Democrats Trash-Talk the Voters

 By Kimberley A. Strassel

Should Republicans lose this election, it will be in some part due to the contempt Donald Trump has shown his opponent. Should Democrats lose this election, it will be in large part due to the contempt they routinely show tens of millions of voters.

The media is doing its best to play down Joe Biden’s casual insult of half of America as “garbage”—he was misunderstood, it was a “gaffe,” let’s meditate on Donald Trump’s garbage-truck “stunt.” Why on earth would anyone assume Mr. Biden would again show derision for voters he’s labeled “semi-fascists,” “MAGA extremists” and proponents of “Jim Crow 2.0”?

Of course it wasn’t a gaffe. It’s the latest injection of toxic Democratic arrogance—and it explains the party’s electoral struggles. It’s of a piece with the open dismissal by the media and elites of critics as idiots, yokels, deplorables. The men accused of “toxic masculinity.” The women written off as “handmaids.” The religious “fanatics.” The millions the left scorn with a long list of “ist” and “phobe” words. If you don’t bow to progressive dogma, you are a fascist. Sexist. Racist. Nationalist. Insurrectionist. Domestic terrorist. Extremist. “Far” rightist. And a homophobe. And a Nazi. Who is bitter. And clinging to a gun and a religion.

These labels are now even being employed as an election strategy—pejoratives to be ascribed to people based on their vote. Michelle Obama lectures “the men in our lives” that only a vote for Kamala Harris will prove they take women’s health “seriously.” (Don’t be a misogynist!) Barack Obama explains to black men that a failure to vote for Kamala is evidence that “you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” (Don’t be a sexist!) Mark Cuban reminds us that Donald Trump is never in the company of “strong, intelligent women.” (Don’t be a weak, dumb, GOP-voting broad!)

The award for most risible ad this season goes to Vote Common Good, which recruited Julia Roberts (D., La La Land) to assist with the following ad: A female voter arrives at the polls with her baseball-hat-wearing husband. As Julia’s voiceover explains, she’s at the “one place in America where women still have a right to choose.” The wife and another woman (secretly) vote for Kamala, grinning conspiratorially at each other. On the way out, the patronizing husband gives wifey a hard stare and asks: “Did you make the right choice? “Sure did, honey,” she replies. “Remember, what happens in the booth, stays in the booth,” Julia assures the viewer. “Vote Harris-Walz.”

Or as a progressive activist Jess Piper tweeted to “white women” this month: “I don’t care what kind of sign your husband has put in your yard, or what your pastor preaches on Sunday, you can vote your conscience. You can vote for your children and grandchildren. No one will know.” Thanks for the stereotypes, ladies. No doubt millions of us females—as soon as we’ve unchained ourselves from the sink and reread Ephesians 5:22—will go mindlessly vote for more inflation, and border chaos and debt. After all, we wouldn’t want to check the boxes of spineless, stupid, and baby-hating.

But that’s the joke. The contempt isn’t working; it’s alienating large segments of the country, including once-key sections of the Democratic coalition. The working class is migrating to the GOP as blue-collar laborers wake up to the disdain the left has for their values and their work. Minority voters, too, are feeling taken for granted, on the verge of voting for Republicans at historic levels.

Americans demand more than “vote for me because I self-attest to moral superiority.” Yet that’s about all the left’s got right now. That’s because the haughty arrogance—and press protection—has allowed the party to continue living in a bubble that shields them from their failings. Look, a dozen (left-leaning, partisan) Nobel Prize-winning economists just assured us that up is down—so we’re good.

It also shields them from average voters’ views. One of the gentler (yet telling) put-downs of this election came from Tim Walz, who pronounced that Republicans are “weird.” Hilarious. Want to know what’s really weird? Taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries for felons. Attempts to regulate cow flatulence. The expectation that fewer police will mean less crime. The 1619 project. Decriminalizing border crossings. Boys competing in girls’ sports. The word “Latinx.” Sizable majorities of Americans think all this is nuts. Yet these remain staples of Democratic policy and rhetoric.

Progressives are fooling themselves if they think a close election is proof the insults are working. The independent and female voters who might pull this out for Democrats aren’t voting in favor of this rhetoric or progressive policies, but rather against a very specific and alienating individual—Mr. Trump. He probably won’t be on the ballot again.

Insults are the last refuge of fools, and there was a day when politicians on both sides understood the “likability” factor in elections. It’s hard to like a party that views you as trash.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/democrats-trash-talk-the-voters-presidential-election-contempt-harris-campaign-4c738190

The Paradigm Shift Is Here

 by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Some wild shifts are taking place in our time...

The low-tariff global trade order is falling apart.

Nationalist movements are gaining strength in every Western nation, not just the United States.

The major media is under serious financial strain to the point that the owner of the Washington Post has penned an editorial decrying the tendency to speak only to elites.

A presidential candidate is talking about scrapping the income tax.

The Supreme Court earlier this year ruled that 40 years of regulatory jurisprudence is essentially contrary to the Constitution.

The list goes on and on with the rise of homeschooling, the reliance on alternative media, the dramatic shift in partisan affiliations over healthy food, the unpredictable alliances over the U.S. role in the world, and so much more.

People are asking fundamental questions about issues that only a few years ago seemed fully settled. What was stable is unstable and what was believed by nearly everyone is now widely doubted.

It’s enough to make one’s head spin. What is happening and why is it happening?

The short answer is that we are living through a class paradigm shift.

One is going away and another is coming. We are in pre-paradigmatic times, which are surely the most exciting times to be alive.

The word paradigm entered into the mainstream of thought with an important book by Thomas Kuhn. His “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” appeared in 1962, and it completely upended the dominated assumptions about how science works.

More than that, it implicitly shook how people came to understand how progress takes place. He said it is not a linear process with every generation absorbing the best from the last but rather that progress is episodic, a shift from success to failure and back again, through titanic movements of large paradigms.

Kuhn arrived at this conclusion by looking at the long history of science and noticing the tendency toward complacency around an orthodoxy of some sort. This is the period he calls “normal science.” The practitioners have all been schooled in a certain way, deferring to teachers and dominant institutions that have captured government and the public mind. It’s a way of understanding the world and within that the main practitioners focus on problem-solving and applications.

This period of normal science can last a month or decades or centuries, rarely questioned. And then something happens. Kuhn writes that this orthodoxy comes to be challenged by certain features of reality that are not explained by normal science. Once these are more closely investigated, the anomalies start to pile up and then overwhelm the explanatory power of the settled paradigm. The longer this goes on, the more the paradigm comes under strain, as a new generation seizes on the failures and highlights the incapacity of the orthodoxy to account for the reality all around us.

That’s when the settled science breaks down. It can happen slowly or quickly, and sometimes paradigms overlap both in their popularity and their collapse. That collapse does not mean that every mind is changed. Kuhn observes that the practitioners of the old science continue on their merry way through retirement and final expiration, while the younger people work on cobbling together a new way of thinking that gradually emerges as the dominant paradigm.

Kuhn was writing about science and the profession thereof but his insight has broad application to sociological, cultural, and political ideas too. They do not evolve in a linear fashion, piling victory upon victory, as a Whiggish perspective of the 19th century would have it. Instead, change occurs episodically. One generation is as likely to forget the wisdom of the past as it is to overthrow the orthodoxies of the present. We are in a forever state of cobbling together truth rather than progressively unfolding it.

We’ve seen this happen in the postwar world, as planners built structures that were supposed to govern the world forever. But in a few short years, the world came to be divided rather than united by the Western perception of the new threat of Russian imperialism. That created the Cold War which lasted for 40 years until a new “end of history” was born, which put freedom, democracy, and U.S. hegemony on the commanding heights. That turn has been challenged by the rise of China and huge industrial shifts in the 21st century.

A worker is pictured with car batteries at a factory of Xinwangda Electric Vehicle Battery Co. Ltd., which makes lithium batteries for electric cars and other uses, in Nanjing in China's eastern Jiangsu Province, on March 12, 2021. STR/AFP via Getty Images

If we were to name one dominant factor that has provoked the big change in our time, it would have to be the global response to the lab-created virus of SARS-CoV-2, which was met with Chinese Communist Party-style universal quarantines all over the world, and followed by shot mandates on most public institutions and many private businesses. These policies were extreme beyond which had been practiced in any period of history but also, and in many ways, merely an extension of the “normal science” of times.

The media, large corporations, and nearly all governments got behind the pandemic resp

onse and jeered the non-compliers. This was a huge error because it gave rise to a full generation of the incredulous who lost trust in elites at all levels: medical, academic, media, and government. It has all fallen apart in our time, leaving people scrambling in all directions for explanations of what could have gone so wrong and what should be done about it.

What fascinates me about our election year is not so much the issues on the table but the underlying template that everyone knows is there but no one dares mention; namely the utter discrediting of elite opinion over the last four years.

The claims of the experts simply became too implausible to compel public assent. And this time it was personal. People’s schools and churches were closed, loved ones forced on ventilators to die alone, and whole communities were shattered when public spaces were blocked.

In other words, the “normal science” became a threat to people’s lives, especially once the vaccine mandates came along that most people did not want or need and which ended up being far less effective and far more dangerous than advertised. That was the turning point, the mark at which the anomalies overwhelmed the orthodoxies and the expert classes fell into disrepute.

Nothing about any of this would shock Thomas Kuhn, who gave us a map of understanding back in 1962. Finding that new way of thinking is the essence of our times, which is why everything seems to be in question. The other day, Elon Musk suggested cutting $2 trillion next year from the federal budget. It barely made the headlines, even though it is a highly credible promise.

That’s the new world in which we live. It is being built on the embers of the old.

To be sure, this shift will not happen all at once. It will happen in fits and starts and be accompanied by a great deal of alarm and even pain along the way. But one way or another, it is going to happen, and for one simple reason. As Jeff Bezos explained in the Washington Post, reality is an undisputed champion.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/paradigm-shift-here

Another US oil refinery to vanish with Lyondell Houston plant closing

 Chemical maker LyondellBasell Industries on Friday detailed its long-announced plan to permanently shutter its 263,776 barrel-per-day (bpd) Houston oil refinery in the first quarter of 2025.

The planned closing marks the latest in a wave of U.S. refinery closures as motor fuel demand is expected to peak this decade and decline under pressure from renewable fuels and electric vehicles.

In January, one of the facility's crude distillation units (CDU) and coker production train will shut, Lyondell refining chief Kim Foley told analysts on a call to discuss third-quarter results.

In February, the second CDU-coker production train, which supplies the gasoline-producing fluidic catalytic cracker (FCC) and ancillary units, will shut, ending motor fuel production, Foley said.

For the fourth quarter of this year, Lyondell plans to run the refinery at 90% of its capacity.

Lyondell originally planned to shutter the Houston refinery in 2023, but extended its life due to strong fuel margins. Last month, rival U.S. refiners Phillips 66 and Valero Energy announced plans to close one California refinery and put two others under review for possible closure in that state.

Phillips 66's 139,000-bpd Los Angeles refinery will cease production by the end of 2025.

"The refinery, if you think back historically, was originally designed to process in-state California crude production, and that has declined by about 75%," CEO Mark Lashier said.

Valero CEO Lane Riggs said last month "all options are the table" for the company's 91,300-bpd Wilmington and 145,000-bpd Benicia, California, refineries. New California laws for maintaining emergency inventories would penalize operators and make their refineries unprofitable, Valero said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the last wave of U.S. refinery closures, which occurred between 2017 and 2022, nine crude oil refineries with a combined capacity of 1.2 million bpd were idled or converted to production of renewable fuels.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/index/S-P-GSCI-BIO-FUEL-INDEX-46869729/news/Another-US-oil-refinery-to-vanish-with-Lyondell-Houston-plant-closing-48237823/

Judge orders Pennsylvania county to issue ballots for voters who did not receive them

 A Pennsylvania judge on Friday ordered the Erie County Board of Elections to issue ballots for up to 17,000 voters who had not received requested mail-in ballots ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

The state's Democratic Party filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the county board of elections, challenging its failure to send out between 10,000 and 20,000 requested mail-in ballots.

In the lawsuit, the party said the failure led to "substantial delays and hardships in casting ballots" and potentially violated the right to vote of many electors.

Pennsylvania is one of the seven swing states that will likely determine who wins the presidential election. With 19 Electoral College votes, it is the biggest prize among the battleground states, and both Democrats and Republicans see it as a must-win.

Erie County is widely seen as one of the state's most contested counties.

Judge David Ridge, who serves on the Erie County Court of Common Pleas, ordered the board of elections to extend early voting through Nov. 4.

He allowed the board to hire a company that provides overnight delivery services to send replacement ballots after it was determined that about 1,200 county voters temporarily living outside the state had not received their ballots.

Ridge said in his ruling that it was determined that at least 365 duplicate ballots were sent to voters that contained a ballot with a barcode corresponding to another voter. As a result, he ordered that voters be given the opportunity to cancel previous ballots cast in their name by casting a new one.

Neither the Pennsylvania Democratic Party nor the Erie Board of Elections responded to requests for comment.

"I think that everybody worked together and did the best we could to enable people to vote despite the failings of the county's contractor, which was just horrendous," said Timothy McNair, an attorney for the state's Democratic Party, according to WJET-TV.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Kamala Harris are running neck and neck in Pennsylvania ahead of the election on Tuesday.

More than 1.6 million voters have already cast their ballots in Pennsylvania, according to a report by the state.

Over 25,000 voters have cast ballots in Erie County, which has 177,000 registered voters.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/latest/Judge-orders-Pennsylvania-county-to-issue-ballots-for-voters-who-did-not-receive-them-48238168/

U.S. finalizes rule to review more foreign land deals near military bases

 The Biden administration on Friday finalized a new rule expanding its authority to review foreign purchases of real estate near U.S. military bases for national security threats.

The U.S. has become increasingly concerned about the national security risks posed by Chinese-linked purchases of property near sensitive military sites.

The Treasury Department rule, which was first proposed in July, adds nearly 60 facilities across 30 states to its review list and would expand the jurisdiction of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to about 227 military installations.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the final rule "will significantly increase the ability of CFIUS to thoroughly review real estate transactions near bases and will allow us to deter and stop foreign adversaries from threatening our Armed Forces, including through intelligence gathering."

CFIUS, led by the Treasury Department, reviews foreign investments in the United States for national security risks.

Treasury rejected a push to retroactively apply the rule to a proposed battery plant by Gotion in Michigan. Germany's Volkswagen AG is the largest single shareholder of parent company Gotion High-Tech, but Republican lawmakers say China maintains "effective control" through multiple individual shareholders.

The rule will take effect in December.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/VOLKSWAGEN-AG-436737/news/U-S-finalizes-rule-to-review-more-foreign-land-deals-near-military-bases-48237397/

Washington state activates National Guard in case of election violence

 The governor of Washington state on Friday said he was activating some members of the National Guard to be on stand-by after information and concerns regarding potential violence related to the 2024 election.

The state, where Democrat Kamala Harris is easily expected to defeat Republican Donald Trump according to polling, was one of two where ballot boxes were set on fire earlier in the week.

Early voting is available to those in Washington and more than 2 million have already cast their ballots, according to the Election Lab at the University of Florida.

"Based upon general and specific information and concerns regarding the potential for violence or other unlawful activity related to the 2024 general election, I want to ensure we are fully prepared to respond," Governor Jay Inslee wrote in a letter published on his website on Friday.

Hundreds of ballots were damaged or destroyed by the use of the incendiary device in the drop box in the city of Vancouver, according to Inslee.

https://www.marketscreener.com/news/latest/Washington-state-activates-National-Guard-in-case-of-election-violence-48238185/

Biden-Harris Administration Wasted Nearly One Billion Dollars On Misinformation

 by Ian Miller via The Brownstone Institute,

The party of “Science” apparently misled hundreds of millions of people on the actual science surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic. Stop the presses.

Starting in early 2020, the combined efforts of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and their partners in the media caused an untold amount of damage to society and public health and might have even created conditions for increased Covid spread. How? By repeatedly, profoundly, and often purposefully communicating inaccurate information while spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get their preferred messages across.

Now, a new, massive 113-page report from the US House of Representatives Energy & Commerce Committee has detailed the remarkable abuses from the Biden-Harris administration and the manner in which they communicated during Covid. 

Biden, CDC Partners Literally Wasted a Fortune to Lie to the American People

The report details a number of unbelievable inaccuracies in 2021 coming from the Biden administration’s communications team and the CDC’s messaging apparatus. Fauci and Francis Collins’ National Institutes of Health were also responsible, creating guidance using taxpayer money, nearly $1 billion per the report, that misled millions of people and caused unimaginable harm in the process.

While the Biden-Harris administration’s public health guidance led to prolonged closures of schools and businesses, the NIH was spending nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money trying to manipulate Americans with advertisements—sometimes containing erroneous or unproven information. By overpromising what the Covid-19 vaccines could do—in direct contradiction of the FDA’s authorizations—and over emphasizing the virus’s risk to children and young adults, the Biden-Harris administration caused Americans to lose trust in the public health system,” Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) said after the report’s release. “Our investigation also uncovered the extent to which public funding went to Big Tech companies to track and monitor Americans, underscoring the need for stronger online data privacy protections.”

One of the most damaging, and woefully incorrect messaging campaigns centered on vaccine efficacy against infection. As the report details, Biden’s “Stop the Spread” campaign was a pervasive marketing effort in conjunction with the CDC that claimed vaccines would end the pandemic by reducing infections. That had enormous knock-on effects, including decreasing trust in all vaccinations and ultimately harming public health.

“The entire premise of the Biden-Harris ‘Stop the Spread’ campaign was that if you got vaccinated for COVID-19, you could resume daily activities because they said vaccinated people would not spread the disease,” said Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chair Morgan Griffith (R-VA). “Despite lacking scientific basis, the administration bought into this CDC claim and misled the American public. As a result, vaccination coverage with other vaccines appears to have declined, I believe because of a growing distrust of information coming from our public health institutions.”

This campaign was even more disingenuous and purposefully misleading than previously realized. The “Stop the Spread” publicity blitz hid in plain sight a message from the CDC that even they didn’t know whether the vaccines actually stopped infection or transmission. The report shared a screenshot of a page from the Biden administration’s marketing that specifically said “science” wasn’t sure how well the vaccines worked against infection. 

Yet the Biden administration made life-altering policy decisions such as vaccine mandates, discriminatory entry processes, and military vaccination requirements regardless. And that was in addition to the less quantifiable impacts like nudging millions of people to follow their preferred course of action.

CDC Guidance Exacerbated Existing Problems

The report also explains how the Biden administration relied heavily on guidance from the CDC, an organization that thoroughly disgraced itself during the pandemic. There were several examples highlighted, chief among them that CDC “experts” went far beyond what even the FDA claimed Covid vaccines could do.

Without evidence, the report says Biden’s marketing claimed that “COVID vaccines were highly effective against transmission.” Within just a few months, it was clear that all the available evidence pointed towards the exact opposite direction. Per the report, this had a “negative impact on vaccine confidence and the CDC’s credibility when proven untrue.” 

The CDC also had “inconsistent and flawed messaging about the effectiveness of masks,” which created seemingly endless mandates and, again, overconfidence in an ineffective policy. Some of those mandates even continue to this day.

That’s just the tip of their misinformation. A wealth of data and public embarrassments for the CDC confirmed that the organization “consistently overstated the risk of COVID-19 to children,” the report states. That fear-mongering had disastrous consequences, from unnecessarily terrifying parents to prolonged school closures and lack of socialization—setting an entire generation of children back in the process.

Still, after being repeatedly and profoundly proven wrong, the CDC has demonstrated they’ve yet to learn their lesson. In late 2024, the CDC continues to recommend Covid-19 vaccines for babies starting at six months old. That makes the US a global outlier compared to European nations that have maintained at least some level of intellectual honesty.

How Do We Fix CDC Abuses?

The report detailed several recommendations to fix these organizations after their disastrous work during the pandemic. Even implementing just a select few, listed below, would do wonders for fixing the institutional rot that influenced these mistakes. 

• Congress should consider clarifying responsibility for evaluating the safety of vaccines and streamlining existing reporting systems for capturing vaccine injuries and adverse reactions.

• HHS and its agencies should embrace a culture of transparency and accountability.

• The CDC and federal public health officials should not attempt to silence dissenting scientific opinions.

Also highlighted in the report is how the CDC and NIH used their weight in their attempts to censor scientists who dissented from their preferred narratives. Beyond their mistakes, profound inaccuracies, and nearly unlimited spending, their censorship efforts are equally concerning.

As we learned during Covid, if there’s one thing “experts” hate, it’s being told that they were proven wrong. Instead of learning, adjusting, and apologizing, they move to censor, criticize and mislead. This new report is the latest confirmation of these unacceptable “mistakes.” And reaffirms the importance of ensuring they never happen again.

Republished from the author’s Substack

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-harris-administration-wasted-nearly-one-billion-dollars-misinformation