Justplainbill's Weblog

Joseph R. John
To jrj@combatveteransforcongress.org
Today at 2:38 AM

Why The Genocide of Christians Has Escalated Worldwide (Retransmitted in Entirety)

By Capt Joseph R. John, March 25, 2018: Op Ed # 384

If you click on the below listed link to watch the video, it reveals that over the last 7 years, the Genocide of Christians in the Middle East, and the violent attacks on Christians in Europe have dramatically escalated. The landscape in Europe has significantly changed over the last 8 years, because millions of Muslim Refugees, that have been flooding into Europe, refuse to assimilate; instead they’ve formed heavily populated Muslim enclaves that law enforcement officers avoid entering, because they are aggressively opposed.

If immigrants entering the United States, refuse to assimilate, and oppose the US Constitution as the supreme law of the Republic, the “Unity of Purpose” Americans worked to maintain, for 242 years, that further supported “Freedom of Speech”, “Freedom of Religion”, and the “Liberty of The Individual”, will not survive.

Anti-American Leftists, Socialists, Marxists, Communists, Progressives, the Muslim Brotherhood, CAIR, Radical Islamic Terrorists, George Soros, Russians, Iranians, and the Chinese have collectively tried to break down, America’s “Unity of Purpose”, ”Freedom of Speech”, “Freedom of Religion”, and the “Liberty of The Individual”. The above referenced groups, are executing their anti-Americanism policies by:

Opposing America’s Free Enterprise System, that created the most successful economic engine in the history of mankind, by negotiating inequitable trade agreements with inept representatives of the US Government.
Engaging the US Armed Forces on the field of combat, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and worldwide by Radical Islamic Terrorist, in their attempt to defeat Judeo/Christian policies and practices.
Perpetrating violent demonstration in the streets, and on university campuses, exposing their opposition to the “Rule of Law”, “Freedom of Speech”, “Liberty of The Individual”, and the US Constitution.

The sinister forces, listed above, continue to try to undercut the Republic’s “Unity of Purpose”. Their supporters continue to enter the United States thru the wide open southern border, and thru the corrupt UN Refugee Program, that has excluded Middle East Christians for 8 years. Over 900,000 Middle East and African Muslim Refugees, were resettlement in 187 cities throughout the US over the 8 years of the Obama administration.

The FBI has investigated over 2000 terrorist plots, in all 50 states. Since 9/11, the FBI has gained convictions in 549 Radical Islamic Terrorist plots on US soil; 402 of those terrorist defendants were foreign born immigrants or refugees. Former Director of the FBI, James Comey, said fifteen percent (15%) of the 2000 terrorist cases under investigation(or roughly 300), can be attributed to 900,000+ refugees, referred to above.

The Federal Government must severely restrict the entry of Middle East Muslim Refugees on the terms they were allowed to enter the US, for the 8 years of the Obama administration, during that period the FBI was prevented from interviewing the refugees to determine if they had terrorist ties.

The United States is the only country in the world that accepts one million legal immigrants each year. The Department of Homeland Security must follow US Immigration Laws, and Congress must finally fund a program to seal the wide open southern border.

Copyright by Capt Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. The material can only posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without the permission from the author

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62

Capt USNR(Ret)/Former FBI

Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC

2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184

San Diego, CA 92108

http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

https://www.facebook.com/combatveteransforcongress?ref=hl

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8

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From: Rosalin Schiller
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2018 6:05 PM
To: Rosalin Schiller
Subject: New Center Video with Robert Spencer – Persecution of Christians

This is a link to a very important video of our March 21 Speaker, Robert Spencer.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/269616/robert-spencer-video-why-muslim-persecution-frontpagemagcom

This video (link above) of Robert Spencer is on the topic of Muslim Persecution of Christians. It coincides with a just released pamphlet by Robert. It is critically important that we bring more attention to this issue. We will be sending this video to activists, the media and to public officials across America. Thank you for all of your support!

Michael Finch

David Horowitz Freedom Center

These Five Questions About The Eric Greitens Indictment Must Be Answered
‘Unlike anything I’ve ever seen in all my years of law enforcement’
Dave Grossman
By Dave Grossman
March 8, 2018

Three members of the Duke lacrosse team were accused of rape in 2006. Tried in the court of public opinion and hung out to dry by their university, the boys were later declared completely innocent. After the fact, it was called a “tragic rush to accuse,” and it left the boys’ reputations ruined, a prosecutor disbarred and jailed, and a country reckoning with how it fell for the narrative the media pushed.

It’s worth keeping that case in mind as another graduate of Duke, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, stands in the crosshairs of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner. Greitens was indicted for felony invasion of privacy, in a case with dynamics that seem strikingly similar to the Duke lacrosse case — a prosecutor who may have brought an indictment based more on politics than facts, and a public that may be judging too quickly.

It is my personal opinion that Gardner may be guilty of malpractice and malfeasance on par with the Duke lacrosse case, but with potential to do far greater harm to our nation. Her misconduct is of such a magnitude that she should be investigated and possibly disbarred. If she is found to be guilty of malfeasance, like the infamous prosecutor in the Duke rape case, she too should face criminal charges.

I know Gov. Greitens. I wrote a review for his book, and as a fellow military officer I developed a deep admiration for him. I co-presented with him at a school safety conference in Missouri. I also train police in all 50 states, and I have provided training for all federal law enforcement agencies. My books are required reading in many federal and local law enforcement academies. I have had articles published in the Harvard Journal of Law and Civil Policy and many leading law enforcement journals, and I have been inducted as a “Life Diplomate” by the American Board for Certification in Homeland Security, and a “Life Member” of the American College of Forensic Examiners Institute. From all these perspectives — as a fellow military officer, a law enforcement trainer, and an American citizen — I am simply outraged by what appears to be partisan political bias and egregious injustice represented by this prosecution.

Five questions about the legitimacy of this case demand an answer.
1. Where is the police report?

Our legal system typically works like this: someone commits a crime against someone else. The victim calls the police, who file a report and conduct an investigation. A prosecutor uses the police documents to get an indictment, and a trial begins.

That’s how the system is supposed to work. But in this case, the indictment came down without a police report. It came without a full investigation. And — astonishingly — it came without a victim seeking justice. We know, from prior reporting, that the person who the Circuit Attorney has alleged is the victim never went to the police and never brought an action against Greitens. Indeed, her only complaint has been that this case was brought into the public to begin with. She asked for privacy, and the prosecutor gave her a circus.

Remember how this case first came to light: An aggrieved ex-husband recorded the victim without her consent or knowledge. A television station, Missouri’s KMOV, had shabby enough editorial standards that they chose to run that recording on the nightly news, even as other news organizations passed on it. And that, it turns out, is all that was used by the prosecutor to bring a charge: a secret recording by an angry ex-husband, and a news report.

That’s hardly the stuff of which felony indictments should be made.
2. Where is the evidence?

Gardner’s allegation depends on one question: did Greitens take a compromising photo of the alleged victim in the spring of 2015 and transmit it? Through feints and hints in the media, the prosecution claimed to have such a photo. Some in the media believed them. Not so. Based on discovery delivered to the defense just a few days ago, the prosecution was forced to admit that it has no photo. The damning piece of evidence — the keystone for their entire case — doesn’t exist.

So what other evidence do they have? None. Yes, you read that correctly: There is no other evidence in their possession. The prosecution admitted as much in testimony before the judge this past week. They pleaded with the judge to allow their office to let them have the summer to “gather the evidence.”

Sorry, but Gardner has it backwards. Evidence is supposed to lead to an indictment, not the other way around.
3. Why did the FBI, the U.S. Attorney, and the police refuse to look into this case?

In words she must surely want to take back, the spokesman for Gardner’s office admitted to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, when asked about other law enforcement agencies who looked at this case, “The police, the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office declined to investigate for various reasons.”

That’s telling: The indictment and takedown of a governor is a big deal for any law enforcement agency. And yet no one bit. Gardner shopped this case to other agencies, and those agencies saw no evidence of a crime and decided not to investigate.

That’s also important because those institutions, particularly the U.S. Attorney and the FBI, are responsible for dealing with public corruption. In fact, they have a whole unit devoted to just that. Had there been evidence to suggest a crime by a high state official, surely they would have brought action. That none of them have is an important signal.
4. What’s the deal with the private investigators?

For reasons unknown, Gardner’s office did not use police detectives or even its own office investigators to look into the Governor’s actions. That’s highly unusual. Standard operating procedure for a public prosecutor is to use public resources to conduct an investigation. What Gardner did instead was pay a Michigan-based firm $10,000 to come to Missouri and look into the matter.

There are a few troubling elements to this. First, why an out-of-state firm? Surely there are Missouri-based private investigators who could have been contracted to do this work just as well. Second, were these individuals sworn in? That’s done when using private investigators in this sort of action; it ensures that the people doing the question-asking bear a responsibility to the court and to the law. Third, who was paying them? If taxpayer dollars were paid to these individuals, the public has a right to know. And if they were paid for with private funds, that’s an even bigger red flag.

Finally, why did those investigators travel to Jefferson City, the state Capitol, to talk to politicians? The investigators were first introduced to the public because politicians in the state’s Capitol admitted that they had spoken to them. That begs, even screams, the question: What would politicians in Jefferson City have to say about the facts of a felony indictment about an incident that took place three years ago in St. Louis, before the governor was even in office? These politicians had nothing to do with this case, and what’s worse, many of them have already revealed their biases against Greitens.

Who these investigators are, what they were doing, how they were paid, and why they were used in the first place are all important questions. Already a complaint has been filed about this matter from the association that oversees private investigations in Missouri. Hopefully that complaint yields the answers that haven’t yet been delivered by Gardner.
5. Why did the prosecution want so badly to delay the trial until the fall?

Here’s a final and critical question: Why is the prosecution dragging its feet on the trial date? Just this past week, they asked the judge to delay the trial for several months. One likely answer: They just aren’t ready for trial. As mentioned above, they have plainly admitted they need time to gather the evidence and make an actual case against Greitens.

But the real reason may be more nefarious. The prosecution specifically asked the judge to delay the trial date until just before the mid-term elections on November 6th. Why does that matter? Because it means that Democrats running for office throughout Missouri will be able to use the trial to campaign, fundraise, and win votes. As any Democrat knows, dragging this news on through the summer could pay huge political dividends. As an elected Democrat, Gardner surely knows that.

Thankfully, Greitens attorneys reminded the court that the right to a speedy trial is enshrined in our legal system. The judge denied the prosecution’s request, and thus, denied them the political hay they hoped to make.

These five questions matter.

Had they been asked in a rigorous way about the Duke lacrosse case, those young men might have been spared the humiliating, expensive, and unfair treatment they endured. Once accused of rape, a cloud of suspicion forever hangs above their heads, no matter what announcements or restitutions are made after the fact. That case still angers many people — and with good reason.

Let’s also remember: Someone did go to prison in the Duke lacrosse case. The prosecutor, Mike Nifong. Disbarred and jailed, he was also slapped with a multi-million dollar civil suit. So clear were his political motives, so aggressive was his pushing of a narrative in the media, that nothing could save him once it turned out the whole story was fabricated.

The Duke case teaches a vital lesson for the Greitens case: In the rush to judge a governor by a scandal, let’s not lose sight of the facts. Or in this case the complete lack of facts. It is vital that sober-minded people — in the media, law enforcement, and in the legal profession — continue to ask these questions. I believe that the answers could demonstrate a level of partisan character assassination that would enrage any citizen who believes in our legal system and our way of life.

One public safety official has described this case as simply “nuts” and “unlike anything I’ve ever seen in all my years of law enforcement.” If Gardner is successful in harming a state governor with what turns out to be a malicious, politically motivated prosecution, then every politician and all American citizens should fear the harm that can be done to our nation and to our way of life by such “weaponized” prosecutors with a politically-motivated agenda of prosecution and persecution of elected officials.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman (US Army, ret.) is author of the books, “On Killing,” “On Combat” and “Assassination Generation.” He has been featured on 60 Minutes and 20/20, and has been interviewed on many major networks.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Don Bendell, is a best-selling author with over 3,000,000 copies of his 29 books in print and a Pulitzer prize nomination in 2011, a 100% disabled Green Beret Vietnam veteran, and a 1995 inductee into the International Karate and Kickboxing Hall of Fame, Don is studying for his PhD in Communications at Regent University, has a Masters Degree in Business Leadership from Grand Canyon University, and has 6 grown children and 11 grand-children He and his psychologist wife, Dr. Janet Bendell, own the Strongheart Ranch south of Florence, Colorado named for one of his best-selling westerns.

I have not written an ‘op-ed’ in months, but after the Florida school shooting and all the idiots pontificating, I had to. Don

Guest Editorial by Don Bendell

How We CAN End School Shootings for Good

After the recent school shootings in Florida and immediate attacks on guns, AR-15s, and so-called “assault weapons,” I decided to research, without political agenda,

to see if people like me have been wrong. After all, I am a lifetime NRA member, and was a US Army officer, and Second Amendment advocate.

According to a heavily-researched list of children killed in school shootings since the 1700s, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shootings_in_the_United_States,

I found the pattern that I was curious about. I also strengthened my belief with further research including another Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-Free_School_Zones_Act_of_1990, and a lot of pouring through other writings. I also got some of my information from over a half century of being involved in the

martial arts, primarily teaching and owning martial arts schools. With over a half century of experience, I hold grandmaster ranking in five martial arts, including

10th degree black belts in both jujitsu and judo, 7th degree black belts in ‘tae kwon do’ and freestyle karate, and am a black sash instructor in Muay Thai kickboxing.

During the 18th century there was 1 incident of a school shooting.

During the 19th century there were 28 shootings.

In the 20th century there were 227 shootings.

So far in the 21st century, including the February 14, 2018 shooting, there have been 207 shootings.

Looking at the numbers in the primary article, I found that in the 1990 time frame of school shootings, the figure almost doubled, a drastic increase.

I asked myself, “What did we do differently that caused that jump?”

The answer was easily discovered: The Gun-Free School Zones Act (GFSZA) is an act of the U.S. Congress which was introduced in the U.S. Senate in

October, 1990 by then-Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. It forbids the possession of any

type of firearms within 1,000 feet of any type of school, be it public, private, or parochial. Hence, the signs you see prominently displayed around all schools

now reading, “This is a Gun Free, Drug Free Zone.”

In teaching women and girls sexual assault prevention, I would tell them it is illegal to steal a purse from the front seat of an unattended convertible with the

top down. However, we must use common sense. Just because it is illegal to steal the purse, does not mean you should leave a purse sitting on the front seat

of a convertible while you go work out in the gym at a shopping mall. That is insane, and so are the signs around schools. The Gun Free Zone signs become

welcome mats for cowards, sociopaths, and miscreants. Less danger for the wimp to carry out his shooting rampage without getting shot himself.

There were will never be a successful home invasion or strong-arm robbery at my ranch, not because sheriff’s deputies will arrive in ten or twenty minutes,

but because the aggressors will die a very violent death before law enforcement can even get there. Bad guys know that, so they look for easier targets.

In teaching martial arts over the years, I noticed a distinct change in harried, too-busy adults from parenting, even dysfunctional parenting, which at least

gave children a sense of belonging, to what I call “prescription parenting.” I had patients referred to me by a well-known and highly-respected southern

Colorado pediatrician Dr. Helen M. Danahey, because I was strict, but fair, demanding but not mean. I specialized in children with autism and ADHD because

they needed healthier boundaries, not pampering. I cannot tell you how many parents brought kids in to our schools and had self-diagnosed their child with

ADHD, although I would immediately see that their eyes did not dart around the room when talking to them, a sure sign of the affliction. I concluded most were

simply spoiled brats, but many parents searched until they found doctors who would agree with their Google-inspired diagnoses and put the poor kids on

medications. Hence, I got to teach weeble-sized zombies often-times.

The other thing I noticed while teaching was the high preponderance of children playing video games constantly, and many were games glorifying violence

for the sake of sensation, not for patriotic or noble reasons. The bloodier they would make the games with laser guns, rockets, bombs, and machine guns

the more kids would buy them. I grew up emulating cowboy stars carrying six shooters, or John Wayne-type combat heroes, who would shoot and kill villains,

but for heroic, patriotic, or moral reasons. For years, I have watched the desensitization of our children with video games, or as I call it, “electronic heroin.”

They wantonly shoot and kill bloody victims for no other reason than to achieve a higher score. When those with character defects move from the video game

to the real world, their reward is to get greater media coverage than the previous shooters. Feeling unloved, not listened to, or unfulfilled because a frequently-

absent parent indulges them to make the parent feel less guilty, they strive for the negative attention of the world press and network television, who are only

too eager to oblige. After-all, controversy creates cash, and ratings brings more into their coffers.

AR does not stand for “Assault Rifle,” a term created by anti-gun advocates. It stands for Armalite Rifle.

Those zealots frequently say, “Who needs an assault weapon for hunting?”

Nobody does! They are for sport shooting, collectors, and home and family protection. In World War II, Emperor Hirohito of Japan was going to attack the

United States along the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington, but his generals and admirals stopped him, led by Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto,

Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy who cautioning said,, “There will be an American with a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

The framers of the Second Amendment were not trying to allow for the progression of hunting rifles’ capabilities. Very far-sighted and wise, they wanted to

protect the US citizenry from both foreign invasion and power-mad scoundrels in our own halls of government. That is why we must have semi-automatic

rifles with large magazine capacities. When I was a boy in the fifties, I bought, by mail-order, a BB machine gun which fired BBs rapid fire while I turned a

crank like a Gatling gun, and even in the mid-thirties you could buy an air-cooled .30 caliber machine gun by mail order, and it was delivered to your house

by the postal service, no matter what your age. Automatic weapons were outlawed in 1980, but even back then, there were ZERO mass school shootings.

Do you really want to end mass school shootings? The answers are simple:

1. The news media needs to self-police and stop giving people who kill innocents news coverage. Tell about a shooting, do not name or show the shooter, or over-report the incident. Also, stop politicizing mass murders.

2. If you brought children into this world or adopted any, stop having karate instructors, school teachers, dance teachers, andvideo – games raise your children. Listen to your kids, don’t just bark orders, don’t spoil them because you feel guilty over getting divorced, do things with them. Get involved. If they are not getting your attention, being kids, they will end up getting attention elsewhere negatively.

3. If, God forbid, your family member is killed by a drunk driver, hold the driver responsible, not the car or car-maker. Most people are smart enough to realize this, but want to blame guns when some idiot kills people. 53 year old, Mikhail Popkov, Russian serial killer was a former cop and owned guns, but raped and murdered at least 82 women killing them with knives mainly.

4. Enforce gun laws already in effect, and government officials, actually oversee agencies like the FBI who ignored numerous warnings about the recent mass murderer Cruz in Florida. Investigate when you get such leads.

5. Congress, repeal the well-meaning but very inept Gun-Free School Zones Act (GFSZA) of 1990.

6. Our world has changed. Law Enforcement Officers with guns protect courthouses, congress, the White House, government buildings, but not public schools. Are judges, politicians, and federal and state bureaucrats more precious and important to us than our children? In lieu of the massive overhaul and cost of manning schools with armed security, start a volunteer organization of former well-screened, well-trained veterans and law enforcement officers with concealed carry permits to take turns providing security in all our schools against possible mass-shootings. Hospitals, etc. LOVE volunteers. Volunteers love volunteering!

7. Politicians: STOP IMMEDIATELY turning one group of Americans against another group so you can get votes and political contributions. Start acting like statesmen, not snake-oil salesmen.

No matter how much we close our eyes, smile hopefully, and click our heels together, this problem will not get solved by magic. The perfume of accomplishment is not found in television ads, but in the smell of perspiration and elbow grease from hard work.

My conclusion: The only good gun control is being able to place six rounds in a two-inch bullseye at one hundred yards.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Don Bendell, is a best-selling author with over 3,000,000 copies of his 29 books in print and a Pulitzer prize nomination in 2011, a 100% disabled Green Beret Vietnam veteran, and a 1995 inductee into the International Karate and Kickboxing Hall of Fame, Don is studying for his PhD in Communications at Regent University, has a Masters Degree in Business Leadership from Grand Canyon University, and has 6 grown children and 11 grand-children He and his psychologist wife, Dr. Janet Bendell, own the Strongheart Ranch south of Florence, Colorado named for one of his best-selling westerns.

The Labyrinth of Oppressions
February 26, 2018 12:22 pm / Leave a Comment / Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

When the human experience is simplistically divided into two worlds, then things increasingly do not easily fit.

Specifically, what happens when the number of victims begins to outnumber the pool of oppressors? At that point can the oppressed become victims of the oppressed?

The following news stories illustrate the increasingly incoherent world of the aggrieved and their aggressors:

Item: Nancy Pelosi is on a tour to blast the new tax reform and reduction law, whose savings often will result in $1,000 or more per annum to families. The law already had encouraged private enterprise bonuses to employees due to employer savings. Pelosi habitually scoffs that such savings are “crumbs.” At a recent speech, after she intoned that income inequality would be exacerbated, a woman in the audience shouted out, “How much are you worth, Nancy?”

Fair question. She and her husband, a developer and property investor (with apparently good connections within the bureaucracy of federal construction, land sales, and property acquisitions) are worth over $100 million. They own more than one multimillion-dollar home. And soon the Pelosis are likely to pay tens of thousands of dollars more in California property and income taxes that are no longer fully deductible under the new law that she so energetically despises.

Could that banal fact explain why Pelosi is so heated about a reform that gives the middle class more take-home pay, and will create more jobs and bonuses from the private sector—partly at the expense of blue-state, high-income professionals like herself?

From this teachable moment, we could conclude that progressivism is so often promoted by the very rich. They are best positioned to game the system and seek exemption through virtue-signaling about the poor. The Pelosis of our postmodern world assume that they are not to be subject to the ramification of their ideologies (she dismissed the rude questioning without answering). And they so often exhibit a peculiar contempt for the working middle classes. The latter are clueless, in need of guidance, and supposedly deluded by the promise of “crumbs”—given their lack of education and sophistication, and the absence of the romance accorded to the distant poor. How did we ever get to a point where a progressive politician on the barricades, worth $100 million, lectures the middle class that their extra $200-300 a month are crumbs?

Item: Tavis Smiley is now suing PBS for supposedly “racially hostile” motives in abruptly firing him. His dismissal came in the wake of other fallen NPR and PBS kingpins like Garrison Keillor and Charlie Rose. The latter two allegedly either groped and grossed out female subordinates or leveraged their asymmetrical power to coerce sex.

As of yet, we have no idea whether PBS acted properly in firing Smiley. His severance was predicated on the results of an outside law firm’s investigation that public television commissioned. Legal eagles supposedly found Smiley culpable of numerous liaisons with workplace subordinates (“multiple sexual encounters with subordinates over many years and yielded credible allegations of additional misconduct inconsistent with the values and standards of PBS”). In the old days, he would be presumed innocent until proven guilty, or would have shrugged that two consenting adults are responsible enough to know the often-dicey parameters of either a romantic or merely carnal relationship.

But the point is that these are the new days. PBS has been extraordinary generous to Smiley in giving him show for some 14 years and showcasing his often provocative attacks on conservatives and those whom he claims manipulate to their advantage so-called white supremacy.

But Smiley should know that when one divides the human experience simplistically into victims and oppressors, a progressive hierarchy of supposed exploitation is inevitable. In Smiley’s case, he must also appreciate the always changing calibrations among the vying oppressed.

In the wake of Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo movement, Smiley’s own sense of victimization for now must unfortunately come in a distant second. Indeed, racially based grievances cannot provide exemption from the present climate, in which even unsubstantiated sexual assault charges are treated as convictions requiring only sentencing.

Item: The new “Black Panther” Marvel Comics movie is hailed as both a milestone in the genre and a sign of a new Hollywood. Black screenwriters, producers, and directors not only are supplanting the incestuous old-boy network of Hollywood, but are doing so in spectacularly profitable fashion and entirely on the basis of merit, as adjudicated by profits from audience receipts.

While the film’s noble characters are predominately gifted African-Americans and powerful women, some are now irate that not only are there no gay characters, but rumors persist that an edgy lesbian scene was cut out. Or, as actress Florence Karumba put it of a few lost gay flirtation moments: “The final result that we’ve seen, there were a few scenes that have been cut. Different scenes, also. They didn’t make it into the movie for certain reasons, and at that point, I have to say: What their reason is, I can’t tell you, because nobody told me about whether it’s in or not.” In sum, are all movies supposed to find ways to proportionally represent characters on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, race, and national origin?

From this silly minor kerfuffle, one might infer that the core targeted audience of the comics action film may be African-American youth, males especially. If the lyrics of rap music, the sermonizing of the many of the black churches, or the riffs of African-American comedians are any indication, there is a popular perception that overt homosexuality is not really seen as a civil rights question.

So a cynic might conclude that profits outweighed progressive solidarity: the lesbian edgy parts were cut for fear of offending moviegoers—in a way that might have provoked outrage had the film been a suburban blue-state psychodrama.

Given the profits of the movie, and because the offense did not involve #MeToo and was not an overt rebuke to feminism (cf. the recent scandal over director Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation”), the argument of proportional identity representation goes nowhere.

We are reaching circular firing squad moments—and a topsy-turvy world.

The concept of “disparate impact” is asterisked by the disproportional “meritocracy” of the NFL or NBA. Yet meritocratic Asian admittances at UC Berkeley are seen as some sort of unnatural “overrepresentation,” and thus in the past were carefully and stealthily trimmed. (Isn’t a professional sports billet considered far more lucrative than an undergraduate slot at Berkeley?)

Cultural appropriation aimed at whites is not reciprocal. The doctrine does not absurdly mean that Latinas should not dye their blond, or that talented African-Americans should not become great violinists or opera singers, or that Asian actors should not play Hamlet or Lady Macbeth. But strangely, it does mean that those who are not minorities should not play minority roles, or even adopt for their own the fashions and styles of nonwhite peoples.

We are told that the concealing and carrying of firearms should be outlawed. Armed guards at schools only ensure greater violence. Mace and pepper spray suffice instead of bullets.

Yet politicians, celebrities and marquee athletes require well-armed bodyguards, on the premise that in their unique cases, guns really do both deter and in extremis protect the important. Do armed guards protect or provoke?

Post-Freddie Grey Baltimore has become a far more dangerous place for African-Americans and for small business owners—even as once oppressive and supposedly Neanderthal police became more socially aware and adopted enlightened reforms.

There are a few common denominators to all these paradoxes that overwhelm the daily news.

One, people are people, unique individuals, not monolithic cut-outs of classes, races, or religions.

Two, in comparative global terms, it is hard for anyone to be oppressed in a free-wheeling, rich, and leisured 21st-century America. The efforts to appear so can hinge on the embarrassing.

Three, when movements, such as the identity politics core of progressivism, rely on shared oppressions, and when the categories of the oppressed in many demographic groups outnumber the available oppressors, we should expect a confused competition of grievances.

Four, victimhood cannot serve as the basis of a viable political movement. Contemporary oppression requires a Byzantine regulatory handbook of qualifications, exceptions, and nuances to rank competing reparatory claims on society and culture. How else to account for things like multibillionaire Oprah Winfrey being “discriminated” against in a Swiss boutique on the basis of supposedly not easily being accorded a customer’s look at a $38,000 crocodile-skin handbag? And is such a luxury even permissible in the era of PETA?

Who can calibrate the current plight of California feminist icon, #MeToo leader, and Latina assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, who in the recent past has called for fellow legislators merely accused of sexual harassment to resign from office and to be ostracized by their associates?

Yet Garcia herself now stands accused of sexual assault. She is on temporary sabbatical. She insists she is innocent, won’t quit the legislature, and denies the independent allegation of four subordinates, who claim that they were groped, and propositioned by a supposedly randy Garcia. She now finds herself in a Thucydidean moment in which she yearns for the civil liberty protections that she was so eager to deny to others.

So who will police the police? Who is left to victimize the victims? Is it possible that the oppressed can oppress other oppressed?

Understanding the California Mind
February 22, 2018 9:06 pm / Leave a Comment / Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness

Nancy Pelosi gave a marathon speech on illegal immigration the other day. But how would she know much about the realities of open borders, given her palatial retreat in Northern California and multi-millionaire lifestyle that allows wealthy progressives like herself to be exempt from the consequences of her own hectoring? In the end, the House minority leader was reduced to some adolescent racialist patter about her grandson wishing to look more like his Mexican-American friend.

I was thinking of the San Francisco Democrat’s speech last week, during a brief drive into our local town, in a region that is ground zero of California’s illegal immigration experience.

Illegal immigrants are neither collective saints nor sinners, but simply individuals who arrive from one of the poorest regions in the Americas, without legality or much in the way of English, or high school education.

They encounter an American host that has lost confidence in its once formidable powers of assimilation and integration as well as its ability to mint Americans from diverse races, religions, and ethnicities. Instead, American culture has adopted an arrogant sense that it can ensure near instant parity as redemption for supposed past –isms and –ologies. That may explain the immigrant’s romance for Mexico to which he fights any return, and the ambiguity about America in which he fights to stay.

We dare not mention illegal immigration in California as a factor in the state’s implosion. But privately, residents assume it has something to do with the 20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level. Illegal immigration plays a role in the fact that one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California and that one of four state residents was not born in the United States—or that one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, and that one in four homeless people lives in California.

Note a final statistic. A record of nearly $30 billion a year is forecast to be sent this year as remittances home to Mexico. If the sum is assumed to be wired largely by the reported 11 million illegal aliens, then illegal immigrants are sending per capita around $2,700 home per year. Again, in per capita terms, a household of five would average about $1,100 sent home per month to Mexico—a generosity impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer. (Some might wonder whether the U.S. could tax that sum to build the wall or at least declare that proof of remittances disqualifies one for public support.)

Much Ruin in a State
On the way to town, I passed three neighbors’ parcels. All have something in common: several families are living on lots zoned for single-family residences in an array of illegal sheds, shacks, and stationary trailers. The premises are characterized by illegal dumping, zoning and building code violations, illegal electrical hook-ups, and petty misdemeanors of unlicensed dogs and strays. I remember similar such rural settlements from my early youth in the 1950s, over a decade after the final end of the Great Depression. Now, in our back-to-the-future state, we see some concrete reminders of what my parents used to relate about life in the 1930s.

In this strange “day in the life” melodrama, at the dry cleaner in town, a car collided with mine in the parking lot. We both got out to inspect the fender-bender damage (he had more damage—maybe in the range of $500-800—than I did—probably around $400). I showed him my license, registration, and insurance authentication and asked him to do the same to complete the exchange of information.

But he seemed either to have no license, registration or insurance authentication or was reluctant to show me what he had. I suggested then that we call the police to verify our likely insurance claims, and let them determine whether either one of us was at fault. He said no and suggested instead cash, as if perceived comparative damage outweighed assigning culpability. He spoke limited English. I gave him $50 in cash (all I had in my wallet) and he sped out. I figured that my damage would not have exceeded the insurance deductible and his was likely greater. I suppose he felt a possible insurance claim was not worth even theoretical exposure to deportation. Our negotiation was calm and respectful.

On the way home, I went a different route. The roadside of an adjoining farm parcel has become a veritable dump: I stopped and counted the following sorts of trash piled by the almond orchard: two infant car seats; one entertainment center, three bags of wet garbage, one mattress, one stroller, five tires, and a stack of broken cement, paint cans, and drywall.

Pulling into my driveway, I noticed that a pit bull mix had been dumped at my house during my brief absence (I have already five rescue dogs). We called the animal control officer and are waiting for a reply. I think the result will be predictable, as in the case of my recent misadventure in purchasing expensive solar panels: though they were installed over three months ago, I am still waiting for Pacific Gas and Electric Co., the local utility, to hook the idled system to the grid.

Some time ago I was bitten by two dogs while biking down a rural avenue nearby. The animals’ owners did not speak English, refused to tie up the unlicensed and unvaccinated biters, and in fact let their other dogs out, one of which also bit me. It took four calls to various legal authorities and a local congressional rep to have the dogs quarantined in an effort to avoid rabies shots. The owners were never cited.

The California solution is always the same: the law-abiding must adjust to the non-law-abiding. So I quit riding out here and they kept their unvaccinated, unlicensed, and untied dogs.

All that is a pretty typical day, in a way that would have been atypical some 40 years ago.

Traveling Halfway in Reverse
In California, civilization is speeding in reverse—well aside from the decrepit infrastructure, dismal public schools, and sky-high home prices. Or rather, the state travels halfway in reverse: anything involving the private sector (smartphones, Internet, new cars, TV, or getting solar panels installed) is 21st-century. Anything involving the overwhelmed government or public utilities (enforcing dumping laws, licensing dogs, hooking up solar panel meters to the grid, observing common traffic courtesies) is early 20th-century.

Why is this so, and how do Californians adjust?

They accept a few unspoken rules of state behavior and then use their resources to navigate around them.

1) Law enforcement in California hinges on ignoring felonies to focus on misdemeanors and infractions. Or rather, if a Californian is deemed to be law-abiding, a legal resident, and with some means, the regulatory state will audit, inspect, and likely fine his property and behavior in hopes of raising revenue. That is a safe means of compensating for the reality that millions, some potentially dangerous, are not following the law, and can only be forced to comply at great cost and in a fashion that will seem politically incorrect.

The practical result of a schizophrenic postmodern regulatory and premodern frontier state? Throw out onto the road three sacks of garbage with your incriminating power bill in them, or dump the cooking oil of your easily identifiable mobile canteen on the side of the road, and there are no green consequences. Install a leach line that ends up one foot too close to a water well, and expect thousands of dollars of fines or compliance costs.

2) Elite progressive virtue-signaling is in direct proportion to elite apartheid: the more one champions green statutes, the plight of illegal aliens, the need for sanctuary cities, or the evils of charter schools, so all the more the megaphone is relieved that housing prices are high and thus exclusionary to “them.”

The more likely one associates with the privileged, so too the more one avoids those who seem to be impoverished or residing illegally, and the more one is likely to put his children in expensive and prestigious private academies. One’s loud ideology serves as a psychosocial means of squaring the circle of living in direct antithesis to one’s professions. (I do not know how the new federal tax law will affect California’s liberal pieties, given the elite will see their now non-deductible state taxes effectively double.)

3) California is no longer really a single state. Few in the Bay Area have ever been to the southern Sierra Nevada foothill communities, or the west side of the Central Valley, or the upper quarter of the state. Coastal California is simply far more left-wing than other blue states; interior California is far more right-wing than most red states; increasingly, the former dictate to and rule the latter.

The sharp divide between Massachusetts and Mississippi requires 1,500 miles; in California, the similar cultural distance is about 130 miles from Menlo Park to Mendota. Add California’s neo-Confederate ideas into the equation—such as nullification and sanctuary cities—and we seem on the verge of some sort of secession. (Would the Central Valley follow the path of West Virginia, split off, and remain in the Union?)

4) The postmodern 21st-century state media in its various manifestations is committed to social justice, not necessarily to disinterested reporting. Few read about environmental lawsuits over the planned pathway of a disruptive high-speed rail project; not so in the case of planned state nullification of offshore drilling.

In many news accounts, the race and ethnicity of a violent criminal are deduced in the cynical (and often quite illiberal) reader comments that follow. Is the newspaper deliberately suppressing news information to incite readership, who, in turn, through their commentaries flesh out the news that is not reported and simultaneously spike online viewership by their lurid outrage?

Folk wisdom in California translates into something along the following lines: an unidentified “suspect” in a drunk driving accident that leaves two dead on the side of the road can for some time remains unidentified; a local accountant of the wrong profile who is indicted by the IRS has his name and picture blared.

Progressive Winners and Losers
There are progressive exceptions: universities—in email blast warnings to students and faculty about mere suspects seen on campus in connection with reported burglaries or sexual assaults—are not shy in providing physical characteristics, dress, and perceived racial identities. The media, in other words, feels by massaging its coverage of California realities, it can serve an invaluable role in guiding us to our fated progressive futures—with exceptions for income and class.

Californians, both the losers and beneficiaries of these unspoken rules, have lost confidence in the equal application of the law and indeed the idea of transparent and meritocratic government.

Cynicism is rampant. Law-abiding Californians do whatever is necessary not to come to the attention of any authorities, whose desperate need for both revenue and perceived social justice (150,000 households in a state of 40 million residents pay about 50 percent of California income tax revenue) is carnivorous.

A cynical neighbor once summed up the counter-intuitive rules to me: if you are in a car collision, hope that you are hit by, rather than hit an illegal alien. If someone breaks into your home and you are forced to use a firearm, hope that you are wounded nonlethally in the exchange, at least more severely than is the intruder. And if you are cited by an agency, hope it is for growing an acre of marijuana rather than having a two-foot puddle on your farm classified as an inland waterway.

I could add a fourth: it is always legally safer to allow your dog to be devoured by a stray pit-bull than to shoot the pit-bull to save your dog.

In the former case, neither the owner nor the state ever appears; in the latter both sometimes do.

In a state where millions cannot be held accountable, those who can will be—both to justify a regulatory octopus, and as social justice for their innate unwarranted privilege.

[Californication is moving Eastward. Colorado, once a libertarian populace, has a center of Califonication in the shape of California, no less, straight up and down in its center. Beware of what’s coming.]

Kill Chic
February 20, 2018 4:45 pm / Leave a Comment / Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

In movies, novels, music, and art, progressives murder their enemies, including presidents, in myriad ways.

We live in a society in which gratuitous violence is the trademark of video games, movies, and popular music. Kill this, shoot that in repugnant detail becomes a race to the visual and spoken bottom.

We have gone from Sam Peckinpah’s realistic portrayal of violent death to a gory ritual of metal ripping flesh, as if it is some sort of macabre ballet. Rap music has institutionalized violence against women and the police — to the tune of billions in profits, largely as a way for suburban kids to find vicarious street authenticity. And this idea of metaphorically cutting, bleeding, or shooting those whom you don’t like without real consequences has seeped into the national political dialogue.

For example, why does popular culture wink and nod at the widespread metaphorical killing of Republican presidents? Liberals used to believe that words mattered and images had consequences; the casual glorification of carnage trivialized violence and only made it more acceptable — and likely.

In 2017, the obsessive hatred of Trump led, for instance, to many obscenities: Madonna told us she dreamed of blowing up the White House, comedian Kathy Griffin posed with a bloody facsimile of Trump’s head, Snoop Dog shot a Trump likeliness in a video, a Shakespearean company ritually stabbed Trump-Caesar every night on stage, Johnny Depp joked, “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president? … It has been a while, and maybe it is time.”

But such kill chic is hardly new — and hardly a result of Trump’s sometimes reckless tweets or undisciplined outbursts.

In 2012, a model of the head of former president George W. Bush turned up on a pike in HBO’s Game of Thrones, “by accident” of course. But by then kill-Bush chic was already a tired genre. In the heat of the 2004 election, Alfred A. Knopf had published Nicholson Baker’s novel Checkpoint. It was little more than a boring dialogue of characters dreaming about how to assassinate President Bush. (It’s now “updated” by To Kill the President, by British writer Jonathan Freedland (aka Sam Bourne), a thriller about assassinating a Trump-like president.) In October 2004, long before Johnny Depp’s John Wilkes Booth rant, Guardian guest columnist Charles Brooker lamented that there would be no presidential assassin to kill Bush: “John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?”

The list of “assassinate Bush” public expressions could be expanded — they appeared in a variety of genres, such as Gabriel Range 2006 “docudrama,” Death of a President, which portrayed the successful killing in 2007 of George W. Bush (replete with a president funeral scene).

Between the kill-Bush and kill-Trump chic was the welcomed, calmer hiatus of the eight-year tenure of Barack Obama. True, his critics were often crude, questioning his birth certificate and dredging up stories of his supposedly dissolute youth. But there was, thank God, never an assassination chic among celebrities and in the popular culture associated with Obama, despite the strong passions he often incited. Had there been anything between 2009 and 2017 like Checkpoint or Death of a President, the edgy artist in question would have been ruined if not brought into court and jailed in the manner of the scapegoated Benghazi video-maker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula or perhaps at least surveilled like the journalists Sharyl Attkisson and James Rosen.

More often, Nobel laureate Obama earned hagiography, as journalists hyperbolically compared him to a God or enthused that he was capable of making one’s leg tingle. That piety was often encouraged by Obama himself, who had announced his intention to cool the planet and lower the seas (given recent frigid winters in the American heartland and the near-dry canals of Venice, he may have partially succeeded).

In fact, there was a sort of kill chic that occasionally surrounded Obama — but of a completely different sort.

In January 2016, Obama hosted rapper Kendrick Lamar at the White House. (Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was said to be Obama’s favorite song of 2015). Another Lamar song “BLOOD” (with the lyrics “and we hate the popo”) took on the police at a time when police shootings were in the news. The cover of Lamar’s just-released album at that time, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” depicted a dozen or so African-American young men on the lawn in the front of the White House, celebrating with champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills over the corpse of a white judge at their feet, who sort of resembled Ronald Reagan, with his eyes x-ed out.

Reverse the roles and imagine an invitation to the White House for a country-western singer who had produced such a racialized cover, and one could expect another impeachment resolution. I suppose the Kendrick cover art was meant to imply that the revolution had succeeded — the old white guard was not just gone but, happily, dead, and the time was upon us to bring on the cash and drinks to celebrate the new guard in the White House.

Ignoring Lamar’s racist art and anti-police lyrics is like having your picture taken in 2005 with Louis Farrakhan (“The Jews talk about ‘never again.’… You cannot say ‘never again’ to God because when he puts you in the oven, you’re in one indeed!…‘Never again’ don’t mean a damn thing when God get ready for you!”). Embracing Lamar gave Obama street cred, but with plausible deniability: After all, a public figure cannot be responsible for all the cry of-the-heart expressions of an artist or social activist.

More recently, Obama unveiled his official presidential portrait by the hip artistic sensation Kehinde Wiley. Wiley is an identity-politics conceptual artist who emphasizes his own black and gay identity as essential to his work. He previously had courted controversy on two occasions for recalibrating well-known paintings from the past — reworking the scenes of violence in interracial fashion. In these two paintings, a black woman, sword in one hand, is holding up the severed head of a white women she has just decapitated. Or as Kehinda Wiley once described his black-on-white severances to New York magazine, “It’s sort of a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing.”

What explains the rules of a rather disgusting genre of assassination, decapitation, or kill chic? Most obviously, presidential conservatives are targeted, while Obama flirts with those who artistically indulge in fantasy interracial killings. And the rules over the last two decades seem pretty clear:

1) By their supposedly immoral natures, conservatives have deserved such obscene fantasy invective (Trump with fatal bloody knife wounds and Bush’s head on a pike are almost natural).

In contrast, liberal leaders are moral people. Even to fantasize that their leaders might suffer the same fate is repugnant. The means are different because the ends are, too: equality and social justice versus white privilege and exploitation. Simply put: To achieve progressive agendas, one can explore all the violent avenues of the imagination.

2) Given the long history of racial oppression in the United States, there can be no resort to “what if the roles were reversed?” contextualization (e.g. a talentless pop artist as Trump’s official painter, with a past of substituting blacks for white victims in famous paintings of decapitation, explaining that the reversals were a sort of play on the “kill blacks thing”). Imagining or depicting white decapitation or the murder of a GOP president is an anguished, warranted cry of the oppressed, whereas reversing the racial roles would be proof that racism endures. The art world by nature poses as antithetical to the powers that be; to imagine that it would turn on the establishment forces of social justice is not just unrealistic but absurd.

3) Metaphorically assassinating a Bush or Trump has no real-life ramifications. Lowering the bar of what is culturally acceptable has nothing to do with violence such as a Bernie Sanders supporter shooting Representative Steven Scalise and fellow Republican congressmen. But in the case of progressive targets, lowering the bar just might have real consequences, given the Right’s innate propensity for hate and violence.

Translated, that means that the sober and mellifluous Obama can engage his culturally explorative side — and in his usual judicious tones — while not being especially bothered by the killing chic of Kendrick Lamar or Kehinde Wiley whom he patronizes. All that is a welcomed edgy expression of authenticity and presidential versatility.

And perhaps in the same warped manner, so is the art of ritually killing Bush or Trump in film, art, and literature, through knife, bullet, and bomb: artistically pushing the envelope — and all for a noble cause.

Swamp Things?
February 8, 2018 12:46 pm / Leave a Comment / Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

No doubt people talk indiscreetly when they believe their communications are private; perhaps those in an illicit affair may posture and brag about their self-importance and exaggerate. All that said, when reading through the latest release of the Page-Strzok archive, one is struck not just that the two who eventually were to investigate Donald Trump did not like Trump, but rather that they utterly loathed him, given their banter back and forth included: “God trump is a loathsome human.” Or “And wow, Donald Trump is an enormous d**che.” Or “And Trump should go f himself.” Or “I am riled up. Trump is a f***ing idiot.”

It is hard to imagine how the Mueller investigation was not tainted by such venom — or perhaps the hate is better understood as proof that both were uniquely qualified to serve on the Mueller team doing the holy work deemed necessary to save the progressive project.

And perhaps the two had even more disdain for the supposed white working class who supported this “loathsome human”: e.g., cf., “from buttf*** Texas . . . ” Or “Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support . . . ” Or “Loudon is being gentrified, but it’s still largely ignorant hillbillys [sic].”

Anyone trying to chronicle the supposed pretensions and arrogance of a deep-state, deplorables/irredeemables/clingers/dairy-farmer–hating elite could not make all this up, especially the idea that a Trump supporter gives off a unique odor, real or metaphorical.

Of course, if two FBI amorous agents/attorneys in 2008 were investigating candidate or president-elect Obama and their correspondence was later revealed to be anything like the above about him or his constituents, they would have long ago been fired, no questions asked.

[Right or Left is irrelevant in this matter. These two should be fired, their compensation clawed back, and her bar license permanently revoked. No public servant sworn to uphold the constitution should have such feelings while in office.]

The FISA-Gate Boomerangs
February 6, 2018 2:45 pm / Leave a Comment / Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson // National Review

Some things still do not add up about the so-called Steele dossier, FISA warrants, the Nunes memo, and the hysterical Democratic reaction to it.

A Big Deal or a Nothing Deal?

1) Progressives and Democrats warned on the eve of the memo’s release that it would cause havoc throughout the intelligence agencies, by exposing classified means and processes.

When no serious intelligence expert claimed that the released memo had done such damage, the official response to the memo was suddenly recalibrated by progressives. It went from being radioactive to a “nothingburger.”

The obvious conclusion is cynical: Cry Armageddon to prevent its release, then, after the release, resort to yawns to downplay its significance. An even more cynical interpretation is that Rod Rosenstein, James Comey, and other officials stridently objected to the release of the memo because they are named in it. Comey incoherently mocked the memo’s purported unimportance even while listing all its deleterious effects and the crises that would ensue.

Congressional, DOJ, and FBI resistance to the release of most documents connected to FISA-gate apparently originates with fears that information will either reveal Obama-administration efforts to surveille Trump officials during a campaign or will suggest that the impetus for the Mueller investigation came as a result of illegal activities and a concocted dossier — or both.

2) Critics scream, “Carter Page is no big deal.” Aside from the easy retort that neither, initially, was a petty break-in at the Watergate complex, or rumors of supplying arms to distant guerillas in Central America, Page is a big deal for a variety of reasons.

Democrats allege that, given Carter Page’s familiarity with Russians, it was logical for the Obama administration to use the dossier’s references to him to substantiate FISA warrants.

But is not the opposite more likely true?

He was apparently known to intelligence agencies for years (supposedly under investigation variously by the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network), and he may have been the object of a 2014 FISA warrant. But such intelligence agents were never able to bring charges against him, and it appears he even cooperated with American intelligence in gathering info against the Russians. So why would the FBI and DOJ, suddenly in 2016, believe that mention of Page’s name in an unverified opposition-research dossier warranted four FISA warrants to find wrongdoing?

After all, if he was so well known to the FBI for so many years, during which they never charged him with being a Russian agent, and if the FBI nonetheless still regarded him as suspicious in 2016, why not simply go to a regular court to obtain a warrant to wiretap him? Such a court, of course, would be less secretive, not known for a 99 percent approval rate, subject to far more deliberation, and less useful for surveilling Trump associates.

A more likely supposition is that it was not Page’s past flirtations with the Russians (who supposedly dubbed him an “idiot”) that abruptly brought him back into the sights of the DOJ and FBI in 2016. Instead, it was his brief and minor relationship with Trump, and his appearance in a bogus dossier, that offered useful pretexts for court-ordered surveillance sweeps and indirect targeting of possible Trump associates.

Page was simply a tool, to be surveilled in hopes of also sweeping up other names and information that might corroborate some shred of the dubious Steele dossier. In that narrow sense, his name might as well have been Jones or Smith.

So far, all Carter Page has been found guilty of is momentarily working for the Trump campaign. His likely future lawsuits against Steele, Fusion GPS, the Clinton campaign, the FBI, and the DOJ will probably follow a number of avenues.

3) The New York Times and others strangely have claimed that the dossier-based FISA warrants were not the real basis of the Russian-collusion allegations, given, as the memo implies, that the FISA warrants were issued after FBI agent Peter Strzok had investigated George Papadopoulos, another minor Trump-campaign official of brief tenure.

But there has never been much connection between Page and Papadopoulos, as the Nunes memo also made clear. It is far more likely that Papadopoulos was written off as a dead-end functionary by Strzok, who also claimed to his paramour that there was likely nothing to be found at all in the Russian-collusion investigation. (And indeed Papadopoulos eventually pled guilty to making false statements, not collusion).

More likely, the collusion narrative gained ground only when the Steele dossier energized subsequent FISA requests in October and after the election, resulting in surveillance sweeps.

Moreover, given the admissions by Strzok that he detested Trump and pondered ways of stopping him, and given that he and the FBI were never able to find Papadopoulos indictable on intended collusion charges, it is entirely unlikely that Papadopoulos prompted much of anything.

If he was not a dead end, then the argument could just as well be that an admittedly biased FBI agent hounded a minor, former Trump aide to find collusion, failed to find it, tried to turn him by the usual “false statements” perjury traps, and then Strzok or others around him leaked information about collusion investigations to damage the Trump campaign.

4) Other than Andrew McCarthy of National Review, few have written about the FISA-court application(s) for surveillance of Trump-campaign officials that the FISA court rejected in June 2016, shortly before Trump was nominated as the Republican candidate.

Given that 99.97 percent of FISA requests are eventually granted, why exactly did a federal judge quite extraordinarily reject an Obama-administration FBI-DOJ request? Was it too “broad” or insufficiently sourced in June? And what (or who) had changed by October, when a subsequent request was apparently granted? Was Strzok’s July investigation of Papadopoulos better grounds to surveille Trump associates? Was the dossier (which apparently became known to the FBI as early as June or July 2016) initially used to obtain a warrant, to no avail? Or was the dossier instead used first in October, on a subsequent attempt, and in this case the FISA court granted the warrant?

5) The talented, Trump-hating Peter Strzok was a sort of ubiquitous Zelig of FISA-gate and the most interesting of all the players named so far in the case. He probably convinced Comey to change the wording of his report on Hillary Clinton to prevent criminal liability. He may have started the whole shebang off by investigating George Papadopoulos. He texted away to his mistress and fellow FBI investigator Lisa Page the court secrets of the FBI and Mueller investigations, saying his gut sense was that there was “no big there there” to the entire effort. He interviewed Mike Flynn without Flynn’s lawyer being present, and he probably compared Flynn’s responses in that interview to FISA intercepts. He also met with Andrew McCabe to ponder ways to nullify the Trump ascendency. And unlike his far less talented superiors, he may have been careful to avoid strictly breaking the law.

6) Even less has been written about the Obama administration’s public attitude to the ongoing efforts of its own DOJ and FBI to seek FISA warrants to surveille Trump associates.

Trump (apparently tipped off to prior FISA surveillance of his campaign associates) presciently tweeted on March 4:

Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2017

Most of the establishment media insisted that Trump’s tweet proved he was unhinged and paranoid. Former Obama White House officials issued haughty denials. Yet it is increasingly likely that Trump received good counter-intelligence on Obama-administration efforts that were either improper or illegal, and likely both.

An Obama communiqué that replied to Trump’s accusation had the inadvertent effect of leaving even more doubt:

A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.

Some have noted that the disavowal was carefully worded. First, it claims that no “White House official” interfered with any independent investigation. Fine, but does that mean other administration officials may have, or that a White House official may have interfered with investigations not deemed “independent”? And does “interfered with” include unmasked? Second, if neither President Obama nor a White House official ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen, does that mean that Obama-appointed DOJ and FBI officials might well have?

The problem may not be that the Obama White House itself had ordered surveillance of Trump associates, but rather than it sat back and enjoyed the wide berth granted to its DOJ and FBI investigators.

In support of the Obama denial, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, to take one example, at the time issued an embarrassing second denial in a “fact check” that was soon made inoperative by leaks about ongoing FISA-warranted surveillance of Trump officials:

The Washington Post for months has sought to confirm this report of a FISA warrant related to the Trump campaign but has been unable to do so. Presumably other U.S. news organizations have tried to do so as well. So one has to take this claim with a huge dose of skepticism.

The Wrongdoer in Chief: Obama?

In this context, one of the final executive orders of the Obama administration takes on new significance. Shortly before leaving office, Obama abruptly issued yet another expansion of the Reagan-era Executive Order 12333, dramatically enlarging some 17 government agencies’ legal authority to surveille U.S. citizens — an order that had followed even earlier expansions of the number of officials privy to surveilled information. Why such a radical move in the last days in office?

The practical intent of that order might have been inadvertently contextualized by Evelyn Farkas, a former assistant deputy secretary of defense. On MSNBC’s Morning Joeshow, she blurted out:

I was urging my former colleagues and — and frankly speaking, the people on the Hill, it was more actually aimed — aimed at telling the Hill people, “Get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration.” Because, I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior people who left. So it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy that the Trump folks, the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. So I became very worried, because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more. We have very good intelligence on Russia. So then I had talked to some of my former colleagues, and I knew that they were trying to also help get information to the Hill.

What exactly did she mean by “how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians”? Was the DOD also privy to FISA-ordered surveillances, or did DOD staffers simply read the passed-around Steele dossier and other memos?

What Farkas was probably outlining was an eleventh-hour attempt to leak, perhaps improperly and illegally, surveillance and classified gossip to as many government agencies as possible as well as sympathetic congressional leaders, in hopes that the information would flood out (as it did) before the incoming Trump administration could stop such illicit dissemination of improper government surveillance.

At some distant point, investigators and the media will conclude that the nexus of wrongdoing was likely Barack Obama himself. Aside from the massaged investigations of Hillary Clinton’s wrongdoing, during the election of 2016 and the Trump transition of November 2016 to January 2017, Obama allowed his DOJ and the FBI to manipulate the FISA courts to surveille an American citizen and indirectly target others. He then made sure such data were disseminated among as many administration hands as possible. And he further allowed his subordinates to unmask surveilled citizens, whose identities and (in some cases conversations) were ultimately leaked to news organizations.

That was a process of leaking and sensationalism that sought first to damage the Trump campaign. Ultimately, it succeeded in creating overwhelming public and official Washington pressure to justify James Comey’s later efforts to angle for the appointment of a special counsel.

The House Intelligence Committee’s “phase one” memo, as Nunes has described it, limits itself to the likely wrongdoing of DOJ and FBI officials.

One would expect that phase two and beyond would examine the nature of the surveillance itself, the number of Obama intelligence and political officials who had access to such information, the exact requests of named officials to unmask Trump associates, and the correlations of such unmasking with the roughly simultaneous appearance of such names in the media.

Both Watergate and Iran-Contra were multiyear affairs. FISA-gate may last longer, given that the media this time around are not a watchdog, but an enabler, of government misconduct. We are at the very beginning of the exposure of wronging by Obama-era DOJ and FBI officials — and their superiors — and have not begun to learn exactly why and how American citizens were improperly monitored, and by whom. In one of the strangest moments in the history of American journalism, Washington reporters and agencies, known for their loud interests in protecting civil liberties, are either silent or working to suppress news of these scandals, and they may well soon rue their own complacency.

Nor have we learned the full nature of why and how Obama-era investigative agencies departed from normal protocol in exonerating Hillary Clinton from criminal liability during a number of 2015–16 controversies. Presumably there are records, official and otherwise, of these matters; they should come to light as soon as possible.

What seems clear is that the present hysteria about the Trump administration was already deeply seeded in the federal government throughout the 2016 campaign and the 2016–17 transition. A number of powerful Obama officials thought they had both moral right and the administrative means to nullify Trump. And they were not shy in breaking the law to exercise them.

Are We Free to Discuss America’s Real Problems?
January 2018 • Volume 47, Number 1 • Amy Wax

Amy Wax
University of Pennsylvania Law School

Amy WaxAmy L. Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she has received the Harvey Levin Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence. She has a B.S. from Yale College, an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. She is a former assistant to the United States Solicitor General, and her most recent book is Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century.

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The following is adapted from a speech delivered on December 12, 2017, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

There is a lot of abstract talk these days on American college campuses about free speech and the values of free inquiry, with plenty of lip service being paid to expansive notions of free expression and the marketplace of ideas. What I’ve learned through my recent experience of writing a controversial op-ed is that most of this talk is not worth much. It is only when people are confronted with speech they don’t like that we see whether these abstractions are real to them.

The op-ed, which I co-authored with Larry Alexander of the University of San Diego Law School, appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on August 9 under the title, “Paying the Price for the Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture.” It began by listing some of the ills afflicting American society:

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries.

We then discussed the “cultural script”—a list of behavioral norms—that was almost universally endorsed between the end of World War II and the mid-1960s:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

These norms defined a concept of adult responsibility that was, we wrote, “a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.” The fact that the “bourgeois culture” these norms embodied has broken down since the 1960s, we argued, largely explains today’s social pathologies—and re-embracing that culture would go a long way toward addressing those pathologies.

In what became perhaps the most controversial passage, we pointed out that cultures are not equal in terms of preparing people to be productive citizens in a modern technological society, and we gave some examples of cultures less suited to achieve this:

The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.

The reactions to this piece raise the question of how unorthodox opinions should be dealt with in academia—and in American society at large.

It is well documented that American universities today, more than ever before, are dominated by academics on the left end of the political spectrum. How should these academics handle opinions that depart, even quite sharply, from their “politically correct” views? The proper response would be to engage in reasoned debate—to attempt to explain, using logic, evidence, facts, and substantive arguments, why those opinions are wrong. This kind of civil discourse is obviously important at law schools like mine, because law schools are dedicated to teaching students how to think about and argue all sides of a question. But academic institutions in general should also be places where people are free to think and reason about important questions that affect our society and our way of life—something not possible in today’s atmosphere of enforced orthodoxy.

What those of us in academia should certainly not do is engage in unreasoned speech: hurling slurs and epithets, name-calling, vilification, and mindless labeling. Likewise we should not reject the views of others without providing reasoned arguments. Yet these once common standards of practice have been violated repeatedly at my own and at other academic institutions in recent years—and we increasingly see this trend in society as well.

One might respond, of course, that unreasoned slurs and outright condemnations are also speech and must be defended. My recent experience has caused me to rethink this position. In debating others, we should have higher standards. Of course one has the right to hurl labels like “racist,” “sexist,” and “xenophobic” without good reason—but that doesn’t make it the right thing to do. Hurling such labels doesn’t enlighten, inform, edify, or educate. Indeed, it undermines these goals by discouraging or stifling dissent.

So what happened after our op-ed was published last August? A raft of letters, statements, and petitions from students and professors at my university and elsewhere condemned the piece as racist, white supremacist, hate speech, heteropatriarchial, xenophobic, etc. There were demands that I be removed from the classroom and from academic committees. None of these demands even purported to address our arguments in any serious or systematic way.

A response published in the Daily Pennsylvanian, our school newspaper, and signed by five of my Penn Law School colleagues, charged us with the sin of praising the 1950s—a decade when racial discrimination was openly practiced and opportunities for women were limited. I do not agree with the contention that because a past era is marked by benighted attitudes and practices—attitudes and practices we had acknowledged in our op-ed!—it has nothing to teach us. But at least this response attempted to make an argument.

Not so an open letter published in the Daily Pennsylvanian and signed by 33 of my colleagues. This letter quoted random passages from the op-ed and from a subsequent interview I gave to the school newspaper, condemned both, and categorically rejected all of my views. It then invited students, in effect, to monitor me and to report any “stereotyping and bias” they might experience or perceive. This letter contained no argument, no substance, no reasoning, no explanation whatsoever as to how our op-ed was in error.

We hear a lot of talk about role models—people to be emulated, who set a positive example for students and others. In my view, the 33 professors who signed this letter are anti-role models. To students and citizens alike I say: don’t emulate them in condemning people for their views without providing a reasoned argument. Reject their example. Not only are they failing to teach you the practice of civil discourse—the sine qua non of liberal education and of democracy—they are sending the message that civil discourse is unnecessary. As Jonathan Haidt of NYU wrote on September 2 on his website Heterodox Academy: “Every open letter you sign to condemn a colleague for his or her words brings us closer to a world in which academic disagreements are resolved by social force and political power, not by argumentation and persuasion.”

It is gratifying to note that the reader comments on the open letter were overwhelmingly critical. The letter has “no counterevidence,” one reader wrote, “no rebuttal to [Wax’s] arguments, just an assertion that she’s wrong. . . . This is embarrassing.” Another wrote: “This letter is an exercise in self-righteous virtue-signaling that utterly fails to deal with the argument so cogently presented by Wax and Alexander. . . . Note to parents, if you want your daughter or son to learn to address an argument, do not send them to Penn Law.”

Shortly after the op-ed appeared, I ran into a colleague I hadn’t seen for a while and asked how his summer was going. He said he’d had a terrible summer, and in saying it he looked so serious I thought someone had died. He then explained that the reason his summer had been ruined was my op-ed, and he accused me of attacking and causing damage to the university, the students, and the faculty. One of my left-leaning friends at Yale Law School found this story funny—who would have guessed an op-ed could ruin someone’s summer? But beyond the absurdity, note the choice of words: “attack” and “damage” are words one uses with one’s enemies, not colleagues or fellow citizens. At the very least, they are not words that encourage the expression of unpopular ideas. They reflect a spirit hostile to such ideas—indeed, a spirit that might seek to punish the expression of such ideas.

I had a similar conversation with a deputy dean. She had been unable to sign the open letter because of her official position, but she defended it as having been necessary. It needed to be written to get my attention, she told me, so that I would rethink what I had written and understand the hurt I had inflicted and the damage I had done, so that I wouldn’t do it again. The message was clear: cease the heresy.

Only half of my colleagues in the law school signed the open letter. One who didn’t sent me a thoughtful and lawyerly email explaining how and why she disagreed with particular points in the op-ed. We had an amicable email exchange, from which I learned a lot—some of her points stick with me—and we remain cordial colleagues. That is how things should work.

Of the 33 who signed the letter, only one came to talk to me about it—and I am grateful for that. About three minutes into our conversation, he admitted that he didn’t categorically reject everything in the op-ed. Bourgeois values aren’t really so bad, he conceded, nor are all cultures equally worthy. Given that those were the main points of the op-ed, I asked him why he had signed the letter. His answer was that he didn’t like my saying, in my interview with the Daily Pennsylvanian, that the tendency of global migrants to flock to white European countries indicates the superiority of some cultures. This struck him as “code,” he said, for Nazism.

Well, let me state for the record that I don’t endorse Nazism!

Furthermore, the charge that a statement is “code” for something else, or a “dog whistle” of some kind—we frequently hear this charge leveled, even against people who are stating demonstrable facts—is unanswerable. It is like accusing a speaker of causing emotional injury or feelings of marginalization. Using this kind of language, which students have learned to do all too well, is intended to bring discussion and debate to a stop—to silence speech deemed unacceptable.

As Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, we can make words mean whatever we want them to mean. And who decides what is code for something else or what qualifies as a dog whistle? Those in power, of course—which in academia means the Left.

My 33 colleagues might have believed they were protecting students from being injured by harmful opinions, but they were doing those students no favors. Students need the opposite of protection from diverse arguments and points of view. They need exposure to them. This exposure will teach them how to think. As John Stuart Mill said, “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

I have received more than 1,000 emails from around the country in the months since the op-ed was published—mostly supportive, some critical, and for the most part thoughtful and respectful. Many expressed the thought, “You said what we are thinking but are afraid to say”—a sad commentary on the state of civil discourse in our society. Many urged me not to back down, cower, or apologize. And I agree with them that dissenters apologize far too often.

Democracy thrives on talk and debate, and it is not for the faint of heart. I read things every day in the media and hear things every day at my job that I find exasperating and insulting, including falsehoods and half-truths about people who are my friends. Offense and upset go with the territory; they are part and parcel of an open society. We should be teaching our young people to get used to these things, but instead we are teaching them the opposite.

Disliking, avoiding, and shunning people who don’t share our politics is not good for our country. We live together, and we need to solve our problems together. It is also always possible that people we disagree with have something to offer, something to contribute, something to teach us. We ignore this at our peril. As Heather Mac Donald wrote in National Review on August 29: “What if the progressive analysis of inequality is wrong . . . and a cultural analysis is closest to the truth? If confronting the need to change behavior is punishable ‘hate speech,’ then it is hard to see how the country can resolve its social problems.” In other words, we are at risk of being led astray by received opinion.

The American way is to conduct free and open debate in a civil manner. We should return to doing that on our college campuses and in our society at large.

This Civil War – My South Carolina Tea Party Convention Speech
Posted by Daniel Greenfield 27 Comments

(The following is the speech that I delivered this Sunday at the South Carolina Tea Party Coalition Convention in Myrtle Beach. My appreciation to Joe Dugan and everyone involved in organizing it and making it a reality once again. And to Don Neuen and Donna Fiducia of Cowboy Logic Radio for the introduction. And to anyone and everyone still fighting the good fight.)

This is a civil war.

There aren’t any soldiers marching on Charleston… or Myrtle Beach. Nobody’s getting shot in the streets. Except in Chicago… and Baltimore, Detroit and Washington D.C.

But that’s not a civil war. It’s just what happens when Democrats run a city into the ground. And then they dig a hole in the ground so they can bury it even deeper.

If you look deep enough into that great big Democrat hole, you might even see where Jimmy Hoffa is buried.

But it’s not guns that make a civil war. It’s politics.

Guns are how a civil war ends. Politics is how it begins.

How do civil wars happen?

Two or more sides disagree on who runs the country. And they can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge.

That’s the basic issue here. Who decides who runs the country? When you hate each other but accept the election results, you have a country. When you stop accepting election results, you have a countdown to a civil war.

I know you’re all thinking about President Trump.

He won and the establishment, the media, the democrats, rejected the results. They came up with a whole bunch of conspiracy theories to explain why he didn’t really win. It was the Russians. And the FBI. And sexism, Obama, Bernie Sanders and white people.

It’s easier to make a list of the things that Hillary Clinton doesn’t blame for losing the election. It’s going to be a short list.

A really short list. Herself.

The Mueller investigation is about removing President Trump from office and overturning the results of an election. We all know that. But it’s not the first time they’ve done this.

The first time a Republican president was elected this century, they said he didn’t really win. The Supreme Court gave him the election. There’s a pattern here.

Trump didn’t really win the election. Bush didn’t really win the election. Every time a Republican president won an election this century, the Democrats insist he didn’t really win.

Now say a third Republican president wins an election in say, 2024.

What are the odds that they’ll say that he didn’t really win? Right now, it looks like 100 percent.

What do sure odds of the Dems rejecting the next Republican president really mean? It means they don’t accept the results of any election that they don’t win.

It means they don’t believe that transfers of power in this country are determined by elections.

That’s a civil war.

There’s no shooting. At least not unless you count the attempt to kill a bunch of Republicans at a charity baseball game practice. But the Democrats have rejected our system of government.

This isn’t dissent. It’s not disagreement.

You can hate the other party. You can think they’re the worst thing that ever happened to the country. But then you work harder to win the next election. When you consistently reject the results of elections that you don’t win, what you want is a dictatorship.

Your very own dictatorship.

The only legitimate exercise of power in this country, according to the left, is its own. Whenever Republicans exercise power, it’s inherently illegitimate.

The attacks on Trump show that elections don’t matter to the left.

Republicans can win an election, but they have a major flaw. They’re not leftists.

That’s what the leftist dictatorship looks like.

The left lost Congress. They lost the White House. So what did they do? They began trying to run the country through Federal judges and bureaucrats.

Every time that a Federal judge issues an order saying that the President of the United States can’t scratch his own back without his say so, that’s the civil war.

Our system of government is based on the constitution, but that’s not the system that runs this country.

The left’s system is that any part of government that it runs gets total and unlimited power over the country.

If it’s in the White House, then the president can do anything. And I mean anything. He can have his own amnesty for illegal aliens. He can fine you for not having health insurance. His power is unlimited.

He’s a dictator.

But when Republicans get into the White House, suddenly the President can’t do anything. He isn’t even allowed to undo the illegal alien amnesty that his predecessor illegally invented.

A Democrat in the White House has “discretion” to completely decide every aspect of immigration policy. A Republican doesn’t even have the “discretion” to reverse him.

That’s how the game is played. That’s how our country is run.

When Democrats control the Senate, then Harry Reid and his boys and girls are the sane, wise heads that keep the crazy guys in the House in check.

But when Republicans control the Senate, then it’s an outmoded body inspired by racism.

When Democrats run the Supreme Court, then it has the power to decide everything in the country. But when Republicans control the Supreme Court, it’s a dangerous body that no one should pay attention to.

When a Democrat is in the White House, states aren’t even allowed to enforce immigration law. But when a Republican is in the White House, states can create their own immigration laws.

Under Obama, a state wasn’t allowed to go to the bathroom without asking permission. But under Trump, Jerry Brown can go around saying that California is an independent republic and sign treaties with other countries.

The Constitution has something to say about that.

Whether it’s Federal or State, Executive, Legislative or Judiciary, the left moves power around to run the country. If it controls an institution, then that institution is suddenly the supreme power in the land.

This is what I call a moving dictatorship.

There isn’t one guy in a room somewhere issuing the orders. Instead there’s a network of them. And the network moves around.

If the guys and girls in the network win elections, they can do it from the White House. If they lose the White House, they’ll do it from Congress. If they don’t have either one, they’ll use the Supreme Court.

If they don’t have either the White House, Congress or the Supreme Court, they’re screwed. Right?

Nope.

They just go on issuing them through circuit courts and the bureaucracy. State governments announce that they’re independent republics. Corporations begin threatening and suing the government.

There’s no consistent legal standard. Only a political one.

Under Obama, states weren’t allowed to enforce immigration laws. That was the job of the Federal government. And the states weren’t allowed to interfere with the job that the Feds weren’t doing.

Okay.

Now Trump comes into office and starts enforcing immigration laws again. And California announces it’s a sanctuary state and passes a law punishing businesses that cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement.

So what do we have here?

It’s illegal for states to enforce immigration law because that’s the province of the Federal government. But it’s legal for states to ban the Federal government from enforcing immigration law.

The only consistent pattern here is that the left decided to make it illegal to enforce immigration law.

It may do that sometimes under the guise of Federal power or states rights. But those are just fronts. The only consistent thing is that leftist policies are mandatory and opposing them is illegal.

Everything else is just a song and dance routine.

That’s how it works. It’s the moving dictatorship. It’s the tyranny of the network.

You can’t pin it down. There’s no one office or one guy. It’s a network of them. It’s an ideological dictatorship. Some people call it the deep state. But that doesn’t even begin to capture what it is.

To understand it, you have to think about things like the Cold War and Communist infiltration.

A better term than Deep State is Shadow Government.

Parts of the Shadow Government aren’t even in the government. They are wherever the left holds power. It can be in the non-profit sector and among major corporations. Power gets moved around like a New York City shell game. Where’s the quarter? Nope, it’s not there anymore.

The shadow government is an ideological network. These days it calls itself by a hashtag #Resistance. Under any name, it runs the country. Most of the time we don’t realize that. When things are normal, when there’s a Democrat in the White House or a bunch of Democrats in Congress, it’s business as usual.

Even with most Republican presidents, you didn’t notice anything too out of the ordinary. Sure, the Democrats got their way most of the time. But that’s how the game is usually played.

It’s only when someone came on the scene who didn’t play the game by the same rules, that the network exposed itself. The shadow government emerged out of hiding and came for Trump.

And that’s the civil war.

This is a war over who runs the country. Do the people who vote run the country or does this network that can lose an election, but still get its agenda through, run the country?

We’ve been having this fight for a while. But this century things have escalated.

They escalated a whole lot after Trump’s win because the network isn’t pretending anymore. It sees the opportunity to delegitimize the whole idea of elections.

Now the network isn’t running the country from cover. It’s actually out here trying to overturn the results of an election and remove the president from office.

It’s rejected the victories of two Republican presidents this century.

And if we don’t stand up and confront it, and expose it for what it is, it’s going to go on doing it in every election. And eventually Federal judges are going to gain enough power that they really will overturn elections.

It happens in other countries. If you think it can’t happen here, you haven’t been paying attention to the left.

Right now, Federal judges are declaring that President Trump isn’t allowed to govern because his Tweets show he’s a racist. How long until they say that a president isn’t even allowed to take office because they don’t like his views?

That’s where we’re headed.

Civil wars swing around a very basic question. The most basic question of them all. Who runs the country?

Is it me? Is it you? Is it Grandma? Or is it bunch of people who made running the government into their career?

America was founded on getting away from professional government. The British monarchy was a professional government. Like all professional governments, it was hereditary. Professional classes eventually decide to pass down their privileges to their kids.

America was different. We had a volunteer government. That’s what the Founding Fathers built.

This is a civil war between volunteer governments elected by the people and professional governments elected by… well… uh… themselves.

Of the establishment, by the establishment and for the establishment.

You know, the people who always say they know better, no matter how many times they screw up, because they’re the professionals. They’ve been in Washington D.C. politics since they were in diapers.

Freedom can only exist under a volunteer government. Because everyone is in charge. Power belongs to the people.

A professional government is going to have to stamp out freedom sooner or later. Freedom under a professional government can only be a fiction. Whenever the people disagree with the professionals, they’re going to have to get put down. That’s just how it is. No matter how it’s disguised, a professional government is tyranny.

Ours is really well disguised, but if it walks like a duck and locks you up like a duck, it’s a tyranny.

Now what’s the left.

Forget all the deep answers. The left is a professional government.

It’s whole idea is that everything needs to be controlled by a big central government to make society just. That means everything from your soda sizes to whether you can mow your lawn needs to be decided in Washington D.C.

Volunteer governments are unjust. Professional governments are fair. That’s the credo of the left.

Its network, the one we were just discussing, it takes over professional governments because it shares their basic ideas. Professional governments, no matter who runs them, are convinced that everything should run through the professionals. And the professionals are usually lefties. If they aren’t, they will be.

Just ask Mueller and establishment guys like him.

What infuriates professional government more than anything else? An amateur, someone like President Trump who didn’t spend his entire adult life practicing to be president, taking over the job.

President Trump is what volunteer government is all about.

When you’re a government professional, you’re invested in keeping the system going. But when you’re a volunteer, you can do all the things that the experts tell you can’t be done. You can look at the mess we’re in with fresh eyes and do the common sense things that President Trump is doing.

And common sense is the enemy of government professionals. It’s why Trump is such a threat.

A Republican government professional would be bad enough. But a Republican government volunteer does that thing you’re not supposed to do in government… think differently.

Professional government is a guild. Like medieval guilds. You can’t serve in if you’re not a member. If you haven’t been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals. If you aren’t in the club.

And Trump isn’t in the club. He brought in a bunch of people who aren’t in the club with him.

Now we’re seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them. They spy on them, they investigate them and they send them to jail. They use the tools of power to bring them down.

That’s not a free country.

It’s not a free country when FBI agents who support Hillary take out an “insurance policy” against Trump winning the election. It’s not a free country when Obama officials engage in massive unmasking of the opposition. It’s not a free country when the media responds to the other guy winning by trying to ban the conservative media that supported him from social media. It’s not a free country when all of the above collude together to overturn an election because the guy who wasn’t supposed to win, won.

We’re in a civil war between conservative volunteer government and leftist professional government.

The pros have made it clear that they’re not going to accept election results anymore. They’re just going to make us do whatever they want. They’re in charge and we better do what they say.

That’s the war we’re in. And it’s important that we understand that.

Because this isn’t a shooting war yet. And I don’t want to see it become one.

And before the shooting starts, civil wars are fought with arguments. To win, you have to understand what the big picture argument is. It’s easy to get bogged down in arguments that don’t matter or won’t really change anything.

This is the argument that changes everything.

Do we have a government of the people and by the people? Or do we have a tyranny of the professionals?

The Democrats try to dress up this argument in leftist social justice babble. Those fights are worth having. But sometimes we need to pull back the curtain on what this is really about.

They’ve tried to rig the system. They’ve done it by gerrymandering, by changing the demographics of entire states through immigration, by abusing the judiciary and by a thousand different tricks.

But civil wars come down to an easy question. Who runs the country?

They’ve given us their answer and we need to give them our answer.

Both sides talk about taking back the country. But who are they taking it back for?

The left uses identity politics. It puts supposed representatives of entire identity groups up front. We’re taking the country back for women and for black people, and so on and so forth…

But nobody elected their representatives.

Identity groups don’t vote for leaders. All the black people in the country never voted to make Shaun King al Al Sharpton their representative. And women sure as hell didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton.

What we have in America is a representative government. A representative government makes freedom possible because it actually represents people, instead of representing ideas.

The left’s identity politics only represents ideas. Nobody gets to vote on them.

Instead the left puts out representatives from different identity politics groups, there’s your gay guy, there’s three women, there’s a black man, as fronts for their professional government system.

When they’re taking back the country, it’s always for professional government. It’s never for the people.

When conservatives fight to take back the country, it’s for the people. It’s for volunteer government the way that the Founding Fathers wanted it to be.

This is a civil war over whether the American people are going to govern themselves. Or are they going to be governed.

Are we going to have a government of the people, by the people and for the people… or are we going to have a government.

The kind of government that most countries have where a few special people decide what’s best for everyone.

We tried that kind of government under the British monarchy. And we had a revolution because we didn’t like it.

But that revolution was met with a counterrevolution by the left. The left wants a monarchy. It wants King Obama or Queen Oprah.

It wants to end government of the people, by the people and for the people. That’s what they’re fighting for. That’s what we’re fighting against. The stakes are as big as they’re ever going to get. Do elections matter anymore?

I live in the state of Ronald Reagan. I can go visit the Ronald Reagan Library any time I want to. But today California has one party elections. There are lots of elections and propositions. There’s all the theater of democracy, but none of the substance. Its political system is as free and open as the Soviet Union.

And that can be America.

The Trump years are going to decide if America survives. When his time in office is done, we’re either going to be California or a free nation once again.

The civil war is out in the open now and we need to fight the good fight. And we must fight to win.

Mythologies of Illegal Immigration
January 23, 2018 1:27 pm / Leave a Comment / Victor Davis Hanson
By Victor Davis Hanson| American Greatness

The illegal immigration debate has come to a head once again. Congress remains at an impasse over a temporary spending bill that Senate Democrats refuse to support unless it includes a provision that would allow several hundred thousand illegal aliens to remain in the United States without fear of deportation. It’s a tiresome ploy by the Democrats, abetted by their allies in the media, using deceptive language to paint a false picture that blurs the distinction between legal and illegal, citizen and foreigner, justice and injustice.

Enough obfuscation. Here are some of the most pernicious myths of illegal immigration, debunked.

The System is “Broken”
Broken for whom exactly? Not for Mexico and Latin America. Together they garner $50 billion in annual remittances. The majority of such transfers are likely sent from illegal aliens.

Some of that largess is also subsidized by the entitlements American taxpayers pay that free up this disposable cash for sending abroad. In the eyes of Mexico and Latin America, the only thing that would make our system appear “broken” would be enforcing existing U.S. immigration law.

Or perhaps “broken” would be defined as novel ways of paying for Trump’s wall—by either taxing remittances or so discouraging illegal immigration that a reduction of dollar outflows could be counted (at least rhetorically) as down payments on border construction.

The immigration system is also clearly not broken for the Democratic Party. It has turned California blue. It soon will do the same to Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, and someday may flip Arizona and Texas.

If the statist, redistributionist, and identity politics principles of the Democrats no longer appeal to 51 percent of the electorate, then why would they give up on the annual investment in nearly hundreds of thousands of new arrivals that by some means, and in the not too distant future, would translate into loyal, politically predictable voters for whom this approach to politics is second nature?

Employers believe the system is anything but broken. Any good news for the country about skyrocketing minority employment numbers is likely to be bad news for them if it means declining numbers of cheaper illegal aliens to hire. Open borders have ensured the hiring of industrious workers at cheap wages while passing on the accruing health, educational, legal, and criminal justice costs to the taxpayer. The present system is “working” well enough for this crowd; its possible replacement instead would be defined as “broken.”

Ethnic tribunes support illegal immigration. If the border were closed and the melting pot allowed to work, the façade of identity politics would vanish in a generation.

Recently added accents would be dropped. Hyphenated names would disappear. Trilled r’s would become rare. La Raza/Chicano/Latino Studies programs would become about as popular as Basque or Portuguese. If immigrants from Mexico came in measured numbers, legally, with high-school diplomas, and along with diverse immigrants from all over the world, then rapid assimilation and integration would soon render them politically individuals, not tribes. Someone like California Senate Leader Kevin de León (born Kevin Alexander Leon) would never have needed a preposition and an accent mark.

Broken? More likely, most welcomed.

Illegal aliens, of course, believe the present system is working well, at least compared to the possible alternatives. Legal applicants, still faithfully believing in a now-nonexistent system, wait in line. Those south of the border simply cross.

The moment Mexican citizens—unlike Poles, Australians, or Koreans—reach American soil they or their children, in theory, will become categorized as a minority eligible for government affirmative action and preferred hiring. It is as if Los Angeles or Reno had something to do with the centuries-long racial oppression by an ethnically Spanish-legacy elite 500 miles south of the border.

American elites welcome illegal immigration, both for the cheap labor and for the opportunity to virtue signal their magnanimity, perhaps as much as they seem rarely to live adjacent to the barrio or keep their children in schools that are impacted by immigrants, and or shop where English is rarely spoken.

In sum, the system is working for everyone. It is broken only for the naïfs who worry over the long-term consequences of rendering the law null and void, and of ceding our culture to arriving populations for the most part not yet accustomed to the habits that sustain personal and political freedom.

But the “Dreamers”!
There are 700,000-800,000 DACA recipients, though no one knows the exact numbers. Nor is there a clear definition of who constitutes the population of the “Dreamers,” other than arriving into the United States illegally as a minor. It is an ossified concept, one frozen in amber, given that the average age of a so-called “Dreamer” around 25. When a Dreamer reaches 40, is he still defined as a Dreamer? Or have his “dreams” already come true?

Naturally, minors should not be penalized for the transgressions of their parents. But a large percentage of the DACA cohort is now six or more years into adulthood. Yet upon turning 18 apparently, most have made little effort to obtain either green cards or citizenship.

College graduation and military service are often referenced as DACA talking points. In truth, some studies suggest that just one in 20 dreamers graduated from college. One in a 1,000 has served in the military. So far, about eight times more Dreamers have not graduated from high school than have graduated from college.

Dreamers represent less than 10 percent of all illegal aliens residing in the United States. They are also a fraction of the ignored millions of foreign students from all over the world who seek, often in vain, to study in the United States or are skilled applicants for green cards. Such depressing statistics about DACA might not matter—if supporters of open borders did not always cite incomplete or misleading data.

Weaponizing the Language
Most of the vocabulary surrounding illegal immigration is both politicized and weaponized—as we have seen with “Dreamers.”

Illegal immigration is conflated with legal immigration in order to smear critics with charges of biases against the “other” rather than of simply expressing concerns over legality and sovereignty. By progressive prepping of the linguistic battlefield, some conservatives feel a continued need to “prove” they are not racists by granting more and more exemptions from immigration laws.

“Sanctuary cities” are not “sanctuaries” in the manner we think of a cathedral in a Victor Hugo novel. They are nullification centers where foreign nationals who have broken laws are not subject to full enforcement of immigration laws, due entirely to political considerations.

“Sanctuary city” is not an abstract philosophical term. None of the current sanctuary cities would agree in principle with other jurisdictions in similar fashion nullifying federal laws that advanced left-wing policy objectives. The sobriquet is a euphemism for 1850s-style proto-Confederate, states-rights chauvinism, dressed up similarly in pseudo-moralistic terms.

“Undocumented immigrant” suggests that the problem is a matter of forgetting to bring legal documents, rather than a decision to ignore the need for legal authorization. To become “un-documented” one might first have had to become “documented.” Yet almost no illegal aliens ever were registered as immigrant applicants.

“Undocumented” replaced the adjective “illegal,” just as “immigrant” (and increasingly just “migrant”) superseded the noun “alien.” That is, when the Democratic Party realized that swelling Latino populations began to vote en masse and could salvage what its failing message could not.

At that point, around 2010 or so, the old Democratic and progressive admonitions about illegal immigration cutting the wages of the poor, impeding unionization, and siphoning away social welfare entitlements from the citizen poor were finally and completely jettisoned (along with the language once used by Jimmy Carter and the Clintons). Euphemisms replaced descriptive vocabulary in efforts to construct a new reality.

“Diversity” is often associated with illegal immigration. In fact, the majority of illegal immigrants come from Latin American and Mexico. They are hardly diverse. Real diversity would be recalibrating immigration to be legal, meritocratic, and aimed at roughly equal representation from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe—and thus politically unpredictable.

Political Epithets: Racism and Xenophobia
The cargo of illiberal accusations is likewise constructed, given the United States is the most pro-Latino country in the world, Mexico included. Half of all immigrants, both legal and illegal, come either from Mexico or Latin America—a sort of inverse racism that assumes illegal Spanish-speaking immigrants are intrinsically more deserving of U.S. residence than legal immigration applicants from Uganda, South Korea, or Ukraine.

The constitution of Mexico carefully delineates all sorts of offices that are not open to naturalized citizens. It lists a variety of immigration offenses that result in automatic deportation or imprisonment—the constant theme being Mexico wants skilled immigrants who can help Mexico (consistent with its constitutional prohibitions against any immigration that might adversely affect “the equilibrium of the national demographics”).

What is also not diverse is Mexico and Latin America. The vast majorities of the population there share roughly similar ethnic heritages and a common language and religion; small numbers of minorities such as blacks are treated as second-class citizens.

Strange, too, are the outward theatrics and themes of illegal alien activism—the frequent waving of Mexican flags, the often loud criticism of a generous host country, the usual demands made upon a foreign nation—mysteriously coupled with the overwhelming desire of millions to enter or remain in the supposedly demonic United States. Waving a flag of a country that one does not wish to return to while shunning the flag of a country in which one very much wishes to reside is incoherent.

What is humane and progressive is defining people by the content of their character rather than by their superficial appearance or ethnic affinities—a notion contrary to the engine of identity politics. Finally, many ethnic activists are accepting that reality. Why otherwise would the National Council of La Raza belatedly at last drop the nomenclature of “The Race” shortly after the 2016 election to become UnidosUS (“us united”)?

Is America Great or Not?
The entire image of the United States has been smeared in most discussions of illegal immigration.

The thrust of ethnic studies departments, the narratives of open borders activists, the pageantry and symbolism of mass immigration demonstrations, and the chauvinism embedded into popular culture is mostly couched in implicit anti-Americanism. At least we are led to believe that a culpable America has done wrong in the present and the past, and has to restore its morality by allowing open borders and illegal immigration. But who are the arbiters of American ethics? Vicente Fox? MS-13 gang-bangers? Those whose first act in entering America was to break its laws?

Millions are fleeing paradigms that they apparently judged as wanting, either politically, economically, or socially, or all that and more. Why, then, would foreign nationals have ceased romanticizing their new generous hosts upon their arrival and begun idealizing, instead, their rejected birthplace? And if these are their true feelings on the matter, why did they leave?

Second, there rarely is expressed any formal analysis of why one wishes to enter the United States and leave one’s home country.

What, then, exactly makes a naturally rich Mexico rather poor and naturally poor New Mexico rather rich? Why is Venezuela a mess and Colorado is not? Has anyone prohibited Mexico from reformatting its constitution to ensure an independent judiciary, the rule of law, a free-market economy, the protection and free sale of private property, a bill of rights, unfettered free speech, a meritocratic civil service, transparency in law enforcement, and an ethnically blind culture?

The question is not just mindless American boosterism. In the past, immigrants accepted that they had left Ireland, Italy, or Poland because habits, customs, and government in their home countries were deemed wanting and unworkable, and therefore it was necessary to embrace their antitheses in the United States. It would have made no sense to flee from Italy and expect to live life in America on the premises that an Italian lived in Italy. Immigration, again brutally or not, is a complex two-step hard bargain that succeeds only when one accepts his chosen country—and de facto rejects the collective protocols of his birthplace.

Why do these mythologies abound? Largely because Americans, the hosts, either cannot anymore even define their own civilization to would-be immigrants, or are so intimidated that they are terrified to even try.

A Few Words About Words

Don’t know about you, but I have been somewhat amazed & amused by the outpouring of distress regarding the use of the vulgar word” shithole”. (Thanks to John Kerry, who brought the word back from extinction, shall we say kerfuffle?)

Now, as an Officer of Marines, I worked very hard at avoiding obscene verbiage, although admittedly some times without success. The avoidance of profane language was, in truth, a much greater challenge. With regard to vulgar terminology well let’s say I learned at the feet of the most talented and original users and creators of vulgar terminology: Marine Staff Non-Commissioned Officers!

The essential element in the deciphering of any language, be it orthodox or non-orthodox, is identifying to what does the word infer or refer. In the case of the word in question, shithole refers to a PLACE and not a person or a people. For one to refer in a vulgar manner to a person or a people, the appropriate term would be “shithead” or “dickhead” or better yet, the more popular “asshole”.

Typically, the word shithole would be used in two consecutive and highly dependent sentences: Jeez, what a “shithole”! followed immediately by Clean this shithole up!!. In neither sentence does the word shithole refer to its inhabitants, although there may be an asshole or two in the group.

No doubt Marines and our brethren Soldiers clearly comprehend this distinction. Air Force officers surely would not use such language, and besides, they have contract laborers to clean things up. Similarly, the use of the word would be beneath the dignity of a Navy officer; that’s why they have Chiefs and Swabbies.

Like many of you to whom this email is addressed, I have been to a shithole or two in my time. I believe I know of which I speak. Certainly, we have seen our share in SEA, but until you have stood in some wadi shithole in the Sudan or Somalia or Oman, well, you haven’t lived!

So, in the interest of enlightening the over-educated, yet blithely ignorant masses, you have my permission to disseminate the important distinction in the use of vulgar terminology I have attempted to illuminate.

Peace be with you. Semper Fidelis!

Tony Latorre

Col USMC (Ret)

What I Learned in the Peace Corps in Africa: Trump Is Right

By Karin McQuillan

Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a community center in a rural town. Life was placid, with no danger, except to your health. That danger was considerable, because it was, in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, “a fecalized environment.”

In plain English: s— is everywhere. People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your food, the water. He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water. Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country. Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism.

Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame Cathedral. The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his head not to see.

I have seen. I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant things are not true.

Senegal was not a hellhole. Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures’ terms. But they are not our terms. The excrement is the least of it. Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.

As a twenty-one-year-old starting out in the Peace Corps, I loved Senegal. In fact, I was euphoric. I quickly made friends and had an adopted family. I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man. People were open, willing to share their lives and, after they knew you, their innermost thoughts.

The longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us. The truths we hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese. How could they be? Their reality is totally different. You can’t understand anything in Senegal using American terms.

Take something as basic as family. Family was a few hundred people, extending out to second and third cousins. All the men in one generation were called “father.” Senegalese are Muslim, with up to four wives. Girls had their clitorises cut off at puberty. (I witnessed this, at what I thought was going to be a nice coming-of-age ceremony, like a bat mitzvah or confirmation.) Sex, I was told, did not include kissing. Love and friendship in marriage were Western ideas. Fidelity was not a thing. Married women would have sex for a few cents to have cash for the market.

http://admin.americanthinker.com/images/bucket/2018-01/203589_5_.pngWhat I did witness every day was that women were worked half to death. Wives raised the food and fed their own children, did the heavy labor of walking miles to gather wood for the fire, drew water from the well or public faucet, pounded grain with heavy hand-held pestles, lived in their own huts, and had conjugal visits from their husbands on a rotating basis with their co-wives. Their husbands lazed in the shade of the trees.

Yet family was crucial to people there in a way Americans cannot comprehend.

The Ten Commandments were not disobeyed – they were unknown. The value system was the exact opposite. You were supposed to steal everything you can to give to your own relatives. There are some Westernized Africans who try to rebel against the system. They fail.

We hear a lot about the kleptocratic elites of Africa. The kleptocracy extends through the whole society. My town had a medical clinic donated by international agencies. The medicine was stolen by the medical workers and sold to the local store. If you were sick and didn’t have money, drop dead. That was normal.

So here in the States, when we discovered that my 98-year-old father’s Muslim health aide from Nigeria had stolen his clothes and wasn’t bathing him, I wasn’t surprised. It was familiar.

In Senegal, corruption ruled, from top to bottom. Go to the post office, and the clerk would name an outrageous price for a stamp. After paying the bribe, you still didn’t know it if it would be mailed or thrown out. That was normal.

One of my most vivid memories was from the clinic. One day, as the wait grew hotter in the 110-degree heat, an old woman two feet from the medical aides – who were chatting in the shade of a mango tree instead of working – collapsed to the ground. They turned their heads so as not to see her and kept talking. She lay there in the dirt. Callousness to the sick was normal.

Americans think it is a universal human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It’s not. It seems natural to us because we live in a Bible-based Judeo-Christian culture.

We think the Protestant work ethic is universal. It’s not. My town was full of young men doing nothing. They were waiting for a government job. There was no private enterprise. Private business was not illegal, just impossible, given the nightmare of a third-world bureaucratic kleptocracy. It is also incompatible with Senegalese insistence on taking care of relatives.

http://admin.americanthinker.com/images/bucket/2018-01/203590_5_.pngAll the little stores in Senegal were owned by Mauritanians. If a Senegalese wanted to run a little store, he’d go to another country. The reason? Your friends and relatives would ask you for stuff for free, and you would have to say yes. End of your business. You are not allowed to be a selfish individual and say no to relatives. The result: Everyone has nothing.

The more I worked there and visited government officials doing absolutely nothing, the more I realized that no one in Senegal had the idea that a job means work. A job is something given to you by a relative. It provides the place where you steal everything to give back to your family.

I couldn’t wait to get home. So why would I want to bring Africa here? Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on our shores with a visa.

For the rest of my life, I enjoyed the greatest gift of the Peace Corps: I love and treasure America more than ever. I take seriously my responsibility to defend our culture and our country and pass on the American heritage to the next generation.

African problems are made worse by our aid efforts. Senegal is full of smart, capable people. They will eventually solve their own country’s problems. They will do it on their terms, not ours. The solution is not to bring Africans here.

We are lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third-world immigration by the hundred million with chain migration. They tell us we must end America as a white, Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation – to prove we are not racist. I don’t need to prove a thing. Leftists want open borders because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate America. They want to destroy America as we know it.

As President Trump asked, why would we do that?

We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in. I was happy to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor Senegalese. I am not willing to donate my country.

Crudeness, Double Standard, Political Correctness, and “Truth”

By Capt Joseph R. John, January 16, 2018: Op Ed # 379

Once again we are exposed to the double standard of the misleading “radical left of center liberal media establishment”; ignoring what Obama said two short years ago in the attachment, what other elected politicians said listed below, and pouncing out of control on the “truth” President Trump may have uttered this week in the “privacy” of a closed White House meeting. The President, two Senators, and the Secretary of Homeland Security that were in the meeting said President Trump did not say what that squirrely, tattle tale, twofaced, weasel, Durbin leaked to the press in violation of what has come to be expected of a closed and private White House meeting—for the purposes of this Op Ed, I will assume President Trump did say what Durbin said, he said.

Elected politicians who used foul language in public, that the left of center liberal media is trying to cover up, so Americans would think that the one word that may have been uttered by President Trump in the privacy of a closed White House meeting, not in public, was so unbelievable for any elected politician to say, and it was not “Politically Correct”:

President Truman called General MacArthur —“a dumb son of a bitch”

President Kennedy called Canada Prime Minister Diefenbaker —“a dumb son of a bitch”

President Johnson said the difference between Senators and Congressmen—”is the difference between chicken salad and chicken s—-”

President Johnson when chiding Canada Prime Minster Pearson—“you pissed on my rug”

President Obama referred to Libya as a —“a Shit Show’

President Obama when referring to the BP Gulf oil spill wanted to know—“whose ass to kick”

President Obama referred to Kanye West as —“a jackass”

Vice President Garner, Roosevelt’s VP, said the job of VP—“was not worth a pitcher of warm piss”

Vice President Biden called Obama care—“a big f_______ deal”

Vice President Cheney shouted to Senator Leahy on the Senate floor—-“go f___ yourself”

Senator John Kerry on Iraq—“did I expect George Bush to f____ it up?”

Gov George W. Bush called NYT Reporter Clymer—“a major league asshole”

Certain countries are dangerous to even walk around in—I have been in many of them. They have corrupt governments, fail to educate their youth, refuse to take care of their sick and dying, fail to properly feed their citizens, have many bad ideas about governing, have false religions, have population involved in criminal activities with little concern about right or wrong, have broken cultures, have young males who don’t respect women & rape them, in some countries young boys are sexual slaves, in some cultures male adults are engage in sexual activities with barn yard animals, some local water system are full of communicable diseases, in some countries roadside ditches are used as community latrines, some countries have populations who support terrorism, some cultures have extremely poor sanitary & personal hygiene standards, some countries support and promote the drug culture, some countries do not inoculate their citizens to prevent diseases, some countries are full of rubbish on the streets and in the water, some countries have diseased flies and mosquitos repeatedly infecting the population, etc.

When refugees and illegal aliens arrive in the US they are not quarantined, which is required by US Federal Immigration Law and US Public Health Regulations, as immigrants once were at Ricker’s Island. Illegal Aliens have been introducing communicable diseases, that were once eliminated, back into the public school systems. Diseases that were once under control are being exposed to public school children, like ring worm, mumps, Scalia, polio, hepatitis, malaria, scarlet fever, typhus, small pox, yellow fever, etc. Illegal immigrants, without vaccinations, have not only infected school children, they have been infecting many US Border Patrolmen.

Law abiding and tax paying Americans would not want their children or grandchildren to spend every day in public school rooms with refugees and Illegal Aliens, who arrived from the above listed types of unprincipled and undiscipled countries, who have not been quarantined to detect and treat communicable diseases? The Progressives, elected members of Congress, the Washington elite, and the well-known TV anchors from the left of center liberal media establishment, send their children to private schools, they don’t have to worry about having their children get infected with communicable diseases, or to be held back in their education in very slow moving public schools classes because the illegal aliens and refugees can’t speak, write, or understand English.

The long term goal of the US Immigration System should be to have immigrants eventually help improving society. When considering and then approving the entry of foreigner immigrants into the USA, as immigrants have done for over 100 years, they should be required to renounce their loyalty to their countries of origin, and Pledge Allegiance to the United States. Those immigrants seeking to become new American citizens should be interviewed in advance to ensure that they have skills to support the economy of the US, would have the ability to learn skills to support themselves and the economy of the US, and have no ties to Radical Islamic Terrorists.

The US Immigration Service must ensure that future immigrants will not immediately go on welfare like the 900,000+ Middle East Muslim Refugees that Obama brought into the USA over an 8 year period, while he prevented the FBI from interviewing them to determine if they had terrorist ties. At the same time hundreds of thousands of Muslim Refugees were being brought into the US, for 8 years, Obama refused to let any of the 600,000 Middle East Christian Refugees, being housed and fed by the Greek Catholic Relief Society, from ever immigrating to the US.

The continued attempt to muzzle “Free Speech” and those who disagree with the radical left and progressive Saul Alinsky disciples, is not working for the first time in 8 years, ever since the election of President Donald Trump. The radical left and progressives Saul Alinsky disciples warnings to the public and students in schools & colleges, that certain “truths” spoken openly are not “Politically Correct”, is breaking down and is no longer working . That is driving the radical left, the progressives and the left of center liberal media establishment “insane”, they are coming apart at the seams and striking wildly at President Trump.

The press is now regularly openly vilifying and labeling the President of the United States with names that have never been used against any US President in 242 year—President Trump is the most vilified and attacked president in US History being called on the air and on TV such names as racist, Nazi, Hitler, insane, evil, mad, white supremist, a liar, a thug, a rapist, a moron, bigoted, dishonest, KKK, and so many more names.

The left of center liberal media establishment, the democratic party, the Hollywood elite, the radical leftists, progressives, Marxists, Communists, and Socialists are trying to force American citizens to be “Politically Correct” when referring to the flawed, broken, and illegal immigration policies of the Obama administration. Those policies were destroying the Patriotic fabric of the nation, permitting millions of foreign nationals to maintaining their loyalty to their nations of origin, raise Mexican flags over American public schools, illegally vote in elections, and degrade the Family Values of the Republic. To put it in that well known Obama goal, that he intoned on the day of his election “To fundamentally change the nation.”

Nothing scandalizes the radical left and progressives like the “truth”—the radical left and progressives Alinsky disciples feints being shocked by the “truth” spoken openly in public!! Just don’t do it!!! The radical left and progressives have tried to bully and force America’s youth in school and college to agree, that “truths” spoken openly are not “Politically Correct”—-the radical left, progressives, and now liberal professors in college have been trying to muzzle “Free Speech”, and by so doing, are opposing the US Constitution and the principles upon which the Republic was founded.

No one on the right tries to silence radical left speech, but the radical left, yet progressives, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube try to black list, “shadow ban”, demonize, ostracize, “fact check”, censor, and criminalize—-conservative speech, freedom of speech, support for Christianity, Patriotism, support for President Trump, support for the US Constitution, support for the US Armed Forces, support for the American Flag, and support for the government of the Republic

America does not want to become what Europe is becoming, because of the unbridled open borders and massive immigration of millions of refugees from predominately Muslim countries—-those refugees are mostly single young males, who have a multi-year track record of gang raping women in Germany, Sweden, England, Belgium, and France, and perpetrating Radical Islamic Terrorist attacks across Europe and have perpetrated the 9/11 attack and 215 Radical Islamic Terrorist attacks and attempted attacks in the US killing over 3109 and wounding many thousands of Americans on US soil, here in the United States.

When it comes to the great “Shithole” or “Shit Show” that both Obama and Trump intoned, Americans who support the President don’t particularly care—the “truth” may be viewed by the radical left and progressives as not being “Politically Correct”, but because Americans have a President who is not “Politically Correct”, and outspoken just like most hard working Americans, athletes, military personnel, and members of law enforcement. President Trump reminds them of Andrew Jackson, Winston Churchill, Admiral “Bull” Halsey, and/or General George Patton, he is unvarnished, straightforward, truthful, loves his country, is determined to support members of the military, and is doing his best to protect the lives of his fellow American citizens.

Americans look at the results of one year of the Trump administration, and despite the massive opposition President Trump has been faced with, on both sides of the aisle, he has created outstanding results—–on the battlefield against ISIS, in rebuilding the hollowed out US Military, in the economy with the stock market at record highs and 1.7 million new jobs, bringing unemployment down to 4.1 %(the lowest rate in 17 years), in reducing taxes for all Americans, with the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice and 73 US Federal Judges, in withdrawal from the job killing Paris Climate Accord, withdrawal from the massive open borders for millions of immigrants from 12 nations Trans-Pacific Partnership, in eliminating thousands of growth killing regulations saving the US $8,1 billion, expanding energy infrastructure and production, eliminating the tax penalty on all poor Americans who could not afford the cost of the failed Obamacare Insurance Plan, and so much more.

When looking at the options of having another 8 years of Obama’s failed policies, or of having the corrupt policies that would have been a Hillary Presidency, the majority of Americans will take President Trump, even with the “Shithole” comment, if he ever did say that. Americans will take the crude “truths” of President Jackson, President Truman, and President Trump, rather than the lies that continue to emanate daily from the Washington swamp, from the RINOs who have fought President Trump every step of the way, from the progressives who are Saul Alinsky disciples, and from the radical left of center liberal media establishment that no longer even know what the “truth” is at all; the radical left of center media establishment is now infected by the proponents of propaganda that the Russian Communist promoted for 70 years with their outright lies published in Pravda and Investya .

https://www.city-journal.org/html/crudeness-and-truth-15668.html

Copyright by Capt Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. The material can only posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without the permission from the author

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62

Capt USNR(Ret)/Former FBI

Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC

2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184

San Diego, CA 92108

http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

https://www.facebook.com/combatveteransforcongress?ref=hl

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

-Isaiah 6:8

From Resistance to Nullification to What Next?
January 10, 2018 8:22 am / Leave a Comment / Victor Davis Hanson
By Victor Davis Hanson — National Review

Trump’s critics ratchet up to insurrection, but Trump’s tax reforms and our growing economy could derail their dreams.

George H. W. Bush gave up power quietly and turned to charity work and occasional ceremonial speaking after his reelection defeat in 1992. George W. Bush — like Jerry Ford in 1977 and Ronald Reagan in 1989 — did the same when Barack Obama assumed power in 2009.

Unending Presidencies

Recent Democrats emeriti — Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — apparently had a different vision of the post-presidency, unlike the quiet retirement of Lyndon Johnson back to his ranch in 1969. The three saw politics in more Manichean terms, as an existential struggle far too important to cease at the end of a presidential tenure.

Carter freelanced abroad for 30 years in successful quest for a Nobel Prize, but he often undercut presidential diplomacy. He regularly weighed in on the shortcomings of his successors — in a way he would have deeply resented had either Ford or Richard Nixon done the same.

No sooner had Bill Clinton left the presidency than he and Hillary Clinton began the grand plan for a return to the White House in 2009, and, after a setback, then again in 2017. Theirs was a two-decade long post-presidency of glad-handing, politicking, and, to use a euphemism, quid pro quo fund raising.

Barack Obama has already weighed in, including while overseas, on the shortcomings of his successor. His aides, led by Ben Rhodes, are at the forefront of the “Resistance” to thwart the Trump administration. Susan Rice and John Kerry comment regularly on supposed Trump foreign-policy blunders, as do James Clapper and John Brennan — usually in proactive fashion to deflect news accounts that may reflect poorly on their own past tenures.

Resistances

But all that said, we have never quite seen anything like the opposition of the so-called Resistance to the elected presidency that followed the Obama tenure.

There were the initial false charges that pro-Trump Russians had shut down power grids in Vermont. There were frivolous suits claiming that voting machines in three states were rigged. There was an organized, anti-constitutional effort to subvert the Electoral College so that it would not reflect the vote tallies of individual states. On Inauguration Day, there were congressional boycotts of the swearing-in ceremony. There were demonstrations at which, to take one example, Madonna envisioned blowing up the Trump White House.

An entire genre of assassination chic followed. Politicians, celebrities, actors, academics, and wannabees variously reenacted beheading Donald Trump, stabbing him to death, shooting him, torching him, hanging him, or, in the words of Robert DeNiro, dreaming of punching Trump in the face. Few in the media were bothered by the imagery or threats. Yet sometimes the hysteria became real violence — as when Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson’s shot prominent Republican politicians practicing for a charity baseball game, gravely wounding Republican House whip Steven Scalise, or when libertarian senator Rand Paul (present at the Scalise shooting) was attacked and injured by a disturbed neighbor and proponent of socialized medicine.

Formal efforts followed to impeach Trump in his first months of governance. Some evoked the emoluments clause of the Constitution, claiming that Trump had sought the presidency only to profit. Others sought recourse in the 25th Amendment, hoping that he could be removed because of senility, insanity, or debility. A Yale psychiatrist, who has never met Trump, was brought before Congress to confirm that the president was psychologically unfit to continue his office — and then wondered whether he might be physically restrained and forced to undergo examination (apparently unaware that she was getting quite close to advocating a coup d’état and also channeling the old Soviet remedy to political undesirables).

Deep-state bureaucrats and holdover Obama appointees refused to carry out presidential orders and became causes célèbres for violating their oaths of office. Justices were cherry-picked for stays of presidential directives on the basis on their liberal fides — until higher courts overturned their rulings. The Democratic congressional minority made wholescale effort to slow down confirmation of almost every presidential appointment.

Nonpartisan media research organizations found that 90 percent of all news stories concerning President Trump portrayed him negatively — an unprecedented negative rating. Late-night television morphed into 24/7 anti-Trump diatribes.

Journalists as diverse as the New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg and Univision’s Jorge Ramos insisted that reporters could no longer be professionally disinterested in the age of Trump but must become activists to oppose the president and his agendas.

Indeed, the WikiLeaks trove revealed that marquee journalists such as the New York Times’ Glenn Thrush and the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank had actively colluded with the Clinton campaign to massage their news accounts and commentaries. The genre of “fake news” was born — ranging from the trivial of claiming in racist fashion that Trump had removed a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the West Wing to the mythologies of a purported Trump plan to invade Mexico. CNN’s journalists and employees were sometimes fired for inventing anti-Trump narratives, or caught on a hot mic wishing for the president’s jet to crash, or reduced to using scatology to express their hatred. The network achieved a 93 percent negative treatment of all Trump news.

Obama political appointments had sought FISA court orders to surveille Trump associates, then unmasked the names and leaked them to friendly journalists, first, to hamper the Trump campaign, later to subvert the Trump transition. A Clinton opposition dossier, based on paid and unnamed Russian sources, peddled false stories to the FBI and Obama-administration Justice Department officials. It may well have been used to obtain the FISA orders.

Career FBI officers used government communications to express their hatred for the new president. Such bias may have fueled their efforts to warp their investigations. The director of the FBI knowingly leaked confidential notes of his meetings with the president. He probably passed on at least one classified document to a friend, with the instruction that it then be passed to a friendly journalist. James Comey’s hope was to ensure an investigation of the president by a special counsel — a position soon to be filled by his close associate and friend.

The deep-state resistance of bureaucrats ranged from the petty and trivial of refusing to hang the picture of the current president in their offices to the more substantial move of slowing down or refusing outright to carry out presidential directives. America had not seen such opposition to an incoming president since 1861.

If any such resistance had faced an incoming Barack Obama, the cries of outrage, media fury, and legal recourse would have proved overwhelming and been framed as a constitutional crisis. But no such pushback occurred. Instead, in 2009, power was transferred peacefully if not amicably.

Yet, so far, the Resistance, despite helping to drive down presidential approval ratings to the low 40 percent range, has not stopped the Trump agenda. The Mueller investigation will likely settle for face-saving charges against a few Trump officials for crimes not envisioned under its original directives. Its own biases and the FBI’s involvement with the discredited Steele dossier may result in a number of successful appeals of those who confessed or acquittals of those charged.
Nullification

The frustrated Resistance is starting to morph into a more serious crisis of nullification, if not insurrection.

California has just declared itself, in antebellum South Carolina fashion, a sanctuary state. State law supposedly now transcends both local California municipalities that had chosen not to become sanctuary cities and federal immigration law itself. The law is the logical result of the governor’s and the popular culture’s pushback against Trump. Jerry Brown in the past had evoked God to cast aspersion on Trump’s morality: “I don’t think — President Trump has a fear of the Lord, the fear of the wrath of God, which leads one to more humility.” And Brown toured abroad as state commander in chief, as he assured foreign leaders that California was to be dealt with as a near-autonomous country.

One-third of state residents, according to polls, favor Calexit, or withdrawal from the United States. Central to California’s insurrectionist chic is the idea that it is unique and no other state had the moral courage or right to follow its example. California would probably go ballistic, after all, if during the Obama administration, the governor of West Virginia or Kentucky had visited China to cement coal-export agreements that countered Obama policies, or if Utah had declared the Endangered Species Act null and void within its environs, or if Mississippi had decided that federal gun-registration laws would not fully apply within its Second Amendment–sanctuary state.

California apparently has sensed that its nullification efforts are provoking federal officials, and it now scurries to assure Washington that it does not mean to fully oppose all federal immigration efforts. In theory, state officials who bar federal officials from their mandated duties would be subject to federal criminal charges of obstruction. In a more concrete vein, the quarter-built overpasses of the state’s already ossified high-speed rail project — increasingly dependent on federal funds for reactivation — are beginning to resemble an eerie Stonehenge.

Perhaps not by coincidence, the Congress just passed tax-reform legislation that does not allow local and state taxes above $10,000 to be deducted from federal tax returns. For a state that has among the highest sales taxes, the highest property tax assessments in the nation, and highest state-income-tax brackets (rising above 13 percent on the top brackets), the new law doubles the effective state tax rate.

Given that there are a number of low- or no-tax states in California’s neighborhood, and given that the California Democratic party is incapable of reducing the state income rate, the new law may encourage some affluent retirees to flee the state. It would not take many to undermine a key source of state revenue. Note that of some 40 million residents, only about 150,000 individual or household tax returns account for about half of all California income-tax revenue — itself nearly 40 percent of all state income. Note also that progressive California is understandably worried that its affluent tax-paying golden geese may be sacrificed, even while the vast majority of its population will receive sizable tax cuts from the new federal law.
Damning Salvation

In tit-for-tat fashion, will the state seek more nullification measures to push back against the federal government? Legislators are now dreaming of redefining state income tax as deductible “charitable contributions” in order to reinstate federal tax deductions. That pathetic gambit would land an individual filer in the IRS pokey.

Again, California legislators apparently do not realize that any other state could do the same and thereby nullify the entire federal tax system. If they persist, no doubt the Trump Department of Justice would have good grounds to seek indictments against state officials for conspiracy to commit federal income-tax fraud.

So will large blue states continue their defiance of federal laws, whether they involve immigration nullification or their own legalization of marijuana growing and selling? It depends.

Black and Hispanic unemployment rates are now at record lows. Wealthy California high-tech firms like Apple are eager to take advantage of new tax laws and plan to bring back billions of offshored capital that will enrich state coffers.

Declines in illegal immigration, along with an economy running at 3 percent GDP growth, are pushing up the compensation of low-skilled workers in a way that clumsy state-mandated raises in the minimum wage could not.

Ironically, mega-states such as California, Illinois, and New York were close to the brink of insolvency under the calcified Obama economy. But they may enjoy record growth in 2018 that for now mitigates their own regrettable financial decisions. In other words, an expanding economy could turn resistance and nullification into a mostly boutique symbolic enterprise, as thousands of blue-state officials ceremonially damn the policies that may alone offer them salvation.

The End Of The Yankee Imperium
Posted on November 26, 2017

At the very beginning of the 19th century, the New England states were increasingly at odds with the the Southern states. One cause of the discontent was the sense that the slave states had too much power over the Federal government. Another was the decline in trade with Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. The Embargo Act of 1807 and the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809 sharply reduced trade with Britain and France. There was also the rivalry between the North and South, which dated to the founding the colonies.

Discontent with the War of 1812 brought things to a head. The Federalist Party in New England had been agitating for changes in the Constitution, like eliminating the three-fifths compromise. New England newspapers openly discussed secession. The Hartford Convention was a series of meetings among representatives from the New England states to discuss their grievances. The whole project collapsed with the wave of patriotism that resulted from Jackson’s victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans.

This episode in American history has largely been forgotten, mostly because the North won the Civil War fifty years later. The winners write the history books and this bit of history has never fit the narrative. It’s also why the The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina has been erased from the history books. Northern conservatives have made John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment their base. The fact that Locke and Shaftesbury hoped to impose feudalism on the American South is inconvenient.

The point here is that Americans have been raised up on a history of the nation written by Yankeedom. The North won the Civil War so they became the dominant region both legally and economically. Through the 20th century, the North also came to dominate the nation culturally, writing the history books and defining the national narrative. That’s how we get nonsense about the Puritans seeking religious freedom and carving a nation out of the wilderness. Jamestown has been all but erased from the nation’s memory.

The dominance of the North over the rest of the country probably would have petered out in the 20th century, but world events changed the direction of America. Teddy Roosevelt badgered Woodrow Wilson into breaking with American tradition, with regards to getting involved in European affairs. The Yankee desire to dominate North America became a quest to dominate the world. Once the US chose to get into the Great War, the old traditional American conservatism was killed off forever. The Yankee Empire was born.

The aftermath of the Great War, the Depression, World War II and then the Cold War prevented any change in America’s domestic arrangements. These were great unifying events, in that they justified the suppression of anything challenging the established cultural order. The upheavals of the 60’s and 70’s were based in New England, the Upper Midwest and Northern California for a reason. American Conservatism was born at Yale and run out of Connecticut for the same reason. That where the ruling class lived.

All empires end eventually. Often it is from exhaustion, the cost of maintaining the empire having long ago exceeded the benefits. Other times the culture that built the empire runs its course. The empire remains as a brittle outer husk that eventually shatters. Other times, it is a slow, ad hoc retreat back to something resembling normalcy. The Soviet Empire is a good example of this. It’s not been an organized retreat, but it has been a fairly bloodless one. Russia is now back to something close to its historic norm.

America was never built to a be great crusading empire. Even after generations of cultural cleansing, Alabama is still a vastly different place than Vermont. Regionalism is still the defining feature of America. Having one region dominate the others was the fear of the Founders, which is why they struggled to craft a government after independence from the British. The solution was a small federal government that handled a narrow set of things, like war and trade, that could only be done by a central government.

America’s ruling class, especially over the last few decades, have gone to great lengths to explain why providence has ordained America as the world’s peace keeper. The usual suspect have twisted this into a foreign policy of keeping the world safe for the Jewish diaspora. The truth is, the American Empire was always built on serendipity. The total destruction of Europe and the technological backwardness of East Asia left a huge vacuum. The atom bomb locked in the gains of the victors, by locking out all challengers.

The world that birthed the American Empire is long gone. China is now taking up her historic role as the hegemonic power of Asia. Europe is fully recovered, in the material sense, from the 20th century. It is time for Europe to recover culturally and that can only happen when the Yankee Empire recedes. Whether or not the European people have the will to defend themselves from the barbarian hordes to their south, that’s not something that can be decided for them. Europe must live or die on its own.

Domestically, it is long past time for a return to normalcy. The Cold War has been over for 25 years. The rest of the country is economically and demographically in better shape than Yankeedom. The oldest and most sclerotic states in the nation are located in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The election of Trump and the resulting chaos in Washington strongly suggest the rest of the nation is ready to step outside the shadow of Yankeedom. CalExit and similar rumblings from Progressives are another sign of change.

The fact is, America was never a singular nation. It was a hodgepodge of nations, thrown together with degrees of overlap. The regions of the country share a language and share some history, but they are significant different too. America, maybe even all of North America, is better run as a federation, like a continent sized version of Switzerland. The areas where there can be no agreement are delegated to the regions. The areas where the interests are shared are delegated to a Federal state.

That can only come with the end of the Yankee Imperium.

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Song of the Open Road
By Walt Whitman
Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose,

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune – I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road . . .

. . . From this hour, freedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,
Listening to others, and considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me . . .

. . . I inhale great draughts of space;
The East and the West and mine, and the North and the South are mine.

I am larger, better than I thought;
I did not know I held so much goodness.

All seems beautiful to me;
I can repeat over to men and women, You have done such good to me,
I would do the same to you.

I will recruit for myself and you as I go;
I will scatter myself among men and women as I go;
I will toss the new gladness and roughness among them;
Whoever denies me, it shall not trouble me;
Whoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed, and shall bless me.

SIX BOYS, 13 HANDS – A TRUE STORY FROM A TEACHER

Each year I am hired to go to Washington, DC, with the eighth grade class from Clinton, WI where I grew up, to videotape their trip. I greatly enjoy visiting our nation’s capital, and each year I take some special memories back with me. This fall’s trip was especially memorable.

On the last night of our trip, we stopped at the Iwo Jima memorial. This memorial is the largest bronze statue in the world and depicts one of the most famous photographs in history — that of the six brave soldiers raising the American Flag at the top of a rocky hill on the island of Iwo Jima, Japan, during WW II.

Over one hundred students and chaperones piled off the buses and headed towards the memorial. I noticed a solitary figure at the base of the statue, and as I got closer he asked, ‘Where are you guys from?’

I told him that we were from Wisconsin. ‘Hey, I’m a cheese head, too! Come gather around, Cheese heads, and I will tell you a story.’

(It was James Bradley) who just happened to be in Washington, DC, to speak at the memorial the following day. He was there that night to say good night to his dad, who had passed away. He was just about to leave when he saw the buses pull up. I videotaped him as he spoke to us, and received his permission to share what he said from my videotape. It is one thing to tour the incredible monuments filled with history in Washington, DC, but it is quite another to get the kind of insight we received that night.)

When all had gathered around, he reverently began to speak. (Here are his words that night.)

‘My name is James Bradley and I’m from Antigo, Wisconsin. My dad is on that statue, and I wrote a book called ‘Flags of Our Fathers’. It is the story of the six boys you see behind me.

‘Six boys raised the flag. The first guy putting the pole in the ground is Harlon Block. Harlon was an all-state football player. He enlisted in the Marine Corps with all the senior members of his football team. They were off to play another type of game. A game called ‘War.’ But it didn’t turn out to be a game. Harlon, at the age of 21, died with his intestines in his hands. I don’t say that to gross you out, I say that because there are people who stand in front of this statue and talk about the glory of war. You guys need to know that most of the boys in Iwo Jima were 17, 18, and 19 years old – and it was so hard that the ones who did make it home never even would talk to their families about it.

(He pointed to the statue) ‘You see this next guy? That’s Rene Gagnon from New Hampshire. If you took Rene’s helmet off at the moment this photo was taken and looked in the webbing of that helmet, you would find a photograph…a photograph of his girlfriend Rene put that in there for protection because he was scared. He was 18 years old. It was just boys who won the battle of Iwo Jima. Boys. Not old men.

‘The next guy here, the third guy in this tableau, was Sergeant Mike Strank… (from Johnstown, PA). Mike is my hero. He was the hero of all these guys. They called him the ‘old man’ because he was so old. He was already 24. When Mike would motivate his boys in training camp, he didn’t say, ‘Let’s go kill some Japanese’ or ‘Let’s die for our country’ He knew he was talking to little boys. Instead he would say, ‘You do what I say, and I’ll get you home to your mothers.’

‘The last guy on this side of the statue is Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian from Arizona. Ira Hayes was one of them who lived to walk off Iwo Jima. He went into the White House with my dad President Truman told him, ‘You’re a hero’ He told reporters, ‘How can I feel like a hero when 250 of my buddies hit the island with me and only 27 of us walked off alive?’

So you take your class at school, 250 of you spending a year together having fun, doing everything together. Then all 250 of you hit the beach, but only 27 of your classmates walk off alive. That was Ira Hayes. He had images of horror in his mind. Ira Hayes carried the pain home with him and eventually died dead drunk, face down, drowned in a very shallow puddle, at the age of 32 (ten years after this picture was taken).

‘The next guy, going around the statue, is Franklin Sousley from Hilltop, Kentucky. A fun-lovin’ hillbilly boy. His best friend, who is now 70, told me, ‘Yeah, you know, we took two cows up on the porch of the Hilltop General Store. Then we strung wire across the stairs so the cows couldn’t get down. Then we fed them Epsom salts. Those cows crapped all night.’ Yes, he was a fun-lovin’ hillbilly boy. Franklin died on Iwo Jima at the age of 19. When the telegram came to tell his mother that he was dead, it went to the Hilltop General Store. A barefoot boy ran that telegram up to his mother’s farm. The neighbors could hear her scream all night and into the morning. Those neighbors lived a quarter of a mile away.

‘The next guy, as we continue to go around the statue, is my dad, John Bradley, from Antigo, Wisconsin, where I was raised. My dad lived until 1994, but he would never give interviews.

When Walter Cronkite’s producers or the New York Times would call, we were trained as little kids to say ‘No, I’m sorry, sir, my dad’s not here. He is in Canada fishing. No, there is no phone there, sir. No, we don’t know when he is coming back.’ My dad never fished or even went to Canada. Usually, he was sitting there right at the table eating his Campbell’s soup. But we had to tell the press that he was out fishing. He didn’t want to talk to the press.

‘You see, like Ira Hayes, my dad didn’t see himself as a hero. Everyone thinks these guys are heroes, ’cause they are in a photo and on a monument. My dad knew better. He was a medic. John Bradley from Wisconsin was a combat caregiver. On Iwo Jima he probably held over 200 boys as they died. And when boys died on Iwo Jima, they writhed and screamed, without any medication or help with the pain.

‘When I was a little boy, my third grade teacher told me that my dad was a hero When I went home and told my dad that, he looked at me and said, ‘I want you always to remember that the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who did not come back. Did NOT come back.’

‘So that’s the story about six nice young boys. Three died on Iwo Jima, and three came back as national heroes. Overall, 7,000 boys died on Iwo Jima in the worst battle in the history of the Marine Corps. My voice is giving out, so I will end here. Thank you for your time.’

Suddenly, the monument wasn’t just a big old piece of metal with a flag sticking out of the top. It came to life before our eyes with the heartfelt words of a son who did indeed have a father who was a hero. Maybe not a hero for the reasons most people would believe, but a hero nonetheless.

One thing I learned while on tour with my 8th grade students in DC that is not mentioned here is, that if you look at the statue very closely and count the number of ‘hands’ raising the flag, there are 13.. When the man who made the statue was asked why there were 13, he simply said the 13th hand was the hand of God.

Great story – worth your time – worth every American’s time. Please pass it on.

Let’s All THINK BEFORE WE DONATE!

Suits in shining armour..and who pays

You can and should check these statements with the charities mentioned before you give or withdraw giving.

A timely reminder before the Holidays and our generous spirits open up our wallets…

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT BEFORE YOU MAKE CONTRIBUTIONS: As you open your pockets to do a good thing and make yourself feel good, please keep the following facts in mind:

The American Red Cross
President and CEO Marsha J. Evans’

salary for the year was $651,957 plus expenses

MARCH OF DIMES
It is called the March of Dimes because

Only a dime for every 1 dollar is given to the needy.

The United Way
President Brian Gallagher

receives a $375,000 base salary along with numerous expense benefits

UNICEF
CEO Caryl M. Stern receives

$1,200,000 per year (100k per month) plus all expenses including a ROLLS ROYCE.

Less than 5 cents of your donated dollar goes to the cause.

GOODWILL CEOand owner Mark Curran profits $2.3 million a year.
Goodwill is a very catchy name for his business.

You donate to his business and then he sells the items for PROFIT.
He pays nothing for his products and pays his workers minimum wage! Nice Guy.
$0.00 goes to help anyone!
Stop giving to this man.

Instead, give it to ANY OF THE FOLLOWING

GO “GREEN” AND PUT YOUR MONEY WHERE IT WILL DO SOME GOOD:

The Salvation Army
Commissioner, Todd Bassett receives a small salary of only

$13,000 per year (plus housing) for managing this $2 billion dollar organization.

96 percent of donated dollars go to the cause.

The American Legion
National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary.
Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!

The Veterans of Foreign Wars
National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary.

Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!

The Disabled American Veterans
National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary.
Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!

The Military Order of PurpleHearts
National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary.
Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!

The Vietnam Veterans Association
National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary.

Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!

Make a Wish: For children’s last wishes.

100% goes to funding trips or special wishes for a dying child.

St. Jude Research Hospital

100% goes towards funding and helping Children with Cancer who have no insurance and cannot afford to pay.

Ronald McDonald Houses

All monies go to running the houses for parents who have critically ill Children in the hospital.

100% goes to housing, and feeding the families.

Lions Club International

100% OF DONATIONS GO TO HELP THE BLIND, BUY HEARING AIDES, SUPPORT MEDICAL MISSIONS AROUND THE WORLD. THEIR LATEST UNDERTAKING

IS MEASLES VACCINATIONS (ONLY $1.00 PER SHOT).

Please share this with everyone you can.

[Re: The Red Cross

Most veterans do not give to The Red Cross because they charged us for coffee & donuts while in the field.

As far as Disaster relief is concerned, if you give to The Red Cross, money or blood, for a Declared National Emergency or Disaster, $0.00 goes to the disaster. Under The Stafford Act, that which authorizes FEMA, during a Declared National Emergency or Disaster, The Red Cross presents a bill to FEMA for ALL of its expenses and expenditures, and WE THE TAXPAYER pay The Red Cross 100% of the costs and expenditures!]

The Re-transmittal of Op Ed 371:

To ensure accuracy in reporting, we are modifying the original transmission of Op Ed 371 as originally sent in the below listed link:

“The National Anthem Protests — Do Facts Matter?”

http://combatveteransforcongress.org/story/national-anthem-protests-do-facts-matter

We originally stated: “Out of those 1696 players, 871 professional football players are convicted felons. “, we should have stated:

“Out of those 1696 professional football players in the NFL, 871 were arrested for felonies or misdemeanors (high priced attorneys may have pleaded some of those felonies down to misdemeanors). The arrest of those 871 professional football players did not engender respect toward Police Officers.”

By clicking on the below listed link, and reviewing the arrest record of the 871 professional football players, each recipient of this E-mail can make their own determination of whether the arrests were for felonies or misdemeanors:

https://www.usatoday.com/sports/nfl/arrests/

To engender the respect of Americans, toward professional football players who take a knee during playing of the National Anthem and their NFL Players Association/Union, we encourage them to click on the two below listed links to read the two articles:

Breaking! The NFL Players Association Was Caught Funneling Money to Nazi Collaborator George Soros

https://constitution.com/breaking-nfl-players-association-caught-funneling-money-george-soros/

NFL Players’ Union teamed up with Nazi Collaborator George Soros to fund leftist advocacy groups

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/oct/5/nfl-layers-union-teamed-george-soros-fund-leftist/

Most Patriotic Americans do not respect professional football players, who take a knee during the National Anthem, by doing so disrespect the American Flag, and whose actions further disrespects the memory of military personnel, thru the ages, who were returned to the US in flag draped caskets, after losing their lives while supporting the Republic.

Copyright by Capt Joseph R. John. All Rights Reserved. The material can only posted on another Web site or distributed on the Internet by giving full credit to the author. It may not be published, broadcast, or rewritten without the permission from the author.

Joseph R. John, USNA ‘62

Capt USNR(Ret)/Former FBI

Chairman, Combat Veterans For Congress PAC

2307 Fenton Parkway, Suite 107-184

San Diego, CA 92108

http://www.CombatVeteransForCongress.org

https://www.facebook.com/combatveteransforcongress?ref=hl

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8