By Nicole Wells-newsmax--15 April 2024—printed off 4/15/24
Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed again on social media that former President Donald Trump's allies asked him to join the presumptive GOP presidential nominee's ticket as Trump's running mate. "President Trump calls me an ultra-left radical," Kennedy wrote in a post on X on Monday. "I'm soooo liberal that his emissaries asked me to be his VP. I respectfully declined the offer. I am against President Trump, and President Biden can't win. Judging by his new website, it looks like President Trump knows who actually can beat him."
Trump has stepped up his attacks on Kennedy in recent weeks, blasting the environmental lawyer as a liberal candidate who might prove politically useful. "RFK Jr. is the most Radical Left Candidate in the race, by far," Trump wrote on Truth Social in late March. "He's a big fan of the Green New Scam, and other economy killing disasters. I guess this would mean he is going to be taking votes from Crooked Joe Biden, which would be a great service to America."
On Monday, a top Trump campaign aide challenged Kennedy's version of events. "Re-upping this from January … was true then and it's true now @RobertfKennedJr …. your a leftie loonie that would never be approached to be on the ticket..sorry!" Trump co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita wrote in a post on X, which quoted his denial from January that Kennedy was approached for the role. Make America Great Again Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, launched a website on Monday that retooled Kennedy's monogram to stand for "Radical F****** Kennedy," The Hill reported. The site spotlights his views on taxes, gun laws, and climate initiatives, among other things. In January, the New York Post reported that Trump's team had attempted to recruit Kennedy for the ticket, and The New York Times reported last week that the former president had suggested Kennedy as his running mate, albeit not seriously. In a close race between President Joe Biden and Trump, political strategists have said that an independent like Kennedy could siphon enough votes in must-win states to throw the election in favor of one candidate.

1 - I'd kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
2 - Borrow money from pessimists -- they don't expect it back.
3 - Half the people you know are below average.
4 - 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
5 - 82.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
6 - A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.
7 - A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
8 - If you want the rainbow, you got to put up with the rain.
9 - All those who believe in psycho kinesis, raise my hand.
10 - The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
11 - I almost had a psychic girlfriend, ..... But she left me before we met.
12 - OK, so what's the speed of dark?
13 - How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?
14 - If everythng seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.
15 - Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
16 - When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
17 - Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.
18 - Hard work pays off in the future; laziness pays off now.
19 - I intend to live forever ... So far, so good.
20 - If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?
21 - Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
22 - What happens if you get scard half to death twice?
23 - My mechanic told me, "I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder."
24 - Why do psychics have to ask you for your name
25 - If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
26 - A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
27 - Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.
28 - The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread.
29 - To steal ideas from one person is plagiarsm; to steal from many is research.
30 - The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
31 - The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up.
32 - The colder the x-ray table, the more of your body is required to be on it.
33 - Everyone has a photographic memory; some just don't have film.
34 - If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
35 - If your car could travel at the speed of light, would your headlights work?

April 15, 2024—printed off 4/15/24
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
We have seen enough of the Biden-Trump race so far to predict what lies ahead over the next seven months of the campaign. Currently, the polls are about dead even. Trump, however, for now enjoys small leads in the majority of the fickle swing/purple states that will likely decide the election. So here is what we should expect:
Biden
Biden has three major vulnerabilities and three major assets. His fate will depend on how these criteria play out.
First, on the negative side of the ledger, Biden suffers continual mental and physical decline, which is accelerating exponentially. His work week is now more off than on. Aides pray that he can get through a teleprompter without complete incoherence. His speech is so slurred, his syntax so bizarre that he seems to speak a language that is mostly indecipherable. They rightly fear that any young attractive woman or even preteen might earn a trademark Biden weird call-out, a hair- or accustomed ear-blow, or even an attempted presidential too-long hug or neck nibble. Steps pose an existential threat, given that the president is one trip away from oblivion. Biden is not even the diminished Biden of 2020, when, in his basement, he at least manipulated the COVID-19 lockdown to mask his infirmities and abbreviated schedules. The odds are 50/50 whether Biden will even make it over the next five months to the August Democratic Convention. And, assuming that he does, can he rein in efforts to push him off the ticket?
Second, the Biden family is corrupt. Hunter still faces spring- and summer-long felony exposure in connection with his Biden-family brand of tax cheating. Joe knows that his own documents, first-hand witnesses, bank statements, Hunter’s emails, and testimonies from Hunter’s associates reveal that the otherwise talentless but high-living Biden extended family was surviving only by the sale of Senator, Vice President, and future President Joe Biden’s name—and his known willingness to pay fast and loose with legal and ethical constraints. There is still some chance that, in the current impeachment investigations and trial, more incriminating evidence will emerge or turned witnesses will offer proof of Biden’s criminality. For now, Biden’s lawbreaking is completely dismissed by Attorney General Merrick Garland and by special counsel Robert Hur’s satirical-comedy-worthy argument that even overwhelming evidence pointing to Joe Biden’s criminal behavior cannot be prosecuted because of the president’s dementia.
Third, the hard-left Biden agenda is completely underwater. Not a single Biden administration issue or policy—the border, crime, inflation, energy, foreign policy, race relations, education—polls even 50 percent. Worse, Biden never addresses the inflation created by his massive spending program, the lawlessness in our streets since 2021, the spiking cost of gasoline, or the humiliation abroad, from Kabul to Kyiv to the Chinese balloon. His idea of how to combat inflation is akin to combating obesity by gaining 100 pounds, losing two, and—presto—announcing that obesity was abated. He spiked racial polarization, proved indifferent to an epidemic of anti-Semitism, and fueled the national debt (an additional $1 trillion every 100 days). Now Biden is warring on the Supreme Court—a dangerous precedent given that an assassin has already shown up at Justice Kavanaugh’s home, given that mobs have massed at various justices’ residences with impunity, given Sen. Schumer’s prior personal threats at the very doors of the court to Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, and given left-wing rhetoric about packing the court. All candidate Biden can do is either deny an open border, inflation, crime, racial tensions, and the Kabul humiliation—or claim that the successful policies of Trump, out of power for nearly four years, were responsible for all that crashed on Biden’s watch.
Biden, however, enjoys some natural advantages, most notably incumbency.
(Note that this was not much of an advantage to Trump himself in 2020, given the wild cards of the COVID-19 pandemic, the disastrous nationwide lockdown, and the mysterious workings of the Trump-hating administrative state. We remember the 11th-hour Pfizer declaration that there would be no pre-election announcement, as planned, of the success of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed vaccination initiative. Then, there was indeed an announcement—immediately after the election. And then there was the mysterious CIA/FBI arming of the Biden campaign, on the eve of the last debate and just days before Election Day, with the fake anti-Trump rebuttal of “Russian laptop disinformation.”)
Biden will pull every lever of incumbency, working the office of the presidency in the most Machiavellian and cynical of ways:
1. a) hoping to lower gas prices by not filling up the strategic petroleum reserve, jawboning illiberal and “pariah” oil producers to pump what he claims he hates, ordering Ukraine not to hit Russian refineries, and appeasing enemies like Iran to keep its oil flowing,
2. b) unconstitutionally sidestepping rulings of the Supreme Court to ensure more pre-election illegal student-loan-cancellation giveaways,
3. c) prodding the supposedly independent Federal Reserve to lower interest rates before November,
4. d) pressuring Mexico to tamp down illegal entries for a few months to serve their shared interests in defeating Trump.
A second asset is his army of satellites.
These include left-wing justices, weaponized federal, state, and local prosecutors, and Trump-biased jury pools. The left expects these to do what the effort to remove Trump’s name from the ballot did not: destroy the Republican candidate, financially and health-wise, and bind him with the Lilliputian ropes of Fani Willis, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, and Jack Smith, who are eager to convict him through weaponized judges, juries, and a venomous media. They also include compromised election officials in urban counties in key swing states.
Biden cannot win unless 70-80 percent of voters in the key swing states do not vote on Election Day. Instead, their ballots must be mailed in, harvested, and curated without accustomed audit and without verification of whether voters are registered US citizens or have voted only once and done so legally.
And—his third major asset—Biden will also have billions of dollars more than Trump to pound home these themes in endless ads, social media shenanigans, and news censorship and blackouts.
Biden feels that he nevertheless must make the election hinge on destroying a monstrous, demonic, and hideous Donald Trump through any means necessary. Biden’s is not a positive campaign but will be waged by despising Donald Trump and all who support him. Expect more of those “semi-fascists”/ “ultra-MAGA” Phantom-of-the-Opera Biden hate speeches.
In the next seven months, the Biden effort will play out with three narratives: Trump is a January 6th insurrectionist and dictator and will “destroy democracy,” though apparently without weaponizing the FBI or removing his opponents’ names from ballots or siccing right-wing prosecutors on his enemies.
Trump purportedly will kill women by banning all abortions while relegating non-whites to the pre-civil-rights era—despite leaving abortion up to the states, and likely gaining more Latino and Black voters than any prior Republican presidential candidate. Then we will hear that Trump is a felon who belongs in jail.
All this is the message of the Biden campaign, period.
Trump
Trump likewise has both assets and liabilities. His vulnerabilities are mirror images of Biden’s advantages: he lacks incumbency and the powers that come with it; he does not have an army of officials on his side; and he will have a financial disadvantage.
We have no idea how many gag orders remain. How many late-summer days will Trump spend stuck in court? How many hundreds of millions of his dollars will be expropriated by out-of-control anti-Trump left-wing judges? Can Trump—or any candidate—successfully run with a $1 billion overhead in legal fees and fines and with critical days on the campaign trail diverted to left-wing, media-frenzied, blue-city courtrooms?
In addition, Trump is sometimes his own worst enemy. Trump, one could say, is running mostly against Trump. He knows that if he sticks solely to the agenda, contrasting Biden’s failures with his own past stellar record and future contract with America, he can win. He realizes that he must take the high road and talk idealistically rather than going low and getting angry.
But who could be expected to do so after being the victim of two unfair impeachments, left-wing lies like Russian collusion and disinformation, efforts to railroad him into prison with outrageously politicized legal vendettas, and attempts to remove his name from the ballot?
Trump’s advantages are clear. First, his record: on foreign policy, inflation, and the economy. But most important for the election is his ability to connect with people. So far, the split-screen differences between candidate Trump and President Biden have proved overwhelmingly to Trump’s advantage: Biden in New York schmoozing at a black-tie night with celebrities and ex-presidents to haul in $26 million in campaign cash from the hyper-rich, while Trump is with middle-class NYPD rank-and-file at a rainy wake for a murdered cop—killed by a repeat felon released without bail.
Or Trump buying fast food and milkshakes amid a mostly black Atlanta Chick-fil-A crowd, while Biden dines with the venomous Robert De Niro and the zillionaire Jeff Bezos at a White House dinner, with the celebrities’ trophy girls vying to get the most stares at their multi-thousand-dollar designer clothes—as if they were on the red carpet at the Oscars rather than in the people’s house.
What can Trump do to make the best use of all this? He must magnanimously reach out to former rivals such as Haley, even as she continues to demonize him, and to DeSantis as well. He must unite the House Republicans to keep their razor-thin majority at all costs. He must campaign nonstop among poor whites, blacks, and Latinos, appealing to shared class concerns rather than the racial obsessions and psychodramas of the bicoastal elite.
He should skip the ad hominem invective, forget the past rivalries with his primary opponents, and assume a corrupt media does not deserve a minute of his time. If he does this, he can win.
But if he climbs down into the mud with his leftist opponents, trades insults, wrestles with his opponents, and obsesses about fake news and the crooked media, he will likely lose.
Aside from Trump’s temperament, we must always remember that the answers to two other fundamental questions will determine the outcome of the election:
Can the Republicans monitor the balloting and return it to the environment of 2016 rather than 2020? Can Trump convince millions of minorities, independents, and former Biden voters that there are plenty of reasons to vote for someone they may not like—including the very future of the United States as a free republic as envisioned by the Founders, rather than an increasingly weak, anemic, cranky socialist has-been?
Finally, we must also remember that, ultimately, the outcome of the election could be determined by unpredictable events. What happens if the Gaza War expands to Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, as Israel is attacked from all directions? Or the military of the United States is attacked in the Middle East, as in the past?
What will be the status of Ukraine by November—static, safer, or absorbed by Russia—and who will be praised or blamed for what ensues?
Will China risk attacking or blockading Taiwan on the theory that it will never be gifted a more ossified president than Biden?
Will the left unleash another late-season October surprise like the 2016 Access Hollywood tape or the 2020 “Russian disinformation” laptop farce? And will these desperate gambits resonate or boomerang?
And, lastly, will the candidates in October and November resemble the candidates of today? These are the two oldest candidates ever to run for president. Will Trump still be vibrant at 78? Will Biden still be upright at 81?
Will Biden’s feebleness still earn him sympathy, or at least respectful silence? Or will it devolve to the point that the public, worn out by his lapses, concludes that Joe Biden would not be able to keep any job in America—except the Presidency of the United States?

Additional Notes
Liechtenstein30 years (5 years if married, each year counts for two if under age 20)
Must renounce citizenship in any other country.
United Arab Emirates30 years (3 years for citizens of Oman, Qatar, or Bahrain, 7 years for other Arabic peoples).
San Marino30 years
Citizenship is granted after 30 years of uninterrupted residence. Applicants must renounce their pre...
View MoreQatar25 years, having never left for longer than two months
Must have valuable skill. Still will not have full rights once naturalized.
Kuwait20 years (15 for male spouses and certain nationalities)
Must speak Arabic and must have been Muslim for 5 years minimum.
Bhutan20 years (15 for government workers)
Must swear oath of allegiance to king, country, and people. Citizenship can be revoked for criticizi...
View MoreSwitzerland10 years (5 if from Canada, U.S., or E.U. or EFTA country)
Must have difficult-to-obtain permit to stay in country for required time; must demonstrate devotion...
View MoreAustria10 years
Must have in-demand or top-notch professional skills; must learn German, assimilate w/ Austrian cult...
View MoreMonaco10 years
Potential citizens are expected to renounce any foreign nationality and be free from foreign nationa...
View MoreGermany8 years (7 for some)
Must learn German, have gainful employment, and show knowledge of German society.
United States5 years
Must pass increasingly stringent eligibility requirements, must pass English language and U.S. histo...
View MoreJapan5 years
Must undergo years-long screening and interview process, renounce other citizenships
South Korea5 years
Must learn Korean and renounce other citizenships. Males aged 18-35 must serve 18 months in military...
View MoreFinland4-5 years
Foreigners can apply for citizenship after 4 or 5 years of permanent residence. Individuals who have...
View MoreChinaUnclear. Requirement exists but is poorly defined.
Can naturalize if relatives are citizens living in China. Process is arduous and challenging.
Saudi Arabianot applicable
Must be spouse of Saudi citizen.
Vatican Citynot applicable
Must be working for the Catholic Church in some capacity or meet extremely narrow requirements. Citi...

8 of the countries where it's hardest to become a citizen
Becoming a citizen in some countries is as easy as living there for a few years, but in others, it's nearly impossible.
In Qatar, you would have to be a legal resident for 25 years to be able to apply for citizenship, and if you're not a Muslim, you shouldn't even bother.
Here are eight of the countries where it's most difficult to become a citizen.
Visit Business Insider's home page for more stories.

NEW LOOK
It seems like US citizenship and immigration restrictions have dominated the news since the 2016 presidential election. It turns out that there are a number of other countries where becoming a citizen is quite difficult. Aside from ancestry and extended residency, one shortcut to foreign citizenship is being a top-level athlete. Some countries will give citizenship to athletes who will improve their chances of Olympic victory. If you aren't a world-class pole vaulter, then you may face a long and, in some cases, nearly impossible road to gaining citizenship in countries like Switzerland, China, and Qatar.
Here are eight of the countries where it's most difficult to become a citizen.
1. Vatican City
With about 800 residents and 450 citizens, Vatican City is the smallest country on Earth, perhaps partially because it has one of the toughest immigration policies on the planet. According to the Library of Congress, you can become a citizen if you are a cardinal living in Vatican City or Rome, if you are a diplomat representing the Holy See, or if you live in Vatican City because you are an official of or worker for the Catholic Church
2. Liechtenstein
Liechtenstein, a tiny, mountainous country between Austria and Switzerland, has a population of just under 40,000 — and the country's immigration policy appears to aim to keep it small. If you want to become a citizen, you need to live in Liechtenstein for at least 30 years, with each year before you turn 20 counting as two years. If you're married to a Liechtenstein citizen and already live in the country, that time period is shortened to five years of marriage. If you want a shortcut from the 30-year residency requirement, you can ask your community to vote you in after 10 years.
Regardless of method, you'll have to give up your current citizenship.
3. Bhutan
The Himalayan nation of Bhutan is known for measuring its success by its National Happiness Index rather than GDP. It is one of the most isolated countries in the world. The country didn't open to tourism until 1974 and continues to regulate and monitor travel to the country closely, so you can imagine that the immigration process is not easy. It takes two Bhutanese parents to be born a citizen, and if you only have one, you have to apply for naturalized citizenship after you have lived in Bhutan for 15 years. The 15-year requirement also applies to government employees. Those with non-Bhutanese parents who don't work for the government may apply after living in the country for 20 years, as long as you meet a list of requirements, including no record of speaking or acting against the king or country. If you do that in the future, your citizenship can be rescinded.
Even if you meet the requirements, Bhutan reserves the right to reject you for any or no reason.
4. Qatar
If your father is not Qatari, then neither are you, even if your mother is, according to Doha News. If you have been a legal resident of Qatar for 25 years without leaving the country for more than two consecutive months (among other requirements), you can apply for citizenship. The Doha News reported that Qatar only naturalizes about 50 foreigners a year. Additionally, naturalized citizens are not treated the same way under the law as citizens born in Qatar, likely because the country provides very generous government benefits that would be costly to extend to all citizens.
5. United Arab Emirates
The UAE, home to the sparkling city of Dubai, will let you apply to be a citizen if you have legally resided in the Emirates for 30 years, according to the CIA. Federal Law No. 17 states that if you are an Arab citizen from Oman, Qatar, or Bahrain, you can apply for naturalization after three years of residency. Arabs from other countries are eligible after seven years of residence in the UAE. Descendants of Emirate parents are eligible for citizenship if they were born of known or unknown parents within the state. Currently, women with UAE citizenship married to foreign men cannot pass it to their children, according to a UN report. A 2011 decree allows those children to apply for citizenship when they reach age 18.
6. Kuwait
According to the Nationality Law of 1999, after living in Kuwait for 20 years (15 for citizens of other Arab countries), you can apply to be granted Kuwaiti citizenship, but only if you are Muslim by birth or conversion. If you converted, you must have been practicing for five years. You must also speak Arabic fluently. The Nationality Law also states that the wife of a Kuwaiti man can ask to become a citizen after being married for 15 years.
7. Switzerland
According to a new law that went into effect in January 2018, to make a home in the snowy Alps of Switzerland, you must have lived in the country for 10 years and have a working permit called a C permit.
The C permit, which allows you to live and work in the country, requires five years of continuous residence in Switzerland for EU nationals, people from European Free Trade Association countries, US citizens, and Canadian citizens. Everyone else has to be there for 10 years before they are eligible.
8. China
The Nationality Law of the People's Republic of China allows foreigners to try become naturalized citizens if they have relatives who are Chinese citizens, have settled in China, or "have other legitimate reasons." If you don't have a relative who's a Chinese citizen and lives in China, your chances of becoming a Chinese citizen are slim. According to the CIA, while naturalization is possible, it is extremely difficult. Long-term residency is required but not specified.

Immigration, the process of moving from one country to another, has been part of mankind's journey since the dawn of human civilization—in fact, immigration was technically practiced before any of the countries that make up today's United Nations even existed. Every country in the world, from the largest to the smallest has an immigration policy. In some countries, immigration is easy. In other countries, the process is much more difficult and demanding.
For example, immigration and U.S. citizenship have been hot topics in the United States since the 2016 presidential election. Becoming a citizen of the United States is a lengthy process and requires the applicant to meet a battery of specific and challenging criteria (such as living in the U.S. for a certain number of years), and complete several demanding tasks such as attending an interview, passing tests of the English language and American civics, and pledging allegiance to the United States. While some think that the United States is the most challenging country to gain citizenship in, several other countries are just as challenging—and some are notably more difficult.
While some countries have open immigration controls, many countries have closed borders to limit and restrict who enters the country and gains citizenship. In some countries, becoming a citizen is as easy as living there for a few years. Having an ancestor or relative who was a citizen can help determine one's eligibility in other countries. In countries where it is more difficult to become a citizen, you often need to be of a specific religion to be granted citizenship.
Methods of becoming a citizen of another country:
Blood Relations — The simplest of methods. In many countries, if an individual's parents or grandparents are citizens, that individual is also a citizen. If not, they will likely still have an easier path to citizenship than people whose parents and grandparents are not citizens. As this method requires a certain family tree, it is often unavailable to most would-be immigrants.
Birth Nation — In many countries, children born in that country are automatically granted citizenship. In some countries, citizenship is granted even if the parents are not citizens. This guideline has spawned the trend of "birth tourism," in which an expecting mother or couple will travel to another country specifically to give birth there so their child will obtain citizenship. This method is obviously also unavailable to most potential immigrants.
Marriage — In most countries, the foreign-born spouse of a citizen is offered a faster path to citizenship. For instance, Spain allows spouses to apply for citizenship after a single year of marriage. This method is available to potential immigrants, though it also requires a significant personal commitment.
Naturalization — Arguably the most flexible—though time-consuming—method of obtaining citizenship. Naturalization is open to anyone able to live gainfully employed in a country for a certain number of years (often as few as five or as many as 30) and prove their personal devotion to the country. This is typically done via language and history/culture exams, interviews with immigration officials, and/or various demonstrations that one has integrated into their host country's society. Some countries also charge a naturalization fee.
Exceptional Ability — Many countries, even those that are typically unwelcoming to immigrants, will warmly receive those who can bring specific world-class talents along with them. For example, if one has achieved a degree of as an athlete, researcher, or entertainer in one's home country. Also, workers with technical expertise are currently in demand in most countries around the globe, so they would very likely be granted permission to immigrate.
Military Service — In some countries, foreign-born residents are permitted to serve in the military and are granted fast-tracked citizenship upon completion of certain service-related milestones.
Business Investment — Would-be immigrants with sufficient funds can often earn their citizenship (or at least an "investment visa") by investing heavily in businesses based in their host country.
Top 14 Hardest Countries to Immigrate To:
Austria 🇦🇹Bhutan 🇧🇹China 🇨🇳Finland 🇫🇮Germany 🇩🇪Japan 🇯🇵Kuwait 🇰🇼Liechtenstein 🇱🇮Monaco 🇲🇨Qatar 🇶🇦San Marino 🇸🇲Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦South Korea 🇰🇷Switzerland 🇨🇭United Arab Emirates 🇦🇪United States 🇺🇸Vatican City 🇻🇦
Vatican City
Vatican City is the smallest sovereign state in the world. The population is made up of about 800 residents, 450 of whom are also citizens. According to the U.S. Library of Congress, there are four ways to become a citizen of Vatican City—and they're all strict. The first three methods are to be either a Catholic Cardinal living in Rome or Vatican City, a diplomat of the Holy See, or a person whose profession requires them to live in Vatican City. People fitting into this third category include certain church officials and members of the Swiss Guard, which provides security to Vatican City.
The final way to attain citizenship is to apply directly to the church administration. However, only those who've been granted special permission to live in Vatican City and the spouses and children of current residents are eligible for this method. What's more, once a person moves away from Vatican City—for example, when a Swiss Guard's tour of duty is completed—the person loses their Vatican City citizenship.
China
Becoming a naturalized citizen is very difficult in China, to the point that according to China's 2020 census, only 941 people out of more than a billion were naturalized citizens. The Nationality Law of the People's Republic of China enables foreign-born individuals to become naturalized citizens if they have relatives who are Chinese citizens, if they live permanently in China, or if they have some other "legitimate reason" to become a Chinese citizen. The CIA describes China's naturalization process as "theoretically possible," but adds "in practical terms it is extremely difficult." Long-term residency is a prerequisite for citizenship but the required number of years is not specified by law.
Japan
In addition to renouncing citizenship in other countries, people seeking to become Japanese citizens must live in the country for five years and endure a meticulous review and interview process that may take years to complete. What's more, since the implementation of the Nikkei law of 2009, Japan will actually pay unemployed Latin American immigrants to return to their home country.
Qatar
In Qatar, if an individual's father is not a citizen, then neither is that individual. A mother's nationality does not automatically qualify someone for citizenship. Those looking to apply for citizenship must have lived legally in Qatar for at least 25 years without leaving the country for more than two consecutive months. Qatar naturalizes no more than approximately 50 foreign-born people per year and grants permanent residency to a mere 100 expatriates every year. Naturalized citizens are not classified under the law the same way as Qatar's citizens and may not enjoy the same generous benefits.
Liechtenstein
For a foreign-born resident of Liechtenstein to become a citizen, they must live in the country for at least 30 years. If a person is under 20 years old, each year counts as two years, and if one is married to a citizen of Liechtenstein, the period is shortened to five years. In a community-focused touch, the residents of one's municipality can vote to grant citizenship to a person after just 10 years of residence. Once an individual is eligible for citizenship, the Civil Registry Office of Liechtenstein requires them to renounce their citizenship of any other country or countries.
United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia
According to the UAE's Federal Law, foreign-born residents can apply for citizenship after legally residing in the country for 30 years. However, if an individual is an Arab citizen from Oman, Qatar, or Bahrain, the period is three years, and people of Arabian descent born in other countries may apply after seven years. Children with two Emirate parents may apply with no wait, but the children of an Emirate female and a foreign male are not automatically awarded citizenship. However, they may apply once they have reached the age of 18.
In Kuwait, a foreign-born individual looking to become a citizen must live in the country for at least 20 years. The period is reduced to 15 years if the person is either a citizen of another Arab country or the foreign-born wife of a Kuwaiti man. Additionally, the applicant must speak Arabic fluently and be Muslim either by birth or conversion. Those who have converted must have been practicing the faith for at least five years. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia offers only one route to citizenship: Marry a Saudi national. Even after this, a person (particularly a non-Muslim) may be denied citizenship.
Switzerland
Foreign-born residents in Switzerland who wish to become citizens must have a C permit, which allows a person to live and work in Switzerland. The permit requires five years of continuous residence in Switzerland for E.U. nationals, citizens of the U.S. or Canada, and people from European Free Trade Association EFTA countries. Foreign-born individuals from any other country must also live in Switzerland for at least 10 years before being eligible for citizenship. Simple as that sounds, such a long stay can be difficult to accomplish—in order to be eligible to remain in the country for that length of time, one must be a wealthy investor, the skilled employee of a Swiss company, or the spouse of a Swiss national. What's more, prospective citizens must also prove they have become part of Swiss society and are not a security risk.
Bhutan and South Korea
Bhutan regulates and monitors all travel into the country very closely. It's one of the world's most isolated nations and didn't open its borders to tourism until 1974. Its citizenship laws are similarly strict. The Bhutan Citizenship Act states that for a person to be granted citizenship at birth, both parents must be Bhutanese citizens. Those with only one Bhutanese parent must apply for naturalization citizenship after 15 years of living in the country. Foreign-born individuals with no Bhutanese parents can apply after 20 years of living in Bhutan (15 for government workers). Requirements to become a naturalized citizen include taking an oath of allegiance to the king, the country, and the Bhutanese people. If a person is caught speaking against the king or country, citizenship can be taken away. South Korea is a bit less strict, but there's a catch: In addition to living five years in the country and (usually) renouncing any other citizenships, applicants must learn to speak, read, and write Korean, and males aged 18-35 must perform 18 months military service.
Austria and Germany
Austria is happy to welcome immigrants so long as they have in-demand work skills. The catch is that only 11 professions are currently considered in-demand. If one's job falls outside one of the 11 chosen professions, that person must be at the very top of their profession to be granted citizenship. They'll also need to agree to learn German and participate in Austrian culture, live there for 10 years, and renounce citizenship in any other country. To become a permanent resident of Germany, one must demonstrate an ability to speak German and also show knowledge of the German political system and society. Proof of employment and accommodation is also required. The prospective citizen must also have lived in the country for at least 8 years (7 for those who test well) and renounce other citizenships.
United States
Although the U.S. has historically been considered one of the easiest countries to immigrate to—after all, except for those who have Native American ancestry, every U.S. citizen is either descended from immigrants or is an immigrant themselves—attaining U.S. citizenship has become a greater challenge over the past two decades. First, one must obtain the "green card" required to become a permanent resident of the United States, a process that is becoming increasingly difficult.
The easiest method of obtaining a green card is to be sponsored by an immediate family member (a parent, child, or sibling) who is a U.S. citizen. Another method is to get an offer for an approved job—provided one can prove that the job is not being taken from an American citizen—and get sponsored by the employer. There is also a very limited "diversity lottery" that awards 50,000 green cards per year to residents of certain countries (refugees and asylum seekers may also apply via a different system). Finally, those who have an "extraordinary ability" or a substantial amount of money to invest in a U.S. business are also eligible to apply. Once a green card is obtained, a potential citizen must live in the U.S. for five years, pass an exam that tests their knowledge of the English language and American history, and finally swear an oath of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. However, applicants are not required to renounce their citizenship of their former home country.

April 12, 2024—printed off 4/14/24
Victor Davis Hanson
6. The fornicators. I’ll be brief. Recently, I have stumbled upon a growing number of fornicators, if I may use such a term of disparagement—in cars, on blankets on the ground, on mattresses even. As the town grows closer, so the farm seems ideal for trysts. I am no Puritan, but I resent the detritus they leave behind of soiled toilet paper and paper towels, used condoms, and other unspeakables. Usually when surprised, they leave in embarrassment. (You walk up to the car because you have no idea whether those inside are shooters, or dumpers, or thieves, or the car is stolen.)
The last time I did, two women in the back seat popped up, one dressed quickly and jumped into the driver’s seat and rolled down the window. When I asked them to leave, she unleashed a string of profanities. Then she jammed the car into drive and drove the car over my foot (thank God for sandy soil and their lightweight compact). I smiled. Is there no gratitude for using our farm for their own gratification? It was as unpleasant to have my walk spoiled by them as it was for them to have their activity interrupted.
7. The Liquidators. We often pick up trash, or our renter does, or our neighbors do. Oddly, the flotsam is predictable: entire front car seats, child car seats, tires, ruined appliances, plastic toys, household garbage in bags, dirty diapers, and lots of cast-off building materials such as paint cans, junk lumber, and shingles. Reader, you might condemn me as biased since I have suggested nearly all these encounters involve Spanish speakers. They do, either because they have spoken or cursed at me, or amid their trash are Spanish-language junk mail, or instructions, or magazines (but never once a bill stub identifying their address).
But as I wrote earlier, once, a few years ago, I stumbled in the vineyard onto the work of professional liquidators. There are criminals who visit homes and businesses and offer to take away all the taboo things that the companies will not: toxic dirty fuels, half-full paint cans, florescent tubes, fifty-gallon drums of residual hydraulic fuel, huge piles of broken drywall, large mounds of questionable insulation.
Strangest, the junk was not in a pile but strewn by some sort of lift-trailer down an entire ¼ mile row. Tons of stuff!
I called the sheriff. He warned me of the bad and worse choices I had. If I called the state environmental protection services, they might fine me as if I was the perp and require me to cart it all away to a state toxic waste dump or hire someone to do it.
As the sheriff warned, they will have no proof you didn’t do it (but on my own property?) and thus should be cited.
Or I could pick up the pieces and over months in small amounts take them to the dump myself. A year later the vineyard was finally clean, although for about five years I saw broken florescent light glass shards shine among the disked dirt. And when later I pulled out the vineyard, the bulldozer turned up shingles and insulation fragments still. Do we ever tally the environmental damage from illegal immigration or is it low on the intersectional calculus?

April 11, 2024—printed off 4/14/24
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
When ideology replaces meritocracy or provides immunity from the consequences of illegal behavior, systemic mediocrity follows. Under toxic National Socialism, Stalinism, and Maoism, millions of cronies and grifters mouthed party lines in hopes that their approved ideology would allow them to advance their careers and excuse their lawbreaking.
The same thing has happened with the woke movement and the now-huge Diversity/Equity/Inclusion conglomerate. Grifters and opportunists mask their selfish agendas under the cloak of neo-Marxist care for the underprivileged or victimized minorities. Meanwhile, they seek to profit illegally as if they were old-fashioned crony capitalists.
During the disastrous COVID-19 lockdown, California governor Gavin Newsom pontificated about leveraging the quarantine to ensure greater equality: “There is opportunity for reimagining a [more] progressive era as it [relates] to capitalism…We see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”
Meanwhile, Newsom did not seem very “progressive” when he was caught in one of California’s most expensive restaurants dining with sidekick lobbyists while violating the very mask and social distancing rules he had mandated for 40 million others.
Newsom also bragged about social equity when he signed a new California law mandating $20 an hour for fast-food workers—while many of his own employees at his various company-controlled eateries made only $16 an hour. And he allegedly gave a unique exemption from his wage law to one particular bakery/restaurant chain, Panera, whose owner is an old friend and major campaign contributor.
Newsom apparently feels that the more progressively he postures, the less he’ll be called out for his own hypocrisy and self-interested agendas. In another egregious case, the now-imprisoned felon, Sam Bankman-Fried, may have been the greatest con artist in American history. He siphoned billions of dollars from his cryptocurrency company, destroying the fortunes of thousands when his multi-billion-dollar Ponzi empire collapsed.
How did Sam and his two Stanford law-professor parents manage to accumulate millions of dollars in resort properties and perks without getting caught until after their empire collapsed? Answer: Sam showered millions of dollars on left-wing politicians to advance their progressive crusades. His parents justified this family giving as a form of “effective altruism.”
That catchy phrase masked the reality that his crusade for social justice was just an incredibly effective get-rich-quick scheme. The Bankman-Fried family apparently reasoned that their devotion to this woke form of “altruism” would translate into riches for themselves, albeit bankruptcies for investors.
Another example: in Georgia’s Fulton County, District Attorney Fani Willis ran for office, promising to indict supposed right-wing monster Donald Trump. She raised campaign money on her woke credentials. Often, when challenged, she played the race victim card.
Meanwhile, Willis hired as a special prosecutor her secret paramour, the incompetent Nathan Wade, although he had never tried a single felony or even criminal case. She and Wade then went on expensive junkets. She claimed that she reimbursed him with cash that was, of course, unverifiable Given their woke ideology, both assumed they were entitled to splurge at taxpayers’ expense, offer likely-false testimony under oath, and violate canons of professional behavior for lawyers.
She wasn’t alone in her corruption. After the death of George Floyd, the founders of the left-wing Black Lives Matter movement went on a house-buying rampage. The more corporations filled their coffers with millions, either from guilt or as protection money, the more new homes the directors purchased.
One co-founder, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a self-described Marxist, splurged by spending $3.2 million in BLM money to buy herself four upscale residences. And the most radical Democratic members of Congress—the so-called Squad—apparently feel that the more they level accusations of racism, the more they can profit without fearing any consequences for their wrongdoing.
One squad member, Rep. Ilhan Omar, redirected $2.8 million of her office’s allotted government money to her husband’s political consulting company.
Still another member, the radical leftist Rep. Cori Bush, often harangued the country to defund the police. Now the FBI is investigating her for stealthily paying tens of thousands of campaign dollars to her own husband for “security.”
Woke and DEI activists may not necessarily be any more innately mediocre, corrupt, or conniving than other politicians and activists. But they seem so, because they loudly broadcast that they are for “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion”—and thus assume themselves to be exempt from all scrutiny and free to profit in any way they please.
The woke/DEI project is enticing thousands of shysters, careerists, and mediocrities, all keen to enrich themselves on the premise that they are noble fighters for social justice who deserve immunity from any scrutiny.
How odd it is that America is wasting billions of dollars hiring DEI czars and electing woke politicians who so often accuse others of a multitude of sins, largely as a way of enriching themselves, hiding their own culpability, and making a mockery of the law.

April 8, 2024—printed off 4/10/24
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
In 2021, Joe Biden was elected after a bitterly fought campaign that deposed the incumbent Donald Trump. Democrats eventually captured, for a time, both the House and Senate, ensuring the most left-wing government in modern American history.
Americans were then set to witness a great experiment. For the first time in their lives, a truly radical socialist program would supposedly fundamentally transform the way America dealt with the border, immigration, the economy, race relations, foreign policy, energy, law enforcement, crime, education, and social questions such as religion, gender, abortion, and schooling.
In a sense, we were all to be lab rats of sorts, to be experimented on by the radical left and their various critical theories. Now in the last year of the Biden term, we can see the results of that experiment—and the unfortunate disasters that followed.
But first, how was such a radical move to the left even possible in a center-right America?
The Democratic nominee, Biden, had earlier united the left, but only through a Faustian deal. The handlers of a nearly non compos mentis Biden had ushered all his 2020 primary rivals out of the primary races in unison.
But in exchange for their exits that ensured Biden the nomination, the left took over his general campaign—in which Biden was virtually relegated to his basement—and then set his agenda.
Who was running things?
The mysterious architects of White House ideology included, inter alia, the omnipresent, now-Washington-DC-dwelling Obamas, the old socialist gadfly Bernie Sanders, the fossilized tribunes of the black and Latino congressional caucuses, the DEI firebrand Squad, and the neo-socialist scold Elizabeth Warren.
As a result, for one of the few times in American history, the hard left now had undreamt of power. And it was enhanced by a chorus in our compliant media, academia, corporations, the administrative state, foundations, entertainment, and popular culture.
So we were all to embark on a great adventure led by the foot soldiers of DEI, the Chicken-Little green extremists, the critical race and critical legal theory crowd, the modern monetary theorists, the woke commissars, the transgendered zealots, Antifa, BLM, the hate-Israel lobby, and the Trump Derangement Syndrome media sorts.
Ostensibly, America was to be reset financially, economically, socially, culturally, militarily, and politically. The nation would be arbitrarily divided into oppressors and oppressed—with one caveat: hyper-rich, left-wing white architects had to be exempt from the damage inflicted on those they targeted. Thus, like Orwellian pigs who walked on their two hind legs, they were free to fly their private jets, get their kids into racially quota-bound Ivy League schools, burn lots of fossil fuels to heat and cool their massive homes, and be protected by their walls, security details, and zip codes from the crime wave they would soon unleash on others.
Now, as we enter the fourth year of the great experiment, America is $35 trillion in debt, borrowing $1 trillion every 100 days. Home mortgages are at 7 percent. Key prices for food, insurance, rent, and fuels are 30-40 percent higher than when Biden entered office.
The nation has been humiliated and emasculated abroad. Racial relations are the worst in a half-century. The military is in virtual receivership. Biden is polling about 40 percent approval and is behind in key swing states in most of the 2024 polls.
As a result, the Biden administration is furiously trying to find a way to release more of its hated oil and natural gas on the world market. It stopped refilling the strategic petroleum reserve that it had earlier drained to lower gas prices before the 2022 midterms.
So it will quietly pump more oil and gas, appease Iran in fear of a war in the oil-producing Middle East, plead with the once “pariah” Saudis, and order the Ukrainians not to hit Russian oil installations—all to get more oil produced to lower November 2024 gas prices.
It will head nod to eliminating fossil fuels, mandating EVs, banning natural gas stoves, and subsidizing more inefficient wind and solar farms. But it now realizes that its green agenda on its watch will wreck the United States economy and throw the left out of power. So it pivots to an old-fashioned “Drill, World, Drill” mantra—at least until the election is over.
Biden fulfilled his agenda of getting 10 million illegal aliens into the United States by destroying the southern border. The point was to swarm America with poor, unaudited migrants, all in need of massive federal and state assistance, all supposedly now loyal to their entitlement benefactors. Who could stop them from voting as repayment to their enablers in the new age of 70 percent mail-in ballots, same-day registration, inadequate authentication and audit of ballots, third-party vote harvesting, ballot curing, and Zuckbucks pouring into key precincts to absorb the work of the registrars?
Most of the illegals went to Texas and Florida, key swing states that the left still thinks it can flip to blue status. Long term, the 10 million will recalibrate congressional districts to favor neo-socialist agendas. Short-term, millions of new arrivals unlawfully may still try to vote in 2024.
Any who object to or publicize this agenda will be dammed with boilerplate smears of “election deniers,” “voter suppressions,” “racists,” and “xenophobes,” Yet all that said, the administration is now desperately trying to distance itself from its greatest “new Democratic Majority” border success, given that public opinion abhors what Biden had done at the border to the country at large.
So it floated a phony “bipartisan border security” bill in hopes of luring naïve Republicans to support a stealth de facto amnesty agenda that would have still allowed 5,000 illegals in a day rather than the now customary 10-15,000. The hope was that when it failed (and the left knew it would), to blame Republicans for what the left had wrought.
Biden knows destroying the border will ruin America for generations to come, costing billions of dollars in subsidies and legal and policing costs to integrate the massive influx. So until the election, it is thrashing about, claiming that it never did such a thing at all. Its duplicity is again proof that the open borders agenda was hated by the public, a human catastrophe, and not sustainable before an impending election.
Biden’s foreign policy is also in ruins. Biden destroyed deterrence in an effort to beg, appease, and buy off America’s enemies to behave and not cause an election-losing war. But the more it fled from Afghanistan in humiliation, the more it appeased Russia as it massed on Ukraine’s border, the more it snored as a Chinese spy balloon traversed the United States, the more it put early holds on aid to Ukraine, the more it assured Putin a “minor” offensive into Ukraine would not elicit a US response, so all the more it convinced Putin that he could take Ukraine without an American pushback, the Chinese to threaten Taiwan, and Hamas to prepare for massacring Jews.
So here we are in Ukraine with nearly 800,000 dead, wounded, and missing Ukrainians and Russians. The administration has no clue how to stop the Verdun that its appeasement birthed. The entire therapeutic approach to foreign policy lies in ruins.
Ditto the Middle East. National security advisor Jack Sullivan’s “quiet” portfolio that he inherited from the Trump administration simply blew up. Biden is now scrambling to stop the Israeli response to the encircled Hamas remnants, trapped in their last redoubt in Rafah.
Biden is now replaying the 1950s CIA-stereotype of the “Ugly American,” as he does his best to overthrow the Netanyahu government, and to allow the trapped Hamas remnants to escape and claim they defeated the Zionist entity, despite butchering more Jews in a single day than any time since the Holocaust. No matte: the Biden administration is stealthily communicating with the Israeli opposition concerning the best joint strategies to force Netanyahu out. Mass protests in the streets of Tel Aviv attest to the success of destabilizing the current Israeli government.
Team Biden whispers to the media about slow-walking or stopping key arms shipments, abdicating America’s once protective role in the UN, or encouraging the “international community” to go after Netanyahu for “war crimes” for accidentally hitting a civilian team in Gaza. (By such logic, are Biden and Gen. Mark (“righteous strike”) Milley equally culpable for being in charge when a US strike in Kabul blew up 10 innocent civilians by similarly mistaken targeting?). Meanwhile, Biden keeps courting Muslim-American Michigan voters, who repay his appeasement with cries of “Death to Israel! Death to America!”.
The release of violent criminals and an uptick in property crimes, murders and assault follow a similar script. The Biden administration outsourced criminal justice to defund the police/critical legal theorists at the federal, state, and local levels. No bail arrests led to violent offenders released the next day. Thousands were let go from jails and prisons.
The word spread in the criminal community that in the new Biden years, there were no real consequences, no serious punishments for violent assault or major felonies.
So in 2021-2023, crime exploded. When it reached the point of making life unlivable in the major cities and began to max out, the administration declared “crime is declining”—in the same way that hyper-inflation supposedly did so on the economic front.
After spiking the prices of key food staples, insurance, fuel, and interest rates, such hikes could not go too much higher without destroying outright the American way of life. So as the rate of inflation slowed, Biden bragged about “lowering inflation”—but not the 30-40 percent higher food prices since his own inauguration.
The common denominator for these disasters is the embrace of left-wing “theory.”
Critical legal theory mandates that jurisprudence is a construct. Laws have no morality since they favor the powerful. The latter use “white privilege” arbitrarily to invent crimes and punishments to protect their own power hierarchies. All that nonsense has now led to a pre-civilizational free-for-all in our dirty, dangerous, and dysfunctional cities.
Modern monetary theory—printing lots of money to spread around to those who have none while diminishing the value of money of those who have it—only led to hyperinflation and high interest rates.
When DEI theories were unleashed on the military, potential recruits hesitated, and thousands quit. After Pentagon grandees virtue signaled their fear of “white rage” and “white privilege,” after DEI made promotions and assessments often contingent on race, gender, and sexual orientation, and after the new military was humiliated in Afghanistan, it found it could no longer deter the enemy, recruit sufficient soldiers, or win back the confidence of the American people.
In all these cases, the woke genie left the bottle—and won’t go back in. So it will be hard for the administration to assure a long-suffering public that things are just wonderful, much less to reverse these policies, if indeed they are reversible, before November.
Expect instead nonstop distraction as the left beats the January 6 horse to death, calls for abortion on demand, and waits for its underling judges, prosecutors, and juries to jail or bankrupt Trump and therefore do what balloting cannot.
In other words, the long-awaited Great Fundamental Transformation finally got its moment, crashed, and now has torched the nation—middle-class Americans most of all.

April 10, 2024—printed off 4/10/24f
Victor Davis Hanson
4. The Shooter. Two years ago, during record rainfall and snow melt, the ponds were full, the grass was lush, and the once-ossified cottonwood trees abruptly came back to life as they always do after the end of a drought. Ducks and geese were everywhere. Herons flew in regularly. Bullfrogs croaked all night. The farm teemed with renewed life. And shooters (as in not hunters) from the town began appearing in real numbers—illegally shooting mallards, shooting quail, shooting ducks, shooting geese, shooting anything that moved, and those that did not.
It became scary to walk at night. The shooters were usually young. They seemed to ignore that even a .22 short can travel a mile if unimpeded. And they were often firing NATO-caliber rounds that could easily go 1.5 miles. So how do you approach someone with a full magazine shooting at things in the air, on the ground, and at a distance?
Carefully. What do you say to such vandals? Please shoot on your own property? Are they in cartels? Are they hitmen practicing? Are they just kids goofing around? Are they serious shooters merely target practicing? Or are they trying to shoot varmints for the neighbor? Who knows?
When they started shooting, the dogs stayed put and tried to break the foundation doors and crawl under the house. Sometimes they stay there for an hour (one reason I replaced the flexible ducting with sheet metal given the damage they do).
So what happened? I walked over waving, smiled, and politely said Propiedad privada. I tried to explain in Spanglish that it is a scary thing for them to shoot without wondering where their bullets will end up. Luckily, the shooter said ‘Ok, already,” gave me the death stare, and slowly backed away to his truck, waving two other shooters with him. I’ve seen them since but never repeated my stupidity.
5. The Injector. Three years ago, I began noticing an epidemic of spent syringes, foil pouches, and occasionally used condoms tossed in the same place where two alleyways met. This went on for about three months. But I never saw the injector, only his flotsam and jetsam. In the dirt of the orchard, sometimes there were torn pieces of cloth, beer cans, and toilet paper among the drug leftovers.
Then I noticed something. The car tracks out of the orchard always went in the same direction to a rental farmhouse, where a brown car and a known gangbanger lived with his family and perhaps maybe another 10 or so in various attached dwellings and trailers.
So, at last, I noticed the type of car and color. And I began alternating the time of morning and evening walks, starting at dawn, and walking after dark, or starting at 9 AM and returning at sunset. I finally turned the corner into the orchard row and there finally he was with two others, the ground freshly littered around them.
He was the renter of a house. I knew it well for a half-century and could name every law-abiding farmer or renter who had once lived there. I asked him to leave. He did not. I asked again. He did not. I took a picture of his car, his license plate, and him. Without warning he gunned it in reverse and headed exactly where I knew he lived.
I forgot about it. One week later I drove home only to see the barn door battered down, one dog limping, the other three chasing the same car in the orchard now speeding out of the barnyard into the alleyway.
I called the sheriff. As soon as I gave him the description, they recognized the thief and said he was responsible for almost every theft in a two-mile radius. They took fingerprints off the door. And they drove over to the rental. The next thing I knew, the family was gone and with them came a year or two respite from the gang activity. Bravo to law enforcement.
From Rural to Surreal—Once Small Farming Became Latifundia: Part Two—F53,B85
April 5, 2024—printed off 4/10/24
Victor Davis Hanson
The second incident was last week. I heard a bullet whiz through the almond orchard’s lower limbs. It sounded like it traveled 3 feet off the ground, about 20 yards from me. I could see that it came from a parked car about ¼ mile away. Two men from a dry pond bottom had been shooting an AR-15-like semi-automatic weapon toward our place. They apparently overshot the bank/backstop in between us, where they had placed target bottles. Accidents will happen.
The third “encounter” was the most eerie and uncouth. Last night, a small compact hatchback was parked alongside the orchard at dusk. As I walked parallel to it, I noticed two things: no one was in it—or anywhere near it among the growing shadows of the orchards.
And second, the hatchback door at the rear was strangely popped wide open. At first, I thought the car was stolen, abandoned, and stripped? Or was the owner nearby trying to steal copper wire from the pump a few yards away? Or was the car broken down and they were attempting to get help somewhere?
So, I walked alongside the compact. Suddenly as I neared, I heard strange noises from what I thought was an empty hatchback and then turned startled.
Laying in the rear section of the car were what looked like two women, one was flat on her back with her legs around the other’s neck, the former with her head down.
Stunned, crede mihi, at first I didn’t know whether they were engaged in some sort of mixed martial arts fight, or one was having a heart attack and receiving CPR, or someone had died. I stopped cold and was about to ask what was going on.
And then in a nanosecond, as I passed the car, the picture became all too clear.
Wanting to flee the scene of such a private interaction, but furious that they simply had trespassed and parked in the orchard, I started yelling out in broken Spanish, ¡Esto es propiedad privada!
I kept on walking, turning back at 20 yards, as they seemed by then to be dressed. As I entered the fourth row of the orchard, they sped off, screaming something out the window.
Is it California etiquette now that the property owner has to apologize for inadvertently interrupting trespassers?
This week—freezer, bullet, whatever—prompted me to recall the top ten encounters of the last few years, all emblematic of the decline of rural California.
At the end of the litany, I’ll offer some ideas about what went wrong with us. 1) Are open borders the culprit, even six hours by car north of San Diego? 2) Was it the radical transformation of farming from family to latifundia agriculture? 3) Was it the national trend to see private property as communal—in the spirit of squatterism? or 4) Is there really no law anymore, as bogus claims of social justice trump jurisprudence?

April 9, 2024—printed off 4/10/24
Victor Davis Hanson
Here are my top ten encounters of a strange kind over the last decade in what used to be the safest, most wonderful rural space in the world.
1. The Tragic Dead. Two years ago, I came upon a parked abandoned Volkswagen with a deceased person in it. This was a real tragedy of someone who drove out to the farm’s most scenic spot above the pond, rolled up all the windows of a small Volkswagen, and apparently committed suicide by overdosing. I hoped at least the scenic view of the full pond, the almond trees, and the cottonwoods in the distance gave the deceased a last minute of calmness.
It was, however, unfortunately at the height of summer, when summer temperatures often reach 105-110 degrees, in this spot well-hidden and mostly bypassed by most trespassers. Thus, the deceased was not discovered for well over a day or two. It was a very disturbing sight to walk up to the car and be overwhelmed by what nature does to the dead in San Joaquin Valley heat. I still have an occasional nightmare of the scene and hope the person did not suffer in extremis. For a year afterward, the dogs became animated from the lingering scent in the soil whenever we passed even a hundred yards from the row. (I avoid the spot even today.)
2. The Semi. Last year, parked in our alleyway I encountered a 75-foot-long semi-truck with a double trailer. The back cargo doors were open, and I assumed looted. But stranger still the cab was disconnected and rested on tree stumps from a nearby pile! It was stripped of almost everything inside and outside.
What would be the weight of the rig and trailers when full 70-80,000 pounds? How could such a stolen monstrosity be driven down a narrow dirt alleyway, hidden between two orchards, and in a single night dismantled?
And how did the thieves know where to park it? How did they steal all the cargo and strip the truck in a single night, as we and the neighbors less than ¼ mile away, slept soundly? How did the truck-jackers put the huge cab up on stumps? How did they find the props in the dark?
I had no answers then or now to explain the strange engineering feat and sheer audacity of criminality.
3. The Spray Rig. Months earlier, I stumbled upon a huge spray rig, the older sort that has a self-contained diesel engine that runs the fan and pump without a PTO (Power take-off). I had no idea what toxic liquid was in it since the smell was of a pesticide I did not recognize (but may have scared away the thieves).
It apparently had been stolen from some farmyard, towed to our orchard, and then stripped. But my puzzlement was this: The motor was ancient and seemed intact. The piston pump looked worse, but still there. The cowling was rusted but not ripped off. Was it stripped of something I missed?
I scarcely made out the name of the farmer-owner stenciled on the side. It was from a community near Stockton some 130 miles to the north. How did it get to our farm? When I called the number fading on the ancient rig, I was shocked to talk to the owner who said he had just the evening before reported it stolen.
He picked it up five hours later and apparently fixed the two flats and drove out with a resigned smile as if “Things do happen, Mr. Hanson,” on his way up the 99 at dusk.

April 5, 2024—printed off 4/10/24
Victor Davis Hanson
The second incident was last week. I heard a bullet whiz through the almond orchard’s lower limbs. It sounded like it traveled 3 feet off the ground, about 20 yards from me. I could see that it came from a parked car about ¼ mile away. Two men from a dry pond bottom had been shooting an AR-15-like semi-automatic weapon toward our place. They apparently overshot the bank/backstop in between us, where they had placed target bottles. Accidents will happen.
The third “encounter” was the most eerie and uncouth. Last night, a small compact hatchback was parked alongside the orchard at dusk. As I walked parallel to it, I noticed two things: no one was in it—or anywhere near it among the growing shadows of the orchards.
And second, the hatchback door at the rear was strangely popped wide open. At first, I thought the car was stolen, abandoned, and stripped? Or was the owner nearby trying to steal copper wire from the pump a few yards away? Or was the car broken down and they were attempting to get help somewhere?
So, I walked alongside the compact. Suddenly as I neared, I heard strange noises from what I thought was an empty hatchback and then turned startled.
Laying in the rear section of the car were what looked like two women, one was flat on her back with her legs around the other’s neck, the former with her head down.
Stunned, crede mihi, at first I didn’t know whether they were engaged in some sort of mixed martial arts fight, or one was having a heart attack and receiving CPR, or someone had died. I stopped cold and was about to ask what was going on.
And then in a nanosecond, as I passed the car, the picture became all too clear.
Wanting to flee the scene of such a private interaction, but furious that they simply had trespassed and parked in the orchard, I started yelling out in broken Spanish, ¡Esto es propiedad privada!
I kept on walking, turning back at 20 yards, as they seemed by then to be dressed. As I entered the fourth row of the orchard, they sped off, screaming something out the window.
Is it California etiquette now that the property owner has to apologize for inadvertently interrupting trespassers?
This week—freezer, bullet, whatever—prompted me to recall the top ten encounters of the last few years, all emblematic of the decline of rural California.
At the end of the litany, I’ll offer some ideas about what went wrong with us. 1) Are open borders the culprit, even six hours by car north of San Diego? 2) Was it the radical transformation of farming from family to latifundia agriculture? 3) Was it the national trend to see private property as communal—in the spirit of squatterism? or 4) Is there really no law anymore, as bogus claims of social justice trump jurisprudence?

By Lyle Therese A. Hilotin-Lee, J.D. | Legally reviewed by Melissa Bender, Esq. | Last reviewed February 14, 2024—printed off 3/28/24
Legally Reviewed

Fact-Checked
Voting in the United States is important to maintain our democracy. Here's who can and can't vote.
Voting is a fundamental right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The 15th Amendment became law to ensure that all U.S. citizens can exercise their right to vote. Yet, understanding the intricacies of voting laws can be confusing. Each state may have its own rules and requirements that could affect your right to vote.
This article answers the following questions related to voting:
• Who is eligible to vote in the United States?
• Is voting mandatory in the U.S.?
• What are the voter ID requirements?
• Are people with felony convictions allowed to vote?
• Can immigrants vote in the U.S. Election?
• Do I need to register to vote?
• Can I still vote if I am away from home?
Who Is Eligible to Vote in the United States?
Eligible voters in the U.S. meet the criteria listed by the U.S. Constitution. But the following are the general requirements for eligible voters in the United States.
1. U.S. citizenship. The voter should be a U.S. citizen. This includes those born in the United States and naturalized U.S. citizens.
2. Residency. Voters should meet the state's residency requirements where they wish to vote. Each state has its own rules when it comes to residency requirements.
3. Age. The voter should at least be 18 years of age (voting age) by election day.
4. Registration. The voter should follow the registration rules of their state. Note that voter registration law may vary in every state. For instance, some states allow same-day registration, meaning the voter can register to vote on election day. Other states have specific deadlines to register to vote.
Who Is Not Eligible to Vote?
The following groups of people are not eligible to vote in the United States:
• Non-U.S. citizens
• People convicted of certain types of felonies
• U.S. citizens younger than 18
• Some people who are mentally incapacitated
Also, residents of U.S. territories, although U.S. citizens, cannot vote in presidential elections. They can vote in presidential primaries but not in general elections. This is because these territories do not have representatives in Congress.
Is Voting Mandatory in the United States?
The right to vote is a privilege given to citizens of the U.S. Voters don't need to exercise this privilege. They can choose to exercise it or not. There are no penalties or legal consequences if a person opts not to vote in the federal, state, local, or presidential elections.
What Are the Voter ID Requirements?
Each state has its own rules when it comes to voter ID laws. Some states may ask you to bring a photo identification card, while others are OK with nonphoto identification documents. The following is the general overview of how these voter ID requirements differ:
Photo ID vs. Nonphoto ID States
In states with strict voter ID requirements, you should present a specific identification card to vote. Often, it should be a photo ID, which can be your driver's license, passport, state ID, military ID, or similar documents. Other states may be more flexible. For instance, they would accept your Social Security card, voter registration card, bank statement with your name and address, and other similar documents.
Strict vs. Non-Strict Voter ID Laws
Under strict voter ID laws, you should use provisional ballots if you lack proper identification. Election officers may also ask you to submit certain requirements after Election Day. For instance, election officials may ask you to return to the office and bring an acceptable identification document. If you fail to bring these documents, the election officials will not count your provisional ballot.
Nonstrict voter laws allow you to cast your vote even without an acceptable identification document. For instance, you may verify your identity by asking a poll worker to vouch for you. You may also sign an affidavit affirming your identity. At the end of Election Day, election officials check your eligibility to vote. Then, the official decides whether to count the provisional ballot. In the nonstrict voter law process, you don't need further action.
Are People With Felony Convictions Allowed to Vote?
It depends on the state where you live. Each state has its own set of rules on how felony convictions could affect your right to vote. In most states, voting rights are automatically restored after the person gets released from jail or after parole or probation. Other states do not automatically restore felons' voting rights. Meanwhile, two states, including Washington, D.C., never revoke the voting rights of convicted felons.
States that Automatically Restore Felons' Voting Rights After Release
The following states automatically restore the voting rights of felons after their sentence:
1. California
2. Colorado
3. Connecticut
4. Hawaii
5. Illinois
6. Indiana
7. Maryland
8. Massachusetts
9. Michigan
10. Minnesota
11. Montana
12. Nevada
13. New Hampshire
14. New Jersey
15. New Mexico
16. New York
17. North Dakota
18. Ohio
19. Oregon
20. Pennsylvania
21. Rhode Island
22. Utah
23. Washington
States that Automatically Restore a Felon's Voting Rights After Parole or Probation
The following states automatically restore a person's voting rights after parole or probation:
1. Alaska
2. Arkansas
3. Georgia
4. Idaho
5. Kansas
6. Louisiana
7. Missouri
8. North Carolina
9. Oklahoma
10. South Carolina
11. South Dakota
12. Texas
13. West Virginia
14. Wisconsin
States that Do Not Automatically Restore Felon's Voting Rights
The following states need more requirements to restore one's voting rights:
1. Alabama
2. Arizona
3. Delaware
4. Florida
5. Iowa
6. Kentucky
7. Mississippi
8. Nebraska
9. Tennessee
10. Virginia
11. Wyoming
Note that each state has its own rules on regaining the right to vote. Visit our page on felon voting laws by state to learn more.
Can Immigrants Vote in the U.S. Election?
Noncitizens, including lawful permanent residents, cannot vote in federal elections and state elections. Only U.S. citizens can take part in U.S. elections.
Noncitizens who try to vote without the legal authority could face the following consequences:
1. Fines
2. Imprisonment of up to one year
3. Possibility of deportation
This could also affect the immigrant's ability to become a U.S. citizen through naturalization.
Do I Need to Register to Vote?
In most states, you must become a registered voter before you can vote. The requirements on how to register may vary in every state. Some states need you to submit the voter registration form days before Election Day. Meanwhile, other states allow same-day registration at polling places.
Because of these varying rules, it is best to check your state election office for details, particularly the deadline and requirements of your state. To learn more about your state's registration requirements, visit Vote.gov.

18 USC 611: Voting by aliensText contains those laws in effect on March 27, 2024
From Title 18-CRIMES AND CRIMINAL PROCEDUREPART I-CRIMESCHAPTER 29-ELECTIONS AND POLITICAL ACTIVITIES
Jump To: Source Credit Miscellaneous Prior Provisions Amendments Effective Date
§611. Voting by aliens
(a) It shall be unlawful for any alien to vote in any election held solely or in part for the purpose of electing a candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector, Member of the Senate, Member of the House of Representatives, Delegate from the District of Columbia, or Resident Commissioner, unless-
(1) the election is held partly for some other purpose;
(2) aliens are authorized to vote for such other purpose under a State constitution or statute or a local ordinance; and
(3) voting for such other purpose is conducted independently of voting for a candidate for such Federal offices, in such a manner that an alien has the opportunity to vote for such other purpose, but not an opportunity to vote for a candidate for any one or more of such Federal offices.


(b) Any person who violates this section shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than one year, or both.
(c) Subsection (a) does not apply to an alien if-
(1) each natural parent of the alien (or, in the case of an adopted alien, each adoptive parent of the alien) is or was a citizen (whether by birth or naturalization);
(2) the alien permanently resided in the United States prior to attaining the age of 16; and
(3) the alien reasonably believed at the time of voting in violation of such subsection that he or she was a citizen of the United States.
(Added Pub. L. 104–208, div. C, title II, §216(a), Sept. 30, 1996, 110 Stat. 3009–572 ; amended Pub. L. 106–395, title II, §201(d)(1), Oct. 30, 2000, 114 Stat. 1635 .)


EDITORIAL NOTES
PRIOR PROVISIONS
A prior section 611, acts June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 724 ; Feb. 7, 1972, Pub. L. 92–225, title II, §206, 86 Stat. 10 ; Oct. 15, 1974, Pub. L. 93–443, title I, §§101(e)(2), 103, 88 Stat. 1267 , 1272, prohibited campaign contributions by government contractors, prior to repeal by Pub. L. 94–283, title II, §201(a), May 11, 1976, 90 Stat. 496 . See section 30119 of Title 52, Voting and Elections.
AMENDMENTS
2000-Subsec. (c). Pub. L. 106–395 added subsec. (c).


STATUTORY NOTES AND RELATED SUBSIDIARIES
EFFECTIVE DATE OF 2000 AMENDMENT
Pub. L. 106–395, title II, §201(d)(3), Oct. 30, 2000, 114 Stat. 1636 , provided that: "The amendment made by paragraph (1) [amending this section] shall be effective as if included in the enactment of section 216 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (Public Law 104–208; 110 Stat. 3009–572). The amendment made by paragraph (2) [amending section 1015 of this title] shall be effective as if included in the enactment of section 215 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (Public Law 104–208; 110 Stat. 3009–572). The amendments made by paragraphs (1) and (2) shall apply to an alien prosecuted on or after September 30, 1996, except in the case of an alien whose criminal proceeding (including judicial review thereof) has been finally concluded before the date of the enactment of this Act [Oct. 30, 2000]."

CRIMINAL CASES
Georgia Election Interference (State, GA):

Federal Election Interference (Federal, DC - Criminal Case)

Mar-a-Lago Classified Documents (Federal, FL)—better than unsecure garage?

Hush Money/ Fraud in the 2016 Election (State, NY)
Defamation/ Sexual Assault/ Rape (Federal, NY)

FRAUD (State, NY)
New York Attorney General Letitia James has brought a $250 million civil case against Donald Trump, his two adult sons, and his company for alleged fraud.

Here’s where all the cases against Trump stand as he campaigns for a return to the White House
A New York judge says former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial will go ahead as scheduled with jury selection starting on March 25. (Feb. 15)
February 28, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — From allegations of plotting to overturn a lost election to illegally stowing classified documents at his Florida estate, former President Donald Trump faces four criminal indictments in four different cities as he vies to reclaim the White House.
The cases, totaling 91 felony counts, are winding through the courts at different speeds. Some might not reach trial this year, while one is set to begin in a matter of weeks.
A look at each case:
CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS CASE
Special counsel Jack Smith has been leading two federal probes related to Trump, both of which have resulted in charges against the former president.
The first charges to result from those investigations came in June when Trump was indicted for mishandling top secret documents at his Florida estate. The indictment alleges that Trump repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” and classified map.
A superseding indictment issued in July added charges accusing Trump of asking for surveillance footage at his Mar-a-Lago estate to be deleted after FBI and Justice Department investigators visited in June 2022 to collect classified documents he took with him after leaving the White House. The new indictment also charges him with illegally holding onto a document he’s alleged to have shown off to visitors in New Jersey.
Biden and Trump: How the two classified documents investigations came to different endings
In all, Trump faces 40 felony charges in the classified documents case. The most serious charge carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.
Walt Nauta, a valet for Trump, and Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager at Trump’s Florida estate, have been charged in the case with scheming to conceal surveillance footage from federal investigators and lying about it.
Trump, Nauta and De Oliveira have pleaded not guilty.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon set a trial date of May 20, 2024, though she has signaled that it may be pushed back.
ELECTION INTERFERENCE
Smith’s second case against Trump was unveiled in August when the former president was indicted in Washington on felony charges for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The four-count indictment includes charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States government and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding: the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory. It says that Trump repeatedly told supporters and others that he had won the election, despite knowing that was false, and describes how he tried to persuade state officials, then-Vice President Mike Pence and finally Congress to overturn the legitimate results.
After a weekslong campaign of lies about the election results, prosecutors allege, Trump sought to exploit the violence at the Capitol by pointing to it as a reason to further delay the counting of votes that sealed his defeat.

Supreme Court sets April arguments over whether Trump can be prosecuted for election interference
In their charging documents, prosecutors referenced a half-dozen unindicted co-conspirators, including lawyers inside and outside of government who they said had worked with Trump to undo the election results and advanced legally dubious schemes to enlist slates of fake electors in battleground states won by Biden.
The Trump campaign called the charges “fake” and asked why it took two and a half years to bring them. He has pleaded not guilty.
The case had been set for trial on March 4 in federal court in Washington. But that date was canceled amid an appeal by Trump on the legally untested question of whether a former president is immune from prosecution for official acts taken in the White House.
The Supreme Court injected fresh uncertainty into the trial date, saying Wednesday that it would hear arguments in late April. That leaves it unclear whether a trial can be completed before the November election.
HUSH MONEY SCHEME
Trump became the first former U.S. president in history to face criminal charges when he was indicted in New York in March on state charges stemming from hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to bury allegations of extramarital sexual encounters.
That case is set to be first to proceed to trial, with a judge setting jury selection for March 25.
Trump has already pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Each count is punishable by up to four years in prison, though it’s not clear if a judge would impose any prison time if Trump were convicted.
Manhattan DA wants gag order for Trump, seeks to play ‘Access Hollywood’ tape at hush-money trial
The counts are linked to a series of checks that were written to his lawyer Michael Cohen to reimburse him for his role in paying off porn actor Stormy Daniels, who alleged a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, not long after Melania Trump gave birth to son Barron. Those payments were recorded in various internal company documents as being for a legal retainer that prosecutors say didn’t exist.
GEORGIA
Trump is charged alongside 18 other people — including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — with violating the state’s anti-racketeering law by scheming to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss.
The indictment, handed up in August, accuses Trump or his allies of suggesting Georgia’s Republican secretary of state could “find” enough votes for him to win the battleground state; of harassing an election worker who faced false claims of fraud; an, attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of Electoral College electors favorable to Trump.
Ex-law partner is evasive as attorneys press for details on Willis and Wade’s romance in Trump case
In the months since, several of the defendants, including lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, have pleaded guilty. A trial date for Trump and the others has not yet been set, and the case in recent weeks has been consumed by revelations of a personal relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose office brought the case, and an outside prosecutor she hired.
CIVIL CASES
Beyond the criminal cases, Trump has also been the subject of a civil proceeding in New York City. The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, argued that Trump and his companies engaged in a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated his wealth.
A judge has ordered Trump and his companies to pay $355 million as a penalty in the case. Trump won’t have to pay out the money immediately as an appeals process plays out, but the verdict still is a stunning setback for the former president.
If he’s ultimately forced to pay, the magnitude of the penalty, on top of earlier judgments, could dramatically diminish his financial resources. And it undermines the image of a successful businessman that he’s carefully tailored to power his unlikely rise from a reality television star to a onetime — and perhaps future — president.
That ruling comes on top of the $83.3 million Trump was ordered to pay to E. Jean Carroll in January for his continued social media attacks against the longtime advice columnist over her claims that he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store. He was already the subject of a $5 million sexual assault and defamation verdict last year from another jury in the case.
Jan 6th

Georgia Election Interference (State, GA):
Federal Election Interference (Federal, DC - Criminal Case)
Mar-a-Lago Classified Documents (Federal, FL)—better than unsecure garage?
Hush Money/ Fraud in the 2016 Election (State, NY)
Defamation/ Sexual Assault/ Rape (Federal, NY)
FRAUD (State, NY)
New York Attorney General Letitia James has brought a $250 million civil case against Donald Trump, his two adult sons, and his company for alleged fraud.
Here’s where all the cases against Trump stand as he campaigns for a return to the White House
A New York judge says former President Donald Trump’s hush-money trial will go ahead as scheduled with jury selection starting on March 25. (Feb. 15)
February 28, 2024
WASHINGTON (AP) — From allegations of plotting to overturn a lost election to illegally stowing classified documents at his Florida estate, former President Donald Trump faces four criminal indictments in four different cities as he vies to reclaim the White House.
The cases, totaling 91 felony counts, are winding through the courts at different speeds. Some might not reach trial this year, while one is set to begin in a matter of weeks.
A look at each case:
CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS CASE
Special counsel Jack Smith has been leading two federal probes related to Trump, both of which have resulted in charges against the former president.
The first charges to result from those investigations came in June when Trump was indicted for mishandling top secret documents at his Florida estate. The indictment alleges that Trump repeatedly enlisted aides and lawyers to help him hide records demanded by investigators and cavalierly showed off a Pentagon “plan of attack” and classified map.
A superseding indictment issued in July added charges accusing Trump of asking for surveillance footage at his Mar-a-Lago estate to be deleted after FBI and Justice Department investigators visited in June 2022 to collect classified documents he took with him after leaving the White House. The new indictment also charges him with illegally holding onto a document he’s alleged to have shown off to visitors in New Jersey.
Biden and Trump: How the two classified documents investigations came to different endings
In all, Trump faces 40 felony charges in the classified documents case. The most serious charge carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison.
Walt Nauta, a valet for Trump, and Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager at Trump’s Florida estate, have been charged in the case with scheming to conceal surveillance footage from federal investigators and lying about it.
Trump, Nauta and De Oliveira have pleaded not guilty.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon set a trial date of May 20, 2024, though she has signaled that it may be pushed back.
ELECTION INTERFERENCE
Smith’s second case against Trump was unveiled in August when the former president was indicted in Washington on felony charges for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The four-count indictment includes charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States government and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding: the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory. It says that Trump repeatedly told supporters and others that he had won the election, despite knowing that was false, and describes how he tried to persuade state officials, then-Vice President Mike Pence and finally Congress to overturn the legitimate results.
After a weekslong campaign of lies about the election results, prosecutors allege, Trump sought to exploit the violence at the Capitol by pointing to it as a reason to further delay the counting of votes that sealed his defeat.
Supreme Court sets April arguments over whether Trump can be prosecuted for election interference
In their charging documents, prosecutors referenced a half-dozen unindicted co-conspirators, including lawyers inside and outside of government who they said had worked with Trump to undo the election results and advanced legally dubious schemes to enlist slates of fake electors in battleground states won by Biden.
The Trump campaign called the charges “fake” and asked why it took two and a half years to bring them. He has pleaded not guilty.
The case had been set for trial on March 4 in federal court in Washington. But that date was canceled amid an appeal by Trump on the legally untested question of whether a former president is immune from prosecution for official acts taken in the White House.
The Supreme Court injected fresh uncertainty into the trial date, saying Wednesday that it would hear arguments in late April. That leaves it unclear whether a trial can be completed before the November election.
HUSH MONEY SCHEME
Trump became the first former U.S. president in history to face criminal charges when he was indicted in New York in March on state charges stemming from hush money payments made during the 2016 presidential campaign to bury allegations of extramarital sexual encounters.
That case is set to be first to proceed to trial, with a judge setting jury selection for March 25.
Trump has already pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Each count is punishable by up to four years in prison, though it’s not clear if a judge would impose any prison time if Trump were convicted.
Manhattan DA wants gag order for Trump, seeks to play ‘Access Hollywood’ tape at hush-money trial
The counts are linked to a series of checks that were written to his lawyer Michael Cohen to reimburse him for his role in paying off porn actor Stormy Daniels, who alleged a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006, not long after Melania Trump gave birth to son Barron. Those payments were recorded in various internal company documents as being for a legal retainer that prosecutors say didn’t exist.
GEORGIA
Trump is charged alongside 18 other people — including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — with violating the state’s anti-racketeering law by scheming to illegally overturn his 2020 election loss.
The indictment, handed up in August, accuses Trump or his allies of suggesting Georgia’s Republican secretary of state could “find” enough votes for him to win the battleground state; of harassing an election worker who faced false claims of fraud; an, attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of Electoral College electors favorable to Trump.
Ex-law partner is evasive as attorneys press for details on Willis and Wade’s romance in Trump case
In the months since, several of the defendants, including lawyers Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, have pleaded guilty. A trial date for Trump and the others has not yet been set, and the case in recent weeks has been consumed by revelations of a personal relationship between Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose office brought the case, and an outside prosecutor she hired.
CIVIL CASES
Beyond the criminal cases, Trump has also been the subject of a civil proceeding in New York City. The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, argued that Trump and his companies engaged in a yearslong scheme to dupe banks and others with financial statements that inflated his wealth.
A judge has ordered Trump and his companies to pay $355 million as a penalty in the case. Trump won’t have to pay out the money immediately as an appeals process plays out, but the verdict still is a stunning setback for the former president.
If he’s ultimately forced to pay, the magnitude of the penalty, on top of earlier judgments, could dramatically diminish his financial resources. And it undermines the image of a successful businessman that he’s carefully tailored to power his unlikely rise from a reality television star to a onetime — and perhaps future — president.
That ruling comes on top of the $83.3 million Trump was ordered to pay to E. Jean Carroll in January for his continued social media attacks against the longtime advice columnist over her claims that he sexually assaulted her in a Manhattan department store. He was already the subject of a $5 million sexual assault and defamation verdict last year from another jury in the case.

Jan 6th

One can only say that the Dems have put in place a puppet who was sold as being in the center and hid in his basement to get elected along with endless breaking of state election laws and apparently a lot of fraudulent votes that the courts would not allow to be prosecuted. It might also be good to mention the total mistreatment and false testimony against the so called Jan 6th insurrection but maybe you just want to take on one or two of the topics at a time.
Hopefully this will give you some ideas.
DEB