Michael Scarns

I bear partial responsibility for the entire Naval Woke College debate. I’ve been hammering them for years. Let me tell you why…. 🧵 Strap in, it’s a LONG story. Go all the way back to the start of the Trump 1.0 administration. Actually, go back further. Go back to Obama. The Navy is NOT in charge of shipbuilding. They are in charge of ship buying. The DOT is in charge of shipyards. Specifically @DOTMARAD. And USCG handles shipyard regulations. Internationally, the United Nations @IMOHQ is in charge. But MARAD is the only major agency in the United States chartered to promote an American industry. So Obama had to subvert it. Obama went out of his way to play dumb on all maritime matters. But here’s the thing: he grew up in Hawaii. It is impossible to grow up on an island and not understand shipping. He wanted to turn the oceans into a collectivist wonderland run by Marxists. Here is how he did it. First, he installed the failed governor of Mississippi, Ray Mabus, as Secretary of the Navy. Then he installed the worst USCG Commandant the nation has ever seen: Admiral Papp, who promoted Senior Executive Service officers aligned with UN globalists. Papp’s SES pushed the UN to further adopt climate change and DEI. He landed his top USCG JAG a job leading the IMO and made sure the elected Secretary General was little more than a figurehead. The problem: the UN has zero authority to regulate warships. So Papp had Mabus simply order the Navy to accept USCG shipbuilding rules that were, in fact, UN standards. Then Mabus pushed hard on projects he knew would fail: LCS, Zumwalt, and a massive initiative to convert every Navy ship to run on used French fry oil. He also forced thousands of change orders onto new aircraft carriers. Doubling down on failed designs while welcoming UN-approved inspectors into American shipyards was a one-two punch. Bad ships, plus crushing red tape, would cripple the most powerful Navy in the world. But the UN one-world-government scheme requires more than weakening the strongest. You also have to elevate the weakest. Chinese shipbuilding was growing, but their workmanship was a disgrace. They could only build simple vessels: coal bulkers and the like. So Obama dispatched an American NGO to Chinese shipyards to teach them everything we know. Not just any NGO. The most profitable nonprofit in America. (For legal reasons, I can’t name them.) That NGO pulled the best naval architects, marine engineers, and inspectors out of American yards and sent them to China. They are still there today. But what about MARAD? It is mandated, by law, to advance American maritime interests. He simply didn’t appoint anyone for years. He installed a junior congressional aide with a history of poor performance as acting administrator for most of his first term. (In his second term, when Navy shipbuilding efforts started crashing and burning, Mabus put a submarine O5 in the job.) Ships and shipyards are heavily unionized, so the AFL-CIO Marxists made sure no one complained. And Obama figured out that the GOP hates the Jones Act so every time a based mariner or shipbuilder complained just remind them how the Republicans want to steal their jobs. Simultaneously you get Democrat friends in the Senate to support the number one JA and Merchant Marine hater: John McCain If anyone complains about Navy shipbuilding you point them to all the ways Dems are cooperating with McCain McCain who was undermining the shipyards and commercial maritime base. Now, how do you keep the Navy itself from screaming bloody murder? First, you double down on submarines, which cannot police the oceans the way surface ships can. UN rules were kept out of Electric Boat. Second, you push hard on joint warfare. You send your best and brightest officers not to sea, but to the desert, to serve as support elements for the Army. You pull in reservists like @PeteButtigieg and @RepGoodlander. 1/5

#ICYMI from @FBISanFrancisco: Seven Chinese executives and four of the world’s largest shipping container manufacturing companies were indicted for conspiring to restrict the output of — and fix the prices of — nearly all of the world’s standard unrefrigerated shipping containers. The multi-year conspiracy roughly doubled the prices of standard shipping containers between 2019 and 2021, increasing the container manufacturers’ profits approximately one hundredfold during the COVID-19 pandemic and global supply chain crisis. Read more: justice.gov/opa/pr/four-wo…

More than 7,000 documented non-citizens in Wisconsin will no longer be eligible for food stamps, starting July 1. That includes refugees, asylees and victims of human trafficking. Advocates worry this will strain food pantries already stretched thin: cbs58.com/news/non-citiz…