Joy Pullmann wrote something about the recently published Time magazine article, which explained how powerful elites joined together to “fortify” the e1ection so that B1den would win.

The Federalist:

Corporate media has spent the last year arguing that Donald Trump’s claims about 2020 e1ection integrity amount to “seditious” consp1racy theories. While maintaining that narrative despite the cognitive dissonance, Time magazine’s Feb. 15 cover story pulls back the curtain on a “consp1racy” among a “well-funded cabal of powerful people” in an “an extraordinary shadow effort” that successfully pushed Trump from office.

“In a way, Trump was right,” writes Time national political correspondent Mo11y Ba11. “There was a consp1racy unfolding behind the scenes.” She later describes this “consp1racy” as something that “sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”

[…]The consp1racy’s “work touched every aspect of the e1ection,” Ba11 writes. “They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off v0ter-suppression 1awsuits, recruited armies of po11 workers and got millions of people to v0te by mail for the first time.”

This, she and the “dozens” of consp1racists she interviewed claim, is evidence of their efforts to “protect the e1ection.”

[…]For example, mail-in ballots are known as an unreliable voting method, even without its potential assistance to criminal fraud such as ballot-stuffing, because they create margins of error well within the margin of actual v0tes in a close e1ection. That’s why labor unions, Jeff Bezos, and many foreign countries refuse to use them.

Therefore, in a mail-in e1ection such as 2020, in which half of the total v0tes and most of the B1den v0tes were mail-in, one can control the outcome simply by controlling the po11-watchers and v0te-counters. Even if they are honest, their unconscious bias or the simple mayhem of unreadable handwriting and signatures creates the conditions for untrustworthy results.

[…]One of the core problems with the 2020 e1ection is that many states did not follow their voting laws, suspending them with the excuse of COVID (which the Centers for Disease Control said the day before the e1ection, after most v0tes were already cast, was not necessary). States were pressured or forced to do so, not by what Ba11 hilariously calls Trump’s “henchmen,” but by lawyered-up leftist pressure groups that strategically undermined e1ection protections with pre-emptive 1awsuits while courts rolled over for them.

These leftist lawyers were unquestionably the aggressors in this situation, as Hans van Spakovsky and others have documented, filing as many as four times the number of 1awsuits Trump or Republicans filed. Their efforts caused the very “e1ection confusion” Ba11 claims her vaunted “consp1racy” was trying to avoid. What do you call people who do one thing while claiming to do the opposite? Idiots or liars. And I don’t think these people are idiots.

[…]This “consp1racy” also rigged the e1ection by pre-emptively controlling the information v0ters were able to receive about the candidates. They did this by colluding with big tech companies to hide information that made Joe B1den look bad. Post-e1ection research found that just the consp1racy’s successful information control on Hunter B1den’s alleged corruption and its potential links to his father would have been enough to tip the e1ection.

[…]The Time article bears close and repeated reading. One last area of observation here concerns its discussion of the alliance between big business and big labor.

[…]Amid the big business-big labor discussion, Ba11’s interviewees admit the leftist rioters who terrorized America throughout 2020 did so with the tacit permission of higher-ups, who can turn the riots on and off at will.

The first principle of being a competent human is to not destroy yourself with your own bad decisions.

Daily Wire reports:

In a report released Monday, the Congressional Budget Office said that hiking the minimum wage to $15 might reduce poverty, but at the cost of 1.4 million jobs and by adding billions to the federal deficit.

President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) have both pledged to back legislation raising the federal minimum wage to $15 — what both the president and the socialist Senator call a “living wage.”

[…]The plan, CNN notes, would help some people, increasing “worker pay by $333 billion, giving a boost to some 17 million workers whose wages would otherwise be below $15, as well as many of the 10 million workers whose wages would otherwise be slightly above that level.”

People will lose their jobs:

The jump would “cut employment by 1.4 million workers and increase the federal deficit by $54 billion over a decade,” the outlet notes. And while federal spending on things like supplemental food aid programs might decrease, “spending on Medicaid and unemployment benefits would increase because of higher enrollment by those who lose their jobs.” Prices on goods and services would also rise, The Wall Street Journal adds.

Prices of goods and services would go up:

“Higher wages would increase the cost of producing goods and services, and businesses would pass some of those increased costs on to consumers in the form of higher prices, resulting in reduced demand, the CBO said,” per the WSJ. “From 2021 to 2031, the plan would increase payments to workers by a net $333 billion, after accounting for wage increases and job losses, the study found. That would allow low-income workers to spend more but would increase labor costs for businesses and raise prices, especially at restaurants. The loss of jobs would cause a modest negative overall impact on economic growth.”

We’ve already seen tens of thousands of small businesses shut down as a result of Wuhan virus regulations. Raising the minimum wage would make many of more small businesses shut down. We don’t even need studies to predict the future to prove this. We can look at what happened in the past, in cities that raised the minimum wage.

But does it work?

Here’s an example of how this works in reality, from San Francisco, a Democrat-run city.

ABC News reports:

San Francisco’s minimum wage is currently $11.05 an hour. By July of 2018, the minimum wage in San Francisco will be $15 an hour. That increase is forcing Borderlands Bookstore to write its last chapter now.

[…]Borderlands was turning a small profit, about $3,000 last year. Then voters approved a hike in the minimum wage, a gradual rise from $10.75 up to $15 an hour.

“And by 2018 we’ll be losing about $25,000 a year,” he said.

It’s an unexpected plot twist for loyal customers.

“You know, I voted for the measure as well, the minimum wage measure,” customer Edward Vallecillo said. “It’s not something that I thought would affect certain specific small businesses. I feel sad.”

Consider this story about Seattle, another Democrat-run city.

Excerpt:

Restaurants Unlimited, a Seattle-based chain with restaurant locations in 47 US cities, announced on Sunday it was seeking Chapter 11 protection, citing “progressive” wage laws.

The company, which has operated since the Lyndon Johnson Administration, said rising labor costs—part of a national trend of government-mandated minimum increases—were part of its decision.

“Over the past three years, the company’s profitability has been significantly impacted by progressive wage laws along the Pacific coast that have increased the minimum wage,” Chief Restructuring Officer David Bagley said in court filings, The Seattle Times reports. “As a large employer in the Seattle metro market, for instance, the company was one of the first in the market to be forced to institute wage hikes.”

[…]BLS data show that New York City experienced its sharpest decline in restaurant jobs since 9/11 following its passage of a $15 minimum wage law. In California, a local newspaper recently detailed how an entire business district virtually disappeared following the city’s aggressive minimum wage push.

It sounds like such a good idea to give poor people a raise, but you have to ask about how this policy affects the job creator who PAYS the wages. Minimum wage laws produce bad results. We as a nation have to decide whether we are going to vote based on feelings and peer approval, or vote based on achieving good results.

Daily Wire:

The Wall Street Journal opinion writer and crime analyst Heather Mac Donald reports that, according to early numbers, it appears that the United States “saw the largest percentage increase in homicides” in its history, with murder rates rising an average of nearly 40% in 57 of the country’s largest cities.

Democrat-run cities hardest hit:

“The local murder increases in 2020 were startling: 95% in Milwaukee, 78% in Louisville, Ky., 74% in Seattle, 72% in Minneapolis, 62% in New Orleans, and 58% in Atlanta, according to data compiled by crime analyst Jeff Asher. Dozens of children, overwhelmingly black, were killed in drive-by shootings,” Mac Donald writes on Tuesday. “They were slain in their beds, living rooms, and strollers. They were struck down at barbecues, in their yards, in malls, in their parents’ cars, and at birthday parties. Fifty-five children were killed in Chicago in 2020, 17 in St. Louis, and 11 in Philadelphia. In South Los Angeles alone, 40 children were shot, some non-lethally, through September.”

The trend pans out across the country, according to a number of local stories published in the closing weeks of 2020.  The St. Louis, Missouri, homicide rate spiked the highest it has in half a century, according to St. Louis Today. Chicago had its single deadliest day since the mid-1960s back in May. And even in Texas, where Republicans control most positions of authority in state government, saw a statewide hike in the murder rate, according to local outlets.

What could be the cause of this?

Mac Donald suggests that while the correlation cannot be understated — particularly given that pandemic-related lockdowns appear to have driven the largest rise in poverty in 50 years — there’s another trend that also correlates with the rise in crime: the rise of the “defund the police” movement, that while generally unsuccessful even in progressive cities like Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, had a dramatic effect on officer morale and cities’ willingness to put more officers on the streets to handle issues, leaving many crime-prone neighborhoods further exposed.

“Cops now face a poisonous environment. Since the summer, they have been shot in the head, firebombed, and assaulted with lethal projectiles. An officer providing first aid at a crime scene may be met with a hail of rocks and bottles. Resistance is now the norm. Officers believe they face a political and legal environment that is eager to sacrifice them in the name of racial justice,” Mac Donald says. “As a result,” she adds, “the calculus for engagement has changed.”

Daily Wire reports on a “carjacking epidemic” in Chicago, which is one of the most Democrat-dominated cities in America.

Chicago gas stations are staffing up, hiring an army of private security guards to protect customers amid a “carjacking epidemic” that has the city on track to see 2,000 carjackings this year.

[…]“Carjackings in Chicago rose about 135% to 1,415 in 2020 from 603 in 2019,” the Tribune reported Sunday. “The 2020 tally was the highest figure recorded [in Chicago] since 2001 when Chicago logged only slightly more with 1,422 …”

Police have been slow to respond. So far, the Chicago Police Department has made just 108 arrests (16% of cases, per Chicago’s WGN News), and prosecutors have charged just 58 of those individuals with trespass to a vehicle.

Breitbart notes a carjacking problem in Philadelphia, too. Another city ruled from top to bottom by Democrats:

January 2021 carjackings in Philadelphia were up more than more than triple the number during the same time in 2020.

The Philadelphia Inquirer noted there were 59 carjackings in Philly during January 2021, while there were 18 in January 2020.

Ironically, 2020 broke a record for carjackings, with a total of 404 for the year. Yet 2021 quickly got on pace to surpass the numbers seen last year.

The funny thing about the spike in crimes in these cities is that the Democrat rulers have send a clear message to the citizens. You are sheep. You are not allowed to be armed. You are not allowed to defend yourself. And the police won’t defend you either, because we’ve intimidated them and defunded them. So enjoy being a victim of crime.

The funny thing is that people in these cities keep voting for Democrats. They must not be thinking very much.