UnHerd.

For all the firsts that Kamala Harris represents as a presidential candidate, there’s one part of her identity that seems to both inflame her opponents and energise her supporters like none other. If elected, Harris will be not just the first woman of colour to ascend to the presidency; she will be a woman without children of her own.

Harris, 59, has been married for 10 years to attorney Douglas Emhoff, and is stepmother to his two adult children who famously (and, let’s be honest, adorably) refer to her as “Momala”. It’s her first marriage; before that, she had several high-profile relationships with men including television personality Montel Williams and San Francisco politician Willie Brown, who is 30 years Harris’s senior and is credited with helping jump-start her career as a district attorney.

There are various ways to describe Harris’s romantic history and current family background: non-traditional, blended, modern, messy. The youths, possibly, might call it “brat”, a lifestyle vibe characterised by chaotic fun (along with cocaine use and the occasional emotional breakdown). But whatever you want to call it, it’s remarkable to consider how far we’ve come from the days of rigidly defined “family values” in politics, when extramarital affairs could be career-ending scandals, and even just being divorced was vaguely suspicious.

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The most expensive member of the oldest profession.

The Cloud People will be throwing money at her for the next three months in an attempt to buy their way to retaining power. We will find out whether that actually works.

Victor Davis Hanson

unison withdrew from the presidential race, ceding the nomination to Joe Biden.

Yet Biden had lost the first three races in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada—and only won his first victory in South Carolina.

Suddenly, on the eve of the Super Tuesday mega-primaries, the candidacies of front-runner Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and others simply evaporated.

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A campaign official for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris acknowledged Wednesday that the vice president is deliberately misleading voters about Project 2025.

CNN first reported the stunning admission as part of a fact-check article accusing Harris of making false claims about Project 2025 and former President Donald Trump’s stance on Social Security. CNN’s Daniel Dale revealed:

A Harris campaign official said the campaign has “made a deliberate decision to brand all of Trump’s policies” as “Project 2025,” since they believe “it has stuck with voters.”

Since entering the presidential race Sunday, Harris and her campaign have repeatedly tried to link Project 2025 to Trump, despite the former president’s pushback.

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Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has peddled a series of hoaxes as a U.S. senator and vice president, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found.

Here are the seven most egregious hoaxes pushed by Harris, author of the memoir The Truths We Hold.

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Without earning a single vote cast by the American public, Vice President Kamala Harris won enough support from Democratic delegates to secure her party’s presidential nomination less than 48 hours after her octogenarian boss dropped out of the race.

Over 2,660 delegates said they back the former California attorney general, pushing her way over the 1,976 votes needed to clinch the nomination, an Associated Press survey found. No other potential candidates were named in the survey as an alternative to Harris.

From vote fraud to rigged elections to back-room deals, the most accurate thing one can say about the Democrat Party is that they avoid democracy as if it were some loathsome disease.

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Vice President Kamala Harris is actively raising money for a bail fund that busts violent criminals from jail as her nascent presidential campaign signals her candidacy will lean heavily on her roots as a tough-on-crime former prosecutor.

Harris urged her followers to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund in June 2020 as Black Lives Matter rioters wreaked havoc in Minneapolis in the days following George Floyd’s death. Harris’s fundraising efforts helped the fund raise more than $41 million in 2020, but the group only used a small fraction of that bounty—$210,000—to bail rioters out of jail. The remaining funds helped post bail for violent criminals such as Christopher Boswell, a twice-convicted rapist who was freed from jail in 2020 pending kidnapping and sexual assault charges after the Minnesota Freedom Fund paid $350,000 for his release.

“The last time we were down there, the clerk said, ‘we hate it when you bail out these sex offenders, that is what they said,’” former Minnesota Freedom Fund interim executive director Greg Lewin told Fox9 in August 2020.

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Biden’s X account shared a letter that he supposedly signed on Sunday announcing that he’s dropping his re-election campaign in favor of endorsing Kamala, which led to everyone from the Soroses to Hillary throwing their support behind her, with the notable exception of Obama. The New York Times (NYT) cited people close to him though who advised “not to read too much into it” since he supposedly wants to “position himself as an impartial elder statesman above intraparty machinations”.

The circumstances surrounding Biden’s decision are super controversial since he’s supposedly isolating after falling ill with COVID for a third time despite his multiple vaccinations and had reportedly felt backstabbed by the Obama-Pelosi duopoly’s plot to turn the media and party elites against him. The NYT described Obama as the “puppet master” of this operation and Pelosi as the “main instigator”, yet that’s all now being memory-holed, as is talk about Biden’s cognitive faculties since he hasn’t (yet?) resigned.

Washington Free Beacon.

Vice President Kamala Harris said on Sunday that she will run to succeed her octogenarian boss after President Joe Biden bowed out of the presidential race.

And so, as she endeavors to unburden herself by what has been, a refresher on Vice President Kamala Harris: Here at the Free Beacon, we’ve been chronicling her “Veep Thoughts” since early 2022. Watch the latest volume here.

The last time Harris sought the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination things didn’t go quite as she had planned. Politico characterized the campaign as one with “no discipline, no plan, no strategy.” Harris launched her campaign in January 2019 and dropped out by the end of the year, before her home state of California voted in the primary. She suffered a number of self-inflicted setbacks along the way.

Victor Davis Hanson.

When Donald Trump seemed to have a lock on the 2016 Republican primary, the Democratic Party concluded that the people could not be counted on to do the “right thing” of electing the Democratic candidate in waiting Hillary Clinton.

What followed were eight long years of extralegal efforts to neuter candidate, then president, then ex-president, and then candidate again, Donald Trump.

The nonstop efforts were all justified as “saving democracy”—albeit by nearly destroying it.

In 2015-2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign fueled the lie that discredited ex-British spy Christopher Steele had discovered Trump to be a veritable Russian agent.

Hillary did not disclose that she had paid Steele—with checks hidden through three paywalls. The FBI, under Director James Comey, also hired the fraudster.

Yet almost nothing in his “Steele dossier” was true.

Brett Cooper.

Who knew that ‘Narya’ was ‘Aryan’ with the N moved to the front? (Rachel Maddow)

Read it.

Black women are coalescing around President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in a letter released Thursday indicating their support, reports The Hill.

My, what a surprise.

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A liberal nonprofit that claims to fund “voter rights” initiatives in order to “restor[e] … and activat[e] all voices in the United States” appears to be behind a deceptive anti-Trump ad campaign that tried to discourage Republican voters from taking advantage of mail-in voting.

Global Impact Social Welfare Fund, a little-known dark money group, gave $50,000 to PA Values on June 14, according to Federal Election Commission records. Two days after the donation, PA Values paid $48,000 for an ad that urges “MAGA PATRIOTS” to “stand strong WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP” against mail-in voting. Trump was skeptical of mail-in and absentee voting in the 2020 election, but has since encouraged supporters to vote by those methods in order to “beat the Democrats.”

The ad has stoked blowback, as well as speculation about the origin of the cash behind it. PA Values received contributions several years ago from labor unions and the law firm of Sen. Bob Casey’s (D., Pa.) brother. But it entered this election cycle with an empty bank account, up until the donation from Global Impact Social Welfare Fund. The Trump campaign accused PA Values of election interference over the advertisement, and called for law enforcement to investigate the matter. A liberal election law professor writing at Slate called the ad “borderline criminal” and castigated PA Values for its “trickery and voter suppression.”

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Economists are railing against President Joe Biden’s plan to impose rent controls on nearly half of the nation’s rental market as a ham-fisted election year ploy that would disincentivize building new housing and make it more difficult for Americans already struggling to pay their rent.

Biden on Tuesday unveiled his nationwide rent control plan, which would strip federal tax breaks for corporate landlords with more than 50 units who increase rents by more than 5 percent annually. The White House is promoting the plan as an anti-price-gouging measure to stabilize rents, which have ballooned 22 percent since Biden took office, that would last for only two years. But economists who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon said the Biden administration can’t spin its way out of the fact that the policy would almost certainly exacerbate housing shortages and ultimately increase prices for renters.

“Most economists would agree that it’s a pretty bad idea because it has many unintended consequences,” said Tobias Peter, the co-director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center. “Rents are high because there is more demand than there is supply. And so the solution is not to cap rents, the solution is to build more housing so that rents would naturally come down.”

Imagine that.

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President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party insist that “Democracy is on the ballot” this election.

While some of us have challenged that hyperbolic claim, one thing that may not be on the ballot is choice, if the defenders of Democracy have anything to say about it.

Georgia Democrats have joined counterparts in other states to prevent citizens from being able to vote third-party candidates.

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Rochester Public Schools approved the “Supporting Transgender and/or Gender-Expansive Students” policy originally introduced on June 11.

The policy also allows a transgender-identifying boy to share to room with a girl on an overnight trip without the girl’s or her parents’ knowledge.

Though Jeannine Buntrock’s three children are zoned for the Rochester Public Schools, she moved her daughters to a different district to avoid policies like these. She told The Daily Signal she hopes the policy will be overturned in the near future.

Time to leave.

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Weeks after musician and actor Jack Black appeared at Joe Biden’s Hollywood fundraiser to tell people “democracy is at stake,” he’s canceled the rest of his Australian tour after bandmate Kyle Gass said on Sunday that his birthday wish would be “don’t miss Trump next time.”

Fuck around and find out.

Read it.

A Southern California school district trains counselors to help students hide their transgender identity from their concerned parents, according to documents obtained by The Daily Signal.

Capistrano Unified School District in southern Orange County, California, allows students to change their name and gender in school records without parental permission.

The Individual Transition Plan, obtained by the nonprofit law firm Center for American Liberty through a California Public Records Act request, asks the counselor filling it out whether the child’s parents “need to know” about their child’s transition. It later asks the student to respond with “yes” or “no” to the statement: “My parents/guardians are aware of my transition.”

David Frum, in The Atlantic.

So you can see where it comes from.

Newsbusters.

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday evening reminded some news watchers of what President Joe Biden said to Democratic donors six days ago, as reported by the New York Times: “During a video call with top donors on Monday, Mr. Biden told them: “It’s time to put Trump in the bull’s-eye.”

When you wish upon a star….

One may scoff at the idea that a metaphorical comment like Biden’s “bulls-eye” could possibly lead to an attempted assassination of Trump – yet, in 2011 the New York Times bizarrely blamed a campaign map issued by former John McCain running mate Sarah Palin’s political action committee for the attempted assassination of Democratic Rep. Giffords of Arizona.

What does around, comes around.

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A now-deleted Facebook post by a staffer of Mississippi’s lone Democrat congressman appeared to support the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday.

The deleted post by Jacqueline Marsaw, a field director for U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi, said “I don’t condone violence but please get you some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time ooops [sic] that wasn’t me talking.”

Jacqueline Marsaw:

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Based on all the accusations being hurled back and forth over the past eight years, if there’s one thing everyday Americans agree on, it’s the importance of maintaining faith in our elections. Electoral integrity is a foundational block in our republic’s Jenga tower that, if pulled away, will topple it. Unfortunately, that may be just what a small but dangerous number of Americans are hoping for.

The good news is most voters across the political spectrum want to preserve free and fair elections. Though we may disagree about the best way to ensure election integrity, the majority of us believe it should be easy to vote and hard to cheat and that voter fraud should be pursued and prosecuted.

Unfortunately, research by Scott Rasmussen reveals that 7% of the American electorate would rather cheat than lose an election. That’s quite an alarming admission from what amounts to more than 11 million people. Worse, among the people Rasmussen calls the “politically active elite 1%” (high-income, urban professionals with postgraduate degrees), more than two-thirds would be willing to compromise their integrity to assure victory.

You might call them the ‘Vince Lombardi Democrats’.

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Bipartisan legislation proposed by a group of New York City Council members that would get rid of a number of “sanctuary city” laws currently on the books has the support of Mayor Eric Adams, the Daily Caller reported.

To quote Dave Chapelle: “Gotcha, bitch!”

The Guardian.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s salvo seeks accountability over conservative supreme court justices’ ethics controversies

Which ‘ethics controversies’ were ginned up by Democrats, much like the corresponding lawfare against Trump, purely to create a buzz that can be used to support shit like this.

UPDATE: AOC Files Futile Impeachment Articles Against Justices Alito, Thomas

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As they do.

President Joe Biden claims his political opponents are a threat to democracy, but it is the Democrats doing exactly what they claim to rebuke, according to former Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga.

UPDATE: “Partisan Mischief”: North Carolina Democrats Vote To Block Third-Party Candidates From Ballots

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Electoral fraud is a venerable tradition in these United States, with a history going all the way back to the founding of the Republic.

With control of the public purse, representative government provided lucrative opportunities for both elected officials and the corporations that did business with them. Baroque levels of corruption became the norm, and public policy was devised to maximize profits for all involved while concealing the dirty deals behind a scrim of public rectitude.

Controlling the outcome of elections was essential for the smooth operation of the political machinery, in order to make sure that lucrative enterprises continued to generate lucre for everyone involved. The political cartoon below by Thomas Nast features William M. “Boss” Tweed, the head of Tammany Hall and the most powerful man in New York City in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Boss Tweed was able to guarantee results through an elaborate patronage network, lavish bribery, and his control of the ballot-counting process.

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As Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts said Monday, the Left’s inflammatory attacks on Project 2025 show that it’s “right over the target.” President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is so desperate to defeat Project 2025 that it spreads direct falsehoods about it, perhaps not expecting the American people to actually examine what the project comprises.

The Biden campaign launched a special website dedicated to attacking Project 2025, and posted totally baseless claims about the initiative.

“Project 2025 is the plan by Donald Trump’s MAGA Republican allies to give Trump more power over your daily life, gut democratic checks and balances, and consolidate power in the Oval Office if he wins,” the webpage claims. “Trump’s campaign advisors and close allies wrote it—and are doing everything they can to elect him so he can execute their playbook immediately.”

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She ran in the primaries and literally nobody wanted her.

She has demonstrated no skills other than being able to sleep her way into political office.

Does anybody seriously believe that she was picked for VP for any other reason than because she was a Woman Of Color[TM]?

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Biden and his people loved the idea of democracy much more than the actuality of it. The party had suppressed Rep. Dean Philips, Biden’s one opponent, and No Labels, a group that had fought for ballot access to launch a bipartisan alternative ticket, while running on democracy.

“This MAGA threat is a threat to the brick and mortar of our democratic institutions,” Biden had warned at a tribute to the late Sen. John McCain. At an earlier tribute to the late Sen. Harry Reid, he had preached that “protecting democracy requires vigilant stewardship.”

But now Biden’s own party is searching for ways to get rid of him. And the party’s best odds lie with supplanting the two democratically chosen candidates, Biden and Kamala Harris, with Gov. Gavin Newsom or some other last minute usurper who wasn’t chosen by anyone.

The Democrats have to kill democracy to save the Democratic Party.

In the modern world, the name of a political party is chiefly descriptive of what the party does not support.

Power Line.

I have a prediction. I don’t think Biden’s debate face-plant will hurt him much with his core constituency, whites who earn over $200,000. Those voters are motivated by a combination of economic self-interest and an irrational hatred of Donald Trump. The large majority of them would vote for Biden if he died between now and the election.

The danger to Democrats lies elsewhere; specifically, with black and Hispanic voters. I predict that in two to three weeks, we will see a pretty dramatic shift in the polls among those voters. Both groups are already tending toward Trump and the Republicans, and are increasingly skeptical of the Democrats’ arrogant claim to be entitled to their votes, regardless of how poorly they perform.

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In an order issued on Tuesday, Montana District Court Judge Shane Vannatta, the first Montana judge to openly identify as homosexual, declared Senate Bill 458 to be facially unconstitutional according to Montana state law.

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Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Democratic Party megadonor James Simons’s hedge fund substantially upped its financial stake in several solar energy companies, which reaped windfalls from the bill.

According to federal elections filings, eight days before Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) publicly unveiled the IRA on July 27, 2022, Simons wired $2.5 million to Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC. Then, in August, one week after President Joe Biden signed the bill into law, Simons sent another $2.5 million check to the same PAC.

Simons’s trading activity, coupled with his aptly timed donations to the Senate Majority PAC, raises questions about whether he had advance knowledge of the IRA negotiations, which were supposedly kept private until Schumer and Manchin’s announcement in late July.

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Good luck with that.

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Nearly 80 criminal trespass arrests stemming from a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Texas have been dismissed, a prosecutor said Wednesday, the latest dropped charges against demonstrators arrested on college campuses across the U.S. this spring.

Like most major urban areas, Austin (and it’s surrounding Travis County) is as blue as a bruise.

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I today’s lesson, progressives learn that their magic wand doesn’t work on reality.

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I’m shocked, shocked I tell you….

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The National Education Association has accused Moms for Liberty of being a pawn of “wealthy conservative donors,” even though the teachers union’s revenue is 185 times as great as that of the parental rights group.

The nation’s largest teachers union—which charges its members dues, often totaling $1,000 a year—called Moms for Liberty, which offers free memberships to 130,000, a tool of “ultrawealthy privateers who seek to abolish America’s public school system” in a Friday article.

Moms for Liberty reported $2.1 million in total revenue in 2022. The NEA, on the other hand, reported revenues of about $371 million for the 2021-2022 fiscal year.

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California governor Gavin Newsom, in a pre-recorded state of the state address on Tuesday, touted himself as the first Golden State leader to write a homelessness plan. California’s homeless population has grown 17 percent since Newsom took office and the state has the largest homeless population in the country.

“Let me remind you that when I became governor in 2019, there was no state homeless strategy, no state plan,” Newsom said. “There was no significant investment. … There was no accountability expected or anything demanded in return, no requirement for demonstrable results.”

His boast comes just a few months after a state auditor found that California officials failed to track $24 billion in homelessness spending and have no way to determine which of their many costly programs are working. Since Newsom assumed office in 2019, California’s homeless population has grown from 151,278 people, according to federal figures, to 181,399 at the last count.

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House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan’s latest drop of (R-OH) Amazon Files uncovered that the Big Tech giant suppressed at least 43 books at the behest of President Joe Biden’s administration.

The third installment of The Amazon Files, released Friday, revealed that the Biden administration pressured tech giant Amazon to censor vaccine-critical books that came out even before the COVID-19 vaccine. “Under the guise of combatting ‘anti-vaccine’ misinformation, Amazon censored everything from picture books for children to books criticizing Big Pharma,” Jordan wrote in an X post.

Jordan shared screenshots of internal emails at Amazon revealing that employees “create[d] a new [Do Not Promote] class for anti-vax books.” The employee added, “The impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to, and should be handled urgently.” The emails further show a discussion about whether books should be “remove[d] from sale” since they were often sought out by name rather than being discovered by general searches.

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A now disbanded group in Joe Biden’s Department Homeland Security (DHS) classified Trump supporters, members of the military, and people with religious views as persons likely to commit “domestic violent extremist” attacks, newly released internal files show.

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My, what a surprise.

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The DA who prosecuted and convicted former President Donald Trump on legally dubious campaign finance charges isn’t going to let prominent left-wing activists go to prison or face real consequences for criminal actions.

The anti-Israel protesters not only damaged and occupied school property, they got into a physical confrontation with a custodian while committing their crimes. This came at the end of a monthslong occupation of Columbia University’s grounds.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, prosecutors argued that the protesters didn’t have a criminal history and so it was better to leave any punishment to the university.

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Nicole Shanahan, the running mate for independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said the current leadership of the Democratic Party hates democracy.

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For as long as I can remember, the Left has been sneering at anyone who points out that the United States is a republic, not a democracy. They find the notion almost as unsophisticated and fascistic as flying a revolutionary-era flag. Others dismiss the democracy/republic debate as pedantic or a semantic distraction. They shouldn’t.

It doesn’t help that every left-wing totalitarian state calls itself the ‘People’s Democratic Republic of X’.

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Of course.

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We have heard repeatedly during this election cycle that Donald Trump is a deep and abiding threat to democracy. That threat supposedly springs from Trump’s belief that he won the 2020 election, as well as his promotion of the specious legal theory that the vice president has the unilateral power to invalidate certified state electoral votes.

One can stipulate that Trump has presented no evidence sufficient to support a claim that he lost the 2020 election based on voter fraud; one can further stipulate that Trump’s pressure on Mike Pence to delay election certification was rooted in baseless misinterpretation of the Constitution. In reality, however, the truest threat to American democracy isn’t stubborn unwillingness to concede an election or groundless legal wrangling. It is the continuing attempt to create a series of institutions impervious to public rebuke or electoral accountability, comprised of pseudo-experts who act as “authorities” on a wide range of issues affecting Americans.

It is the creation and maintenance of a permanent bureaucracy, organized by the political left and catering to its whims.