Just when you thought the Democrat Party couldn’t stoop any lower, we have an important election and the leftist swamp creatures outdo themselves with massive widespread voting fraud. Lawyer Sidney Powell appeared on Sunday Morning Futures to discuss the dark side of the election, and her listing of leftist crimes is rather shocking in its extent. Her description of America’s election sounded like that of a low-rent backwater south of the border or in the Middle East, not the Constitution-based home of millions of patriots.
In fact, our imagined “nation of laws” took quite a beating last Tuesday from one of its major political parties.
How did we reach this point? Do Democrats believe their own propaganda that Trump is worse than Hitler — a sentiment that gets nearly 4 million hits on the internet. Certainly the top party hacks thought a little cheating against such evil would be forgiven by the voters — who have also been deprived of the true story of candidate Biden’s corrupt relationship with Red China in years past that has endangered US national security.
The attitude of elite Democrats is shown by David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, in a tweet from 2016:
Top Dems see that Donald Trump is not a member of the swamp and must therefore be completely destroyed, so no other free American ever gets the idea to run for president. That’s why he has been so deeply opposed from Day #1.
MARIA BARTIROMO: Welcome back. President Trump’s legal team as you’ve been hearing this morning are preparing for all-out war, beginning with a slew of new lawsuits this week beginning with one in Pennsylvania tomorrow along with what our next guest says is evidence of voter fraud. Sidney Powell is General Michael Flynn’s attorney. She is fighting on the front lines of this battle as part of the president’s legal team. Sidney, good morning to you; thank you for being here. Can you walk us through what has happened here as you see it…
SIDNEY POWELL: Yes, there has been a massive and coordinated effort to steal this election from we the people of the United States of America, to delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump, to manufacture votes for Joe Biden. They have done it in every way imaginable, from having dead people vote in massive numbers to absolutely fraudulently creating ballots that exist only voting for Biden. We’ve identified at least 450,000 ballots in the key states that miraculously only have a mark for Joe Biden on them and no other candidate.
If you look at Florida where things were done right, you can see that that’s how the rest of the country should have gone, but they also used an algorithm to calculate the votes they would need to flip, and they used the computers to flip those votes from Biden, I mean from Trump to Biden, and from other Republican candidates to their competitors also. I think Doug Collins had the race stolen from him. I think John James had his race stolen from him.
It wasn’t just President Trump — there were many people affected by this. We have got to fight tooth and nail in federal court to expose this abject fraud and the conspiracy behind it and get a recount and audits in every place that’s needed, which is frankly most of the country.
BARTIROMO: So there are recounts going on right now. we know that in Georgia you have a list of numbers of ballots with only Joe Biden on the ticket. You say it’s 98,000 ballots in Pennsylvania, 80 to 90,000 in Georgia, another 42,000 in Arizona, 69 to 115,000 in Michigan and 62,000 in Wisconsin. Sidney, if this is true, this appears systemic, where is the Department of Justice? Where is the AG Bill Barr*? If this is so obvious, then why aren’t we seeing massive government investigations?
POWELL: I don’t know — we definitely should be. I mean we’re getting reports of all kinds of fraud. We’ve got an affidavit from a postal worker now who talks about having been ordered to back-date ballots. No ballots received after the polls closed on voting day should even be counted. We’ve got multiple states that didn’t even follow the rules of their own legislature — that’s a federal constitutional issue. There are at least three major federal issues here that will require the Supreme Court to resolve this case, and when the votes are really audited and the real votes are counted, Trump will win. He is the president, and he is in charge of this country.
BARTIROMO: Sidney, I want to ask you about these algorithms and the Dominion Software. I understand Nancy Pelosi has an interest in this company. Let’s take a break — we’ll come back with that. I’m talking with Sidney Powell this morning on her legal strategy. Stay with us.
Welcome back. I’m back with Sidney Powell who is part of President Trump’s legal team in contesting this election. Sidney, we talked about the Dominion Software: I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.
POWELL: That’s to put it mildly. The computer glitches could not and should not have happened at all. That is where the fraud took place, where they were flipping votes in the computer system or adding votes that did not exist. We need an audit of all of the computer systems that played any role in this fraud whatsoever, and you know Joe Biden had it right — he said that he had the biggest voter fraud organization ever, and he didn’t need people’s votes now, he would need people later.
They had this all planned, Maria. They had the algorithms, they had the paper ballots waiting to be inserted if and when needed, and notably President Trump’s vote in the blue states went up enormously — that’s when they had to stop the vote count and go in and replace votes for Biden, and take away Trump votes.
BARTIROMO: I’ve never seen voting machines stop in the middle of an election — stop down and assess the situation. I also see reports that Nancy Pelosi’s longtime chief of staff is a key executive at that company; Richard Blum, Senator Feinstein’s husband, significant shareholder of the company. What can you tell us about the interest on the other side of this Dominion Software?
POWELL: Well obviously they have invested in it for their own reasons, and are using it to commit this fraud to steal votes. I think they’ve even stolen them from other Democrats in their own party who should be outraged about this also. Bernie Sanders might very well have been the Democratic candidate, but they’ve stolen against whoever they wanted to steal it from.
BARTIROMO: Sidney, these are incredible charges that you are making this morning. We of course will be following this, and we thank you for joining me today; please come back soon.
Automation is coming on strong in the economy and will take millions of jobs in the next few years because as soon as a machine becomes cheaper for an individual task than a human, the worker will be gone. In addition, business owners like how robots work 24/7 and don’t require lunch, sleep or paychecks. Just an occasional squirt of oil will suffice to keep the machines performing.
More recently, the Wuhan pandemic has speeded up the process of businesses adopting smart machines, since robots also don’t get sick — so convenient rather than undependable humans with their annoying germs.
There’s not a lot that can be done to deal with the job-killing Age of Automation we face, but it would make sense to end immigration, because most of the jobs that immigrants do can be done more cheaply by smart machines. In short,
Automation Makes Immigration Obsolete
Here’s a transcript of the discussion I cleaned up for easy reference:
NARRATOR: Automation is coming for your job — at least that’s the fear among many workers — from burger-flipping bots to car-building robots, not to mention high-powered software taking on more and more administrative tasks. It seems like hundreds of skills are rapidly becoming obsolete in the US economy. A McKinsey study found that AI and deep learning could add as much as $3.5 trillion to $5.8 trillion in annual value to companies.
ANDREW YANG: Eighty percent or more of the jobs that make $20 an hour or less are at least potentially subject to automation.
NARRATOR: The economic shock of the pandemic hasn’t helped; human workers are vulnerable to diseases that robots aren’t, making it much easier and now cheaper to have a robot on staff that doesn’t require healthcare.
MARCUS CASEY: Businesses are kind of looking and seeing that humans can get sick from covid, but machines can’t.
MICHAEL HICKS: If you can eliminate the healthcare costs, the labor and wage tag that comes along with those folks and particularly in services — that’s a big competitive advantage.
NARRATOR: To put the increase in robotics in perspective: the U.S. had .49 robots per thousand workers in 1995 which rose to 1.79 robots per thousand workers in 2017, but automation isn’t just a robotics revolution. The rise in information technology and artificial intelligence or AI has also become an enabler of automation. AI can help navigate difficult challenges that previously only a human operator could handle. Of course, if you’ve encountered automated phone systems, it’s likely you personally experienced that automation still has a long way to go. Continue reading this article
Monday was a big media day for documentary filmmaker Namrata Singh Gujral, an immigrant to the United States who now thinks that open borders may not be a great idea.
Gujral started her film with the intention that it was going to be pro-illegal alien, but the specifics of several cases convinced her that too much suffering and death was the real result — both from disastrous illegal border crossings and preventable crimes of unlawful aliens.
Following is the film trailer:
An interview with Elizabeth MacDonald on Fox Business provided more detail, where Gujral noted, “Most of the people that are coming in are coming in for what we call in the film a ‘lifestyle upgrade’ — a lot of them spending $75,000 per person, $50,000 per person — these are not people that are poor.”
The film is available for streaming at AmericasForgottenMovie.com
There was a blast from the past on Wednesday, when the Dallas branch of the FBI announced that Yaser Abdel Said had been arrested after being a fugitive since 2008 when he shot his teenage daughters to death in his own taxi — something I wrote about at the time: Honor Killing in Texas?
Below, Amina and Sarah Said, along with the father Yaser Abdel Said.
Yaser was born in Egypt in 1957, according to his description on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. Since his arrival in the US, he exhibited traditional muslim values of misogyny and harsh parenting, while his daughters grew up to live like American teens in their home in the Dallas area with their US-born mother.
And that behavior seemed to be a problem to Yaser, though it was a predictable outcome of the situation. Unless children of immigrants are sent to religious or foreign-language schools, they will normally absorb conduct typical in a public high school — like dating Americans, which was an irritant for the muslim father.
It’s interesting that Yaser was arrested in Justin, Texas, which is only 35 miles from Irving where the double murder took place. Was he in hiding for 12 years in the Dallas area? If so, it might suggest a community of traditional muslims willing to protect a killer who was seen as sharia friendly. The August 2016 issue of the Texas Monthly reported that the Dallas metro area is “home to more than 150,000 Muslims.”
If any of those persons protected Yaser Said from the law, they would be in big trouble because Texas takes harboring offenses seriously:
In Texas, the law that criminalizes the act of harboring a fugitive is known as Hindering Apprehension or Prosecution. . . Hindering Apprehension or Prosecution is a Class A misdemeanor unless the harbored person is wanted for a felony, in which case it is a Third-Degree Felony punishable by 2-10 years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine.
In fact, a Dallas CBS report noted that Said’s son Islam and brother Yassim were arrested for harboring.
A Texas father — one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives — wanted for the slayings of his two teen daughters was busted after more than 12 years on the run, the federal law enforcement agency announced.
Yaser Abdel Said, 63, was arrested Wednesday by agents in the small town of Justin, about 36 miles northwest of Dallas, officials said.
The Egyptian-born taxicab driver was sought on capital murder charges since the New Year’s Day 2008 shootings of his two daughters, Sarah Yaser Said, 17, and Amina Yaser Said, 18, which have been described as “honor killings.”
The teens were found shot multiple times in a cab outside an Irving motel after one of them called 911, saying she was dying, authorities said.
“Help,” the younger sister could be heard crying on a 911 recording. “I’m dying. Oh my God. Stop it.”
Relatives at the time told cops that Yaser threatened “bodily harm” against Sarah for going on a date with a non-Muslim.
The girls’ mother, Patricia Said, fled with both girls in the week before their killings because she was in “great fear of her life,” police said.
Gail Gattrell, the sisters’ great-aunt, described the deaths as an “honor killing” — which are often carried about by a relative who believes a woman went against conservative Islamic values on love or marriage. (Continues)
The coronavirus event that the media has made its top story certainly has people wound up. Example numero uno from down south: Mexicans are demanding more border controls to keep out possibly infectious Americans — who could have imagined such a thing?
Mexican protesters have shut a US southern border crossing amid fears that untested American travellers will spread coronavirus.
Residents in Sonora, south of the US state of Arizona, have promised to block traffic into Mexico for a second day after closing a checkpoint for hours on Wednesday.
They wore face masks and held signs telling Americans to “stay at home”.
Mexico has fewer than 500 confirmed Covid-19 cases and the US over 65,000.
The border is supposed to be closed to all except “essential” business, but protesters said there has been little enforcement and no testing by authorities.
The blockade was led by members of the group Sonorans for Health and Life, who called for medical testing to be done on anyone who crosses from the US into Mexico.
Jose Luis Hernandez, a group member, told the Arizona Republic: “There are no health screenings by the federal government to deal with this pandemic. That’s why we’re here in Nogales. We’ve taken this action to call on the Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to act now.” (Continues)
Meanwhile, some friends of American sovereignty fear an uptick in illegal border crossers if the coronavirus kicks up trouble in Mexico.
Borders — (nearly) everybody likes them now in the Age of Corona!
TUCKER CARLSON: So a lot of consequences maybe we haven’t thought through of this pandemic, and one of them is countries to our south could be destabilized by it, and you could see a surge, a big surge of illegal immigration come up from Latin America. If that does happen, and it absolutely could happen, are we prepared to deal with it?
Mark Morgan is Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, and he joins us tonight. Mr. Morgan, thanks very much for coming on. This does not seem like a crazy possibility. It’s very easy to imagine that a place like Mexico which doesn’t seem to be doing anything to protect the population is flouting any suggestion that they lock anyone down — that they could have massive problems with this. What would that mean for us? Continue reading this article
Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman, appeared recently with Tucker Carlson to explain his new legislation, aimed at blocking Red China from grabbing any of the Coronavirus funding from the Congress aimed at propping up the American economy during the shutdown.
Called the “No Chinese Handouts In National Assistance Act” or “No CHINA Act” for short, the bill’s aim is simple enough:
To restrict the use of funds made available in appropriations Acts for fiscal year 2020 for the benefit of any United States or foreign person subject to the control of the People’s Republic of China.
It’s good news that the China threat is becoming more widely understood in Washington. Too bad it took a worldwide pandemic to get the message across.
TUCKER CARLSON: Chinese business has penetrated big parts of the US economy; they control much of it, and many American companies now have Chinese ownership. Congressman Matt Gaetz represents Florida. He’s worried that a bailout will wind up enriching the Chinese and helping the Chinese government.
He joins us tonight. Congressman, tell us what your concern is and how you plan to address it.
CONGRESSMAN MATT GAETZ: Radisson hotels, AMC movie theaters, even the Waldorf Astoria New York are controlled by China in essence, and I think we ought to restore every American worker and American small business before borrowing money from China so that we can then give it to China to then pay China back with interest after the Chinese virus.
That seems like a foolish thing that a great nation would never do. I’ve introduced legislation to block bailouts to corporations that are controlled by China. It’s so obvious I can’t even believe it’s not the law already.
CARLSON: They unleash a pandemic on the world. We wind up sending them tax dollars — why would that be a controversial thing to propose?
GAETZ: China has a lot of influence, and the companies that seek Chinese investment also have that influence, but this is a time that we can actually put America first — the needs of our people and our businesses.
This should be the easiest time in the world to ensure that we are making reinvestment in the American economy and that we are not the world’s fools by borrowing money from a country in the bond market, recycling it back to them and then charging the next generation of Americans interest on that money. We cannot do that. Congress should include my No China Act in the ultimate relief package. Continue reading this article
As a businessman, he realizes the serious threat to America’s well being caused by closing the economy for an extended period. It’s not like a light you can switch off and on at will. The costs accrued by businesses being frozen cannot be easily fixed. I think of a nearby street of small stores, restaurants and a movie theater — rents are normally so high that when a business moves out, the storefront may remain empty for months. And that’s just one example of how costs are unforgiving.
A healthy economy is a virtuous circle of businesses that have workers who spend their paychecks in other businesses and so on around and around. Halting America’s dynamic economy is a terrible experiment that may end very badly, Hilton worries.
STEVE HILTON: You’ve been hearing everywhere else about the virus and the latest numbers and the medical response, but I want to focus tonight on what I think is an even bigger crisis, and that is the economic, social and above all human cost of the total shutdown policy.
No one should question the seriousness of this virus, and especially as I said last week, the need to avoid so many hospitalizations; at the same time that our medical system can’t cope. The chosen strategy is social distancing, and right now that involves extreme measures to shut down daily life. But there is a huge gap between sensible social distancing and the total shutdown spreading across the country.
Just as the spread of coronavirus creates a curve of the number of people infected, this economic shutdown is creating a curve of the numbers of people affected — losing their jobs, their homes, their businesses.
I’m not sure that the people on TV have grasped how serious this is, to the extent they’re focusing on it at all. They’re using completely the wrong frame of reference: they talk about a recession like the one we had in 2008. What planet are they on? We’ve never seen this before — a total self-imposed shutdown of the economy. Businesses large, medium and small will lose all their revenue, not a slight reduction or even a steep reduction, like in a recession, but all of it gone — no income, nothing potentially for months, we’re told unless we change course.
The best case is the worst recession since the Second World War; the moderate scenario is that it’s on a par with the Great Depression. The worst case scenario where this shutdown continues for months is even worse than the Great Depression. We hear about a V-shaped curve, a dramatic fall and a quick bounce-back — maybe. But if the V is as deep as the Grand Canyon that is a hell of a climb.
In Washington today, the Senate failed to advance the latest coronavirus relief package, so negotiations will continue on what’s looking to be a two trillion dollar stimulus plan. Let’s talk about that plan, and as we do, let’s remind ourselves what this is all about: men and women across America who have risked everything, worked every hour to follow their dreams and build a business.
Local businesses there are not just economic units but the lifeblood of a community. Most of the people in Congress, most of the talking heads on TV — they’ve never started a business, and don’t understand business. I have, and I do, so what I’m about to say comes not just from my perspective as someone who’s run policy at the heart of a large government, but someone who’s run a small business — a number of them actually, including one a restaurant that was at the heart of its community.
President Trump gets this too: he understands business, He loves entrepreneurs, he loves America’s small businesses and farmers and all the workers who rely on them for living and to support their families. So this economic curve we’re about to take a nosedive on — it is not just about money; it’s about the heart and soul of this country. Continue reading this article
It would be nice if the coronavirus debacle might wake Washington up to the danger that Red China represents.
The whole globalist economy idea was pitched to Americans as being good for creating more and less expensive consumer goods, a system with no downside.
The scheme was advantageous for nations with lots of cheap labor like China. And that country has grown from a poor backwater to a global powerhouse based on outsourced manufacturing from America.
Lately Red China feels strong enough to be the home of a new contagion (perhaps even creating it in a bioresearch lab) without warning the world about it.
Senator Josh Hawley appeared with Tucker Carlson recently to suggest that China be “held to account” for the evil it has exported.
TUCKER CARLSON: Senator Josh Hawley represents the State of Missouri. We’re always happy to have him on tonight. Great to see you, Senator.
SENATOR JOSH HAWLEY (R-MO): Thanks, Tucker.
CARLSON: You’ve been one of the relatively few people in the Congress who has been sounding the alarm on China for a long time. The coronavirus, I think, has highlighted the reasons why that’s an important story. Where should we go next?
HAWLEY: Well, I think one of the things the coronavirus has done, Tucker, is just bare the fact that our globalized economy is an economy that really works for China first and foremost, and not for the United States. Certainly not for American workers.
Our supply chains — where are they now? In China. Our medical devices, where are they made? China. Our pharmaceuticals, where are they made? China. Our Big Tech companies, who do they want to do business with? China.
I think it’s time that we asked ourselves what kind of an economy we have we allowed to be created, and what is it doing for American workers? We need some structural reform.
CARLSON: I think that’s exactly right. In the short term, though, the country is paralyzed by coronavirus, which came from eastern China, of course. What do we know about the Chinese government’s coverup of this virus in its early days?
HAWLEY: Well, we know that they suppressed the actual news, and we know that they ordered the whistleblower doctors to keep silent. Of course, one of those doctors, at least, lost his life because of that.
We know that they delayed global response to this virus by weeks, weeks that represent thousands of lost lives, Tucker.
There are studies out there that show that if we had had more time to deal with this, lives — many, many lives could have been saved.
So listen, the Chinese Communist Party has systematically lied to its own people who paid the price. They lied to the world. Now, we’re all paying the price. And that’s why I think we ought to have an international investigation about where this originated.
We know where it was; it was China. China ought to be held to account and they ought to be made to foot the bill for what the world — including the United States — is now suffering. Continue reading this article
The government’s reaction to the coronavirus of shutting down the normal economy has unsurprisingly inspired some business owners to contemplate shifting to non-human means of production by using machines that don’t get sick.
. . .Peter Xing, a keynote speaker and writer on emerging technologies and associate director in technology and growth initiatives at KPMG, would agree. Xing believes the coronavirus epidemic is presenting us with ample opportunities for increased automation and remote delivery of goods and services. “The upside right now is the burgeoning platform of the digital transformation ecosystem,” he said. . . .
Indeed, some quarters see the epidemic as a swell opportunity to switch to automation and away from annoying human workers who demand paychecks and lunch breaks.
Some industries, like automotive manufacturing (shown below), already have machine-only areas of production.
In China, businesses see an immediate need for service robots as well as more automation in factories:
SHANGHAI, March 20 (Reuters) – A shortage of workers and restrictions on human contact because of the coronavirus pandemic is driving up demand for service robots in China, potentially boosting a sector that has struggled to scale up commercially.
Venture capitalists with expertise in the robotics sector said they are anticipating orders from China to rise significantly this year, based on interest since the end of January when the virus began spreading in China.
That could take the use of service robots from novelties that deliver food and drink in restaurants and hotels to an army that performs essential functions in hospitals bound by strict no-contact rules.
“The healthcare segment has been really hot,” said Emil Jensen, vice president of China sales for Denmark-based Mobile Industrial Robots, which makes customisable robots that are used both in hospitals and on factory floors. [. . .]
FACTORY AUTOMATION
Along with the service robots, the coronavirus pandemic could spur demand for more automation at factories.
Many Chinese semiconductor plants located in the virus epicentre of Wuhan have run continuously throughout the outbreak, which chip industry experts attribute to their highly automated production processes.
Still, the virus itself also presents an obstacle to widespread long-term adoption of automation because of the economic stress it is imposing on many companies.
Huan Liu of Mujin, which makes intelligent robot sorting and picking systems, said companies often must spend millions of dollars for a basic automation project, which can take six to twelve months to complete.
“For new customers, it depends on which factor is stronger,” said Liu. “The need to replace labour during the virus, or the need to balance the budget as sales go down during the virus.”
The more America imports unfriendly foreigners to live here, the more obvious the need for the Second Amendment. Of course, every citizen deserves access to adequate self-defense, and we were guaranteed that right in our founding documents.
Today normal life has suddenly become a lot more complicated and perhaps dangerous with the coronavirus threat, or at least that’s how many Americans must feel, as shown by increased numbers of firearms sales in recent days.
Tucker Carlson noticed the trend and surmised that many Americans must not feel safe for so many newbies to be buying guns.
He also observed that State Department continued to resettle refugees from corona-infected nations through this week, showing how old preferences live on.
SPARE AUDIO:
TUCKER CARLSON: Across the country, Americans are literally the lining up outside gun stores ahead of what could be some kind of shutdown.
UNIDENTIFIED LOS ANGELES REPORTER: Toilet paper, hand sanitizer and now gun supplies. Lines weave around gun shops.
UNIDENTIFIED GUN SHOPPER: I’ve been robbed before, you know, who says that the people aren’t going to start robbing for food, and that’s scary.
ANOTHER GUN SHOPPER: When you feel uncertainty about your security, you want to do something about it.
COLORADO REPORTER: Many of them are first-time firearm owners who are learning how to use a weapon to protect themselves and their families.
ARIZONA REPORTER: Coronavirus uncertainty has led to a spike of guns and ammo sales at his store.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They sold upwards of 40 to 50 guns yesterday alone.
ARIZONA REPORTER: That is a big uptick from a typical day.
NEW YORK STATE REPORTER: Owner Andrew Chernoff says sales are soaring as fears of coronavirus continue to climb.
GUN STORE OWNER ANDREW CHERNOFF: We got in a bunch of guns, I’m sure by the end of the day, we will be out of guns again. We are now seeing a lot of first time gun buyers who never would have thought to buy a gun before who are now saying I need to have something to protect myself.
CARLSON: And just to be clear, a lot of these people who have never owned a gun before, if the public believes their leaders would protect them, they wouldn’t be buying guns; but they know their leaders won’t, and so they are, and this infuriates Democrats.
In New York, Nassau County Executive Laura Curran attacked people for trying to protect themselves amid this uncertainty.
LAURA CURRAN, D-NASSAU COUNTY EXECUTIVE: Guns are not going to fight the virus. What will fight the virus is people staying home and isolating themselves and not having birthday parties and weddings and clustering together in big groups.
CARLSON: Arrogant, stupid, totally uneducated, nasty. That’s the face of it right there — Laura Curran.
Tim Schmidt is President of the U.S. Concealed Carry Association. He joins us tonight. Tim, thanks so much for coming on. I mean, it does seem pretty clear that when you trust that the authorities are going to keep you safe, you’re probably not fixated on protecting yourself because you don’t have to be. People know that they need to protect themselves, correct?
TIM SCHMIDT, PRESIDENT, U.S. CONCEALED CARRY ASSOCIATION: Of course, Tucker, and as you’re talking about before, our law enforcement professionals and police departments, they had their hands full before the coronavirus, and so now, it’s only going to be worse.
Now more than ever, people need to understand that they need to be their family’s first line of defense.
CARLSON: Well, of course, and by the way, I thought there was a constitutional right guaranteeing that, and if there was ever a moment to invoke it, it’s now. So how can leaders lead? Air quotes around it, leaders like Laura Curran, the one we just saw right there from Nassau County, New York, how can she — I mean, how can any of them get in the way of your constitutional right to protect yourself?
SCHMIDT: Well, you’re right. They shouldn’t be, and honestly, I applaud all of these brand new people that are buying guns, but Tucker, what I’m about to say is going to become a little bit of a shock to you, especially coming from a guy like me, and that is that that so many — 90 percent of these brand new people buying guns have never owned guns before. They’ve probably never even touched a gun.
And that means they’re untrained. Now, don’t get me wrong, Tucker, I personally think that firearm ownership is a natural born right of free people. But with that, right, comes a tremendous responsibility and that responsibility is to be trained.
And so I will make a request right now if you’re watching this and you just bought a gun for self-defense, get training. Get training as fast as you can, whether it’s in person or even online, it will help you be a better defender, which we all know you’re going to have to be.
CARLSON: I think that’s really wise advice and anyone who has hunted a lot or has had guns, you know, they tend to have real respect for firearms because they’re dangerous tools. Thanks so much for that. Tim, we appreciate you coming on tonight.
SCHMIDT: My pleasure, Tucker.
CARLSON: Well around the world, thanks to this pandemic, countries are rediscovering the value of borders. Canada, believe it or not, has announced is closing itself off from foreigners. Obviously, it’s time we did the same.
And yet remarkably, until this very afternoon, the United States was still resettling refugees in the country, many of them from countries battling coronavirus outbreak. Let’s repeat that. Until this afternoon, our State Department was resettling refugees in your neighborhood from countries with virus outbreaks.
To stop a virus, while millions of Americans can’t go outside, the State Department was still dropping outsiders, foreign nationals into their communities. We’re glad the Trump administration put a stop to that. Thank God, at least for now.
Like a number of other people, Heather Mac Donald has expressed doubts about how the coronavirus story is playing out in the press: the media volume is turned up to high without a corresponding level of factual analysis.
Mac Donald recognizes the threat to public health, but her reaction is Compared to what? in a March 13 article explaining her disquiet.
It boils down to numbers — she sees an “unbridled panic” in America over several dozen deaths, 41 at her writing, while there were 34,200 flu deaths in the US during the 2018–19 influenza season. (And there were 61,000 flu fatalities the year before that.)
Mac Donald also notes the 38,800 traffic fatalities in the United States last year, but observes, “Shutting down highways would have a much more positive effect on the U.S. mortality rate than shutting down the U.S. economy to try to prevent the spread of the virus.”
She discussed the issues with radio host Larry O’Connor on March 16:
Here’s the original article:
Compared to what? by Heather Mac Donald, New Criterion, March 13, 2020
On the misguided response to covid-19.
Compared to what? That should be the question that every fear-mongering news story on the coronavirus has to start with. So far, the United States has seen forty-one deaths from the infection. Twenty-two of those deaths occurred in one poorly run nursing home outside of Seattle, the Life Care Center. Another nine deaths occurred in the rest of Washington state, leaving ten deaths (four in California, two in Florida, and one in each of Georgia, Kansas, New Jersey, and South Dakota) spread throughout the rest of the approximately 329 million residents of the United States. This represents roughly .000012 percent of the U.S. population.
Much has been made of the “exponential” rate of infection in European and Asian countries—as if the spread of all transmittable diseases did not develop along geometric, as opposed to arithmetic, growth patterns. What actually matters is whether or not the growing “pandemic” overwhelms our ability to ensure the well-being of U.S. residents with efficiency and precision. But fear of the disease, and not the disease itself, has already spoiled that for us. Even if my odds of dying from coronavirus should suddenly jump ten-thousand-fold, from the current rate of .000012 percent across the U.S. population all the way up to .12 percent, I’d happily take those odds over the destruction being wrought on the U.S. and global economy from this unbridled panic.
By comparison, there were 38,800 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2019, the National Safety Council estimates. That represents an average of over one hundred traffic deaths every day; if the press catalogued these in as much painstaking detail as they have deaths from coronavirus, highways nationwide would be as empty as New York subways are now. Even assuming that coronavirus deaths in the United States increase by a factor of one thousand over the year, the resulting deaths would only outnumber annual traffic deaths by 2,200. Shutting down highways would have a much more positive effect on the U.S. mortality rate than shutting down the U.S. economy to try to prevent the spread of the virus.
There have been 5,123 deaths worldwide so far—also a fraction of traffic deaths worldwide. And unlike coronavirus, driving kills indiscriminately, mowing down the young and the old, the sick and the healthy. The coronavirus, by comparison, is targeted in its lethality, overwhelmingly striking the elderly or the already severely sick. As of Monday, approximately 89 percent of Italy’s coronavirus deaths had been over the age of seventy, according to The Wall Street Journal. Sad to say, those victims were already nearing the end of their lifespans. They might have soon died from another illness. No child under the age of nine has died from the illness worldwide. In China, only one individual in the ten-to-nineteen age group has succumbed.
Comparing the relative value of lives makes for grisly calculus, but one is forced to ask: are we missing the forest for the trees? If the measures we undertake to protect a vulnerable few end up exposing them, along with the rest of society, to even more damaging risks—was it worth the cost?
An example: there were 34,200 deaths in the United States during the 2018–19 influenza season, estimates the cdc. We did not shut down public events and institutions to try to slow the spread of the flu. Yet we have already destroyed $5 trillion in stock market wealth over the last few weeks in the growing coronavirus panic, reports The New York Times, wiping out retirement savings for many.
The number of cases in most afflicted countries is paltry. As of today, 127 countries had reported some cases, but forty-eight of those countries had fewer than ten cases, according to Worldometer. At this point, more people have recovered from the virus than are still sick. But the damage to people’s livelihoods through the resulting economic contraction is real and widespread. Its health consequences will be more severe than those of the coronavirus, as Steve Malanga shows in City Journal. The people who can least afford to lose jobs will be the hardest hit by the assault on tourism. Small entrepreneurs, whether in manufacturing or the service sector, will struggle to stay afloat. Such unjustified, unpredicted economic havoc undermines government legitimacy. (Continues)
There is one good aspect to the coronavirus event, and that is the rediscovery of borders: they are so handy in keeping out people who might cause the preventable deaths of Americans from disease.
Unfortunately we face the Third World to our south and the border there is inadequate.
Perhaps worse is the cavalier attitude of Mexico toward the contagion. Life goes on as normal there in the corrupt and clueless nation. President Lopez Obrador leads the way, still hugging supporters at campaign rallies and remarking, “the pandemics… are not going to do anything to us.”
The disease is going to spread fast in Mexico, where a weak and corrupt state has made almost no preparations.
As much of the world goes into various stages of lockdown because of the Wuhan coronavirus, Mexico is in denial. The government’s response thus far has been to downplay the risks and carry on with life as normal. Mexican officialdom has taken almost no steps to contain the virus or prepare for an outbreak, despite a warning last week from the deputy health minister that a widespread outbreak is inevitable and that community transmission could begin there in a matter of weeks.
When that happens—not if, when—things are going to deteriorate very quickly in Mexico. The outbreak will almost certainly affect the entire country, cripple the economy, and threaten to bring down an already weak and corrupt government. . . .
The author John Daniel Davidson appeared with Tucker Carlson on Tuesday to discuss the illegal immigration implications.
Davidson thinks things could get messy when the Mexican public decides the disease is a problem and they would like some nice American healthcare.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, as the coronavirus pandemic spreads, nations around the world are rediscovering the value of borders. Even Canada has closed itself off from outsiders.
Of course, if we wanted to shut our border, it would be difficult along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, it would be impossible.
According to the New York Times, the Border Patrol will soon be instructed to immediately return all people detained at the border, even without a hearing.
But even then, if Mexico was hit hard by coronavirus outbreak, are we remotely ready for the ramifications of what could happen next?
John Daniel Davidson wrote a piece about this recently for The Federalist. We’re happy to have him on tonight. John, thanks so much for coming on. Explain what could happen if you would.
JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON: Yes, right now Mexico doesn’t have a huge outbreak of the coronavirus. I think they have less than a hundred confirmed cases right now.
But the danger is if there is an outbreak there, and there will be an outbreak there, health officials have said it is inevitable, it will be uncontrolled partly because the Mexican state is incredibly weak and corrupt.
They barely exercise control over vast swathes of their own territory, and the healthcare system there is virtually non-existent in some places.
So an outbreak there is going to put communities in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California that border Mexico in great danger even if the coronavirus is introduced to those areas from the United States.
Crossing back and forth over the Rio Grande is going to become a very great concern because of the lack of any kind of governmental control and the lack of any kind of preparedness in Mexico right now. Continue reading this article
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