Japanese F-15s Fire Warning Flares After Russian Spy Plane Violates Airspace 3 Times
US ally Japan just had a close call with a Russian military airplane. The country’s defense ministry has condemned what it says was a blatant violation of Japanese airspace on Monday.
Japan’s defense chief Minoru Kihara in a press briefing described that a Russian Il-38 reconnaissance plane breached Japan’s airspace above Rebun Island in the far north of the Japanese island chain. This is not far off the main northern island of Hokkaido.
“The airspace violation was extremely regrettable,” Kihara said, detailing that in the aftermath Tokyo “strongly protested” to Moscow by diplomatic channels, demanding that future preventative measures be put in place.
Importantly, Japan disclosed that it scrambled multiple F-15 and F-35 fighter jets in response to the airspace violation, and that the Russian aircraft appeared to ignore initial warnings.
That’s when the Japanese fighters fired flares to escalate the warning, after which the Russian plane eventually departed the area.
Japan’s defense ministry described that the aircraft violated sovereign airspace three times during a five-hour total flight. The Russian plane spent up to a minute inside Japan’s airspace during each violation instance.
China and Russia have been conducting joint naval and aerial patrols in the area, putting both US and Japanese forces on high alert. There was a also a recent joint naval sail-through of the area.
The Associated Presswrites of the latest maneuvers, “The Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning, accompanied by two destroyers, sailed between Japan’s westernmost island of Yonaguni and nearby Iriomote, entering close to Japan’s waters.”
According to more, “According to Japan’s military, it scrambled jets nearly 669 times between April 2023 and March 2024, about 70% of the time against Chinese military aircraft, though that did not include airspace violations.”
US Border Agents Find RPGs & IEDs Near Southern Border Amid “Internal Alert” Of “Drastic Escalation” In Weaponry Used By Cartels
An alarming battle between rival factions of the Sinaloa drug cartel has unfolded in northwestern Mexico, near the Biden-Harris administration’s open southern border. The risk of spillover continues to increase as US Border Patrol agents recently discovered a weapons cache of shoulder-fired rocket launchers and improvised explosive devices just across from the Arizona border.
“4 RPGs and 8 IEDs along with a large amount of ammo discovered in a scout site in Mexico just across the Arizona border which butts up against the Ajo area of operation within the Tucson Sector,” NewsNation’s border correspondent Ali Bradley wrote on X on Monday afternoon.
Bradley said, “Border Patrol agents are being warned of the “drastic escalation” in weaponry being used on the south side of the border—According to an internal alert obtained through sources.”
“The fighting within the Sinaloa cartel, spilling over the border with multiple instances of armed men showing up to the southern border in the same area fleeing into the US for safety,” she added.
#EXCLUSIVE 4 RPGs and 8 IEDs along with a large amount of ammo discovered in a scout site in Mexico just across the Arizona border which butts up against the Ajo area of operation within the Tucson Sector.
The eruption in violence near the border is infighting within the Sinaloa cartel, between groups known as the “Mayos” and the “Chapos”. This first began when authorities arrested Joaquín Guzmán López and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in July.
A tsunami of violence has since been reported, with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador blaming Zambada’s arrest on the US.
Last Friday, US Ambassador Ken Salazar rejected AMLO’s claim, saying, “What is being seen in Sinaloa is not the fault of the United States,” adding the US cannot be held responsible for “the massacres that we see in different places.”
What’s clear is that cartels are quickly becoming militarized while the Biden-Harris team prided themselves with open southern borders. Meanwhile, Venezuelan prison gangs are running amok in the US, and a new bombshell hearing on Capitol Hill last week revealed Biden-Harris covered up the sharp rise in encounters with suspected terrorists on the border.
It’s become a truism in the past few years that younger people get their news predominantly, if not entirely, from social media. Turns out it’s true, but it may not be an information crisis, as some would have you believe.
Of course, as an old-time newspaperman, I was one of those who thought that the country was not being served well by this increasing dependency on unvetted news sources and the implied repudiation of traditional media. How could the country survive if the next generations turned their back on the trusted voices of the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, and “the most trusted name in news” – CNN?
But that was my opinion before Donald Trump was elected president and the legacy media exposed itself for being exactly what Trump said it had become – Fake News. The young people of America may not realize that their distrust of mainstream media was anticipated by Donald Trump, but the more that the old media voices expose their own bias, the closer together Trump and the young men and women of America are getting.
A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 86% of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 prefer to get their news from digital devices. Comparatively, only 8% of that same age group prefers television as their main news source, 2% prefer radio, and 3% prefer newspapers.
The Pew poll also reveals that the youngest adults are not relying entirely on digital devices as their news sources. Although nine out of 10 say they get some of their news from digital devices, nearly half also get some news from TV, 27% from radio, and 18% from newspapers. So if they are rejecting traditional news media, it is not from ignorance but from familiarity.
It should be obvious to anyone paying attention that the mainstream news has tilted so far left that they have almost no point of contact with mainstream America. The disgusting bias against not just Trump but against any conservatives or Republicans is so obvious that fair-minded people can’t make excuses any longer. The latest evidence was the appalling behavior of the ABC moderators of the Sept. 10 debate between Trump and Kamala Harris. Whether the anti-Trump slant was intentional or just the result of institutional bias, it proved young people right to look elsewhere for honest news.
Even more significant than the debate itself was the follow-up. If you as a viewer had noticed (and who couldn’t?) the way ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis aggressively fact-checked Trump, sometimes incorrectly, and let Harris slide on obvious lies such as the “both sides” hoax, you probably tuned in to the post-debate panels on TV expecting the so-called media experts to set the record straight.
But they didn’t. If the post-debate analysis in June had doomed the candidacy of Joe Biden, the punditry in September was immediately and relentlessly pro-Harris, largely ignoring the assist that ABC had given her.
But if, on the other hand, you had been accessing news from YouTube, you would have seen an immediate backlash against ABC. Most ferocious was Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News and NBC newswoman, who now runs her own show on SiriusXM. Her extensive background in TV news gave her the credibility to decry the debate as a media disaster:
I am disgusted. I am ashamed of those moderators at ABC News. David Muir and Linsey Davis did exactly what their bosses wanted them to do. The head of ABC News, Dana Walden, is a close personal friend of Kamala Harris who is responsible for Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, meeting. They did Dana Walden’s bidding. It was three against one on the debate stage this evening…
This was a mistake to trust ABC News with this debate. The Republicans must learn from this mistake the same way the Democrats never agree to moderators they don’t entirely trust. This should be the last time the Republicans ever do this because those two moderators tried to sink Donald Trump tonight.
On X, Kelly wrote, “Why did the moderators need Kamala Harris there at all?” and “This is one of the most biased, unfair debates I have ever seen. Shame on you ABC.”
That last tweet garnered nearly 5 million views. That’s substantially more than CNN’s ratings for the entire debate, which hovered around 4.4 million.
A substantial percentage of CNN viewers probably abandoned the channel immediately after the debate when they heard Jake Tapper deliver a virtual eulogy for the Trump candidacy. Not all of them went to Megyn Kelly’s YouTube channel either, but more young people probably went there than the other TV networks, the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal.
Kelly was not alone among the many alternative voices on YouTube that spoke out in favor of fairness. One of the most interesting features of social media websites is that they use an algorithm to steer news and videos to each user based on their interests. That means if you watch Kelly’s podcast, you will eventually see other conservative news sources directed to your feed.
In my case, it means that I now watch way more YouTube videos than Fox News shows. They range from the raw pro-Trump commentary of Benny Johnson, youthful activism from Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, the establishment point of view of Sean Spicer (Trump’s first press secretary) and radio host Hugh Hewitt, the numerical wizardry of the People’s Pundit (Rich Baris, a conservative pollster), and the multiple other pundits you would never hear of like Dr. Steve Turley (the Patriot Professor), the Body Language Guy (Jesus Enrique Rosas), and the Conservative Twins (black brothers who left the Democratic Party to join the growing trend of young black Republicans).
Trust me, I don’t miss either CNN or Fox News, which both have hidden agendas that come from corporate boardrooms. I would much rather watch news that mirrors the world I am seeing than watch news that is intended to convince me I didn’t see what was right in front of me.
Call it confirmation bias or call it truth-telling, but whatever you call it, the average person is going to seek out news sources that validate what we saw with our own eyes. Young people may be more skeptical of authority by nature, but people of any age will eventually tire of being told by mainstream media things that they know are not true – or even more often, omitting things they think you don’t need to know.
So take my challenge: Tune in to “The Megyn Kelly Show” every day for a week. If you don’t think you are better informed after that week than you have been in decades of following ABC, CBS, and the rest, feel free to retreat back into “The Media Matrix,” whose purpose is to manipulate, mislead, and manage the news.
At the start of our country, the free press was considered a vital component of our democracy – a watchdog that would keep honest the three branches of government and ensure the existence of an informed citizenry.
Those days are long over. Nowadays, the mainstream media’s function is to protect the government and guard the status quo, which is why the alternative media on YouTube, Rumble, and other platforms are so vital to protecting not only the government but our democracy. The answer to the question, “Who will watch the watchmen?” is obvious. It is the citizen journalists and exiled news reporters who reject the mainstream narrative and ask questions that challenge you to think for yourself.
Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His book “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake” is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA and on X/Gettr @HeartlandDiary.
Nuclear Is Back: PA Governor Shapiro Pushes For “Fast Track” Re-Open For Three Mile Island
The plan to power AI and data centers using nuclear power just caught another tailwind, just days after we wrote about Microsoft helping bring Three Mile Island back online. And the latest (maybe unexpected) support comes from Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor.
Following Microsoft’s agreement to purchase power from the dormant Three Mile Island nuclear plant, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro urged regulators to prioritize the reactor’s connection to the electrical grid, according to a new report from Barron’s.
In a letter to PJM Interconnection, the grid operator serving Pennsylvania and several other states, Shapiro emphasized that the plant should not face the extended delays typical for new developments, as Microsoft aims to start utilizing the reactor’s energy by 2028.
The energy generated by the reactor, enough to supply about 700,000 homes, will be used to power Microsoft’s data centers, the report says.
PJM Interconnection responded to Shapiro’s concerns, stating that it is developing a “fast track” process to prioritize certain electricity projects, potentially speeding up the reactor’s return to service.
Shapiro wants the reactor to “be allowed to come online as quickly as possible rather than waiting in the queue as if they were an entirely new development,” he wrote.
PJM commented: “PJM was glad to see the planned repowering of Three Mile Island Unit 1. Adding megawatts to the grid during this period of tightening supply/demand conditions will help reliability of the system.”
Recall we wrote last week the owner of Three Mile Island is investing $1.6 billion to revive the plant and has agreed to sell all of its output to Microsoft, which is seeking power for its data centers.
This momentum continues our “Next AI Trade” that we pointed out in April of this year, where we outlined various investment opportunities for powering up America, playing out.
The restart of Three Mile Island, specifically to sell energy to Microsoft to power its data centers, will be the most material advancement in the nuclear/AI thesis since we first outlined it.
Constellation Energy Corp. plans to restart the Three Mile Island reactor by 2028, according to a Friday statement. The reactor, closed in 2019 due to economic challenges, will reopen despite the site’s other unit being shut down nearly 50 years ago after a major nuclear accident, according to Bloomberg.
The Bloomberg report noted that Microsoft has committed to a 20-year energy purchase from a nuclear facility, its first dedicated 100% nuclear energy deal.Financial details were not disclosed.
Constellation Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez said: “Policymakers and the market have received a huge wake-up call. There’s no version of the future of this country that doesn’t rely on these nuclear assets.”
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told lawmakers that he is considering the so-called “generals’ plan” to lay total siege to northern Gaza and expel all its Palestinian residents, the Times of Israelreported Monday.
When retired major general Giora Eiland presented the plan last week, he claimed it would “change the reality” on the ground in Gaza. “We have to tell the residents of north Gaza that they have one week to evacuate the territory, which then becomes a military zone, [a zone] in which every figure is a target and, most importantly, no supplies enter this territory.” The remaining Hamas fighters would then be forced to surrender or starve, according to the plan.
Eiland was the former director of the National Security Council and former head of the Planning Department of the Israel Defense Forces.
Israeli national broadcaster Kan reported on Sunday that Netanyahu, in a closed-door meeting with the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said that the plan “makes a lot of sense.”
Eiland claimed that the ethnic cleansing and siege of the north of the strip, where some 300,000 Palestinians still live, is not only an effective military tactic but is also compliant with international law.
“What matters to [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar is land and dignity, and with this maneuver, you take away both land and dignity,” he said.
Eiland has been critical of Israel’s current strategy in the war against Hamas’s military wing and Palestinian civilians in Gaza, saying it has not been harsh enough against the Palestinian population.
“You can’t win a war while this is the situation in Gaza,” he said. “The slogan that ‘only military pressure will bring victory’ has no basis whatsoever. The wars of the 21st century are based on something else. The most important parameter is the population, and those who can control the population win the war.”
In November, Eiland said that the spread of disease in Gaza is good for Israel. “After all, severe epidemics in the southern strip will bring victory closer and reduce fatalities among IDF soldiers,” he wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth.
Likud MK Amit Halevi, a member of the committee, said the Eiland plan marked “the right direction” for Israeli policy in Gaza. “In order to defeat Hamas, we must control the land and the population. There is no other way to victory,” he told the Times of Israel.
The plan does not reveal whether Palestinians could ever return to northern Gaza, one of its backers told CNN.
In October, a leaked document issued by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence recommended the total transfer of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, ensuring they would not be able to return.
The document recommends that Israel evacuate the Gazan population to Sinai during the war, establish tent cities and new cities in northern Sinai to accommodate the deported population, and then create a closed security zone stretching several kilometers inside Egypt. The deported Palestinians would not be allowed to return to any areas near the Israeli border.
In November, Israeli minister Ron Dermer proposed a plan to “thin out” the Gaza population by forcing civilians to flee to Egypt by land or to other parts of Africa and Europe by boat because the “sea is open to them.” Many Israelis wish to conquer and destroy Gaza, ethnically cleanse it of Palestinians, and build settlements for Jews in their place.
Carl Chinn, 65, is a man of deep faith who thought church was a place to go to find peace—until he locked eyes with an angry gunman 28 years ago.
On May 2, 1996, a man carrying a rifle, a handgun, and claiming to have explosives walked into the Focus on the Family ministry in Colorado Springs and took four hostages.
Chinn was one of those hostages, and his experience changed his outlook on the vulnerability of churches from that day forward.
Before then, “security wasn’t even in the back of my mind,” he said.
The suspect, a construction worker, carried out the attack four years after he injured himself while building the ministry’s new 256,000-square-foot facility.
He filed for disability at the time, but his insurance ruled the injury was due to “horseplay” and substantially cut his benefits.
It took four years for the man’s anger to reach critical mass—four years to come back to “exact his form of justice,” Chinn told The Epoch Times.
“He wanted to go out suicide by cop.”
During the hostage situation, the man shot into a wall before police were able to arrest him.
“That was my wake-up call,” Chinn said. “That incident changed the trajectory of my life.”
It also wasn’t the only time he encountered an armed intruder in church.
In 2007, Matthew John Murray, 24, killed two people and wounded two others as he opened fire at a church youth training center in Arvada, Colorado.
Murray evaded law enforcement and later that afternoon he shot and killed two more people and wounded three others at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs before he was fatally shot by a security team member.
Chinn was there on the day of the shooting. He knew one thing about the gunman: “He hated Christians.”
The former building engineer said after the first incident in which he was held hostage, he started reading up on the degree to which attacks were happening in churches across the United States.
Chinn looked at law enforcement databases and found violent attacks were a leading cause of death in churches: Around 1,050 people died out of 2,361 total incidents between 1999 and 2020.
He compiled a list of “deadly force incidents” for the 22-year period and found the No. 1 reason was robbery, with 464 incidents (24.4 percent).
The second-leading cause of fatal force encounters was domestic violence, accounting for nearly 15 percent of all cases.
Five percent of the deadly force incidents were motivated by hatred against houses of worship, Chinn said. Recent incidents show that anti-religious bias is not going away.
On May 5, a man walked up to the pulpit and pointed a gun at Glenn Germany, pastor of the Jesus’ Dwelling Place Church in Braddock, Pennsylvania, while he was preaching.
The man tried to pull the trigger but the gun jammed, according to news reports. Another church member quickly wrestled the gun from him.
In another incident, a man was wounded in the leg after a woman with a history of mental illness began shooting an AK-47 inside the Lakewood Church in Texas on Feb. 11.
Genese Moreno, 36, was killed by police after she opened fire. In a hail of bullets, her 7-year-old son also died.
Chinn, president of the Faith Based Security Network (FBSN) founded in 2017, said that deadly attacks at houses of worship are becoming more commonplace.
He said it’s a sign of the times and an ominous indicator of a society in rapid moral decline.
“We absolutely are seeing more animosity towards faith-based organizations by those who espouse what I would call anti-moral opinions,” Chinn said.
“I believe we are going to continue seeing attacks.”
The FBSN now boasts 800 members from Christian congregations, as well as Jewish synagogues and other religious groups across the nation.
Chinn, who has witnessed a dramatic hardening of public buildings against acts of violence, said attacks against houses of prayer is a growing issue.
“You can hardly walk into a school without being stopped,” Chinn said. “It’s getting harder to do an attack at a school. It’s getting hard to perform an attack on any municipality or government building.”
He said that historically, churches have been the last to shore up their facilities against deadly violence and other potential disruptions
Chinn’s mission as an FBSN instructor of “intentional security readiness” is to make membership organizations “ready, willing, and able to protect the people they love.”
Raising awareness of potential threats, creating security teams and protocols, building security, and using deadly force and non-lethal means are some of the things the FBSN teaches.
“I believe it is an absolute requirement for the coming age,” Chinn said. “I think we’re in for tough times in this country. The divisions are very sharp.”
Chinn found that 118 people had died in 2017 and 88 people died in 2018, according to law enforcement databases. Each year, there were 261 reported incidents.
In 2019, there were 216 total violent incidents and 74 deaths. During the pandemic, there were 178 incidents and 71 deaths.
“I absolutely believe there is a slip in moral character in our country which has lessened the degree of respect for sanctuary-type places,” Chinn said.
“In fact, there’s hatred toward faith-based organizations. There is a cry for something to be more stable. I don’t know what the political solution is.”
Death By Numbers
Each year, the FBI collects data on 49 different types of crime through the National Incident-Based Reporting System with reports from law enforcement agencies in 32 states.
The Dolan Consulting Group, which provides training for law enforcement, examined 17 years of FBI data between 2000 and 2017 and counted 1,652 violent incidents against houses of worship, including robbery, aggravated assault, shootings, stabbings, and bombings.
The 1,652 violent incidents resulted in 155 deaths and 742 injuries over the time period. On average there were 97 incidents per year causing nine deaths and 44 injuries.
“Extrapolating to the whole U.S. population, we estimated that there are actually about 480 incidents of serious violence at places of worship in the U.S. each year,” according to the Dolan Consulting Group.
“These incidents produce about 46 deaths and 218 serious injuries annually. This is a serious problem. As the vast majority of places of worship in the U.S. are Christian churches, it is not surprising that 94 percent of the incidents occurred at Christian churches.”
In 2019, the FBI said that hate crimes motivated by religious bias accounted for 1,650 incidents reported by law enforcement.
Around 60 percent of these incidents were against Jews, 13.3 percent were against Muslims, 4 percent were against Catholics, and 3.6 percent were against other Christians.
Chinn said his organization does not monitor hate crimes, focusing instead on lethal encounters.
“We only track deadly force incidents. When you’re tracking the worst of the worst, the data set changes,” he said.
The Arizona Church Security Network is a group that helps around 300 churches in Arizona with resources and training.
Yellen Meddles: Warns That Policy “Veering Off Course” Could Harm “Economic Trajectory”
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that a significant change in current economic policies could damage the American economy.
Writing for The Wall Street Journal in a Sept. 22 article, Yellen said that “veering off course could jeopardize our economic trajectory.”
As Jack Phillips reports via The Epoch Times, Yellen said tax cuts for higher earners “would explode the federal deficit,” repealing investments in “the industries of the future would stunt growth,” and “pursuing nontargeted, nonstrategic international economic policies would raise costs for Americans and cause global turmoil.”
She also touted the federal government’s investments in green energy, calling them “cutting-edge industries,” and praised the vaccination programs launched during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We then navigated additional crises, including the energy shock from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the U.S. Treasury secretary said.
“And we made critical investments in infrastructure and manufacturing—from clean energy to semiconductors—including in training Americans for jobs in these cutting-edge industries.”
Yellen said these actions helped “reverse the pandemic’s shock to our ability to produce goods and services” and “boosted the economy’s long-run potential output.”
Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump said during an appearance at the Economic Club of New York that he would lead what he described as a “national economic renaissance” by slashing government regulations, increasing tariffs, and cutting government spending as well as corporate taxes if he were to be elected as president in November.
The Republican presidential nominee also proposed a plan to cut down on what he called wasteful government spending and said that he would tap Tesla CEO Elon Musk to head a government efficiency commission.
“I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with completing a complete financial and performance audit of the federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms,” Trump said on Sept. 5.
Vice President Kamala Harris said on Sunday that she would deliver a speech on the economy later this week. There is “more we can do to invest in the aspirations and ambitions of the American people while addressing the challenges they face,” she said.
The Democratic presidential nominee cited the high cost of home ownership and high grocery bills as examples.
“I grew up a middle-class kid and I will never forget where I came from,” the vice president said on Sunday.
In the 2024 contest, Harris has backed away from proposals that she made in her 2020 presidential bid, including banning fracking for natural gas and establishing a single-payer health care system.
Going into November’s election, neither Harris nor Trump has a decisive edge with the public on the economy, according to a Sept. 20 poll by The Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Trump is slightly ahead, with 43 percent of registered voters saying they trust the former president to do a better job handling the economy, while 41 percent of voters chose Harris.
When I attended West Point back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, cadets used to joke that we got a “$50,000 education, shoved up our a** a nickel at a time.” Times have sure changed. Today, the cost of an education at the nation’s service academies has risen to an estimated quarter-of-a-million dollars per cadet or midshipman, all of which is funded by our tax dollars.
In the past, such an investment was more than worthwhile; West Point has produced such luminaries as Presidents Grant and Eisenhower, World War II Generals MacArthur, Patton, Arnold and Bradley, and scores of other accomplished military, political and business leaders ever since its inception in 1802.
But in recent times, things have changed. Not only has the taxpayer cost of a West Point education risen, but the Academy’s moral and professional compass seems to have shifted.
The U.S. Military Academy was the nation’s first engineering school, and rightly so, because engineering is a crucial skill on the battlefield. Soldiers must plan and build fortifications, bridges and other infrastructure as well as find ways to destroy them. But over the last few decades, the Academy has become more of a Liberal Arts College, offering battlefield-irrelevant course materials in such areas as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Critical Race Theory and Gender Studies. West Point now offers a minor in Diversity & Inclusion Studies.
Although sexual fraternization has been a problem ever since women were first admitted to the Academy in 1976, among its various “Affinity Clubs” West Point now sponsors a so-called “Spectrum Club” for homosexual and transexual cadets based solely on their sexual orientation. Presumably, such clubs for heterosexual males and females would not be tolerated.
The Cadet Honor Code used to be unequivocal: “A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do.” The penalty for violating the code was expulsion. Now, not so much. The Honor Code is still “managed” by cadets, but punishment for violators is now solely the Superintendent’s purview. Football players involved in a recent cheating scandal were not only retained but permitted to play in public competitions, including the Army-Navy and Army-Air Force games, both of which they “won.” An athlete-cadet watch thief caught on camera at the Post Exchange was allowed to graduate. The Superintendent has characterized the Honor Code as “aspirational” rather than absolute. The same Superintendent recently excised the school’s “Duty, Honor, Country” motto from West Point’s mission statement.
Each cadet company now has cadet “Respect Officers” reminiscent of Soviet Political Commissars, to ensure that all bow to the Academy’s now-woke culture. Admissions and advancement are now governed by race and gender over merit. The school’s Diversity and Inclusion Department has been renamed (for political reasons) but still exists. None of the speakers at last year’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion and Equal Opportunity Leadership Conference expressed any divergent views regarding DEI. Boxing, a warrior’s sport if ever there was one, no longer is on the intramural schedule.
I was a cadet when the USS Pueblo and its crew were seized in international waters by North Korea. On the door to my barracks room, I rashly posted a map of Southeast Asia with a mushroom cloud replacing that communist country. It was captioned, “Make South Korea an Island.” My tactical officer required me to remove my overtly political statement and write an essay on the U.S. military tradition of soldiers subservient to civilian control, as it was clear that the poster questioned Commander-in-Chief Lyndon Baines Johnson’s authority. I learned a valuable lesson from that. Now, however, things are different. Overlaying everything at West Point today is politics–Leftist politics.
Upon graduation from West Point, all of us took an oath as commissioned officers to “…support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic….” Enshrined in that document among the very first of our unalienable rights is freedom of speech, yet classmate email lists maintained by the Association of Graduates routinely censor any discussion critical of the Academy’s and the military’s direction. For example, I recently sent an email to my entire class that simply shared the website address of The MacArthur Society of West Point Graduates (www.macarthursociety.org), which was formed to push back against woke policies that many of us believe are undermining our alma mater’s mission as well as Army recruiting. My class president censored the email, stating “I have reviewed the site and it’s (sic) information and I find it to be biased and highly political therefore not appropriate to be shared with the Class.” This same class president emailed the class supporting the Superintendent’s decision to remove Duty, Honor, Country from the mission statement and regularly distributes policy positions of current Air Force Secretary and classmate Frank Kendall. I have no problem with such communications, but opposing viewpoints also should be shared.
West Point staffers now routinely violate federal law: The Freedom of Information Act requires citizen queries to be answered within 20 working days, yet the Academy’s FOIA office now willfully ignores the law. Judicial Watch had to sue to force West Point to share course materials promoting Critical Race Theory, DEI and other woke subjects. I and graduate friends of mine have unanswered FOIA requests going back one, two or more years.
My own FOIA—to determine the fate of cadets who overdosed on fentanyl-laced cocaine on Spring Break two years ago—was completed by West Point in June of this year but now languishes in the “Initial Denial Authority” office at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, 11 months after it was filed. The “Initial Denial Authority” refuses to respond to or acknowledge my emails and phone calls.
As a graduate and, more important, as a taxpayer funding these $250,000 educations, I have a right to know what punishment, if any, those drug-abusing cadets received. Did they graduate? Were they expelled and forced to repay their educational costs by serving as enlisted soldiers? Are drug abusers now permitted to serve in the military at all? I don’t know. We don’t know. And West Point and the Army refuse to enlighten us.
So, here we are: West Point’s officer leadership willfully ignores federal law. And they’re getting away with it. The same is true at our other service academies. This must change.
* * *
Tony Lentini is a 1971 West Point graduate. He served five years in the Army, attaining the rank of captain, and then had a successful career in the energy industry, eventually serving as vice president of public and international affairs at two independent oil and gas companies. He is a founding board member of The MacArthur Society of West Point Graduates.
Watch: Mob Attacks Philly Police Officer In Cruiser During One Of A Dozen Illegal Car Meetups This Weekend
Video is surfacing on social media showing a violent mob attacking a Philadelphia police officer in his cruiser, directly in front of City Hall, last night.
The mob shown in the below video was one of many, with 6ABC reporting “hundreds of cars and large crowds of people engaging in reckless activity” all over the city in the name of “car meetups”.
The report said there were “11 illegal car meetups, six of which allegedly involved excessive violence and destruction”. One officer was injured and left in the hospital when all was said and done.
Deputy Commissioner Mike Cram with Philadelphia police told ABC: “Everything they do is disruptive, they’re ruining the quality of life. At one point, they had a flame thrower. Yes, there’s video with a flame thrower.”
“They’re able to disperse quickly and then reform at other locations. That’s why we have officers dedicated. It’s playing wack-a-mole. We hit them at once, and they move to another,” he continued.
🚨NEW: violent mob attacks a Philadelphia police officer in his cruiser last night, rampaging with total impunity — Soros D.A. Larry Kranser doesn’t prosecute violent criminals. Period. pic.twitter.com/uBdrjIYs69
“It’s dangerous, honestly. I’m amazed — it’s extremely dangerous for them and people walking down the street,” one local resident said.
“They don’t care about your safety, their own safety. You’ve all seen the videos of their behavior. How much chaos can they cause?” Cram added.
Illegal car meetups started around 9:30 p.m. Saturday and continued until 4:30 a.m. Sunday, with police responding to incidents at multiple locations, including Bustleton Avenue, 20th and Pattison, Island and Bartram, and 15th and Market.
Footage from Action News shows a large crowd near City Hall, a known spot for burnouts and stunts, with cars even spinning around a ring of fire.
Several officers were attacked, and five police vehicles, including a mobile station, were damaged. About 200 vehicles were involved, with damage to police cars including smashed windshields and flat tires.
When in the course of history’s twists and turns dire necessity becomes the mother of invention the hour is usually late. That’s the case with America’s septic fiscal derangement at the present time. There is simply not a snowball’s chance in the hot place that either the Trumpified GOP or the beltway blob-controlled Democrats will lift a finger to deflect America’s fiscal doomsday machine from its appointed rendezvous with disaster.
The latter stems from the UniParty’s bargain with the fiscal devil. It amounts to a coalition of convenience dedicated to the fierce perpetuation of the fiscal status quo at all corners of the budget.
For its part, the Trumpified GOP now says it will no longer be accused by the Dems of planning to throw granny out into the snow. Instead, its very own party platform now says no cuts from Medicare or Social Security. Not even a single thin dime is to be squeezed from what will be the staggering $36 trillion cost of these two programs over the next decade.
That’s right. Neither wing of the UniParty will now even utter the words entitlement reform or spending cuts in the same sentence with Social Security, which alone will cost $20 trillion over the next decade, or Medicare, which will clock in at $16 trillion.
The GOP also reiterates its long standing refrain of no tax increases in any way, shape or form. In fact, it calls for an extension of the expiring Trump tax cut (2025) at a deficit cost of $4.5 trillion over the next decade.
Such an extension, however, would bring down Federal revenues to an average of just 16.5% of GDP—the lowest level since the 1950s. And, no, it won’t even out in the wash of higher “growth” either because CBO’s Rosy Scenario already assumes loads of cumulative real growth owing to no recession or any other economic upset for the next 10-years. Effectively, CBO’s 2.0% real growth with no recession for a decade is the same thing as 3.0% growth interrupted by a normal cyclical downturn and recovery.
In any event, the resulting revenue number of $58 trillion over the 2025-2034 decade would actually give the idea of soaring red ink an altogether new definition. That’s because the baseline spending level during the same period according to CBO’s latest projections is just under $85 trillion or 24% of GDP. So as the Trumpified GOP would have it, Joe Biden’s parting public debt of $36 trillion would reach upwards of $65 trillion by the mid 2030s.
At the same time, the Beltway Blob on the Dem side of the aisle is dug in deeply on the Medicaid/ObamaCare complex and safety net programs like Food Stamps, SSI, unemployment insurance, family tax credits and child nutrition, which would cost about $13 trillion over the decade.
And when push comes to shove in the cauldron of legislative battle, the GOP doesn’t have the cojones to dislodge the Dem defenses in this corner of the budget, either, despite rampant abuse and weak to non-existent work requirements for most of these programs.
Finally, we come to the Forever Wars, the Washington global hegemon, the military/industrial/intelligence/security assistance complex and the $15 trillion of baseline spending over the next decade for defense, international relations and veterans. As it happens, the neocons, war-hawks, the internationalist busy-bodies and the beltway racketeers which infest both parties have locked up this bulging corner of the budget tighter than a drum.
In fact, there is so much loose change seeping through the budgetary cracks of this $15 trillion Warfare State bonanza that the defense think tanks, international NGO’s and multitudinous military contractor lobbying arms are in high clover. The massively swollen national security budget thus funds its own lobbying and self-justification force—a self-licking ice cream cone, as it were.
Therefore, and to summarize: From a slate of $85 trillion of total baseline spending over the next decade we have the following UniParty “No Go”” zones:
Medicare and Social Security: $36 trillion.
Medicaid, ObamaCare and the Safety Net: $13 trillion.
The National Security Budget: $15 trillion;
Net Interest on the Debt: $13 trillion.
Total UniParty No-Go Zones: $77 trillion.
Percent of Baseline Spending: 91%.
In short, the frozen in place UniParty fiscal equation amounts to—
A revenue take at 17% of GDP at best.
Politically frozen spending at 24% of GDP—or far worse in the likely event that the weighted average cost of Treasury debt happens to rise above the absurdly low 3.0% level assumed by CBO.
Annual deficits of 7-8% of GDP or 2X the assumed nominal GDP growth rate as far as the eye can see.
A runaway public debt that reaches $65 trillion by 2034 and 166% of GDP or $150 trillion by 2050.
Needless to say, long before the public debt reached $150 trillion the financial system would implode because even the Keynesian mad-men, mad-women and mad-theys domiciled in the Eccles Building couldn’t come up with an excuse to monetize even a small share of the tsunami of public debt now coming down the pike. And make no mistake, the only reason we are at $36 trillion today is that the Fed has enabled it politically. That is, by massively monetizing the public debt it has temporarily deferred what would have otherwise been a severe crowding out of private borrowers and escalation of yields in the bond pits.
Still, we don’t think that the public debt will get to the financial implosion point because we do not believe that American democracy is inherently suicidal. In fact, even in the context of today’s tightening fiscal vice we see the emergent shadows of a path to resolution or at least a stick-save not too far down the treacherous road ahead.
To wit, it is now exceedingly likely that Donald Trump will not only win the 2024 election, but it is also possible that his return to the Oval Office could trigger the Great Realignment that might finally shatter the UniParty’s death grip on the fiscal equation.
To be sure, we italicize the “possible” part for good reason: The Donald is one of the most unstable, inconsistent and unpredictable politicians to ever prance upon the stage of presidential politics in America—so anything can happen, even a worse mis-governance disaster than his first time around the barn.
But our impression is that he is bitterly resentful of the manner in which the UniParty and its RINO wing undermined and ruined his first presidency. So this time he may actually allow himself to be guided and re-directed by the fantastic posse of brilliant dissidents—Robert Kennedy, Nicole Shanahan, Tulsi Gabbard, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk and JD Vance—who have recently joined or rallied to his campaign. Call it the Good Squad.
Indeed, it is this flying wedge of anti-Washington statesmen and intellects that could constructively harness and channel the Donald’s own inchoate instincts to drain the swamp. If their natural leader, RFK, can use his co-chairmanship of the transition organization to keep the neocons, RINOs and anti-abortion howlers out of the key posts in the next administration, it would make all the difference in the world. And if he could manage to parlay that role into Chief of Staff and de facto deputy president after the inauguration it would obviously be all to the better.
That’s because the GOP needs a big purge. It has been hijacked and led astray from is core fiscal mission during recent decades by ideological factions—neocons, tax cons, right to lifers, nativists and militant nationalists. But during a Trump Administration, which is led or strongly influenced by the Good Squad, the Donald’s promise to settle the Ukraine disaster quickly via partition of the artificial country that Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev built could trigger the very realignment that is sorely needed.
To wit, much of the neocon Never Trumper brigade has already migrated to the Dems and will cement their departure through specious claims of being “Republicans for Kamala” during the balance of the campaign. But where the potential deal of the century with Putin will have its biggest impact on the Realignment will be among the neocon ranks of Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Upon the Kennedy-Trump led rapprochement with Putin, these befuddled souls will either—
Retire from Congress disconsolately.
Switch parties to join the rest of the bitter-end Never Trumpers.
Or, in the main, see that their whole world view was wrong. That is, after a deal to split up Ukraine, Estonia did not fall, Poland remained free, the Brandenburg Gate was still visited by tourists not Russian troops, and that, alas, NATO could be disbanded with no harm done to Homeland Security.
In turn, what amounts to bringing the Empire Home could finally pave the way for breaking the fiscal deadlock. A Trump foreign policy formulated by the Good Squad would enable at least a 50% cut in defense spending and $5 trillion of savings from the baseline National Security budget over the next decade.
Beyond that, we seriously doubt that even the Good Squad could talk the Donald out of his 10% across the board tariff. But if it is applied to all of America’s $3 trillion of annual imports and not used as a club to start an economic war with China, so be it. A VAT (value added tax) would be a better instrument—but a Trumpified stealthy version might function as a second best alternative under the circumstances.
In any event, a stealthy VAT could generate $3-4 trillion of incremental revenue over a decade, without getting into the mischievous and counter-productive business of raising income, payroll or corporate taxes. And with the fiscal ball rolling in this manner, it is conceivable that another $4 trillion in interest savings, corporate boondoggles, green energy waste and the like might also be cobbled together by a realigned government led by the Good Squad.
Needless to say, $13 trillion of savings over the next decade would decisively stifle the current race to fiscal doom.
Finally, what happens if by some off chance Kamala wins? Or if the Good Squad gets squeezed out and shunted aside in a second Trump White House by the same protectionist, nativist and right-wing loonies who screwed the pooch the first time around?
Well, that’s why Bobby Kennedy will remain on the ballot in 40 states and thereby have the electoral base for a Realigned Anti-Washington Party in 2028. Coalesced around the leadership of the Good Squad and after 4 years of dismal partisan warfare between Kamala and the old guard GOP on Capitol Hill the electorate could be fairly begging for a Realignment next time around.
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