I Shop, therefore, I am!

“... just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”

― Guy Debord, "The Society of the Spectacle"

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“Spectacle is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity”

― Guy Debord, "The Society of the Spectacle"

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“The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.”

― Guy Debord, "The Society of the Spectacle"

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“The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.”

― Guy Debord

The Beauty in Small

Rachel Bovard, "Why Republicans Must Rethink Antitrust"

Recovering the Republican tradition of skepticism towards centralized economic power

For the first time in a century, Republicans find themselves on the brink of an antitrust revival. Though derided in some corners as the “hipster antitrust” of the “neo-Brandeisians,” the right has largely woken up to the threat of concentrated economic power, acting at scale, because it has been so overtly wielded against them.

Powerful tech companies, from Google to Amazon and Facebook, have suppressed conservative political views, prohibited circulation of news stories critical of the Democratic party, shielded progressive figures from criticism while deplatforming those on the right, kneecapped their conservative market rivals on transparently pretextual grounds, and memory-holed a president of the United States.

Collectively, these actions raise concerns about rights to speech and the nature of free discourse. But they must also be acknowledged for what they are: blatant expressions of market power. Absent market power, such actions ripple, but they do not overwhelm. But when unprecedented economic dominance is paired with activist progressive dogma, one witnesses an ideologically driven economic cartel: a handful of powerful tech firms able to alter the flow of information, crush small competitors, and change the nature of independent thought and public discourse in free societies.

When Google chooses to suppress or amplify content for ideological reasons it doesn’t affect merely a portion of the marketplace. With 90 percent of search market share in America, for all intents and purposes Google is the marketplace. When Facebook suspends political candidates, it cuts them off from one of the world’s most powerful digital advertising agencies—one which the company itself has acknowledged is critical to how candidates reach voters in the modern era. Amazon boasts 50 percent of the digital retail market, and sells more than half of the books in the United States. A single decision by Amazon to drop a book from its virtual shelves reduces the financial incentive for publishing houses to even send it to print.

The threats Big Tech poses to speech and thought, in other words, are downstream of market power. Distorting the marketplace of ideas is only possible if these same companies first control the marketplace itself.

Recovering A Lost Tradition

Antitrust law—the legal framework for ensuring a robust and competitive marketplace—is designed to deal with threats to the free market. But for the last 50 years or so, it has been a tool which many conservatives have been loath to use. It wasn’t always this way, however, and it bears examining why.

America’s antitrust laws emerged, in part, from a Republican tradition of skepticism toward centralized power, both in the government and outside of it. Indeed, it was Senator John Sherman, a pro-Lincoln, anti-slavery Republican from Ohio, who lent his name to the nation’s founding antitrust law, and a Republican president, Benjamin Harrison, who signed it. Just like democracies can be threatened by the tyranny of an unchecked majority, generations of classical liberal and libertarian-minded thinkers have understood that scaled and centralized economic power can tyrannize capitalism.

Friedrich Hayek’s intellectual case for the free market arose out of this belief. An immigrant from Nazi-controlled Europe, Hayek witnessed first-hand how centrally controlled economic activity inherently led to totalitarianism. Aggressive decentralization of both the state and monopoly power in the marketplace, he wrote, was the antidote to fascism.

Though one of the great advocates of the unfettered market, Hayek was aware that free markets require vigilant defense. It was for this reason he did not subscribe to “dogmatic laissez-faire” economic policy, acknowledging instead that certain governmental functions beyond the minimal state were not only justified, but necessary to preserve a free market system—particularly when confronting the nexus between big government and big business in the form of monopolies.

George Stigler, a Nobel Prize winning economist and key figure in the Chicago school of economics, made the same link early in his career. “The dissolution of big business is … a part of the program necessary to increase the support for a private, competitive enterprise economy,” he wrote in Fortune magazine in 1952, “and reverse the drift toward government control.”

Over time, however, Republicans began an ideological shift away from the traditional conservative embrace of an ordered liberty that flows from deference to custom, tradition, and community toward a more libertarian philosophy which emphasized freedom as an end unto itself. This narrowed what was once a comprehensive vision regarding where threats to liberty could arise to one in which the only conceivable threat to liberty was the one that arose at the point of a government gun.

Whereas historical conservative and classical liberal thinkers were keen to acknowledge that the American way of life could be undermined by all kinds of forces, including but not limited to the tyranny of the state, modern right-leaning ideology acknowledges only government as the sole perpetrator capable of harming democracy. This has informed the right’s approach to antitrust law.

The Chicago school of economics emerged with a novel legal approach to antitrust law built around what its adherents viewed as a key measurable metric: economic efficiency. Under the scholarship of Judge Robert Bork, Richard Posner, and others, the consumer welfare standard developed in response to a more progressive approach to antitrust law, which was legally dominant by the mid-20th century and characterized by judges imposing their own values onto consumers and businesses. Bork’s disciples took his approach even further, infusing antitrust with economic rhetoric about price theory, economic cost analysis, and consumer benefits.

While scholars can and do debate the merits of Bork’s consumer welfare standard, it has had two clear effects. The first was to ground the legal interpretation of antitrust law in economics. This is, in some way, common sense. The Sherman and Clayton Acts offer a fairly generous standard of enforcement but little in the way of particulars. The economic analysis of what is actually happening in the marketplace is a critical input toward determining the necessary nature of enforcement.

But over time, the role of economic analysis has evolved from supplementing enforcement to controlling it. It has acted as a one-way ratchet, with its proponents insisting on the primacy of increasingly speculative, complex, and theoretical economic claims that “interpreted” or “disproved” actual evidence of clear anti-competitive behavior by dominant firms. Pragmatic legal assessments of market distortion—the actual work of the antitrust statutes—became secondary.

Ironically, this was not how Bork originally anticipated his legal theories would be applied. In The Antitrust Paradox, Bork unequivocally warned against allowing the “economic extravaganza” to distract from the actual task of assessing anti-competitive behavior. “Antitrust must avoid any standards that require direct measurement and quantification of either restriction of output or efficiency,” he wrote. “Such tasks are impossible.” He went on, describing “performance tests and efficiency defenses in antitrust law” as “spurious,” and noting that “the judge, the legislator, or the lawyer cannot simply take the word of an economist in dealing with antitrust, for the economists will certainly disagree.”

The opposite has happened, however. Antitrust enforcement has been steered away from its broad congressional mandate to police concentrated power in the market and toward the exclusive terrain of complicated, theoretical economic models, and the esoteric ruminations of economists, often with no direct experience in the business world. In a sense, this has subjected antitrust law to the cult of the well-compensated expert, and well-heeled legal and economic practitioners. It is, as the British philosopher Edmund Burke mused, the age in which “the sophists, the economists, and the calculators” have triumphed, leaving the full market-policing remit of our antitrust laws to languish in their wake.

This distortion was on display as recently as 2013, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), in considering an antitrust claim against Google, allowed completely speculative economic analysis (which later proved to be hilariously wrong) to overrule clear evidence of anti-competitive intent. This was a mere six years after the same agency greenlit Google’s acquisition of one of its rivals, the internet ad company DoubleClick. The acquisition cemented Google’s unprecedented dominance in the digital ad space.

The lone FTC commissioner to dissent to the DoubleClick merger, Pamela Jones Harbour, wrote that she did so because “I make alternate predictions about where this market is heading, and the transformative role the combined Google/DoubleClick will play if the proposed acquisition is consummated.” The chairman of the FTC at the time, William Kovacic, a George W. Bush appointee, said in 2020 that if he had known in 2007 what he knows now, “I would have voted to challenge the DoubleClick acquisition.” Hindsight is 20/20, but it seems economists only look ahead.

The Reform Imperative

The right must do more than lament, however. Much of the contortion in antitrust enforcement has taken place away from congressional scrutiny, and with little regard for its intent. Rather, enforcement is guided largely by a body of jurisprudence that has transformed a broad mandate into a tiny keyhole, through which enforcement actions must be squeezed.

It is incumbent upon Congress to clarify its intent with regard to these laws. This is especially true as the economy continues to race forward. The digital economy, unlike analog markets, is driven by innovation as much if not more than price. Where antitrust law has been so narrowed as to assess harm exclusively as a function of price, it must be re-framed. Bork’s original proposal, for example, was far broader than mere considerations over price, and sought to encompass innovation, consumer choice, and quality.

Barriers placed in front of the government’s ability to bring antitrust challenges also must be examined. In the last 20 years, roughly 750 mergers and acquisitions have moved through the digital space, largely unchallenged. Congress must ask why. Supreme Court precedent in cases like United States v Philadelphia National Bank laid out the framework for challenging mergers in concentrated markets—specifically by establishing a presumption that mergers which cover at least 30 percent of the relevant market were presumptively unlawful. If agencies are not following established precedent, Congress should consider codifying it in law.

To the extent that later precedents have made it harder to bring enforcement actions in digital markets, Congress should consider legislatively overturning them. And if enforcement agencies are choosing to tie themselves instead to higher or more complex standards that are more difficult to meet, they must be statutorily directed to do otherwise. Likewise, Congress must only confirm nominees who pledge to vigorously enforce the law—and hold them to that promise with effective oversight.

Robust antitrust enforcement raises the obvious question: Will 10 Googles be any better than one? The answer is yes. Even if they remain ideologically similar, subjecting component parts of the company to market forces requires them to compete on their merits, rather than relying on sheer dominance or rent-seeking on smaller competitors as a means to success. Moreover, structural separation, if necessary, combined with aggressive enforcement against anti-competitive behaviors—as the Department of Justice’s case against Google does with its focus on the company’s network of exclusionary contracts—will prevent the re-formation of a de facto monopoly on contractual grounds.

The investigation and enforcement of the antitrust laws are designed to do what one-size-fits-all regulation, or even statutory stipulation on separating lines of business, cannot: identify specific contracts and behaviors that are anti-competitive, enforce against them, and thus free the market to work as intended. In this way, antitrust supplements activities in the market, rather than making assumptions about the market itself. It is incumbent upon lawmakers to ensure the antitrust apparatus has the resources, tools, and guidance to act with its full remit.

Overcoming Ideological Barriers

Accomplishing any of this, however, requires the right to rethink its reflexive hesitance to take action. This is especially true in the area of antitrust. Too many on the right conflate antitrust enforcement with regulation, when the two are quite distinct. Antitrust is targeted law enforcement. It addresses specific acts of marketplace conduct that must be thoroughly investigated by the Department of Justice or the Federal Trade Commission, and proven before a judge, before the law is enforced. Regulation, by contrast, goes after entire sectors of the economy with a one-size-fits-all approach, and does so without necessarily concerning itself with finding clear evidence of fault.

Ironically, it is lax antitrust enforcement in highly concentrated markets which often triggers the decision to regulate in the first place. In a real sense, antitrust is the antidote to an aggressive regulatory approach. Regulation is what tends to give the government more unchecked power; antitrust enforcement merely polices the market under due process.

The right must also stop taking at face value the notion that well-meaning attempts to ensure our antitrust laws are properly enforced, in line with congressional intent, is somehow a politicized attack on innovators. Antitrust enforcement has already become politicized, in the direction of corporations rich enough to spin complex econometric tales that undermine evidence of anti-competitive conduct. This imbalance must be rectified.

Antitrust enforcement, when done correctly, is designed to unleash the market, not to stymie it. It should not entrench incumbents but rather liberate the marketplace for new entrants to compete on their merits. There is precedent for this.

Microsoft, which was the last big conduct case the government brought against a tech platform, never dominated the internet the way it had dominated the personal computer. This was due to the federal antitrust enforcement that prevented Microsoft’s monopoly control of the browser market, and subsequently changed the way users were able to engage content online. The open internet that Microsoft was forced to allow meant it could not block a new, innovative search engine called Google from reaching Microsoft customers through the web.

IBM, AT&T, and RCA all faced similar antitrust suits which cracked their dominant holds on technological expertise, exploding markets for data processing, consumer electronics, and telecommunications, and laying the groundwork for the modern software industry.

The Necessity of Prudent Change

The conservative intellectual tradition has long placed an emphasis on prudence: the ability to assess an action for its long-run consequences, rather than merely by temporary advantage. “Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery,” conservative traditionalist Russell Kirk was fond of saying. But importantly, Kirk also argued for the necessity of prudent change, particularly that which preserves customs, traditions, and practices that animate “the community of souls” we call America.

As the right reconsiders both the use of antitrust and bolstering its application, it must consider the nature of the threat it now faces. The most powerful corporations the world has ever seen are increasingly undermining the values of free speech and diversity of expression, pluralism, and dissent. In changing how we gather and see information, in placing significant costs on the freedom of expression, these companies are changing who we are, and how we live together.

Inaction is, of course, a choice many on the right still call us to embrace. But to take no action when presented with clear evidence of market distortion, of companies powerful enough to meaningfully alter the flow of information in overt political directions and that feel justified in removing the speech of democratically elected leaders, suggests that an ideology and idolatry of markets has trumped the principle of their prudent structural defense. It is a posture which, ultimately, calls upon democracy to be subservient to corporate power, as the latter decides what economic and social order is best for us.

This inverts the nature of self-government to one in which citizens, with natural rights, agencies, and freedoms, are turned into consumers, their worth and flourishing defined solely by economic outputs. “What future have a people whose schooling has enabled them, at best to ascertain the price of everything,” Kirk asked, “but the value of nothing?”

As Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee’s lead Republican pointed out in February, the threat of state coercion is increasingly “rivaled by another: the soft totalitarianism of a corporate shadow state. It is not the government’s monopoly on force that today’s left uses to punish wrong think, but the economic monopolies of multinational corporations. While the means are different, the effect may in some cases be the same.”

Antitrust cannot solve every problem related to Big Tech. What it can do is solve ongoing abuses of market power and prevent future anti-competitive concentration. Managing the market concentration which lax enforcement has already allowed to form will require further legislative and perhaps regulatory efforts to constrain and limit how these massive firms are able to exercise their market power. Section 230 reform, interoperability, data privacy, and perhaps even common carrier status and public accommodation laws, as Justice Clarence Thomas has argued, all must be thoughtfully considered.

But so much of Big Tech’s power—its ability to crush small competitors, limit and distort the flow of news and information, and anoint itself as primary arbiter of who can speak in the digital public square—is directly linked to its market power. Breaking this nexus and ensuring that a free market is available to allow competition to take many of these concerns away is not rocket science. It is antitrust enforcement, a tradition the right once embraced, and one which it must revisit. “Sometimes,” as Walter Isaacson ascertained in his study of the digital revolution, “innovation means recovering what has been lost.

Rachel Bovard is the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. She is the co-author of Conservative: Knowing What To Keep with former Senator Jim DeMint and a member of the TAC advisory board.

American Thugs and Their Devotees in the DNC

Lee Smith, "Street Violence as a Political Tool"

The new Democratic Party of oligarchs and technocrats enforces its orthodoxies upon blue state clients through broken windows and beatings, administered by party militias like antifa and BLM

The Democratic Party has had a problem. It’s a small, incoherent, and privileged clique funded by billionaire oligarchs to push policies that even mainstream Democratic voters oppose. How to bridge the gap? The solution they chose, which party officials made clear this week, was simple: the way third-world elites always do—by using street violence to keep their clients in line.

This week, pro-Palestinian demonstrators auditioned for the chance to join already established Democratic Party militias antifa and Black Lives Matter by attacking Jews in New York and Los Angeles.

🚨🚨 Tonight pro-Palestinian individuals were driving with megaphones around La Cienega & Beverly (a heavily Jewish area) in Los Angeles and threw objects at Jews at a restaurant table. Some threw things back.

The pro-Palestinian group came to the sidewalk to fight.

1/ pic.twitter.com/rc72JhBPPj

— Sia Kordestani 🦁 (@SiaKordestani) May 19, 2021

Apologists for the violence reason that the demonstrators are angry about the deaths of innocent Palestinian babies under Israeli fire in Gaza so they’re taking their frustrations—admittedly misplaced!—out on American Jews.

That is not what’s happening.

Who knows how many of the activists waving the Palestinian flag as they beat Jews and detonate fireworks in front of Jewish-owned businesses are genuinely Palestinian Americans? Maybe some aren’t even Arab or Muslim, but that’s irrelevant—they are staking their claim to recruit, promote, and represent Arabs and Muslims as an interest group. And so the flag they’re really flying isn’t for the Palestinians but rather for the Democratic Party.

This is all “intersectionality” really is — a branding mechanism to unite the various sects the Democratic Party has gathered under a big and potentially bloody tent. The current-day Democratic Party is a top-down structure paid for by the corporate establishment, led by Big Tech and finance, that appeals to a small class of managers, technocrats, and educators who for a variety of reasons, from self-pity to psychopathy, really do back the party’s most sinister policies—like open borders, designed to impoverish America’s working middle class. The party has lots of money and owns virtually all of the country’s major institutions, from the press to the Department of Justice. What it lacks, however, is voters. So they packed together interest groups and turned them into clients.

The trick is making them all fit. From the outside, for instance, it makes no sense that activists from the LGBT wing show up in support of the pro-Palestinian terror wing. But what might seem to you like hypocrisy actually illustrates the basic premise, which is that these seemingly disparate groups actually do share a goal: upholding the Democratic Party. When LGBT activists are called to demonstrate on behalf of Islamic terrorists, they show up to fly the flag not for Hamas but for the Democrats.

Since the late spring, many have noted that these blue militias have typically avoided laying waste to red regions. And it is strange, if you think the Democrats have mobilized criminals and psychopaths and other semitragic misfits to target those they claim are the true enemies of democracy, tolerance, and brotherly love—the more than 74 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump. Presumably, blue militias know that if they campaigned in rural or even suburban America they would be met by a well-armed citizenry. Still, why burn down their own neighborhoods? Again, here the Middle East is the key to understanding. And if you know anything about that region, you know that the answer is because that’s their job—not to confront their alleged red state enemies, but to remind their neighbors and fellow Joe Biden voters that their security, indeed even their lives, depend on them keeping the faith, no matter how much the party’s pet projects might hurt or offend them personally.

Obviously many of the programs the Democratic Party is pushing are not popular with the people who belong to the interest groups they’re trying to motivate. You hardly need polling to show, for instance, that most African Americans who live in urban areas do not support defunding the police.

Why would Asian American voters support the bias against Asian American students that have been institutionalized by the Democratic Party and its allies in teachers unions and universities? The many years a Korean American mother, say, might spend tutoring her children to ensure they win a place in an accelerated math or science program are now meaningless in districts that have eliminated these programs in the name of “equity.”

Why would the bulk of American Jews continue to vote for a presidential administration like Joe Biden’s that funds Palestinian terror, or whose up-and-coming leadership, like Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, promote organizations that celebrate the murder of Jews? Given a choice, no rational person would defend any of these policies.

Thus the need for street violence, to take decision-making out of the realm of the rational. It’s about fear: Mouth off and you won’t like what happens to your business, your home, your wife, your children.

What we’re seeing is the streets’ version of “cancel culture.” If you’re in book publishing or academia or Big Tech and you buck the party’s consensus, even by accident, they’ll take away your job. It’s bad, and maybe even a little Stalinist. But it’s getting off relatively easy in comparison to what’s happening in the streets of our cities, where gangs are employed to target Americans on behalf of a political party whose policies appear to be designed to destroy America.

Our corporate media salaried-bourgeois elites are pitching Marxist "class essentialism" to keep the American working sub-classes divided against themselves through Intersectionality, but united under the DNC Party umbrella (who are in turn, wholly owned by the bourgeois billionaire oligarch class)

Joe Biden Knew Nothing About Hunter Biden's Business Dealings...

 ...yet directed the Secret Service to accompany him on 411 trips?

Judicial Watch Obtains Secret Service Records Showing Hunter Biden Took 411 Flights, Visited 29 Countries

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it received records from the U.S. Secret Service showing that, for the first five and a half years of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden traveled extensively while receiving a Secret Service protective detail. During the time period of the records provided, Hunter Biden, son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, took 411 separate domestic and international flights, including to 29 different foreign countries. He visited China five times.

Judicial Watch’s February 7, 2020, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request sought:

Records reflecting the dates and locations of travel, international and domestic, for Hunter Biden while he received a U.S. Secret Service protective detail; please note whether his travel was on Air Force One or Two, or other government aircraft, as applicable and whether additional family members were present for each trip; time frame is 2001 to present.

The Secret Service did not indicate, as was requested, whether Biden’s travel was on Air Force One, Air Force Two or other government aircraft, or whether additional family members were present.

The Secret Service records show that countries and territories visited by Hunter Biden, between June 2009 and May 2014, included:

Ethiopia and India on June 14-22, 2009
Argentina on September 14-17, 2009
France and Spain on November 9-13, 2009
Canada on February 12-15, 2010
Dominican Republic on February 18-22, 2010
Puerto Rico on March 20-27, 2010
China on April 6-9, 2010
Belgium, Spain, and the United Kingdom on May 5-8, 2010
UK, Egypt, Kenya, South Africa, Ascension Island, U.S. Virgin Islands on June 6-13, 2010
Denmark and South Africa on August 9-24, 2010
Hong Kong, Taiwan and China on April 16-22, 2011
Mexico on May 15-17, 2011
Colombia, France, United Arab Emirates and France again on November 1-11, 2011
UK and Russia on February 15-18, 2012
Germany, France and UK on February 1-5, 2013
UK and Ireland on March 20-22, 2013
China on June 13-15, 2013
Switzerland and Italy on July 26-August 7, 2013
Japan, China, South Korea and the Philippines on December 2-9, 2013
China and Qatar on May 7-14, 2014

The records were also provided, but were not made public, to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson in a request the senators sent to Secret Service Director James Murray on February 5, 2020.

In its cover letter to Grassley and Johnson, which was included in the records produced to Judicial Watch, the Secret Service said that the senators’ request was time and labor intensive, and they could only provide a limited amount of information by the senators’ imposed turnaround time of February 19.

“Given the Burisma-Ukraine-China influence peddling scandals, Hunter Biden’s extensive international travel during the Obama-Biden presidency, including at least 5 trips to China, will raise additional questions.” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

According to reports, Vice President Joe Biden and Hunter Biden flew on Air Force Two for the official trip to Beijing in December 2013. The records obtained by Judicial Watch from the Secret Service show Hunter Biden arrived in Tokyo on December 2, 2013 and departed for Beijing two days later. While it is typical for the families of the president and vice president to travel with them, questions have been raised about whether Hunter Biden used the government trip to further his business interests.

NBC reporter Josh Lederman, who was one of four reporters on the December 2013 trip, noted in an October 2, 2019 report that, “What wasn’t known then was that as he accompanied his father to China, Hunter Biden was forming a Chinese private equity fund that associates said at the time was planning to raise big money, including from China.”

During the last year and a half of the Obama administration, Hunter Biden served on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma Holdings while his father was heading up Ukraine policy. Judicial Watch is seeking records through six lawsuits and dozens of FOIA requests related to Hunter Biden’s dealings with the Ukrainian Burisma Holdings and the Chinese BHR Partners.

Time to Officially Re-Name COVID as "The Chinese Flu"

Mathew Crawford, "Science has become a cartel: There's a reason the medical establishment dismissed the lab leak theory"

The idea that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a laboratory, and then escaped accidentally, always had a certain plausibility. The virus first appeared in Wuhan, China, where there is a laboratory that conducts research on bat coronaviruses — one of only a handful in the world to do so. Yet this possibility was dismissed quite forcefully and from the beginning of the outbreak by prominent virologists.

Now that same lab-leak hypothesis appears to be on the verge of acceptance as the most likely. Such reversals happen; it is the nature of science. In an emergency, it is understandable that a research community might commit to one theory over another, even if prematurely, in order to focus its intellectual energies and resources. Surely that’s what happened here.

But there may be more to the story. On 2 May, the veteran science reporter Nicolas Wade published a long, detailed account of the career of the lab-leak hypothesis. His reporting appears to have triggered a cascade of defections, not simply from a consensus that no longer holds, but from a fake consensus that is no longer enforceable.

Now 18 scientists have signed a letter in the journal Science with the title “Investigate the origins of COVID-19”. The New York Times notes that “Many of the signers have not spoken out before.” “Speaking out” is an odd locution to use in a scientific context; one expects to find it in a story about a whistle blower. If, during the Covid fiasco, scientists have not felt free to speak their minds, then we have a serious problem that goes beyond the immediate emergency of the pandemic. Regardless of how the question of the virus’s origins is ultimately decided, we need to understand how the political drama surrounding the science played out if we are to learn anything from this pandemic and reduce the likelihood of future ones.

By now the reader will have heard of “gain of function” research and the hazards it poses. A large number of scientists came together in July 2014 as the Cambridge Working Group to urge that “Experiments involving the creation of potential pandemic pathogens should be curtailed until there has been a quantitative, objective and credible assessment of the risks, potential benefits, and opportunities for risk mitigation, as well as comparison against safer experimental approaches.” Later in 2014, the Obama administration issued a moratorium on this type of research, partly in response to some “bio-safety incidents” that occurred at federal research facilities.

But before the ban went into effect, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded some gain-of-function research which, through an intermediary nonprofit and subcontracting arrangement, came to be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The moratorium was lifted during the Trump administration, apparently at the urging of Anthony Fauci, and a 2019 renewal of the 2014 research grant did include gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. SARS-CoV-2 exhibits biological signatures consistent with the plan of research laid out in the grant.

Doing such research requires extreme safety precautions, and these make it very cumbersome to do the work. You have to wear what is essentially a space suit, and every task is burdened with procedures that slow the work down dramatically. Meanwhile, scientists are competing with one another to publish first.

As Wade notes, researchers have an incentive to carry the work out under less restrictive safety standards, and therefore to downplay the risks when applying for grants. And indeed the work at Wuhan was not conducted at the highest safety standard. In this, there may have been a subtle form of collusion. There is no need to posit a conspiracy, one need only take note of the shared incentives. It is other members of the guild who conduct the review process that decides the allocation of research funds; they are unlikely to insist upon more stringent safety standards — which would have to apply to themselves as well. Research communities have internal competition, but also collective interests.

Wade points out that the “consensus” that Covid must have an entirely natural origin was established by two early pronouncements, one in The Lancet in February 2020 and the other in Nature Medicine in March 2020. These were op-eds, not scientific papers. Both spoke with certainty about matters which it was impossible to be certain about. Wade writes: “It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Dr Daszak’s organisation funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Dr. Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”

In other words, the guy who was orchestrating research on bat coronaviruses at the lab in Wuhan corralled other scientists, with similar professional interests, into making a declaration to the effect that anyone who mentions the (obvious) possibility that the pandemic (which started in Wuhan) might have a connection to this research could only be doing so with bad intentions. This seems a bit thuggish.

The yawning gap between the actual state of knowledge at the time and the confidence displayed in the two letters should have been obvious to anyone in the field of virology. And indeed, there were scientists from outside the guild, but in fields adjacent enough to speak competently, who said as much. The Lancet and Nature Medicine letters were in fact anti-scientific in spirit and intent. Yet the pronouncements had the effect of shutting down inquiry that was not only legitimate, but urgently needed.

Wade notes that “in today’s universities speech can be very costly. Careers can be destroyed for stepping out of line. Any virologist who challenges the community’s declared view risks having his next grant application turned down by the panel of fellow virologists that advises the government grant distribution agency.”

This is consistent with everything we know from the sociology of science. With the centralisation and bureaucratisation of scientific funding, defection from a well-institutionalised consensus is even more costly now than it was when Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He showed that it is almost always from outside a research community that challenges arise. Progress happens when a prevailing scientific consensus is revealed to rest on the loyalties and intellectual affinities of an established research milieu, and not simply on correspondence with reality.

Something is left unexplained in the consensus view, and to focus on this lacuna is to be an outsider. Reliably, such challenges are fought tooth and nail by the research empire built on the encrusted consensus. The scientific paradigm they are invested in is typically superseded only when the scientists sitting atop the institutional hierarchy literally die, or retire. It is not “anti-science” to acknowledge this. Rather, the point is that one has to keep in mind that scientists are human beings first.

That much is old news. But in the catastrophe of the Covid pandemic, something novel and disturbing comes into view. A peculiar form of intellectual intimidation has become prominent in public life in general, and science has not been spared. The letter in The Lancet stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”

The invocation of “conspiracy theory” has become a reflex by which incumbents in many domains seek to arrest criticism. They have had to do a lot of this over the last 10 years, as the internet has broken the knowledge monopolies by which institutional credibility is maintained.

As I wrote in a previous essay, policy challenges from outsiders presented through fact and argument, offering some picture of what is going on in the world that is rival to the prevailing one, are not answered in kind, but are met rather with denunciation that is highly moralised. Epistemic threats to institutional authority are resolved into moral conflicts between good people and bad people.

What is significant is how effective the early, pre-emptive declarations of scientific consensus in The Lancet and Nature Medicine were in garnering media enforcement of public opinion on the matter. The “fact checkers” of PolitiFact used these statements to shut down any discussion of the lab leak hypothesis. In effect, it appears the scientists who were signatories to the two letters may have been acting as a classic research cartel. Such behaviour is common enough in science. But because of the political environment, they were able to use the magic words “conspiracy theory” to trigger a wider epistemic immune reaction in high-prestige opinion.

Because this reaction had achieved a kind of automaticity during the Trump years, the guild of virologists could deploy it for their own purposes, directing establishmentarian ire against a perfectly reasonable course of inquiry. At the risk of understatement, such inquiry would have brought unwelcome attention to the US-funded virus work in Wuhan in particular, and gain of function research in general.

As the evolutionary biologist turned cultural critic Bret Weinstein (who specialises in bats, as it happens) has pointed out, the resulting moratorium on pursuing the lab leak hypothesis may have been quite consequential, as an engineered virus behaves differently from a naturally evolved one, and this has implications for how it can best be fought.

Since April 2020, he has been insisting that a possible lab origin for the virus be kept on the table. Notably, his avenue of communication is his YouTube channel. Likewise, Nicholas Wade’s powerful and widely circulated article appeared, not in any national outlet, but on the blog site Medium. (It has since been republished by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, not an organisation within the orbit of virology or public health.) Only now has “the nation’s newspaper of record” and other organs of acceptable opinion been dragged into acknowledging what may be the most important story of the pandemic.

The logic of the surrounding political frame for these events is painfully simple. 1. Donald Trump publicly floated the idea that Covid may have had its origin in a Chinese lab. 2. It was therefore a point of conviction for all those who believe in science that such a hypothesis could only be a conspiracy theory, probably rooted in “Sinophobia”.

The letter in Science calling for an investigation concludes by rejecting “anti-Asian sentiment”. Clearly, this was thought necessary. When the lab leak hypothesis has been mentioned at all in the legacy press, the “conspiracy theory” has often been juxtaposed with reporting on anti-Asian hate crimes, thereby subsuming an urgent scientific question to the Trump-era morality play.

Journalism suffered a general intellectual collapse during the Trump administration, as many have noted on the Left and Right alike. The moral grandeur of #Resistance appears to have been so intoxicating to those who felt the mantle of Saving Democracy settle on their shoulders that the workaday demands of journalistic diligence and sceptical curiosity seemed paltry. The great imperative was to keep underlining the divide between good people and bad people. What we have learned is that a Manichaean atmosphere of moral sorting is intimidating, and therefore provides the perfect cover for “informal pacts of mutual protection,” to borrow a phrase from Martin Gurri.

Liberalism began as a doctrine of political scepticism directed at rulers, based on the truism that power corrupts, and always adopts a virtuous pose. In time, this gave rise to a complementary form of journalism that was basically adversarial towards the politicians it reported on. If we want to revive the spirit of liberalism and adapt it to a technocratic era, it will require a similarly sceptical form of science journalism, based on the recognition that appeals to Science have become the basic idiom for the exercise of authority.

Which Monkey is Making YOU Dance?

The American Guinea Pig

John Cleer, "Why Are Media Ignoring Data Showing Massive COVID-19 Vaccine Death Spike?"

Although this is raw data, previous VAERS studies have shown that only 1–10% of vaccine-related deaths are reported to VAERS — or less. This would put the likely real death count in the U.S. at tens to hundreds of thousands.

Inexplicably, Dr. Fauci was able to look at those data and say, "obviously the safety looks really, really good in well over 140 million people having been vaccinated." How can he look at the VAERS data in good faith and say the safety looks good?

The updated number of published death reports as of April 30 is 3,837. That's 300 reports in a week, and those are just the reports: per the studies that show that VAERS underreports deaths, we're on pace for an estimated half a million COVID vaccine deaths by the end of the month. It's remarkable that the press isn't covering this.

They are indeed doing the opposite, insisting that VAERS data are meaningless. They say VAERS reports are unverified, which is always true with raw data, and anyone can make them, so we don't know that 3,544 deaths have happened.

Did You Know How Badly Biden Broke US Immigration Policy?

Biden Gives Stamp of Approval for More Palestinian Strikes

 

Biden:Palestinian Terrorists::Biden:BLM/Antifa Rioters 

 Want more violence? "Biden's" your man.  No violent conduct goes unrewarded.  The Liz Cheney Neocons are LOVING this!

"When I was in office we were known as the Peace Presidency, because Israel’s adversaries knew that the United States stood strongly with Israel and there would be swift retribution if Israel was attacked.

Under Biden, the world is getting more violent and more unstable because Biden’s weakness and lack of support for Israel is leading to new attacks on our allies." 

Donald J. Trump

America's Secret Leading Cause of Death Revealed

How the Music of Democracy Stops...

Nuclear Power - The 'Waste' Problem that Really Isn't...

Bigglier Lies...

Julie Kelly, "Democrats Can’t Quash the ‘Big Lie’"

The “Big Lie,” of course, isn’t that the 2020 election was stolen—it’s that the election was perfectly fair and lawful.

Six months later, the “Big Lie” won’t die.

The Left and NeverTrump have tried everything in their collective power to punish critics of the 2020 presidential election: Social media accounts, including those belonging to Donald Trump, have been deplatformed. Republican lawmakers have been cut off by longtime donors, threatened with legal recourse, and worse.

Nonviolent Trump-supporting Americans who traveled to the nation’s capital on January 6 to protest dubious election results in swing states now face criminal charges. Nearly 75 million Americans are considered potential “domestic violent extremists” by their own government and nearly half their countrymen agree.

Lives and careers are being destroyed—and the Biden regime is only getting started.

The news media portray election doubters as conspiracy theorists or QAnon cultists. CNN’s Jake Tapper this week threatened to ban from his show any Republican who peddles the “Big Lie” about election fraud. Speaking on the same network responsible for perpetuating any number of lies related to Donald Trump, from tales of Russian election collusion to disrespectful MAGA-hat-wearing Catholic teenagers, Tapper had a major meltdown.

“The lie about the election on its own is anti-democracy, and it is sowing seeds of ignorance in the populace, and obviously has the potential to incite violence,” Tapper ranted. “But beyond that is, if you’re willing to lie about that, what are you not willing to lie about?”

Tapper insisted that history would harshly judge politicians who “lied” about the election. “History sees you being a coward. They are afraid of Republican voters who have been lied to by a very sophisticated propaganda machine led by President Trump but augmented by plenty of others.”

Projection much?

Beleaguered Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a martyr to the very same people who just a decade ago wanted her father charged with war crimes, now clings to political relevance based on her nonstop condemnation of the January 6 protest and her election fraud denialism. Naturally, Cheney found an appropriate outlet for her latest tantrum—the opinion pages of the Washington Post—where she attempted to lecture a Republican Party with a voter base that wants nothing to do with her.

“[F]ormer President Donald Trump has repeated his claims that the 2020 election was a fraud and was stolen,” Cheney wrote in an op-ed published Wednesday. “Trump repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6.”

Like so many NeverTrumpers, Cheney dutifully tied the events of January 6 to alleged delusions about an unfair and unlawful election. So, brainwashed MAGA Man, you think the 2020 election wasn’t on the up-and-up? Then you’re no better than the deplorable insurrectionists who “stormed” the Capitol that day, warns Cheney and her fellow travelers at National Review.

And yet.

Tens of millions of Americans still refuse to submit to this endless bullying campaign. According to recent polls, the percentage of Republicans who still view the 2020 election as illegitimate is the same as it was six months ago. Now, as then, nearly three in four Republicans do not think Biden won the election; 70 percent of Republicans in a CNN poll taken late last month said Joe Biden “did not legitimately win enough votes to win the presidency.”

Election integrity remains a top priority for Republican voters. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis just signed a bill preventing the very COVID-justified election rules that benefited Joe Biden and Democrats last year. “We’re making sure we’re enforcing voter ID,” DeSantis, a 2024 presidential frontrunner, said in an interview Thursday morning. “We’re also banning ballot harvesting. We’re not gonna let political operatives go and get satchels of votes to dump them in some dropbox. We’re also prohibiting mass mailing of balloting.”

Similar measures are in the works in several Republican-controlled states. Texas and Arizona have passed several proposals that will tighten election requirements; Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a massive election reform bill in March that enraged Democrats across the country including Joe Biden.

Which is why Democrats, the media, and NeverTrumpers like Liz Cheney must keep the “Big Lie” taunt alive. The cowardice of congressional Republicans notwithstanding, political leadership at the state level and rank-and-file Republicans are working to ensure a redo of the 2020 election doesn’t happen again—most would rather be considered liars than craven bystanders while the country burns.

Unfortunately, the “Big Lie” faces more headwinds than just a Jake Tapper tantrum or a Liz Cheney op-ed: Joe Biden’s Justice Department is poised to use its power to halt election reform in advance of the 2022 election. During a congressional hearing this week, Attorney General Merrick Garland made clear he would use the agency’s Civil Rights division to fight Republican-backed election laws in court, especially those requiring photo identification.

“The question on voter ID is what kind of disparate impact it has on voters of different races, colors and language groups, and whether it violates the Constitution by having a disparate impact on people’s ability to vote,” Garland told a House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday. “The Supreme Court has held that voter ID as a concept is constitutional. And the issue is what, in any individual cases [sic], the record shows about whether it deprives certain groups protected by the 14th Amendment right to vote.”

Garland’s Civil Rights division now is getting involved in the ongoing audit of votes in Maricopa County, Arizona. The head of the division sent a letter to the Arizona Senate president expressing concern about the “security of ballots and potential voter intimidation” related to the review.

The “Big Lie,” of course, isn’t that the 2020 election was stolen; the “Big Lie” is that it was fair and lawful. The Left can keep weaponizing that phrase all it wants but Republicans aren’t buying it.

So You Want to Defund the Po-Po's...

Stephen J. K. Walters, "Anatomy of a Crime Wave: Baltimore’s experiment with de-policing has been disastrous—and deadly."

A decade ago, Baltimoreans became lab rats in a fateful experiment: their elected officials decided to treat the city’s long-running crime problem with many fewer cops. In effect, Baltimore began to defund its police and engage in de-policing long before those terms gained popular currency.

This experiment has been an abject failure. Since 2011, nearly 3,000 Baltimoreans have been murdered—one of every 200 city residents over that period. The annual homicide rate has climbed from 31 per 100,000 residents to 56—ten times the national rate. And 93 percent of the homicide victims of known race over this period were black.

Remarkably, Baltimore is reinforcing its de-policing strategy. State’s Attorney for Baltimore Marilyn Mosby no longer intends to prosecute various “low-level” crimes. Newly elected mayor Brandon Scott promises a five-year plan to cut the police budget. Both justify their policies by asserting that the bloodbath on city streets proves that policing itself “hasn’t worked”; they sell their acceleration of de-policing as a “fresh approach” and “re-imagining” of law enforcement.

The motivation for de-policing traces to the city’s botched response to an earlier crime epidemic in the 1990s, when it averaged 45 homicides per 100,000 population, up 55 percent from the previous decade. So in 1999 Baltimoreans elected a mayor, Martin O’Malley, who promised to apply New York’s successful crime-fighting approach, where homicides had plunged by two-thirds over the decade (to one-ninth Baltimore’s rate) thanks to an expanded police force and innovative, proactive policing strategies.

O’Malley’s first commissioner, NYPD veteran Ed Norris, initially showed promise. By 2002, Baltimore’s homicide rate was 20 percent below its 1999 level. As O’Malley pressed for more, however, relations soured, and Norris departed (and some financial shenanigans eventually earned him a stint in federal prison). His successor, Kevin Clark, another NYPD import, also became embroiled in personal and professional controversy; he was fired and succeeded by a Baltimore PD holdover. By the time O’Malley moved to the Maryland governor’s mansion in 2007, Baltimore’s homicide rate was back to its 1990s average.

The problem was not just turmoil among BPD leadership and meddling (or worse) by O’Malley, but a fatal misunderstanding of what had worked in New York. There, the broad spectrum of criminal activity was addressed efficiently and with community engagement. Detailed data helped guide resources to crime hot spots. Chief William J. Bratton implemented the Broken Windows theory-inspired community-policing methods pioneered by social scientists George Kelling and James Q. Wilson, who understood how small manifestations of disorder could grow to larger ones. Minor offenses that made residents feel unsafe or hinted at acceptance of violence were addressed in order to improve quality of life, strengthen communities, and prevent serious crime.

In Baltimore, however, Broken Windows was misunderstood and misapplied. It mutated into a malignant variant, “zero tolerance” policing—and BPD conduct became not just intolerant but unfocused and excessive. As David Simon, a veteran Baltimore crime reporter and creator of HBO’s The Wire, summed things up, O’Malley “tossed the Fourth Amendment out a window and began using the police department to sweep the corners and rowhouse stoops and [per Norris] ‘lock up damn near everyone.’” That sometimes even included Wire crew members on their way home from a long day of filming.

True Broken Windows policing, in Kelling’s words, creates “a negotiated sense of order in a community” and involves collaboration between cops and residents. As one BPD vet put it, “You go to a community—before we come in, [we should ask], ‘What are the main things you all can’t stand?’ Everybody playing music at 11:30 at night, kids sitting on the corner, the prostitutes using the little park over there to work their trade. Now, ‘What don’t you care about?’ See the old guys sitting down at the corner playing cards every night? They could stay there all they want. . . . Then the police come in and do what the neighborhood wants. You just don’t go out and lock everybody up.” But, he concluded, “we went overboard.”

Kelling had warned that “If you tell your cops, ‘We are going to go in and practice zero tolerance for all minor crimes,’ you are inviting a mess of trouble.” That’s exactly what Baltimore got: stratospheric arrest rates (over 110,000 in 2005, in a city of 600,000), no meaningful reduction in homicides, an ACLU lawsuit, and an erroneous but widely shared feeling that Broken Windows was bunk and policing was not the answer to the city’s crime problems.

Then came a respite. O’Malley’s successor, Sheila Dixon (the city’s first female and third black mayor), defied her staff’s recommendations and named as commissioner Frederick Bealefeld, a BPD lifer with no college pedigree. “It was something in my gut that felt he was the best person,” Dixon explained. “I could just feel his passion.”

Bealefeld understood community policing better than the New York imports, addressing disorder and crime efficiently. He attended community meetings tirelessly to find out what residents wanted done; got cops out of their cars and walking patrols more often; invested in better training; and supported cops’ work with kids. Partnering with a savvy federal prosecutor, Rod Rosenstein, he targeted known dealers and shooters, emphasizing quality arrests—including of cops on the take. It worked. Even as arrest totals fell (to 70,000 by 2010), so did the homicide rate, to a low of 31 per 100,000 residents by 2011.

But that’s when progress stopped and the de-policing experiment began.

Dixon had embezzled gift cards meant for the poor—petty corruption is a Baltimore tradition—and in 2010 was succeeded by Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. The Oberlin-educated former public defender was more liberal than Dixon, personally lukewarm to Bealefeld, and sympathetic to those embittered by O’Malley’s “zero tolerance” policies. And she faced budget problems. De-policing, then, seemed to tick all the right boxes—and, with the homicide rate at a 23-year low (though still almost seven times the national average), there would be little outcry against it.

First came some defunding, with a 2 percent pay cut to help address a recession-related budget pinch; cops’ contributions to their pension funds also were raised to help address shortfalls there. The new mayor’s first proposed budget actually cut the BPD’s request by 10 percent, though the difference eventually was split. Demoralized, experienced cops started retiring in numbers.

Rawlings-Blake did not replace them, and she trimmed staffed aggressively. BPD budgets had consistently authorized about 3,900 positions through the O’Malley and Dixon years. Rawlings-Blake took that down by 5 percent in her 2012 budget and another 6 percent in 2013. Bealefeld called the cuts “unconscionable” and retired. As he’d told the head of the police union at one point, “you can only beat down your horses for so long before they give up.”

So even before Freddie Gray died in police custody in 2015 and Baltimoreans rioted, the BPD had 460 fewer budgeted “horses” than under Mayor Dixon—with 300 fewer on patrol, conducting investigations, or targeting violent criminals. Not surprisingly, the homicide rate surged 20 percent by 2013. And after the city’s newly elected prosecutor, Mosby, criminally charged six uniformed officers in Gray’s death—though she failed to convict any—proactive policing essentially ceased. The city’s annual body count jumped and has remained tragically high since.

Criticized for her handling of the riots—somewhat unfairly—Rawlings-Blake decided not to run for reelection, but in her last two budgets she shaved another 345 personnel from BPD’s budget, nearly halving its investigative staff. (Real BPD expenditures, however, grew about 4.5 percent per year in her term because of mandated pension contributions and ballooning overtime outlays.)

Today, then, the BPD patrols the city’s 81 square miles with 18 percent fewer staff than a decade ago. Post-Ferguson, of course, it has become common to point to intuitively plausible but difficult-to-quantify reductions in the level of police effort to explain localized surges in crime; the evidence for this claim, though tentative, is supportive. In Baltimore, the “Ferguson Effect” has intensified an established pattern of diminished policing resources contributing to rising bloodshed.

And now Baltimore is among the national vanguard in a new trend: de-prosecution. While it was widely perceived that early in her tenure Mosby put the brakes on prosecution of many “low-level” crimes, once the pandemic began she made that policy explicit (nominally to ensure that overcrowded prisons not become Covid spreaders). She dismissed over 1,400 pending criminal cases and quashed as many warrants for possession or “attempted distribution” of controlled dangerous substances, prostitution, trespassing, public urination or defecation, minor traffic offenses, and more.

A year later, she revealed that this policy was not just a Covid palliative but an experiment with human subjects; declaring it a big success, she proclaimed that “the era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over in Baltimore.” She pointed to a 20 percent reduction in violent crime and a 35 percent decline in property crime in the first quarter of 2021 compared with the same period last year. With all the confounding variables at work during the pandemic, of course, no social scientist worth her salt would proclaim such a complex experiment complete—much less successful—with just a year’s worth of data (or a subsample thereof).

When you’ve got data you like, however, “the science” or logic can be overlooked. So Mosby claimed that a 33 percent decline in 911 calls mentioning drugs and a 50 percent decline in calls mentioning sex work during her experiment proves that “there is no public safety value in prosecuting these offenses.” To the contrary: with drug use and prostitution de facto legal in Baltimore, many residents still wasted their time calling the cops about the dealers, junkies, hookers, or johns on their block.

Then there is Mosby’s spin that focusing “the limited law enforcement resources we have” on murder, armed robbery, and carjacking will magically lead to a safer Baltimore. Yet it is Mosby who has been running the State’s Attorney’s office for over six years, during which time her staff has grown by 14 percent (with 50 added positions) and her real budget by 27 percent. A cynic might suggest that the resource limits she imagines are a byproduct of her active travel schedule or other distractions.

A simpler explanation is that Mosby is just not very good at her job. Pre-pandemic, violent crime surged on her watch; homicides (averaging 55 per 100,000 residents) have run one-fifth higher than in any prior administration. Conviction rates fell as soon as she took office. According to Sean Kennedy of the Maryland Public Policy Institute, in 2017 only 12 percent of murder, attempted murder, or conspiracy-to-commit-murder cases resulted in a guilty plea or verdict for the murder charge. In 2018, only 18 percent of gun-crime defendants were found guilty.

It’s true, of course, that BPD resources—measured in actual boots on the ground—have been increasingly scarce in recent years. Mosby ignores the rather obvious implications of that trend while drawing dubious conclusions from her own too-brief, badly designed test. A dispassionate look at Baltimore’s decade-long experiment with de-policing seems fairly clear: people die.

De-prosecution is likely to amplify this tragic tendency. Now that sellers and buyers of drugs and sex face lower risk (or no risk) of prosecution in Baltimore, these markets will expand and become more profitable. The gangs that supply these products often compete for market share by violent means; their customers sometimes fund their habits with muggings and assaults.

As Kelling and Wilson taught and many cities’ histories have demonstrated, disorder and crime can be contagious, but policing these problems efficiently and with community involvement can yield major improvements in public safety and quality of life. Baltimore is simply ignoring these lessons. Other cities should not follow suit

As the Wise Judge Dervish Sanders would say, "City Officials Not Do Anything to Reduce Crime Sure Makes the Problem More "Manageable" (for THEM anyways). 

.

Even Conservatives are Tying to Justify the Federal Power Grab of Local PDs

Lauren Weiner, "Cleaning House in Baltimore"

We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption, by Justin Fenton (Random House, 335 pp., $28)

Residents of Baltimore are getting used to the feds swooping down on the city in pursuit of official malfeasance. Federal prosecutors are investigating Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore, and Nick Mosby, her husband and the president of the city council, for alleged tax evasion and abuse of office. The mayoralty of Catherine Pugh ended when she resigned in May 2019, later pleading guilty to fraud, tax, and conspiracy charges.

Before that, in the spring of 2017, Baltimoreans learned, through local radio and television reports and in the pages of the Baltimore Sun, of the criminality of an entire city police plainclothes unit. According to Sun reporter Justin Fenton, who has written a book about it, it’s the biggest corruption case in Baltimore’s history. Picking through the rubble of this disaster is not a pleasant task, but it reveals urban dysfunction in all of its demoralizing complexity.

Certain common elements pertain. First, drugs. Just try to send officers out to enforce laws and solve crimes when at every turn they encounter loads of valuable pills, powder, and marijuana, as well as thick stacks of cash. It’s called temptation. And Internal Affairs, the traditional watchdog within police departments, is kept out of the loop in Baltimore City. Fenton explains that, in a neighboring jurisdiction, “the functional equivalent of internal affairs officers accompany drug units on search warrants.” Evidently, some police departments do a better job of guarding against temptation than others.

Bent cops will do bad things; that is a given. But a law-enforcement agency’s org chart creates problems of its own. Fenton shows how the bureaucratic bloat inside the Baltimore Police Department looms as large as drug addiction and all its attendant crime and violence, worsening the dilemma he lays out in the book’s opening pages: as citizens, we want cops who will put down the doughnuts and show initiative in fighting crime, but we do not want them crossing the line into misconduct. Cops can hate red tape—and perhaps cut the occasional corner—but they have to love, or at least respect, the rule of law and the Constitution.

With the authorities desperate to reverse Baltimore’s downward slide, it’s understandable that city officials trot out new initiatives. New units, which show dynamism for a while, eventually succumb to bureaucratic inertia and merely carry on. That’s what happened with the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), the elite plainclothes unit created in 2007. The GTTF got dramatic results at first, with “fewer but more deliberate investigations” that saw large numbers of weapons confiscated from serious criminals efficiently, without mass arrests. Then the rot set in, with no one really keeping track of an officer named Wayne Jenkins. Jenkins put on employee-of-the-month airs, all the while inveigling his fellow task-force members to pocket money and drugs from criminals. His wrongdoing under the color of police work included performing warrantless searches, planting weapons or drugs on suspects to frame them, robbing drug dealers and reselling their wares, engaging in reckless car chases that injured and in one case killed bystanders, faking a car theft to collect insurance, and—as if all that wasn’t enough—revealing the names of police informants to drug dealers.

Jenkins wasn’t the sole source of criminality in the unit. Some of the policemen had been skimming money during searches for drugs and firearms before joining his team. One, Maurice Ward, who cooperated with investigators, recalled that early in his career as a Baltimore cop he accidentally forgot to turn drug evidence in. It was a serious breach, or so he assumed: “I was terrified because in the academy they teach that IAD [Internal Affairs] knows everything, is always watching.” But no reprimand ensued, so he inferred that he was pretty much on his own.

According to one of the book’s heroes, Assistant U.S. Attorney Leo Wise, GTTF members “threw drugs away all the time. [They] just [didn’t] submit them. What we were told is that you drive along Interstate 83 and throw it out the window because it’s a pain in the ass to submit the paperwork.”

The GTTF was more than conscientious when it came to another kind of paperwork, however. Overtime theft is everywhere in We Own This City. As with some of the other malfeasance, Jenkins wasn’t the only one doing it, but he took it to new heights. Ostensibly the model cop who “never moved from the small ranch-style home he had bought with his high school sweetheart,” Jenkins “was raking in $170,000 in city pay between his salary, overtime pay, and the fraudulent overtime work.” And that’s not counting the proceeds from robberies and drug sales. An officer “told the FBI that Jenkins had once said he had $200,000 buried somewhere and was building toward $500,000.”

Jenkins sent cheerleading emails to the department’s upper echelons, but out on the streets, he pulled stunts that others wouldn’t dream of, like phoning his lifelong friend, a crooked bail bondsman named Donald Stepp, during drug busts so that Stepp could “show up undetected to help pilfer drugs without his officers knowing.” One day, suspicious colleagues quizzed Jenkins about this random person entering a restricted area with them. He told them Stepp was with “the fugitive task force.”

It took years for the FBI and federal prosecutors to build their case against the GTTF, which began with accusations from drug dealers that officers were ripping them off during arrests. A similar federal case against drug cops in Philadelphia collapsed when the accused stuck together and retreated behind the “blue wall.” So prosecutors proceeded very carefully in Baltimore. When they moved in and apprehended the eight officers, Jenkins, with his usual brazenness, tried to hire the very defense lawyer whose complaints—that Jenkins was shaking down his criminal clients—helped originate the case. The lawyer declined to represent him.

After the scandal broke, several officers in the Baltimore PD said they were not surprised; Jenkins’s testosterone-fueled excesses and general pushiness had alienated some. But his immediate supervisor, Lieutenant Marjorie German, was caught off guard. She admitted that she couldn’t control Jenkins, that he would go over her head to garner special treatment from higher-ups, and that he sometimes got others to sign his overtime slips and didn’t even work out of the locale to which he was assigned. Still, the GTTF’s crimes were a “kick in the gut,” and she “did not expect this” from Jenkins. “He gives 150 percent on the street and is always running and gunning, and that is what they want.”

German took no responsibility for letting a wayward unit operate with impunity for years. Instead, she shifted blame: “While she did not want to absolve the officers of responsibility for their own behavior, she said, ‘Command created the monster, and allowed it to go unchecked.’”

How much can police reform accomplish in Baltimore—or in any city—if this kind of institutional sclerosis is left untouched? The feds have been looking over Baltimore’s shoulder since the riots following Freddie Gray’s death in police custody in 2015. A U.S. district judge is implementing the Justice Department’s consent decree and has been proctoring police-training sessions in a program called Ethical Policing Is Courageous.

EPIC represents the latest in police reform. It’s what they’re calling the “peer-intervention approach.” Good cops, as Fenton shows, face a lot of pressure from bad cops to participate in misconduct in the ranks, or at least to look the other way. Overcoming the diffidence that stops officers from keeping one another in check sounds commonsensical—but it can still be tricky. Clearing out the mid-level empty suits would also help, but that item is not covered in the consent decree.

Meet the REAL Deep State Hand of the King and PotUS!

Source 

The name’s Klain — President Klain. Washington insiders delight in assigning the White House chief of staff this mischievous title as the driving force behind the actual president, Joe Biden. The man himself, Ron Klain, would never describe himself this way, but his firm grip on the levers of government has enabled the 78-year-old president to cruise through his first 100 days in office without breaking sweat.

Everybody who is anybody in Washington knows Klain, although few people outside the Beltway — the ring road surrounding the capital — have heard of him. He is a powerful, confident operator who knows the business of government inside out. Trusted to exercise power and take decisions, he keeps his boss informed while lifting the burden of office from him.

Klain, 59, has recently emerged from the shadows as the surprising face of the administration on Twitter, where he touts Biden’s achievements with gusto under the handle @WHCOS, for White House chief of staff. His output is very different in style to Donald Trump’s but equally triumphal. Among his latest tweets was a Reuters/Ipsos poll showing 55 per cent of Americans approved of Biden’s job performance, as opposed to 38 per cent who disapproved. He also highlighted a Washington Post article headlined: “No wonder the president has a bounce in his step.”

That bounce, such as it is, is down to Klain, the ultimate enabler. For those who find the scale of Biden’s colossal $6 trillion spending plans hard to square with the moderate politician who has been knocking around Washington for half a century, look no further than “President Klain”. He is determined to secure Biden’s place in the pantheon of presidents, with Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, who built the American welfare state.

Having achieved his life’s ambition by reaching the White House, Biden’s goal is to remain in office as long as possible — two terms, preferably. This means he is “pacing himself” in the job, as a seasoned official told me wryly.

The president’s address to Congress last week, in which he unveiled the third tranche of his stimulus package — the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan — was delivered at 9pm to reach West Coast viewers. That is late for him. Most days, Biden works from 9am until 6pm or 7pm, before retiring to his private quarters. His wife, Jill, whom he gallantly presented with a dandelion on the White House lawn on Friday, also makes sure he gets plenty of rest.

Weekends are often spent in Delaware, to which he flies on Air Force One (a smaller plane than the usual wide-bodied jet, as the runway is too short). “The president lives in Wilmington. It’s his home. That’s where he’s lived for many years,” the White House press secretary said recently.

Biden is letting his team take the strain, and that is how they like it. “There is nothing wrong with delegating. It’s a lesson the Democrats should have learnt from Ronald Reagan,” a former White House official told me. The president is served by an inner cadre of half a dozen officials who know him backwards. “The price of entry into this club is a minimum of ten years working with Joe Biden,” he added.

At its apex is Klain, a Harvard law graduate who was clerking at the Supreme Court when he joined Biden’s first presidential campaign in 1988 as a junior speechwriter. A year later Klain became chief counsel to the Senate judiciary committee, then chaired by Biden. A former colleague recalled his appointment raising eyebrows. “I see you’ve just hired a 27-year-old,” a fellow senator chided Biden. “Well, I can remind you I was elected a senator at 29,” Biden retorted.

Since then, the two men have been virtually inseparable. “Even when Ron was off the staff, if Biden was doing one of the Sunday television shows he would have a pre-call with Ron about what he should say,” the same colleague told me.

Klain is not just Biden’s “brain” but has spent more time than his boss in government. He served four years as chief of staff to Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s vice-president, before taking on the same role for Biden when Barack Obama became president. Only once did he fall out with the Biden camp, when he joined Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign without consulting him.

“I’m dead to them,” Klain wrote in an email disclosed by WikiLeaks during the huge document dump that helped to seal Donald Trump’s victory. Yet he was soon back in favour. His expertise in government, knowledge of arm-twisting in Congress and skills as a lobbyist proved too valuable.

Klain was not only the “ebola tsar” under Obama — a useful primer for handling the Covid-19 pandemic — but did a lot of the heavy lifting when Obama appointed Biden “stimulus sheriff” after the 2008 financial crash. Klain’s wife, Monica Medina, is a climate change expert who has just been nominated to a top oceans, environment and science job at the State Department.

Beating the pandemic, stimulating the economy, taking climate change seriously — these are all Biden administration priorities. In particular, Klain has thrown his weight behind the “go big” spendathon that has come to define Biden’s first 100 days. Klain describes the task as “rebuilding the backbone of the country, rebuilding the soul of the country”.

Biden has won applause on the left for the return of big government after decades of bending the knee to Reaganomics. Yet it is not only Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary under Obama, who is raising the alarm about the “substantial risk” of inflation. A former colleague and admirer of Klain told me he had only one downside: “Ron is so smart he doesn’t understand when he is wrong.”

A lot is riding on the success of Biden’s stimulus and infrastructure plans, not least the fortunes of the Democratic Party in the midterm elections next year. So far his policies are proving popular, although he is on the defensive over immigration and “woke” cultural wars. But plenty of moderate Democrats are concerned that he is betting the farm on progressive policies in a divided nation for which the party has no mandate.

Biden, they thought, was on their side, as was his White House chief of staff. What happened? Klain has argued that nobody should be surprised by the president’s boldness. “He laid this out in pretty elaborate, often mind-numbing detail over the course of the campaign — very detailed policy papers and very long speeches,” Klain was quoted as saying in The Wall Street Journal last week. “Everything we are doing is what we said we were going to do.”

Yet the point is that Biden was not expected to deliver on all those promises. They were devised as a “peace treaty” with Bernie Sanders, his rival for the Democratic nomination, who had a huge number of die-hard supporters on the left whom Biden needed to rally behind his own candidacy (after all the damage they caused Hillary Clinton). Once in government, the policies were supposed to be safely trimmed or dropped.

Six “unity task forces” were set up, covering the economy, climate change, health, education, immigration and criminal justice reform. When the economic plan was released without much fanfare in July, a senior campaign aide described it as the “largest mobilisation of public investments in procurement, infrastructure and [research and development] since the Second World War.”

If anybody read this statement, they did not believe it. Even the new left, led by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been surprised by the scale of Biden’s ambition.

What some of these trillions will be spent on remains anyone’s guess. Sharp observers have noticed that Brian Deese — the “infrastructure guy” in charge of the National Economic Council — recently talked on a New York Times podcast about “shovel-worthy” rather than “shovel-ready” projects that have yet to be determined.

Klain believes the impressive degree of unity forged in the Democratic Party can be replicated in the country at large. But are former Republican and independent suburban voters who helped to secure Biden’s victory ready to endorse the biggest left-wing experiment for decades?

In the words of his former colleague: “You’ve got to assume Ron’s doing a very good job. He understands government as well as anybody.” Others are adopting the brace position. Either way, Biden has a remarkably dedicated wingman.

Global Deep State Corruption at the Highest (US/UN) Levels