#Senator Roger Wicker

[minnesotafollower]

Introduction of New Proposed Afghan Adjustment Act 

On July 13, 2023, U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (Dem, MN) with five co-sponsoring Democrat Senators and six co-sponsoring Republican Senators introduced a new proposed Afghan Adjustment Act (S.2327). The Democrat co-sponsors are Senators Coon (DE), Blumenthal (CT), Shaheen (NH), Durban (IL) and Menendez (NJ), and the Republican co-sponsors are Senators Graham  (SC), Moran (KS), Mullin (OK),…

[titleknown]

So, while I've talked about this in other posts, I figured I may as well compile it in one post with this nifty propaganda poster (more on that later)

Long story short, they're bringing back KOSA/the Kids Online Safety Act in the US Senate, and they're going to mark it up next Thursday as of the time of this post (4/23/2023).

If you don’t know, long story short KOSA is a bill that’s ostensibly one of those “Protect the Children” bills, but what it’s actually going to do is more or less require you to scan your fucking face every time you want to go on a website; or give away similarly privacy-violating information like your drivers’ license or credit card info. 

Either that or force them to censor anything that could even remotely be considered not “kid friendly.” Not to mention fundies are openly saying they’re gonna use this to hurt trans kids. Which is, uh, real fucking bad. 

As per usual, I urge you to contact your congresscritters, and especially those on the Commerce Committee, who'll likely be the ones marking it up.

Those senators are:

Maria Cantwell, Washington, Chair

Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota

Brian Schatz, Hawaii

Ed Markey, Massachusetts

Gary Peters, Michigan

Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin

Tammy Duckworth, Illinois

Jon Tester, Montana

Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona

Jacky Rosen, Nevada

Ben Ray Luján, New Mexico

John Hickenlooper, Colorado

Raphael Warnock, Georgia

Peter Welch, Vermont

Ted Cruz, Texas, Ranking Member

John Thune, South Dakota

Roger Wicker, Mississippi

Deb Fischer, Nebraska

Jerry Moran, Kansas

Dan Sullivan, Alaska

Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee

Todd Young, Indiana

Ted Budd, North Carolina

Eric Schmitt, Missouri

J.D. Vance, Ohio

Shelley Moore Capito, West Virginia

Cynthia Lummis, Wyoming

Again, it doesn't work unless you do it en-masse, so make sure to call ASAP and tell them to kill this bill, and if they actually want a bill to allow/get sites to protect kids, the Federal Fair Access To Banking Act would be far better.

Also, this poster is officially, for the sake of spreading it, under a CC0 license. Feel free to spread it, remix it, add links to the bottom, edit it to be about the other bad internet bills they're pushing, use it as a meme format, do what you will but for gods' sake get the word out!

Also, shoutout to @o-hybridity for coming up with the slogan for the poster, couldn't have done it without 'em!

[reasonsforhope]

Yesterday [April 30, 2024], a bipartisan collection of US Senators introduced the Fans First Act, which would help address flaws in the current live event ticketing system by increasing transparency in ticket sales, and protecting consumers from fake or dramatically overpriced tickets.

Today, the artists and Congressmen allege, buying a ticket to a concert or sporting event requires negotiating a minefield of predatory practices, such as speculative ticket buying and the use of automated programs to buy large numbers of tickets for resale at inflated prices.

The legislation would ban such practices, and include provisions for guaranteed refunds in the event of a cancellation.

The political campaign organizers, calling themselves “Fix the Tix” write that included among the supporters of the legislation is a coalition of live event industry organizations and professionals, who have formed to advocate on behalf of concertgoers.

This includes a steering committee led by Eventbrite [Note: lol, I'm assuming Eventbrite just signed on to undermine Ticketmaster and for PR purposes] and the National Independent Value Association that’s supported by dozens of artistic unions, independent ticket sellers, and of course, over 250 artists and bands, including Billie Eilish, Dave Matthews, Cyndi Lauper, Lorde, Sia, Train, Fall Out Boy, Green Day, and hundreds more which you can read here.

“Buying a ticket to see your favorite artist or team is out of reach for too many Americans,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

“Bots, hidden fees, and predatory practices are hurting consumers whether they want to catch a home game, an up-and-coming artist, or a major headliner like Taylor Swift or Bad Bunny. From ensuring fans get refunds for canceled shows to banning speculative ticket sales, this bipartisan legislation will improve the ticketing experience.”

Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Roger Wicker (R-MS), John Cornyn (R-TX) and Peter Welch (D-VT) also signed on to the Fan First Act.

In the House, parallel legislation was just passed through committee 45-0.

[Note: That's a really good sign. That kind of bipartisan support is basically unheard of these days, and rare even before that. This is strong enough that it's half the reason I'm posting this article - normally I wait until bills are passed, but this plus parallel legislation with such bipartisan cosponsors in the senate makes me think there's a very real chance this will pass and become law by the end of 2024.]

“We would like to thank our colleagues, both on and off committee, for their collaboration. This bipartisan achievement is the result of months and years of hard work by Members on both sides of the aisle,” said the chairs and subchairs of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

“Our committee will continue to lead the way on this effort as we further our work to bring this solution to the House floor.”

“The relationship between artist and fan, which forms the backbone of the entire music industry, is severed,” the artists write. “When predatory resellers scoop up face value tickets in order to resell them at inflated prices on secondary markets, artists lose the ability to connect with their fans who can’t afford to attend.”

-via Good News Network, May 1, 2024

[fullhalalalchemist]

🚨🚨🚨URGENT PLEASE READ AND REBLOG

dec 13, 2022

we literally have just a few days to act. the senate is debating about putting KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, into the omnibus spending bill. if it is added, it WILL pass. despite the title and content of the bill seeming to be about protecting kids, we know everytime someone claims they are "saving the children" they have more sinister goals

which is why Senator Blumenthal is working with one of the biggest transphobes in the senate, Marsha Blackburn, to force this bill through, and claiming they are listening to LGBT voices when they are blatantly ignoring us.

essentially this bill gives every state attorney generals the power to remove anything they deem 'harmful' to kids online. you can see how a state like Texas or Florida would run with that, yes? it also forces you to upload your government ID online to access the internet. the bill will create a 'commission' led by handpicked members of the govt to oversee what is and isn't allowed online. it will lead to mass censorship of anything related to race or LGBT content. in a post-Roe world too? say goodbye to any abortion/sex-related info.

they are doing a shit ton of PR for this, including claiming they are listening to LGBT voices. i mean just look.

two weeks ago, 90+ human rights, LGBT, and tech orgs signed onto an open letter telling Senators NOT to pass this bill. in response, over 230 orgs led by the American Psychological Association signed a letter urging senators to. it's really fucking bad. like i can't sleep because of this. i didn't expect this to happen. we really really need people to speak up.

if this bill goes through it will literally kill off the internet as we know it

sign the open letter and petitions against KOSA here

the best way to fight against this bill is to call these specific senators (if you have dem senators, call them too)

nancy pelosi (202) 225-4965 roger wicker (202) 224-6253 chuck schumer (202) 224-6542 maria cantwell (202) 224-3441

call script below:

For Wicker only:

I'm calling because I'm asking the Senator to vote no on KOSA S.3663 from being added to the omnibus and being put through the Senate. The re-released text of the bill is still not adequate enough, and it's being rushed. This bill does not belong in an omnibus anyway. As a Gen Z, I also want to protect kids. I've been there. But this language is not ready yet. It should not move forward at all.

Hello Senator __:

My name is _, and I strongly urge you to oppose the dangerously misguided KOSA bill from being added to the omnibus spending bill. Bills like this should not be included in spending bills. Over 90 human rights and LGBT organizations have spoken out against this bill.

KOSA gives state attorney generals full power to sue any website if they see it has anything that is “inappropriate for children”'. For the past year, Republicans claimed everything LGBT is “grooming” children and we ended up with a shooting in Colorado and bomb threats sent to hospitals, NO senator should support a bill with vague phrasing like this. Before that, they successful removed books on race due to "CRT". This gives them a pass to do this to the entire internet. KOSA will only lead to more harm towards minorities and LGBT youth across the nation by censoring everything online.

The Heritage Foundation said they will use KOSA to target LGBT kids, specifically trans kids. In a post-Roe world, they will even use KOSA to censor resources on abortion. Anything they dislike will be targeted.

A bill this huge and this impactful should not be added to any spending bill. Even if it was a small bill, it has nothing to do with the omnibus spending bill and shouldn't be added at ALL. It needs more time being discussed. There should be hearings on it as well

We all care about kids mental health. We all want to hold Big Tech accountable, but this is NOT it. This will give Big Tech more power while taking away resources from the most vulnerable children. It is not the solution.

Please, do NOT support this bill. Do the right thing, and VOTE NO on KOSA.

[zvaigzdelasas]

[Fox News is Private, Pro-GOP US Media]

"I welcome the U.S. and coalition operations against the Iran-backed Houthi terrorists responsible for violently disrupting international commerce in the Red Sea and attacking American vessels," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement. "President Biden’s decision to use military force against these Iranian proxies is overdue."

"I am hopeful these operations mark an enduring shift in the Biden Administration’s approach to Iran and its proxies. To restore deterrence and change Iran’s calculus, Iranian leaders themselves must believe that they will pay a meaningful price unless they abandon their worldwide campaign of terror," he added.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Mike McCaul, R-Texas, who said he was meeting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the strikes were called, also praised the actions. He also called on Biden to restore the Houthis' terror designation.

"I’m pleased the president, in coordination with our allies, finally took action against the Iran-backed Houthis following weeks of instability in the Red Sea. Tonight, with these strikes, we are beginning to restore deterrence. The administration must acknowledge it was a mistake to rescind the Houthis designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and re-list them immediately," he said.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, similarly called the action "overdue" and accused the Biden administration of contributing to the increasingly hostile situation in the Red Sea, but said the strikes were "a good first step toward restoring deterrence in the Red Sea."[...]

["]It is important that we follow this action in close consultation with our Saudi partners to ensure they are with us as the situation develops," Wicker said.[...]

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an ally of former President Trump's, said he was "very supportive of the Biden Administration’s decision to strike Houthi rebels who have been harassing international shipping and trying to attack Israeli and American interests."[...]

Even rank-and-file Republicans have been issuing cautious and rare praise for the move. Rep. John James, R-Mich., a military combat veteran who served in Iraq, told Fox News Digital, "The Houthis are a terrorist organization. They have been striking at U.S. military personnel since late last year and must be destroyed."[...]

"While I support these targeted, proportional military strikes, I call on the Biden Administration to continue its diplomatic efforts to avoid escalation to a broader regional war and continue to engage Congress on the details of its strategy and legal basis as required by law," Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said.

11 Jan 24

[simply-ivanka]

Sens. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), John Cornyn (R-TX), Joni Ernst (R-IA), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), John Kennedy (R-LA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mitt Romney (R-UT), Mike Rounds (R-SD), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), John Thune (R-SD), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Roger Wicker (R-MS), and Todd Young (R-IN)

VOTE THESE PIECES OF SHIT OUT OF CONGRESS.

[idvoteforthatdaddy]

Roger Wicker (R-MS) United States Senator

[1americanconservative]

These 28 GOP Senators voted for continued funding to Ukraine, even though we are $33 Trillion in debt, and face a Gov shutdown. Some real shockers in this group!

1. John Barrasso (WY)

2. John Boozman (AR)

3. Shelly Capito (WV)

4. Bill Cassidy (LA)

5. Susan Collins (ME)

6. John Cornyn (TX)

7. Tom Cotton (AR)

8. Kevin Cramer (ND)

9. Mike Crapo (ID)

10. Joni Ernst (IA)

11. Lindsey Graham (SC)

12. Chuck Grassley (IA)

13. John Hoeven (ND)

14. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R)

15. John Kennedy (LA)

16. James Lankford (OK)

17. Mitch McConnell (KY)

18. Jerry Moran (KS)

19. Markwayne Mullin (OK)

20. Lisa Murkowski (AK)

21. Mitt Romney (UT)

22. Mike Rounds (SD)

23. Marco Rubio (FL)

24. Dan Sullivan (AK)

25. John Thune (SD)

26. Thom Tillis (NC)

27. Roger Wicker (MS)

28. Todd Young (IN)

[mariacallous]

Congress may be closer than ever to passing a comprehensive data privacy framework after key House and Senate committee leaders released a new proposal on Sunday.

The bipartisan proposal, titled the American Privacy Rights Act, or APRA, would limit the types of consumer data that companies can collect, retain, and use, allowing solely what they’d need to operate their services. Users would also be allowed to opt out of targeted advertising, and have the ability to view, correct, delete, and download their data from online services. The proposal would also create a national registry of data brokers, and force those companies to allow users to opt out of having their data sold.

“This landmark legislation gives Americans the right to control where their information goes and who can sell it,” Cathy McMorris Rodgers, House Energy and Commerce Committee chair, said in a statement on Sunday. “It reins in Big Tech by prohibiting them from tracking, predicting, and manipulating people’s behaviors for profit without their knowledge and consent. Americans overwhelmingly want these rights, and they are looking to us, their elected representatives, to act.”

Congress has tried to put together a comprehensive federal law protecting user data for decades. Lawmakers have remained divided, though, on whether that legislation should prevent states from issuing tougher rules, and whether to allow a “private right of action” that would enable people to sue companies in response to privacy violations.

In an interview with The Spokesman Review on Sunday, McMorris Rodgers claimed that the draft’s language is stronger than any active laws, seemingly as an attempt to assuage the concerns of Democrats who have long fought attempts to preempt preexisting state-level protections. APRA does allow states to pass their own privacy laws related to civil rights and consumer protections, among other exceptions.

In the previous session of Congress, the leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committees brokered a deal with Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, on a bill that would preempt state laws with the exception of the California Consumer Privacy Act and the Biometric Information Privacy Act of Illinois. That measure, titled the American Data Privacy and Protection Act, also created a weaker private right of action than most Democrats were willing to support. Maria Cantwell, Senate Commerce Committee chair, refused to support the measure, instead circulating her own draft legislation. The ADPPA hasn’t been reintroduced, but APRA was designed as a compromise.

“I think we have threaded a very important needle here,” Cantwell told The Spokesman Review. “We are preserving those standards that California and Illinois and Washington have.”

APRA includes language from California’s landmark privacy law allowing people to sue companies when they are harmed by a data breach. It also provides the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general, and private citizens the authority to sue companies when they violate the law.

The categories of data that would be impacted by APRA include certain categories of “information that identifies or is linked or reasonably linkable to an individual or device,” according to a Senate Commerce Committee summary of the legislation. Small businesses—those with $40 million or less in annual revenue and limited data collection—would be exempt under APRA, with enforcement focused on businesses with $250 million or more in yearly revenue. Governments and “entities working on behalf of governments” are excluded under the bill, as are the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and, apart from certain cybersecurity provisions, “fraud-fighting” nonprofits.

Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, called the draft “very strong” in a Sunday statement, but said he wanted to “strengthen” it with tighter child safety provisions.

Still, it remains unclear whether APRA will receive the necessary support for approval. On Sunday, committee aids said that conversations on other lawmakers signing onto the legislation are ongoing. The current proposal is a “discussion draft”; while there’s no official date for introducing a bill, Cantwell and McMorris Rodgers will likely shop around the text to colleagues for feedback over the coming weeks, and plan to send it to committees this month.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Adam Kredo

Lawmakers like Budd, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have taken a great interest in the Palestine Chronicle and its nonprofit parent company, the People Media Project, since the Free Beacon first reported on Monday about its links to Iranian regime-controlled propaganda sites. The outlet’s editor in chief, Ramzy Baroud, wrote for two now-defunct websites that the U.S. government seized in 2020 for being part of a propaganda network controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC). At least six of the outlet’s writers also wrote for these IRGC-controlled sites.

Following Aljamal’s death during an Israeli raid in Gaza to free the hostages, the Palestine Chronicle published a glowing obituary, claiming its writer was just an innocent civilian trying to perform journalism. As Budd and his colleagues note in their letter, however, Aljamal "previously served as a spokesman for the Hamas-run Palestinian Ministry of Labor in Gaza."

"While Aljamal may have played a journalist by day, the evidence clearly suggests he was, at a minimum, a Hamas collaborator, if not a full-time terror operative, responsible for keeping hostages captive," according to the letter, which is also backed by Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Joni Ernst (R., Iowa), Rick Scott (R., Fla.), Pete Ricketts (R., Neb.), and Roger Wicker (R., Miss.), the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

With questions now swirling about the Palestine Chronicle and its editor Baroud, the senators say a multi-pronged federal investigation is necessary to determine if the outlet and its parent company were "actively employing an individual with apparent ties to and support for Hamas." The Palestine Chronicle downplayed its ties to Aljamal in a Monday piece, saying Aljamal "was a freelance writer who contributed articles to the Palestine Chronicle on a voluntary basis, mostly since the start of the Israeli genocide in Gaza."

"It is possible that this tax-exempt media outlet had no knowledge of its correspondent’s Hamas affiliation; however, given the organization’s recent attempts to cover up evidence of its ties to Aljamal, this seems unlikely, making them complicit in supporting terrorist propaganda on their platform," the senators wrote.

The lawmakers also instructed the IRS to "prepare a report on the findings of this investigation for the [Senate] Finance Committee to review in the appropriate venue."

[saydams]

the usa senate passed the budget that banned all aid to UNRWA and Biden signed it.

the senators who voted for this budget (preventing usa from funding UNRWA) are under the readmore. if your senator is on this list, call (202) 224-3121 and demand they find another way of funding relief to palestine.

Tammy Baldwin Wis.

Richard Blumenthal Conn.

Cory Booker N.J.

John Boozman Ark.

Katie Britt Ala.

Sherrod Brown Ohio

Laphonza Butler Calif.

Maria Cantwell Wash.

S. Capito W.Va.

Benjamin L. Cardin Md.

Tom Carper Del.

Bob Casey Pa.

Bill Cassidy La.

Susan Collins Maine

Chris Coons Del.

John Cornyn Tex.

C. Cortez Masto Nev.

Tom Cotton Ark.

Kevin Cramer N.D.

Tammy Duckworth Ill.

Dick Durbin Ill.

Joni Ernst Iowa

John Fetterman Pa.

Deb Fischer Neb.

Kirsten Gillibrand N.Y.

Lindsey Graham S.C.

Chuck Grassley Iowa

M. Hassan N.H.

Martin Heinrich N.M.

John Hickenlooper Colo.

Mazie Hirono Hawaii

John Hoeven N.D.

Cindy Hyde-Smith Miss.

Tim Kaine Va.

Mark Kelly Ariz.

Angus King Maine

Amy Klobuchar Minn.

Ben Ray Luján N.M.

Joe Manchin III W.Va.

Edward J. Markey Mass.

Mitch McConnell Ky.

Robert Menendez N.J.

Jeff Merkley Ore.

Jerry Moran Kan.

Markwayne Mullin Okla.

Lisa Murkowski Alaska

Chris Murphy Conn.

Patty Murray Wash.

Jon Ossoff Ga.

Alex Padilla Calif.

Gary Peters Mich.

Jack Reed R.I.

Mitt Romney Utah

Jacky Rosen Nev.

Mike Rounds S.D.

Brian Schatz Hawaii

Charles E. Schumer N.Y.

Jeanne Shaheen N.H.

Kyrsten Sinema Ariz.

Tina Smith Minn.

Debbie Stabenow Mich.

Dan Sullivan Alaska

Jon Tester Mont.

John Thune S.D.

Thom Tillis N.C.

Chris Van Hollen Md.

Mark R. Warner Va.

Raphael G. Warnock Ga

Elizabeth Warren Mass.

Peter Welch Vt.

Sheldon Whitehouse R.I.

Roger Wicker Miss.

Ron Wyden Ore.

Todd Young Ind.

[minnesotafollower]

Bipartisan Group of U.S. Senators Call for Reassessment of So-Called Havana Syndrome 

On April 12 a bipartisan group of eight U.S. Senators sent a letter to President Biden calling for a “renewed assessment . . . to identify the cause behind directed energy attacks” . . . and “review of the March 2023 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) of AHHs.”[1] This letter said, “Most recently, some . . . [former intelligence officials, service members and diplomats] have told Congress…

[posttexasstressdisorder]

GOOD NEWS!

There’s a new plan to revive the Affordable Connectivity Program, a pandemic-era initiative that provides low-income households in the US with discounts on high-speed internet access.

At the end of April, funding for the program was set to run out, affecting millions. But a bipartisan group of senators, led by Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, have proposed using a Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization measure as a vehicle for funding the ACP and other telecom programs for a combined $6 billion. Luján’s coalition includes senators J.D. Vance, Peter Welch, Jacky Rosen, Steve Daines, and Roger Wicker.

“Right now, there are over 23 million households participating in this program. That’s more than 55 million people. But it’s not only benefiting these individual families—it’s benefiting their local communities as well,” Luján tells WIRED. “It gives families access to better-paying jobs, to training and education to create economic mobility, to better deals on groceries and household goods. The time is now to save this program.”

The measure also includes a provision for the Federal Communication Commission’s “rip and replace program,” which refunds US telecom providers for removing equipment from Chinese manufacturers including Huawei and ZTE from their networks and replacing it with less-risky tech. Earlier this month, the FCC asked Congress for around $2 billion to help bolster the program, which has faced a shortfall. That initiative has been in place since 2020, which is when the FCC identified Huawei and ZTE as national security threats and then-president Donald Trump signed the “rip-and-replace” bill into law.

“It’s also critical that we adequately fund the ‘rip-and-replace’ program to ensure our country can move forward the effort to remove and replace untrusted technological equipment. This amendment also empowers the FCC to reauction spectrum licenses to free up airwaves and allow more opportunities for the public to access faster internet speeds and more responsive networks,” Luján said.

The Biden administration has made significant investments in broadband expansion over the past few years. In a speech last month, Biden called on Congress to reinvest in the ACP.

“High-speed internet isn’t a luxury anymore, it’s an absolute necessity,” Biden said. “Congress needs to reauthorize that program now.”

Update, May 7 at 7:19 pm: A previous version of this story misidentified the state Ben Ray Luján represents in the US Senate. It is New Mexico.

[honeysucklepink]

What's your opinion on "strategic primary voting?"

I'm going all blue as usual in November, but the issue is I live in a very, VERY red state...like BLOOD red (like "hey guys sorry for being the case that got Roe V Wade overturned" red). So really my vote is like spitting in a fire.

I've seen people do protest votes for the primaries (like in Michigan and Minnesota, where they didn't vote for Biden in the primary to protest his actions re: Gaza). And in 2016 many Dems in "open primary" states (like mine) crossed over to vote against Trump (a hell of a lot of good it did us).

The presidential race is set. In my state all the House of Representatives incumbents are pretty locked in. All our statewide stuff was last year.

BUT there is one senate race. The Democrat is unopposed (and a long shot). The Republican race is between the incumbent Roger Wicker, who is a pretty standard "old school" conservative. The other two, well, one is a former Marine railing against using "Marxist CRT" and the other has listed as an issue amongst others, "Woke/Transgender Agenda" (oh and is an evangelical preacher). Wicker has seniority and hey, hopefully he becomes a member of the "minority" party but can still send money to us, the poorest state.

[nicklloydnow]

“But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?”

I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day—perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?

(…)

A chronic “soft budget constraint” in the public sector, which was a key weakness of the Soviet system? I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future, and to rise inexorably to 8.5 percent by 2054. The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration’s “industrial policy.”

Economists keep promising us a productivity miracle from information technology, most recently AI. But the annual average growth rate of productivity in the U.S. nonfarm business sector has been stuck at just 1.5 percent since 2007, only marginally better than the dismal years 1973–1980.

(…)

We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear. As I read Wicker’s report—and I recommend you do the same—I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and therefore most lethal military in the world.

On paper, it was. But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of. It could not even win a war in Afghanistan, despite ten years of death and destruction. (Now, why does that sound familiar?)

On paper, the U.S. defense budget does indeed exceed those of all the other members of NATO put together. But what does that defense budget actually buy us? As Wicker argues, not nearly enough to contend with the “Coalition Against Democracy” that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have been aggressively building.

In Wicker’s words, “America’s military has a lack of modern equipment, a paucity of training and maintenance funding, and a massive infrastructure backlog. . . . it is stretched too thin and outfitted too poorly to meet all the missions assigned to it at a reasonable level of risk. Our adversaries recognize this, and it makes them more adventurous and aggressive.”

And, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the federal government will almost certainly spend more on debt service than on defense this year.

It gets worse.

According to the CBO, the share of gross domestic product going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041, thanks partly to the fact that the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3 percent of GDP this year to a projected 2.3 percent in 30 years’ time. This decline makes no sense at a time when the threats posed by the new Chinese-led Axis are manifestly growing.

Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.

(…)

Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. Leon Aron’s brilliant book Roads to the Temple shows just how wretched life in the 1980s had become.

(…)

In a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda from 1990, for example, a reader decried the “ghastly and tragic. . . loss of morality by a huge number of people living within the borders of the USSR.” Symptoms of moral debility included apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching. The entire country, he wrote, was suffocating in a “miasma of bare-faced and ceaseless public lies and demagoguery.” By July 1988, 44 percent of people polled by Moskovskie novosti felt that theirs was an “unjust society.”

Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979.

It is now well known that younger Americans are suffering an epidemic of mental ill health—blamed by Jon Haidt and others on smartphones and social media—while older Americans are succumbing to “deaths of despair,” a phrase made famous by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. And while Case and Deaton focused on the surge in deaths of despair among white, middle-aged Americans—their work became the social-science complement to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy—more recent research shows that African Americans have caught up with their white contemporaries when it comes to overdose deaths. In 2022 alone, more Americans died of fentanyl overdoses than were killed in three major wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries. The main explanations, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, are a striking increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide, and a rise in various diseases associated with obesity. To be precise, between 1990 and 2017 drugs and alcohol were responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths among the working-age population (aged 25 to 64). Suicide accounted for 569,099 deaths—again of working-age Americans—over the same period. Metabolic and cardiac causes of death such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease also surged in tandem with obesity.

This reversal of life expectancy simply isn’t happening in other developed countries.

Peter Sterling and Michael L. Platt argue in a recent paper that this is because West European countries, along with the United Kingdom and Australia, do more to “provide communal assistance at every stage [of life], thus facilitating diverse paths forward and protecting individuals and families from despair.” In the United States, by contrast, “Every symptom of despair has been defined as a disorder or dysregulation within the individual. This incorrectly frames the problem, forcing individuals to grapple on their own,” they write. “It also emphasizes treatment by pharmacology, providing innumerable drugs for anxiety, depression, anger, psychosis, and obesity, plus new drugs to treat addictions to the old drugs.”

(…)

The mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase deaths of despair for years has been ringing a faint bell in my head. This week I remembered where I had seen it before: in late Soviet and post–Soviet Russia. While male life expectancy improved in all Western countries in the late twentieth century, in the Soviet Union it began to decline after 1965, rallied briefly in the mid-1980s, and then fell off a cliff in the early 1990s, slumping again after the 1998 financial crisis. The death rate among Russian men aged 35 to 44, for example, more than doubled between 1989 and 1994.

The explanation is as clear as Stolichnaya. In July 1994, two Russian scholars, Alexander Nemtsov and Vladimir Shkolnikov, published an article in the national daily newspaper Izvestia with the memorable title “To Live or to Drink?” Nemtsov and Shkolnikov demonstrated (in the words of a recent review article) “an almost perfect negative linear relationship between these two indicators.” All they were missing was a sequel—“To Live or to Smoke?”—as lung cancer was the other big reason Soviet men died young. A culture of binge drinking and chain-smoking was facilitated by the dirt-cheap prices of cigarettes under the Soviet regime and the dirt-cheap prices of alcohol after the collapse of communism.

The statistics are as shocking as the scenes I remember witnessing in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which made even my native Glasgow seem abstemious. An analysis of 25,000 autopsies conducted in Siberia in 1990–2004 showed that 21 percent of adult male deaths due to cardiovascular disease involved lethal or near-lethal levels of ethanol in the blood. Smoking accounted for a staggering 26 percent of all male deaths in Russia in 2001. Suicides among men aged 50 to 54 reached 140 per 100,000 population in 1994—compared with 39.2 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic American men aged 45 to 54 in 2015. In other words, Case and Deaton’s deaths of despair are a kind of pale imitation of the Russian version 20 to 40 years ago.

The self-destruction of homo sovieticus was worse. And yet is not the resemblance to the self-destruction of homo americanus the really striking thing?

Of course, the two healthcare systems look superficially quite different. The Soviet system was just under-resourced. At the heart of the American healthcare disaster, by contrast, is a huge mismatch between expenditure—which is internationally unrivaled relative to GDP—and outcomes, which are terrible. But, like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy, brilliantly parodied by South Park in a recent episode—is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.

Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.

In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants, and that the United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis had been in “the great Patriotic War.” The truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude, while Stalin, who had started World War II on the same side as Hitler, utterly failed to foresee the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and then became the most brutal imperialist in his own right.

The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”

In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”

As for the current direction of U.S. foreign policy, it is not so much to help other countries defend themselves as to egg on others to fight our adversaries as proxies without supplying them with sufficient weaponry to stand much chance of winning. This strategy—most visible in Ukraine—makes some sense for the United States, which discovered in the “global war on terror” that its much-vaunted military could not defeat even the ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort. But believing American blandishments may ultimately doom Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to follow South Vietnam and Afghanistan into oblivion.

(…)

To see the extent of the gulf that now separates the American nomenklatura from the workers and peasants, consider the findings of a Rasmussen poll from last September, which sought to distinguish the attitudes of the Ivy Leaguers from ordinary Americans. The poll defined the former as “those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile,” and having attended “Ivy League schools or other elite private schools, including Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.”

Asked if they would favor “rationing of gas, meat, and electricity” to fight climate change, 89 percent of Ivy Leaguers said yes, as against 28 percent of regular people. Asked if they would personally pay $500 more in taxes and higher costs to fight climate change, 75 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said yes, versus 25 percent of everyone else. “Teachers should decide what students are taught, as opposed to parents” was a statement with which 71 percent of the Ivy Leaguers agreed, nearly double the share of average citizens. “Does the U.S. provide too much individual freedom?” More than half of Ivy Leaguers said yes; just 15 percent of ordinary mortals did. The elite were roughly twice as fond as everyone else of members of Congress, journalists, union leaders, and lawyers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 88 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said their personal finances were improving, as opposed to one in five of the general population.

A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.

(…)

We can tell ourselves that our many contemporary pathologies are the results of outside forces waging a multi-decade campaign of subversion. They have undoubtedly tried, just as the CIA tried its best to subvert Soviet rule in the Cold War.

Yet we also need to contemplate the possibility that we have done this to ourselves—just as the Soviets did many of the same things to themselves. It was a common liberal worry during the Cold War that we might end up becoming as ruthless, secretive, and unaccountable as the Soviets because of the exigencies of the nuclear arms race. Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway.

I still cling to the hope that we can avoid losing Cold War II—that the economic, demographic, and social pathologies that afflict all one-party communist regimes will ultimately doom Xi’s “China Dream.” But the higher the toll rises of deaths of despair—and the wider the gap grows between America’s nomenklatura and everyone else—the less confident I feel that our own homegrown pathologies will be slower-acting.

Are we the Soviets? Look around you.”

[darkmaga-retard]

Dozens of military veterans serving in Congress have signed a letter blasting radical Democrat vice presidential candidate Tim Walz over claims of stolen valor.

The letter was distributed on Thursday by President Donald Trump’s campaign.

The letter condemning Walz has emerged as the Democrat Minnesota governor has sought to dodge questions about the timing of his retirement from military service.

In an announcement about the letter, the Trump campaign slammed Walz as “Freakish Timothy.”

Walz, who joined the Nebraska National Guard as a teenager and also later served for Minnesota, met his 20-year requirement in 2001.

After learning he was due to be deployed to Iraq in 2005, Walz abruptly retired, abandoning his battalion.

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, the senator from Ohio, and others have criticized Walz for retiring shortly before his unit was deployed to Iraq.

The letter was led by retired Army sergeant Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) and signed by other servicemembers-turned-lawmakers including:

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA)

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS)

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL)

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS)

Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX)

Rep. Jennifer Kiggans (R-VA)

Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN)

Rep. Greg Lopez (R-CA)

Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL)

Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA)

Rep. Barry Moore (R-AL)

Rep. Jack Bergman (R-MI)

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE)