"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." (Pls note: This is a comedy site and I am a comedian, so don't take anything here seriously. It's all in jest, haha. For entertainment purposes only!)
(I posted the following on Feb 28th, 2017, six weeks into Donald Trump's term. The original title was, "Hate Trumps Civility". In light of yesterday's assassination attempt, it was eerily prescient.)
He is: a tyrant, a despot, a racist, a bigot, a dictator, a liar, a demagogue, grossly unqualified, lacking in character, ugly, an idiot, a braggart, a buffoon, a monster, foul tongued, indecent, disrespectful to women, vulgar, intellectually lazy, a white supremacist, deranged from syphilis, disrespectful of freedom of the press.
If he is elected we will: leave the country, secede, refuse to follow federal laws.
He should: be assassinated, be impeached, be removed, go to hell.
His way of speaking and writing is: silly, slip-shod, loose-jointed, lacking in the simplest rules of syntax, coarse, devoid of grace, filled with glittering generalities.
He and his entire cabinet are not equal to the occasion and are full of incapacity and rottenness.
Notably absent from the above lists are two of the most frequent slurs against Donald Trump: “He’s Hitler!”, and “He’s a fascist!”.That’s because those words were not available in the 1860s.You see, those were all direct quotes about Abraham Lincoln!
That's right; the Republican who freed the slaves and defeated the confederacy, who has a big memorial on the mall in D.C., and who is on the penny and the five dollar bill, was, prior to being assassinated, the most hated president in American history. Until Donald Trump, that is.
I'm not implying some equivalence between Donald Trump and the now revered Honest Abe.I am however asserting some striking similarities between what's happening with Trump and what happened with Lincoln.In many significant and ominous ways we are reliving the disastrous 1860s. That should concern everyone.
Democrats hated Lincoln for the same reason they hate Trump - both threatened "entitlements". By entitlement, I'm referring to anything that benefits one group at the expense of another.
Slavery was such an entitlement. It benefitted slave owners at the expense of the slaves. Lincoln was the first president to be seriously unsympathetic to that entitlement. You may not have learned this in school, but Republicans didn't own slaves.Slavery was a Democrat institution.
Today’s Democrats have several entitlements perceived to be under threat by Donald Trump:the teacher's union monopoly entitlement, the government bureaucrat power entitlement, the various Obamacare and medical entitlements, the government permanent union job entitlement, the cheap labor illegal immigrant entitlement, the Muslim refugee entitlement, the illegal voting entitlement, the congressional unlimited tax and spend entitlement, the subsidized mortgage entitlement, the media power entitlement, the lopsided trade agreement entitlement, the EPA unlimited power entitlement, the radical LGBTQ federal rights entitlement, the federally funded late term abortion entitlement, and many more.
And that list doesn’t include the traditional transfer payment entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Food Stamps, etc.Even Donald Trump’s just released budget doesn’t dare touch those entrenched goodies.But it matters little whether or not a politician explicitly threatens to take the candy away.The only requirement for drawing Democrat vitriol is the perception that an entitlement is under threat.
Thus, pretty much every Republican since the Progressive Era has been Hitler or equivalent. Most recently, Reagan was Hitler, Bush was Hitler, McCain was Hitler.Even Mitt Romney, a decent man by politician standards and a bishop in his church, was Hitler. Romney also wanted to bring back slavery, keep women in binders, and was a notorious abuser of puppies.
There is a big difference between dissent and hate. Dissenters will assert that the other side is wrong. Haters will assert that the other side is evil. When Democrats employ the vitriolic rhetoric they used against Lincoln, they are labeling Trump and his supporters evil. This is a deliberate tactic to dehumanize an opponent and open the door to violence. All tactics, including violence, are appropriate when dealing with evil. It must be stopped at all costs.
In both Lincoln's and Trump's cases, Democrat civil disobedience began immediately after the election. Southern Democrat states began seceding in 1860 right after Lincoln won the election. Similarly, Democrats were in the streets protesting and being violent immediately following Trump's 2016 victory.
Most recently, several Democrat state and local governments have announced plans to "secede" by refusing to enforce certain federal laws.In response, Donald Trump has promised to withhold federal funds.This type of standoff is exactly what led to the battle of Fort Sumter, the first battle of the Civil War.Fort Sumter took place six weeks after Lincoln took office.Donald Trump has been in office six weeks as of today.
If you think I'm exaggerating the danger posed by hateful rhetoric and demonization, consider that Betsy DeVos, the new Secretary of Education, vilified and threatened by Democrats and the teacher's union, has been placed under the protection of federal marshals.The only other cabinet member ever needing federal marshals was a drug czar in danger of being murdered by violent drug cartels!
Entertainers have also expressed a particularly virulent strain of hatred towards Donald Trump.Thus, the Golden Globes and Oscars spent an inordinate amount of time hating the new President. Saturday Night Live is pretty much full time Trump hatred, and you can’t attend a play or concert without the actors and musicians lecturing on the evils of Trump.
Abraham Lincoln faced a similar situation from Democrat entertainers in his day.An actor named John Wilkes Booth, whom Lincoln had seen perform only a week before, was the man who infamously shot him in the head while attending another play.As Booth jumped onto the stage immediately after shooting Lincoln he shouted, “Sic Semper Tyrannis!”, thus always to tyrants! Donald Trump has already survived at least one bumbling assassination attempt during his campaign.
Dissent is a necessary part of democracy, but hatred is a necessary part of dissolution and civil war.Once Democrats convince themselves that half the country is made-up of deplorable fascist Hitler supporters, don’t they have an obligation to eliminate them?If you are convinced that any Trump supporter you know is evil, where does that logically lead? Hateful rhetoric disguised as dissent can unintentionally paint impressionable minds into a dangerous corner with no peaceful way out. We know what that led to in the 1860s.
Come on America, we’ve seen this play before. Let’s not give it a sequel.
As you may have heard, America's borders are wide open. How wide open, you ask? Well, current estimates are that one in five hotels in New York City are involved in housing migrants.* That's NYC, not Houston, Phoenix, or LA. Most Americans would have trouble affording a single night in a Manhattan hotel, yet illegals are living there for free.
Along with rising crime, lowered wages, overcrowded hospitals, and stressed social services, the visible flood of illegals has become an embarrassing liability for Democrats on the eve of an election. In response, Joe Biden recently issued an executive order to persuade voters he means business at the border.
That's quite a reversal for an administration that literally instructed migrants to "surge to the border"**, and then spent the next four years denying the problem.
And surge they did.
It is estimated that roughly 15 million# people have entered the U.S. illegally in the last three and a half years. Add that to the roughly 20 million# who were already here and that makes about 35 million# illegals currently in the U.S. That is roughly the population of California.
But, that's not all of the noncitizens here. There are also permanent residents who hold Green Cards, Visa holders, and visitors. The U.S. government issues about one million Green Cards per year so there could be roughly 20 million# additional noncitizens in the U.S. today.
That makes a total of roughly 55 million# noncitizens, or 16% of the population. That's far more people than any state. (See footnote #)
The question is, why are Democrats doing this? Why risk the political fallout? What do they have to gain?
Could it be a simple case of wanting more workers, more diversity, & more ethnic food?
Or could it be that they want them here because they overwhelmingly vote Democrat?
Well, we can safely rule out the idea that Democrats brought all those people here to vote! As everyone knows, it is strictly illegal for noncitizens to vote!
Pop Quiz #1
1. It is strictly illegal for noncitizens to vote.
2. It is incredibly easy for noncitizens to vote.
You are probably certain the answer is #1. You've been told this a million times, "Only citizens are allowed to vote. It's the law!"
Except, you'd be wrong.
Noncitizens are able to vote in the U.S. with very little threat of negative consequences. And this includes those here illegally.
The relevant law is called "18 U.S. Code § 611 - Voting by Aliens". The law states that aliens (noncitizens) are technically not supposed to vote in national elections and could be subject to punishment, but there is a glaring exception. Here's one line of it:
(3) the alien reasonably believed at the time of voting in violation of such subsection that he or she was a citizen of the United States.
Huh? In other words, if you identify as a citizen, you are not subject to punishment!
This exception renders meaningless the prohibition against noncitizen voting for a large subset of the group. All that is required is a reasonable belief of citizenship.
Now, what could possibly give a noncitizen the reasonable belief that they are a citizen? Oh, I don't know, maybe if a sitting president told them explicitly that they were?
Listen carefully as Barack Obama singlehandedly renders meaningless the prohibition against noncitizen voting pursuant to 18 U.S. Code § 611. His exact words; "When you vote, you are a citizen yourself." In other words, Obama told noncitizens and those here illegally that through the act of voting they could reasonably identify as citizens. He also told the audience, "If you show up to vote, they can't stop you." This was from the highest authority in the land, a sitting President.
But that's just one example. Democrats and their supporters have been telling illegals for decades that they should identify as citizens simply for being here and working. The interviewer echoes this idea in the clip above. Notice that Obama does not correct her.
Now, Let's apply the "identify as a citizen" logic to other situations. Could you legally withdraw money from a bank if you identify as a depositor? Could you legally collect Social Security at age 25 if you identify as old? Could you practice medicine just by identifying as a doctor?
There's a bedrock principle in law that says ignorance of the law is no excuse. Lawyers are taught the latin, "ignorantia juris non excusat". Yet any noncitizen can claim ignorance of their legal status and vote. You'd think with all the lawyers in congress they could write better laws, but when it benefits Democrat power, there's no bedrock principle they can't ignore.
Curiously, the "identify as a citizen" exception does not work for Trump voters. The only person I could find currently serving time for 18 U.S. Code § 611 is an Arizona illegal who voted for Trump and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Apparently, Republican noncitizens are not afforded the "Obama alibi" defense.
The truth is, laws are meaningless unless enforced. Lawyers and legal scholars can debate the language and intent of written statutes all they want, but unless a DOJ enforces it, it might as well not exist. That's called prosecutorial discretion. As Obama makes clear in the above clip, no Democrat DOJ will enforce 18 U.S. Code § 611.
So, could up to 55 million noncitizens, including the Biden/Harris 15 million illegals vote in 2024, decide our next President, and be legally untouchable? Yes, absolutely.
"Hold on a minute!", you say. Noncitizens can't just vote, they first have to register. That's where we check for citizenship!
Pop Quiz #2
How many states require proof of citizenship in order to register for national elections?
1. 37
2. 3
3. None
4. All
Surely there must be some states that require proof of citizenship to vote nationally, right? After all, there are a bunch of "red" states that lean conservative, like Texas, Florida, Utah, Idaho, etc!
Sorry, nope. Not a single state, city, town, or district requires proof of citizenship to register for national elections, let alone vote.
So why haven't states passed laws that would require that proof? Well, a few have tried but, surprise, surprise, it's illegal!
According to a 1993 law, pushed and signed by Bill Clinton (Democrat), popularly called the "Motor Voter Bill", it is illegal to require proof of citizenship for national voter registration. (Motor Voter was also the first step in our currently un-auditable mail-in voting system. It normalized registration by mail.)
The registration form does require a signature, and citizenship is one of several things that voters are attesting to, but it is strictly on the honor system. There can be no checks, verifications, or follow-up according to the law. Just sign the form and you are registered whether eligible or not. That's an obvious intentional loophole for noncitizens, many of whom broke our laws when they came here.
Moreover, Motor Voter makes providing voter registration forms automatic for any interaction with government. Get a drivers license? You get registered. Apply for benefits? You get registered. And noncitizens do all those things by the millions.
Once you are registered, you get a ballot in the mail automatically in nine states plus D.C.. And once you have a ballot, you can vote anonymously through the mail or at a drop-box. In the other states you can easily request a mail-in ballot with a simple mail-in form.
Long story short, no state is allowed to check for citizenship to vote in a national election. Noncitizens, including those here illegally, are registered by the tens of millions, and since 2020 they can easily get mail-in ballots just like citizens. Potentially, that is close to 55 million noncitizen registered voters.
ABOVE: President Bill Clinton (D) signing the "Motor Voter Bill" in 1993. Directly behind him are Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, two Columbia University professors who lobbied for the bill. The Cloward and Piven Strategy was to democratically institute a form of communism by flooding the country with dependents, getting them to demand services, and allowing them to vote.
OK, so maybe millions are registered and could potentially vote, but before states mail out ballots they check their voter rolls and get rid of all the noncitizens, deceased voters, and relocated voters!
Pop quiz #3
1. States clean their voter rolls regularly making it impossible for noncitizens to obtain ballots.
2. States DO NOT clean their voter rolls regularly making it incredibly easy for noncitizens to obtain ballots.
You'd think the answer is #1. After all, how can a representative republic call itself legitimate if it does not ensure that only citizens get ballots?
Except, that's not what happens. In fact, any state that tries to clean their voter rolls is in for a barrage of lawsuits by well-funded Democrats. In many instances, judges have ruled that states are not even allowed to clean their voter rolls.
By law, it is up to the states to run their own elections. Maintaining a list of eligible voters is part of that obligation. Some states do a diligent job, but many states do not. Many Democrat states prefer having extra ballots mailed-out because they have legalized a practice called "ballot harvesting". Ballot harvesting is the practice of having activists scoop-up all the potentially ineligible and unclaimed ballots. Then the activists take the ballots to a landfill and burn them. Nah, just kidding!
Without ID requirements or real signature matching, it is incredibly easy for activists to harvest ballots, fill them out, and return them. The Democrat party has been doing this for years. The Republican party has shunned this activity correctly considering it fraudulent. But it is now legal (with a wink and a nod) in a majority of states, so Republicans are having to play catch-up in this crooked game. Only one state in the U.S., Alabama, requires that ballots be returned by the actual voter. Of course, even in Alabama, there is no way to check with mailed ballots.
There is an organization called ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) whose ostensible mission is to help states clean their voter rolls of noncitizens, dead people, and relocated voters. ERIC currently has half the states as members.
In 2020 ERIC had a majority of the states as members, but after looking into the debacle of how those elections were mis-managed, several Republican led states dropped out. While digging around, they learned that ERIC was founded by leftists, run by leftists, and funded by leftists including George Soros. Republicans now believe that ERIC is a front for increasing noncitizen, deceased, and relocated voters, while simultaneously purging conservative ones!
Arizona is one ERIC state that just had a lawsuit filed against it:
Arizona has at least 500,000 registered voters on the voter rolls who should have otherwise been removed. In other words, at least 500,000 registered voters currently listed on the Secretary’s voter rolls for Arizona are deceased or no longer reside in Arizona.
And a review of other reliable data sources shows that Arizona has between 1,060,000 and 1,270,000 unaccounted-for voters on the state voter rolls.
ERIC currently lists six of the seven so-called "swing states" as members. U.S. national elections are decided in the swing states. In short, leftist activists are in charge of the voter rolls, including noncitizens, that will determine the next President.
Ok, so maybe the voter rolls are run by leftists, ballots get sent out willy-nilly, anyone who identifies as a citizen can register and vote, etc., but there's no evidence noncitizens actually vote! None!
Pop Quiz #4
1. Noncitizens voted in past elections in large numbers.
2. Noncitizens HAVE NOT voted in past elections in large numbers.
You are probably certain the correct answer is #2. After all, you would know if noncitizens were voting en masse. You'd hear about it on the news. Someone would have the proof. Republicans would be screaming about it every day!
Except, you'd be wrong.
It is virtually impossible, and illegal, for a citizen to know when a ballot has been filled out by a noncitizen.
Therefore, looking for "proof" is a fool's errand. It's impossible by design, and by law.
So what's the solution? It's the same remedy anytime a dispute arises between a citizen and the state: The "burden of proof" is on the state.
It's up to the state to prove they ran an election that was fully auditable, clean, with only eligible voters, and observed by both parties at ever stage. And citizens suspecting election fraud are innocent until proven guilty.
In the case of the 2020 election, citizens who asked questions have been accused of being "election deniers", "threats to democracy", or if they protested, "insurrectionists". Thousands are currently in prison or under indictment for these types of accusations. Citizens accused of those things must be considered innocent until the state can prove they ran an election that was observed by both parties and auditable end-to-end.
Polls show over half the citizenry believe the states cannot prove their case. That is the real "threat to Democracy".
Florida is one state today that has a strong record of running auditable, trustworthy, and clean elections. It can be done.
Despite proof being impossible, there is statistical and circumstantial evidence that noncitizens vote in large numbers. I made the case in 2016, before Democrats made anonymous mail-in voting ubiquitous. You can read that piece HERE.
And this piece ran last month in The Washington Times: "Noncitizens Do Vote... Here's How..." (If you clear your computer's cookies you can read it without paying.)
Recently, Rasmussen pollsters asked voters about fraud. 3 in 10 voters said they would absolutely commit voter fraud in 2024 just to keep the other side from winning. Three in ten say they would commit election fraud!
If you do a web or AI search for whether or not noncitizens vote, you'll come across the supposed "definitive" study by "The Brennan Center for Justice" which found no evidence noncitizens vote. Sounds pretty official, right? So who is the biggest donor to The Brennan Center? Yeah, that would be George Soros, the same guy funding all the DAs targeting Donald Trump, and the same guy funding ERIC.
The assumption has to be that noncitizen voting is huge. Unlimited wealth and power are at stake. It's the kind of wealth and power that corrupts everything.
Believing noncitizens do not vote is like believing Fort Knox would remain filled with gold if the doors were flung open, anyone could take whatever they want, and no one could be prosecuted.
This is important: direct voting in elections is only part of the problem. There's also indirect voting. Noncitizens would be the largest state in the U.S. if they were all in one place. Often overlooked is the fact that noncitizens are counted in the census. The census is how we determine Congressional and Presidential Electoral votes. So even if noncitizens were prevented from directly voting, they would still have more votes in Congress and Presidential elections than California or Texas!
Ok, maybe everything above is true, but we have polls! How bad could it be if polls currently show a Republican could win in 2024? The polls would sound the alarm if 55 million noncitizens were about to vote Democrat!
Pop Quiz #5
1. The polls accurately reflect noncitizens.
2. The polls DO NOT accurately reflect noncitizens.
You would think polls would automatically pick-up noncitizens. After all, it's not like pollsters ask about legal status when they poll!
Except, you'd be wrong.
While it's true that pollsters do not screen out noncitizens, there are built-in reasons why noncitizens get missed. For one, noncitizens are less likely to speak english, and second, they are less likely to agree to being polled.
That means any poll you see today that shows Donald Trump doing well is probably inaccurate.
How inaccurate? No one knows, but it could be off by 55 million!
But hold on! The original question was, "why is the border open?" So far the only thing mentioned is voting! It could be as simple as Democrats wanting more workers, diversity, and Halal!
Pop Quiz # 6
1. Democrats do not have a nefarious reason for opening the border. It's just workers, diversity, and ethnic food.
2. This sure looks like a nefarious plan for a permanent Democrat majority.
You probably think the answer is #1. You may even be a Republican and think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are just semi-conscious politicians who accidentally stumbled their way into some bad policies. You may be a believer in "Hanlon's razor", which states, "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity". Or you may be a Democrat who buys into the slogan, "Diversity is our strength!"
Except the answer cannot be #1, and here's why: Democrats have been lying about the border for decades. Yes, decades. You don't lie about something that consistently unless you have something to hide.
We'll get to the Biden/Harris lies in a second, but first let's review some Obama lies.
Obama got the media to give him the nickname, "Deporter in Chief". He wanted to be portrayed as tough on immigration. It was good politics. It went against stereotype and made him look centrist. But it was a ruse. The way he got his deportation numbers high was by "cooking the books". For a full accounting of how he snookered his way into becoming "Deporter in Chief", read: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/obama-as-deporter-in-chief-hardly/
When Donald Trump became President he sincerely tried to secure the border. It didn't work at first because Democrats blocked him at every turn through the courts, through legislation, and by lying about his motives. But by the end of his term, the border was under control.
Then Biden/Harris took office and all that changed. From the top on down, Democrats have lied about the open border policy since day one.
First they denied the border was open and insisted it wasn't. This continued despite thousands of hours of video showing illegals pouring across the border. Then they denied it was a crisis despite border states, cities, and towns declaring emergencies.
It wasn't until the illegals started taking over Northern Democrat cities like Chicago, Boston, and New York that they even acknowledged the problem. But then they blamed it all on Republicans claiming they are responsible for a "broken immigration system". Finally, they blamed conservatives for not going along with their plan to codify the open border in their new border bill.
Alejandro Myorkas, the Biden/Harris official in charge of the border was impeached for lying to Congress and maintaining the open border policy. He's only the second cabinet secretary in history to be impeached.
Vice President Kamala Harris was publicly named "Border Czar" by Joe Biden early in the term. She was tasked with getting a handle on the flood of illegals coming into our country. Under her watch it got worse. Now that the flood has become an embarrassing problem, they are all denying she was ever given that responsibility!
No, if the border was open for some innocent reason they wouldn't be lying about it 24/7/365 for decades.
As recently as five years ago a huge majority of voting was done in-person and on election day. You had to show up at a local precinct, show your face to bi-partisan poll workers (who were also your neighbors), often present ID, sign a register with a witness, and complete the ballot yourself.
Noncitizen voting was rare.
Those days are over. Now almost half of all voting is done anonymously, in secret, by mail or dropbox, over a period of months, with no bi-partisan observers.
Under current law up to 55 million unpolled noncitizen voters could show up for the 2024 election and vote. The vast majority of those noncitizens are loyal to the Democrat party that used taxpayer money to get them here, and gave them transportation, housing, food, healthcare, work permits, and jobs.
To put 55 million potential voters in perspective, the last election was decided by a total of .008 of that number. A tiny percentage of that 55 million will determine the next President.
Noncitizen voting is only one part of the electoral Death Star. As in the "Star Wars" original, there are several smaller death-rays that make up the whole:
Here are some we saw in 2020:
Gigantic irregularities that all went one way in Democrat run cities
Democrats used government agencies to strong arm private media companies into supporting their preferred narratives
Democrat lawyers used lawfare and the pandemic to remove 250 years of election integrity measures
Democrats used 51 government intel officers along with government intelligence agencies to lie about the crimes committed by Democrats as revealed on the Biden laptop
But rather than listing everything from 2020, why not just listen to Joe Biden brag about the Democrat "voter fraud" operation he and Barack Obama built:
Today, in addition to all that, Democrats have used lawfare in an attempt to imprison Donald Trump, along with hundreds of GOP lawyers, dozens of pro-Trump media voices, several of Trump's key advisors, and thousands of Trump supporters who questioned the last election. Several of those accused and imprisoned (at least five as of today) have committed suicide due to unimaginably harsh treatment in what amounts to a concentration camp for opponents of the Biden/Harris regime.
And if you're thinking there might be a Luke Skywalker or Han Solo in this story, I've got bad news for you. Behold the two most powerful Republicans in office today. One is a minority leader, and one has a single vote majority. They couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag, let alone defeat a Death Star.
Believing Democrats didn't use their Death Star in 2020, and wouldn't dare use it again in 2024, is beyond naive.
Gigantic hat tip to Catherine Englebrecht and Tucker Carlson for making me aware of the "identify as a citizen" exception in 18 U.S. Code § 611. It was only then that I fully understood Obama's words, "when you vote, you are a citizen yourself...". Below is the promo for Catherine's interview with Tucker. The full interview is behind a paywall:
*The Federalist - "1 in 5 hotels in NYC are housing illegal migrants."
**Video of Biden telling illegals to "surge to the border":
# It is impossible to know the actual number of noncitizens in the U.S. In fact, it is illegal to even ask during a census. President Trump tried to get a citizenship question on the census, but Democrats sued and tied it up in courts long enough to render it illegal for 2020.
Every number you've ever seen is a guess, as is my 55 million number. But we do have a decent handle on one number: 15% of K-12 children in the U.S. are native Spanish speakers. 55 million is about 16% of the U.S. population. Of course all noncitizens do not speak Spanish, and many former noncitizens have become naturalized citizens. Taking all that into account, 55 million looks about right.
## Biden referring to illegals as voters, citizens, wanna become citizens on Spanish radio:
As you may have heard, Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota, wrote a book in which she described shooting her own dog for being dangerous and out-of-control. "Putting down" dangerous animals has been common practice for time immemorial, yet somehow this admission by Noem has "killed" her chances for higher office.
But has it really? Has there ever been a case of a national politician who admitted mistreating man's best friend and went on to win election?
Why, as a matter of fact there has been such a case!
Let’s check in on the kiddos and see what they are being taught in college. Here is a current screenshot from Open Syllabus by author. This organization tracks what is being assigned to U.S. college kids. Let’s see…of the top three authors out of 1.8 million, two of them are communists. Michel Foucault was a member of the communist party, and Karl Marx is, of course, the father of communism.
Those Hamas supporting mobs making asses of themselves on campuses around the country are trained street communists. And summer hasn’t even started…
It's no secret that since Joe Biden took office about 10 million illegals have flooded into the U.S. That's a larger population than 40 of our states! This mass of humanity was invited here by the Democrats and paid to make the journey with promises of free healthcare, housing, education, food, jobs, citizenship, smartphones, and much more.
But, what's in it for the Democrats? Why would they encourage an invasion of our country? Why would they dilute our citizenry? Why would they deliberately hurt our ability to provide services to our own people? Watch as Barack Obama, one of the key architects of this strategy, explains the plan to an Hispanic audience:
In light of today’s news, I thought I would try to take a step back and provide perspective on what this is really all about.
I first became concerned about
when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.
How could this be? I wondered.
When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.
A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.
I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.
I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.
Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.
I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more.
What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.
Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”
Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.
As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.
In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.
After the death of George Floyd, the already burgeoning DEI movement took off without any real challenge to its problematic ideology. Why, you might ask, was there so little pushback? The answer is that anyone who dared to raise a question which challenged DEI was deemed a racist, a label which could severely impact one’s employment, social status, reputation and more. Being called a racist got people cancelled, so those concerned about DEI and its societal and legal implications had no choice but to keep quiet in this new climate of fear.
The techniques that DEI has used to squelch the opposition are found in the Red Scares and McCarthyism of decades past. If you challenge DEI, “justice” will be swift, and you may find yourself unemployed, shunned by colleagues, cancelled, and/or you will otherwise put your career and acceptance in society at risk.
The DEI movement has also taken control of speech. Certain speech is no longer permitted. So-called “microaggressions” are treated like hate speech. “Trigger warnings” are required to protect students. “Safe spaces” are necessary to protect students from the trauma inflicted by words that are challenging to the students’ newly-acquired world views. Campus speakers and faculty with unapproved views are shouted down, shunned, and cancelled.
These speech codes have led to self-censorship by students and faculty of views privately held, but no longer shared. There is no commitment to free expression at Harvard other than for DEI-approved views. This has led to the quashing of conservative and other viewpoints from the Harvard campus and faculty, and contributed to Harvard’s having the lowest free speech ranking of 248 universities assessed by the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression.
When one examines DEI and its ideological heritage, it does not take long to understand that the movement is inherently inconsistent with basic American values. Our country since its founding has been about creating and building a democracy with equality of opportunity for all. Millions of people have left behind socialism and communism to come to America to start again, as they have seen the destruction leveled by an equality of outcome society.
The E for “equity” in DEI is about equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity.
DEI is racist because reverse racism is racism, even if it is against white people (and it is remarkable that I even need to point this out). Racism against white people has become considered acceptable by many not to be racism, or alternatively, it is deemed acceptable racism. While this is, of course, absurd, it has become the prevailing view in many universities around the country.
You can say things about white people today in universities, in business or otherwise, that if you switched the word ‘white’ to ‘black,’ the consequences to you would be costly and severe.
To state what should otherwise be self-evident, whether or not a statement is racist should not depend upon whether the target of the racism is a group who currently represents a majority or minority of the country or those who have a lighter or darker skin color. Racism against whites is as reprehensible as it is against groups with darker skin colors.
Martin Luther King’s most famous words are instructive:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
But here we are in 2024, being asked and in some cases required to use skin color to effect outcomes in admissions (recently deemed illegal by the Supreme Court), in business (likely illegal yet it happens nonetheless) and in government (also I believe in most cases to be illegal, except apparently in government contracting), rather than the content of one’s character. As such, a meritocracy is an anathema to the DEI movement. DEI is inherently a racist and illegal movement in its implementation even if it purports to work on behalf of the so-called oppressed.
And DEI’s definition of oppressed is fundamentally flawed.
I have always believed that the most fortunate should help the least fortunate, and that our system should be designed in such a way as to maximize the size of the overall pie so that it will enable us to provide an economic system which can offer quality of life, education, housing, and healthcare for all.
America is a rich country and we have made massive progress over the decades toward achieving this goal, but we obviously have much more work to do. Steps taken on the path to socialism – another word for an equality of outcome system – will reverse this progress and ultimately impoverish us all. We have seen this movie many times.
Having a darker skin color, a less common sexual identity, and/or being a woman doesn’t make one necessarily oppressed or even disadvantaged. While slavery remains a permanent stain on our country’s history – a fact which is used by DEI to label white people as oppressors – it doesn’t therefore hold that all white people generations after the abolishment of slavery should be held responsible for its evils. Similarly, the fact that Columbus discovered America doesn’t make all modern-day Italians colonialists.
An ideology that portrays a bicameral world of oppressors and the oppressed based principally on race or sexual identity is a fundamentally racist ideology that will likely lead to more racism rather than less. A system where one obtains advantages by virtue of one’s skin color is a racist system, and one that will generate resentment and anger among the un-advantaged who will direct their anger at the favored groups.
The country has seen burgeoning resentment and anger grow materially over the last few years, and the DEI movement is an important contributor to our growing divisiveness. Resentment is one of the most important drivers of racism. And it is the lack of equity, i.e, fairness, in how DEI operates, that contributes to this resentment.
I was accused of being a racist from the President of the NAACP among others when I posted on
that I had learned that the Harvard President search process excluded candidates that did not meet the DEI criteria. I didn’t say that former President Gay was hired because she was a black woman. I simply said that I had heard that the search process by its design excluded a large percentage of potential candidates due to the DEI limitations. My statement was not a racist one. It was simply the empirical truth about the Harvard search process that led to Gay’s hiring.
When former President Gay was hired, I knew little about her, but I was instinctually happy for Harvard and the black community. Every minority community likes to see their representatives recognized in important leadership positions, and it is therefore an important moment for celebration. I too celebrated this achievement. I am inspired and moved by others’ success, and I thought of Gay’s hiring at the pinnacle leadership position at perhaps our most important and iconic university as an important and significant milestone for the black community.
I have spent the majority of my life advocating on behalf of and supporting members of disadvantaged communities including by investing several hundreds of millions of dollars of philanthropic assets to help communities in need with economic development, sensible criminal justice reform, poverty reduction, healthcare, education, workforce housing, charter schools, and more.
I have done the same at Pershing Square Capital Management when, for example, we completed one of the largest IPOs ever with the substantive assistance of a number of minority-owned, women-owned, and Veteran-owned investment banks. Prior to the Pershing Square Tontine, Ltd. IPO, it was standard practice for big corporations occasionally to name a few minority-owned banks in their equity and bond offerings, have these banks do no work and sell only a de minimis amount of stock or bonds, and allocate to them only 1% or less of the underwriting fees so that the issuers could virtue signal that they were helping minority communities.
In our IPO, we invited the smaller banks into the deal from the beginning of the process so they could add real value. As a result, the Tontine IPO was one of the largest and most successful IPOs in history with $12 billion of demand for a $4 billion deal by the second day of the IPO, when we closed the books. The small banks earned their 20% share of the fees for delivering real and substantive value and for selling their share of the stock.
Compare this approach to the traditional one where the small banks do effectively nothing to earn their fees – they aren’t given that opportunity – yet, they get a cut of the deal, albeit a tiny one. The traditional approach does not create value for anyone. It only creates resentment, and an uncomfortable feeling from the small banks who get a tiny piece of the deal in a particularly bad form of affirmative action.
While I don’t think our approach to working with the smaller banks has yet achieved the significant traction it deserves, it will hopefully happen eventually as the smaller banks build their competencies and continue to earn their fees, and other issuers see the merit of this approach. We are going to need assistance with a large IPO soon so we are looking forward to working with our favored smaller banks.
I have always believed in giving disadvantaged groups a helping hand. I signed the Giving Pledge for this reason. My life plan by the time I was 18 was to be successful and then return the favor to those less fortunate. This always seemed to the right thing to do, in particular, for someone as fortunate as I am.
All of the above said, it is one thing to give disadvantaged people the opportunities and resources so that they can help themselves. It is another to select a candidate for admission or for a leadership role when they are not qualified to serve in that role.
This appears to have been the case with former President Gay’s selection. She did not possess the leadership skills to serve as Harvard’s president, putting aside any questions about her academic credentials. This became apparent shortly after October 7th, but there were many signs before then when she was Dean of the faculty.
The result was a disaster for Harvard and for Claudine Gay.
The Harvard board should not have run a search process which had a predetermined objective of only hiring a DEI-approved candidate. In any case, there are many incredibly talented black men and women who could have been selected by Harvard to serve as its president so why did the Harvard Corporation board choose Gay?
One can only speculate without knowing all of the facts, but it appears Gay’s leadership in the creation of Harvard’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging and the penetration of the DEI ideology into the Corporation board room perhaps made Gay the favored candidate. The search was also done at a time when many other top universities had similar DEI-favored candidate searches underway for their presidents, reducing the number of potential candidates available in light of the increased competition for talent.
Unrelated to the DEI issue, as a side note, I would suggest that universities should broaden their searches to include capable business people for the role of president, as a university president requires more business skills than can be gleaned from even the most successful academic career with its hundreds of peer reviewed papers and many books. Universities have a Dean of the Faculty and a bureaucracy to oversee the faculty and academic environment of the university. It therefore does not make sense that the university president has to come through the ranks of academia, with a skill set unprepared for university management.
The president’s job – managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management – are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing. Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.
Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the University is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5% annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.
The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades, (I believe it has grown about 7-8% per annum) and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard College. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.
The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20%. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20% in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?
In summary, there is a lot more work to be done to fix Harvard than just replacing its president. That said, the selection of Harvard’s next president is a critically important task, and the individuals principally responsible for that decision do not have a good track record for doing so based on their recent history, nor have they done a good job managing the other problems which I have identified above.
The Corporation board led by Penny Pritzker selected the wrong president and did inadequate due diligence about her academic record despite Gay being in leadership roles at the University since 2015 when she became dean of the Social Studies department.
The Board failed to create a discrimination-free environment on campus exposing the University to tremendous reputational damage, to large legal and financial liabilities, Congressional investigations and scrutiny, and to the potential loss of Federal funding, all while damaging the learning environment for all students.
And when concerns were raised about plagiarism in Gay’s research, the Board said these claims were “demonstrably false” and it threatened the NY Post with “immense” liability if it published a story raising these issues.
It was only after getting the story cancelled that the Board secretly launched a cursory, short-form investigation outside of the proper process for evaluating a member of the faculty’s potential plagiarism. When the Board finally publicly acknowledged some of Gay’s plagiarism, it characterized the plagiarism as “unintentional” and invented new euphemisms, i.e., “duplicative language” to describe plagiarism, a belittling of academic integrity that has caused grave damage to Harvard’s academic standards and credibility.
The Board’s three-person panel of “political scientist experts” that to this day remain unnamed who evaluated Gay’s work failed to identify many examples of her plagiarism, leading to even greater reputational damage to the University and its reputation for academic integrity as the whistleblower and the media continued to identify additional problems with Gay’s work in the days and weeks thereafter.
According to the NY Post, the Board also apparently sought to identify the whistleblower and seek retribution against him or her in contravention to the University’s whistleblower protection policies.
Despite all of the above, the Board “unanimously” gave its full support for Gay during this nearly four-month crisis, until eventually being forced to accept her resignation earlier today, a grave and continuing reputational disaster to Harvard and to the Board.
In a normal corporate context with the above set of facts, the full board would resign immediately to be replaced by a group nominated by shareholders. In the case of Harvard, however, the Board nominates itself and its new members. There is no shareholder vote mechanism to replace them.
So what should happen?
The Corporation Board should not remain in their seats protected by the unusual governance structure which enabled them to obtain their seats.
The Board Chair, Penny Pritzker, should resign along with the other members of the board who led the campaign to keep Claudine Gay, orchestrated the strategy to threaten the media, bypassed the process for evaluating plagiarism, and otherwise greatly contributed to the damage that has been done. Then new Corporation board members should be identified who bring true diversity, viewpoint and otherwise, to the board.
The Board should not be principally comprised of individuals who share the same politics and views about DEI. The new board members should be chosen in a transparent process with the assistance of the 30-person Board of Overseers. There is no reason the Harvard board of 12 independent trustees cannot be comprised of the most impressive, high integrity, intellectually and politically diverse members of our country and globe. We have plenty of remarkable people to choose from, and the job of being a director just got much more interesting and important. It is no longer, nor should it ever have been, an honorary and highly political sinecure.
The ODEIB should be shut down, and the staff should be terminated. The ODEIB has already taken down much of the ideology and strategies that were on its website when I and others raised concerns about how the office operates and who it does and does not represent. Taking down portions of the website does not address the fundamentally flawed and racist ideology of this office, and calls into further question the ODEIB’s legitimacy.
Why would the ODEIB take down portions of its website when an alum questioned its legitimacy unless the office was doing something fundamentally wrong or indefensible?
Harvard must once again become a meritocratic institution which does not discriminate for or against faculty or students based on their skin color, and where diversity is understood in its broadest form so that students can learn in an environment which welcomes diverse viewpoints from faculty and students from truly diverse backgrounds and experiences.
Harvard must create an academic environment with real academic freedom and free speech, where self-censoring, speech codes, and cancel culture are forever banished from campus.
Harvard should become an environment where all students of all persuasions feel comfortable expressing their views and being themselves. In the business world, we call this creating a great corporate culture, which begins with new leadership and the right tone at the top. It does not require the creation of a massive administrative bureaucracy.
These are the minimum changes necessary to begin to repair the damage that has been done.
A number of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania have proposed a new constitution which can be found at http://pennforward.com, which has been signed by more than 1,200 faculty from Penn, Harvard, and other universities. Harvard would do well to adopt Penn’s proposed new constitution or a similar one before seeking to hire its next president.
A condition of employment of the new Harvard president should be the requirement that the new president agrees to strictly abide by the new constitution. He or she should take an oath to that effect.
Today was an important step forward for the University. It is time we restore Veritas to Harvard and again be an exemplar that graduates well-informed, highly-educated leaders of exemplary moral standing and good judgment who can help bring our country together, advance our democracy, and identify the important new discoveries that will help save us from ourselves.
We have a lot more work to do. Let’s get at it.
