AOC’s move is about all optics as UAW strikes intensify and Democrats continue their crusade against billionaire Elon Musk.
According to Cars.com, the most American-made vehicles are the Model Y, Model 3, Model X, and Model S – all produced by Tesla.
Occasional-Cortex strikes again. Someone should tell her this new EV will cost a lot more after the strike. Then again, it would provide a handy excuse to blame capitalism.
To remain relevant this week as President Biden heads to the picket line to support United Auto Workers, ultra-liberal New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday that she intends to trade her non-union-made Tesla for a union-backed Ford, General Motors, or Stellantis electric vehicle.
When asked about her non-union-made Model 3 purchase during the pandemic, AOC said she’s “looking into trading in our car now.” She added, “So we’re looking into it, and hopefully we will soon.”
.@AOC says she drives a non-union-made Tesla because she purchased it during the pandemic, “prior to some of the new models” of electric vehicles that are now available.
“We’re actually looking into trading in our car now,” she says.
The state generally does not cede power back to the people. The influx of the power-hungry into lofty positions prevents that. Continuous political battle between passionate ideological factions wastes the people’s time and energy, impoverishes them, and gives the state opportunities to usurp even more power.
John Locke known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician. Locke’s theoriesillustration, drawing, sketch, engrawed were usually about identity and the self. Locke thought that we are born without thoughts, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience.
The classical liberal revolution, starting in the 1600s and continuing through the 1700s, created a new ideal for government. Instead of hoping for just rulers who limited the use of their sovereign power, thinkers like Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and many of the American Founding Fathers aimed at a different goal: government derived from the idea of a sovereign people and carefully established to serve their interests. Many of these thinkers saw government as a necessary evil: a coercive force with just enough power to deal with criminals, enforce contracts, and defend the people from foreign attack.
The American founders envisioned a federal government strictly limited by powers enumerated in a written constitution, held in check by the more powerful (yet still limited by written constitutions) states and the people. These states created the federal government to ensure free trade across state lines and military cooperation against other encroaching governments. At least, that was what they told the people at the time.
A government with such limited powers can serve diverse peoples because it legislates on few issues, and no issue it touches presents significant disagreement. This was the Lockean ideal.
However, the incentive for any coercive state is to grow its power. The ways it does so are numerous, ranging from the simple incentive for power-hungry individuals to seek power and abuse it to whatever limit they can get away with, to the tendency for the words in any written constitution to be reinterpreted, redefined, and even ignored as time goes on. When a state decides its own limits, it will expand them whenever it can. As its power grows, special interest groups clamor for legislation providing them rents or giving them control over various issues. The body of laws grows, and self-contradictions become rampant, allowing judges to reach any desired conclusion by selective interpretation.
“The FBI likes to play games no matter what side of this you’re on. They actually came to me and told me they could ‘supplement my income,’ offering me—they didn’t specify what exactly they meant or or how much, but they said they’d supplement my income,” he said.
“I told them I don’t want anything to do with them and to talk to my lawyers, so they did—they talked to my Arizona lawyer at the time,” he said, adding, “I would have personally told them to f*ck off and keep their money, but my lawyer’s like, ‘Let me tell them. I’ll say it a little bit nicer for you.’”
An FBI informant cofounded one of the largest and oldest neo-Nazi organizations in U.S. history: the National Socialist Movement, a group connected to numerous crimes and violent events, including the deadly 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, according to previously unpublicized records reviewed by Headline USA.
The documents—a trove of FBI memos, affidavits and court records that this publication has dubbed the “Fed Files”—further indicate that the NSM allegedly had informants in prominent positions throughout much of its nearly 50-year history.
Once known as the “Hollywood Nazis” for its flamboyant demonstrations and crude propaganda, the NSM has also been accused of being co-opted by the FBI in a lawsuit filed by a former member who is now in prison.
Multiple current and former NSM members denied any affiliation with the FBI or law enforcement.
The FBI declined to comment for this story.
NSM’s Founding
The NSM was founded in 1974 by Cliff Herrington and Robert Brannen, both of whom were chief lieutenants of prominent American fascist George Lincoln Rockwell—the founder of the original American Nazi Party in 1959.
By 1976, there was growing suspicion in the Nazi movement that Brannen was working with the FBI.
In fact, the NSM’s own publication, the National Socialist, released an article in April 1976, denying accusations from a rival group—the National Socialist White Peoples Party, or NSWPP—that Brannen was an informant. The National Socialist article called the accusations a “reckless and irresponsible smear attack on Comrade Brennan.”
But the NSWPP was right about Brannen.
An FBI memo warning that undercover informant Robert Brannnen’s cover had been compromised
Commenting on that National Socialist article several months later, a May 1976 FBI memo warned that Brannen’s cover might have been blown.
The redacted memo doesn’t show the informant’s name, but it clearly identifies Brannen by referencing the National Socialist article and the accusations floating around him at the time.
“Informant’s photograph and description appeared in the February 1976, NSWPP publication and he was named an FBI informant,” the FBI memo said.
“Informant’s group, the NSM, has publicized a rebuttal, and the Cincinnati Office is taking special precaution to ensure this informant can be operated successfully without jeopardizing his personal safety,” the memo said.
Despite the accusations against Brannen, he continued to lead the NSM undaunted for almost another decade until he suffered several strokes in 1983.
…Rochelle Walensky and other CDC personnel on dates beginning February 1, 2021 through May 31, 2021, containing the word myocarditis.”
The Pentagon says it will exempt its Ukraine operations from a potential shutdown if lawmakers can’t agree on a deal to fund the government by the end of the month.
The DailyClout reports that attorney, Edward Berkovich submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the CDC for the email communications of former CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky and other CDC personnel on dates beginning February 1, 2021 through May 31, 2021, containing the word myocarditis.” The DailyClout reported on the initial 472-page production from that FOIA last August.
Well, Berkovich recently received 46 additional pages, possibly from a whistleblower – over 80% of which were fully redacted – involving other government entities, such as the White House and Executive Office of the President, as part of this production. Of the 46 pages, only two pages were released without any redactions. The redactions were “pursuant to 5 U.S.C. §552 Exemptions 5 and 6,” which relate to the White House and the President.
DailyClout publisher, Naomi Wolf was on with Steve Bannon to explain the bombshell importance of what was found. In short, starting in April of 2021, the Biden Regime knowingly lied that the vaxx was safe and effective, after they had already started to receive a slew of adverse events reports from all over the world.
A number of long-term trends, including the collapse of mainline Protestantism, has led to the death of religious liberty, killed by the very groups who long defended it.
The answer, and the second reason religious liberty is dying, is that liberalism has abandoned the distinction of public and private life—and the necessity of keeping government out of private life, once so crucial to it.
In short, many people running elite institutions in this country think of “traditional” Catholics, or faithful Christians of any sort, as enemies. They are using the power of these institutions to reduce legal protections for these religions because they see them as threats to concerns of their new political coalition.
Which brings to mind one of the many great books I have started but not finished: Subtracting Christianity A collection of writings by Joseph Sobran, printed by Fritzgerald Griffin Foundation.
Catholics have rightly been appalled by the spectacle of the FBI investigating “radical traditionalist Catholic groups.” If it were not clear already, this is part of a broader campaign against what the National Security apparatus of the United States sees as “disinformation” and “threats” to the government. This campaign appears to be coordinated with elements of the Biden Administration and possibly with help from former members of the Obama administration as well.
The most striking instances of this are the prosecution of Donald Trump and those involved in the protests of the 2020 presidential election in January of 2021. It appears for all the world that the Biden administration and its allies are using the administrative state to attack its perceived enemies, which apparently includes faithful Catholics.
How have we come to this pass? Catholics have come to trust that such boundaries would not be crossed, and some commentators have wondered how liberalism could embrace such obvious violations of religious liberty. Especially since the end of WWII, Catholics have come to expect the government to protect them from the depredations of others. Until recently, it did. How did this come about?
A couple of long-term trends are at work here. The first is the collapse of the old mainline Protestant churches. The reason why this affects religious liberty is that, in practice, religious liberty as Americans understand it was always predicated upon a rapprochement among the various Protestant bodies in this country. Religious liberty allowed the potentially warring factions of Protestantism to work together; this was a necessity during the American Revolution, but the Constitution made it permanent.
When Catholics became a large enough minority in this country, and nativist anti-Catholicism reared its head, it was the old mainline Protestant bodies—the more liberal ones, mostly—that defended religious liberty for things like parochial schools in the Supreme Court and other elite institutions. With the decline of old mainline churches in the 1960s, this compromise—in which the various Protestants agreed to safeguard Catholic religious liberty in order to safeguard it for themselves—collapsed with them.
Suddenly, the Protestants most likely in the past to deny Catholics their full religious liberty—mostly Evangelical Protestants—became allies with Catholics against a new, more secular elite, as embodied in Roe v. Wade and other milestones. Catholics gained political allies but lost the patronage of the old WASP establishment that once protected Catholics’ religious liberty.
A more secular elite has succeeded the old WASP establishment, one that is no longer concerned with protecting religious liberty, as previously understood, because conservative Catholics and others who benefited from this are no longer part of their governing coalition. This is reflected in changes these elites have sought to promote in American society.
From cradle to grave, progressive elites have been bred since the ’60s to believe that racism, sexism, and other past evils were going to disappear from all areas of life, not just politics. Once the older generation of Americans, with their racism and homophobia died off, so the thinking went, their beliefs would die with them. This belief can be summed up in the phrase “the right side of history.”
This phrase was prominent in progressive rhetoric during the Obama administration, of course. I never took this kind of talk seriously, since my training as a historian led me to regard these types of ideologically charged beliefs with suspicion. Hindsight proves how deadly serious most progressives took it. The election of Obama seemed to have been a signal for these elites that the time had now come to cleanse the nation of its sins.
As we all know, “history” had other plans. Trump’s election shook them to their core, as it demonstrated that all of their planning and activism to control institutions could fail. Much of the hysteria emanating from the Left, but also the brazen attempts at undermining Trump’s election, stems from the puncturing of the narrative these elites created for themselves about the way the world is supposed to work.
That may be the case, but what does this have to do with the Church, or even religion in general, other than its being part of the social fabric which the Left wishes to transform? The answer, and the second reason religious liberty is dying, is that liberalism has abandoned the distinction of public and private life—and the necessity of keeping government out of private life, once so crucial to it.
Underhill, a seller of “Mechanicals” (unthinking robots that perform menial tasks) in the small town of Two Rivers, is startled to find a competitor’s store on his way home. The competitors are not humans but are small black robots who appear more advanced than anything Underhill has encountered before. They describe themselves as “humanoids”.
Disturbed at his encounter, Underhill rushes home to discover that his wife has taken in a new lodger, a mysterious old man named Sledge. In the course of the next day, the new Mechanicals have appeared everywhere in town. They state that they only follow the Prime Directive: “to serve and obey and guard men from harm”. Offering their services free of charge, they replace humans as police officers, bank tellers, and more, and eventually drive Underhill out of business. Despite the humanoids’ benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited. Humans who resist the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so that they may live happily under the direction of the humanoids.
Underhill learns that his lodger Sledge is the creator of the humanoids and is on the run from them. Sledge explains that 60 years earlier he had discovered the force of “rhodomagnetics” on the planet Wing IV and that his discovery resulted in a war that destroyed his planet. In his grief, Sledge designed the humanoids to help humanity and be invulnerable to human exploitation. However, he eventually realized that they had instead taken control of humanity, in the name of their Prime Directive, to make humans happy.
The humanoids are spreading out from Wing IV to every human-occupied planet to implement their Prime Directive. Sledge and Underhill attempt to stop the humanoids by aiming a rhodomagnetic beam at Wing IV, but fail. The humanoids take Sledge away for surgery. He returns with no memory of his prior life, stating that he is now happy under the humanoids’ care. Underhill is driven home by the humanoids, sitting “with folded hands,” as there is nothing left to do. – Wikipedia
People have to start using their brains when considering whom to elect. Of course we could just continue to leaving election results to the CIA and FIB. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Sen. John Fetterman’s (D-PA) anti-decorum work uniform at the United States Senate has the entire country (me included!) asking: Even if you can wear a hoodie and athletic shorts to work, should you?
News broke this week that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had defunded the dress code police — greenlighting the likes of Fetterman to join a plague that probably many of us have fallen victim to in recent years: excessive casualness.
Fashion is reflective of the times. I’ve hardly ever looked to Washington, D.C. for such commentary on our culture because it’s generally just suits and sheath dresses with some standouts once every decade or so.
To get to the bottom of Fetterman’s insistence on larping working poor in the Senate, I spoke to two of my favorite menswear aficionados: O.W. Root (Instagram linked here) and W. Matt Tinch (Instagram linked here).
“If you’re familiar with Fetterman’s history … he just got out of like a clinical depression, he was in a facility, and he’s come out publicly and talked about his depression,” Tinch told me over the phone.
“In one sense, Fetterman is authentic if you believe his story,” Tinch said. “However, it’s a question of how much of it is authentic. He’s obviously a person who can afford more than a hoodie and basketball shorts … If you know Fetterman’s history, it just seems odd. He’s portraying himself as just an average joe, and it feels dishonest.”
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) arrives to the U.S. Capitol Building on April 17, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) has a quick exchange with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WA), right, as Fetterman walks to a vote on the Senate floor on June 22, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
When you first look at Fetterman, let’s say you know nothing about him, you may assume he was a truck driver turned U.S. senator or a former handyman or felon who got his act together. And then a quick Google search shows none of that to be the case.
In Fetterman’s own words to the Philadelphia Inquirer, he says he had a “cushy” suburban upbringing so much so that he was able to get an MBA from the University of Connecticut and later a master’s at Harvard without ever racking up student debt. By August 2022, his family’s assets totaled more than $700,000. Good for him, right?
I wanted to know if the experts assumed what I’ve assumed, that Fetterman is appropriating working class culture, or at least what he thinks working class culture is. It wouldn’t be so far-fetched considering tan Carhartt overalls and tees are dominated today by Brooklyn transplants rather than the construction and steel workers the heavy-duty duds were intended for.
“He is cynically appropriating clothing that reads as a working class stereotype,” Root told me over Instagram. “He’s doing this intentionally as a cynical move to be seen as something he is not — it’s a costume.”
“I would be willing to bet that if you took a poll of working class American men and asked them ‘What would you wear if you were invited to speak to the Senate?’ I suspect that most would not say a hoodie and shorts,” Root noted. “Most, even if they wear that during their average day, would think they should wear something more formal, something which shows respect for the place and the setting.”
What Trudeau is doing is pretending to be stupid while engaging in a very clever strategy of scapegoating. It’s the government and the central bankers that are the foundational cause of inflation, but by blaming individual business sectors he sets the stage for government enforced price controls. When these fail and create a crisis in supply he will then introduce rationing, and once the government has conditioned the public to accept rationing the elites then control the entire population’s access to food and necessities.
Price controls results will result in nothing but disaster.
Last month in the middle of the surreal “Bidenomics” hype I published an article titled ‘Nothing Is Over: Inflation Is About To Come Back With A Vengeance.’ I outlined the misconceptions surrounding CPI and how it is not an accurate model for the effects of inflation. I also noted that the index had been manipulated downwards by Joe Biden as he flooded the market with oil from the strategic reserves. Because so many elements of the CPI are connected to energy, Biden had created an artificial drop in CPI using this strategy.
I argued that as the strategic reserves ran out and Biden lost his leverage, CPI would rise again and prices on a number of necessities would climb. This is happening now, with the biggest jump in CPI in 14 months and gas prices clawing back towards all-time highs.
Inflation is not going away anytime soon, but the bigger issue at hand is who benefits most from inflation and rising prices? The answer might be obvious to some but many people are oblivious to the root cause of inflationary dysfunction and often see it as a consequence of random economic chaos rather than a product of clever engineering. The truth is, banking oligarchs and political authorities revel in the inflationary tidal wave because it is a perfect opportunity to institute far reaching socialist controls over resources.
In most cases central bankers are the primary culprits behind the creation of an inflationary event, and the word “creation” best applies because it is nearly impossible for overt inflation to occur without them. While money supply is not the only factor when dealing with inflation (sorry purists, but there are indeed other causes), it is the most important. More money chasing less resources triggers supply-side instability and prices go up. Central banks have a number of excuses as to why they “need” to conjure up more dollars or pesos or pounds or marks, but there is no doubt that they know what the ultimate end result will be.
It’s happened too many times for them not to know…
These inflation events trigger a predictable set of dominoes in society as well as in economy and finance. Price spikes, diminished savings, rising poverty, rising crime, and rising interest rates – This is then followed in most cases by failed rate hikes, more inflation, then more hikes, diminishing foreign investment in debt, foreign currency dumps (causing more inflation), plunging consumer spending and job losses.
This same pattern has been witnessed from 1920s Weimar Germany to 1970s America to 1990s Yugoslavia to 2000s Argentina and Venezuela and beyond. But what happens next? In each case the trend leads first to price controls on producers and distributors, which ultimately fail. Then comes government rationing and the complete takeover of necessities including the food supply.
The AP notes that some Haitians are opposed to the deployment of UN soldiers from Kenya. In 2010, UN forces released sewage, causing a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 Haitians. Additionally, Kenyan soldiers have been credibly accused of war crimes in Somalia, where Nairobi conducted military operations in the name of counterterrorism.
No one wants to touch Haiti. Kenya must be getting a lot of US taxpayer inspiration.
Too bad the Clinton Foundation’s efforts at directing restoration funds, less a hefty service charge, did absolutely no good.
The US is preparing a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution to authorize Kenya to send its soldiers to Haiti. Washington believes Nairobi can aid Port-au-Prince in restoring order to gang-controlled territory. The Joe Biden administration said the American taxpayers will foot the bill for the deployment, and US soldiers will train the Kenyan force.
For a year, the White House has sought a third country to send its soldiers into Haiti as UN Peacekeepers. After Canada resisted American pressure to lead the force, Nairobi agreed to send its troops to the Caribbean nation.
The AP notes that some Haitians are opposed to the deployment of UN soldiers from Kenya. In 2010, UN forces released sewage, causing a cholera outbreak that killed nearly 10,000 Haitians. Additionally, Kenyan soldiers have been credibly accused of war crimes in Somalia, where Nairobi conducted military operations in the name of counterterrorism.
Kenya-based Independent Medico-Legal Unit issued a report this month warning that Kenyan police are committing an increasing number of human rights abuses since President William Ruto took office. The US has provided a significant amount of training to the Kenyan soldiers. However, there is no indication it has curbed abuses by Nairobi’s security forces at home or in Somalia.
Speaking at the General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, Biden called on the UNSC to pass a resolution allowing Kenya to send troops to Haiti. “On Haiti, the Caribbean communities facilitated a dialogue among Haitian society. I thank President Ruto of Kenya – I thank him for his willingness to serve as a lead nation of a UN-backed security support mission,” he said. “I call on the Security Council to authorize this mission now. The people of Haiti cannot wait much longer.”
On Wednesday, Ruto met with Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry in an official ceremony to commemorate Washington’s plot to send Kenyan forces to Port-au-Prince. Washington says it will fund the missions and provide the peacekeepers training.
The irony is that anyone who understands energy knows that there is no successful energy transition without natural gas and nuclear, and this requires incentives to invest in energy security. Governments will not back down, and they will prefer a decline in energy prices coming from a deep recession to an improvement coming from diversification and investment.
Oil prices are soaring, and, as always, we read in many articles that OPEC and Russia are to blame. However, if OPEC and its allies were almighty and the drivers of oil prices, why have Brent and West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude plummeted in 2022? OPEC only reacts to demand, but it is not a price-setter. It is a price-taker.
WTI is up 13% year-to-date, but it only started bouncing in May. WTI is only up 6% in the past year. At $90.7/barrel, it is still far away from the June 2022 high of $122/barrel and barely reaching the levels of November 2022.
What made oil prices plummet from their June ’22 highs? Rate hikes and monetary contraction sent the entire commodity complex down to pre-Ukraine invasion levels despite production cuts, geopolitical risk, and the Chinese re-opening. Commodity prices are driven by monetary factors, and the hawkish stance of global central banks accelerated the decline despite supply chain challenges and limits to production. Added to the decline in the money supply and rate hikes, the United States and non-OPEC production offset the negative impact of Russia and OPEC limits on some exports. Competition works. Finally, oil prices stumbled as Asian demand ended up being weaker than estimated, with global industrial production declining, particularly in developed economies.
The weakness in crude was a combination of monetary factors, increased United States supply, and weaker global demand. Those three factors have now reversed at the same time.
We cannot blame OPEC when prices rise and ignore them when prices fall.
The biggest challenge for the oil market in developed economies in the next five years is self-inflicted.
Governments and financial institutions all over the world declared war on investment in fossil fuels under the misguided view that supply and prices would not be affected. According to JP Morgan, there is a chronic underinvestment in the oil and gas complex that exceeds $600 billion per year. In 2022, with oil prices rising to the previously mentioned $122/barrel, companies all over the world continued to reduce investment in exploration and production. Development capital expenditure was kept to a bare minimum, and even some European oil and gas giants started selling their “net zero emissions” strategy, ignoring the global energy reality. Total oil and gas investment came below depreciation for the sixth year in a row, according to Goldman Sachs.
The energy transition cannot happen through ideological imposition. It requires technology and competition. Destroying the incentives to invest in oil and gas and imposing an ideological, not industrial, view of energy has made developed economies more dependent on fossil fuels.
When politicians decide, they willingly ignore economic calculations because they believe that the political world dictates prices, not supply and demand. Economic analysis has been abandoned, and the result is an exceedingly negative scenario.
MCViewPoint 