BOMBSHELL: FBI Staged Fake Photo of Classified Documents for PR Purposes

BY DAVID STROM | HOT AIR

FBI

You know that famous photo of Trump's purloined Top Secret documents? The one that the FBI released that showed all those classified documents hidden in folders?

It's kinda, sorta faked. Staged. Not accurate at all. A sham. A con. Complete BS. 

No, it's not a photoshop. That would be worse, I suppose. Maybe. 

You see, those folders that scream Top Secret were brought by the FBI and the documents were inserted in them by FBI agents. 

Think about this for a minute. The General Services Administration shipped these documents to Trump, which is why they are stuffed away in Mar a Lago in the first place. Then, the Archives met with the Biden administration to prod it to investigate Trump. 

Then the FBI raids Mar a Lago, armed with folders screaming "Top Secret," photographs them, and releases the photo to the world, suggesting that Trump stole away with these documents in these folders screaming Top Secret. 

Smells like a setup. 

Julie Kelley has the scoop. And it is a big one. 

It is the picture that launched a thousand pearl-clutching articles.

A few weeks after the armed FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, the Department of Justice released a stunning photograph depicting alleged contraband seized from Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate that day; the image showed colored sheets representing scary classification levels attached to files purportedly discovered in Trump’s private office.

Included as a government exhibit to oppose Trump’s lawsuit requesting a special master to vet the 13,000 items taken from his residence, the crime scene pic immediately went viral—just as Attorney General Merrick Garland, who authorized the unprecedented raid, intended. 

At the time, even regime-friendly mouthpieces questioned the need and optics of the raid; the photo helped juice the DOJ’s justification for the storming of Trump’s castle.

“[The] question of whether Trump had classified material with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort has captured the public’s attention. The photo published by the government appears to answer that question quite affirmatively,” Washington Post resident fact checker Philip Bump wrote on August 31, 2022.

Some of Bump’s colleagues were more hyperbolic. An ex-CIA officer told ABC News the cover sheets indicated the highest level of secrecy, which in the wrong hands could have resulted in murder. “People's lives are truly at stake. Without being melodramatic, anything that helps an adversary identify a human source means life and death," intelligence expert Douglas London melodramatically warned in reaction to the photo.

 The photo was staged precisely to create this outrage. Proof positive that Trump was a Russian spy or something. It is the Steele Dossier reborn. 

The photo was staged. 

The folders weren't there before the FBI TAMPERED WITH EVIDENCE. 

Amazing. 

New court filings in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s espionage and obstruction case against Trump and two co-defendants conclusively demonstrate that the government used the cover sheets to deceive the public as well as the court. The photo was a stunt, and one that adds more fuel to this dumpster-fire case.

Jay Bratt, who was the lead DOJ prosecutor on the investigation at the time and now is assigned to Smith’s team, described the photo this way in his August 30, 2022 response to Trump’s special master lawsuit:

“[Thirteen] boxes or containers contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings…were seized. Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status. (Emphasis added.) See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ‘45 office’).”

The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.

Classified cover sheets were not “recovered” in the container, contrary to Bratt’s declaration to the court. In fact, after being busted recently by defense attorneys for mishandling evidence in the case, Bratt had to fess up about how the cover sheets actually ended up on the documents.  

Here is Bratt’s new version of the story, where he finally admits a critical detail that he failed to disclose in his August 2022 filing:

“[If] the investigative team found a document with classification markings, it removed the document, segregated it, and replaced it with a placeholder sheet. The investigative team used classified cover sheets for that purpose.”

 These two stories are different. At all. Last I checked, Judges don't like being lied to. Not even a little bit. The FBI and Special Counsel have been lying to the Court. 

This revelation follows an earlier story in which the FBI admitted to mishandling the documents and scrambling them up, which is never, ever supposed to happen. They are doing a modified limited hangout, admitting that the documents aren't as they found them. 

How much do you want to bet there is a reason for that?

But Jack Smith might have bigger problems. During the raid, agents took a box in its entirety if it contained papers with classified markings; the box usually contained other items, which is how the FBI ended up with so many of Trump’s personal belongings.

So, in order to flag the location of the alleged classified record in the box, agents, as Bratt noted, used the cover sheets as placeholders. (The classified records were then placed in a separate secure file.)

But now defense attorneys claim, and the special counsel concedes, that some placeholders do not match the relevant document. “Following defense counsel’s review of the physical boxes…and the documents produced in classified discovery, defense counsel has learned that the cross-reference provided by the Special Counsel’s Office does not contain accurate information,” attorneys representing Trump’s co-defendant Waltine Nauta wrote in a May 1 motion.

The motion forced the special counsel to admit the error. “In many but not all instances, the FBI was able to determine which document with classification markings corresponded to a particular placeholder sheet,” Bratt wrote.

In other words, in their zeal to stage a phony photo using official classified cover sheets, FBI agents might have failed to accurately match the placeholder sheet with the appropriate document. This is a potentially case-blowing mistake, particularly if the document in question is one of the 34 records that represents the basis of espionage charges against Trump.

 Cases have fallen apart for less. 

Further, the FBI "determined" the documents' classification status at the time of the raid without actually knowing if those documents were classified or not. 

We could have expected the folders to tell us, but it turns out the folders were planted by the FBI. They are not dispositive at all. What appeared to be proof of Trump's guilt means nothing at all. Those could have been newspaper clippings in those folders or nothing at all. 

The intelligence community determined whether the documents remained classified long after the raid, which is why the FBI took all sorts of things from Trump that were purely personal. They had no idea what was classified or not. They wanted everybody to believe they knew, but how could they? A "classified" marking on a document only tells you whether the material was at one time classified, not whether it remains so. 

Which Bratt also admitted is an issue. After the boxes were transported from Florida to the hopelessly corrupt Washington FBI field office (another scandalous aspect of the case since the investigation should have been conducted in southern Florida not in another jurisdiction), a private company took scans of the inside of the boxes. But according to the defense team, the current condition of the boxes does not match the scans taken in August 2022. 

Bratt explained that “there are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans.” He then offered a list of excuses including how some “boxes contain items smaller than standard paper such as index cards, books, and stationary, which shift easily when the boxes are carried, especially because many of the boxes are not full.”

It is safe to assume Judge Cannon will not take these new revelations lightly--particularly since Bratt also had to admit in the same filing that he did not tell her the truth when she asked about the condition of the boxes during a hearing last month. On April 12, Cannon directly asked Bratt, “are the boxes in their original, intact form as seized?” Bratt replied yes, but “with one exception, and that is that the classified documents have been removed and placeholders have been put in the documents [place.]”

 Will any of this matter in the courtroom? Maybe, maybe not. The case is rigged, and the Special Counsel, the FBI, and the Justice Department don't even care if a guilty verdict holds up on appeal. The Judge may, though. And maybe even a jury. 

But this is all about the election, which is why they staged that photo in the first place. 

UPDATE: Unfortunately for Biden, the trial was just delayed because of so many outstanding issues. 

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RELATED ARTICLES

Trump's Florida Trial Postponed 'Indefinitely'

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Dems use the legal system to target the right — yet give the left a pass

By Glenn H. Reynolds | New York Post

Former President Donald Trump in court for his "hush money" trial in Manhattan on May 6, 2024. Photo by Steven Hirsch-Pool/Getty Images - Photo by Steven Hirsch-Pool/Getty Images

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

This philosophy, announced by Brazilian President Getulio Vargas in the 1940s, is no longer just the favored approach of Latin American strongmen. It has become the openly practiced strategy of today’s Democratic machine.

Laws that hamper Democrats are ignored. Laws that might be used to hurt Republicans are enforced to — and often well past — the limits of the law.

One need look no farther than the absurd circus-clown show trial (one pundit prefers the term “goat rodeo”) in which the state of New York has gone so far in trying to turn Donald Trump’s (alleged) personal peccadilloes into business crimes that Gov. Hochul had to go out of her way to reassure other businessmen that this was a one-off, and that only Trump would be prosecuted under this novel approach to the law. 

As law professor Jonathan Turley noted in these pages, the New York statute in question has never been used this way before: “Even The New York Times agreed that it could not find a single case in history where this statute was used against an individual or a company that did not commit a criminal offense, go bankrupt, or leave financial victims.”

Nothing says “rule of law” like custom-made forms of liability designed for a single hated defendant.

And while prosecutor Alvin Bragg leaves no stone unthrown in his assault on Trump’s creatively designed “crimes,” he’s letting thieves, murderers and illegal immigrants who assault cops run free. 

He’s not policing the streets, he’s policing threats to Democratic power.

(Meanwhile, prosecutor Jack Smith, who’s after Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents, had to admit to the court this week that his office had . . . mishandled those same classified documents, mixing them up in ways that disadvantaged Trump’s defense lawyers and then falsely representing to the court that the documents were exactly as they had been received.)

Of course it’s not just Trump. 

Former Trump White House official Peter Navarro is doing time for contempt of Congress after being prosecuted by the Biden administration. 

Obama’s attorney general and self-described “wingman” Eric Holder was also charged with contempt by Congress, but the Obama Justice Department — headed by one Eric Holder — gave him a pass. 

(Personally, I think there’s something wrong with anyone who doesn’t possess a fair amount of contempt for Congress.  As Mae West once said when a judge asked her if she wanted to be found in contempt, “Why no, your honor, I was tryin’ to conceal it.”)

And outside the world of Washington we see a similar two-faced approach. 

On campuses around the nation (well, around the blue parts of the nation, anyway), anti-Israel protesters are being treated with kid gloves by law enforcement in a way that no one believes protesters in support of right-wing causes would be.

Legal pundit Hans Bader has rounded up examples: In Baltimore, police declined to remove an illegal encampment at Johns Hopkins University because the city’s mayor told them not to.

No one has a right to camp out on private property in the exercise of their First Amendment rights — or, as the Supreme Court ruled in Clark v. Community for Creative Non Violence, on public property.  

But the same thing is happening in Philadelphia, where the Philadelphia police disregarded a request from the University of Pennsylvania to clear the encampment on Penn’s property. 

Similarly, DC police are refusing to remove protesters from the George Washington University campus. 

As Bader notes, the reason seems to be, again, that Democratic officials favor the speech of these protesters.

No one, he notes, thinks that right-wing protesters would get the same treatment. 

If they were pro-life, anti-election fraud or gun-rights encampments, the bulldozers would have been fired up at once. 

Yet the Supreme Court has made clear that officials have to be evenhanded in their treatment of protests, and can’t discriminate based on whether or not they like the viewpoint, something California federal judge Cormac J. Carney recently noted regarding selective prosecution of right-wing protesters vs. Antifa. 

But for all the talk about “rule of law,” they’re doing just that in all sorts of cases, all over the country. 

That needs to stop. 

For the longer term, we need to do something about policing prosecutors’ discretion to prosecute, and not to. 

Over a decade ago, before the madness of the Trump years, I wrote about this in the Columbia Law Review, in a piece titled “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime.” 

As New York Judge Sol Wachtler once said, any competent prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, which appears to be what Trump prosecutor Alvin Bragg has done. 

We used to rely on the political process to discipline this sort of overreach, but with politics polarized as they are today, it’s not likely to work.

Even more dangerous, in a way, is the refusal of police and prosecutors to protect people whose lives or property are being threatened. 

Over time, that can only lead to cynicism, and to self-help.

In Brazil, starting in the 1960s and continuing on and off until the present, we wound up seeing “death squads” deal out vigilante justice that the legal system couldn’t, or wouldn’t deliver, with predictably bad results. 

We’re not in danger of that in New York, yet, but Alvin Bragg, both through his overreach aimed at Trump, and his no-prosecution approach to many genuine criminals, is moving us closer. 

That needs to stop, too.  But will it?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.

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The Runaway Biden Problem Train Is Gathering Steam and Heading Towards the November Cliff

By Adam Turner | RedState.com

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

If the Presidential election were held on May 7, 2024, Republican Donald Trump would probably repeat the feat of Democrat Grover Cleveland – over 100 years ago – to become only the second President ousted from the White House to return four years later.

Trump is currently leading in virtually all of the national and state polling. The RealClearPolitics polling average has him up by 1.3 points nationally, and he has been leading by around two points for almost a year now. To keep this in perspective, during 2016 and 2020, Trump rarely led in any polling, and never led in the average. Also, Trump is leading by an average of 3.2 points in the battleground states, which include Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And for Biden to win these battleground states, and thus the electoral college, he will almost certainly have to win the popular vote by at least three points, a five-point swing from where we currently are.

Joe Biden is also facing some huge electoral problems that make things even worse for him. Let’s re-examine the five old problems still facing Biden, and one new (sixth) one, as well.  Here they are, in order of their importance:   

Joe Biden Is Old and Senile

First, Joe Biden continues to age and is increasingly senile. Axios has reported that Biden’s aides have introduced a change to his White House departure and return routine so that instead of walking across the lawn alone, he's now surrounded by aides. This is clearly meant to disguise his halting and stiff gate. Further, Biden is rarely allowed to speak before cameras — because he clearly can’t, as some of these clips show.  As a result, he will almost certainly not participate in any debates.  

It's the Economy, Stupid

Second, the economy and inflation continue to be horrible, and Biden was the president when they went sour. Let’s look at the specifics:

The Bureau of Economic Analysis released its advance estimate for 2024’s first-quarter real GDP growth. At 1.6 percent, it is the worst quarterly performance since the economy contracted by 0.6 percent almost two years ago in the second quarter of 2022. This was a growth level one-third below economists’ expectations of 2.4 percent. It is also a precipitous drop from 2023’s fourth-quarter rate of 3.4 percent and 2023’s third-quarter rate of 4.9 percent.

This slower growth comes on the heels of higher inflation. The March report on overall prices showed the Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers rose 3.5 percent over the last year — 3.8 percent when core inflation (minus food and energy) was considered. That figure was higher than any since September 2023 and marked the third consecutive monthly increase.  

Then, on Friday, came more bad inflation news, this time on personal consumer expenditures excluding food and energy. This is the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge, and in March, it rose 2.8 percent compared to a year ago — the same as in February and above expectations. 

Inflation is still well above the Fed’s 2 percent annual target, and many Americans have been feeling the frustration of rising prices since Biden took office. Even worse for Biden, most Americans believe Trump was better on the economy – prior to COVID 19, which Trump is not blamed for – than Biden. And they are right to think so.  

The Border Is Wide Open

Third, the Southern U.S. border continues to be wide open and out of control. Since President Biden took office, the U.S. Border Patrol has encountered or observed approximately ten million illegal border crossers between ports of entry. Many of these people are military-aged men, of a variety of nationalities, including Mexican, Venezuelan, Chinese, Russian, Afghani, Turkish, Arab, etc. 

There is plenty of polling to show that the American public is very concerned with the border problem, and that the public holds Joe Biden personally responsible for it.  Which is the correct assumption, because, contrary to what Biden has claimed, the Biden administration does not need the Congress to give them any new legislation to enforce the border.  

The Pro-Hamas Democrats Are Rioting

Fourth, the Gaza situation continues to heat up, pitting the pro-Hamas Democrats against the pro-Israel Democrats, and the pro-Hamas faction is growing more violent and out of control as time moves on. They have taken over or trashed a multitude of college campuses, including elite universities like Columbia, Yale, and MIT.  Because of the Democrat divide, we have Biden (usually) verbally supporting Israel while, behind the scenes — and occasionally in front of the cameras — he and his administration attempt to undermine it. But this is not going to be enough. Biden needs the war to end and to punish Israel to cater to his pro-Hamas base. And if he does, the pro-Israel Democrats could be picked off by Donald Trump. And the DNC convention is coming up – does anyone really doubt that pro-Hamas radicals will riot/protest in Chicago?  And does anyone doubt that this will go over as well as it did in 1968, when, also in Chicago, the leftwing rioters helped Richard Nixon, (presumably) Donald Trump’s favorite president, win that year’s presidential election?

Joe Biden Is Clearly Corrupt

Fifth, the Biden influence-peddling scandal continues to undermine Joe Biden’s reputation. We know that Joe Biden, as a sitting vice president from 2009 through 2017 (and after), used his ne'er-do-well, alcoholic, drug-addicted, sex-crazed son, Hunter Biden, and also his lobbyist brother, to serve as the bagmen for the Biden family influence operation, which involved taking money from foreign nations, like China, Qatar, and Ukraine. The unbelievable part is we still have no alternate explanation offered as to why Hunter Biden was being paid all this money. Was it for Hunter Biden’s legal acumen, his expertise in hookers or drugs, or to influence Joe? I think we all know the answer to this supposed conundrum. This Biden corruption scandal is totally new from 2020 because it was suppressed by the MSM back then. A retroactive poll showed that, had the scandal come out in 2020, Joe Biden would have lost. This is perhaps the easiest of all scandals to understand, as everyone thinks bribery is a serious crime.  

The Biden Campaign Is Becoming Unglued and Has Bad Campaign Instincts

Sixth, the Biden campaign is panicking because of Biden’s electoral freefall and making campaign mistakes galore. They keep sheltering Biden from tough questions and hiding him away from the press in Delaware, which is so obvious and troubling that it has been noticed by the New York Times. And when Biden has a supposedly “safe” interview, he still manages to screw things up, promising to debate Trump when he clearly can’t and won’t. 

The campaign spends millions on an advertising blitz to play up “Bidenomics,” only to give up when they realize the American voters can’t be bamboozled into thinking Biden is performing well on the economy. Biden promises action on the border, only to give Obamacare to illegals so as to better win their votes. Biden also maligns Japan and India while seeking to defend his open border. 

The Biden campaign keeps pushing to reward pro-Hamas supporters, who it agrees with on the issue, and fears will desert the Democrats. For example, Biden announces a pier offshore in Gaza to bring in more aid, which makes the U.S. troops/workers manning it sitting ducks for terrorist groups.  Also, the administration considers bringing Palestinian (radical Muslim) Arabs from Gaza into the U.S., despite that population’s hatred for the U.S., for non-Muslims, including Christians and Jews, and despite its documented willingness to resort to terrorism and violence. 

And the Biden campaign is directing the NY prosecution against Trump (plus the other cases), where there is no actual crime, and where, even if there was a crime, it would still be all about sex. This is despite the fact that American voters believe the case is partisan lawfare and are more likely to support Trump based on this (as seen by the Trump polling bumps when he was indicted). 

Conclusion 

We now have about six months to go until the 2024 election. The polling negatives from these six huge Biden problems continue to accelerate and aggregate – Biden is getting older; the economy is getting worse; the border continues to bleed; the Gaza protesting chaos is increasing; and the Biden corruption scandal continues to grow; and campaign mistakes will keep being made. And all these issues will certainly be more publicized as Republican/conservative forces increasingly get their paid message out.  

All in all, things are not looking good for Joe Biden. In my view, a campaign crash seems far more likely than a rebound.

Mark Levin Blasts Biden's Depraved Antisemitic Protests Response

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THIS SHOCKING LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN SHOW

Gee, Thanks Kammy! Kamala Harris Just SANK the One Issue Dems Thought They Could Win With in November

By Sam J. | Twitchy.com

AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough

We get what Kamala Harris was trying to do here with abortion but all she really did was admit Democrats have done nothing to secure Roe for 50 years, and they're STILL just promising they will do something so they can use abortion to campaign.

When will Democrat voters wake up? They could have easily passed legislation multiple times over securing Roe; heck, Obama himself campaigned on doing just that. But even when he had the majority to make it happen, he switched gears and decided destroying our healthcare made more sense.

Biden could have secured Roe when he first came into office ... he did not.

Thanks for reminding everyone Democrats talk the talk but never walk the walk, Kammy. Truly.

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Post on "X"

Kamala Harris @KamalaHarris

Donald Trump was the president who took away the protections of Roe. 

@JoeBiden will be the president who puts the protections of Roe back in place.

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Will.

Huh.

Why wait?

See?

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Post on "X"

John Hawkins @johnhawkinsrwn

Isn't he the President now? If there are some "protections" he wants to put in place for people murdering babies, why isn't he doing it?

_________________

Right? What are they waiting for? OH, that's right. They need this issue to run on for November because it's all they've got.

Way to go, Kamala.

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Post on "X"

𝗥𝗢𝗗𝗥𝗜𝗤𝗨𝗘𝗭 @rodriQuez

FWIW: In 1982, Joe Biden voted in support of an amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to choose their own policies on abortion.

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Oopsie.

Cheers indeed.

Oh, and it wasn't Trump. Yeah yeah, they know if they say this nonsense enough the idiots who keep voting for them will forget SCOTUS did it but still.

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Sebastian Noto 🇺🇲🇮🇹 @AtlasAZ22

Is that all you have to campaign on... sad

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It is and yes, it's sad.

How anyone can vote for a Democrat in 2024 is beyond this editor.

Why Intellectuals Don't Like Capitalism

By Rainer Zitelmann | Townhall.com

Rattankun Thongbun/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Anti-capitalism is back in fashion. Even Marxism, which many had declared dead after the collapse of socialism, is experiencing a renaissance. Books such as those by the left-wing French economist Thomas Piketty are popular. In my home country, Germany, a book called Das Ende des Kapitalismus (The End of Capitalism), whose author advocates the introduction of a planned economy, has climbed the bestseller lists. She cites the British war economy of the Second World War as a potential model. In her opinion, we should introduce this kind of economic system as quickly as possible, as it is the only way we can save our planet.

So, why do many intellectuals dislike capitalism? Many of them fail to understand the nature of capitalism as an economic order that emerges and grows spontaneously. Unlike socialism, capitalism isn’t a school of thought imposed on reality; free-market capitalism largely evolves spontaneously, growing from the bottom up rather than being decreed from above. Capitalism has grown historically, in much the same way as languages have developed over time as the result of spontaneous and uncontrolled processes. Esperanto, invented in 1887 as a planned language, has now been around for over 130 years without gaining anything like the global acceptance its inventors were hoping for. Socialism shares some of the characteristics of a planned language in that it is a system devised by intellectuals.

Once we’ve grasped this essential difference between capitalism, as a spontaneously evolving order, and socialism, as a theoretical construct, the reasons why many intellectuals have a greater affinity for socialism – in whatever form – suddenly become obvious. Since their own livelihood depends on their ability to think and communicate ideas, they feel more in tune with an artificially planned and constructed economic order than with one that allows for unplanned, spontaneous development. The notion that economies work better without active intervention and planning is alien to many intellectuals.

In order to understand why so many intellectuals hold anti-capitalist views, it is important to realize that they are an elite, or at any rate a community of practice that defines itself as such. Their anti-capitalism is nurtured by their resentment of and opposition to the business elite. In this sense, the rivalry between the two groups is simply that – a competition between different elites vying for status in contemporary society. If a higher level of education doesn’t automatically guarantee a higher income and a more privileged position, then the markets that allow this imbalance to happen are seen as unfair from the intellectuals’ perspective. Living in a competitive system that consistently awards the top – economic – prizes to others, a system where even the owners of medium-sized businesses achieve higher incomes and wealth than a tenured professor of philosophy, leads intellectuals to adopt a general skepticism against an economic order based on competition. 

Understandably, intellectuals tend to equate knowledge acquisition with academic education and book learning. Psychology uses the term “explicit knowledge” to refer to this type of knowledge. However, there is a different kind of knowledge, “implicit knowledge”, which you can also call “gut feeling” or “intuition.” This is far more primordial and often more powerful, although many intellectuals are unaware of its existence. Research has shown that this is the route to knowledge acquisition taken by the majority of entrepreneurs. 

By an intellectual’s standards, an entrepreneur who may not have read a lot of books or shown much promise at college or university has nothing to show for himself that would compare to a doctorate or a list of publications. 

Intellectuals cannot understand why someone with an “inferior intellect,” someone who might not even have an undergraduate degree, should end up making a lot more money and living in a much bigger house. They feel offended in their sense of what is “fair” and thus vindicated in their belief in a malfunction of capitalism or the market, which needs to be “corrected” by means of redistribution on a massive scale. By divesting the rich of some of their “undeserved wealth,” intellectuals console themselves with the fact that, even if they can’t abolish the brutal capitalist system altogether, they can at least “correct” it to some extent.

Pro-capitalist intellectuals – economists such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich August von Hayek, and Milton Friedman, as well as writers such as Ayn Rand, have tried to take up the battle that the business elite itself is unwilling or unable to fight, whether out of lack of courage or intellectual wherewithal and verbal agility. However, such supporters of capitalism have always been outsiders among their fellow intellectuals.

Campus riots and a Chicago convention: Deja vu all over again?

By Michael Barone | Washington Examiner 

Photo by Gabriella Gregor Splaver / Senior Staff Photographer

As the philosopher/baseball player Yogi Berra once (supposedly) said, it’s deja vu all over again. Student protesters are occupying the campuses of famed universities across the country. In New York, Columbia University protesters occupied administrative offices in Hamilton Hall and were cleared out by police, exactly 56 years to the day after student protesters occupied and were thrown out of that building in 1968.

Back then it was famously reported that protester Mark Rudd sat at president Grayson Kirk’s desk smoking his cigars. It’s not clear whether protesters reached president Manouche Shafik’s office, but it seems unlikely that any humidor there contains tobacco.

One thing that has changed in the last three generations is the place of universities in American life. In 1940 only 6% of college-age Americans were enrolled in such schools. Thanks to the G.I. Bill of Rights, that percentage rose sharply after World War II, and with the expansion of old schools and the rollout of state and community colleges, it reached about 25% by 1968.

Higher education also earned huge prestige. Brilliant scientists, many of them Jews, arrived from Hitler’s Europe, created the atomic bomb that ended World War II, and spared the lives of the hundreds of thousands of G.I.s who would have died in an invasion of Japan. Lavishing more money on education, and especially on gifted children and universities, was politically popular and justified as defense spending.

Fast forward two generations. Policymakers of both parties, in states as well as Washington, D.C., concluded that if people with college degrees earned more money than others, enabling more people to get college degrees would mean more money for them too. State legislators expanded universities, and federal policy encouraged and, during the Obama administration, administered loans for college and graduate school.

Meanwhile, the 1968 student rebels and their intellectual progeny started their long march through the institutions. Faculties that once included conservatives as well as liberals, and even some Republicans, became mono-partisan bastions of the political Left. Politically correct tenured faculty imposed ideological tests on new hires as their elders retired.

Students’ politically incorrect speech was punished with expulsion and opprobrium. Schools that had arguably America’s freest speech zones in the 1940s and 1950s became the most restrictive and censorious institutions by the 1990s and 2000s.

Government subsidies of institutions and students pumped huge sums of money into colleges and universities, which responded by raising tuition and hiring even more bureaucrats, to the point that post-secondary schools today employ more administrators than teachers. Over the last generation, there has been a particular increase in diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats, whose Orwellian function is to impose uniformity of opinions, divergent treatment according to ethnic status, and exclusion of those who disagree.

In the process, colleges and universities have squandered much of the prestige that they once enjoyed. It’s not clear any longer that college degrees, particularly in politically correct fields, produce higher incomes. Imposition of feminist-backed behavior codes, just reiterated by Biden administration Title IX proposals, has seen college gender ratios change from two-thirds male in the 1960s to three-fifths female in the 2020s.

Ominously, enrollment in higher education peaked in 2010, declined by 10% even before COVID-19,  and has continued to decline since. And the long-term trend seems almost certain to be downward from there, for the number of births in the nation has plunged since the 2007-08 financial collapse and recession from 4.1 million to 3.6 million. With smaller percentages embarking on post-secondary education, the number of college and university students seems headed downward. What looked like a growth sector back in 1968 looks like a shrinking and declining sector today.

And it’s a sector, unlike the mass of American society, riddled with repellent antisemitism. The pro-Palestinian student protesters say they are anti-Israel, not anti-Jewish, but their frequent attacks on Jewish students are redolent of the antisemitism of German universities in the Weimar Republic. This flows from the view, widely taught on campuses, dividing the world into oppressors and virtuous victims, in which Israel and Jews, in general, are dismissed as oppressors and Hamas terrorists are celebrated as heroes.

This view, of course, is not shared by the vast majority of the public. There has probably never been such a large population so respectful of the rights and contributions of Jews and so repelled by anti-Jewish bigotry. Which is, as political scientist Charles Lipson writes at RealClearPolitics, “bad news for Democrats” since “their party is closely tied to education at all levels” and since the pro-Palestinian “squad” of congressional Democrats is aligned with the protesters. All the more so since the day the police cleared Hamilton Hall, Joe Biden announced student debt cancellation for 317,000 adults who attended art institutes. 

 Disorder tends to hurt incumbents and, as political scientist Omar Wasow and leftish consultant David Shor have pointed out, to the dismay of young leftists, anger at student riots helped elect Ronald Reagan as governor in 1966 and Richard Nixon as president in 1968. The Democratic National Convention this year will be held in Chicago, as it was in 1968, and some are threatening protests there. Will it be deja vu all over again?

Like Clockwork

By J Garrett 

On July 7, 2016, Micah Xavier Johnson, a heavily armed sniper, started firing from the second story of a Dallas community college into a Black Lives Matter protest. He was aiming at the white police officers who were protecting the crowd. He killed five officers and injured nine others that day. That was the culmination of the Black Lives Matter movement that had been protesting police shootings of black men across America in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, St. Paul, New York, Chicago, Washington, DC and many other cities throughout the summer of 2016.

The day before the five cops were gunned down in Dallas, President Barack Obama stoked the animus between police officers and the minority community when he said, “These[police shootings] are not isolated incidents. They are systematic of a broader set of disparities that exist in our criminal justice system. When incidents like this occur, there’s a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels that because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same, and that hurts.” Obama was employing his most effective tactic of dividing the country along racial lines for political purposes.

All of that must have worked because for the next three years, 2017 to 2019, the protesting and rioting over police shootings slowly died down and disappeared. Things were so quiet during that time, that it was fair to conclude that the problem had been solved, that no black men were being killed by police officers anymore. We had heard absolutely no news stories about those types of incidents for three years. The internet, social media, cable news did not drive our country to a screeching halt because an unarmed black man had been killed by police officers. Problem apparently solved.

And then, in June 2020, for some reason, police officers started killing black people again. They had taken a three-year hiatus and then went back to business as usual. On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, killed George Floyd by kneeling on his back for 9 minutes as Floyd died of a drug overdose. People were suddenly enraged by the systemic racism that was rampant in police forces across America that no one had noticed for three years. Once again, we were being told that police officers shooting black men was an epidemic in American life even though the public had not heard of one of these incidents since 2016.

Every year, anywhere between 10 to 15 unarmed black people are killed by police officers. Whether that can be considered an epidemic or an aberration or something in between is not the point. The more salient point is that 10 to 15 black people had been killed by police in the years 2017 to 2019, and no one in the media and no one in politics believed that those deaths were important enough to even mention. It was only when a black man died in police custody in May of 2020, that black people being killed by police became a major issue in our country once again.

From June to November 2020, over 500 riots broke out in many of our major cities, over 30 people were killed, thousands of police officers were injured, billions of dollars of property damage, thousands of businesses burned to the ground, federal courthouse were fire bombed, police precincts were set on fire, lives and livelihoods were lost because people believed they had the right to kill and injure and destroy because they were protesting racism in American police departments.
All of that must have worked, because as happened after 2016, police officers once again decided to stop shooting black people. Since 2021, has there been one major news story about a police officer killing a black man? How many BLM protests have there been for social justice in policing in that time? None that I can think of.

And now, in 2024 we have protests going on across the country, mainly on college campuses. Anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protestors have taken over Columbia University, CCNY, NYU, UCLA, USC and many others. In New York, these anti-Israel protestors took over Hamilton Hall at Columbia University, and the NYPD had to be called in to root them out. At UCLA, police had to be deployed to break up a pro-terrorist encampment that had taken over the campus.  

And the pattern emerges once again. Like the swallows to returning to Capistrano, every four years riots break out across our country over the social justice cause of the month. It just so happens that these protests and riots disproportionately occur during a Presidential election year. This is what the left always does leading up to Presidential elections – create as much chaos as possible with the hope that the enflamed emotions over these issues will motivate their base to show up and vote for a non-inspirational and non-charismatic Presidential candidate, such as Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton.

This time next year, there won’t be anyone concerned with the plight of the Palestinians, just as no one seems to care about blacks being killed by cops anymore. No one seems to care about the welfare of illegal immigrant children anymore. During Trump’s presidency, there were plenty crocodile tears shed by our congressmen for so-called “kids in cages”, but none of those teary-eyed representatives – namely AOC – care at all about illegal immigrant children being raped by coyotes or sex-trafficked because of the Biden Administration open border policy. So, in reality, no one really cares about the people they claim to care about; no one cares about the people they protest for.

So, why do we take these people seriously anymore? What they are doing has nothing to do with the cause they claim to be standing up for. Not one person who has been protesting on college campuses this spring gives a damn about the Palestinians in Gaza. The Palestinians are mere pawns in their game of power. When December rolls around, all these protests and all these emotions will have disappeared. There are wars going on across the Middle East all the time and innocent civilians are killed all the time, and this is the only time that there’s outrage, that there are protests. All of this is purely political.

Our country was on fire from June to November of 2020, every night there was a new riot splashed across our TV screens. Where was all that emotion, where was all that call for social justice in 2021, 2022, 2023 when black people were shot by police? No where. Everyone suddenly stopped caring because it was a waste of time and resources to protest and riot in 2021 because it would have no effect on the presidential election in 2024.

How many black people have been killed by police officers since the BLM riots stopped in 2021? We don’t know because no one has said a word about one black man being killed by cops in 3 three years. No one has protested. No one has rioted. Why? Because they do not care. BLM has never cared about black people dying. The BLM activists, antifa, people on the left, never cared about black people being killed by police officers. They only cared about their ability to exploit their deaths in order to gain politically. And they are waiting right now with much anticipation for a black man to resist arrest, attack a police officer, so the officer draws his firearm. That will be a great day to them. They will have a reason to take to the streets, to loot, burn, riot, injure and even kill, with the sole purpose of pushing Joe Biden across the finish line in November.