Washington’s Bipartisan Brothel Is Thriving

• 2 years ago

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

A couple of years ago a story went by that got less attention than it deserved. It reported that the fees paid to Capitol Hill lobbyists in Washington had grown by a factor of fifty — that is, by five thousand percent — in the thirty years between 1986 and 2016.

Federal law requires that those hired to influence legislation on Capitol Hill register every year with the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Secretary of the U.S. Senate. Lobbying firms’ fees, lobbyists, and clients are all available to the public, but they don’t make it easy.

Reporters from the Washington Examiner recently rolled up their sleeves and did the digging on TikTok, a Chinese firm that has come under severe scrutiny lately on both side of the aisle.

First — why the scrutiny?

Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, is probably the savviest observer around when it comes to the danger that Communist China poses to the United States. In a recent interview he described what TikTok requires of its 100 million American users when they sign up.

Apparently, TikTok users grant the company access to all the apps and all the file names, all the things they have filed away on their phones, even their keystroke patterns — to put it bluntly, China has access to all of their data.

“It’s obviously Chinese government spyware,” says Mosher. “In 2017, the Chinese Communist Party passed an intelligence law, which requires all tech companies to turn over all data all the time to the government. Not only TikTok, but every U.S. enterprise that stores its user data on China’s cheap computer storage systems.”

That’s right — not only TikTok, but all the companies and websites that store massive amounts of data in China, lured by the bargain-rate fees.

And all of those companies have to turn over their data in real time to the government.

Have you used one of those “genealogy” programs to find out whether you’re really Irish?

If they store their data in China’s mega-servers, the Communist Chinese government has all of your biological data. Along with that of hundreds of millions of users all over the world.

For free.

TikTok is “just part of a massive espionage effort against the United States, not only the American public but all agencies to the government, including state and local agencies, being penetrated by a massive effort,” Mosher said.

So TikTok’s vitally important. Who’s lobbying for them in Washington?

Remember Trent Lott? He was a conservative GOP Senator from Mississippi for years, serving twice as Senate majority leader. He abruptly retired in 2007, and founded one of Washington’s premier lobbying firms.

At the time, I recall that he told reporters how glad he was — “we get weekends,” he said, and he had a point: Senators and members of Congress have to spend every weekend attending one function, meeting, dinner, and ceremony after another with the home folks.

Every weekend.

Trent Lott was glad finally to have some free time.

Well, Trent didn’t mention the millions he’d be making every year, though.

A lot of millions.

This is the unlovely path followed by too many “public servants” — many of whom got into politics so they can cash out of it like Trent Lott did.

And sure enough, the Washington Examiner’s review of the records “found the social media giant’s Chinese parent company ByteDance and TikTok itself have embarked on a heavy-hitting bipartisan lobbying endeavor, paying an army of lobbyists including former Senators Trent Lott (R., Miss.) and John Breaux (D., La.)….”

That’s right. Republican Lott, Democrat Breaux.

Do you see all those Republicans “fighting hard” against the Democrats on the Senate and House floor? “You’re endangering our democracy,” liberals whine. “You’re destroying the Constitution,” the indignant conservatives respond.

Note how they never quite manage to land a knockout punch. After all, many of those belligerents are quietly sizing up their “adversaries” to determine who might be their most productive future business partners.

The Examiner continues: “The [ByteDance and TikTok] lobbying team also includes at least 31 former congressional staffers nearly evenly split between parties, including those who worked for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.).”

Curious, isn’t it? Those folks who have been “fighting” one another for years are now all on the same team.

But it’s not like Notre Dame and Alabama players becoming teammates when they’re both drafted by the Atlanta Falcons.

Those guys are playing a game. But the United States versus Communist China is for real.

And the grifting Brothel Bro’s are fighting on the other side.

“China is corrupting our political system from the inside out,” Mosher tells The Wanderer, “spending tens of millions a year to gain billions upon billions of profits. They set up American branches of their state-run or state-controlled companies, and then use these ‘front organizations’ to hire lobbyists to help craft legislation and regulations in their favor. We need to completely decouple our two economies if we are not to be totally compromised.”

Sen. Jesse Helms Revisited

“You don’t spit on a man’s head if you’re standing on his shoulders” — Notre Dame Football Coach Knute Rockne, 1925.

• + + Threaten to kill Supreme Court justices. Attack over a hundred churches and vandalize dozens of emergency pregnancy centers. Assault high-school girls canvassing neighborhoods in support of a pro-life amendment.
  
  Sleazy, right?
  
  And just when we thought the pro-abortion fanatics couldn’t stoop any lower, comes this:
  
  Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina was the most effective pro-life advocate of his generation. For that, he was vilified by the pro-abortion lobby for years. When he died in 2008, we thought that, at last, they’d let him rest in peace.
  
  No way. Not these vultures. So last week Ellen Gaddy, one of the senator’s granddaughters, stepped forward to dig up grandpa and drag him through the mud one more time.
  
  “My grandfather was a Republican who opposed civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, HIV/AIDS research and abortion,” she writes — so Ellen has to vilify him again to right his wrongs. After all, she is a personal friend of Joe Biden (why, she met him at her grandfather’s funeral), so she can now personally encourage him to “seize the chance to counter one of the most painful legacies of my grandfather — the Helms Amendment.”
  
  Speaking of painful legacies, 1973 was a crucial year for the abortion lobby. After Roe v. Wade came down in January of that year, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), a leader in the bipartisan population control movement so popular at the time, was preparing hundreds of thousands of abortion aspirator kits to send to the Third World at taxpayer expense. The purpose: to facilitate the extermination of the “excess population” so feared by the elites at the time.
  
  The Helms Amendment prohibited the use of any foreign aid funding for abortions. Ronald Reagan’s “Mexico City Policy” expanded the ban to include the funding of any AID grantee whose “family planning services” included abortion. Donald Trump strengthened the policy even more, while Democrat administrations have done their best to circumvent it.
  
  The Helms Amendment’s impact cannot be overstated: It has saved untold millions of lives.
  
  And it is still part of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, and it still enrages the pro-abortion crowd at home and abroad.
  
  It is painful indeed to witness the senator’s pouting, petulant progeny invoke his name only to defile it.
  
  Apparently, if you’re bent on rejecting the Fifth Commandment, then the Fourth doesn’t mean very much either.