Soros-Linked DA Exonerates Illegal Alien Who Flipped Middle Finger to Charges for Attack on NYPD Officers
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), linked to billionaire George Soros, has exonerated an illegal alien who flipped his middle fingers after being charged with attacking New York Police Department (NYPD) officers in Times Square in January.
Jhoan Boada, a 22-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela, was among eight illegal aliens charged with attacking NYPD officers in Times Square outside a taxpayer-funded migrant shelter. After being charged, Boada went viral online when he was seen flipping the middle finger while being released from jail without bail.
Late last week, Bragg’s office confirmed to Fox News that all charges have been dropped against Boada with prosecutors saying they charged the wrong person:
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office dismissed the criminal complaint against Jhoan Boada, 22, saying he had been “exonerated as a participant in this assault” following a “thorough and diligent investigation.”
“Our investigation has revealed that Marcelino Estee, not Jhoan Boada, is the individual described in this complaint, wearing the black & white jacket with pink shoes, committing this assault,” a statement from DA Alvin Bragg’s office said.
Estee has since been charged, instead, with helping the other illegal aliens attack NYPD officers. A judge set his bail at $15,000 — far less than the $100,000 bail prosecutors had asked for.
As Breitbart News reported, two of the eight illegal aliens charged with the attack on NYPD officers are members of Venezuela’s violent street gang known as Tren de Aragua.
The other illegal aliens charged for the attack are:
- Yohenry Brito, a 24-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela
- Yorman Reveron, a 24-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela
- Kelvin Servita Arocha, a 19-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela
- Wilson Juarez, a 21-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela
- Darwin Gomez-Izquiel, a 19-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela
- Ulises Bohorquez, a 21-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela
- Yarwuin Madris, an 18-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela
Bragg has been financially linked to Soros after he enjoyed major support from the Color of Change PAC in his 2021 bid. Soros gave the PAC around $1 million at the time and Soros’s relatives donated directly to Bragg.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
The ”fundamental change” that the Obama Era ushered in has, of course, led to fundamental change in what many of us value -- and how we see the country … and what it represents. Nearly everyone notices that there is a very different feel from, say, 1985. I would posit that, in many ways, that change has adulterated and debased us. Confidence, buoyancy and optimism have largely been displaced by ennui, doubt, angst, and a jaundiced pessimism.
At least 100 J6 attendees were very wrongly over-sentenced
People swept up in the Department of Justice’s January 6 dragnet have been getting extraordinarily harsh sentences. While daily headlines are filled with stories of repeat offenders walking away with slaps on the wrist following brutal crimes, the January 6 defendants, almost every one of whom had no previous criminal record (that I’m aware of), were being sent away for years simply for having stepped onto Capitol grounds. These were insane sentences compared to what happened to violent and destructive Antifa and BLM protestors. Now, though, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a unanimous decision, held that the prosecutors and the judges improperly used a “multiplier” to reach these sentences.
The decision arises in the case of only one defendant—Larry Brock—a retired Air Force officer who entered the capitol wearing a helmet and tactical vest and who was carrying zip ties that he testified he found on the floor and picked up. There’s no indication that he did anything other than wander through the Capitol.
Nevertheless, for these sins, Brock was sentenced to two years in prison. He filed an appeal alleging that the prosecutors wrongly demanded and the judge gave a sentencing multiplier based upon his having violated U.S.S.G. sec. 2J1.2(b)(2). That provision says that, for Base Offense Level 14, “If the offense resulted in substantial interference with the administration of justice, increase [the Base Offense Level] by 3 levels.”
Image: The DOJ’s and DC judges’ dream sentence for January 6 defendants. (Actually, it’s the execution of Louis XVI, another moment of leftism run amok.)
That’s a big leap. According to Brock’s attorney, Brock received a sentence almost twice as long as he would have received had it not been for the misapplication of the guidelines.
Brock’s attorney argued that a legislative procedure is not within the purview of “the administration of justice.” However, the activists in the Department of “Justice” and those sitting as judges at the trial court level insisted that interfering with “the administration of justice” included “the unnecessary expenditure of substantial government resources.” That’s an amazing viewpoint that argues that everything the government does is just. Think about that for a moment.
On appeal, the D.C. Circuit appellate court got it right, explaining that “we hold that the ‘administration of justice’ enhancement does not apply to interference with the legislative process of certifying electoral votes.” While acknowledging politely that the trial judges were desperately trying to enhance the sentence of the January 6 defendants, the appellate court essentially said that Brock’s argument was a no-brainer:
Section 2J1.2’s text, context, and commentary show that “administration of justice” refers to judicial, quasi-judicial, and adjunct investigative proceedings, but does not extend to the unique congressional function of certifying electoral college votes.
The plain, natural, and ordinary meaning of the phrase “administration of justice” is the governmental process of investigating, determining, and enforcing the legal rights of persons.
[snip]
Black’s Law Dictionary similarly defines “obstructing the administration of justice” and “interfering with the administration of justice” as “[t]he skewing of the disposition of legal proceedings, as by fabricating or destroying evidence, witness-tampering, or threatening or intimidating a judge[.]” Perverting the Course of Justice, BLACK’S LAW DICTIONARY 1383 (11th ed. 2019) (emphasis added)…
In addition, right in the commentary to Section 2J1.2 of the sentencing guidelines, the sentencing commission echoed Black’s Law Dictionary, making it quite clear that the goal was to punish matters associated with judicial proceedings.
What’s important to note here is that neither the language of the sentencing guideline nor the legal history behind the concept of the “administration of justice” nor the commentary on the guidelines is ambiguous. Each makes remarkably clear that it refers to people who try to pervert a judicial proceeding.
What happened when it came to the January 6 defendants was not a good faith error on the part of the prosecutors or the judges. Instead, it amounted to a deliberate and “substantial interference with the administration of justice.” The prosecutors involved should be fired and the judges impeached.
According to the New York Post, the DOJ is deciding whether to appeal the ruling, while over 100 other January 6 defendants are undoubtedly planning to appeal their own improperly extreme sentences.
HOW MANY SHITBAG LAWYERS DOES IT TAKE TO DESTROY AMERICA? HERE'S A LIST
The Steal Is On
“Protect and enrich.” This is a perfect encapsulation of the Clinton Foundation (TWO GAMER LAWYERS - OWNED BY GEORGE SOROS) (WHAT ABOUT THE CHINA BIDEN PENN CENTER?) and the Obama (TWO GAMER LAWYERS - OWNED BY GEORGE SOROS) book and television deals. Then there is the Biden family (FOUR GAMER LAWYERS - JOE, HUNTER, JAMES, FRANK - OWNED BY GEORGE SOROS AND LARRY FINK OF BLACKROCK) corruption, followed closely behind by similar abuses of power and office by the Warren (GAMER LAWYER) and Sanders families, as Peter Schweizer described in his recent book “Profiles in Corruption.” These names just scratch the surface of government corruption (ADD GAMER LAWYER KAMALA HARRIS (WANTS TO BE OWNED BY GEORGE SOROS) AND HER LAWYER HUSBAND AND THE BANKSTERS’ RENT BOY, LAWYER CHUCK SCHUMER, OWNED BY LARRY FINK OF BLACKROCK WHO OWNS A BIG PIECE OF THE ‘BIG GUY’ JOE, AND GEORGE SOROS’ RENT BOY (GAMER LAWYER) TONY BLINKEN, AS WELL AS CON MAN (GAMER LAWYER) ADAM SHIFF AND HIS CORRUPTNESS (GAMER LAWYER) BOB MENENDEZ STILL EVADING PRISON, AND NOT BE VERY LEAST, ERIC SWALWELL (GAMER LAWYER), THE CHINESE HO CHASING BRIBES SUCKER.
BRIAN C JOONDEPH
Rural America Is a Threat to the Totalitarian Left
Last week Newt Gingrich tried to remind Americans how serious the threat of nuclear conflict remains. In a sober essay, he warned that the United States is not prepared to withstand nuclear or electromagnetic pulse attacks and urged Americans to prepare for unthinkable possibilities. Then a few days later, I woke up to read that “white rural rage” is the greatest “threat to democracy” and thought, “Well, at least we don’t have to worry about nuclear Armageddon now.” Such is the sorry state of the “woke” West that the “thinking class” moronically obsesses over trivialities, while ignoring everything that is disastrous.
This somewhat regurgitated “white rural rage” thesis comes from a “journalist” and an “academic” who have written a book explaining why white, patriotic Americans who just want to live their lives free from government interference are actually responsible for everything wrong in the country. Just when I think my white-hot contempt for closed-minded toffs couldn’t burn more brightly, a couple nitwits ratchet up my “rage” to eleventy. Dang, they got me. Turns out that if you scapegoat rural Americans long enough, some will get angry. Uff da.
Of course, anyone who lives in or near rural America knows that the brain-dead professor and reporter tag-team responsible for this drivel never spent any time meeting the people whom they disparage. If they had, it would have been impossible for them to write so dishonestly (even for people paid to lie for a living). Rural America is where authentic democracy flourishes. People still gather in churches and town squares to discuss their communities’ hardships and successes. Law enforcement and firefighting depend on the efforts of volunteers. Local papers tell stories of next-door neighbors and follow the adventures of townspeople far from home — many risking their lives in combat overseas. When someone isn’t seen in the grocery store or at the bank for any length of time, people notice. Before a sheriff’s deputy has time to investigate, local residents are on the case. When snowed-in roads need clearing, family trucks turn into plows. When farmers need extra hands to harvest crops, familiar faces arrive in droves. At the deli, town market, or local watering hole residents debate the issues on their minds. There are no timeouts because some topic has been declared “politically incorrect” or because some intervening listener declares the conversation riddled with “hate.” Rural America is where free speech thrives.
If saving American “democracy” were really the goal, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., would be sending delegations out to “flyover country” as part of fact-finding missions to see how it’s done. Umm, interesting, these residents can disagree with each other without burning down each other’s businesses? I did not know that was possible! Yet it is possible. It is normal! Rural Americans can scream at each other one night and make up before church service the next day. You mean nobody is around to police their speech? Nope, rural Americans recognize the same basic truth that our political forefathers understood — that no king or parliament has the power to tell an adult what he may think or say. But how does anything get done without a strong central government providing for their every need? It might sound amazing, but ordinary people are quite capable of protecting their neighbors and providing for their towns’ survival. During an emergency, they don’t wait for the “authorities” to arrive. Outside of Almighty God, they are the authorities. As rational adults with responsibility for their own lives, they know what needs to be done. And they do it. If you want to see “democracy in action,” visit one of the tens of thousands of small communities that dot the country from coast to coast. They are where strong, caring, and resilient people work and live.
The real fear of the “white rural rage” Chicken Littles is not that rural Americans are a threat to “democracy” but rather that they provide an immovable bulwark against the Deep State’s “master plan” for a totalitarian super-State. All over the West, politicians and pundits continue to extol authoritarianism as “democratic” and denigrate self-government as “populist.” It’s absurdly Orwellian, of course, but since we live in the age of censorship, propaganda, and linguistic chicanery, these word games will continue. Somewhere in the pits of Hell, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao are eager to remind Klaus Schwab and all the other Western globalists how “democratic” their “rules-based international orders” are, too.
The globalist authoritarians have instructed the commoners to stop eating meat. Rural Americans have said, “Nah, we’re good. We like steak.” The “new world order” folks have insisted that a great deal of speech must be censored in order to protect fragile adults from experiencing outbreaks of unapproved “hate.” Rural Americans have responded, “Suck it up, Buttercup. Maybe try listening to an opposing point of view sometime. It might just vaccinate you from the plague of groupthink.” The globo-Marxists have demanded that consumers hand over their keys to any car with an internal combustion engine. Rural Americans have laughingly replied, “Not only are we keeping every truck and tractor from the last century in a barn out back but also we can’t wait to buy some new all-terrain vehicles to ride through the backcountry.” Officials who betray their oaths to the Constitution have told law-abiding Americans that they have no right to own a gun. Rural Americans have calmly loaded their weapons in preparation for self-defense and whispered back, “Come and take it.” In disposition and beliefs, rural Americans are the natural “Minutemen” guarding American liberty.
It is no wonder, then, why the World Economic Forum’s tawdry tyrants wish to incarcerate Americans in “fifteen-minute cities.” Cities are hotbeds of censorship, economic coercion, and social control. They are where freedom goes to die. In rural America — where everyone knows how to hunt, fish, farm, and defend their properties — a strong and self-sufficient culture exists that teaches people how to live. The last thing the WEF’s depopulation fanatics want is an American society capable of taking care of itself…and thriving. How could intelligence agencies, central banks, and unaccountable regulators maintain power if they had nobody to control?
Ultimately, attacks against rural Americans — like the left’s attacks against Christians — are a wretched form of bigotry designed to spread the insidious idea that people who live outside city limits are subhuman. Because rural America is filled with resilient people who adamantly defend the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, it represents an antidote to the cancerous form of Marxist globalism killing cities across the country. Because rural America is filled with faithful people who are obedient to God’s will — and not D.C.’s — it remains a natural refuge for those immune from institutional brainwashing. Because rural America is blessed with an abundance of self-sufficient families, hard workers, and freethinkers, it provides a welcoming home for human liberty. For these reasons, aspiring totalitarians must destroy rural America if they are to have any chance at erecting a new system founded on censorship, surveillance, oppression, and tyranny. The problem for the Deep State is that rural Americans know what to do when the SHTF and, in fact, have been preparing all their lives.
Mass psychological programs that dehumanize groups of people always precede State-engineered genocides. It is how cognitive warfare specialists pepper society with a preemptive rationale for why some people must be loaded onto boxcars and sent away for “re-education.” Newt Gingrich is certainly right: any nuclear war would be catastrophic. If we’re being honest, though, Americans must also worry about how the totalitarian left is following in the footsteps of Hitler’s Germany. Prepare your mind accordingly.
IN CA THERE ARE PROBABLY MORE MEX FLAGS TO BE SEEN THAN AMERICAN!
THESE PEOPLE DO NOT COME TO BE AMERICANS. THEY COME BY INVITATION OF THE BRIBES SUCKING N.A.F.T.A. DEMOCRAT PARTY TO LOOT AND VOTE DEM FOR MORE!
The End of Assimilation
America’s open borders have put huge strains on our social services, schools, and police departments, let alone facilitating drug addiction and human sex-trafficking. Donald Trump has promised to shut the door on day one of his administration, but even if Trump is elected, the damage will continue for decades. Graphic pictures of cities inundated with illegals only reflect the beginning of a disaster.
The deeper problem is that nearly all illegals arrive embracing values against core American principles. They are “aliens” both legally and in terms of our political culture.
Modern immigration is wholly unlike that of the earliest days, when most immigrants were of English ancestry and quickly integrated into society. Today, by contrast, those flooding into the United States arrive from almost every nation on the planet, including places like El Salvador, Kazakhstan, India, Ghana, China, Syria, Cuba, and Vietnam. Those newly arrived Muslims clustering in places like Dearborn, Mich. have altered the political landscape thanks to their vociferous support for Hamas, and this new voice may be a harbinger of future Balkanization.
No precise definition of America’s political culture exists, but central is patriotism — subordinating all loyalties to national identity. As Teddy Roosevelt put it in 1907, “there can be no divided allegiance here. ... We have room for but one flag, the American flag. ... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty, and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
Further add the values explicitly embedded in the Constitution: the rule of law; the rights of free speech and freedom of religion; freedom from government tyranny; the primacy of individual, not group rights and similar rights vital to ordered liberty. Further add elections, not violence, to settle disputes. To be sure, this catalogue can be murky, and exceptions exist, but at their core, “American political values” are well understood. Alas, these values are exceedingly rare in third-world countries, the overwhelming source of today’s illegals.
There is both good news and bad news regarding the possible absorption of these new arrivals. The good news is that America once experienced a similar problem, and we solved it. Yes, people may not initially embrace an American identity, but this can change, and our history demonstrates that this transformation is possible. According to one estimate (p. 45), between 1790 and 1990, about half of American’s population growth was due to immigration, but overwhelmingly, everyone embraced an American identity as their primary identity. Especially between the 1880s and World War I, the influx of immigrants from dozens of nations, most not speaking English, with multiple religions, exceeded a million a year. Nevertheless, the principle of E pluribus unum, one out of many, prevailed.
Successful assimilation was hardly spontaneous and reflected herculean efforts by both the private sector and government at all levels and transcended the partisan divide, attracting such elite notables as Woodrow Wilson and Henry Ford. In fact, Ford offered factory workers six- to eight-week courses on Americanism, with a graduation where each employee received a certificate preparing them for citizenship. US Steel, among countless other businesses, similarly provided civic education classes together with patriotic messages in its pay envelopes and subsidized after-work civics classes. In cities with significant foreign populations, local affiliates of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce provided free English classes and civic literacy (Huntington, p. 132). Assimilation was voluntary, and those who rejected Americanization often returned to their homeland.
Private groups such as local YMCAs, the Colonial Dames, and Sons of the American Revolution — together with religious and ethnic organizations — taught English to newcomers while helping them find jobs and housing. Over thirty states passed laws to facilitate Americanization, and by 1921, some 3,526 localities were participating in the federal government’s Bureau of Nationalization program. Public schools were at the forefront of this Americanization, and, ironically, this push was led by self-defined “Progressives.” These pro-America messages filled patriotic textbooks, while nationalistic pictures and American flags were inescapable. Schools also offered evening English classes together with lessons on the Constitution necessary to pass the citizenship examination. Leading pedagogues of the era such as Horace Mann shared this patriotic enthusiasm that transcended ideology.
This massive assimilation effort paid handsome dividends. The United States survived a terrible economic depression without a political upheaval. And when the U.S. entered WWII, the country was totally united, though millions of immigrants had come from nations that were now enemies. During the Cold War, Americans remained steadfastly loyal, paid their taxes, and enlisted in the military, and the internecine conflict endemic in heterogeneous nations elsewhere was unthinkable. Assimilation had triumphed and, at least then, seemed inevitable.
Could a similar all-hands-on-deck assimilation effort succeed in today’s political environment? Highly unlikely. It is hard to imagine today’s political elites, notably educators, insisting that recent arrivals must learn English, all the while becoming red-blooded American patriots who embrace our traditional constitutional rights and liberties. Proponents of resurrecting past pro-assimilation school lessons would be denounced as right-wing fascists or worse.
More likely, modern outreach efforts directed at recent arrivals would be the very opposite of past absorption campaigns. George Washington would be demoted from honored Revolutionary War hero to evil slave-owner, and capitalism would be taught as exploitation, not the creator of wealth. Lessons would dwell on how America is fundamentally racist, sexist, and transphobic. Imagine how Google employees would react if their foreign-born colleagues were required to enroll in nightly civic education courses celebrating America’s greatness! Many would go on strike in protest. Requiring schools children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance might “trigger” many parents, and thus would be banned.
Nor would current financial burdens associated with immigration abate if Trump were elected. Only job descriptions would change. Yet more functionaries will have to be hired to accommodate the unassimilated arrivals. Currently, there are 96 different languages spoken in Los Angeles public schools, and the Tower of Babel problem will expand nationally. The presence of unassimilated youngsters will also require fresh hires to ensure that cafeteria food is culturally suitable, that everything is translated into exotic native languages, and school practices such as mixed-gender activities do not offend religions practices.
The failure to stress English will severely retard learning and only exacerbate already declining test scores while the inevitable ethnic conflicts will be handled by employing yet more social workers to keep the peace. And schools will be only one of many settings requiring expensive accommodation. This is a far cry from an earlier era, where the immigrant himself was primarily expected to adjust to America, not vice versa.
The modern immigration problem is just the first installment of Balkanization. As turmoil in France, Germany, and the Scandinavian nations demonstrates, assimilation of migrants from radically different cultures is not the default human option. Tellingly, their “no go” ethnic enclaves show no signs of disappearing. It is hardly surprising that the rise of American campus anti-Semitism reflects an influx of students from Arab countries. It is delusion to believe that illegals will embrace our values out of gratitude for America’s generosity.
We have the blueprints for a proven solution, but the current political environment precludes implementing it, and conceivably, the fans of open borders are getting the destruction they want. Perhaps today’s Progressives hope that Americans will assimilate to the Third World, not vice versa.
Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
BLAME THE BRIBES SUCKING DEMOCRAT PARTY!
And that is just scratching the surface. We all are aware of the increase in crime, drug use, and attendant homelessness.
Corruption and redemption? America on the precipice
A corrupt people will not long remain free. Period. That is something the Founders knew in their bones.
Yet I fear we have forgotten that lesson.
A corrupt people will not long remain free. That is a simple truth.
Here are a couple Merriam-Webster definitions of corrupt:
1) a: morally degenerate and perverted: depraved b: characterized by improper conduct (such as bribery or the selling of favors)
3) adulterated or debased by change from an original or correct condition
Few honest folks would fail to admit that our society’s morals have declined in recent years, or that the amount of “improper conduct” has increased. Without question, our behavior has been adulterated and debased by change. Look at the content of television shows circa say, the 1970s or 1980s versus today. When one went out to dinner, or even a nightclub or tavern 50 years ago it was extremely rare to hear those next to you using using “F-bombs.” Today, nearly everyone uses them on a constant — and loud — basis, young girls included. In some places the word appears as ubiquitous as “the,” “and,” or “you.” Look at pictures of people attending sporting events in the '40s, '50s, or '60s and compare them to today. Coats, ties, dresses, and hats were the norm back then, whereas anything goes today. Tats, piercings, and sweatpants predominate in many cases. And that is just scratching the surface. We all are aware of the increase in crime, drug use, and attendant homelessness.
And now we have a corrupt government, one that does not value the personal liberty of its citizens; that, in fact, disdains it and sees it as a threat. Those in the current government and its various institutions fervently wish to tame us -- and eventually effectively enslave us. They make it abundantly clear, in every way possible, that they much prefer the illegal immigrants pouring across our border in an incessant, unbroken torrent. Easier to bribe, mold, and coerce you see. And secure their votes. Those in that government do everything possible to suppress, cancel, or imprison their political opponents — and their supporters -- all the while proclaiming they are doing so to “preserve our democracy.”
The ”fundamental change” that the Obama Era ushered in has, of course, led to fundamental change in what many of us value -- and how we see the country … and what it represents. Nearly everyone notices that there is a very different feel from, say, 1985. I would posit that, in many ways, that change has adulterated and debased us. Confidence, buoyancy and optimism have largely been displaced by ennui, doubt, angst, and a jaundiced pessimism.
We have been here before, however, and lived to tell of it. So there is still some hope. In 1979, President Carter talked of the “erosion of confidence” afflicting the nation. Around the same time, Ronald Reagan stated: “Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”
If President Biden loses his job on or about Nov. 5, 2024, perhaps America will recover once again.
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
The Russians Aren’t the Only Ones with Oligarchs
Many of us have experienced people in our lives who build a certain narrative which we accept despite evidence before our eyes. Sometimes it’s easier to accept the narrative, sometimes the benefit of the relationship outweighs the cost of facing the facts. Very often, there comes a time when the dam we built to hold the facts away from our consciousness breaks. That is usually a critical moment.
The same holds for our relationship with government. We all have accepted a certain narrative about our government. The less informed talk about a “democracy.” Those who paid attention in civics class think of it as a “representative republic.” As a member of the second group, I revere the genius of our Founders and the remarkable system they put in place resting on the Constitution.
Recently, I had an experience that broke my dam. A series of marvelous coincidences put me on a tropical hillside in Thailand enjoying the hospitality of some Thai friends who were celebrating the birthday of one of their number. I met these guys when I took a diving trip with them. We had so much fun together, one trip became four. On the third trip, I got an invitation I couldn’t refuse.
So, there I was on this hillside on a beautiful evening. My Thai is limited pretty much to “Hello” and “Thank you,” while my hosts’ English is functional. Regardless, they did a grand job of making me feel welcome.
There was another non-Thai speaker there. Linn is a beautiful young Chinese woman who speaks remarkably good English. We established a quick bond, as she is an enthusiastic diver and similarly charmed by Thai people. Linn lives in the People’s Republic of China. Chinese people are frequent visitors to Thailand, but generally they are in groups and keep to themselves.
Because of her superb English, Linn was the first Chinese national I have ever engaged in conversation. She is bright, well-educated, and charming. We both did our best to tread lightly when the conversation approached the differences between our nations. However, I noticed early on that she was not the least bit defensive about the Chinese Communist Party. On the contrary she actually seemed almost indifferent. Linn didn’t behave in any way that resembled people I’ve known from Eastern Europe and Russia during the Soviet days.
Rather, she was relaxed and comfortably free to say whatever she pleased.
At one point the conversation turned to my personal experience in manufacturing in California during Silicon Valley’s manufacturing heyday. I told her about how my work in the 1980s took me to the various business parks in the Bay Area that, at the time, were all bustling hives. Machine, sheet metal, and paint shops along with printed circuit board houses filled the area’s manufacturing landscape. I left manufacturing in 1991 and did not return to any of those parks until 1997. What I found on return were ghost towns. All the shops were gone. All that work was offshored.
In deference to my new friend, I avoided reflexively mentioning China and instead pointed my finger at the American oligarchs who moved all that work in those few short years. That’s when my dam broke.
America is no democracy, nor is it a representative republic in any functional sense. America is, and has been for at least a century, an oligarchy. We learned in those civics and history classes that Teddy Roosevelt busted trusts and put those “Robber Barrons” in their place. Of course, they couldn’t be oligarchs because America is a republic, not an oligarchy. All this pleasant narrative in my case was robust enough to withstand a lifetime of contrary experience and learning from books like The Creature from Jekyll Island, or Milton Friedman’s work.
My dam held for half a century, until that moment with Linn, when I heard myself blame America’s manufacturing demise on our oligarchs, not China. For years I separated and catalogued facts, and tossed them over the dam to swim around in my head independently. Suddenly the dam broke and those facts formed a fearsome school that flooded my consciousness.
At that moment, I realized it is America’s oligarchs who are destroying our currency. It is our oligarchs who want our border, our cities, and our nation to collapse. It is our oligarchs who installed a senile fool in the Presidency. It is our oligarchs who control the media. It is our oligarchs who feted Chairman Xi in San Francisco last year. It is our oligarchs who likely gave the world COVID as their response to a public that dared to think we could elect people who would actually represent us. It is our oligarchs who inflicted their “vaccines” on the world. Can we doubt that it is our oligarchs who are now directing our own government against us? Indeed, our government has long been a helpless tool in their hands.
Neither a democracy, nor a representative republic, for well over a century America has been an oligarchy, and the pity is, we all know it. It’s the dams made of fables that were planted in our childhood minds that keep us from seeing it. I now look back at the history and the horrors of the 20th century with new eyes. Try it and see if you get a clearer view of the immediate threat, as well as the ugly reality of the past.
I’m certainly not inclined to dismiss the CCP as a threat, but could it be a convenient distraction? A minor villain, perhaps, if not a boogeyman? Was it created by our oligarchs? Is it being used now to misdirect us away from the true, mortal threat standing in our faces?
The flowering of manufacturing in the 19th century gave rise to the fortunes we all recognize. They were relatively few in number but their wealth is what gave us the Progressive Era and the administrative state.
The prototype of the oligarch “Br’er Rabbit play” was the railroads and the Interstate Commerce Commission, established to regulate the railroads. In short order the railroad barons came to control the ICC and use it as their tool to boost their interests. Can you say CDC? FDA? “Please don’t throw me in that regulatory briar patch!”
The technology revolution of our day has spawned hordes of billionaires, many of whom have formed comfortable “public-private partnerships” with government. Along the way, some have become wealthier than most governments on earth. Few of them seem to show any particular loyalty to their nation or their neighbors.
The problem is that all those people are human. The recent billionaires have demonstrated an amazing capacity to get rich. However, if they were dorks when they started, they’re just rich dorks today. In the American oligarchical system, unfortunately, we get stuck with their vices and shortcomings.
How do we protect ourselves from more of their deadly, crackpot fantasies?
Image: Public Domain
No comments:
Post a Comment