The ‘Never Trump’ Construct:

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

 The ‘Never Trump’ Construct: The president’s fiercest critics still do not grasp that Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the GOP’s internal strife.

For all the talk of a Civil War in the Republican party over Donald Trump, 90 percent of Republicans ended up voting for him. Bitterness Over the 2016 Election? So a vocal Never Trump Republican establishment had not much effect on the 2016 election. Voters do not carry conservative magazines to the polls. They are not swayed much by talking heads, and on Election Day they do not they print out conservative congressional talking points from their emails.
John McCain and Susan Collins are as renegade now as they were obstructionist in 2004. If in 2016 it is said that John McCain cannot forgive President Trump for his 2016 primary statements, it was also said in 2004 that John McCain could not forgive President Bush for how he won the 2000 primaries. Trump is called a Nazi and a fascist. But so was George W. Bush in 2006. Reagan in the campaign and during his first few months as president was slandered as a pleasant dunce as often as Trump is smeared as a mean dunce.
If neocons are now on MSNBC in 2017 trashing a Republican president, paleocons were doing the same in 2006 over Iraq. Parties always have dissidents. Donald Trump got about the same percentage of the Republican vote (about 90 percent) as John McCain won in 2008 — slightly less than Mitt Romney’s supposed 93 percent in 2012. If Romney’s 93 percent is the standard of party fealty (Obama usually pulled in about 92 percent of the Democratic vote), then it is hard to know whether the 3 percentage points fewer of Republicans who could not stomach McCain were about the same as the 3 percentage points fewer who were Never Trump.
In either case, 90 percent party loyalty was not good enough for McCain, and even 93 percent did not win Romney an election. Both, unlike Trump, lost too many Reagan Democrats and Independents in the swing states of the Electoral College. . . .
Apart from establishment figures, there is a split in perceptions between the vast 90 percent majority of Republicans who voted for Trump and the small 10 percent minority who did not — and it is largely over Trump himself and not his message. Never Trumpers now see the Trump base as prone to demagogic frenzies on immigration and trade; too monolithically white; often-angry blame-gaming losers of globalization; naïve rather than self-critical about so-called white pathologies; and in their populism too dismissive of the importance of political experience, impressive education, and the changing demography of the U.S.
The far more numerous Trump base voters see the Never Trumpers as too self-important; predictably bicoastal careerist; too quick to judge and write off their supposed ethical inferiors; too eager to get along with liberals within their own bubble; too wedded to traditional definitions of political qualifications and success; and more worried about decorum than winning.

Read the whole thing.
Plus: “The war is mostly infighting among politicos, pundits, politicians, and media people and so far does not necessarily change the realities of the voting public. We saw that reality in 2016 when the thunderous damnation Trump received from his own party had no profound effect on his candidacy.”

53Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds   

After Trump dossier revelation, FBI is next.

BYRON YORK:

After Trump dossier revelation, FBI is next.

Investigators looking into the so-called “Trump dossier” were not surprised when news broke Tuesday night that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, working through the Democrats’ law firm, Perkins Coie, financed the “salacious and unverified” compilation of allegations of Trump collusion with Russia in the 2016 presidential campaign. (The “salacious and unverified” description comes from former FBI Director James Comey.)
There had been plenty of talk about the Democrats and Perkins Coie, so much that investigators almost assumed that was the case. But it wasn’t until the Washington Post broke the story that it was confirmed.
“I’m shocked,” one lawmaker joked Tuesday night. “Who could have ever guessed?”
And why did the story break when it did? Credit the much-maligned Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The California Republican has been pursuing the dossier more aggressively than anyone else, and it was his Oct. 4 subpoena for the bank records of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that handled the dossier, that finally shook loose the information.
But knowing that the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and Perkins Coie supported the dossier is not the end of the story. The most important next step is the FBI.
Sometime in October 2016 — that is, at the height of the presidential campaign — Christopher Steele, the foreign agent hired by Fusion GPS to compile the Trump dossier, approached the FBI with information he had gleaned during the project. According to a February report in the Washington Post, Steele “reached an agreement with the FBI a few weeks before the election for the bureau to pay him to continue his work.”
It was an astonishing turn: the nation’s top federal law enforcement agency agreeing to fund an ongoing opposition research project being conducted by one of the candidates in the midst of a presidential election.

People should be fired — and, quite possibly, prosecuted — over this.

79Posted at 7:43 am by Glenn Reynolds   

W

It Wasn’t Comey’s Decision to Exonerate Hillary – It Was Obama’s

It Wasn’t Comey’s Decision to Exonerate Hillary – It Was Obama’s

 by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY September 2, 2017 12:33 PM 

The thing to understand, what has always been the most important thing to understand, is that Jim Comey was out in front, but he was not calling the shots. On the right, the commentariat is in full-throttle outrage over the revelation that former FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference. The news appears in a letter written to new FBI Director Christopher Wray by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham. Pundits and the Trump administration are shrieking because this indicates the decision to give the Democrats’ nominee a pass was clearly made long before the investigation was over, and even long before key witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed. It shows, they cry, that the fix was in! News Flash: This is not news. Let’s think about what else was going on in April 2016. I’ve written about it a number of times over the last year-plus, such as in a column a few months back: On April 10, 2016, President Obama publicly stated that Hillary Clinton had shown “carelessness” in using a private e-mail server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the [criminal statutes relevant to her e-mail scandal]). The president acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, its importance had been vastly overstated. This is precisely the reasoning that Comey relied on in ultimately absolving Clinton, as I recounted in the same column: On July 5, 2016, FBI director James Comey publicly stated that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in using a private email server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the relevant criminal statute). The director acknowledged that classified information had been transmitted via Secretary Clinton’s server, but he suggested that, in the greater scheme of things, it was just a small percentage of the emails involved. Obama’s April statements are the significant ones. They told us how this was going to go. The rest is just details. In his April 10 comments, Obama made the obvious explicit: He did not want the certain Democratic nominee, the candidate he was backing to succeed him, to be indicted. Conveniently, his remarks (inevitably echoed by Comey) did not mention that an intent to endanger national security was not an element of the criminal offenses Clinton was suspected of committing – in classic Obama fashion, he was urging her innocence of a strawman crime while dodging any discussion of the crimes she had actually committed. As we also now know – but as Obama knew at the time – the president himself had communicated with Clinton over her non-secure, private communications system, using an alias. The Obama administration refused to disclose these several e-mail exchanges because they undoubtedly involve classified conversations between the president and his secretary of state. It would not have been possible to prosecute Mrs. Clinton for mishandling classified information without its being clear that President Obama had engaged in the same conduct. The administration was never, ever going to allow that to happen. What else was going on in May 2016, while Comey was drafting his findings (even though several of the things he would purportedly “base” them on hadn’t actually happened yet)? Well, as I explained in real time (in a column entitled “Clinton E-mails: Is the Fix In?”), the Obama Justice Department was leaking to the Washington Post that Clinton probably would not be charged – and that her top aide, Cheryl Mills, was considered a cooperating witness rather than a coconspirator. Why? Well, I know you’ll be shocked to hear this, but it turns out the Obama Justice Department had fully adopted the theory of the case announced by President Obama in April. The Post explained that, according to its sources inside the investigation, there was “scant evidence tying Clinton to criminal wrongdoing” because there was “scant evidence that Clinton had malicious intent in [the] handling of e-mails” (emphasis added). Like Obama, the Post and its sources neglected to mention that Mrs. Clinton’s felonies did not require proof of “malicious intent” or any purpose to harm the United States – just that she willfully transmitted classified information, was grossly negligent in handling it, and withheld or destroyed government records. As I recounted in the same May 2016 column, the Obama Justice Department was simultaneously barring the FBI from asking Mills questions that went to the heart of the e-mails investigation – questions about the process by which Clinton and her underlings decided which of her 60,000 e-mails to surrender to the State Department, and which would be withheld (it ended up being about 33,000) as purportedly “private” (a goodly percentage were not). This was the start of a series of Justice Department shenanigans we would come to learn about: Cutting off key areas of inquiry; cutting inexplicable immunity deals; declining to use the grand jury to compel evidence; agreeing to limit searches of computers (in order to miss key time-frames when obstruction occurred); agreeing to destroy physical evidence (laptop computers); failing to charge and squeeze witnesses who made patently false statements; allowing subjects of the investigation to act as lawyers for other subjects of the investigation (in order to promote the charade that some evidence was off-limits due to the attorney-client privilege); and so on. There is a way – a notoriously aggressive way – that the Justice Department and FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case. Here, they were trying to unmake a case. Knowing all these things, as we now do and have for a year, I’m baffled by complaints that Comey allegedly made “his” decision not to charge Clinton before key witnesses were interviewed. The main issue is not that witnesses hadn’t been questioned; it is that by April 2016, restraints were already in place to ensure that witness interviews would be fruitless, and that any incriminating information they accidentally turned up would be ignored or buried. The decision not to indict Hillary Clinton was not made by then-FBI Director Comey. It was made by President Obama and his Justice Department – Comey’s superiors. If you want to say Comey went along for the ride rather than bucking the tide (as he concedes doing when Lynch directed him to call the Clinton probe a “matter,” not an “investigation”), that’s fair. But the fact that Comey already knew in April what he would say in July has long been perfectly obvious. The Obama administration was going to follow its leader. What Comey ultimately stated was just a repeat of what Obama was openly saying in April, and what Obama’s Justice Department was leaking to the press in May. Bottom line: In April, President Obama and his Justice Department adopted a Hillary Clinton defense strategy of concocting a crime no one was claiming Clinton had committed: to wit, transmitting classified information with an intent to harm the United States. With media-Democrat complex help, they peddled the narrative that she could not be convicted absent this “malicious intent,” in a desperate effort to make the publicly known evidence seem weak. Meanwhile, they quietly hamstrung FBI case investigators in order to frustrate the evidence-gathering process. When damning proof nevertheless mounted, the Obama administration dismissed the whole debacle by rewriting the statute (to impose an imaginary intent standard) and by offering absurd rationalizations for not applying the statute as written. That plan was in place and already being implemented when Director Comey began drafting the “findings” he would announce months later. But it was not Comey’s plan. It was Obama’s plan.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/451053/not-comeys-decision-exonerate-hillary-obamas-decision

Investigating the Investigators

Investigating the Investigators

By Victor Davis Hanson| October 23, 2017

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espite having both an expansive budget and a large legal team, Special Investigator Robert Mueller likely will not find President Trump culpable for any Russian collusion—or at least no court or congressional vote would, even if Mueller recommends an indictmentThat likelihood becomes clearer as the Trump investigators—in Congress, in the Justice Department, and the legions in the media—begin to grow strangely silent about the entire collusion charge, as other scandals mount and crowd out the old empty story. This news boomerang poses the obvious question—was the zeal of the original accusers of felony behavior with the Russian collusion merely an attempt at deflection? Was it designed to protect themselves from being accused of serious crimes?

What Did the FBI Do?
It was bad enough that the original narrative had the authors of the so-called Fusion GPS/Steele dossier leaking their smears to the media. Worse, the FBI, in the earlier fashion of the Clinton campaign, may have paid to obtain the Fusion concoction

Now it appears that some of the leakers who had the file in their possession also may have belonged to the American intelligence community. Did the FBI pass around its purchased smears to other intelligence agencies and the Obama administration in the unspoken hope that, in seeing the file had been so sanctioned and widely read, some intelligence operative or one of the Obama people would wink and nod as they leaked it to the press?

And why did the progenitors of the Steele dossier fraud—the Fusion GPS consortium and former Wall Street Journal reporters (a firm that had a prior history of smearing political enemies with “opposition research”) and working indirectly on behalf of Russian interests—reportedly behind closed doors invoke the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying about the dossier, its origins, and its funding before the House Intelligence Committee?

Increasingly, James Comey seems to be caught in contradictions of his own making. The former FBI director may well have misled the U.S. Congress in deliberate fashion, both about the timeline of events that led him to recommend not charging Hillary Clinton and about his denials that the FBI had communications about the bizarre “accidental” meeting on an Arizona tarmac between the U.S. Attorney General and Bill Clinton. How does an FBI Director get away with leaking his own notes, ostensibly FBI property, to the media with the expressed intent of leveraging the selection of a special prosecutor, only to succeed in having his friend, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, appointed to that very post—an official who presumably and earlier had been investigating possible Clinton collusion with Russian uranium interests?

So Many Questions, So Few Answers
Apart from noting how strange and surreal it was, no one yet knows the full relationship between former Democratic National Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and her IT “expert,” the now-indicted Imran Awan. Why would Wasserman-Schultz go out of her way to protect him and by extension his network from government investigations—even as Awan’s criminal familial enterprises, as well as his unauthorized and perhaps illegal conduct concerning government communications, were being exposed? Why is Awan apparently eager to talk to prosecutors about his relationships with Wasserman-Schultz and other congressional representatives? Why did an “in-the-know” Wasserman-Schultz apparently allow Awan to act so illegally for so long? In other words, the behavior of the former head of the DNC seems inexplicable.

After initial denials, Susan Rice now admits that she unmasked the names of private U.S. citizens swept up in Obama administration intelligence surveillance and seems to have no regrets about it. Samantha Power, the Obama administration’s former U.N. ambassador, does not deny that she, too, unmasked names—but strangely is reported to have argued that she was not responsible for all the unmaskings that appear under her authorizations on the transcripts. If true, does that astonishing statement mean that she has amnesia or that her own staff or others improperly used her name to access classified documents? Has anyone ever admitted to unmasking American citizens under surveillance, and then claimed that her authorizations were not as numerous as they appear in documents? And what were the connections between those who unmasked and those who illegally leaked information to the press?

Despite roadblocks and media obfuscation, we are strangely still inching along a pathway that may end up not far from Donald Trump’s once widely ridiculed and sloppy tweet that “Obama” (read: members of the Obama administration) had Trump’s “wires tapped” (read: electronically surveilled) “in Trump Tower” (read: among other places too) “just before the victory” (read: probably well before).

But perhaps the biggest bombshell concerns the entire foundation of the “Russian collusion” accusations. The Hill, not known as a conservative organ, now is reportingthat as early as 2009 some within Robert Mueller’s FBI knew of possible blackmail, bribery, and money-laundering by Russian interests in seeking, through various means, control of sizable uranium sources inside the United States—an agenda Putin’s surrogates apparently knew to be impossible without a waiver from Hillary Clinton’s State Department.

Where the Real Collusion Lurked
Even as Mueller presses ahead and even as anti-Trump journalists have sought for a year to find any proof that Trump was a Russian patsy, the charge of “collusion” may be proved accurate after all—but it seems to have had little to do with Trump per se. Instead, Bill and Hillary Clinton, the former directly, the latter via the family foundation, may well have been empowering and profiting from Russian insiders who were eager to obtain control of 20 percent of North America’s uranium holdings.

Indeed, Russian agents caught spying in connection with the deal were swapped out—in a not very favorable trade for the United States—without much audit. Stranger still, so far the denials have not contested the facts, but only the efficacy of the Russian-Clinton deal: there was supposedly not any wrongdoing given that so far the Russians have not shipped out any uranium as if a habitually drunk driver is not culpable until he kills someone on the road.

Barack Obama was strangely in no hurry to move on the opportunistic Russian collusion charges against Donald Trump during the campaign or between his election and inauguration—and perhaps not just because he knew there was no there there. Instead, Obama wisely may have concluded that if quid pro quo election-timed concessions to Russian interests constitute a criminal or treasonous offense, then his own hot-mic offer to the Putin government was a similar transgression. But more important, it seems likely now that Obama knew that any such reopening of the Russian question would not only expose a compromised Clinton in an election cycle but also his own administration—as knowledge of politically motivated decisions to ignore what might well have indictable offenses came to light.

At this point, it would be silly to ask why there will be no more $145 million gifts from Russian interests to the Clinton Foundation (or from anyone, for that matter), or no more $500,000 fees for a single Bill Clinton speech. Whereas the Clintons are always willing to sell something that properly belongs to the government, they are no longer in any position to negotiate anything and thus by their own financial standards have zero monetary value to the sorts who in the past were eager to buy them.

Are we finally nearing the end of our own Jacobin cycle of revolutionary fervor—as wild charges of criminality are exposed to be little more than the bitter feelings over a blown election or, worse, efforts either to nullify that election or an attempt to cloak the accusers’ own felonious behavior? But the inquisitions will likely stop only when the inquisitors, under intense pressures, learn that they have far more exposure to the very charges that they have leveled—and thus finally beg to call the whole sordid matter off.

Diminished Institutions, Stark Truths
In a fair world, Robert Mueller would find that his original agenda had proved irrelevant, other than incidentally colliding with far more serious culpability on the part of many of those who had energized him. He would then either drop the investigation, recuse himself, or expand it to include far more likely charges of collusion that affected our national security.

In a fair world, those in the House Ethics Committee long ago would have dropped politically motivated and empty complaints against Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and would have agreed that he was simply a political target. He was preemptively targeted not for leaking classified government information (which he did not do), but for presciently long ago announcing to intelligence agencies and to the president that Obama Administration officials had likely improperly unmasked information about private U.S. citizens that was subsequently unlawfully leaked to the press—a tawdry process that ultimately may well be connected to many of the scandals mentioned above.

And in a fair world, those who were determined to indict all who profited from Russian largesse would conclude that the Clinton machine always should have been their most likely target.

America is in a radical state of flux, or rather in a great accounting and recalibration, ranging from government to popular culture.

Hollywood lived a lie and now is not what it was just three weeks ago. The NFL was based on known but ignored hypocrisies and is no longer the league it was in September. The media has put rank partisanship before truth and lost ideologically and morally.

And the lie about Russian collusion has sired truths beyond our wildest nightmares.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

Liberals Embrace ‘Dark Money:’ Fusion GPS rolls out a novel excuse to block a House subpoena.

 WALL STREET JOURNAL: 

Liberals Embrace ‘Dark Money:’ Fusion GPS rolls out a novel excuse to block a House subpoena.

Remember when Democrats and the press corps complained about “dark money” and wanted to rewrite the First Amendment to ban certain campaign contributions? Well, well. Now the progressive operatives at Fusion GPS are invoking free-speech rights to block the House Intelligence Committee’s probe of the infamous Steele dossier.
Fusion GPS is the opposition research firm behind the Steele dossier claiming that Donald Trump colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. Congress is investigating Russian influence, and former British spook Christopher Steele relied on Russian sources. The dossier is clearly of interest, perhaps even a Rosetta Stone in the probe.
Yet Fusion chief Glenn Simpson won’t cooperate, and on Monday the company’s lawyers sent a letter to the House Intelligence Committee refusing to comply with subpoenas for documents and testimony related to the dossier. The letter claims the subpoenas “violate the First Amendment rights of our clients and their clients, and would chill any American running for office . . . from conducting confidential opposition research in an election.”
Hello? Mr. Simpson must be having a good laugh at that one. Surely he knows that his many Democratic clients have spent most of the last decade moaning about “dark money” donations in politics. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders proposed rewriting the First Amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling so government could regulate political speech. Fusion must also not have read the avalanche of press releases from Democrats like Chuck Schumer demanding disclosure of all political donations.
Citizens United protected the broadcast of a movie opposing Hillary Clinton—obvious political speech. But the House wants to know who paid Fusion to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump and whether any of that money or intelligence came from foreign sources. The First Amendment doesn’t protect attempts by foreign governments or agents to influence U.S. elections.
Foreign campaign contributions are banned under U.S. law, and in the 1990s Congress conducted extensive investigations into Chinese and other donations to the Clinton campaign. No one claimed the Riady family’s donations were protected political speech because they financed Bill Clinton’s re-election.
Fusion by its own admission has worked in the past on a lobby campaign for a Russian company with ties to the Kremlin. Investigators want to know if those clients or other foreign actors had anything to do with the commissioning or production of the Steele dossier.

It’s as if all the talk of Trump/Russia collusion, which has so far turned out to be vaporware, was just a smokescreen to cover the real collusion.

26Posted at 12:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds   

T

Message to the Republicans: Free the People!

Message to the Republicans: Free the People!

By Thaddeus G. McCotter 

T

he political adage holds that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This adage’s not-irrational assumption is that “the enemy of my enemy is also me.”

Unless, it seems, you’re the Republican Congress.

Having once served with many of you, I understand and empathize as you contend with obstructionist Democrats, a hostile media, and internecine ideological and political schisms in your collective endeavor to affirm and advance American greatness amidst the transformational challenges facing our nation in this chaotic age.

Truly, I do not envy you.

Don’t fret. As a guitar player, I won’t be singing in the Greek chorus of mounting complaints regarding your performance to date—or the lack thereof. But at times it seems you’re intent on proving the sagacity of Ralph Waldo Emerson (you know, the keyboard player in Emerson, Lake, and Palmer): “As long as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way.”

I’m sure no one is more frustrated about this stasis of affairs than you are—save for the sovereign citizens who entrusted you with a majority to steer the ship of state toward the distant shore of better days after eight years adrift under the Obama Administration and its mercifully fleeting Democratic majority. Yet every great journey has its missteps and stumbles; and, in your case, dead-ender Democrats trying to cut you off at the knees.

But you knew this going in and have been ceaselessly reminded of it 24/7/52/365: Ladies and gentlemen, you’re not paranoid; the Left is out to get you. And, in the immortal word of Andrew Breitbart, “So?” Despite the Left, you’re in Congress because of the people who believe you will affirm and advance American greatness. They believe there is greatness in you.

Such is not the illusory “greatness” Emerson decried (I think in “Lucky Man”), whereby one “crawls through life a paralytic to earn the praise of bard and critic.” It is the true greatness Emerson extolled (I’m paraphrasing here): “Stand your ground and the world will come ’round.”

That time is now.

Of course, to stand for principle is not to stand still; nor content oneself with playing defense, however earnest, against the Left’s insane attacks upon humanity’s enduring verities and virtues that have made and kept America great. You don’t get off that easy, Tiger. You are compelled by the honor you sought, and God and the voters granted, to actively affirm and advance American greatness, and to do it all the while aware of the unattractive consequences of your course—and, it being the swamp, the temptations and threats proffered to induce your retreat. Yet, this is why voters glimpsed a simple, elegant greatness in you:

You’ve got the guts to do what you must and not give a damn who doesn’t dig it.

This you can and will do. Because, like your voters, you know America is always great; and it is the government and the racket of hacks and hucksters infesting its swamp that suck. And, thus, you know why the people consented to entrust you as its servants in a Republican majority: To free the people from the swamp.

So . . .

Free the people to pursue their American dreams.

Free the people to keep what they earn.

Free the people to escape the welfare state’s soul-crushing cycle of poverty, despair, and dependence.

Free the people to enjoy their hearth of home by defeating tyrants and terrorists.

Free the people to heal our nation by speaking, acting and engaging in accordance with the dictates of their consciences absent any fear of governmental coercion under the guise and guileful enforcement of “political correctness.”

In sum, free the people to inspire the world with what America achieves!

And that’s just for starters. (Talk about a “honey-do” list.)

Sure it won’t be a leisurely stroll through the swamp. You’ll step in some quicksand and bogs and some other stuff you’d prefer not be identified as it clings to the bottom of your shoes. But as the heirs of our party’s first president, “the Great Emancipator,” and that “Gipper” fellow who liberated the world from an evil empire, you’ll make it.

I just humbly submit you might pick up the pace a bit. In this social media-driven and riven world, folks are growing increasingly impatient in their pursuit of happiness.

Godspeed, GOP!  

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

Image copyright: pogonici / 123RF Stock Photo

About the Author: Thaddeus G. McCotter

The Hon. Thaddeus McCotter is the former chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee and current itinerant guitarist.

Si - VDHlicon Valley Billionaires Are the New Robber Baron's

Silicon Valley Billionaires Are the New Robber Barons
\


by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON August 17, 2017 12:00 AM @VDHANSON

Progressives forget their history of breaking up mega-corporations as they lionize tech giants such as Apple, Google, and Facebook. Progressives used to pressure U.S. corporations to cut back on outsourcing and on the tactic of building their products abroad to take advantage of inexpensive foreign workers. During the 2012 election, President Obama attacked Mitt Romney as a potential illiberal “outsourcer-in-chief” for investing in companies that went overseas in search of cheap labor.

Yet most of the computers and smartphones sold by Silicon Valley companies are still being built abroad — to mostly silence from progressive watchdogs. In the case of the cobalt mining that is necessary for the production of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars, thousands of child laborers in southern Africa are worked to exhaustion.

 Powered by In the 1960s, campuses boycotted grapes to support Cesar Chavez’s unionization of farm workers. Yet it is unlikely that there will be any effort to boycott tech companies that use lithium-ion batteries produced from African-mined cobalt. Progressives demand higher taxes on the wealthy. They traditionally argue that tax gimmicks and loopholes are threats to the republic. Yet few seem to care that West Coast conglomerates such as Amazon, Apple, Google, and Starbucks filtered hundreds of billions in global profits through tax havens such as Bermuda, shorting the United States billions of dollars in income taxes.

 The progressive movement took hold in the late 19th century to “trust-bust,” or break up corporations that had cornered the markets in banking, oil, steel, and railroads. Such supposedly foul play had inordinately enriched “robber baron” buccaneers such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan. Yet today, the riches of multibillionaires dwarf the wealth of their 19th-century predecessors. Most West Coast corporate wealth was accumulated by good old-fashioned American efforts to achieve monopolies and stifle competition.

Facebook, with 2 billion monthly global users, has now effectively cornered social media. Google has monopolized internet searches — and modulates users’ search results to accommodate its own business profiteering. Amazon is America’s new octopus. Its growing tentacles incorporate not just online sales but also media and food retailing. Yet there are no modern-day progressive muckrakers in the spirit of Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and Lincoln Steffens, warning of the dangers of techie monopolies or the astronomical accumulation of wealth. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are worth nearly $1 trillion each. Conservatives have no problem with anyone doing well, so their silence is understandable.

But in the Obama era, the nation received all sorts of progressive lectures on the downsides of being super-rich. Obama remonstrated about spreading the wealth, knowing when not to profit, and realizing when one has made enough money. He declared that entrepreneurs did not build their own businesses without government help. Yet such sermonizing never seemed to include Facebook, Starbucks, or Amazon. The tech and social-media industries pride themselves on their counterculture transparency, their informality, and their 1960s-like allegiance to free thought and free speech. Yet Google just fired one of its engineers for simply questioning the company line that sexual discrimination and bias alone account for the dearth of female Silicon Valley engineers.

What followed were not voices of protest. Instead, Google-instilled fear and silence ensued, in the fashion of George Orwell’s 1984. On matters such as avoiding unionization, driving up housing prices, snagging crony-capitalist subsidies from the government, and ignoring the effects of products on public safety (such as texting while driving), Silicon Valley is about as reactionary as they come. Why, then, do these companies earn a pass from hypercritical progressives? Answer: Their executives have taken out postmodern insurance policies. Our new J. P. Morgans dress in jeans and T-shirts — like the late Steve Jobs of Apple or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook — appearing hip and cool. Executives in flip-flops and tie-dyes can get away with building walls around their multiple mansions in a way that a steel executive in a suit and tie might not. The new elite are overwhelmingly left-wing. They head off criticism by investing mostly in the Democratic party, the traditional font of social and political criticism of corporate wealth. In 2012, for example, Obama won Silicon Valley by more than 40 percentage points.

Of the political donations to presidential candidates that year from employees at Google and Apple, over 90 percent went to Obama. One of the legacies of the Obama era was the triumph of green advocacy and identity politics over class. No one has grasped that reality better that the new billionaire barons of the West Coast. As long as they appeared cool, as they long as they gave lavishly to left-wing candidates, and as long as they mouthed liberal platitudes on global warming, gay marriage, abortion, and identity politics, they earned exemption from progressive scorn.

The result was that they outsourced, offshored, monopolized, censored, and made billions — without much fear of media muckraking, trust-busting politicians, unionizing activists, or diversity lawsuits. Hip billionaire corporatism is one of the strangest progressive hypocrisies of our times.    

READ MORE:     Silicon Valley’s Anti-Free-Speech Monopoly     Immigration & Silicon Valley     Google Goes Rogue – Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won, to appear in October from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com. © 2017 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

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