Socialism – RESOLVE

Carrboro’s power play

By Steve Woodward

We probably should have seen this coming. Amid the steady, predictable demise of misguided policies imposing “diversity, equity and inclusion” on education, large corporations, small businesses, law enforcement and the U.S. military industrial complex, virtue signalers were becoming desperate. They needed to find another hill on which to DIE absent DEI.

If, in fact, DEI is destined to fail in its mission to cripple for-profit entities and elevate individuals into positions of power and influence because of their skin color or gender identity, another destructive path had to be identified.

And now we are learning that it runs through North Carolina. Last week, underwritten by an obscure environmental activism operation with an ominous name (NC WARN, aka, Waste Awareness and Reduction Network), the municipality of Carrboro filed a lawsuit against Charlotte-based Duke Energy, a dominant coal generated electricity provider and natural gas holding company. According to the Duke Energy website the company provides services to 8.4 million customers in Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio and South Carolina, and provides natural gas service to 1.7 million customers across five states.

The complaint filed December 4, 2024, in Orange County (N.C.) superior court “seeks compensation for the damages that it has incurred, and will incur in the future, as the proximate result of Defendant Duke Energy Corporation’s knowing deception campaign concerning the causes and dangers posed by the climate crisis”.

NC WARN’s attorney, Matt Quinn, told The Washington Post that the town has hired consultants to assess the cost of climate-induced damages, and expects it may be up to $60 million.

Good luck covering the consultants’ fees. The suit’s filing is littered with the climate cult’s tired, baseless claims connected by hedgy words such as “may” and “likely”.

Naturally, the petulant mayor of Carrboro, Barbara Foushee, and her band of hysterical municipal “leaders”, many of whom are indoctrinates of the University of North Carolina in nearby Chapel Hill, have completely overlooked the irony of going after Duke Energy for the sin of providing reliable energy to the town, county and state for decades.

Electricity literally lifted Carrboro out of obscurity. It was incorporated in 1911 but did not take on its present name until two years later. In 1913, one Julian Shakespeare Carr, owner of the town’s grist mill, made a generous offer to deliver electricity and expand the mill. At the time, nobody cared that Carr was a well-established white supremacist who supported the Ku Klux Klan, opposed the 15th Amendment that gave black men the right to vote, and bought the News and Observer newspaper to provide a platform to advance his views with the help of editor Josephus Daniels, a fellow, virulent white supremacist.

(Editor’s note: Daniels? Sounds familiar, huh? His grandson, Frank Daniels Jr., was publisher of the N&O for 26 years, retired and subsequently purchased The Pilot of Southern Pines in 1996. Daniels’ ancestors still own the publication to this day, and while they denounce their white supremacist DNA, we wonder what old Josephus would think of their rabid endorsement of a drag queen show in the local theater in 2022).

The Carrboro climate zealots not only are blind to irony but also are lousy at optics. The mayor unveiled the lawsuit by staging a highly rehearsed press event in a well illuminated room with panels of electric lighting in the ceiling and a large flat panel monitor bearing Carrboro’s funky green (of course) town logo. They might have gathered outdoors as a nod to “Mother Earth”. Instead, they flipped on the lights to underscore the implausibility of life without electrical power.

One of the tenets of the lawsuit is that Duke Energy has consistently deceived citizens “into believing that climate science was in dispute, that climate change was not real, that humans were not causing the climate crisis, that climate change did not present an urgent risk to the Earth and public, that fossil fuels were not causing the climate crisis, that fossil fuels were necessary, and other such mistaken beliefs.”

The lawsuit pins all of the looming threats facing the people of Carrboro to one entity, Duke Energy, although it is undisputed that the United States has a much lower, and persistently declining, carbon “footprint” compared to other developed nations, namely China, India and Russia. But the disingenuousness does not end there.

Climate risk data analyst First Street assesses risk factors in municipalities across a spectrum ranging from flooding, fire, wind, air quality and heat. First Street chronicles one major flooding event in Carrboro, in September 2018. Ninety-seven properties were impacted. Overall, reports First Street: “The city of Carrboro has minor risk from flooding. There are 640 properties in Carrboro at risk of flooding over the next 30 years(emphasis added). This represents 11.7% of all properties in Carrboro.”

There’s more:

This year 11.3% of properties in Carrboro have risk of flooding. In 30 years 11.6% of properties in Carrboro will have risk of flooding, First Street projects.
“Dangerously hot days and heatwaves may occur more often,” First Street acknowledges. Yet, the projections do not exactly strike end-of-the-world fear in a normal person who knows better than to run a marathon in 100-plus degrees.
Thirty years ago, Carrboro experienced 11 “dangerously” hot days (100+), compared to 23 such extreme days in 2024. Based on its projection model, First Street sees a possibility that Carrboro will contend with 41 sweltering days in 2054. Assuming this is accurate, Carrboro’s extreme heat days might increase at a rate of 0.6 days per year. Or not. (Across the ages, climate “changes” in both directions but that’s not a fact the climate cultists acknowledge).

Mayor Foushee was asked by a WRAL TV reporter about the timing of the lawsuit targeting Duke Energy.

“Why not now?” said the town’s first black woman mayor (photo nearby). “The opportunity presented itself. … When you talk about righting wrongs, or facing injustices, someone has to step out and give it voice and take action.”

Based on Carrboro’s crime data, one is left to ponder as to whether the mayor is using climate as a diversion from more pressing issues. According to NeighborhoodScout.com, the crime rate in Carrboro is considerably higher than the national average across all communities in America from the largest to the smallest. The chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime in Carrboro is 1 in 50. Based on FBI crime data, Carrboro is not one of the safest communities in America. Relative to North Carolina, Carrboro has a crime rate that is higher than 66% of the state’s cities and towns of all sizes.

Perhaps Carrboro’s esteemed leaders are counting on the town’s propensity toward violence to further engage Duke Energy in the battle to save the planet. Who knows what a combination of fear mongering and climate religiosity might accomplish?

A former television meteorologist in San Francisco, Brian Sussman, elaborates on this frequent confluence in a new book, “Climate Cult” (PostHill Press, May 2024)

Sussman was run out of the weather forecasting profession because he challenged “global warming” as long ago as 1996. Sussman’s book presents a road map toward exposing and defeating the war on life, liberty and property waged by the climate tyrants.

“The premise of climate change has become similar to a system of ecclesiastic belief, based on pseudo-facts and science, while manifesting traditional religious elements of guilt, revelation, repentance, devotion, and duty. … Leaders of the cult preach dreams of a new world, a pristine environment, a calmed climate, a manageable population, and universal salvation through sustainable development, which, in turn, will expunge the world of social injustice and inequity.

“This cult has its own prophets and evangelists dedicated to converting the masses through the cataclysmic messaging of fear. … Guilt is repressed through acknowledgment of (indulgence)and the subsequent pursuit of a frugal existence and reduced carbon footprint; these are all paths of self-righteousness and outward virtue.”

Duke Energy pledges carbon-zero emissions from electrical power generation by 2050. But what if the cultists decide that’s not soon enough? What if a well-educated graduate with multiple degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill or Duke University decides that Duke Energy executives have evaded responsibility for killing the planet for far too long? What if Carrboro’s lawsuit advances through the court system and stalls?

That person wouldn’t think of making the ultimate sacrifice, would he? That person would never contemplate shooting a Duke Energy executive in cold blood on a city street, would he?

Rogan’s heroes

“It may be that this present system, with no modifications and no experiments, can survive. Perhaps the money-making machine has some kind of built-in perpetual motion, but I do not think so. To a very considerable extent, the media of mass communications in a given country reflects the political, economic and social climate in which it grows and flourishes. That is the reason our system differs from the British and the French, and also from the Russian and the Chinese. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. And our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.” — Edward R. Murrow, October 15, 1958, speaking to the Radio and Television News Association’s annual convention

By Steve Woodward

Distilled to its essence, CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow’s speech delivered to broadcasting colleagues 66 years ago warned that television, then in its infancy, already had begun to betray its audiences and imperil its long-term viability. There is no one even remotely similar to Murrow remaining in the 21st century corporate media. Murrow cared about truth, substance and an informed population, all now obsolete.

Murrow also said this during his remarks in 1958 in Chicago: “I have decided to express my concern about what I believe to be happening to radio and television. … I have no feud, either with my employers, any sponsors, or with the professional critics of radio and television. But I am seized with an abiding fear regarding what these two instruments are doing to our society, our culture and our heritage.”

The Democrat Party’s precipitous march to the ideological Left likely began long before Murrow’s speech, around the time Woodrow Wilson ascended to the U.S. presidency in 1912 espousing “progressivism”. It ebbed and flowed in the decades ahead, revived by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

But the Democrats soon entered a period of near extinction in presidential politics, putting forth presidential aspirants named George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Carter was the only one who actually made it to the Oval Office as president but his gain was the Democrat’s loss. His ineptitude assured Carter will be remembered among the most failed presidents.

Then, in 1992, along came William Jefferson Clinton, the youthful but obscure governor of Arkansas. It is notable that his ascension to the presidency coincided with the first cracks in network television’s absolute information dominance. Cable TV’s CNN cemented its legitimacy during riveting coverage of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. The internet was coming into its own with 10 web sites up and running (including the Raleigh News & Observer’s Nando.net, one of the first digital platforms adopted by a newspaper). There would be nearly 3,000 functional web sites by 1995. And a former disc jockey named Rush Limbaugh was conducting an experiment that would become a genre — conservative talk radio, of which he would be king for 30 years.

Deep beneath the surface, something else was happening that would influence and corrupt mainstream media in ways Murrow could not have foreseen. Public schools and institutions of higher education pulled away the veil. Educators devolved into indoctrinators committed to diminishing American exceptionalism, severing the connective tissue of Judeo-Christian values that defined its citizens, and challenging every societal boundary by seeking to normalize transgenderism, relativism (the end of delineating between right and wrong) and climate-change hysteria. Despite progress toward diminishing racial inequality made by the civil rights movement, the mantra among educators increasingly was moving toward dismissing the U.S. as irredeemably and systemically racist to its core.

This was the precursor of a cultural shift across mass media. Newsrooms and television studios gradually became infested by graduates of these institutions, today’s editors, producers and reporters who view journalism through an activist lens. As the Democrats moved further Left, the media went with them, no longer inspired by the objective nobility of their journalistic forefathers — Murrow, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, John Chancellor and Charles Kuralt, et al.

The election of Barack Hussein Obama in 2008 opened the floodgates of a newly emboldened state-run media, not beholden to scrutinizing the powerful but more prone than ever to fawning over Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America and enabling those in his orbit to increase their power.

The zenith of Obama’s iron boot control over a compliant and corrupt media came amid the 2012 election cycle during a debate between Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney, aka, the Candy Crowley debate. The media had spent weeks running interference for the Obama-Hillary Clinton debacle in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, when four Americans died amid a terror attack on the U.S. embassy. During an October debate moderated by CNN’s Crowley, Romney seized on the Obama administration’s refusal to acknowledge the coordinated assault as an act of terror. Crowley jumped to Obama’s defense on live television. “(Obama) did call it an act of terror,” she said. (In reality, Obama and Clinton shamelessly blamed the attack on a viral internet video beyond their control).

That debate, artfully choreographed by CNN, enabled Obama to move the race from a dead heat to a decisive victory (332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206) despite his tepid approval rating (46%), high unemployment (8.3%) and growing contempt toward ObamaCare. Of course to have used these realities against Obama would have been dismissed as “racist”, which is what the Left often said about Limbaugh and his millions of loyal listeners.

It is sadly ironic that Limbaugh passed away just as alternative media was beginning to take root in the aftermath of Trump’s 2016 dismantling of Hillary Clinton’s coronation. Trump became the first president to recognize the utility of social media, going after his adversaries and corrupt media outlets with his so-called “mean tweets” using Twitter (before he was blackballed by the tech elites).

But this alternate media landscape was coming rapidly to the fore as critical thinkers (Conservatives) watched Trump Derangement Syndrome transform The Atlantic magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and, to a lesser degree, Fox News, into naked appendages of the Left. The corner was turned during pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates, and the ascension of Joe Biden to the White House by precise leveraging of COVID hysteria.

The mainstream media overlords were dismissive of Steve Bannon’s War Room, and the Joe Rogans, Dinesh D’Souzas, Charlie Kirks, Sebastian Gorkas and Dan Bonginos expanding audience across the live streaming spectrum. By the time Trump launched his bid for re-election, millions of MAGA faithful were tuning into Newsmax, the Real America’s Voice network, Rumble and, more recently, the Tucker Carlson Network, where the likes of Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat down for lengthy, granular interviews.

Trump’s campaign recognized the influence of alternative outlets, most notably Rogan’s vast audience. A three-hour interview with Rogan attracted a seismic 45 million views on You Tube, and 25 millions across Spotify and other platforms (The Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2024). Trump also did 90 minutes of live-streamed chat with a video gamer phenom named Adin Ross (at the behest of Trump’s teen son, Barron). Across all of 2024, Trump was a guest on 20 podcasts, the Journal reports. (Kamala Harris dodged Rogan altogether).

The net effect of this dramatic shift raises a question future Republican presidential candidates must ask: Why would I consent to a network controlled, prime time television debate with a Democrat ever again? Answer: You wouldn’t. You shouldn’t. Consider this stunning data point. The Journal, citing the Associated Press VoteCast survey, notes that Trump got the support of 56% of male voters ages 18 to 29. Where do these youngsters go for news and analysis? TikTok and podcasts. Period.

The TV networks are bleeding viewers and that erosion was bad news for the Harris-Biden bid for reelection. CNN’s prime time lineup does not even reach one million households (it has fallen to 792,000), and its viewers’ median age is 69. MSNBC’s 1.3 million prime time household audience has a median age of 70. These folks have likely never have heard of Rogan, Kirk and their media peers.

The Journal’s Kimberley Strassel observes that the media’s fierce defense of the Left backfired this time because “a narrative full of fantasy enabled Democrats to live in a world disconnected from the mood and worries of the country”, which were laser focused on the economy, illegal immigration and the absurdity of men competing in women’s sports.

In the aftermath of Trump’s resounding comeback win on November 5, there is something else to celebrate (and relish). Think about it. The smug network bastards who despise 80 million-plus Americans who voted for Trump/MAGA — Jake Tapper, Rachel Maddow, Joy Reid, Anderson Cooper, Margaret Brennan and David Muir, along with many others — are hurtling toward complete irrelevance. It’s over.

Morrow foresaw this moment coming.

“This instrument (television) can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire,” he said in 1958. “But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box.”

Partisan or patriot?

By Steve Woodward

British prime minister Neville Chamberlain holds a most dubious distinction as a failed leader derailed by diplomatic appeasement.

In his quest to prevent World War II in 1938, Chamberlain attempted to cut a deal with a rising German political figure, Adolf Hitler. Chamberlain pursued appeasement despite writings and speeches by Hitler that failed to hide his lust for war and the creation of a German empire, and even after Hitler’s forced annexation of Austria in March 1938.

Chamberlain proclaimed that he achieved “peace for our time” when he returned from meetings with Hitler and other European heads of state after signing the Munich Agreement in September 1938. By early 1939, Hitler’s Germany began it rampage across the continent, trampling the pages of the agreement under foot.

Hitler proceeded to do precisely what so many had warned Chamberlain about. World War II soon became inevitable.

Comparing contemporary leaders or nations to Hitler and the Third Reich typically is ill-advised because he was no mere tyrant. He was a murderous monster. Ask Donald Trump, who is neither but is often portrayed as Hitler-in-waiting by the fear mongering Left.

But there is a parallel between Chamberlain and his underestimation of Hitler happening before our eyes in 2024. There certainly is nothing Hitleresque about Trump, the MAGA movement, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or a corrupt corporate media. The parallel lies in the underestimation by Republicans and so-called independents of who these people are, and their insistence that we must “tone down the rhetoric” and “end the polarization”.

Columnist John Hood of the John Locke Foundation – a constitutional government research institute – laments the nation’s political partisan divide in a recent, oddly timed column amid the final countdown to election day 2024.

“I do indeed believe in bridging the partisan divide,” Hood writes. “For one thing, our discourse has become coarse, often even revolting.”

You don’t say, Mr. Hood? If we could only reason with Islamic jihadists. If we could somehow empathize with virulent antisemites parading in our streets and disrupting universities in defense of an Iran-backed terror plot that killed 1,200 innocents in Israel on October 7. 2023. If we could embrace the measured temperament of, say, Neville Chamberlain.

He prattles on: “Understand that others probably see things differently from you not because they are evil or stupid, but because they possess a different set of facts, experiences, assumptions and values.”

The partisan divide Hood laments is not, as he would have us believe, a drifting to extremes on both sides. Arguably, conservatives remain steadfast in defending our core principles in the spirit of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile, since the improbably ascension of Obama beginning 20 years ago, the Left has not merely drifted but sprinted further away from any pretense of “leaning” Left of center.

Hood seems to have missed numerous glaring examples, so let’s refresh his murky memory.

They were more measured, at first, in their dismissive contempt for conservative Republicans and their Christian tendencies. Barack Obama mocked us during a private event for “clinging to guns and religion”. Hillary Clinton scoffed, also behind closed doors, about a “basket of deplorables”. Then along came Trump in 2016. Gloves came off. The media concocted Russian collusion. Democrats in Congress pursued Trump’s impeachment on baseless grounds. And lusting for Trump’s demise, the Left seized upon a manageable virus unleashed by their Chinese ally, to impose formerly unimaginable tyranny, locking down cities and leveraging a well-orchestrated “health crisis” to hijack an election in 2020.

The emergence of a Biden regime has turned ordinary Americans into January 6 political prisoners. It has ushered in an era of lawfare in an effort, futile as it turns out, to diminish or even imprison Trump. It has normalized crime and homeland insecurity by deliberately allowing untold millions of illegal immigrants to surge across the U.S-Mexico border.

It has brought us to a place where Hillary Clinton, no longer behind closed doors, is calling for the imprisonment of Americans for exercising a right to free speech. And to a place where vice president Kamala Harris is installed without a single vote having been cast as her party’s presidential nominee, platforming a campaign that defends abortion, ignores the economic realities crushing the American people and brazenly mocks those who dare express their Christian faith.

During a rally in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Harris denounced two college students who in defiance of her threats to nationalize abortion shouted, “Christ is king”. She shot back: “You guys are at the wrong rally.”

Only a deranged atheist would be “triggered” by the mention of Jesus Christ. Is this a “polarizing” moment, Mr. Hood?

The strongest indicator that the era of naïve partisanship is over, and that it has been usurped by an understanding that we stand at a crossroads of distinct choice – good vs. evil, America First vs. America in managed decline – is proven by the very public denunciation of the latter by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard and, most recently, Democrat hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman.

Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, not only openly endorses a second Trump presidency. He outlines 33 policies embraced by the Obama-Biden-Harris that mirror what America’s most “aggressive adversaries would likely implement if they wanted to destroy America from within and had the ability to take control of our leadership.”

A review of Ackman’s concerns refutes the flimsy narrative advanced by Hood that we just need to mind our manners and we’ll all be sharing an ideological hot tub before we know it.

In fact, Mr. Hood, I would warn that it is dangerous, and intellectually dishonest, to lump evil and stupid together when exposing the agenda of the Left. The Left is inherently Godless and, thus, evil to its core, but stupid? Certainly not. Dismantling a nation and eroding its values, its culture, requires vast intellect, actually. The term “evil genius” applies. Utterly despicable, compassionless and arrogant, the George Soros-Klaus Schwab-Barack Obama deep state overlords do not want for intellect or resolve.

Thus, opposing them is not merely a partisan choice. It is duty.

The Harris file

By Steve Woodward

The ascension into public life and political power by Kamala Harris makes Barack Obama’s improbable rise seem noble and inspiring by comparison. That’s quite a statement considering Obama’s sordid path to the White House.

He was “the least experienced politician in at least one hundred years to obtain a major party nomination for President of the United States,” wrote David Freddoso in his 2008 book, “The Case Against Barack Obama”. “He (was) the product of a marriage between two of the least attractive parts of Democratic politics – the hard-core radicalism of the 1960s era and Chicago’s Machine politics.”

While Obama was artfully positioning himself to become a U.S. Senator from Illinois in 2003, Harris was navigating her way through the San Francisco political scene after earning a degree from the University of California’s Hastings School of Law and working for several district attorneys. Her mentor was also her periodic romantic interest, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (photo nearby), a married man who had been opening doors for Harris for the better part of a decade.

An attorney who often crossed paths with Harris was Harmeet Dhillon, who arrived in the Bay Area as Harris was becoming more politically connected. In the ensuing years, Dhillon, an active member of the San Francisco Republican Party (who knew it existed?) marveled at Harris’ ability to move from one job to another while accomplishing very little and working minimal hours.

During a fascinating 110-minute interview by Tucker Carlson on his streaming Tucker Carlson Network (home of many such in-depth interviews, and, as of October 10, 2024, James O’Keefe’s intense documentary exposing the extreme crisis ongoing along the U.S.-Mexico border), Dhillon describes in detail what The Wall Street Journal aptly described as “the lightness of being Kamala Harris”. These are among the most revealing of Dhillon’s memories:

“(Harris) really has been kind of a shapeshifter throughout her entire career and existence,” Dhillon tells Carlson.

“One of the interesting things that I found when looking at her background is the first time she registered to vote was at age 29. … So, many years after coming to the United States (Harris lived in Montreal with her divorced mother, a professor, from age 12 through 18), and during the year that she dated … former mayor and (California state house) speaker Willie Brown is the year that she registered to vote (1993). … Well after she became an attorney, well after she became a prosecutor, she hadn’t registered to vote.”

Dhillon marvels at the flimsiness of Harris’ record as a prosecutor during those early years, first in Alameda County’s D.A. office, then San Francisco’s more visible D.A. office.

“In Alameda County she specialized in child sex crimes, an important job,” Dhillon said. “According to research that was done by some of her opposition when she ran for (San Francisco) district attorney in 2003, she tried something like eight cases that they can prove there, during her eight years as a prosecutor.”

Eight cases in eight years.

Two years in the San Francisco D.A.’s office failed to deliver the high-profile positions she wanted. Harris (photo nearby) abruptly quit and went to the city attorney’s office, a lateral move. During that time, Willie Brown appointed Harris to a pair of “patronage jobs” that required little work but helped Harris earn more than $400,000 during a five-year period on top of her prosecutor’s salary.

“She was marked out as privileged in her 20s and 30s, very early on,” said Dhillon, who recalls that Brown also provided Harris with a free car, a BMW no less.

Brown’s ultimate leveraging of his influence came with a dual objective. He was anxious to rid the city of a D.A. (Terrance Hallinan) who was launching too many investigations into corruption involving Brown’s cronies. And, he prioritized the D.A. job as Harris’s next move up the political ladder. Harris, despite an unremarkable career to date, was inaugurated as the city D.A. in 2004.

But the next move, the one that would facilitate the fast tracking of Harris to Vice President of the United States, remained on the horizon – Attorney General of California.

Dhillon well remembers that Harris sought to position herself as being against runaway spending on political campaigns when she launched her run for AG.

“If you agreed to cap your fund-raising and spending at $211,000 in 2003, you got a statement published in the voter guide that was mailed to all the almost half a million voters in San Francisco, registered voters, saying that you had voluntarily agreed to confine yourself to that spending cap. So it’s like (agreeing to) a level playing field and it’s a little bit of a gold star that you’re agreeing not to engage in corruption and wasteful spending and cronyism by raising money from all kinds of unknown sources. So she agreed to that. She filed a piece of paper. She signed it under penalty of perjury, saying I, Kamala Harris, agree to this voluntary spending limit.

“Most of the candidates running for office in California and San Francisco … agreed to that spending limit.”

In a three-way race for AG Harris trailed, a distant third, right out of the blocks and was gaining no ground. Willie Brown took note. This was to be the seminal moment when Harris demonstrated that she was a corrupt member of the San Francisco machine, even as a novice politician. It has defined Harris ever since and is the bedrock of her unlikely campaign for President of the United States in 2024.

“She realized,” Dhillon told Carlson, “she was going to have to really supercharge her spending. Willie Brown helped her with this. Willie Brown also helped raise money for independent expenditures to support her as well. One of her campaign themes was that she was going to be tough on drugs, tough on marijuana. In 2003, the recreational use of marijuana was not legal in California. She was very tough on pot.

“So apparently some pot activists who didn’t like this … were pouring over the campaign finance records. And it’s a pot activist who realized that Kamala Harris had raised over $300,000 and had spent over $300,000. So this person … let the other campaigns know; they filed an ethics complaint against her. And at the end of the election, she had spent over $600,000, so triple the amount that she was allowed.

“But thanks to hiring a good lawyer and making the excuse that, the form changed, I didn’t really understand the meaning of this, so please lift the cap, she got the San Francisco Ethics Commission (to look the other way). And by the way, many of those people on the Ethics Commission owed their positions to Willie Brown.

“It’s a crime, by the way. She could have been prosecuted for a misdemeanor had she been properly held accountable for this significant campaign finance violation and anybody else would have. But the Ethics Commission simply lifted the cap, which is not in the statute. So instead of disqualifying her, which would have been the normal punishment and prosecuting her, she simply got away with it. So in her first race for elected office, she ignored the campaign finance limits. She used corrupt patronage from her former lover to raise the money.”

Against this backdrop, Harris would run for U.S. Senate and win on her first try in 2016. She was selected by a two-term vice president, Joe Biden, to be his “person of color” running mate for VP when he ran and was installed in 2021.

And here we are. To fully contemplate what an unqualified, unethical and unbearable individual Harris is as a U.S. vice president and would-be president, contrast her story and record with that of our nation’s first vice president, John Adams.

He was a farmer who would become a scholar, a political philosopher and a consequential foreign diplomat at a time in U.S. history when the nation’s viability depended on loans from bankers in Amsterdam. Adams secured them. Before that, he authored the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, the oldest written constitution (emphasis added) in the world still in effect.

In David Rubenstein’s magnificent collection of interviews with master historians of our time, “The American Story”, he engages legendary historian David McCullough in a conversation about Adams, about whom McCullough published the quintessential biography in 2001 (“John Adams”, Simon & Schuster).

McCullough points to a clause in the Massachusetts Constitution, which Adams wrote in 1780. He “wrote the whole (constitution),” McCullough says. “It’s a clause that was never in any constitution up till then and is still not in any other constitution except New Hampshire’s.”

Imagine a San Francisco machine politician or one of its mutations, contemplating, let alone writing:

“Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among (all), it shall be the duty of the legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this Commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them in public schools and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions … to inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.”

Today, Democrats like Harris reflexively tune out after the opening words, wisdom and knowledge. How very quaint. How very irrelevant.

Apathetic or afraid?

By Steve Woodward

During the afternoon business session of the 2024 North Carolina Republican Party convention on May 25, 2024, Moore County was represented by 48 Republican delegates who not only were pre-registered but had “checked in”. They were in the conventional hall, having reported for duty.

This band of citizens who chose to launch their Memorial Day Weekend in a hotel ballroom with seating configured similar to the economy section of a discount airline cabin could have elected to be anywhere else. Driving to the Atlantic coast. Driving to a mountain cottage. Smoking a pork butt at home on their patio. Playing 18 in the Cradle of American Golf beneath the pines.

But they assembled instead in an antiquated hotel and conference center overlooking strip malls to conduct the business of their party. Alongside them were more than 1,300 delegates from most of North Carolina’s 100 counties. Believe it or not, in this moment in time in America which finds us hurtling toward tyranny and Socialism, there are counties in our state that can’t find even one Republican to show up for the annual convention.

As for Moore County, our brigade was a familiar one. The “usual suspects”. Dedicated. Reliable. We are family. We respect one another though we do not always see eye to eye. There is underlying tension. There are generational issues. When we return to our county, we will have our disagreements while continuing to be united by a sense of duty.

Amid this perilous moment in American history, it is striking that actively engaged Republicans are perpetually worried that we’ll be outworked by well organized Democrats. One important function of a state convention is to energize attendees to go back home to rally citizens away from the sidelines. Each county is limited as to convention delegate counts, but it’s worth noting that the 48 Moore County delegates in the hall accounted for .00155 percent of the county’s 31,107 registered Republican voters as of April 2024. They could have traveled to the convention in a chartered bus with seats to spare.

Why do Republicans rarely max out their delegate counts at the annual gathering? There are plausible explanations. Some people avoid large crowds at all costs. Attending a convention is not inexpensive. The base registration price is $75. That ticket will not get you into the luncheons and dinners where the keynote speakers are on stage (Lara and Eric Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, etc.). Those tickets costs hundreds more.

But a majority of right-of-center folks have never and will never consider attending a convention, door knocking or phone calling on behalf of the cause. A lot of citizens are fully aware of what is at stake when voters go to the polls this November but choose to tune out the Left’s persecution of Judeo-Christian values amid overt weaponization of the judicial and legal systems to punish adversaries. They say they are not “political”. They chose not to watch “the news”.

What if we are mistaking what appears to be apathy for a deeper symptom? Maybe it’s fear. In the freest country in the world citizens are afraid. It’s easy to pay lip service to the courage of our Founding Fathers but our inherent fears — of character assassination, of job loss, of strained friendships and family relationships, of cancellation — stop most of us from embracing that courage. The Left is ruthless. A few short years ago, fear was weaponized to escalate a health crisis, to turn family members against one another, to isolate children, to re-order social norms, and to force healthy citizens to submit to experimental injections, and, ultimately, to compromise the integrity of an election season.

Some fear they’ll be labeled racist or transphobic for confronting the identity politics of the Left. But there also are Republicans who are afraid to stand up to fellow Republicans when our own teammates betray or disappoint. It’s easier, less confrontational, to sink into the shadows as the establishment shamelessly defends the status quo. Consider how many Republicans ardently condemned those who sought the removal of feckless Kevin McCarthy as House speaker.

In Moore County, the only vocally conservative member of the local school board is the one denounced by a Republican board chairman and the Republican Party leadership. The one person who demands fiscal accountability and transparency in public education was “primaried” last March. The ploy failed because authenticity and loyalty to principle always win. Ultimately, the establishment Right prefers that those who push too hard, say too much, and denounce the hypocrites just become fed up and quit. And many have.

At the convention, Ramaswamy (photo nearby), the former presidential candidate who is a rising star and now a Trump surrogate, and Lt. Governor Mark Robinson, the GOP nominee for governor, issued stern warnings to timid Republicans. The crowd applauded. Let’s hope their words resonated.

“There is a culture of fear that has spread across this country like an epidemic,” Ramaswamy said. “Fear of losing your job; fear of your kids getting a bad grade in school; fear of becoming an outcast in your own community. And that culture of fear has actually totally replaced our culture of free speech in America. What is the best measure of the health of our democracy? It is the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think in public. We stand for truth, and we do not apologize for it.”

Republicans are “not just on the right,” Robinson said. “We are right.” He went on to exalt the assembled to become “warriors” and to resist the urge deeply rooted in far too many Republicans to “tone it down”.

“This is our moment to start running to something, back to what it means to be an American,” Ramaswamy said. “It means we stand for the rule of law. It means the people we elect to run the government actually run the government, not the deep state … that is pulling the strings of power.

“These are American ideals we fought a revolution to secure, and the question is, do we believe those ideals still exist? The next question is, are you willing to fight for them? That’s what this year is about. … When we meet George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, and John Jay in the afterlife, and they look us in the eye and say, ‘What sacrifice did you make for your country?’ We had better have a darn good answer to give them. What sacrifice are you willing to make for this country?”

We know these fearless warriors are out there. They were in Washington on January 6, 2021. Owed to the sinister trap set by the Biden regime and then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi, some engaged in and were not deterred from criminal activity, while others, curious about photo ops inside the Capitol, have been falsely charged as criminals and languish in prison cells. History will record that the motives of the vast majority assembled on January 6 were pure and just.

More than three years on, the spirit of January 6 grips the nation. It is seen and felt every time Donald Trump arrives at a rally. A recent rally in the South Bronx in New York City suggests the fervor to derail the Biden wrecking machine is building. The 25,000-plus who gathered demonstrated the power of hope over fear. What else explains the surging numbers of black and Hispanic citizens, and college students, boldly expressing their support for Trump’s re-election?

Political conventions are moments in time that have their place and fulfill a purpose. But that’s all they are. What matters in the four months until the onset of early voting is compelling sporadic voters to actually vote with courage for Trump and all of the Republican candidates who will advance the MAGA agenda. How is this accomplished? It is accomplished when individuals liberate themselves from their fears by adopting the spirit and courage of the founders, who relied on the hand of God to sustain them.

They knew their lives and finances were at risk, and some lost both. Today, in 2024, no one is asking fellow Republicans to run into a hail of gunfire. The asks are actually very reasonable. Get over the fear of signing a letter to the editor that condemns Leftist hypocrisy; of standing up at a school board meeting to defend the right of parents to protect their children from sexually graphic books and gender grooming; of denouncing elected Republican leaders when they betray our core principles; and of flying banners, planting yard signs and engaging with friends and neighbors even at the risk of enduring their wrath. Relish their misery.

Worse than fear is its by-product. Despair. Until the Left is silenced it will pursue its Marxist goals of ruling over a frightened, despairing, and defeated people no longer recognizable as Americans.