble fighting infections because they make antibodies that deactivate their own interferon. On Thursday, a global consortium of researchers said such immune reactions to the protein could account for life-threatening pneumonia in at least 2.6% of women and 12.5% of men that causes inflammation in the patient’s lungs.

Findings from the research offer the first explanation for the significantly higher mortality rate seen in male and elderly COVID-19 patients.

Interferon-blocking antibodies appeared in 101 of 987 patients with severe disease, but none of the 663 people with an asymptomatic or mild case, according to the research being published in “Science”. Patients over 65 were also more likely than younger ones to have the autoimmune abnormality, which was “clinically silent until the patients were infected with SARS-CoV-2,” said a group of more than 100 scientists said.

Researchers estimated that Inteferon issues might underlie as many as 14% of fatalities and the most severe cases.

Authored by Angelo Codevilla via The American Mind,

Understanding what drives the revolution that is destroying the American republic gives insight into how the 2020 election’s results may impact its course. Its practical question – who rules? – is historically familiar. But any revolution’s quarrels and stakes obscure the question: to what end? Our revolution is by the ruling class – a revolution from above. Crushing obstacles to its growing oligarchic rule is the proximate purpose.

But the logic that drives the revolution aims at civilization itself.

What follows describes how far along its path that logic has taken America, and where it might take us in the future depending on the election’s outcome.

Regime Change

Aristotle, in Book 5 of the Politics, describes how revolutions kill regimes (such as America’s) that balance the contrasting interests of ordinary people with those of the wealthy, of officials, and of other prominent persons. As the balance between any complex regime’s components shifts over time, the system may seamlessly transform into unmixed democracy, oligarchy, or some kind of monarchy. The revolution may be barely perceptible—providing that those who impose themselves, whether from above or below, do so without adding insult to injury.

But, if the party that takes power thereby destroys the friendship that had bound the several parts, even trifling incidents can spiral into all-consuming violence. Thucydides’ account of the revolution that destroyed Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War is prototypical. The French revolution, the Spanish civil war, and countless others echo it. Today, the oligarchic transformation of America’s republic is turning violent. Aristotle, however, points out that oligarchies born of violent revolution tend to succumb to the very violence that births them, quickly degenerating into some kind of tyranny or one-man rule. Restoration of anything like the original constitutional regime is most unlikely.

The U.S. Constitution had codified as fine a balance between the powers of the Many, the Few, and the One as Aristotle may have imagined by arming the federal government’s components, the States, and ordinary citizens (via the first ten Amendments as well as elections) with means to maintain the balance. Its authors, however, were under no illusions about the efficacy of “parchment barriers” to prevent interests from coalescing into factions against the common good. During the 19th century, interests and opinions in the South and the North coalesced into antagonistic ruling classes that fought the century’s bloodiest war. In the 20th, the notion that good government proceeds from scientific expertise, as well as the growing identity between big business and government, fostered the growth of a single nationwide Progressive ruling class. Between the 1930s and the early 21st century, the centralization of administrative power in this class’s hands did much to transform the American republic established in 1776-89 into an oligarchy.

Progressive Oligarchy in America

The ruling class was able to transform America’s constitutional regime because its collective partisanship bridged the divisions between the federal government’s parts, the states, as well as between public and private power.

In America as everywhere else, government regulation of business meant the twains’ coalescence. From the very first, the blurring of lines between public and private—the focus of government on distributing tasks and rewards—shifted decision-making from citizens who merely vote to the administrative system’s “stakeholders.” This reorganization of liberal societies was first codified in Italy’s 1926 Corporation Law as Fascism’s defining feature. Before WWII every Western country, America included (in FDR’s New Deal), had adopted a version thereof. In 1942 Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, a neo-Marxist analysis, described this oligarchy as the necessary consequence of modernity.

In America, however, this oligarchy fit Aristotle’s (or Marx’s) mostly economic criteria only superficially. Yes, as we will see below, its power always very much involved the growing identity between government power and private wealth, and hence on restricting access to wealth to the politically connected. But as the decades passed, it became ever clearer that membership in the U.S. ruling class depends primarily on sharing the right socio-political opinions.

The European tradition of government by experts reaches back beyond Napoleon and Hegel to royal techno-bureaucrats. Being essentially amoral, it treats transgressors as merely ignorant. It may punish them as rebellious, but not as bad people. That is why the fascists, who were part of that tradition, never made it as totalitarians. People—especially the Church—remained free to voice different opinions so long as they refrained from outright opposition. America’s growing oligarchy, however, always had a moralistic, puritan streak that indicts dissenters as bad people. More and more, America’s ruling class, shaped and serviced by an increasingly uniform pretend-meritocratic educational system, claimed for itself monopoly access to truth and goodness, and made moral as well as technical-intellectual contempt for the rest of Americans into their identity’s chief element. That, along with administrative and material power, made our ruling class the gatekeeper to all manner of goods.

Progressivism’s foundational proposition—that the American way of life suffers from excessive freedom and insufficient latitude for experts to lead each into doing what is best for all—is the intellectual basis of the oligarchy’s ever-increasing size, wealth, and power. The theme that the USA was ill-conceived in 1776-89 and must be re-conceived has resounded from Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government (1885) to the campaigns of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden: “listen to the scientists!” The criticism’s main point has been constant: America’s original conception validated the people’s right to live as they please, and made it hard to marshal them for Progressive purposes.

But the Progressive critique adds a moral basis: the American people’s indulgence of their preferences—private ease and comfort, focus on families, religious observance, patriotism—has made for every secular sin imaginable: racism, sexism, greed, etc. Because most Americans are racist, sexist, un-appreciative of real virtue or refinement (these are somehow rolled together), because these Americans resist knuckling under to their betters, America is a sick society that needs to be punished and to have its noxious freedoms reformed.

Hence, the revolution that created the American oligarchy—illiterate contemporary Marxists notwithstanding—has nothing in common with Karl Marx’s original democratic (in the Aristotelian sense) conception “from below” (e.g. his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme) other than “overthrowing the pillars of the house.” Ours is the Party-centered oligarchic revolution from above that Lenin outlined in What Is to Be Done? (1902). This Leninism is the template of the Soviet and every other Communist regime, bar none. In our revolution, too, everything—always and everywhere—is about the Party.

Upbuilding the Ruling Class

The moral class critique from above was always implicit. It largely stayed in the background of the campaigns for social improvement into which Progressives have led the American people ever since the 1930s, and especially since the 1960s. The ruling class chided Americans for insufficient commitment to education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health, as well as for oppressing women, and, above all, for racism. The campaigns for remedying these conditions have been based on propositions advanced by the most highly-credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S. government, whom the media treated as truth-telling scientists, their opponents as enemies of the people.

But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power, endowing them with socio-political clienteles as well as with levers for manipulating them. As its members’ powers grew, they developed a taste for disdaining independent Americans and acquired whips for punishing them.

In 1950, Americans at all levels of government spent 2% of GDP on K-12 education and 0.37% on higher education. In our time we spend 4.4% on K-12 and 1.9% on higher education, of a GDP that is about ten times as large. By any measure, the increases have been huge. These were supposed to uplift Americans intellectually and (maybe) morally. But they have dumbed down the nation to the point of mass illiteracy at the bottom and, at the top, created herds of ignorant, haughty, debt-ridden college graduates, fit only to enforce government edicts against Americans they despise. But the money also built up and entitled a class of monied, entitled, self-indulgent educrats—mostly administrators. U.S. college towns nowadays are islands of luxury, ease, and hate. They act as the ruling class’s gatekeepers.

Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir had reminded Americans to preserve our country’s beauty and bounty for all. But beginning in the 1960s the ruling class started using conservation as an excuse for restricting the public living on and profiting from the land, even their own properties. This resulted in big developers, regulators, politicians and lawyers making fortunes while preserving the privacy and increasing the value of places where they themselves live. (Now they want to outlaw building new single-family homes anywhere.) They also reaped billions from subsidies for “renewable energy” by flogging possible correlation—without evidence of cause—between CO2 and “global warming.” All others have suffered.

In 1965, the Census counted some 40 million people as “poor”—roughly the same number as today. Over the succeeding half-century, the Federal government has spent some $22 trillion to lift people out of poverty. Had that money been divided evenly between all the poor, each would have been a millionaire. Instead, the War on Poverty swelled and solidified America’s underclass. Because the government paid to support women with children so long as they were not married, marriage and family cohesion declined. With only about one in eight black children growing to adulthood with two married parents, the black community and America as a whole are beset by a self-perpetuating flow of dysfunctional youth. This led to the long-term imprisonment of more than a million people. Prisons became an industry. But the war on poverty enriched countless contractors, consultants and members of the “helping professions.”

These initiatives are scams. Whatever else they have done, they have increased the number of people whose livelihoods depend on government. Since 1965, the number of direct employees has more than doubled to 22 million, and their pay exceeds that of persons who actually perform services that people want. The city of San Francisco, for example, employs 19,000 persons whom it pays more than $150,000 yearly. This does not count the countless government contractors, or the advantages for some and disadvantages for everyone else that government power combined with corporate power conveys. In short, whatever else these initiatives have done, they surely have created a lot of patronage.

The Little Law That Ate the Constitution

One initiative, sold as the pursuit of justice for black Americans, has empowered the U.S. ruling class with power that transcends money. More than all the other campaigns combined, it has fueled its members’ sense of entitlement to rule fellow citizens it deems moral inferiors. That sweet, heady sense—not any love for blacks—is what drives it.

Into the 1960s, the states of the former Confederacy had imposed segregation to racially separate accommodations. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court had approved them so long as they were “equal.” In fact, most of what states had reserved for Negroes was grossly inferior. The longstanding campaign for “civil rights” had rallied the country against this obvious negation of the 14th amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” But as liberals fought state-imposed racial segregation, they had come to equate justice with the forcible imposition of racial integration resulting from countless personal choices. The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed state-directed segregation, also gave impetus to all manner of efforts to re-form society by legal-administrative force.

The decision itself eliminated any chance that this could be done in a disinterested manner. It was not based on the plain, unequivocal meaning of the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection of the laws.” Back in 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan had dissented from Plessy, arguing that any state establishment of racial preference whatever, regardless of its character or intention, violates those words. But Thurgood Marshall based his decision on “science”—that is, on the variable opinions of the credentialed class. A sociologist by the name of Kenneth Clark claimed he had proven that Negro children could feel and learn normally only in a racially mixed environment. (The “black is beautiful” movement began countering this immediately.) Quickly, “scientific” conventional wisdom made “benign” or “remedial discrimination” by race official U.S. government policy.

The Brown decision’s reliance on “science” also confused legally established segregation with the segregation that results from personal choices. This confusion was the basis for Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in “public accommodations” on the basis of race. Thenceforth, Civil rights law was no longer about removing legal barriers to personal choices. It had begun forcing personal choices. The Supreme Court’s approval of the law as a mere regulation of interstate commerce was thin pretense. The Act turned out to be the little law that ate the Constitution and poisoned American society.

It was passed primarily by Republican votes. Democrats, seeing the empowerment of a historic Republican constituency in the South as potential disaster, scrambled to avert it by out-pandering Republicans, while describing any reticence on their part as racial animosity and ascribing whatever ailed Negroes to the Republicans’ racism. Quickly, the dynamics of politics turned “civil rights” into a ruinous socioeconomic scam.

Howard W. Smith, segregationist Democrat of Virginia, best foresaw the scam’s size. Bitterly, to ensure that the law’s logic would roil the lives of its sponsors as it was roiling his constituents’, Smith, Chairman of the House of Representatives’ powerful Rules Committee, added language that outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex. The list of supposedly invidious discriminations that the Act (as amended) thus prohibits never stopped growing—age, all manner of disabilities, sexual orientation, etc. In the Act’s lengthening legal shadow, even speech that some may construe as insufficiently hostile to discriminatory “anti-discrimination” has become punishable civilly as well as criminally. Thus, willy-nilly, the Act established what U.S. law quickly recognized as “protected categories” of persons. This negates the American republic’s bedrock: “all men are created equal.” It invited whoever perceives himself disadvantaged or dishonored to construe himself part of such a category and to invite the government to discriminate against his foe. As government joined in some people’s quarrels against others, government became fomenter and partisan in endless strife.

Race (and sex, etc.) is yet another set of excuses for transferring power to the ruling class. The oligarchy is no more concerned about race than it is about education, or environmentalism, or sex, or anything else. It is about yet more discretionary power in the hands of its members, for whom not all blacks (or women, or whatevers) are to be advantaged—only the ones who serve ruling class purposes. In education, employment, and personnel management, co-opting compatible, non-threatening colleagues is the objective. As Joseph Biden put it succinctly: if you don’t vote for him, “you ain’t black.” A ruling class of ever-decreasing quality is a result.

Members and hangers-on who receive privileges, however, are a small number compared with the ruling class’s clients. Breaking down their client’s resistance to the revolution of the ruling class requires inducing them to share in the revolution’s logic of hate for its targets. This in turn requires control over channels of communication. Google, Facebook, and Twitter are indispensable for this. But creating and maintaining a sense of identity between oligarchs and the client mobs is possible mostly because of the latter’s gullibility.

The Logic of Hate

I noted that this revolution’s logic leads to no logical end. That is because “the logic that drives each turn of our revolutionary spiral is Progressive Americans’ inherently insatiable desire to exercise their superiority over those they deem inferior.” Its force, I observed, “comes not from the substance of the Progressives’ demands,” but rather “from that which moves, changes, and multiplies their demands without end. That is the Progressives’ affirmation of superior worth, to be pursued by exercising dominance: superior identity affirmed via the inferior’s humiliation.” Affirmation of one’s own superiority by punishing inferiors is an addictive pleasure. It requires ever stronger, purer doses of infliction, and is inherently beyond satisfaction.

In short, the Progressive ruling class’s intensifying efforts to oppress those they imagine to be their inferiors is not reversible. It is far less a choice of policy than it is the consequence of its awakening to its own identity—awakening to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them. It is awakening to its deep resentment—indeed, to hate—for whoever does not submit preemptively.

Let there be no doubt: the ruling class’s focus on Donald Trump has been incidental. America’s potentates do not fear one pudgy orange-haired septuagenarian. They fear the millions of Americans whom they loathe, who voted for Trump, who gave his party control of House and Senate, and who will surely vote for folks these potentates really should fear.

The Trigger

America’s oligarchic transformation had proceeded smoothly for decades because the ruling class had taken care not to add insult to injury. But as time passed, its arbitrariness and contempt increasingly tried the patience of ordinary people who practiced constitutional restraint.

During the 2008 financial panic, however, as the Progressive, bipartisan ruling class scrambled incompetently to save itself and its clients’ assets, it fatefully flaunted its united contempt for the rest of Americans. Republican president George W. Bush, Republican presidential candidate John McCain, the overwhelming majority of Republican politicians and institutions, and the literati from the Nation to the (post-Buckley) National Review were of identical minds with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Democrat politicians and institutions regarding measures to be taken—to which three fourths of the public objected, to no avail. United, this ruling class scoffed at popular opposition.

Insult having awakened substantial numbers of Americans to the injuries being inflicted on them, they looked to push back.

That began a cycle of recrimination which laid bare and accentuated the differences that had been growing between America’s rulers and ruled. At the time, I wrote that

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners—nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who hath created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity.

The people who killed one another in 1861-65 respected each other as individuals and shared standards of truth, justice, and civility. But as our ruling class put the rest of America beyond the proverbial pale, what remained of friendship among the American republic’s components drained away.

By 2016, most Americans preferred either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders over ruling-class candidates for president. And of course, they increasingly despised one another. In short, the popular basis for constitutional restraint had ceased to exist on all sides. But mostly the ruling class, unaccustomed to outright opposition to its presumption of authority, deemed the voters’ recalcitrance to be illegitimate. That began the revolution’s active phase.

At that time, I wrote that, regardless of who won the upcoming election, the United States of America had crossed the threshold of a revolution, and that though no one could know how that would end, we could be sure only that the peaceful American way of life we had known could never return. Hilary Clinton’s or Donald Trump’s victory in the election would merely have channeled the revolution onto different courses. We would look back on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as relics from an age of moderation.

Identity Unfolded

Events since 2016 have surprised because of the ever-increasing speed with which this revolution’s logic has unfolded. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 suggestion that Donald Trump might refuse to accept losing the election seemed a speck of gratuitous campaign mud. Even if Trump had lost and been so minded, his recalcitrance could not have amounted to anything. No one imagined, however, that the Democratic Party—the party of government, of the entertainment industry, of the educational establishment, of the judiciary, of corporate America, the party of the ruling class—that this party, having lost the 2016 elections, would refuse to accept popular rejection and launch a full-court “Resistance” against the voters who had rejected them. But that is what happened.

A parenthetical note is needed to square politics’ perversion of language with reality. The word “resistance” does describe what the ruling class did vis-à-vis the 2016 election’s results. But the impression that the ruling class was resisting some kind of onslaught is the reverse of reality. In fact, the election’s outcome had resulted from the general population’s resistance to the ruling class further solidifying its oligarchy. Hence the self-described “Resistance” was but a continuation of its longstanding oligarchic revolution.

The oligarchy’s offensive to forcibly disable the voters began as a mere protest against—and explanation and excuse for—the 2016 elections’ outcome. But, as its identity unfolded according its logic of hate, one thing led to another.

Official and unofficial ruling class confluence in the Resistance turned the Democratic National Committee’s July 2016 throwaway lie that the Russians had hacked its emails into a four-year national convulsion about Trump’s alleged conspiracy with Putin. Ruling class judges sustained every act of opposition to the Trump administration. Thousands of identical voices in major media echoed every charge, every insinuation, nonstop, unquestioned. The Resistance made it official ruling class policy that Trump and his voters’ “racism” and a host of other wrongdoings made them, personally, illegitimate. In 2016 Hillary Clinton had tentatively called her opponents “deplorables.” By 2018 the ruling class had effectively placed the “deplorables” outside the protection of the laws. In any confrontation, the ruling class deemed these presumed white supremacists in the wrong, systemically. By 2020 they could be fired for a trifle, set upon on the streets, and prosecuted on suspicion of bad attitudes, even for defending themselves.

This happened because the Resistance rallied the ruling class’s every part to mutually supporting efforts. Nothing encourages, amplifies, and seemingly justifies extreme sentiments as does being part of a unanimous chorus, a crowd, a mob. Success supercharges them. The Resistance fostered in the ruling class’s members the sense that they were more right, more superior, and more entitled than they had ever imagined. It made millions of people feel bigger, and better about themselves than they ever had.

Ruling class violence started on inauguration day 2017 and grew unceasingly, at first an ominous background to all manner of bureaucratic, oligarchic, and media attacks on the election’s winners. But note well that the black-clad burners and looters were the very opposite of a proletariat and that, Marxist rhetoric aside, they never attacked the wealthy or the powerful—not Wall Street, nor major corporations, certainly not any government, never mind Google, Facebook, or Twitter, America’s most powerful monopolies, or corporate officials. Instead, they received financial contributions from these sources. The violent ones were as troops in the service of the powerful, out to crush the spirit of rebellious subjects. Some Marxists!

The 2018 elections tested the Resistance’s tactical efficacy. Had the Democratic Party failed to recapture the House of Representatives, the ruling class might have sought some sort of modus vivendi. Instead, the Democrats took the House. Did any reasonable person imagine that they would not use every last bit of its legitimate authority and much more to push the Resistance to a higher level?

Reiterating the ruling class’s efforts to cower potential Trump voters since 2016 is superfluous. Countless voices indicted and convicted Trump of every misdeed imaginable, largely uncontradicted. And yet, as 2019 ended, the U.S. economy’s vibrancy, and the incompetence with which the ruling class had waged a Resistance that had grown tiresome, made it quite likely that Trump would be re-elected—and maybe even that somewhat roused Republicans would retake full control of Congress.

Then came COVID-19 and the riots.

“Intersectionality” Beats Conspiracy

The full story of the COVID-19 pandemic and of the riots that followed is yet to be told and is beyond our scope. The readiness and ease with which the ruling class turned these events into something like a coup d’état might lead one to imagine a vast conspiracy. But no conspiracy could have accomplished so thoroughly what the ruling class’s single-mindedness did. It illustrates the power of a hate so shared among diverse groups that each acts pursuant to it, more coherently than they would have were a general staff to have coordinated them.

Yes, in January 2017 Dr. Anthony Fauci had ruminated publicly about how the next epidemic to hit America could redound to Trump’s disadvantage. Independently, other ruling class figures went on the record to the same effect. Yet none could have known precisely how such an epidemic might hit. When it did, they exploited it, at first tentatively, but following the logic that already possessed them. Yet they were able to do it only with Trump’s help.

In January 2020, when COVID hit and Trump cut off travel from China and Europe, the ruling class predictably indicted him for racist excess. Fauci and the CDC claimed that the virus was not particularly contagious to humans, and Democrat officials urged people to attend big gatherings. After contagion became obvious the media, following Fauci, did not apologize for their errors. Instead, they spread estimates that the virus would kill some two million Americans, that U.S. hospitals would be overwhelmed, and insisted that Trump urge Americans to avoid contact with one another “to slow the spread and flatten the curve” of infections. No one suggested that any measures available might stop the virus. Trump took that step—unnecessary, but possibly politically analgesic.

As of this point in mid-March, nothing extraordinary had yet changed the balance of power in America. But then Trump let himself be persuaded to extend the suggestion of “lockdown” indefinitely, subject to such conditions as the CDC might make for “reopening.”

Thus, having made “lockdowns” his own, did Trump largely disempower himself, enabling and legitimizing the ruling class’s seizure of powers that are reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. Subsequently, the entire ruling class—the media (especially the social media giants), every officeholder, politician, and publicist associated with the Democratic party, and corporate America—took upon itself powers over the American people such as not even Woodrow Wilson had wielded in World War I. Foremost of these is exclusion of criticism of itself from public circulation. Banning church services and other voluntary organizations, interactions among neighbors, as well as closing small businesses reduced communications of whatever the ruling class might decide largely to one-way, top-down conveyance.

Thus did the oligarchy manage to convince the public to let it treat a virus the infection/fatality rate of which (circa 0.01%) is either equal to or lower than that of the average of seasonal influenzas, as if it were the plague. Worse that, for the sake of public health, the public should acquiesce in restrictions—such as quarantining uninfected persons and staying indoors—that reverse the logic of quarantine.

The ruling class use of COVID-19 is medical nonsense. But the “lockdowns” made perfect political sense because they disadvantaged primarily the sort of people who vote conservative. The lockdowns also made ordinary people more economically dependent on government, while enriching those best connected with it.

Most remarkable has been the unbroken consistency with which every part of the ruling class’s entourage joined the campaign while piggybacking its own priorities to it—to the complaisance of all the others. That is the meaning of “intersectionality.” Teachers’ unions, for example, conditioned returning to the classroom on the government banning charter schools; Black Lives Matter (BLM) claimed that “White Racism” must be treated as another public health menace. All other components supported them. All signified solidarity by demanding that all Americans wear masks outdoors, and that those who don’t be jailed. Meanwhile, they insisted that persons convicted of rape, robbery, and murder be released. The world turned upside down.

The riots that began depopulating America’s major cities in late May are intersectionality’s apotheosis. Since blacks commit homicides at five times and other violent crimes at three times the rate of whites, confrontations between black criminals and police are quotidian. Violent reactions to such confrontations are common. Any number of personalities and organizations, mostly black, have made fortunes and careers exploiting them, e.g. New York’s Al Sharpton. Increasingly since 2013 BLM has become the most prominent of these, founded as a project of a hardline Communist organization based in Cuba and funded lavishly and unaccountably by a high percentage of America’s major corporations. Its stated goals of protecting the black community against police brutality notwithstanding, it functions to mobilize black voters on the Democratic Party’s behalf. Along with Antifa, an organization of violent Marxists and anarchists, BLM organized the physical side of the ruling class’s campaign of intimidation against the American people.

The patently counterfactual claim that months of burning, looting and personal attacks by mobs professionally armed, marshaled, and effectively authorized are “mostly peaceful protests” doubly serves the ruling class by warning the victims that they are alone, can expect no help, and that even resenting the mobs is culpable.

Yet the riots may be intersectionality’s downfall because ordering people to tell each other things they know are not true is the most hazardous of political power grabs.

A New Regime?

In 2020, the ruling class imposes itself by Democratic officials’ arbitrary regulations as well as by all manner of corporate restrictions on dissent. Demanding that people apologize for their whiteness and show other signs of submission on pain of being fired have become routine. In 2016 it would have been difficult to imagine the 2020 level of ruling class presumption, virulence and violence. In 2020, violent bands roam America’s cities with official complaisance, acting as the ruling class’s officious enforcers of powers without logical end.

Thus, acting in the name of public health and social justice, the ruling class effectively repealed the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Freedom of religion? Filling churches and synagogues, celebrating baptisms, weddings and funerals can now land you in jail. Freedom of speech? On the contrary. You may now be punished for failing to declare what is ordered of you, even if you don’t believe it, or even for failing to attend a political re-education session or by not showing due deference therein. Freedom of assembly? Only for those on the ruling class side. Property? If you forcibly defend it against the mob, Democrat-controlled states will jail you. They will also prosecute you for defending your life.

None of this was done by laws passed by elected representatives. All was done by all manner of officials’ and bureaucrats’ edicts, and discretionary actions supported by the media and corporations. Leaderless, the American people by and large obeyed a regime that had become an oligarchy served by thousands of its clients, eager to hurt opponents financially, socially, and physically.

The Other Side

The major question overhanging our revolution is how all this has affected the Right side of American society. Since recognizing that the ruling class’s oligarchy surrounded them circa 2008, they sought to keep it at bay. In 2010 their Tea Parties elected the most heavily Republican Congress in a generation. But the Republicans they elected mostly joined the ruling class. Rather than voting for one of them—Mitt Romney for president in 2012—many stayed home.

Then in 2016, sensing that the barbarians were at the gates, they gave short shrift to whoever would not denounce Republicans as harshly as Democrats and elected the loudest denouncer, Donald Trump. By 2020, Trump notwithstanding, the barbarians had proved to be the gatekeepers. They cowed the deplorables, punished them to convince them that they are evil and isolated, deprived them of normal social intercourse, and made them dependent on media that pushed politically correct reality down their masked throats.

The deplorables are angry, but so what?

Why have conservatives mostly obeyed perverted authority? Did the ruling class succeed? Is the revolution over? A minority seem to believe that example may lead leftists once again to recognize their opponents’ equal rights. In short, they are conservatives who yearn to preserve something already gone. They are not yet revolutionaries for their own cause.

Most have felt sandbagged by Donald Trump’s and the Republican Party’s verbally combative but toothless reaction to the oligarchic revolution. They waited in vain for them to use the active and passive devices available to any president or house of Congress to deprive the ruling class of its government-derived powers: commanding and prohibiting, funding and defunding, hiring, firing, rewarding and punishing, accrediting and discrediting to punish violations of freedom of speech, religion, and assembly, of basic civil rights. Instead, these officials largely gave the oligarchic regime a pass. Private persons cannot easily defend themselves while their own officials don’t. Now they no longer care what the Trump administration’s calculations might have been.

Today, the oligarchy’s impositions pursuant to the COVID-19 epidemic and the riots that followed removed conservatives’ equivocations by forcing millions bereft of protection to look beyond conventional leadership and categories. They have made existential choices, voiced mostly to family and friends but increasingly evidenced by action.

Millions moved out of cities and Democrat-ruled states, and millions more wished to do so. Yet more people clogged the roads out into mask-less America as for breaths of fresh air. Countless persons whose jobs or careers had been wrecked have been forced to look for ways to live the rest of their lives. The majority of Americans having been accused of racism, etc., and sensing that the powers-that-be stacked the deck against them, look upon the powers-that-be as enemies.

No one could know for sure how much the empowered oligarchy had cowered ordinary people’s resentment or inflamed it. The fact that some two thirds of respondents told pollsters that they are afraid publicly to voice their views suggests much.

Whatever may happen, it is safe to say that, on the Right side of American life, conventional conservatism is dead, as is political moderation.

2020: Who You Gonna Believe?

The 2020 election is the first of the ways in which these changes will manifest themselves. The election, regardless of its outcome, cannot by itself diminish the oligarchy’s hold on America’s institutions nor alter the revolution’s driving logic, nor extinguish the rest of America’s commitments to itself, nor return America to what had been normalcy.

When the American people vote on November 3, they—like the proverbial husband who walks in on wife in flagrante—will choose whether to believe what they are told or what their senses tell them.

The ubiquity, depth, and vehemence of the ruling class’s denigration of Donald Trump is such as to render superfluous any detailing thereof. Suffice it to note that not a day in four years has gone by without the news media hyperventilating or ruminating on some allegation of Trump’s wrongdoing or wrongbeing. For what? Again, the list of subjects is so exhaustive that it is easier to note that there is hardly any mortal transgression of which he has not been accused. Suffice it to say that, to the extent one depends on the media’s narrative, one cannot help but believe that Donald Trump is the enemy of all good things, that nothing he has done has been any good, that he is responsible for all that is bad.

Nor has the media forgone any occasion to protect, foster, and embellish narratives in support of each and every member of the “intersectional” coalition and to shut out or denigrate alternatives thereto. It labels as false and/or as “hate speech” facts and arguments that counteract its narratives. Since the ruling class can be certain of the media’s unquestioning support, it need not worry about truth.

For example, do physicians in America and around the world use hydroxychloroquine successfully against the COVID-19 virus? Yes, correct—but banished as if it were false because it is politically incorrect. Riots, arson, and looting are leading so many to relocate from America’s major cities as to cause urban vacancies and a house-building boom in the country? Fact. But politically incorrect fact, indeed, racist. Repeat: “mostly peaceful protests, mostly peaceful protests.”

To win the 2020 election, the oligarchy deployed all its forces and staked its legitimacy, whole. It cannot imagine losing them. Yet, win or lose, the election changed American politics in a way not entirely friendly to the oligarchy.

For the ruling class, the electoral problem is that the intersectional coalition’s actions and demands have made far too explicit that crushing Donald Trump is only incidentally its objective—that crushing the spirit of independence in America’s “deplorable” population is its essential objective. How many Americans are willing to join the privileged ones in confessing their neighbors’ sins in exchange for the hope of being counted as “allies” of the folks doing the real oppressing rather than among the real oppressed? How many are happy that their company’s H.R. department now decides promotions, demotions and firings regardless of professional competence? Do most Americans really believe that the authorities ought to have the powers they exhibited during the COVID affair, and do they see the “mostly peaceful protests” as part of a brighter future for themselves?

Since 2016 the ruling class have had the luxury of acting as if the deplorables were lifeless punching bags. On November 3 they will find out to what extent that may not be so. Its leaders have already discovered that their “intersectional” entourages are not entirely controllable. After the election, the politicians bidding for leadership of conservatives will make Trump look like milquetoast. As the ruling class tries to suppress them, it will also have to deal with uncontrollable allies, whose violence will spur the conservatives to fiercer resistance.

Revolution has already undone the regime established in 1776-89. The election’s alternative outcomes will strongly affect how it moves America toward a new regime.

What If the Rulers Win?

Victory for the Democratic Party is a recipe for violent strife.

The lack of moral-political authority at the head of the ruling class has been arguably the most important and least remarked fact of public life in 21st-century America. Most visibly since 2008, its leaders have led primarily by pulling rank—denigrating ordinary Americans and calling attention to their own elevated stations in government and society—and by courting the coalition of groups driven by intersectional hate.

After an electoral victory, these leaders—the elected officials, the deep state bureaucrats, the corporate and finance chiefs, the educrats, etc.—will be able to wield power to the extent of the losers’ complaisance and their ability to satisfy the intersectionals’ ambitions and hates. Moderating and meshing these contrasting requirements would be hard even for exceptionally astute and potent persons. But neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris has talent, personal following, or moral authority. Hence, the winners would be hostages to the war that their own activists would wage against the rest of America, and to the deplorables’ resistance.

For most ruling class notables, enjoying and parceling out victory’s prerogatives is the revolution’s point. They would prefer to suppress the deplorables while minimizing disruption of the economy and avoiding violence. For these chiefs, rubbing the deplorables’ faces in excrement is mostly an instrument of conflict. But for the intersectionals, it is the revolution’s very objective, its driving logic. For them, vengeance is electoral victory’s foremost prerogative. Determined as the chiefs may be that the intersectional tail must not wag the revolutionary dog, the fact is that each and every part of the intersectional coalition sees itself as the dog.

For their part the deplorables would not accept the legitimacy of the Left’s victory in 2020 any more than the Left accepted the Right’s victory in 2016. Why should they? Lacking any hope of federal protection, they would retrench behind such state, local, and private means of resistance as they may have, while they sought effective national leadership. Sensing that disobedience to the point of violence had become the only effective means of defense, they would respond to challenges with force. The revolution’s logic would play out in a series of confrontations, and the revolution’s next stage would depend on these confrontations’ outcomes.

Understanding these confrontations requires reconsidering what happened in America after 2016, and especially in 2020. Elected officials of the Left acted as laws unto themselves regardless of federal law, according to the principle “stop me if you can.” The Trump administration’s passivity validated their decisions. All manner of bureaucrats, corporate officials, and employees—indeed anyone who wielded any kind of authority—came to believe that they had the right and duty to police, to command, and to punish whoever offended their sensibilities.

This phenomenon recalls social practice in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, East Germany, etc. The sense of arbitrary authority over the regime’s outlawed enemies is a hallmark of totalitarianism. The alleged offenses matter little and the truth not at all. Even after accusations prove to be hoaxes, the narrative’s usefulness and being on the right side is all that matters. The Right was slow to learn that lesson. But learn it they did.

Intersectional groups exist regarding each and every facet of life to make as much trouble as they can for whoever differs from them. Following the Left’s victory in 2020, attorneys general, agency potentates, mayors, and corporate officials who are part of or partial to these groups would see it as more to their advantage than ever to act against deplorables: investigations to harass, lawsuits to bankrupt, arrests to defame, seizures of property, firings, cancelings, restraining orders, custody of children…there is no limit to how people can be hurt by willful uses of power.

As the intersectional groups were swollen by recruits during the post-2016 period, their adherents became more independent as they became more radical. All of the above surely augurs assaults on deplorables increasingly pervasive, unpredictable, and violent. It also leaves the deplorables no alternative but to respond in kind.

In sum, the Right is likely to emulate the Left’s 2016-20 Resistance to the best of its abilities and limits of its powers. And since a fully empowered Left is likely to be far more kinetic in its response to Resistance than Trump had been, violent clashes would be inevitable.

At all levels, officials of red states are the deplorables’ first line of defense. And indeed, during the post-2016 period some such officials used tactics similar to their leftist homologues: refusing to enforce dictates from above, and declaring their jurisdictions “sanctuaries” for one or another’s causes. Correctly, they judged that just as the Trump administration was not going to send the army to California to enforce immigration laws, nobody was going to send force majeure to their jurisdictions to govern in their stead.

Were the Left to win in 2020, that assumption would be tested. Every U.S. agency has a SWAT team. The Biden/Harris administration’s appointees would surely want to use them to crush resistance to any number of edicts. Among the most interesting questions concerning such an administration is the extent to which it would try to restrain its members from major confrontations with red states and with private groups of Deplorables.

Though the material balance of forces would be heavily weighted on the Left’s side, it would not prejudge the outcomes simply because government agents are unaccustomed to opposition—check-collectors rather than heroes willing to suffer harm for a cause. Believing in nothing, they are unlikely to go beyond initial skirmishes into guerrilla war against an armed population fighting for a way of life.

Yet there is no doubt that such an administration would lack the power as well as the inclination to restrain the manifold pent-up acts of vengeance that its empowered, energized base would unleash on the deplorables in countless instances. Some have suggested that such an administration could tame that base by offering sinecures in exchange for calm, and that only a lack of money would limit its ability to buy it. But it is doubtful that money would extinguish the taste for raw force to which so many had become accustomed in 2020. Hence, violent confrontations, all over the country, would be virtually certain.

Where these confrontations led would depend on how the Right side of American life organized itself politically after Trump’s defeat. The 2016 Republican primaries’ unambiguous lesson was the voters’ wholesale rejection of the Republican Party’s establishment. Two candidates out of seventeen, Trump and Cruz, were serious alternatives because they ran against both Parties. Nothing that has happened since then, or that would happen were Trump to be defeated in 2020, would make establishment Republicans any less disgusting to deplorable voters.

In short, American politics’ Right side will be looking for leaders eager to do unto the Left what the Left has been doing to them, for leaders who organize effective resistance, and who offer a prospect for saving their constituents’ way of life.

Necessarily, the race for leadership would center on the besieged deplorables’ plight. This would mean organizing nationwide measures such as tax strikes and other actions to protest or cripple major administration decisions. It would also mean nationalizing opposition to local instances of injustice, perhaps interposing conservative elected officials between citizens targeted by injustice and their tormentors. It would mean fostering and leading campaigns of civil disobedience.

After 2016 the Left had pretended to be frightened of populism. It would be incumbent on whoever would lead the Right side of American life after 2020 to give them real reasons to fear it.

Since to lead is to show the way, contenders for leadership must frankly distinguish what is possible and what is no longer so. They would have to acknowledge the extent to which a half century of ruling class dominance has reduced the proportion of people who believe that “all men are created equal” and that none may rule another except by reasoned persuasion. Hence, now, they would have to start from the fact that republican life is possible only among these Americans, and not possible with people insensible to all manner of freedom.

To avoid having the left’s priorities forced on them and eschewing desire to force anything on the Left, to avoid a civil war of which the armed forces must be the arbiter, they would ask their voters to support plans for so de-centralizing government—that is, for a much-expanded federalism—as to guarantee their right to live the kinds of lives that other Americans are no longer willing or able to live.

If, in the event of the Left’s victory in the 2020 election the Right does not come up with such leadership, the ruling class’s inability to control the inevitable clashes between the intersectionals and the Deplorables really is likely to lead to a civil war that only the military can end. That might end the revolution on the usual terms: right is the interest of the stronger.

What if They Lose?

Donald Trump’s reelection would reduce the intersectionals’ confidence a bit and give the Right side of American life a bit more leeway as it chooses new leadership. In this slightly calmer atmosphere, the beginning of the 2024 election cycle would open a host of possibilities.

But it would not end our revolution any more than the ruling class’s victory would. The revolution’s essentials would remain and its logic would continue to unfold. The ruling class, having failed peaceably and hence firmly to establish oligarchy, remains pressed by the deplorables on one side and its chosen intersectional instruments on the other. It dares not try dismounting the tiger it rides.

The deplorables tried in 2016 to call into being a Party to relieve the ruling class’s oppression and, Trump notwithstanding, ended up oppressed by the intersectionals more than they ever imagined. In 2020, despite Trump, only these are stronger than four years earlier. But the intersectionals’ power is an expression of the ruling class—and in 2020 the ruling class, its enormous power over money and institutions notwithstanding, lacks energy and legitimacy of its own and must borrow them from the intersectionals. Trump’s reelection raises no obstacles to their aggrandizement that did not exist the previous day. Virtually without obstacles under Trump I, that aggrandizement would continue under Trump II.

After election day 2020 Trump, even victorious, is a spent force. From the day he declared his candidacy until some time in 2018 he embodied the Deplorables’ hopes for salvation. Thereafter until the 2020 election, he embodied the certainty that his defeat would mean the choice between subjection and war.

Few if any of his voters deluded themselves that his second term would be better than his first, during which they had lost more of their country than in the previous half century. But the deplorables’ fate is tied to Donald Trump—until election day 2020. The morning after the 2020 election, the deplorables’ agenda resets to 2016, with the vital difference of urgency. Yes, the deplorables need a political vehicle of their own for the future. But, most urgently, they need national focus and organization to guard their freedoms today. That means instantly searching for new leadership, and urgently getting behind it.

Donald Trump having vaccinated the deplorables against what Theodore Roosevelt used to call “the unbridled tongue and the unready hand,” candidates for leadership of the Right side of American life will have to present themselves by actually leading their fellow Deplorables effectively to resist and reverse what officious and official policy by potentates high and low are doing, and have done, to foul so much of American life.

There is no substantive difference between the sort of leadership that the deplorables will demand in the wake of Trump’s reelection from what they would have demanded after his defeat. The problems are the same. In either case they would have to lead protests, lawsuits, boycotts, campaigns for legislation, for legitimizing or delegitimizing all manner of potentates, as well as explaining how to reestablish the American way of life on a sound basis for those who want to live it. The difference would lie in circumstances. In the wake of electoral defeat, the Left’s more energetic and widespread acts of oppression would effectively set the Right’s defensive agenda. But having won at the polls and having a nominally friendly administration, the deplorables’ leaders would have the luxury of picking their fights with strategic consistency.

The revolution long since destroyed the original American republic in the minds, hearts, and habits of a critical mass of citizens. They neither want nor are any longer able to live as Americans had lived until so recently. Loudly, they declare that the rest of us are racists, etc., unworthy of self-government. No one can undo that. Chances are against the undoing happening on its own. The longer we pretend to live under precisely the same laws, the likelier we will end up killing one another. We must not do that. And yet regional differences notwithstanding, we are mostly intermingled. Sorting ourselves into compatible groups is part of the American genius and tradition. More of that has been happening and more will happen yet. If we want to live in peace, as we should, we must contrive to agree to disagree to accommodate peace.

The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes.

Is China’s housing bubble – the main “wealth effect” for hundreds of millions of middle class Chinese – finally about to burst?

On Friday, trading in onshore bonds of China Evergrande, China’s second largest and the world’s most indebted property developer, was halted after reports it was seeking government help to stave off a cash crunch caused the price of its shares and debt to tumble, and sparking a crisis of confidence among creditors who’ve lent the world’s most indebted developer more than $120 billion.

As Bloomberg reports, long-simmering doubts about the property giant’s financial health exploded to the fore on Thursday, following reports it had sent a letter to Chinese officials warning of a potential cash crunch that could pose systemic risks. The news sparked a furious liquidation in the company’s bonds that continued into Friday, sending the price of Evergrande’s yuan note due 2023 down as much as 28% to a record low. Losses in the company’s dollar bonds spread to high-yield debt across Asia.

The selloff was so intense that according to the Financial Time, it forced the Shanghai stock exchange to suspend trading in Evergrande bonds for half an hour on Friday morning, due to “abnormal fluctuations”, which is a polite euphemism for “selling.”

The crash in Evergrande shares and bonds was sparked after a letter, purportedly from the company, circulated on Chinese social media on Thursday requesting support for a previously planned reorganization from the provincial government in Guangdong, where Evergrande is based. In the purported letter dated August 24, the FT reports  that Evergrande asked the Guangdong government to approve a plan to float its subsidiary Hengda Real Estate on Shenzhen’s stock exchange through a merger with an already listed company (another eerie similarity to the Nicola SPAC-reverse merger). Evergrande reportedly added that a failure to complete the reorganization would pose “systemic risks.”

In response, and in continuing its most sincerely imitation of Trevor Milton, the company said in a filing to Hong Kong’s stock exchange late on Thursday that the documents “fabricated and pure defamation” and that it had reported the matter to China’s security authorities.

“There are rumors circulating on the Internet about the reorganisation of Hengda Real Estate. The relevant documents and pictures are fabricated and are pure defamation, causing serious damage to the Company’s reputation. The Company strongly condemns such acts and has reported the case to the public security authorities.”

Just to be safe, reports that Evergrande also asked its employees to post on social media platform WeChat a statement saying the letter was fake, according to the FT.

The full-blown attempt at deflecting investor skepticism proved woefully insufficient, however, and resulted in a wholesale puke in the company’s publicly traded securities, with Evergrande shares falling 9.5% to the lowest level since May at the close of trading in Hong Kong.

Alas, where there’s smoke there is usually fire – especially in an economy that has been ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic – and on Thursday rating agency S&P poured fuel on the fire when it cut its outlook on Evergrande’s B+ credit rating outlook from stable to negative.

“Evergrande’s short-term debt has continued to surge, partly due to its active acquisition of property projects,” it said. “We had previously expected the company to address its short-term debt, especially given the tough economic climate.”

Making matters worse, there is a near-term trigger that could catalyze a full-blown debt and liquidity crisis and which is further spooking investors. As part of an agreement Evergrande struck with some of its largest investors, the company raised about 130 billion yuan ($19bn) by selling shares in Hengda and needs to repay investors if fails to win approval for a backdoor listing on the Shenzhen stock exchange by Jan. 31.

This is a problem because that amount represents 92% of Evergrande cash and cash equivalents of 142.5 billion yuan in. And since the fate of the company itself is suddenly determine by its stock price – a reverse merger appears very much unlikely if Evergrande can’t stabilize its stock price – the possibility of a toxic feedback loop emerges, where the lower the stock price drops, the more aggressive the selling, the more likely a terminal liquidity event occurs and forces the company to demand a shareholder-liquidating bailout.  S&P agrees, saying that Evergrande will have to repay a portion of its investments in Hengda, even as it sought to contain the panic by adding that the risk of a liquidity crunch was “still low for now.” We’ll check back in a week.

Though it’s unclear why Evergrande has yet to win approval for its listing plan, Bloomberg speculates it may relate to China’s efforts to tame sky-high home prices and restrain fundraising by developers. Regulators have been using a wide range of policy levers since 2016 to deter speculative home-buyers, curb expensive land prices and restrict lending to residential builders.

Evergrande has said it won’t raise new funds through the listing in Shenzhen, but the transaction could allow the company to achieve a higher valuation and thus easier access to future financing. Its stake sale to strategic investors in 2017 implied a valuation of about 425 billion yuan for the unit, which holds most of Evergrande’s real estate assets. That’s almost three times higher than the market value suggested by the developer’s existing shares in Hong Kong. Chinese property developers trade at about 12 times projected earnings on average in Shanghai and Shenzhen, compared with about 5 times in Hong Kong.

In yet another red flag, Bloomberg reports citing five sources that at least five Chinese banks and two trust firms held emergency meetings on Thursday night to discuss their Evergrande exposure and access to collateral. Among them was China Minsheng Banking Corp., whose exposure to Evergrande exceeds 29 billion yuan. And since this is China, where once a default cascade begins it may never end, reader will recall that Minsheng Bank, also known as “China’s JPMorgan” was itself in crisis last spring when it missed a bond payment in January 2019 and sought money from its employees to avoid collapse.

But while Minsheng may be stable for now, Evergrande is anything but especially after at least two of the banks that were present in the emergency meetings decided to bar the company from drawing unused credit lines, effectively capping the company’s liquidity just as it will desperately need access to every incremental yuan. The developer had credit lines of 503 billion yuan as of June 30, of which 302 billion yuan were unused, according to Bloomberg.

“Regardless of the authenticity of the letter, we think the situation may have prolonged negative impact,” Manjesh Verma and Stella Li, credit analysts at Citigroup, wrote in a report. “It increases concerns among various investors and lenders and hence increases difficulty in funding access and refinancing.”

Meanwhile, the FT notes that analysts have long been concerned that any issues at Evergrande could ripple through China’s financial system: “Evergrande is a significant source of systemic risk,” said Nigel Stevenson, an analyst at GMT Research. “There are huge debts in the listed parent company that will ultimately need to be refinanced.”

Just how huge are the debts? One look at the chart below should answer all questions on why the second most important Chinese property developer is also a systematically important company for a country where the bulk of household wealth is not in the stock market but in real estate.

As Bloomberg adds, Evergrande has long been viewed as a poster child for highly leveraged companies in China, where corporate debt swelled to a record 205% of gross domestic product in 2019 and has likely climbed further this year as firms increased borrowing to tide themselves over during the pandemic. Evergrande has tapped banks, shadow lenders and the bond market in recent years to expand beyond the property industry into businesses ranging from electric cars to hospitals and theme parks –- areas that often align with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s policy priorities.

The core problem that Evergrande has faced as it unleashed this historic debt issuance spree, is that it did not expect the coronavirus to cripple the Chinese economy. Following the coronavirus pandemic, investors have sharpened their focus on China’s heavily indebted property developers, which have huge volumes of outstanding debt held by foreign entities (amusingly enough, FTSE Russell just announced Chinese government bonds will be included into its flagship World Government Bond Index from October 2021, as China can never find enough greater fools to whom it can sell even more Evergrande debt).

Amid the economic slowdown, Evergrande this month was forced to slash the price of its properties in China by 30%. The company has said the discounts were a “normal sales strategy” for September and October. Just one problem: those two months are a peak time for home sales in China, which means that Evergrande is lying. Again.

* * *

One big variable surrounding the future of Evergrande is whether Beijing will merely swoop in and bail it out if it is unable to repay creditors. While the Chinese government has a long history of bailing out systemically important companies to maintain financial stability, policy makers have in recent years sought to instil more market discipline and reduce moral hazard. Case in point, as part of China’s spotty efforts to rein in risk, authorities have recently nationalized indebted conglomerates such as HNA Group, Anbang and Tomorrow Group. They’ve also introduced new rules for financial holding companies, including Evergrande, that impose minimum capital requirements and other restrictions meant to reduce the threat of systemic blowups.

In any case, every ponzi scheme eventually comes to an end, and unless Evergrande can find a way to continues it unprecedented debt expansion, it is facing a brutal debt maturity schedule…

… which sees billions in existing yuan and dollar bonds set for repayment. If the company remains locked out of capital markets, if it can’t restore access to its line of credit, and unless it can complete its reverse merger, it just may be over for Evergrande, and also for China’s gargantuan housing bubble.

Authored by Ann Coulter via AnnCoulter.com,

During a BLM “peaceful protest” in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 30 (over George Floyd’s dying of a heart attack while in police custody in Minneapolis), James Scurlock was peacefully protesting by breaking into an architecture firm – hoisting an office chair and hurling it into two computer monitors, then ripping a phone from a desk and throwing it against the wall, as his friend shattered another monitor – all of which was captured on video.

Nearby, Jake Gardner, an Iraq War veteran and Trump supporter, was keeping watch over the two bars he owned, The Hive and The Gatsby, aided by his 68-year-old father and a security guard. The peaceful protesters soon made their way to Jake’s bar, where they hurled a street sign through The Hive’s plate-glass window. He and his father rushed outside to prevent the peaceful protesters from storming his bar.

Scurlock’s friend, catching his wind after smashing computer monitors, knocked Gardner’s father to the ground. (It’s on tape.) Or as CNN’s Madeline Holcombe put it: “An unidentified man can be seen pushing Gardner’s father.”

Gardner rushed to help his father, then backed away toward the bar, lifting his shirt to show the protesters he was armed, and telling them to move along. Again, it’s all on tape. Murmurings can be heard from the crowd: “That (expletive) got a gun” and “It’s not worth it (expletive) you stu–,”

At that point, peaceful protester Alayna Melendez leapt on Gardner from behind (not subscribers to the Marquess of Queensberry rules, these peaceful protesters), knocking him down and into the street, whereupon yet another peaceful protester jumped on top of Gardner, who fired two warning shots in the air, scattering his first two assailants.

Again: all on tape.

Three seconds later, as Gardner was trying to get up, Scurlock jumped on him from behind and put him in a chokehold — which I believe is considered definitive proof of intentional murder when performed by a police officer. In videos, Gardner can be heard yelling, “Get off me! Get off me!”

With his right arm pinned, and Scurlock choking him, Gardner moved the gun to his left hand and shot over his shoulder, hitting Scurlock in the collarbone, killing him.

Or as The New York Times’ Azi Paybarah explained it:

“Mr. Gardner got into a fight with one man, James Scurlock, 22. The two scuffled before Mr. Gardner fired a shot that killed him.”

They “scuffled.”

It brings to mind the Times headline from Nov. 23, 1963: “President Kennedy Dies in Dallas After Scuffle — Albeit at Great Distance — With Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Let’s be fair, though. Maybe Scurlock jumped Gardner, or maybe Gardner jumped Scurlock. Who knows? It’s not like there are 4 million videos of the incident.

Gardner was immediately taken into police custody for questioning and held until 11 p.m. the next night.

The Democratic district attorney, Don Kleine, his chief deputy Brenda Beadle, and all the homicide detectives spent 12 hours that weekend reconstructing the incident with multiple videos. Their unanimous conclusion? That Gardner shot Scurlock in self-defense.

Despite the delusional claims posted on “social media” that Gardner used the N-word — which, as we all know, is grounds for summary execution by any black person — none of the videos substantiate that. To the contrary, Scurlock’s own friend denied that Gardner said anything racial at all. (Apparently, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.)

At 22, Scurlock already had a rap sheet a mile long, including home invasion, assault and battery, domestic violence — and, of course, he was in the middle of a crime spree that very night. Methamphetamine and cocaine were found in his urine.

But “the community” erupted like COVID in April. Nebraska state Sen. Megan Hunt (bisexual, graduate of a now-defunct college) repeatedly called Gardner a “white supremacist.” Another Nebraska state senator, Kara Eastman (bisexual), called Gardner’s shooting of Spurlock a “cold-blooded murder.”

(Why do I mention their sexual orientations? A lot of the hate toward Gardner seems to come from the transgender community for his posting on Facebook that transgenders would be restricted to the unisex bathrooms because a man in a dress had attacked a female customer in the ladies’ room.)

Twitter was full of unattractive humans claiming that Gardner was a “white supremacist,” which were dutifully reprinted in local media, such as this one from @nostudavab (Twitter banner: “F*CK TRUMP”):

“Club owner Jake Gardner shot and killed a protestor in Omaha on video, yelling racial slurs. he is openly racist and homophobic. he murdered James Scurlock, he’s proud of it, and he’s not in jail.”

Protesters besieged Kleine’s neighborhood.

Kleine responded to the mob’s demand for “justice” by calling in a black prosecutor, Fred Franklin, to make damn sure the grand jury indicted Gardner – whom Kleine (the elected D.A.) had found to be innocent. As he was expected to do, Franklin produced a series of fanciful indictments, including for manslaughter and making a “terroristic threat.” (The “terroristic threat” was Gardner lifting his shirt to show the peaceful protesters that he was armed.)

The special prosecutor’s ALL NEW EVIDENCE THAT BLEW THE OTHER FACTS AWAY was this: The night of the BLM protest, Gardner had posted on Facebook:

“Just when you think ‘what else could 2020 throw at me?’ Then you have to pull 48 hours of military style firewatch.”

WHY WAS THIS MAN NOT IMMEDIATELY ARRESTED?

Gardner’s landlord, Frank Vance, promptly evicted Jake’s bars from the building, and sent an anguished apology letter to Scurlock’s family:

(“deepest sympathy … the pain and suffering … losing a child to unnecessary violence … apologize for this horrible incident … time to heal … very deepest condolences”).

Gardner was facing 95 years in prison for shooting a career criminal who was choking him, and now he had lost his source of income. So naturally his friends tried to set up a GoFundMe account to help pay for his legal defense.

GoFundMe’s response? They instantly and repeatedly took down the page, based on their clearly stated policy: We don’t like you.

Here’s a thought, GoFundMe: Guaranteeing a fair trial for an individual accused of a crime isn’t the same as defending the thing he’s accused of. That’s the whole point! Gardner wanted to prove that he was innocent. Nope! No fair trial, no fair press, no livelihood, no GoFundMe. No chance.

Meanwhile, the family of the convicted criminal who jumped Gardner has already raised more than a quarter-million dollars on GoFundMe. (Funeral expenses can be costly!)

Poor Jake Gardner didn’t stand a chance against the raging, hate-filled multitude. Even those sworn to uphold the law, like Kleine and Franklin, leapt in with the mob. And a corporation whose business it is to enable people to raise money for just causes such as getting a fair trial refused to do business with him, not unlike the Memphis Woolworth’s treatment of black people in 1960.

Sadly, President Trump never said a word about his polite, cheerful supporter being railroaded in Omaha. Gardner had attended Trump’s inauguration with such high hopes. He had well wishes even for the (can we say “insane”?) protesters he encountered there.

Last weekend, facing death threats and a kangaroo court, and with no means to mount a defense, Gardner killed himself, rather than be killed by the mob waiting for him back in Omaha.

This is the part of the column where I make a clarion call for action. How about civil suits against the monsters in the prosecutor’s office, against the criminal-supporting GoFundMe and the Facebook and Twitter defamation mobs! Maybe a department of justice investigation or FCC action against biased social media companies. Antitrust suits. Boycotts!

I’ve got nothing. The country has gone mad. I always figured the first armed civilian who ever fought back would put an end to the violence exploding all over the country — the violence that police and prosecutors can’t or won’t stop. “We have the guns,” conservatives like to say. In fact, it’s even worse now.

It’s official: You can’t protect yourself. Not even a blameless ex-Marine could defend himself from being choked to death. The D.A. will call in a “special” prosecutor to throw you to the wolves, and they’ll both be praised for railroading an innocent man in the Omaha World Herald, while the national media defame you.

Like most Democratic-machine cities, Philadelphia has endured its fair share of corruption emanating from city hall. But this latest scandal is truly unprecedented – it’s almost like a prestige TV plot come to life.

Philadelphia City Treasurer Christian Dunbar is facing federal charges – and, if convicted, up to 45 years and $1.5 million fine – for allegedly embezzling thousands of dollars from bank customers and also committing to a “sham” marriage to gain American citizenship. 

The charges were unveiled by Attorney William McSwain on Friday. The prosecutor said Dunbar was arrested by FBI agents on Friday.morning. A local TV station pointed out that the charges facing Dunbar are unrelated to his work as treasurer.

Dunbar

Philly Mayor Jim Kenney says Dunbar, who is originally from Liberia, and reportedly a descendant of American abolitionist Harriet Tubman, has been fired as city treasurer, and the inspector general will begin a “thorough review” of Dunbar’s office.

“The criminal complaint announced today does not involve Christian Dunbar’s work with the City of Philadelphia. But in light of the allegations, his employment has been terminated effective immediately. At the same time, I have asked Inspector General Alexander DeSantis to begin a thorough review of the City Treasurer’s Office during the time of Dunbar’s employment as both Deputy Treasurer and Treasurer. This review can help resolve any concerns about the Office’s conduct and transactions during this period,” Kenney said in a statement.

According to the criminal complaint, Dunbar is facing charges of embezzlement by a bank employee, conspiracy to commit marriage fraud, and fraudulent procurement of citizenship. He allegedly stole a total of $15,000 from two customers at the Wells Fargo Bank in Newtown Square where he worked as a financial adviser, weeks before he was appointed as the city’s deputy treasurer in 2016.

But the scheme to obtain citizenship through fraudulent marriage was perpetrated by Dunbar and three others – his current wife, and two friends they allegedly met at Temple University.

Dunbar’s wife, identified in the criminal complaint only as “FND”, along with the two others – identified only as “Person #1” and “Person #2” – also deliberately participated in the scheme to defraud the US via entering into sham marriages, but the complaint didn’t detail any charges relating to them.

The two sham marriages – one between Dunbar and one of the co-conspirators, and the other between Dunbar’s now-wife, and one of the other conspirators – occurred within days of each other in December 2006 and were performed by the same officiant, a former Temple University professor. But since that time, the only “legitimate” marriage Dunbar and his wife have participated in has been their own, which was cemented in Senegal back in 2013.

“The alleged conduct that is outlined in this case reveals a pattern of dishonesty, poor judgment and criminal behavior that spans many years,” McSwain said Friday .

Over the last four years as treasurer, Dunbar has been responsible for managing the city’s debt obligations, bank accounts, its operations and capital accounts and petty cash amounts related to various departments.

Dunbar’s maternal grandfather, William VS Tubman, served as president of Liberia for 27 years and is widely regarded as “the father of modern Liberia”.

Read the press release below:

PHILADELPHIA – United States Attorney William M. McSwain announced that Christian Dunbar, 40, of Philadelphia, PA, the current Philadelphia City Treasurer, was arrested this morning and charged by Criminal Complaint with embezzlement by a bank employee, conspiracy to commit marriage fraud, and fraudulent procurement of citizenship. U.S. Attorney McSwain detailed the charges at a press conference this afternoon in front of the James A. Byrne U.S. Courthouse in Philadelphia.

As the Philadelphia City Treasurer, Dunbar’s responsibilities include: (1) managing the City’s debt obligations, which includes overseeing the issuance of the City’s municipal bonds; (2) managing the City’s bank accounts, including its operating account, capital account, and petty cash accounts in various departments; (3) paying the City’s bills, including making payments to vendors, cutting payroll checks, and making payments to pension plans; and (4) managing the City’s cash reserves.

According to the Criminal Complaint, Dunbar allegedly participated in two schemes – (1) bank embezzlement and (2) marriage fraud in order to become a U.S. citizen.

The details of the alleged bank embezzlement scheme are as follows: Just weeks before his appointment to serve as the City’s Deputy Treasurer, Dunbar, while employed at Wells Fargo Bank in Newtown Square, stole $15,000 from two different bank customers. The Complaint alleges that on two separate occasions, once in December 2015 and again in January 2016, Victim #1 met with the defendant to transfer $5,000 between Victim #1’s Wells Fargo bank accounts. During both meetings, Dunbar allegedly directed Victim #1 to sign several documents, including a blank withdrawal slip. He later allegedly used the blank slips to withdraw cash from Victim #1’s account and deposit those funds into his own personal bank account.

The defendant allegedly used the same trick with Victim #2. In December 2015, Dunbar assisted Victim #2 in the same Wells Fargo branch and directed Victim #2 to sign several documents, including a blank withdrawal slip. As alleged in the Criminal Complaint, he later used the blank withdrawal slip to withdraw money from Victim #2’s account. Soon thereafter, Dunbar allegedly made significant cash deposits into his personal bank account.

Dunbar also allegedly participated in a conspiracy to enter into a sham marriage in order to secure immigration benefits, and ultimately U.S. citizenship, for himself and his family. The details of that alleged fraud are as follows: The Criminal Complaint alleges that the defendant and his current wife, identified in the Complaint by the initials “F.N.D.,” both entered into fraudulent marriages, Dunbar with Person #1 and his wife with Person #2. Prior to these sham marriages, Persons #1 and #2 were U.S. citizens, but Dunbar and F.N.D. were not – having been born in Liberia and Senegal, respectively. By marrying U.S. citizens, Dunbar and F.N.D. were able to gain their own U.S. citizenship.

These four individuals – Christian Dunbar, F.N.D., and Persons #1 and #2 – attended Temple University together and allegedly coordinated this sham marriage plan. Both of these sham marriages occurred within days of each other in December 2006 and were performed by the same officiant — a former Temple University professor. But since the time they attended Temple University together, Dunbar and F.N.D. were the only legitimate couple, marrying each other in Senegal in June 2013 (while Dunbar was still legally married to Person #1).

On their child’s 2014 birth records, Dunbar is listed as the father, F.N.D. is listed as the mother, and they are listed as married to each other.

But in February 2012, relying on his sham marriage to Person #1, the defendant allegedly applied to become a permanent resident of the United States (which he certified as true under the penalty of perjury), was granted that status in October 2012, and then submitted additional paperwork to become a naturalized citizen in late 2015 and early 2016.

As detailed in the Complaint, in paperwork he submitted in 2015 and in subsequent interviews, he continued to make fraudulent claims about his marital status, which was the basis for his becoming a naturalized citizen in January 2016. Two months later, he filed paperwork to divorce Person #1.

“The alleged conduct in this case shows a pattern of deception, dishonesty and criminality that no individual should ever engage in – but is especially alarming and intolerable for a high ranking City official,” said U.S. Attorney McSwain. “City officials whose job is to handle money should not be thieves. And they should not have a track record of engaging in elaborate immigration fraud against the public that they are supposed to serve. My Office will continue to hold public officials to the high standard of conduct that residents of this City deserve. And when we find that a public official’s behavior falls short, we will hold them accountable.”

“The accusations against Christian Dunbar run quite the criminal gamut, from stealing his own bank customers’ money to violating the immigration laws that help protect our national security,” said Michael J. Driscoll, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division.

“In his role as City Treasurer, Dunbar holds a position of public trust, making these charges lodged against him today extremely disturbing. The FBI is working every day to battle public corruption and the corrosive damage it does to people’s faith in government. We must hold public officials to high ethical standards — and we will hold them to obeying federal law.”

If convicted, Dunbar faces a maximum possible sentence of 45 years’ imprisonment and a fine of $1.5 million.

* * *

Source: DoJ

By Greg Miller, senior editor at American Shipper

Watch the containers to see which way the economic winds will blow. How many are ordered, for when and for how much. And if you do, you’ll see that box demand is strong — not just through year-end, but into 2021. 

Three of the largest container-equipment lessors — Triton (NYSE: TRTN), Textainer (NYSE: TGH) and CAI International (CAI) — conducted virtual presentations for institutional investors over the past week, hosted by Keefe, Bruyette & Woods (KBW). Notes on those presentations provided to FreightWaves by KBW paint a rosy picture of consumer demand.

According to one theory, U.S. import volume is so high today because shippers are bringing orders forward. Volumes will start tapering off soon and moderate through year-end.

This doesn’t seem to jibe with what the container-equipment lessors are seeing.

“Triton expects to see sustained heightened activity through the fourth quarter, while demand could remain strong through the Chinese New Year [in mid-February 2021],” reported KBW.

A handful of producers in China build almost all of the world’s containers. “At this point, factories are now full through January and are taking orders for February and March delivery,” KBW said, reporting on Triton’s presentation.

“Based on indications from customers [shipping lines], demand looks like it is going to continue into the first quarter,” speakers said in the Textainer and CAI presentations.

Liners caught short

Container lines own a portion of their container portfolio and rent the rest from box-equipment lessors.

One of the key takeaways from the Triton presentation was that “the surprising strength in trade meant that shipping lines were structurally short on containers.”

Compounding the capacity crunch, lessors noted that due to “changes in labor regulations [in China], the manufacturers are limited to one shift per day, effectively capping production levels.”

That is not welcome news for liners and cargo shippers facing mounting container shortages.

Shift in consumption

Triton pointed to “the ongoing strength of the consumer and the shift in consumption away from services and experiences into goods, particularly anything related to the home.”

Shippers transport lighter cargoes such as consumer goods in 40-foot containers. They ship heavier cargoes such as raw materials in 20-footers. Triton noted that the 40-foot sector “is the tightest portion of the market.” Its own portfolio is now at nearly 100% utilization. In contrast, the 20-foot segment, more prevalent in the intra-Asian raw-materials trades, is softer.

Demand has been so strong that box-equipment lessors will be protected even if there is a COVID second wave and “the recent upswing fizzles out,” said KBW.

“Due to the strength of the recent upswing, the lessors have been able to lease out nearly all containers under demand — namely 40-foot high cubes — on favorable terms for multi-year contracts.”

High demand is hiking the price of new containers. They are now at $2,200 per cost equivalent unit (CEU) versus $1,800 earlier this year. (CEU expresses the value of a container as a multiple of a 20-foot dry cargo unit.)

“If demand is sustained, prices could push higher following Chinese New Year,” KBW added.

Lease rates paid by liner companies have also improved, albeit not as much as they could have. Triton said that it “could push pricing [higher] to boost returns, but given that business is tied to seven to eight main shipping lines, management feels the short-term benefit is not worth the risk to long-term relationships.”

A better bellwether

It takes around two years to build a ship, but only six to eight weeks to build a new box. This makes it less likely for box supply to outstrip demand than ship supply. The box market can more easily self-correct.

“Lessors are typically wary of placing orders too far out as the exposure to movements in steel prices is risky,” wrote KBW. “This caution keeps order and production cycles short.”

Michael Webber, founder of Webber Research & Advisory, highlighted the significance of box-equipment lessors as a more general bellwether.

“These [box-equipment lessor] stocks offer a better real-time gauge of what’s actually happening from a trade perspective and they’re closer as a real-time indicator to the container lines themselves,” he said during an interview with FreightWaves. “I tend to look at the box-lessor stocks as the best gauge.”

“It’s also a very tradeable group,” said Webber. “You can actually make money trading this group by having a fundamental thesis and having that thesis play out. That is not always the case.”

Positive signal

Box-equipment lessor stocks should be trading on next year’s outlook, not 2020, he continued. People have already placed bets “on the back half of the year,” said Webber. “Now we’re talking about what 2021 and what a return to normalcy looks like,”

If the stocks of companies like Triton are a bellwether for the bigger picture, then the signs are certainly positive. As of the closing bell on Wednesday, Triton’s stock was back to where it began the year.

The Federal Reserve’s release of its Beige Book in early September revealed permanent economic scarring, suggesting the economic revival is not as robust as previously thought. The stalling recovery, thanks to the lapse in fiscal stimulus, is pressuring households once more, prompting The Salvation Army, for the first time in 130 years, to start its annual holiday fundraising campaign early “in order to rescue Christmas.”  

“Our ability to raise vital funds to serve those in need this Christmas and beyond is at risk,” said Commissioner Kenneth G. Hodder, National Commander of The Salvation Army.

Hodder said, “We need everyone who has the capacity to come alongside us and ensure that the holiday season is bright for millions. We’re asking you to help rescue Christmas with us by providing support in any way you can. Our hope is to offset these challenges to meet the increasing demand for services across our nation.” 

“Based on the increase in services already provided in response to the pandemic, the organization could serve up to 155 percent more people in 2020 with Christmas assistance, including putting food on the table, paying bills, providing shelter and helping place gifts under the tree – assuming the resources are available. At the same time, due to the closing of retail stores, consumers carrying less cash and coins, and the decline in foot traffic, The Salvation Army could see up to a 50 percent decrease in funds raised through the red kettles, which would limit their capacity to provide services for the most vulnerable. To put this in perspective, last year, $126 million was raised through about 30,000 red kettles,” The Salvation Army said. 

Tens of millions of households are in desperate need of support this year, more than ever, – the virus-induced economic downturn has resulted in depressionary unemployment and wiped out emergency savings for millions of people. There’s also the risk that “more than 50 million” Americans will be fighting hunger this holiday season. 

The Salvation Army’s red kettle fundraising campaign is a familiar sight during the holidays, but this year, with the proliferation of online shopping as consumers stay home to avoid contracting the virus, donations are expected to be well below average. Also, less and less of the organization’s iconic red kettles will be seen as shopping malls shutter their doors if that is because of public health orders or because of bankruptcy. 

By starting their annual holiday fundraising campaign early, the goal is to support households with food, financial aid for paying bills, and, in some cases, provide shelter for those who are now homeless.  

Despite the virus pandemic, cash and coins will still be expected, but The Salvation Army may expect a reduction in the number of coins this year, thanks to the national coin shortage. Folks can also use Apple or Google Pay at any red kettle.

The Salvation Army’s mission to “rescue Christmas” for millions of broke Americans implies there’s no “V” shaped recovery coming this year.