Hunter Biden gets a love tap on the wrist and a get out of jail free card

The New Neo Posted on by

It was predicted, and it has come to pass with an extremely mild plea deal agreement. Back in May here was Ted Cruz’s prediction:

“That will be the tell if they focus on individual crimes related to Hunter and they seal off what makes this a matter of public concern which is the connection to Joe Biden. The millions Hunter made selling access to Daddy.”

“Merrick Garland doesn’t want to get near the growing evidence of corruption” that’s touching Joe Biden, Cruz added.

That was always utterly obvious to anyone on the right who’s been observing the last 15 years or so. So no one should be surprised, although it is still profoundly upsetting and infuriating. Democrats should be upset as well, but the vast majority will think it’s just fine and that it proves the whole brouhaha was and is a tempest in a teapot. And large swathes of the public probably aren’t even following it except in a very vague way.

This is correct:

Ace has a lot to say on the matter, and I suggest you read the whole thing. But here’s an excerpt:

If Biden wanted to better insure political neutrality, he would have insisted on a special prosecutor, and not just a Democrat ringer, either.

But he wants a Democrat ringer, under his control.

And of course a whistleblower reports that Merrick Garland refused to allow Weiss to investigate Hunter’s other crimes, such as… conspiracy to engage in bribery with officials from a foreign nation.

And there’s no FARA charges, despite Hunter plainly being an agent of a foreign power.

Had enough yet?

Scott Johnson asks of Biden, “Why is this man laughing?” My answer is what’s called “duping delight“:

Duping delight is a facial “tell” that occurs when a person takes pleasure in deceiving others. The term was coined by psychologist and Professor Emeritus Paul Ekman, who has extensively researched the field of nonverbal communication and facial expressions. He is best known for his work on micro-expressions and facial recognition. Ekman has been a consultant for various government agencies and is considered one of the foremost experts in his field.

Specifically, duping delight occurs when someone is lying or manipulating others and feels a sense of power or control over the situation. This pleasure can manifest itself in various ways, including through subtle facial expressions, body language, or vocal cues.

Biden’s duping delight isn’t even subtle; it’s overt. He knows there will be no consequences for him or his family, or certainly thinks he knows. And I fear that he’s all too correct.

I’ll let Richard Fernandez have the last word. Here, he succinctly expresses a thought many of us have had for years:

NOTE: Also see Turley.

Dershowitz on that anti-Trump-lawyer group The 65 Project

The New Neo Posted on by

Dershowitz writes:

There is a nefarious group that calls itself The 65 Project that has as its goal to intimidate lawyers into not representing Trump or anyone associated with him. They have threatened to file bar charges against any such lawyers. When these threats first emerged, I wrote an op-ed offering to defend pro bono any lawyers that The 65 Project goes after. So The 65 Project immediately went after me, and contrived a charge based on a case in which I was a constitutional consultant, but designed to send a message to potential Trump lawyers: if you defend Trump or anyone associated with him, we will target you and find something to charge you with. The lawyers to whom I spoke are fully aware of this threat — and they are taking it seriously.

They don’t call it “Lawfare” for nothing.

More from Dershowitz:

There may be other reasons as well for why lawyers are reluctant to defend Trump. He is not the easiest client, and he has turned against some of his previous lawyers, as some of his previous lawyers have turned against him. This will be a difficult case to defend and an unpopular one with many in the legal profession and in general population.

Good lawyers, however, generally welcome challenges, especially in high-profile cases. This case is different: the threats to the lawyers are greater than at any time since McCarthyism…It may even be worse today, as I can attest from my own personal experiences…

This may be the most important part of Dershowitz’s article:

Our system of justice is based on the John Adams standard: he too was attacked for defending the British soldiers accused of the Boston Massacre, but his representation of these accused killers now serves as a symbol of the 6th Amendment right to counsel. That symbol has now been endangered by The 65 Project and others who are participating in its McCarthyite chilling of lawyers who have been asked to represent Trump and those associated with him.

For decades, the left screeched about McCarthyism. They got a lot of mileage out of that, but in reality their main objection seems to have been that they were the targets rather than the ones behind the threats.

NOTE: I wrote this post about The 65 Project back in August of 2022.

Backtracking on the lab leak – hey, Trump was right

The New Neo Posted on by

From Legal Insurrection comes this example of many people eager to take back things they said or wrote some time ago about the lab leak theory of COVID’s origins:

Professor Robert Garry, a respected microbiologist who works at Tulane University in New Orleans, is one of five bylined on a paper in March 2020 entitled ‘The Proximal Origin of Sars-Cov-2’.

…The letter, published in the journal Nature Medicine, concluded: ‘We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.’

Now, Dr Garry has told the BBC this statement was never meant to dismiss all types of potential lab leak.

Speaking to Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin, an eight-part BBC Radio 4 series, he said they were aiming to dismiss the idea the virus had been intentionally crafted as a bioweapon.

‘At that point we were still largely under the influence, when that particular sentence was written, with the notion that this may have been a bioengineered virus or maybe a weapon that just sort of accidentally released,’ he said.

That’s sounds ridiculous to me. I remember reading about the lab leak theory very early on, and although it wasn’t proven it certainly was plausible and was considered a possible accident rather than a purposeful weapon, although weapon was (and remains) another possibility.

Garry’s words in the 2020 letter were clear, but he’s trying to explain what he really meant:

Professor Garry admitted the wording was wrong.

‘Maybe we went a little too far there,’ he said.

Maybe.

Scientists are supposed to be precise. But there probably were pressures brought to bear on the group writing the letter in 2020. I could understand why they would want to be cautious. But to rule out the possibility? No.

And then there was this – and note the date of the Trump quote, May 1, 2020. But oh, what a lying stupidhead Trump is, according to CNN and virtually all of the replies at the time:

All of you who are on Twitter might want to add some new comments there.

In the late May of 2021, when the lab leak theory started gaining more traction in the MSM (now that Biden was safely president), the WaPo corrected its reporting on COVID origins from back in February and March of 2020:

The Washington Post issued a correction 15 months after alleging Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., was peddling a “debunked” “conspiracy theory” about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

Much of the media last year was quick to dismiss the possibility that the virus stemmed from a leak from the Wuhan Virology Lab in China, a theory that was promoted by top Republicans including Cotton and then-President Trump and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Over the weekend, however, the Post revised the February 2020 report which had the headline, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked.

“Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus,” the correction read at the top of the report. “The term ‘debunked’ and The Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.”

The headline was changed to “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.”

And now it’s really not even seriously disputed. Will they be issuing mea culpas in big headlines, or point out that Trump was right? Silly question, I know.

Obama versus Tim Scott on the black experience in America

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama gets into the act:

Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, is the son of a white woman from Kansas who gave birth to him in Hawaii. Afterward, he moved to Indonesia, returned to Hawaii, and attended a prestigious private school.

Barack Obama has decided to call out Senator Tim Scott for dismissing America as a racist nation. Tim Scott grew up in the heart of the Confederacy — Charleston, SC — and was raised in working-class poverty as the descendant of slaves and went to public schools.

Barack Obama is a descendant of Irish settlers on his mother’s side, and his father is from Kenya. Tim Scott is the descendant of slaves on both sides.

It is really notable that Obama and Scott are both from broken homes, but the one who got to travel the world and go to a private school in Hawaii wants to lecture the South Carolina descendant of slaves about race and opportunity in America.

Barack Obama, authority on American blackness compared to Tim Scott.

Because I’ve followed Obama for a long time and in some depth, I remember stuff from his history of which others may not be aware. The thing that comes to mind here is his failed attempt to unseat Bobby Rush. Obama learned from that effort not to challenge someone like Rush again, who could one-up him on blackness and call him what George Wallace used to refer to as a pointy-headed intellectual.

Rush, who retired from Congress only a year ago, was a House member when Obama tried to unseat him in the 2000 primary. Big temporary mistake of Obama’s, who lost to Rush by 30 points – and yet went on to become a senator in 2004. During the 2000 campaign, Rush said this of Obama:

“Barack Obama went to Harvard and became an educated fool,” said Rush during that year’s Democratic primary campaign, before soundly defeating Obama with more than 60% of the vote.

Obama spoke like the University of Chicago professor that he was. Rush spoke the language of the streets where he was raised, just west of the city’s glitzy Gold Coast neighborhood.

And this:

Every account of that campaign points out that Obama was tagged as “not black enough” for the South Side. State Sen. Donne Trotter, the third wheel in the primary, told me then, with a sneer, that “Barack is viewed in part to be the white man in blackface in our community.” Black nationalists grumbled about an “Obama project,” led by the candidate’s political godfather, former Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva. But no one appreciates how hard the man tried to earn his ghetto pass. At a rally for South Side teachers, held in a dim, tiny nightclub called Honeysuckle’s, Obama lashed out at the critics who were calling him too bright and too white…

Obama just couldn’t — or wouldn’t — loosen up. The dignified demeanor that had won him a state Senate seat in the university community of Hyde Park did not translate to the district’s inner-city precincts. His internal rhythm was set to “Pomp and Circumstance.” “Arrogant,” scoffed a South Side radio host. Even his body language signaled he was slumming…

Back in 2000, when I interviewed Obama in his cubicle-size office at a downtown law firm, he started the meeting by checking his watch. Then he dissed his congressional district, half-joking that he was more committed to the South Side than his opponents, because, number one, he’d moved there from Hawaii, and number two, he could have been raking it in on Wall Street.

“I really have to want to live here,” he said. “I’m like a salmon swimming upstream on the South Side of Chicago. At every juncture of my life, I could have taken the path of least resistance but much higher pay. Being the president of the Harvard Law Review is a big deal. The typical path for someone like myself is to clerk for the Supreme Court, and then basically you have your pick of any law firm in the country.”

So now snobby old Obama – who knows so much more about racism than Tim Scott – doesn’t like the fact that Tim Scott denies systemic racism in today’s America:

The former president last week criticized Scott, a rare Black candidate in the GOP primary contest, for comments he has made about race and racism in America, saying that voters had a right to be “skeptical” of claims made by minority candidates that ignore the inequality that exists in the United States.

“There’s a long history of African American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can make it,’” Obama said during a conversation with Democratic strategist David Axelrod on his podcast “Axe Files,” which was released last week.

“If somebody’s not proposing — both acknowledging and proposing — elements that say, ‘No, we can’t just ignore all that and pretend as if everything’s equal and fair. We actually have to walk the walk and not just talk the talk.’ If they’re not doing that, then I think people are rightly skeptical,” Obama added.

Tim Scott responds that he considers Obama’s criticism a great compliment, adding:

“Whenever the Democrats feel threatened, they drag out the former president and have him make some negative comments about someone running, hoping that their numbers go down,” he said.

Scott has repeatedly argued that America “is not a racist country,” pointing to his own experience growing up with a single mother and eventually reaching the halls of Congress.

“Here is what the people need to know: The truth of my life disproves lies of the radical left,” Scott said Sunday.

The truth of Obama’s life also disproves the lies of the radical left, but don’t expect Obama to say it.

For tomorrow: Happy Father’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]

Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.

Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.

Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.

Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.

There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Is religion necessary for morality?

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a huge topic and I will barely scratch the surface here. But it’s something that’s long fascinated and somewhat puzzled me. I’ll set the scene with a quote from commenter “Brian E.”:

At some point, as we move to a post-Christian world, rational people are going to face a stark reality that this is what society will look like as we not only abandon God, but actively mock Him.

God is the author of the universe. Evil is real and his face is Lucifer.

If there is no God, then what difference does it make how society is structured? One of the key attributes of sin is pleasure– and along with it excitement and all the heightened senses along with it. Get with the program. Those uneasy feelings this is fundamentally wrong must be subdued.

In other words, was Nietzsche correct?:

“God is dead”…is a statement made by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The first instance of this statement in Nietzsche’s writings is in his 1882 The Gay Science, where it appears three times. The phrase also appears in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

The meaning of this statement is that since, as Nietzsche says, “the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable”, everything that was “built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it”, including “the whole […] European morality”, is bound to “collapse”.

Other philosophers had previously discussed the concept, including Philipp Mainländer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

In one of the passages in which Nietzsche wrote the phrase, he has a madman utter it and add the following:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

The phrase wasn’t a statement about whether God actually exists. It was about humankind’s perception that He does or doesn’t, and the result of the perception that He does not.

When I ponder the question, I note – as I’m sure others have before me – that there are many believers who are amoral or even immoral in their actual behavior, and many non-believers who are moral. But I don’t know percentages. My guess is that more believers than non-believers live moral lives, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the differences were not enormously large. You can see some statistics on infidelity and religion here, for example.

A chart from the article:

Historically, it’s easy to show that religions and religious societies can become corrupt, and societies that are seemingly religious can wage religious wars or pogroms that are very murderous. The same is true of individuals. I’ve personally known a number of religious people with very shaky moral behavior, as well as atheists who are very upright.

Nevertheless, I think there’s something to the general proposition that a society in which most of the people throw religion away, and whose culture starts mocking religious belief, tends to be on the way to ruin. I don’t think that’s the only thing going on, though. Perhaps the loss of religion is a symbol of a decline rather than the main cause, but then it sets up a negative feedback loop a la Sodom and Gomorrah?

I’m obviously not going to solve this one today.

The feds get their hands on the Minneapolis police department and – guess what? – find it racist

The New Neo Posted on by

Scott Johnson of Powerline relates the story:

Attorney General Merrick Garland came to town yesterday to indict the Minneapolis Police Department for racism, find it guilty, and announce the terms to which municipal authorities have agreed. The Department of Justice press release is here, Garland’s remarks at the press conference here, the DoJ’s 89-page report here, and the parties’ settlement in principle here.

The report results from a DoJ investigation launched in the wake of Derek Chauvin’s conviction of the murder of George Floyd in April 2021. According to the report, the Minneapolis Police Department uses excessive force, including unjustified deadly force, unlawfully discriminates against blacks and Native Americans, violates free speech rights, and discriminates against people with behavioral health disabilities when responding to calls. “The patterns and practices of conduct the Justice Department observed during our investigation are deeply disturbing,” Garland said at the news conference in Minneapolis.

This was a foregone conclusion. One of the metrics on which such findings are based is whether black people are disproportionately stopped by the police. Johnson quotes Greg Pulles (former general counsel and secretary of TCF Financial Corporation), as writing:

The report reflects no knowledge of what cops have to go through every day, every shift, every incident — the abuse they suffer, the dangers they face in every encounter, and the depravity of many offenders.

Some of the report is comical: there were a total of 19 police shootings over the six-and-a-half years studied, with over 11,000 uses of force. Instead of giving the department an award for their remarkable restraint in using firearms — .0017 percent of the time they use force — they are accused of gross incompetence and excessive use of force.

And then there is this: “Minneapolis Police Officers shoved adults and teens.” My gosh, they actually shoved people…

The core of the charge of discrimination is based on the same old faulty failure to impose complete and proper controls on statistical analysis. The report first cites the meaningless statistic that blacks are stopped in numbers disproportionate to their share of the population. Of course they are. That is because blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime.

Every study ever conducted (including victim surveys) has shown that blacks are arrested in the same proportion as they offend. National studies actually show that the stop-rate for blacks is lower than their violent crime rate would predict. The report is absolutely void of any analysis…

Among other things, reports such as the one for Minneapolis represent the reliance on flawed social science to gain and implement political power by the federal government, and to further the fiction that racial disparities in policing are always the result of racism in police departments rather than from more rational causes. Defining the situation in that way allows the feds to gain more and more power, naturally.

Who will suffer most from this sort of report and its consequences, particularly in cities such as Minneapolis, which also had been losing police officers even before the report was issued? Law-abiding black people in inner cities, of course, of whom there are many.

I wrote a post about the history of such federal interventions – which are called “consent decrees” – in March of 2022. I urge you to read it, because it’s highly relevant. I’ll just briefly summarize the main points here; you can find the citations in the longer article at the link.

The practice began in 1994 through a law passed in the wake of the Rodney King incident. It gave the DOJ the authority to investigate local police departments to see whether there was a “pattern or practice” of civil rights abuses. The first investigation under this new law was in Pittsburgh in 1997, and over the years there have been 70 such studies by the feds. The Obama administration alone undertook 25 studies and entered into 14 consent decrees, but the Trump administration paused the practice and initiated none, saying it was not the federal government’s role and it also hurt police morale. Biden and Garland have, of course, picked it up again.

The article on which I based my 2022 post was this. A telling quote [emphasis mine]:

There can be tension between the police departments under investigation and the federal attorneys instructing them on what amounts to a constitutional violation, said Sharon Brett, one of the lead attorneys for the Obama administration’s investigation of the Chicago Police Department. She also worked on consent decrees for Cincinnati; Seattle; Ferguson, Missouri, and other cities.

When Brett would sit down with officers during the investigation, she recalled, the first question she would get is whether she had ever been a police officer or served in the military.

“There’s a sense among the rank-and-file that, you don’t know what I’m dealing with if you’ve never been here,” said Brett, who now is the legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas. “Law enforcement does not like people coming in who have no law enforcement experience and telling them how to do their job correctly.”

I just can’t imagine why anyone would resent that. And my guess is that the “resentment” wasn’t just some infantile emotion based on being criticized, but instead a rational reaction based on the fact that someone like Brett has a high probability of not having a clue what she’s talking about except for what she read in books.

The trans proliferation: Part I (intro and grooming)

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately researching the proliferation of the trans phenomenon and its increasing visibility and demands, especially regarding children. I’ve decided to start a multi-parter series of posts, because even though I’ve already written about this many times I have a lot more to say.

Why do I find the topic so important? It’s not only that it’s doing a lot of harm, although it is. It’s also that it is an example of the consolidation of many trends on the left – such as the influence of social media, the Orwellian use of words, the co-opting of the medical and therapy professions, the power of propaganda, the focus on the young, and especially the tactic of labeling some group as a persecuted identity and calling opposition to all of its demands a bigoted and hateful “ism” that all nice people must fight against.

As part of the effort to understand more deeply what’s been going on, I’ve read many articles and also watched a host of YouTube video interviews of transitioners and detransitioners, especially youthful ones. I’ve been impressed at the eloquence and insight of so many of the latter, who despite their exceptional intelligence got sucked into this terrible mess and often made irreversible decisions because the adults in charge failed them in major ways. These stories are heartbreaking, fascinating, and enraging.

Here’s part of a video that involves an aspect of this phenomenon of which people may be unaware: the role of what for want of a better term I’ll call online grooming. I’ve cued up some relevant clips that are short, but they are part of a much longer interview that is well worth watching if you’re interested (if you’re pressed for time and want to hear the whole thing, you can do as I often do and listen to it at 1.5 or 1.75 speed). Here are the briefer excerpts:

This is terrible and this is important.

DeSantis’ plan for the FBI and the DOJ

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: “Kate.”]

A man with a plan:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been working for months on plans to tear down and rebuild both the Department of Justice and the FBI, consulting with experts and members of Congress to develop a “Day One” strategy to end what conservatives see as the weaponization of the justice system.

The governor has privately told advisors that he will hire and fire plenty of federal personnel, reorganize entire agencies, and execute a “disciplined” and “relentless” strategy to restore the Justice Department to a mission more in line with what the “Founding Fathers envisioned.”

But his ambitions go beyond bureaucratic restructuring. He wants to physically remove large swathes of the DOJ from the District of Columbia, including FBI headquarters, RealClearPolitics is first to report.

“We’re not going to let all this power accumulate in Washington, we’re going to break up these agencies,” DeSantis said during a private strategy session over the weekend, excerpts of which were obtained exclusively by RCP. He vowed in that call to order “some of the problematic components of the DOJ” be uprooted, reorganized, and then promptly “shipped to other parts of the country.”

To me, this highlights the difference between Trump and DeSantis, which is that DeSantis – whom some see as boring – is more of a policy nerd and is interested in the nuts and bolts of government. He proved that in Florida, where he was instrumental in spearheading a program to reform (see also this) the all-important voting system, despite cries of “racism” and “voter suppression.”

Here’s more about DeSantis’ plans for reforming the bureaucracy (please read the whole thing):

“We’ve seen throughout this country that the DOJ and the FBI are controlled by one faction of our society,” DeSantis said on the call, pointing to how those agencies were “going after pro-life activists,” wrongfully investigating parents at school board meetings “who are concerned about things like critical race theory, and forcing kids to wear masks,” and “colluding with tech companies to censor information such as what they did with the 2020 election.”

DeSantis has assembled a brain trust of academics, members of Congress, and former administration officials to draw up step-by-step blueprints for tearing the DOJ and FBI down to the studs for a rebuild…

A key feature of the emerging plan: Move fast. Don’t wait on Congress…

While the current Republican frontrunner was famous for telling celebrities, “You’re Fired” on television, the DeSantis campaign insists the governor would follow through in the Oval Office. DeSantis promised that as president, there’d be a “new sheriff in town,” one who doesn’t mind sending federal employees into early retirement…

Trump said in Iowa earlier this month that he could tame the bureaucrats who tormented his tenure “in six months.” DeSantis countered in New Hampshire that anyone making that kind of claim should be asked, “Why didn’t you do that when you had four years to try?”

I doubt this will convince many (or any) of the EverTrump group to support DeSantis. I’d be happy to be wrong about that, but time and again I have seen them counter positive news about DeSantis with suspicion for his every utterance. I think that’s a big big big mistake on their part.

And he has already shown he means what he says:

This is something of a theme for DeSantis. He fired a state attorney for failing to enforce Florida election law last year. He has already told voters he would fire Wray, the FBI director appointed by Trump and retained by Biden. He identified a new target Saturday: any DOJ employee working on a grand jury investigation caught talking to the press to undermine political opponents.

“If they’re leaking,” DeSantis said with a broad directive that could very well foreshadow his tenure if elected, “we’re going to fire people.”