Who Is Pulling the Strings?

I’m sharing a video today that I’m not altogether certain about, but it has gotten my attention.

It’s a 25-minute presentation by a commentator named Chris Kohls, on a YouTube channel he calls Mr. Reagan (referring to Pres. Ronald Reagan).

Chris Kohls, Mr. Reagan presesntation
screenshot from here

He asserts that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a puppet, hired through a casting call, who essentially learns her lines but has no ideas of her own. He presents evidence that she’s managed and controlled by her chief of staff (among others), who is part of a group called the Justice Democrats, founded by Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks.

I don’t know Kohls, hadn’t heard of him before seeing a clip on Tuesday’s The News and Why It Matters on The Blaze. (This section is about 18 minutes in; a subscription is required.) But I later saw a link to the longer video, which I’ve included below, at the bottom of this piece.

I looked up Kohls. He’s an actor and commentator. Other commentators have also started as actors; Michael Knowles, on The Daily Wire, for example, so being an actor doesn’t necessarily mean he’s just acting.  But is it possible someone is scripting this for Kohls? I guess that’s possible. It’s also possible that he’s right.

So I also looked up the Justice Democrats. According to Wikipedia:

Justice Democrats is an American progressive political action committee founded on January 23, 2017, by Kyle Kulinski of Secular Talk, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, and former leadership from the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Uygur and Kulinski are no longer affiliated with the group.

from Justice Democrats platform page

I took a look at their platform positions on the Justice Democrats website. It’s probably safe to say I’m diametrically opposed to everything they want—or, when they claim to want something I also want, I know you can’t get that result the way they want to get it.

They want:

·         The Green New Deal—i.e., $40 trillion (double the annual GDP) in programs that would devastate the economy, take away our transportation, and lower our standard of living to “equal” poverty.

·         Guaranteed jobs and income, regardless of merit or willingness to produce.

·         Higher taxes—without a way to escape (from which anyone who could would, of course, move away).

·         Free Medicare-style healthcare for all. Paid for by those high taxes that people and companies would leave the country to avoid.

·         Free college and trade school tuition. Paid for by—well, as I said above.

·         Protection of abortion under all conditions—enforcing paying for it through taxes, no matter what.

·         And other “social justice” causes that either have no connection to reality or are purposely intent on imposing tyranny on us all.

·         Oh, and also abolish ICE.

Kohls says Ocasio-Cortez didn’t “run for Congress”; she “was run.” In other words, it wasn’t her idea to run as a candidate for Congress; it was some puppeteers’ idea to run someone in that role—someone they could control and use as a vehicle for their agenda.

The current Justice Democrats director, Alexandra Rojas, says they got 10,000 applicants for the role. Ocasio-Cortez says she wasn’t even the one who put her name in to apply; her brother put her name in.

Kohls says he’s done casting, and he’s been cast in roles. He thinks they did a superb job of casting. Ocasio-Cortez is appealing, attractive, appears to be a “common man” type of representative.

And she’s almost devoid of any ability to think through an issue beyond the talking points. I don’t think she’s stupid; I think she’s ignorant. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. But she seems perfectly willing to speak the lines given to her. That’s got to be better for the puppeteers than a politician-with-own-agenda would be.

This explains why Ocasio-Cortez never engages in interviews that pit her against an adversary, or even a serious line of questioning. And she doesn’t debate. Even under these conditions, when she’s pressed beyond her talking points, she blathers.

Saikat Chakrabarti, co-founder Justice Democrats
and chief-of-staff for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez
screenshot from here

I had been thinking she must at least be brilliant at social media. But it turns out those behind her are the experts at that too. Among them are experienced social media manipulators. Saikat Chakrabarti, social media expert for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, who is one of the co-founders of Justice Democrats, is Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff. Supposedly it was her staff that wrote the behemoth Green New Deal legislation--during a weekend in December. Justice Democrats are listed as one of the groups that helped. Kohls says he can't find evidence that Ocasio-Cortez was even in the room during the creation of her flagship legislation.

If it were only about this one district in a very blue area of New York, I wouldn’t give this a second thought. But they’ve been doing this practice in multiple races, targeting mainstream democrats to make them more radical. In 2018 they won three races. That was their first campaign year. They’re playing a long game.

It’s something to watch for. We tend to expect both lies and radicalism from democrats. But this isn’t about fighting candidates, or even politicians who could be voted out. This is about the people hidden behind the scenes, controlling the message, controlling the media messaging, controlling the votes of representatives—and these puppeteers are unelected and unaccountable. If one of their puppets gets voted out, they’ll just cast another for the role.

Imagine the damage these shadow-governors could do with a larger portion of the legislature, or, heaven forbid, the presidency.

People who think you’re seeing a fresh, new face with great new ideas—you’ve been duped.

That was this year. The next question is, how do we keep you from being duped next year? Because the freedom, prosperity, and civilization of all of us depends on you susceptible populists not getting duped.

America Will Never Be Socialist

Short quiz. Who said this?

This is the time to re-ignite the American imagination. This is the time to search for the tallest summit, and set our sights on the brightest star. This is the time to rekindle the bonds of love and loyalty and memory that link us together as citizens, as neighbors, as patriots.

This is our future—our fate—and our choice to make. I am asking you to choose greatness.

How about this?

We must keep America first in our hearts. We must keep freedom alive in our souls. And we must always keep faith in America's destiny—that one Nation, under God, must be the hope and the promise and the light and the glory among all the nations of the world!

Soaring rhetoric, but it’s pretty good. Ronald Reagan, maybe? JFK? George H. W. Bush?

Nope. That was Donald Trump last Tuesday at the State of the Union. I’ve waited a few days, to see how the words settled. There were actually quite a lot of words that I liked in the speech. Unlike a Facebook friend (who is due again for me to snooze his posts for 30 days) who heard only racism and hatred; I didn’t hear those words. At all. You’d think maybe those being offended are seeking and finding something that isn’t even there.

President Trump at State of the Union
image from Wikipedia

There was a section of the State of the Union Address I particularly appreciated. After mentioning Venezuela, the president said:

Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.

A certain half of the audience failed to stand or even applaud. Hmm.

The unusual thing is that it needed to be said at all. We have a significant portion of the population—and elected officials among them—who think it would be a good idea to “fundamentally transform,” as Obama used to say, the United States of America from a free country to a totalitarian regime.

They don’t call it that; they used to bristle at those of us who called it socialism. Now they proudly call it socialism. But socialism is tyranny. And everywhere it’s been tried, it has been about controlling people’s actions, along with their words and thoughts. That’s total control. Beyond economic meddling or social engineering. It’s totalitarian.

When socialist failures are pointed out, these people say, “But that’s not what we mean. We wouldn’t do it like them; we won’t fail. Because we’re just better people, and we know so much more now.”

Now being ten minutes past Venezuela, not just decades past Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.

How do we know these current “democratic” socialists wouldn’t be any different from their socialist predecessors? Because of what they already do and say.

They believe in killing the innocent—the unborn. And beyond that, Democrats this past week showed they were not even willing to protect the already born, if a mother suddenly decided she didn’t want the child. So—they believe in killing based on their own selfish purposes. That isn’t really different from the past socialists, who killed millions of Jews and others they deemed genetically or mentally inferior (such homosexuals, the disabled, or anyone who protected any of those categories), or who disagreed with them (such as Bonhoeffer or Hubener), or who simply didn’t matter to them (such as the thousands who starved to death in the Soviet Union during WWII).

These new socialists have already shown they will target those who disagree—as they did to Tea Party and patriot groups during the Obama administration. They target bakers and florists and photographers, and nuns and doctors and therapists who don’t go along with their sexually irresponsible agenda.

They work tirelessly to disarm citizens, so that coercion of no-longer-free people will be simplified.

They typically lie about what they want to do, because the people wouldn’t stand for their actual purposes. For example, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” and it will cost less. None of that was true; all of it was a step toward greater coercive control.

Sometimes we do get the truth, though. For example, the Green New Deal proposed this past week by media darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who didn’t get the memo about not revealing their nasty plots. She didn’t invent the idea of a Green New Deal; it has been around for several years. Her forte is getting stuff out in today’s media environment. This is all proposal, and not yet legislation. But it’s informative.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announcing Green New Deal
screenshot from CNN

In the name of saving the world from climate change—which she says will bring on the end of the world within twelve years if we don’t take drastic action—she insists that we in the US, but not the rest of the world, should have our government do the following over the next decade:

·         Get rid of all cars currently on the roads, except electric ones (so, about 99% of all cars, all trucks, all heavy equipment).

·         Get rid of all energy sources except wind, solar, and coal plants. So, no oil, no natural gas, no nuclear—all of which are cleaner than coal. These entire segments of the market would be shut down. But somehow magically we would have plenty of electricity.

·         All buildings would be either razed and rebuilt or stripped and retrofitted to meet some undefined level of energy efficiency. It’s unclear whether the government (i.e., taxpayers) would pay for every home, apartment complex, store, warehouse, office building, church, hospital, school, or cabin—all regardless of architectural value—to be built anew. Details, details. I am wondering, though, how that massive amount of building could go on without trucks or heavy machinery. And how can new wealth be created if this huge undertaking is just to retrofit what we now use.

·         Shut down air travel—the entire industry. But not to worry: there will be high-speed rail everywhere, except of course from the terminal to wherever in a city you may want to go, because…no cars, except for the 1% still allowed. Sorry, Hawaii. And Alaska. Maybe you can still do shipping—except, not fueled by internal combustion engines, or nuclear (as submarines are). Just electrical. Good luck plugging them in in the middle of the ocean.

·         Shut down, or sharply curtail, the cattle industry, because those animals produce gases, you know, in their flatulence. Also, get rid of large production farms in favor of small family farms, which of course won’t need trucks or tractors or anything gas powered.

·         And, since we’re on the subject of saving the planet from climate change, we’ll throw in a totally unrelated living family wage for everyone—even for those unable or unwilling to work. Because, what with shutting down most of the oil and gas and nuclear energy, automobile, air travel, and farming and ranching  sectors of the economy, and having torn down all buildings so that all other production is disrupted—this is a great time to assume we’ll have many many trillions of extra tax revenue dollars to just pay people who don’t want to work.

Seriously, where will the money come from for government to do all these things? Or any of them, really?

Some of the proposals have been walked back—awkwardly, as if walking backward in Gucci heels through the mud. Ocasio-Cortez decided to take down the FAQs she and her staff put up, and blame the confusion on some fake site that had added “recycling urine” onto the list. But no one was talking about that; they were talking about the real things she had put up, like paying people who don’t want to work.

How would we pay for it? By incurring debt at rates heretofore never seen. Or maybe she means grow it on trees, or start using fairy dust. Because real economists would tell you, you can’t take down multiple major industries and infrastructure, and expect the economy to just charge right along.

So, what we have is evidence that the new socialists do not know more than previous socialists.

And the new socialists are not more moral than the previous socialists.

socialists   image from here

But the new socialists are indeed every bit as into acquiring power and using “government coercion, domination, and control” tactics to beat down anyone who might want to stand up to them.

We’ve seen these “new” socialists before. They’re tyrants, just like all their predecessors.

But we are born free. I pray that we have the resolve to stand up to the tyrants so that America will never be a socialist tyranny—with all the misery, slavery, death, poverty, and decay into savagery that inevitably come with that type of government.

Little Red Hen Economics Lesson

There’s an old folk story called “The Little Red Hen.” A hen comes upon a grain of wheat and decides to plant it. She asks for help from various barnyard animals, but none will help. Not with the planting, the watering, the weeding, the harvesting, the threshing, the milling, or the baking into bread.

But then, when it comes to eating, they’re all willing. But the hen turns them away, and feeds the bread only to her little chicks and herself. Image from Wikipedia: 

Was that fair to the other barnyard animals? The purpose of the story is to teach that yes, it was. She worked for her bread, so she got to use it for her own family.

book cover image
from Wikipedia

Having the bread, as the ultimate end of all her labor, meant she was more wealthy than all the other barnyard animals. Is that fair?

Was she more wealthy because she took advantage of the other animals? No.

Had she deprived them of opportunities to work and earn their share? No.

She did make use of the found seed, which seems to be a free resource advantage. But we don’t know if that was a commonly available resource to all, and anyone else who had picked one up and done the work might have yielded the same result.

So you might say that it’s natural for us to believe that the person who makes the bread eats it—or, in other words, the person who earns the wealth gets to decide how to spend it.

That hasn’t been happening for a while in Venezuela. One of the richest in resources, this country had plenty to start with, but socialism ate it all up. People are starving. Money is undergoing hyperinflation. People have shortages of essentials like toilet paper.

Stuart Varney, on Fox News, Monday, points out that Venezuela is a corrupt socialist dictatorship with a collapsing economy. But he warns against intervention. “Send in food, and Maduro extends his power.” It’s a sad tale and not getting better soon. Varney suggests: 

screen shot from Varney on Venezuela

Maybe Venezuela is best used as an example for our own socialists here in America. Socialism is making great strides among young people. Venezuela could be one of those teaching moments. After all, in our schools and colleges, socialism is often held up as something wonderful. The sight of Venezuelans eating out of trash cans might open some eyes. But let’s be clear: Venezuela is done. It is not our fault. It’s not our responsibility. But it is a very strong warning to the pie-in-the-sky socialist dreamers.

One of those pie-in-the-sky socialist dreamers said more economically ignorant things this week, which brought a response (and eye roll) from Ben Shapiro.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Pod Save America
image from here

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked on a Pod Save America interview how she planned to pay for her various socialist necessities: single-payer healthcare, free college tuition, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed income for all, etc. You can see her answer here, along with a transcription, which is pretty painful. A friend, who is socialist/progressive/leftist-minded but otherwise a decent guy, and old friendships require some tolerance, promoted a video of her on Facebook today, because he was so impressed with her. There’s no accounting for taste, I guess. Or like-mindedness appeals.

Anyway, on yesterday’s podcast (starting at about 23 minutes) Ben Shapiro shared some of the numbers related to her (and Bernie Sanders’) intended plans. Her answer, Shapiro points out, never responds to the actual question:

I do love the fact that the original question here was, “How do you pay for things?” And her answer is, “Nobody pays for things.” Thank you, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for that brilliant exposition on the debt and deficit in the United States.

So we’ll just magically keep spending money we don’t have, because she thinks government has an unlimited supply, and all that is needed is someone convincing government to spend it the way she sees fit.

Some things, though, she thinks are stupid spending: tax cuts and wars. Of the $4.3 trillion federal budget this year, what percentage was military spending? 16%. But on social programs?

62% of the entire federal budget goes to mandatory spending under Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The vast majority goes to social welfare programs that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says we’re spending too little money on. The fact is, the amount of money we spend per capita in the United States on social welfare programs is actually almost on par with that of the European countries, and actually surpasses some of the European countries.

He adds,

Social Security will be bankrupt in the next decade. Medicare will be bankrupt a decade after that. These programs are not going to be around. Or, if they are around, they’re going to require massive cuts or massive taxes.

While she says we shouldn’t worry about spending, because we’ve never worried about it before—she’s wrong; many of us do worry, because we know debt always comes due, but at least we have economic growth right now, which mitigates the damage slightly—we’ve also never contemplated the insane level of spending she suggests. Ben Shapiro continues:

According to the Mercatus Center, the libertarian leaning center at George Mason University, they estimated that Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for all plan—we talked about this last week—would cost the government $32 trillion over the next decade.

But, we can actually do a budget exercise using nonpartisan and even left-leaning groups. Vox.com, a left-wing source. They talk about what exactly we would have to pay for single-payer health care, a jobs guarantee, and free college; what exactly would it cost? Well, it turns out that it would cost, according to the Tax Policy Center, it would cost legitimately trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. $42.5 trillion in new proposals over the next decade, on top of the $12.4 trillion baseline deficit.

To put this into perspective, according to Vox.com, Washington is currently projected to collect $44 trillion in taxes—in revenues, that’s what they call it—over the next decade. Ok, the Republican tax cut, the “fiscal Armageddon,” will cost less than $2 trillion over the next decade. So we’re going to spend $44 trillion, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the real problem is those tax cuts that “cost” $2 trillion.

What is the 30-year projected tab for these programs that they’re talking about? The 30-year projected tab is, I kid you not, $218 trillion, on top of an $84 trillion baseline deficit driven by Social Security, Medicare, and the resulting interest costs. Federal spending, which is typically between 18 and 22% of GDP in the United States, would soar past 40% of GDP on its to 50% of GDP within three decades.

She thinks the government shouldn't do something so profligate as letting Americans keep $2 trillion, spread over a decade, of money they earned, but it's a wise "investment" to spend two hundred times that on things that are not within the enumerated powers of government.

I’m trying to picture how vast that $218 trillion "infinity and beyond" number is.

Here’s the Federal Reserve's historical chart of federal spending as a percentage of GDP:

See that spike in the 1940s? That's WWII. Imagine a spike that high by 2030, and nearly triple the normal within 30 years. It’s usually around 20% of GDP. The socialist spending plan would blitz past WWII-era emergency spending, up to between 50%-60% by 2050. 

Assuming we continue with good GDP growth, which we wouldn’t. Because, as we know from the Little Red Hen, when you do all the work yourself, you’re entitled to decide how to spend it. And we know from all the socialist experiments, if you don't get the fruits of your labor, you're not willing to do the labor.

There’s a socialist argument that, all those failed states, they just didn’t do it right; "This time we’ll do it right," they say. But if you’re talking about letting someone as out of touch with reality as either Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez give it a try, there’s zero chance of not making the mistakes that have caused every socialist state to fail. And the more corrupt or just plain wrong those elites who make the decisions, the quicker you get to Venezuela, or Stalinist Russia, or Cuba, or North Korea—any place where you have to force people to stay, and where the state blithely says to its subjects, “Your death is a loss I’m willing to bear.”

Every time a tyrant comes in and seizes power over your decisions on how to spend what you earn, and how to live your life—the eventual end is that you may not get to live your life at all.

The socialists start by breaking “Thou shalt not covet,” continue by breaking “Thou shalt not lie,” and end up breaking, “Thou shalt not murder.” Every time. Don’t trust a covetous liar to wield positions of power.