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Socialism Is Targeting The Foundations That Made America Great

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via The Epoch Times,

This is a lightly edited transcript of a July 6 segment of the Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words podcast.

One question that came up constantly during this 250th anniversary Fourth of July celebration was whether we were gonna make it another 250 years, 500 years. We could be longer than the Roman Republic. Longer than the Roman Empire.

Democratic Socialists of America march in downtown Berkeley, Calif., on Aug. 5, 2018. Amy Osborne/AFP/Getty Images

And to answer that question, you have to know what allowed us to get this far, and for those who don't like us, what they would like to do to stop us.

And it turns out that the reasons that we survived 250 years and the reasons that we might survive another 250 years are precisely the areas where our critics would wish us to fail, or who are actively trying to see that we fail.

Take the first one, our Constitution. What's brilliant about the American Constitution is its federalism.

It outlines all the duties and prerogatives of the federal government, and then it says anything that is not relegated to the federal government is up to the states, and that's the majority of human experiences. It doesn't mean the states can fight one another or pass laws against one another or pass laws against the federal government.

The federal government has ultimate authority, but this federalism means that if California wants to tax 13.3 percent and Florida wants to tax 0 percent, then maybe 300,000 people a year will go to Florida and still enjoy the American experience, and vice versa.

You can go to any state in the country and what it really means is you're having 50 separate experiments.

You're all united by the federal government and the checks and balances of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But you have 50 different interpretations of them based on local and regional concerns, and that gives Americans a lot of choice, and that means when you're disaffected and you're angry at your lot in life, you have 49 other choices, and it's been a wonderful way of easing tensions.

The second is that we have been the beneficiary of legal immigration. We take more immigrants than any place in the world, and people have remarked that as we speak, the people who created Google, for example, or Elon Musk, were all legal immigrants, and they came to the United States because this is the only place in the world where you would have a free market economy, a protection of private wealth, and an encouragement of the population to be successful and to take risk.

And it's impossible to envision a Silicon Valley in the Muslim Middle East. It just wouldn't happen. Wouldn't happen. You couldn't have a Harvard or Yale or Princeton in today's China. They wouldn't allow free speech. You wouldn't have most of our American institutions in any other place.

And that means we get all of these legal immigrants, and they enrich our country if they come in diverse fashion, in numbers that can be assimilated legally with some knowledge of our country and preferably with English language fluency.

The other third reason is we were very lucky naturally. Once the United States, whether you like it or not, embraced Manifest Destiny and decided we were not going to be a continent of warring states as was Europe, 30 or 40 individual nations, but one uniform state in North America, then it was richly endowed for all of us.

We had mining, we had gold, we had silver, we had iron ore, we had almost... We even have rare minerals, rare earth minerals we have not fully tapped. We have oil, we have coal, we have hydroelectric. We have the richest energy nation in the world. We're pumping more oil and gas than any other country in the history of the universe.

We have plentiful timber. We have plentiful farmland. We're the largest farming producing country by the value of our exports and our domestic produce in the world. We have two huge coastlines, not to count the Gulf of America.

In other words, we're protected from the insanity that goes on in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, and we always have been.

So, the sheer size of the American continent, its role in American history as a frontier, its role as a safety valve where people could head West, young men, if they were disaffected by events on the East Coast, and they could make a fortune or make a livelihood farming or in timber or in minerals or in energy, you name it.

There's a fourth reason that we're very successful, and that is we have a free market, private property economy. We're not a socialist, we're not a communist country.

In other words, people flock to the United States from countries where there is no economic opportunity. It either is statism controlled by the state or it's crony capitalist, and that's why we have the most billionaires in the world.

China has more people than we do, four times more people. Russia has twice, three times the territory, but we have more people in the affluent class.

And finally, we have a middle class. Our middle class is the largest in the world. We're not a pyramidal society of a few rich people on top that use their wealth for special dispensations or to affect the government or a mass of poor who are subsidized and always demanding entitlements.

Free middle class. Now, those are our strengths.

So if you wanted to hurt the United States or to ensure that it would not last 250 years, what would you do to stop that? Well, the first thing that I would do is I would start questioning the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. So, what do we see now from, for example, the left?

They're always attacking the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. They want to pack the court. They want to get rid of the filibuster. It is in the Constitution, the Electoral College. They want to ban or destroy the Electoral College.

They want to bring in two new states specifically, not one conservative and one liberal like the old Alaska-Hawaii compromise, but two liberal new states, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., and get four senators.

Anytime you see anyone that wants to alter the system like that, you know that they don't have the best interest of the United States because the system has worked for 250 years in most of these cases.

The second thing is you would want to, as I said earlier, you would want to say, we don't want legal-only immigration. We want anybody to come in. So we have 30 million illegal immigrants right now. Ten to 12 million came in under Joe Biden. We have no idea who they are. You walk across the border.

Is he a criminal? I don't know. Is he Albert Einstein? I don't know. Does he have COVID-19? I don't know. We were vaccinating in a mandatory fashion Americans in 2020 while people were flooding across in 2020, '21, '22, flooding across the border without border security.

And today, even though legal immigration has been the bulwark of what we've seen, we are getting immigrants who even come in legally and have nothing but hostile attitudes toward their generous host.

If you also wanted to damage the United States, then you would look at what I just talked about, natural resources. You would say no mining. We're in a problem right now with rare earths. We're short. They're critical to our economy. China has a monopoly, but we have some of the most abundant rare earth minerals in the world and we've been prohibited from using them.

We have the richest deposits of oil. Until recently, we did not develop them all. We did not develop coal in the proper way.

Our farming sector, the best and most efficient in the world, is under attack by environmentalists who want to cut off the water here in California.

I'm speaking from the richest agricultural county in the United States, Fresno County, and yet it needs water that has been sent out on the San Joaquin River into the ocean.

If you also wanted to destroy the United States or see it not last too much longer, you would kind of assault the middle class.

You would look at the United States as a binary, a Marxist binary. It is comprised not by class but by race. So, 70 percent, 65 percent are white oppressors. They are mostly white male, to be more particular, or more sensational, white male Christian heterosexuals, or the white race, or whatever we call these silly terms.

They are the exploiter, victimizer, and everybody on the other side is the victimized or oppressed. This is the binary that the Democratic Socialists of America and like-minded people use to alienate and divide the country, and it's worked very well.

But in between those two racial binaries is a class system in which the middle class still is the largest class and was the exact form, shape of a class system that the founders thought would be essential to republican government.

And then finally, of course, one of our greatest strengths is we have institutionalized a free market private property economy. Do away with that, and we go the way of the old Soviet Union or Cuba or Venezuela.

And what do we see now? We have people in the Democratic Socialists of America that want to confiscate property, get the means of production, take over tenant-landlord relationships, and absorb the private sector into the state.

If that happens, we will be impoverished.

So, we can make it another 250 years if we do what we did the last 250 years. But if we let people destroy those strengths that I enumerated, then we won't last another 50 years.

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Federal Appeals Court Rules Sex Offenders Have Constitutional Right To Live With Their Children

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times,

A federal appeals court ruled July 6 that convicted sex offenders retain a fundamental constitutional right to live with their own children.

The new ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit arises out of an Alabama case but could help reshape strict sex offender residency laws in the other two states in the circuit—Florida and Georgia—and serve as persuasive authority elsewhere.

At the heart of the case is the constitutional doctrine of substantive due process, which protects certain fundamental rights that are not explicitly listed in the U.S. Constitution but deeply rooted in U.S. history and tradition, including the right of parents to live with and raise their children.

The court ruled 8–5 in favor of the plaintiff, Bruce Henry, in the case known as Henry v. Sheriff of Tuscaloosa County.

The majority opinion was authored by Circuit Judge Robin Rosenbaum.

In 2013, Henry pleaded guilty to “knowingly possess[ing] ... any book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape, computer disk, or any other material that contains an image of child pornography.”

The opinion recounts that the federal district court sentenced him to 70 months in prison and 60 months of supervised release.

He served five years before being released in March 2018.

He finished a qualified Sex Offender Treatment Program, along with individual and group counseling, and continues to attend weekly meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous. In addition, he has a steady job, attends church, and volunteers.

He violated the terms of supervised release twice by viewing pornography. He reported the violations to his sexual offender treatment provider but did not inform his probation officer. The officer filed a petition to revoke his supervised release, but the district court declined, choosing instead to extend the duration of the supervised release period through March of this year, according to the opinion.

Since the last incident in December 2019, Henry has followed the terms of his release. In August 2021, he and his wife had a son, but because he was a sex offender, the Alabama Sex Offender Registration and Community Notification Act barred him from living with the child.

The Act prohibits a sex offender from residing with or conducting overnight visits with any minor, but it contains a family exception that allows the offender to live with or stay overnight with their own children, grandchildren, step-children, siblings, or step-siblings.

That protection is removed for any adult convicted of a sex offense involving a child or any offense involving child sexual abuse material, legally referred to as child pornography.

“Alabama law affords no offramp to Henry or anyone else: the Act contains no mechanism for offenders to challenge its prohibitions on residing or staying overnight with their own children,” the opinion said.

After Henry’s son was born, he sued officials in Alabama under federal law to block enforcement of the Act’s prohibition against him living with his son. The district court agreed that the prohibition was unconstitutional and enjoined its enforcement.

A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled largely for Henry, finding that the Act’s prohibition against a parent living with his own child interfered with Henry’s “fundamental right to live with and raise [his] child,” and vacated the district court’s injunction.

The full 11th Circuit then reheard the case and ruled for Henry.

The Supreme Court has recognized that parents have a fundamental right to live with their children, and this right is “perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests” that the 14th Amendment protects, the opinion said.

By contrast, Alabama argued that not all parents enjoy this right and that entire categories of parents enjoy “no fundamental rights at all because they committed state-defined ‘misconduct’ years before their children were even born.” The Supreme Court has recognized that even a parent convicted of possessing “child pornography” still retains a fundamental right to live with his son, the opinion said.

“That does not mean that Alabama can’t regulate or even abrogate that right. But to do so, Alabama must show that its legislation is narrowly tailored to further its compelling interest in the safety of children,” the appeals court said. Abrogation is the act of formally annulling a law or legal provision.

The appeals court returned the case to the district court for reconsideration.

Chief Circuit Judge William Pryor filed a dissenting opinion, criticizing the majority for undermining Alabama’s child-protection efforts.

“All agree that parents generally enjoy a fundamental right to ‘make decisions concerning the care, custody, and control of their children,’” Pryor said.

“But this appeal presents a different question: whether the Due Process Clause [in the 14th Amendment] grants child-sex convicts, not parents generally, a fundamental right to reside with their children. Of course not.”

Pryor said that using the majority’s reasoning, a father who raped his young child still enjoys the fundamental right to live with that child unless he has been judicially determined to be dangerous.

Pryor also said the doctrine of substantive due process creates a “treacherous field,” and the Supreme Court has directed courts to “exercise the utmost care whenever ... asked to break new ground,” to avoid usurping the authority that the Constitution entrusts to elected legislatures.

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On The War For The Soul Of Our Nation...

Authored by James Howard Kusntler,

Werewolves Of London

“To use language to obscure reality is to show ‘indifference regarding the truth’ - to lie to the public and cease to treat our fellow citizens as equals.”

 - Justice Clarence Thomas

Now that the grand 250th USA birthday party is over - the speeches, the shrieking warplanes, the dazzling fireworks, the speeches and strawberry shortcake - there is only one way this thing can go. What thing? The war for the soul of the nation. Some mysterious somebody is behind the surging “Democratic-Socialist” craze. Somebody is paying for it. It’s a last-ditch drive to marshal the disaffected, under-employed young voters, choking on their college loans, deranged by anomie, and get them marching in solidarity with X-million illegal aliens to act-out an election jihad so as to squeeze out House and Senate majorities and, ultimately, wreck the nation.

That mysterious background “somebody” is not so mysterious. It just doesn’t self-identify under a banner, but you can easily tell who they are: the, the slippery closet-Marxist Barack Obama and, behind him, the American Deep State nomenklatura desperate to stay out of prison, along with the unelected EU Commission led by the grandmotherly sadist Ursula von der Leyen (plus the banksters behind her). Some call them “globalists.” They are a loose coalition of convenience against the populist threat of Mr. Trump in America and similar populist movements in Europe: AfD in Germany, the two parties of Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe in the UK, and LePen’s Nationalist Rally in France.

The EU, with its front-men Macron, Merz, and whoever will replace Starmer this month, is currently preoccupied with its stupid effort to provoke Russia into a wider war, using their proxy, Ukraine. Mr. Putin, still advancing through the Donbas, refuses to get drawn-in deeper with the EU despite the drone and missile sorties lately banging-up his oil depots. Mr. Putin is actually a defender of Western Civ — yes, ironic, isn’t it, considering what his country escaped out of in 1991 — but it’s so. Russia has become our natural ally in this struggle as the EU goes all werewolf on both Russia and us. File under strange-but-true.

Contrary to Deep State propaganda, and the IRGC’s bullshit, Mr. Trump has the Iran situation in-hand. We have bigly reduced Iran’s capacity to make trouble in the world and our satellites watch everything they do now, so there will be no Iranian military re-build, no matter how the MOU talks go. They still do have the option of dropping their jihad fixation and acting like a normal nation, but we’ll just have to stand by on that.

What has to happen now in the USA is a summer of accountability. Perp walks. Indictments. Preparation for trials. Many of you are discouraged about this, I know, but please put those black pills back in the medicine chest. Accountability is coming. The mills of the law grind slowly, and its especially difficult since the Deep State has corrupted select precincts of the law, such as the US District Court for the District of Columbia, where rogue judges Boasberg, Chutkan, Sullivan, Howell, Meta, Reyes, Cooper, et al., have made an industry of paralyzing Mr. Trump’s executive branch.

Nevertheless, accountability might also be coming for Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the dodgy majority opinion on the SCOTUS’s June 30 “Birth Citizenship” decision (Trump v. Barbara), an epic fail for Justice Roberts (joined by Amy Coney Barrett and the three DEI gals). The 14th Amendment was written to mitigate the disruptions of the Civil War. Section One is clearly aimed at defining the full citizenship of former slaves, and that’s all, not the offspring of casual visitors and border-jumpers. There was considerable clarifying debate on the record about all that in June, 1866, with skeletons still being cleared off the battlefields. The 2026 decision looks like a debacle for reasons also obvious.

The Chief and his harem

What motivated Mr. Roberts to do such a harm? Perhaps he’s just an idiot, but there’s more lurking there.

It’s widely known that the Chief Justice made at least one week-long visit to Norm Eisen, after Eisen had been appointed Ambassador to Prague (2011) by his law school classmate, President Barack Obama. In these final years of Obama-in-office, Norm Eisen was busy plotting so-called Color Revolution in Europe, which climaxed in the 2014 Maidan operation in Ukraine. The purpose was to make Ukraine as a proxy to weaken Russia, and would come to entail massive money-laundering and the setting up of bio-weapons labs there. This was also the period when then-Veep Joe Biden was given the “Ukraine Portfolio” and was busiest with his own grifting enterprise, through son Hunter.

Norm Eisen went on to become the chief lawfare ninja coordinating against the Trump administration with his field captains: Marc Elias, Mary McCord, Andrew Weissmann, and others. All have been involved in suspiciously seditious activities through both Trump terms. What was the Chief Justice confabbing about with Norm Eisen in Prague then? About vagaries of US / EU legal cooperation? Or were they deliberating on tactics for dealing with Barack Obama’s as-then-undeclared successor? Or possibly on bringing color revolution to the US, if Barack Obama’s posterity declared it necessary?

Consider the strange situation that one Sheldon Snook was appointed Special Assistant to Roberts in 2014. Snook is married to lawfare ninja Mary McCord, who served as Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division, DOJ (2014–2016) and Assistant Attorney General for National Security, DOJ (2016–2017). She was involved in the initiation of the RussiaGate operation and in 2019 was appointed Special Counsel to Jerrold Nadler’s House Judiciary Committee during the 2019 impeachment inquiry into President Trump — the impeachment that was all about Ukraine. . . and what might have been going on there under Obama, especially Joe Biden shenanigans.

Consider, too, that a scandal has just emerged involving CJ Robert’s wife, Jane, and the enormous commissions she received working at the DC law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, and then the legal recruiting outfit Major, Lindsey & Africa (through 2019), and then legal another recruiting firm, Macrae, for placing eminent attorneys into law firms with active Supreme Court case practices. Her income from all this recruiting surpassed $10-million. CJ Roberts did not recuse himself from the cases involving these relationships. This is a still-developing story. . . .

And, of course, an investigation of California Governor Gavin Newsom begun, irony-of-ironies, by the Biden DOJ, has just blossomed into a florid scandal involving shell companies set up by Gov. Newsom’s busy wife, Jennifer, through which millions of dollars were laundered under various fake social and health service initiativs. Newsom appointee Alexis Podesta “wore a wire” during the period and is cooperating in the case. Buh-bye presidential hopes, Guv, and don’t let the cell door whack your ass on the way in.

These are just a few possible appetizers. The main course is coming up.

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'Great Injustice Reversed': Belgian Soccer Furious As FIFA Allows Suspended US Star To Play

Just after 2:00 p.m. (ET) today, President Trump published the following statement on Truth Social:

What is he talking about? What is the "great injustice"?

As Noel S. Williams explains via American Thinker, he's referring to the moment during the U.S. vs. Bosnia & Herzegovina World Cup match when the referee issued a bizarre, unwarranted red card to star striker Folarin Balogun.

Initially, that made him ineligible to play in the crucial last-16 match against Belgium on Monday. Great or not, there was an injustice - I just hope Karma and those mercurial soccer gods agree in the coming days.

It's clear that Balogun didn't deliberately stamp on the B&H defender's ankle.

I just wonder, now that FIFA has bent over backward to re-institute his eligibility to play against Belgium, if that will dull the U.S. team's cutting edge. Sometimes, when a team feels "hard done by," it solidifies their sanctimonious indignation, giving them more power.

Our team is already pulling together, but the "great injustice" added more "all for one, and one for all" spirit.

Given President Trump's post, the spotlight has just intensified on an individual player.

Additionally, the media is piling on, increasing performance expectations upon a person they describe as our best striker (with some creative player repositioning, Christian Pulisic could be deployed as a striker). Plus, there are other options. We have brilliant players all over the field, actually.

In a statement, the US Soccer Federation said:

WE ACCEPT THE DECISION OF THE DISCIPLINARY COMMITTEE AND ARE PLEASED THAT FOLARIN BALOGUN IS ELIGIBLE TO COMPETE TOMORROW.

OUR FULL ATTENTION IS FOCUSED ON THE ROUND OF 16 MATCH AGAINST BELGIUM IN SEATTLE, AND WE LOOK FORWARD TO THE CONTINUED SUPPORT OF OUR AMAZING FANS.

Understandably, the Belgian Soccer Federation is furious:

"The Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) is astonished by FIFA's decision to declare suspended United States player Folarin Balogun eligible to play in the USA–Belgium match on Monday, 6 July at 5:00 p.m. (Seattle time).

FIFA bases its decision on Article 27 of the FIFA Disciplinary Code.

...

❗️In order to safeguard the legitimate rights of all participating teams and to protect the fundamental principles of fair play in our sport, both at this FIFA World Cup and at future editions of the tournament, the RBFA is investigating all potential options."

With the Belgian coach exclaiming: "I did not know that July 4th was April Fools day..."

US odds improved after the suspension was lifted...

Go USA!

But before that, Go England!!

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OPEC+ Approves Another Oil Output Increase As Hormuz Exports Start To Recover

OPEC+ agreed a further increase in output targets from August, the group said in a statement on Sunday, ‌adding to global supply at a time when oil prices are falling due to the gradual reopening of the Strait of Hormuz for oil exports. 

The oil-producing cartel, which recently lost the UAE as a core member, agreed during an online meeting to increase quotas by 188,000 barrels per day from August, on top of similar increases for June and July. That said, the producers reserved the right to increase, pause, or reverse the phase-out, including the November 2023 cuts already unwound. Furthermore, every country that overproduced since January 2024 still has to fully compensate for it, tracked monthly by the JMMC. 

The seven ​core members of OPEC+, which groups OPEC and allied producers including Russia, have hiked their output quotas from April through July ​by almost 800,000 bpd. Yet the increase has remained largely on paper because of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, ⁠which closed the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic for some of the most important OPEC+ members, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and ​Iraq.

According to Reuters, OPEC+ output fell to 33.13 million bpd in May, according to OPEC data, from 42.77 million bpd in February. It began ​to recover in June thanks to U.S. efforts to help the UAE and other OPEC+ nations export more oil, but is still below pre-war levels.

Despite persisting supply disruptions, oil prices have returned to pre-war levels, pressured by sharply lower Chinese imports, higher exports from non-Middle East producers, and a record global strategic stock release coordinated ​by the International Energy Agency.

"The group of seven kept unwinding their production cuts as widely expected," UBS analyst Giovanni Staunovo said. "The near-term focus ​will remain on how many tankers will manage to cross the Strait of Hormuz and how quickly demand and Chinese crude imports recover."

A memorandum of understanding ‌between Washington ⁠and Tehran to end the war, which has been breached on several occasions but is still holding, has also helped convince traders that supply will ultimately return to normal levels.

Brent crude prices traded near $72 per barrel on Friday, down from recent peaks of more than $120 per barrel and back to levels traded just before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on February 28.

Besides agreeing production targets, OPEC+ is also facing other challenges after the United Arab Emirates left ​the group and Iraq signaled it wants ​higher quotas.

OPEC+ includes 21 members ⁠including Iran, but in recent years only the seven nations - and the UAE until its departure - have been involved in monthly production management. Those seven producers, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Kazakhstan and Oman, are ​boosting output as part of the phased rollback of a 1.65 million bpd supply cut agreed ​in 2023, when ⁠the group still included the UAE.

In a stunning twist, the UAE quit the alliance in late April because it wanted to align its capacity more closely with its production, free of production restraints imposed by the group. From August, taking into account the UAE's exit from May 1, the seven core members will still ⁠have about ​379,000 bpd of the original cut to return to the market, according to ​Reuters calculations.

With the August increase now decided, they will have fully unwound the 2023 cut if they make one more hike of around the same size for September at ​their next meeting on August 2.

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