Tuesday, August 27, 2019

Finally, a President Stands Up to China!

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

President Trump is the first to stand up to Communist China in almost 50 years. Beginning with President Nixon, who was then under the spell of Henry Kissinger, presidents of both parties have appeased China.
Once known as “Red China” to distinguish the mainland regime from the anti-communist Chinese who fled to Taiwan in 1949, the communist dictators have stolen our intellectual property for decades. This is the same tyrannical China against which millions of people in Hong Kong are protesting now.

Starting with George H.W. Bush, who began his rise to the presidency by acting as Ford’s liaison to China, politicians in both political parties embraced a phony “free trade” with China. Millions of American manufacturing jobs were lost, and China used its growing trade surplus to build a massive arsenal against which we must defend.

China exported a staggering amount of goods to the United States in 2018, totaling $539.5 billion, while allowing only $120.3 billion of American goods to be sold there. That created a record trade deficit of more than $400 billion.

Despite our massive patronage of Chinese companies, in 2018 the communist Chinese government cut back on the small amount of American goods allowed to be sold there. There was a nearly 10% drop in its purchases of American farm products, particularly corn and soybeans.

Like the weather in Mark Twain’s famous quip, everyone complains about China’s abusive trade practices but nobody does anything about them. No one, that is, until Donald J. Trump became president.

Trump adviser Peter Navarro explains that tariffs against China are needed to end its “cyber intrusion into our business networks, forced technology transfer in exchange for market access, intellectual property theft, dumping into our markets state-owned enterprises which are heavily subsidized, currency manipulation and killing Americans with fentanyl.” Fentanyl is a drug imported from China which causes half of all American deaths from overdoses.

Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both promised to take action against China’s exploitation of us in trade, but neither did. Both ex-presidents are now enjoying a comfortable retirement, with Obama having just purchased a $15 million beach house on Martha’s Vineyard as merely a summer vacation home.
But American workers have continued to lose ground in the global economy, and China is a big reason why wages have not improved in decades. The average American family is worse off as a result, due to the loss of better-paying middle class jobs.

China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, over the opposition of Phyllis Schlafly and others who defended American sovereignty against that international tribunal. The WTO has repeatedly ruled against the United States, and China has used the WTO to advance its anti-American goals.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is releasing his new film exposing the treachery of China, called “Claws of the Red Dragon.” It describes how Huawei, the communist-funded technology leader, is poised to dominate world telecommunications for “5G” and “6G,” which are the next-generation internet connectivity services.
The Trump Administration has prohibited federal agencies from doing business with Huawei, which Trump recognizes to be a national security threat to the United States. This Chinese company has so infiltrated the American economy that an additional 90 days had to be allowed to wind down business arrangements with Huawei.

Trump tweeted: “The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP.” When China announced last Friday that it is imposing $75 billion in new tariffs on American goods, Trump responded by tweeting, “This is a GREAT opportunity for the United States.”

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, complained to Trump that Apple’s exporting of iPhones will be hurt by a so-called tariff war, because Apple’s Korean competitor Samsung will not have to pay the tariffs. But Apple employs relatively few American employees compared with other large corporations, so it is difficult to see why Apple should be dictating our trade policy.

Apple has been making an estimated 50% of its iPhones in China, and earlier it announced moving a portion of this manufacturing to India instead. These are not American jobs that are at stake, but Asian ones.

Indeed, Silicon Valley where Apple is headquartered has enriched a few billionaires but largely failed to hold onto American technology secrets. Now China can manufacture smartphones using technology stolen from the West, probably using some engineers who returned to Asia after working in Silicon Valley on H-1B visas.

Liberals ridiculed Trump for saying he is “the chosen one,” but the American people did choose him to stand up to China. To make America great again requires, at a minimum, ending how China takes advantage of our massive consumer market while stealing our secrets.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Saturday, August 24, 2019

Time magazine has an article on ERA history:
In passing the Equal Rights Amendment, Congress had set a seven-year deadline for ratification. At first, ratification seemed to be a given, with states quickly approving the amendment, but those ratifications slowed to a trickle. Crucially, the amendment’s passage had had a major consequence: mobilizing anti-feminists, including its arch-opponent Phyllis Schlafly, to defeat it.

In many ways, Schlafly was deeply contradictory. Although she praised stay-at-home mothers, Schlafly — a mother of six — dedicated much of her life to political organizing and traveled the country giving lectures. She believed that the ERA would do away with much of the special status granted to women, including the right to be supported by their husbands, and would damage the traditional American family. Schlafly founded the organization “STOP ERA” (an acronym for “stop taking away our privileges”) to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment.

“What I am defending is the real rights of women,” Schlafly once said. “A woman should have the right to be in the home as a wife and mother.”

Telling her audiences that the ERA would eventually lead to a future of gender-neutral bathrooms and women being drafted into the military, she successfully made many people think twice about what Constitutionally mandated equality of the sexes would mean. Deirdre Condit, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, notes that in fact Schlafly was right that the future would include such things — but they came to pass even without the amendment.

“Well, if you fast forward to 2019, without the Equal Rights Amendment having passed, we’re trying to figure out how to deal with bathrooms in a multi-gendered universe. And we’re trying to figure out, should in fact women be drafted if men are drafted?” says Condit. ”And while we were are unsettled as a culture about these new questions, they did not fail to emerge because we didn’t have an Equal Rights Amendment.”
That's right, those questions did not fail to emerge. Defeating ERA did not cure the problems of feminism.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Trump Defeats Planned Parenthood in Ninth Circuit

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Last month the first physician to run Planned Parenthood in nearly a half-century was forced out because she actually wanted to focus on women’s health. Her firing proved what many Americans already knew, which is that Planned Parenthood exists primarily to promote abortion rather than women’s health.

Taxpayers should not be required to fund this pro-abortion organization, and in a remarkable series of rulings even the Ninth Circuit agreed, for now. With seven new Trump judges on that court, the Ninth Circuit is no longer the liberal playground where Planned Parenthood has been able to snap its fingers and get everything it wanted.

Apparently Planned Parenthood did not see the memo about changes at the Ninth Circuit. Planned Parenthood sued in that jurisdiction to block new rules by the Trump Administration which limit the use of taxpayer dollars by abortion advocacy groups.

These new rules improve upon restrictions installed during the Reagan Administration, but which Clinton repealed and George W. Bush failed to reinstate. From the inception of the family planning program known as Title X, the federal government has been prohibited from spending money to promote abortion as a method of family planning, but that limit has mostly been ignored.

Trump’s fabulous new rules reinstate the original goals of Title X, by banning use of its money to refer for abortions. These rules require separating any affiliated abortion clinics, ending the standard requirement of abortion counseling, and restricting which employees can promote abortions while receiving federal dollars.

Planned Parenthood wants to continue to receive the $60 million in handouts from the federal government under Title X, but without complying with the new rules. Imagine how far that amount would stretch if it were spent on lifesaving medical care for the poor, rather than on abortion advocacy.

Before Trump began appointing judges to the federal bench, Planned Parenthood could have quickly persuaded a federal court to block the new rules, and prevailed on appeal.

Even now, Planned Parenthood won as it always has at the district court level, which issued an injunction upon demand by Planned Parenthood against the Trump Administration. The appeal went to the Ninth Circuit, where Planned Parenthood has won so often before.

Assignment is random to three-judge appellate panels in the U.S. Court of Appeals. In the Ninth Circuit, that means a random pick from among 16 active judges appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama, 12 active judges appointed by Presidents George W. Bush and Trump, and 18 mostly liberal judges who have senior status, including 4 appointed by President Jimmy Carter.

But in a statistically unlikely assignment, three Republican-appointed judges were picked for the panel. They unanimously blocked the district court decision, allowing the Trump Administration rules to go into effect during the pendency of the litigation.

Planned Parenthood then sought rehearing “en banc,” which in most U.S. Courts of Appeal would include a full sitting of all the active judges. But only 11 random judges out of 28 sit en banc in the Ninth Circuit, because its court is so large.

Planned Parenthood came up with the short end of the stick again. It drew an en banc panel that was 7 Republican-appointed judges, and 4 Democrat-appointed ones; Planned Parenthood lost 7-4.

All four of the votes for Planned Parenthood were by judges appointed to the Ninth Circuit by President Clinton. All seven of the votes against Planned Parenthood were by Republican appointees, including two nominees by Trump who provided the margin of victory, and Planned Parenthood’s unusual attempt to convene a new sitting of all 28 active judges was too much even for Democrat appointees who still hold a majority there.

Planned Parenthood has since declared that it will pull out of the Title X funding program if it does not persuade another court to enjoin the new rules. Apparently the organization would rather forgo the $60 million in taxpayer funding than have to limit some of its abortion advocacy and referrals.

There is plenty of money among wealthy liberals who support Planned Parenthood, so do not expect it to close its doors any time soon. Michael Bloomberg and other billionaires could easily fill that funding gap without making much of a dent in their own fortunes.

But what this battle is really about is the credibility of Planned Parenthood, and whether it can force its opponents to pay its bills while it promotes abortion. Prior Republican administrations and Congresses have promised to do this, but the Trump Administration is the first to actually achieve it.

Two unusually Republican draws of judicial panels in the Ninth Circuit resulted in this tremendous victory. Four more years of President Trump will ensure more of these wins without relying on the luck of the draw.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

#MeToo Takes on the Deep State

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The #MeToo movement takes on the Deep State over the Epstein scandal, and the shadow government may have finally met its match. The outrage by feminists against Jeffrey Epstein for evading justice while allegedly providing underage girls to powerful men has even the New York Times demanding answers.

Epstein was apparently protected by the Deep State for more than a decade, receiving extraordinary favoritism right up until his final moments of life in jail. At first the liberal media reacted to his death by calling anyone who questioned the circumstances a “conspiracy theorist,” but the media has since flipped amid pressure by liberals themselves not to let Epstein’s scheme off the hook.

No one can pretend that Epstein “acted alone” all those years, which is the favorite refrain of the Deep State when it wants to close the lid on investigatory failures about other famous crimes. Epstein obviously had powerful allies, starting with Bill Clinton, as well as pilots to fly them and others on the “Lolita Express” staffed by underage girls to serve for their satisfaction.

There are surely dozens, if not hundreds, who must have been in on Epstein’s illicit activities and unexplained accumulation of massive wealth. Bill Clinton himself traveled numerous times on Epstein’s private airplane, which included a bedroom for the pleasure of his travelers.

This former high school teacher who became the billionaire owner of luxurious properties and even his own island in the Caribbean evidently had much he could have said about Clinton and other favorites of the Left. Perhaps Epstein’s cohorts think his death should close the case, but instead it should make getting the truth easier without his army of lawyers hiding behind a plea bargain which can be voided now.

The Department of Justice was prosecuting Epstein a decade ago when special intervention apparently let him off. Attorney General Bill Barr should unseal all those records in his department now that Epstein is dead.

It has been reported that someone then called the U.S. Attorney and told him that Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and to drop the investigation and prosecution, which the U.S. Attorney immediately did. As a result, Epstein received a plea bargain that was so unusual that some have even called it illegal.
Ah, so that is how the Deep State obtains favoritism for its own. It can stop investigations of itself by insisting – or pretending – that the perpetrator is a member of “intelligence” and thus cannot be prosecuted.

James Clapper, once the Director of National Intelligence, famously lied under oath to Congress and yet was never prosecuted for it. It appears that anyone who “belonged to intelligence” is considered above the law, and that using those magic words can get a U.S. Attorney to drop even the strongest of cases.
Meanwhile, millions of ordinary folk languish in federal prisons, many even dying there, while no friend of the Deep State is ever held accountable. But this time the #MeToo crowd is on the case, as they may consider the alleged crimes of Jeffrey Epstein to be comparable to capital offenses.

Alexander Acosta, who was the U.S. Attorney, has refused to confirm or deny the published account of why the Epstein case was compromised. No one has explained why the plea bargain given to Epstein was so preferential that it even protected his accomplices against being brought to justice.

Now Attorney General Barr has identified “serious irregularities” at the jail where Epstein was allowed to commit suicide despite being under a suicide watch. Barr promises a full and thorough investigation, and for once liberals seem to be supportive of this Trump nominee.

But the investigation should not be limited merely to the Manhattan jail cell where Epstein died. Rather, Barr should release to the public all the files on the federal investigation and cover-up of Epstein a decade ago.

Peeling back the layers of cover-up for Jeffrey Epstein could finally bring down the Deep State and its own perverse way of protecting some while destroying others. Was the preferential treatment of Epstein motivated in part to protect Bill Clinton?

Like Epstein, Clinton has been able to get away for decades with conduct that would have landed any Republican in prison long ago. But the Epstein scandal and the clamor by all sides of the political spectrum may finally bring some accountability to Bill Clinton, after all these years.

Important revelations could also result from a full probe into Epstein’s unexplained accumulation of wealth. There are reports that Epstein handled the $29.3 million jackpot on behalf of the still undisclosed winner of the Oklahoma Powerball lottery in July 2008.

If Attorney General Barr digs deep, state lotteries or other government corruption might be brought down, too. And not a moment too soon.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.

Friday, August 9, 2019

We Choose Truth Over Facts

This is Joe Biden's new campaign slogan.

This was probably just a slip of the tongue, but it does symbolize his extreme leftward political shift. Right-wingers deal in facts. Left-wingers have ideological concepts that they promote as truths. Biden has stumbled across a good insight into political thinking.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

Leftist vitriol is getting worse

I thought that RedState.com was a bunch of Republican Trump-haters, but it now says:
While the press continues to blame Republicans for their “rhetoric,” there’s no question that the vitriol we’ve seen from the left this week dwarfs anything anyone on the mainstream right has ever said or done in a political setting. Period. Calling entire voting blocks white supremacists, doxxing donors, yelling for the death of a Senator, asserting Republicans want mass shootings to occur, threatening people for their political activities, asserting the President wants to exterminate a race – these are not the rantings of sane people looking for de-escalation of rhetoric. They are the drivers of escalation in our rhetoric and it’s reaching dangerous levels.

There’s no coming back from this for the media. There will never be a time when a majority of the country trusts them again. They will always now be looked on with scorn by far more people than those who approve of their actions. No amount of rehabilitation post-Trump is going to save this current generation of journalists and cable news pundits from the credibility death spiral they chose to enter.

These people have lost it. They are so caught up in their bubbles that they can’t even function with any sense of rationality. As the press as an institution finally burns to the ground, they have no one to blame but themselves and things are only going to get worse.
The leftist game plan is to keep accelerating the name-calling until Pres. Trump and his supporters cave into their demands.

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

“Soulless” Gamer Shot Up El Paso

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The 21-year-old who shot up the El Paso Walmart was a “soulless” video game player. He cooperated with authorities during his interrogation afterward, and officials should release to the public his answers to many important questions.

It is unlikely that the killer’s motives fit the narrative of “white nationalism” that is being pushed by the national media. For starters, the accused shooter, Patrick Crusius, is a registered Democrat who was critical of Republicans.

The British press is often the best source of information when these tragedies occur, because the American media try to spin and suppress the news to fit their political narrative. The shooting was not domestic terrorism, but was the product of a loner who grew up on video games rather than healthy relationships.

In a manifesto he apparently posted shortly before opening fire on a crowd of back-to-school shoppers, Crusius refers to “Call of Duty,” which trains boys to kill and kill again. People who knew him in high school described him as a “gamer” for his devotion to playing video games.

One of his few friends was of Egyptian descent, and it is implausible that the killer was a “white nationalist.” Another student who knew him in school said “he never spoke of anything political or talked about guns or had any hatred toward minorities,” as reported by the Daily Mail.

Instead, the real problem is that he is “soulless,” as another high-school acquaintance characterized him. His crime might be described as one of nihilism, which is an ideology of despair that has motivated rootless young men toward violent crimes throughout human history.

He had no girlfriends and participated in no extracurricular activities in high school, recalled one classmate who knew him there. He apparently did not have any genetic psychiatric disorder, as his twin sister was considered to be well-adjusted.

Nearly four times as many young men are avid video game players compared with young women, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center study. The average gamer spends more than 7 hours each week playing video games, and many boys spend more than 40 per week consumed by the impersonal games which impede their social development.

Crusius became unemployed and it is not yet known how he passed his time each day. Politically, he was not “right wing” or pro-Trump by any stretch of the imagination.

On the same weekend as the El Paso and Dayton shootings, 55 people were shot in Chicago, of whom 7 died. The grim total included two mass shootings: one in which 8 people were shot by the same gunman, and another in which 7 were shot by the same gunman.

Liberals do not want to talk about the massacre in Dayton because it was by a supporter of Elizabeth Warren. Connor Betts, who was killed by police near the outset of his rampage, had posted that he did not think socialism was being adopted quickly enough.

Betts does not fit the “white supremacist” narrative either. Betts described himself as a “leftist,” and is seen in a photograph wearing the patch “Against all Gods.”

He killed 9 people and injured 27 in a mere 30 seconds, which suggests that he got his training on violent video games, too. It is unfathomable that someone could inflict such rapid, deadly harm so quickly without practicing to kill.

Liberals predictably call for gun control after every mass shooting, but they are silent about how these young killers became desensitized to murdering people. It is dangerous to addict unemployed young men on games similar to what the Army uses to desensitize soldiers to killing.

Democrat frontrunner Joe Biden acknowledged the video game problem, to the dismay of Anderson Cooper during a CNN interview on Monday. “It is not healthy to have these games teaching kids this dispassionate notion that you can shoot somebody and just sort of blow their brains out,” Biden observed.

Studies show that playing violent video games increases aggressive behavior. This is found to be true across ages and cultures, which is hardly surprising.

The Supreme Court would not likely strike down new bipartisan legislation to protect minors against addiction to violent video games, as it did in 2011 when five Justices said the “publishers” of such games have a First Amendment right to sell their products to children. Since then one Justice in the majority (Kagan) has expressed regret for her decision, and two others have been replaced.

Just 10 days before the weekend shootings, a U.S. House committee conducted a hearing into what was called the “youth vaping epidemic” in which the founder of Juul was harshly condemned for making his products so attractive to teens. It is time for a similar spotlight to be cast on the dangerous video game industry.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work. These columns are also posted on pseagles.com.