Hollywood’s elites have themselves to blame for Los Angeles’s deadly wildfires, Fox News host Rachel Campos Duffy insinuated on Monday.
In a discussion on Fox News’ “Outnumbered” on Monday, panelists cheered on supposed condemnations of California leadership from A-listers who lost their homes in a devastating blaze that has killed at least 24.
“It’s interesting to see them all turning on each other,” said Duffy, wife of Donald Trump’s transportation secretary nominee Sean Duffy, going on to say Democrats would face a messaging crisis in the wake of the blaze.
“The new one is ‘we’re going to blame Trump and [Elon] Musk.’ It’s not going to work this time because their friends who amplify their liberal deflection messages just had their houses burn down. They’re mad as heck,” she continued.
Duffy noted the backlash from some against Newsom and Bass was not just an “indictment on these leaders” but on “liberal policies” as well, including environmental reforms.
The Fox host was all but giddy to connect the fires to the “liberal policies” that she claims exacerbated them.
“The environmental policies are also on display here. The people whose houses are burned down right now, they’re the ones who were funding all these environmental groups, to a large extent, and funding the Democrat politicians who are now responsible for the condition of LA,” Duffy said.
What amazes me is the people in this article feel that it was okay for the Democrats to run these sham trials against a person. Maybe they need to be the victim and they wouldn’t be go gleeful.
Just think how much taxpayer money the Democrats have wasted since 2016 on fake news. They have been trying to pin the TAIL OF THE DONKEY on the American people since Obama was elected and that is when all of this weaponizing started. Since it is proven and it is proven that Biden has been sick with dementia since 2020, it is time for the Republicans to file a law suit against the Democrats called FORCE MAJEURE – therefore, erasing all of the laws and money contracts that were made during this time – that is the only way justice will be served for the people.
When voters are consumed with anti-system rage, a criminal rap sheet is no barrier to high office.
Liberals have little enough to be cheerful about right now, so one can hardly begrudge a little glee at the news on Friday that a New York court declared Donald Trump a convicted felon over the hush-money payments he made to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels. There is certainly some satisfaction in Trump’s discomfort at the sentencing, as recorded by The New York Times: “Arms crossed, scowl set, President-elect Donald J. Trump avoided jail, but became a felon.” Trump’s conservative base was gratifyingly outraged. Fox News host John Roberts sputtered, “He is now branded Donald Trump with a scarlet letter of a big F on his forehead that he is a convicted felon.” Roberts went on to complain that the conviction was “ginned up…to taint Donald Trump.”
Conversely, tennis legend Martina Navratilova chortled, “Convicted felon Donald J. Trump does have a certain ring to it, no?” Other liberals elatedly listed the many countries where Donald Trump would be barred from entry as a felon (a joke that loses its bite once you realize that as American president he’ll easily be able to get a waiver to the normal rules).
If we step outside the immediate partisan reaction, Trump’s felony conviction seems like a small victory for liberalism that hides a larger catastrophic defeat. Even if we welcome the small symbolic justice of the felony conviction, there’s little to cheer about the fact that this conviction is for the least consequential of the criminal cases Trump has faced and that both the judge and prosecutor agreed there should be no punishment for it. As The New York Timesreports:
Trump once faced up to four years in prison for falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal, but on Friday, he received only a so-called unconditional discharge. The sentence, a rare and lenient alternative to jail or probation, reflected the practical and constitutional impossibility of jailing a president-elect.
In other words, the conviction doesn’t reflect an end to Trump’s lifelong impunity but rather is another manifestation of that impunity. With Trump about to enter the White House, the other criminal cases against him are effectively over. On Friday special counsel Jack Smith, who was overseeing the investigation in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents, resigned. The Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump group, caught the contradictions of the moment by noting, “Donald Trump ran for office to avoid punishment for his crimes, and it worked. The fact still remains that he is a 34 times convicted felon.”Related video: ‘The truth matters’: Trump sentenced as a felon after failing to outrun secrets (MSNBC
We are joined by a former federal prosecutor, Joyce Vance,
MSNBC
‘The truth matters’: Trump sentenced as a felon after failing to outrun secrets
In truth, Trump’s toothless felony conviction, coming on the cusp of his return to the White House, is no moment for jubilation: Rather, it should spur sober reflections among anti-Trump forces about the failure of prosecutorial liberalism. The use of prosecutors and courts to counter Trump has been the focus of much liberal energy over the last decade—but it is a failed strategy that has ended up only strengthening Trump.
Back in 2017, I wrote a column for The New Republic where I questioned the faith many liberals had that prosecutors such as Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller were on the verge of getting the goods on Trump and neutralizing him as a political force. I argued that
[relying] on Rosenstein and Mueller as barriers against Trump’s worst excesses is a prime example of a trap that liberals have fallen into time and again when dealing with presidential abuse of power—a tradition of “prosecutorial liberalism,” which seeks legal rather than political remedies to punish presidential misdeeds. Such an approach is dangerous because it allows legislators to pass off political problems to apolitical law enforcement officials.
In 2020, after the Mueller investigation had fizzled, I reflected in The Nation on the cultural and historical roots of prosecutorial liberalism.
The cult of Mueller was based on the dubious idea that a Republican and lifelong member of the Washington elite would pursue a relentless and scorched-earth investigation into a GOP president. This belief, in turn, rested on an idealization of federal law enforcement, seen as uncorrupted and rigorously loyal to the law. The liberals who joined the Mueller cult gave as much credence as any conservative in the cultural myths J. Edgar Hoover created in the early 20th century to legitimize the FBI. These myths paint federal lawmen as uniquely worthy: crew-cut upholders of justice who could be trusted more than politicians.
Even though prosecutorial liberalism has repeatedly failed, its hold on elite left-of-center opinion has only deepened. A big part of Kamala Harris’s political persona was the boast that she had been a tough-as-nails district attorney in California, so she’d be able to stand up to the arch-felon Trump.
In fact, not all voters loved Kamala-the-cop. Many on the left, animated by the police reform movement, saw her prosecutorial career as grounds to distrust her. A report on working-class people of color in the Bronx who had voted for both Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2024 documented that there was grassroots distrust of Harris’s prosecutorial record.
The problems with prosecutorial liberalism are twofold. First, it is a strategy that tries to use the legal system to do the work of politics. Of course, if figures like Trump commit crimes, they should fall under the purview of the law. But the law in and of itself is ill-equipped to settle the matter of a corrupt politician’s status with voters. There is a long history of voters rewarding politicians who run afoul of the law or have been entangled in scandal, beloved miscreants such as onetime Washington Mayor Marion Barry and onetime Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards.
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The names Barry and Edwards highlight the second major problem with prosecutorial liberalism: It is a strategy that is counterproductive in an era of anti-system rage. Barry and Edwards were popular rascals precisely because their run-ins with the law reinforced their general populist stance. The fact that Barry was targeted as part of an FBI crack cocaine entrapment scheme only proved he was a threat to the system, which gave him credibility with working-class voters.
We live an age of anti-system rage, which has now expanded from impoverished areas like Washington, DC, and Louisiana to the entire United States. Trump’s popularity is due to the fact that he can give voice, however fraudulently, to anti-system anger. To counter Trump with FBI cardboard heroes like Robert Mueller or the liberal punitiveness of Kamala-the-cop serves only to legitimize Trump’s own claims that the powers that be oppose him.
Problem – The Biden/Obama/Pelosi/Democrats/Military were put in the WOKE Camp. Why didn’t you direct this to them about the military being woke and why – and let the process handle the nominee?
President-elect Donald Trump is taking over the “staggering challenge” of a military that is unprepared to fight America’s enemies, conservative analyst Max Boot wrote for The Washington Post — and worse still, he has nominated a man to lead it who doesn’t understand why.
This comes as Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense, Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, has come under fire for his history of alleged sexual misconduct, heavy drinking, and advocacy to pardon war criminals — and it also comes as Trump refuses to rule out using military force to seize territories like Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone as part of a neo-imperialist project.
But the military is not even prepared to perform its basic defense duties right now, wrote Boot, let alone engage in wars of aggression and conquest.
“The essential question that senators must ask is whether Hegseth, a Fox News host and former National Guardsman, has the capacity and experience to prepare the armed forces to fight a major war — and, if so, how he would go about it,” wrote Boot. “Because right now, the U.S. military simply is not ready to defeat an adversary such as China or Russia in a protracted conflict.”
Hegseth has repeatedly claimed the military is failing to meet its recruitment goals due to “wokeness” and commitments to diversity alienating the type of masculine soldier stock America once relied on — but that completely misunderstands the issue, wrote Boot: the real problem “is that America became complacent after the Cold War when it downsized its armed forces and its defense-industrial base. Since then, the United States has prepared a military suitable for fighting insurgents in Afghanistan or Iraq — but utterly inadequate for an extended fight against a major power.”
Today, Boot wrote, we’re facing a military that has a degraded ability to construct and service its own ships, a massive shortage of drones, and a lack of infrastructure or institutional knowledge to fix these problems — and despite common complaints about how much money is spent on the military, “While high in absolute terms, U.S. defense spending is just 3 percent of gross domestic product, far below Cold War levels.”
“Now it will be up to senators to decide if Hegseth — who was dogged by accusations of mismanagement and misconduct at the two nonprofits he ran — is the right person to rebuild America’s atrophied defense capabilities,” Boot concluded. “The committee members should grill him not only about his past, but also about his plans to address this massive challenge. His record doesn’t inspire confidence that he can rise to a task that would severely test far more experienced executives.”
Maybe you need to forward your recommendation for this position to President Trump. The Military leaders are in a pickle right now – the top leaders are guilty of treason.
MSNBC
kommonsentsjane 