Politics

Lessons from Watergate Today marks fifty years since the Watergate break-in. Given that the scandal is something of a founding myth for modern Washington journalism, there is no shortage of reflections on the meaning of the story half a century later — and what has changed between 1972 and 2022. One popular parallel is between Nixon and Trump, with contemporary commentators claiming that the big change between then and now is a level of partisanship that makes the successful ousting of a sitting president practically impossible. Witness, for instance, the one-sided proceedings of the House’s January 6 Committee. Away from this rather tired and often overstated analogy, more mischievous comparisons are possible.

This article was originally published on Ann Coulter’s Substack, which you can sign up to receive here. As much as I'm enjoying the January 6 Committee's careful assembly of evidence proving former president Trump is a douchebag, I wasn't seeing much in the way of a criminal offense until this week's underreported story about how Trump used his "STOP THE STEAL" fundraising appeals to grift his supporters out of $250 million, none of which was, in fact, used to fight election fraud. It didn't even go to the poor saps who got themselves arrested at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Instead, the $250 million seems to have been funneled exclusively to Trump businesses, family and friends.

Recent mass shootings have reminded us of just how much gun violence has surged since Covid. The record of 45,222 Americans dying from gun-related injuries in the first year of the pandemic could well be topped in 2022, with more than 12,000 fatally shot since the end of April. Many rightly condemn progressive district attorneys in cities for failing to condemn the increased bloodshed. Yet the uptick in violence has been uniform across the nation, plaguing rural counties as much as urban ones, which is why most psychological experts put the blame squarely on the emotional residue of lengthy Covid lockdowns.

Last year, someone inside the Biden administration had a bright idea: let’s tweet about food prices on the Fourth of July! The staffer surely scanned an American Farm Bureau news release, and thought, wait until people hear they’ll save a whole 16 cents on their cookouts compared to last year! The staffer no doubt ran this brain wave by his higher-ups, who agreed. We'll even do a GIF that people can readily retweet! To quote the last administration, it’ll be YUUUUUUUGE! Of course, the graphic may have been tweaked slightly before it was sent out. Otherwise everyone might have noticed that prices were up on hamburger buns (6 percent), chocolate chip cookies (11 percent), and strawberries (22 percent!).

There’s a new federal gun law in the works and it's being heralded as a “bipartisan breakthrough agreement on gun violence.” I can’t even get past the first sentence without issuing an objection, your honor! Because the proposed gun control package is just more manipulative language aimed at eroding Second Amendment rights. “Gun violence” makes it sound as if the guns are the ones causing the violence. The same goes for “gun safety” — a term President Biden used in response to this proposed legislation, which will not make guns any safer or less violent. Guns are inanimate objects, neither violent nor safe. They don’t spontaneously combust. People do.

Soaring gasoline prices (they’re up 49 percent since President Biden took office) are due to “Putin’s price hikes,” claims Biden. But last I checked, Putin wasn’t stateside canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline, pursuing efforts to end federal oil and gas leasing programs, and careening our country toward more Covid-like lockdowns, social isolation, supply chain shortages, and another summer crime wave. A brief recap of Biden’s oil and gastastrophe: in January 2021, during his first days in office, the president revoked the Keystone Pipeline permit and issued an executive order that, in his own typically eloquent words, directed the “Secretary of the Interior to stop issuing new oil and gas leases on public lands and offsh- — and offshore waters, wherever possible.

Conservative media seems to have missed this story, and the limited liberal press it got took it as a simple win. But the real showdown is coming this fall. Later this year, it is possible — not likely, but possible — that the Supreme Court will take away the right of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor content. This would have the effect of granting some level of First Amendment protection, now unavailable, to conservative users of those platforms. The potential for change hinges on a law struck down by the lower courts, Netchoice v. Paxton, which challenges Texas law HB 20. That law addresses social media companies with more than 50 million active users in the US, like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook.

This week brought revelations that a consortium including multiple interested leftist participants has banded together to attempt to buy a number of Spanish-language radio stations across the country. The effort, backed in part by George Soros, is unsurprising. But it is also an underrated indication of the weakness of vision on both the left and the right. It illustrates an approach used by the left toward Hispanic outreach, which has been consistently top-down. As opposed to listening to the priorities of these communities and making any effort to meet them where they are, the left has instead tried to assert and propagandize to them. Univision, Fusion, and a number of other left-driven media outlets have attempted to control the narrative heard by Spanish speakers in America.