The Armstrong and Getty Show

Nuclear Power – Still Our Best Hope

Published by Papa Giorgio

While I disagree with the points regarding the “Climate Crisis,” this video is solid in it’s dealing with the fears of nuclear power safety issues and how many are frightened by misinformation. They link to two other videos that are worth a watch as well. They are:

  • Worst Nuclear Accidents in History (YOUTUBE);
  • The Economics of Nuclear Energy (YOUTUBE).

The Truth About Nuclear Energy

How Dangerous Is Nuclear Waste?

Even environmentalists concede that nuclear power is a clean source of abundant, reliable energy. But they stop short of supporting it. Why? Because of the “waste problem.” But how real are their concerns? James Meigs, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, answers this question.

Nuclear Energy: Abundant, Clean, and Safe

If you truly want to save the planet from global warming, there’s one energy source that can do it. It’s not wind or solar. It’s not coal, oil or natural gas, either. So what is it? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, has the answer in this important video.

The above video mentioned Will Siri, the President of the Sierra Club a few decades ago. Here is an excerpt from Michael Shellenberger’s article from FORBES (via CLIMATE DEPOT):

…In the mid-1960s, the Sierra Club supported the building of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant to replace fossil fuels. “Nuclear power is one of the chief long-term hopes for conservation,” argued Sierra Club President Will Siri in 1966.

“Cheap energy in unlimited quantities is one of the chief factors allowing a large, rapidly growing population to set aside wildlands, open space and lands of high-scenic value,” added Siri, who was a biophysicist, mountaineer, and veteran of the Manhattan Project….

* THE BONUS BELOW WILL EXPLAIN THE FRUITION OF WILL SIRI’S POSITION – JUMP

And there is a letter the ANS is floating around as well that many are signing:

The letter: Already signed by such notables as James Hansen, Ken Caldeira, Richard Muller, Meredith Angwin, and James Hopf, the Generation Atomic letter notes that, in its early years, the Sierra Club supported nuclear technology.

“Early in the technology’s history, the Sierra Club recognized nuclear energy’s power-dense and emission-free environmental benefits,” the letter states. “Many of the Sierra Club’s members at the time were strong advocates for the energy source. Among them were Will Siri, the club’s president at the time, and the photographer and Sierra Club board member Ansel Adams.”

(AMERICAN NUCLEAR SOCIETY)

The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste

Nuclear waste is scary. Maybe you’ve seen it as glowing green goop in The Simpsons, or as a radioactive threat on the news. Either way, you likely know it has been a major block to the use and improvement of nuclear power. Over the last few decades, experts, politicians and the public have had heated debates over what to do with this radioactive material created by nuclear power plants.

But what if there were a way to not just store nuclear waste, but actually USE it?

This video is about the effort to make electricity out of nuclear waste. Really. It turns out, we developed the tools to do this decades ago. This story is about a technology we left behind and the people who want to bring it back.

This Environmentalist Says Only Nuclear Power Can Save Us Now

Michael Shellenberger believes The Green New Deal’s focus on wind and solar is a waste of time and money.

Calling climate change an existential threat to humanity, congressional Democrats introduced a policy proposal in February called the Green New Deal, which would mandate that 100 percent of U.S. energy production come from “clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources” like wind and solar by the year 2050.

But some environmentalists say Green New Dealers are neglecting one obvious source of abundant clean energy already available: Nuclear power, which an accompanying Green New Deal FAQ explicitly states should be phased out alongside fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal.

“If you want to save the natural environment, you just use nuclear. You grow more food on less land, and people live in cities. It’s not rocket science,” says Shellenberger. “The idea that people need to stay poor… that’s just a reactionary social philosophy that they then dress up as a kind of environmentalism.”

Watch the above video to learn more about the history of nuclear energy and to hear more from Shellenberger about his case for nuclear, as well as his response to concerns about radiation, nuclear weapons, and the economic viability of nuclear energy. The video also features solar energy advocate Ed Smeloff, who served on the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District board during the shutdown of California’s Rancho Seco nuclear plant and who makes the argument that nuclear power simply can’t compete in the marketplace.

PANDORA’S PROMISE:

This documentary film is about nuclear energy and other energy sources. Its central argument is that nuclear power, which still faces historical opposition from environmentalists, is a relatively safe and clean energy source which can help mitigate the serious problem of anthropogenic global warming. The film emphasize that more deaths is caused by coal powered power plants than nuclear power plants.

— PART ONE —

— PART TWO —

— PART THREE —

The below deals with the broken promises and the amount of land in the United States in order to reach a “net zero” dream. This is actually merely a combining of a few of my past posts under one umbrella.

* BONUS *

“Apocalypse Never” – Michael Shellenberger Talks With Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager had Michael Shellenberger on his show to discuss his new book entitled “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All” (Amazon: ). In an article by Michael, you see him transitioning into a “Bjorn Lomborg” type of category. Here is the opening paragraph of that article:

  • On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. (ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRESS)

Facts through reason and common sense have made it through to this gentleman, and this is nice to hear. In another review of the book, it is noted that Mr. Shellenberger is a long time environmentalist and contributed “rationalism [that] is in woefully short supply in present day environmental discourse. Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never succeeds in providing a welcome boost” Here is the opening of that review:

The way to a cleaner, sustainable planet is not to eliminate fossil fuels and nuclear power, but rather to expand their use, especially in developing countries to bring economic growth and prosperity, the way such sources did for the developed world.

This is one of the primary themes in the new book, Apocalypse Never, written not by a “climate denier” or “corporate shill.” Instead, author Michael Shellenberger is a 30-year environmental activist with street cred in various causes including saving California’s redwood forests and co-founding a “progressive Democratic, labor-environment push” in 2002 for the New Apollo Project, a renewable energy initiative that long predated the Green New Deal. He also is a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment.”…..

(PA PUNDITS – Peter Murphy)

Do We Have to Destroy the Earth to Save It?

Do wind turbines and solar farms hold the keys to saving the environment? Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress and noted climate activist, used to think so. Now he’s not so sure. He explains why in this important video. (See my previous Prager audio with Michael)

The West’s Green Delusions Empowered Putin | Shellenberger

  • “It was the West’s focus on healing the planet with ‘soft energy’ renewables, and moving away from natural gas and nuclear, that allowed Putin to gain a stranglehold over Europe’s energy supply.” — Michael Shellenberger

Armstrong and Getty read some of Michael Shellenberger’s article titled, “The West’s Green Delusions Empowered Putin“. An article of similar nature is found over at THE FEDERALIST, and it is titled: “Stop Letting Environmental Groups Funded By Russia Dictate America’s Energy Policy“.

Both are must reads.

State Sized Chunks Land for a Zero-Carbon Economy

Why were federal tax subsidies extended for wind and solar by Congress? Again. For the umpteenth time! We are against subsidies because they distort markets. Those politicians who support these market-distorting policies should at least be forced to answer the question: “How much is enough?” Taxpayers have been subsidizing wind and solar corporations for more than 40 years! These companies have gotten fat and happy on your money, and Congress keeps giving them more of it. This video is based on a Texas Public Policy Foundation report that explains why it’s long past time to stop wind and solar from stuffing their bank accounts with your tax dollars.

  • To give you a sense of scale, to replace the energy from one average natural gas well, which sits on about four acres of land, would require 2,500 acres of wind turbines. That is a massive amount of land. You would have to cover this entire nation with wind turbines in an attempt to replace the electricity that we generate from coal, natural gas, and nuclear power, and even that would not get the job done. (CFACT)

This is from a recent BLOOMBERG article:

At his international climate summit in April, President Joe Biden vowed to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. The goal will require sweeping changes in the power generation, transportation and manufacturing sectors. It will also require a lot of land.

Wind farms, solar installations and other forms of clean power tend to take up more space on a per-watt basis than their fossil-fuel-burning brethren. A 200-megawatt wind farm, for instance, might require spreading turbines over 13 square miles (36 square kilometres). A natural-gas power plant with that same generating capacity could fit onto a single city block.

Achieving Biden’s goal will require aggressively building more wind and solar farms, in many cases combined with giant batteries. To fulfill his vision of an emission-free grid by 2035, the U.S. needs to increase its carbon-free capacity by at least 150%. Expanding wind and solar by 10% annually until 2030 would require a chunk of land equal to the state of South Dakota, according to Princeton University estimates and an analysis by Bloomberg News. By 2050, when Biden wants the entire economy to be carbon free, the U.S. would need up to four additional South Dakotas to develop enough clean power to run all the electric vehicles, factories and more.

Earth Day 2021 is April 22nd. Therefore, eco-activist groups will be preaching the gospel of wind & solar power and the importance of biodiversity. What those trying to “save the planet” fail to understand (or more likely ignore) is that these two priorities are in direct conflict. Wind & solar require far more land than nuclear, natural gas and coal power. They are also far more destructive to regions of high biodiversity as well as large birds, bats and endangered species. As we celebrate Earth Day, let’s consider the significant environmental consequences of attempting to provide electricity through low density, unreliable sunshine and breezes.

Vice President Joe Biden aims to be the most progressive president on the issue of climate change. The man who spent most of 2020 hiding in the basement believes the future of energy is renewable energy like wind and solar. Biden should go back to the basement, watch Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans,” and rethink his advocacy for renewable energy. Wind and solar are not the answer, and the idea of converting our fossil fuel-based economy into renewables could be a devastating take-down to society.

Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task? Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality.

Remember when Google joined the common sense era?

FLASHBACK

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

[…..]

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally! (RPT)

  • What It Would Really Take to Reverse Climate Change: Today’s renewable energy technologies won’t save us. So what will? (SPETRUM)
  • Shocker: Top Google Engineers Say Renewable Energy ‘Simply won’t work’ (WATTS UP WITH THAT)
  • Polluting the Beauty and Cleanliness Of Our World With Renewable Energy (RPT)
  • Wind and Solar More Harmful To Environment Than Helpful (RPT)

Racism Disguised as Racial Justice at Smith College

Published by Papa Giorgio

????????? ??? ????? discuss a staffer at Smith College, Jodi Shaw, talking publicly about the dangers of “Critical Race Theory” in dehumanizing people in the work environment and in life. I hadn’t heard of Jodi and so this was my first introduction to her… but she joins a panoply of women fed up with the racial contextualizing of them as the leading factor that counts about them. So, I included two excerpts from her YouTube Channel after the commentary by A&G. These begin at the 6:08 mark.

Here are some stories I recommend:

  • Smith College whistleblower hits campus Critical Race Theory indoctrination: “Stop reducing my personhood to a racial category” (LEGAL INSURRECTION)
  • Meet the Smith College employee whistleblower exposing anti-white racism (THE COLLAGE FIX)
  • Update: Story of Smith College “Critical Race Theory” Whistleblower Jodi Shaw Goes National (LEGAL INSURRECTION)

A book I wish to recommend is “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody” – a short review I end with is here:

…What Cynical Theories expresses is not a paranoid state of mind. It is a genuine concern about the threat that social justice activism, identity politics, and the legacy of postmodernism poses to Enlightenment liberalism and the belief that “disagreement and debate [are] means to getting at the truth.” The book explains how we have arrived at a state in which social justice scholarship treats the principles and themes of postmodernism as The Truth, where no dissent is tolerated, and anyone who disagrees must be cancelled.

(Read It All)

Armstrong and Getty are right, this is one of the most dangerous dogmas infecting our country right now. I would say enjoy, but blood boiling is not always “enjoyable.”

I will add that Critical Race Theory is a form of fascism in that the only country known for the deeply held belief that race make a difference in similar ways was that of Germany in the first half of the 20th Century. And now? Social Justice Warriors pick up that horrible mantle.

NPR BIAS: Armstrong & Getty (Bonus Material Added)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(A&G end at the 2:20 mark, and the bonus material runs to the 8:36 mark where A&G pick back up) (The thumbnail is of Aaron Danielson [left], the murdered Trump supporter) Armstrong and Getty discuss a recent NPR news story that was quite biased (no surprise there). I added some bonus video detailing the Leftist proclivity towards violence.

Alarm Clocks (Armstrong & Getty)

Published by Papa Giorgio

These guy always make me laugh. And this “everything you didn’t need to know about alarm clocks” segment from their “best of” from today. I also relate because before my wife’s Fit-Bit, she was a 30-minutes before she needed to get up and hit snooze 6-times on that annoying car-alarm sounding noise. Anyways, enjoy the non-coronavirus/non-political break.

A Pandemic Caused By Red Tape (Government IS the Problem)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Regulations have delayed test kits, “telehealth”, and hospital innovation, making the coronavirus pandemic worse. They set America back months in responding.

Before the excellent PPE story from Front Page, On Wednesday-March 25th, New York’s PPE shortage was filled:

…On Wednesday, Cuomo announced via Twitter that the state received a donation of 1.4 million masks, clearly helping to fill the PPE gap.

“NEW: [Soft Bank] donated 1.4 million critically needed N-95 masks to us. New York State thanks you,” the Democrat said. “We are so grateful for this PPE that protects our healthcare workers.”…

(DAILY WIRE)

Supporting the above info from John Stossel comes this excellent FRONT-PAGE MAGAZINE:

…But why aren’t there any masks?

Surgical masks, like anything in the medical field, are tightly regulated. You can’t just make a mask. Some masks have to be certified by the FDA and others by the CDC. Some are certified by both the FDA and the CDC.

Until recently, the public had no problem buying N95 respirators for use in construction. These masks are certified by the CDC. Why is the CDC in the business of certifying industrial masks, you may wonder? Because, as discussed previously, the CDC does every possible thing except what people think it does. The component of the CDC that does this is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

NIOSH is not to be confused with OSHA, even though they were created at the same time, through the same law, and serve a very similar function: making this another skein in the infinitely tangled web of the federal bureaucracy.

The Open PPE Project launched an effort to quickly create N95 masks only to be told by NIOSH that approving a new mask production facility would take between 45 and 90 days.

Meanwhile there are reports of large stockpiles of masks sitting around waiting for an FDA inspector.

The United States government has a stockpile of 12 million NIOSH approved masks and 5 million that are expired, and are therefore not approved by NIOSH. Except it may approve some conditionally for use.

The FDA and CDC bureaucracy are not up to speed with the current crisis. There aren’t enough inspectors and the Wuhan Virus won’t wait on inspectors from the FDA or NIOSH to do their job.

Instead of streamlining its approvals and inspection process, the CDC lowered its mask protection recommendation for health care workers on the front lines.  

The CDC is willing to tell health care professionals to use scarves, rather than accelerate approvals.

Meanwhile N95 mask manufacturers feared being sued if masks meant for industry were used in surgical settings, which meant that they wouldn’t sell those masks to health care providers. At least not until a law protecting them against lawsuits was passed. All this, of course, took even more time.

Smaller manufacturers have tried to get in the game, only to discover the regulatory challenges of it. Fashion businesses that tried to jump in have settled for trying to make surgical masks that they hope will be FDA certified. Meanwhile the big manufacturers were making masks in the People’s Republic of China. And those masks are not leaving ChiCom territory except by the express will of its government.

Worse still, as the crisis grew, the People’s Republic of China bought up **THE WORLD’S SUPPLY OF MASKS, at one point importing 20 million masks in 24 hours. American companies even eagerly donated masks.

**…The U.S. mask gap stands in stark contrast to what other nations have on hand: the U.S. has one mask for every three Americans (masks are not supposed to be shared), while Australia has 2.5 masks per resident and Great Britain boasts six. “With the recent outbreak of the novel H1N1 influenza virus,” warned Representative Kay Granger, a Texas Republican, “it has become clear that we need to purchase more medical supplies and replenish the Strategic National Stockpile.” (Read “How to Prepare for a Pandemic.”)

Maskmakers are worried too, especially since ramping up production in the midst of a pandemic won’t be easy. Most maskmaking operations have moved outside the U.S., and 90% of masks sold in the U.S. now come from Mexico or China. But if the U.S. suddenly put in orders for millions of masks, Mexico and China would be unlikely to export their supplies before making sure their own populations were fully protected. “HHS knows the problem exists and yet they won’t tell the health-care industry,” says Mike Bowen of Texas-based Prestige Ameritech, the largest and one of the last remaining American mask manufacturers. “If they would only admit the problem exists, American hospitals would buy American masks and the manufacturing infrastructure would return.” (Read “Battling Swine Flu: The Lessons from SARS.”)… (TIME)

But why was the United States so unprepared for a run on masks before the pandemic arrived?

After Katrina, the Bush administration had set a goal of billions of masks in case of a major disaster. But that goal was never met. When the H1N1 swine flu outbreak arrived, we were badly unprepared.

The last run on masks took place during the H1N1 swine flu outbreak under Obama. Hospitals and health care providers began running low on masks and the Strategic National Stockpile released 85 million N95 masks. The stockpile was never replenished and today there are only 12 million N95s.

There were warnings back then that “maskmaking operations have moved outside the U.S., and 90% of masks sold in the U.S. now come from Mexico or China” and that “Mexico and China would be unlikely to export their supplies before making sure their own populations were fully protected.”

While the Obama administration threw billions at assorted solar and wind boondoggles, it failed to invest the money that would have set up reliable mask production in the United States of America. All the experts who claimed that “science” predicted the imminent demise of the planet had been too busy trying to control the weather through higher taxes to spend money on anything as crude as masks.

The secret warehouses where the strategic mask reserve was supposed to be kept are a mess and millions of the masks are expired. New York City asked for millions of masks and got 78,000 expired masks. Oklahoma got 500,000 expired masks. This is the situation, not just at the federal level, but state mask stockpiles, where they exist, also often consisted of storehouses of expired N95 masks.

Had the Bush administration’s National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza been followed, there would be no mask shortage. And had the Obama administration at replaced the masks that it withdrew from the Strategic National Stockpile, we might have had 100 million or so masks in the stockpile.

And had we brought mask manufacturing back to America, we would have a pipeline for making more.

Instead the Wuhan Virus brought a perfect storm, cutting us off from our manufacturing sources in the People’s Republic of China, after the Obama administration had depleted our mask reserve, while regulatory barriers make it difficult for companies quickly get in the game and produce more masks.

President Trump has done his best to cope with a sudden disaster that was decades in the making….

Armstrong and Getty read a letter from a listener discussing the “red-tape” of government stalling and interfering with supplies and innovation this pandemic needs.

George Gilder said something during an interview that stuck with me over the years:

  • “A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge”

And that is the heart of the issue these guys tackled. During the above excerpt, Armstrong and Getty mentioned their extended podcast with Lanhee Chen:

  • An extended (and off-air) conversation with Lanhee Chen about “Bureaucracy Disease” and how our bloated government agencies can steered in the right direction. (LISTEN)

Larry Elder discussed a FOX NEWS article…

…to which I use the NEW YORK TIMES to make the point that the attack on Trump (as if this is his fault) is unwarranted:

….“So much that was predicted has come to pass,” said Marcia Crosse, former head of the healthcare section of the Government Accountability Office. Since the early 2000s, the GAO, the federal government’s leading internal watchdog, has issued a steady stream of reports about poor pandemic planning.

[….]

That is only the most recent warning. As early as 2003, the GAO cautioned that many urban hospitals lacked enough ventilators to treat a large number of patients suffering from respiratory problems that would be expected in an anthrax or botulism outbreak.

“Ventilators have long been recognized as a weak link,” said Crosse, who spent 35 years at GAO before retiring in 2018.

[….]

Federal policymakers concentrated heavily on pandemic preparedness in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and anthrax scare in 2001, which both exposed gaps in the nation’s emergency response system.

In 2005, the administration of President George W. Bush published a landmark “National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza.” The document, among other things, highlighted the need for plans to distribute necessary medical supplies from the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile and to support state and local efforts to “surge” medical personnel and facilities to handle an outbreak.

Medical equipment such as masks and protective clothing in particular were given high priority as planners recognized that doctors, nurses and other medical staff were most vulnerable.

After the swine flu epidemic in 2009, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks, which filter out airborne particles, be replenished by the stockpile, which is maintained by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

That didn’t happen, according to Charles Johnson, president of the International Safety Equipment Assn.

The stockpile drew down about 100 million masks during the 2009 epidemic, Johnson said…..

Miko Grimes Confirms Raider’s Throw Games

Published by Papa Giorgio

In a previous audio ARMSTRONG AND GETTY pass along the information that the offensive line of the Raiders allow politics to enter into professional sports (). Even to the point of breaking the law by throwing games. Here again is a confirmation of this… and you can see the offense “actin’ a fool” in their on field antics:

➤ Wife Of NFL Player Claims Raiders Let Derek Carr Get Hurt Over Anthem Protests (ᗪᗩIᒪY ᑕᗩᒪᒪEᖇ)

Hard-Left Shift In Ideology

Published by Papa Giorgio

  • Distaste for Donald Trump and the leftward shift may go hand-in-hand, as Democratic leaders move the party’s overall politics left in reaction against the president. (Washington Free Beacon)

GAY PATRIOT notes the following about the above graph[s] (emphasis added):

…PEW FOUND DEMOCRATS HAVE MOVED SUBSTANTIALLY LEFT ON A VARIETY OF ISSUES WHILE REPUBLICANS’ VIEWS REMAIN RELATIVELY CONSTANT.

“In nearly every domain, across most of the roughly two dozen values questions tracked, views of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and those of Democrats and Democratic leaners are now further apart than in the past,” Pew noted.

Emblematic of this hard-left shift is the talk that ancient Senator Dianne Feinstein — a doctrinaire liberal — may be challenged by hard-left California hairpiece Kevin de Leon (of “ghost guns that fire 30 magazine clips per second” fame.) De Leon is so hard left he makes Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren look like … um… someone just moderately left-wing. Susan Collins, maybe.

When Dianne Feinstein was first elected to the Senate, she was decidedly left-leaning, Someone like Kevin de Leon would have been considered part of the radical fringe. He’s now quite the mainstream of a party whose activist core believes that equates Free Speech with White Supremacy and due process with rapists…

See More:

✦ New Study Finds Democrats Moving Left, Driving Growing Partisan Gap (Washington Free Beacon)

…Democrats’ leftward shift helps to exacerbate an overwhelming partisan divide. Across ten questions Pew has asked of survey respondents since 1994, the difference between Democrats and Republicans averages 36 points. That is the highest rate ever, though the gap has been growing continuously since 1994, when the average difference was just 15 points. The gap between Republicans and Democrats “far exceeds divisions along basic demographic lines, such as age, education, gender and race.”

“In nearly every domain, across most of the roughly two dozen values questions tracked, views of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents and those of Democrats and Democratic leaners are now further apart than in the past,” Pew noted…

[….]

“The party is being pulled in a more liberal direction, there’s no question about that,” Bowman said. “I mean Elizabeth Warren’s comment a few weeks ago essentially that this isn’t Bill Clinton’s party, we’re not the party of welfare and crime. I think she’s reflecting the views of many of the people in her party. And I think a lot of it happened during the Obama years.”

✦ Yes, the Democratic Party’s Polarization Helps Explain Trump’s Rise (National Review)

…The point here isn’t to recommend that those on the left repress their moral convictions. It’s simply to note that, given the remarkably fast and profound ideological changes undergone by the Democratic party, and given that the rival party’s raison d’être is to resist sudden and wholesale social changes, the resulting moment was perfectly predictable and, even though it is morally problematic in numerous respects, totally understandable.

To believe that the Democratic party’s leftward drift is not in any way responsible for Trump is to bizarrely think that the party is at one and the same time the Left’s most promising and effective vehicle for change and also so socially inconsequential as to be incapable of provoking any sort of reaction from its ideological opponents.

Obama and Krugman Held White Supremacist Views

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here are some portions of the LARGE and EXCELLENT article at THE ATLANTIC JOURNAL:

…In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.

Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”

Today, little of that ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,” adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone. The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the 2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.” The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal, or any variation of it, at all.

“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?

[….]

A larger explanation is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency, Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008 win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in a desert.”

[….]

Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.

This combination of Latino and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox. Klein asked whether, in order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country.”

Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox’s Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”

Sanders stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”

But has the claim that “immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved “incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this means a fall in wages.”

It’s hard to imagine a prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary, progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits.

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