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The Chinese Navy’s Development During 8 Years Of Obama’s Sequestration of the US Navy

By Capt Joseph R. John, June 4, 2018: Op Ed # 390

The below listed Op Ed, by Admiral James A Lyons, Jr. USNA ’52. USN (Ret), discusses how the US Navy could counter China’s blue water navy, and oppose China’s plan to control the South China Sea. Over the last 10 years, China has developed an technically advanced blue water Navy whose goal is to be able to defeat the US Navy with conventional weapons; its rapid technology advances and ship building programs have been fueled by China’s theft of advanced weapons systems and ship designs from US corporations and the US Navy. China’s long range goal is to become the dominate global naval power in the next decade.

China’s plan is to expand its fleet to 351 ships, while the US Navy’s goal is to expand its fleet to 355 ships; Pentagon planners should not be planning parity with China, they should take a page out of President Reagan’s playbook, and develop a larger and more advanced US Navy than China’s Navy. In addition to the Navy’s ship long range building program, in addition it should modernize and recommission a certain number of ships in its reserve fleet.

Over the last 8 years, with no opposition from the Obama administration, China has created 4 artificial manmade island bases on rocky shoals, throughout the South China Sea. China has developed and is implementing a strategic zone offensive plan for the South China Sea, and will most probably create other artificial manmade island bases on rocky shoals. Those island bases can’t be properly defended from a coordinated strike on all four bases, at the same time, by high flying stealth bombers, and submarine launched cruise missiles. There should never be a need for the US Marine Corps to execute four amphibious assaults to take control of those manmade island bases.

When China has 351 ships operating within the restricted area of the South China Sea, the US Navy will still be required to operate half of its fleet, or about 180 ships, in the vast Pacific and the Persian Gulf operating areas. China will therefore have a numerically superior naval fleet operating in the South China Sea. To ensure “Freedom Of The Seas”, the US Navy will be required to coordinate joint naval operations with the Navies of governments who must ensure free and open commercial transit thru the South China Sea (Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, Taiwan, India, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam).

China’s newest destroyer, in reality a light cruiser; has shifted the balance of naval power in the Pacific to China’s advantage, that new advanced destroyer has over the horizon supersonic cruise missile technology; a missile fired from that destroyer will only provide a US Navy ship, a response time of from 15 to 30 seconds to counter the over the horizon supersonic cruise missile fired at it. The US Navy will not have the technology to counter China’s over the horizon supersonic cruise missile threat until about 2025. China’s newest naval ships are on a technological par with US Navy ships, excluding the superior technology of the US Navy’s fleet of aircraft carriers, to China’s one aircraft carrier.

More worrisome than the development of the Chinese Navy’s technically advanced fleet, is the military discipline exhibited by the officers and crews aboard Chinese Naval ships. In the last 10 years, the Chinese Navy has done an excellent job of training it’s, all male, fully manned, shipboard crews, into a heightened state of readiness and military discipline. Compare that to how, Obama’s Social Experiment On Diversity has changed the character, make up, manning, readiness, and military discipline of shipboard crews in US Navy ships. For 10 years, the US Navy has covered up serious shipboard manning and readiness problems. The shipboard manning problems occurs just prior to 6 month deployments of US Navy ships. Deploying Navy ships have experienced many married and single female crewmembers, requesting transfer to shore duty, just prior to deployment, because of their recent pregnancies.

The makeup, and manning, and readiness of crews aboard US Navy ships often required to deploy in reduced states of readiness. The reduced manning results in fewer watch standing sections, less time for training, lack of military discipline, fatigue for being overworked, and a reduced state of readiness. Those problems have been exposed by collision reports explaining what led up to US Navy ship’s collisions at sea and groundings. Those collision reports also exposed the inadequate navigational procedures being followed by bridge and CIC watch standers, and the inability of the command to properly train watch standers because of excessive fatigue, which contributed to collisions and groundings.

Some of the examples of collisions at sea are as follows. On August 21, 2017: ten sailors were killed when the USS John McCain (DDG-56), a guided missile destroyer, collided 50 miles east of Singapore with the ALNIC MC, a 600-foot oil and chemical tanker. On June 17, 2017: seven sailors were killed when the USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62), a guided missile destroyer, was broadsided off the coast of Singapore, by MV CRYSTAL, a Philippines-registered cargo ship. On May 9, 2017: a 70 foot South Korean fishing boat collided on the port side of the USS Lake Champlain (CG-57), a guided missile cruiser, while the cruiser was conducting routine operations in international waters. On Aug. 19, 2016: the USS Louisiana (SSBN-743), a ballistic missile submarine, and the USNS Eagleview (T-AGSE-3), a Military Sealift Command support vessel, collided off the Coast of Washington State, while conducting routine operations in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

In the last 5 years, 90 Commanding Officers of US Navy ships have been relieved of command, because of collisions at sea, ships going aground, aqs a result of inappropriate sexual relations with a crew member (by both male and female commanding officers), and for other reasons brought about by complaints filed by crew members against Commanding Officers on the IG Hotline (posters on Navy bases outline the 4-step Hotline complaint procedure required to turn in senior officers). In light of the fact that so many Commanding Officers are being continually relieved, Obama’s politically correct selection criteria for the selection of new female and male Commanding Officers, should be re-evaluated.

For 8 years, Obama’s Social Experiment On Diversity has negatively affected the character, make up, military discipline, unit cohesiveness, training, unit moral, and “Combat Effectiveness” of members of the US Armed Forces. The Cadets and Midshipmen matriculating at the five service academies have been indoctrinated in politically correct leadership techniques, and their “Honor Codes” been negatively affected by the Social Experiment On Diversity—Honor Code violators are now being put thru retraining programs (sometimes as many as three times), violators are no longer being dismissed.

Lt David Nartker, the US Naval Academy Class of 2011, surrendered his two heavily armed 49 foot riverine command patrol boats with 10 sailors in the Persian Gulf, to a single smaller and less armed Iranian speed boat “without a fight.” Naval Academy Alumni still wonder how the Social Experiment On Diversity, affected Lt Nartker view of John Paul Jones’s doctrine of “Don’t Give Up the Ship”, and would like to know how Lt Nartker training permitted him to beg for forgiveness from his Iranian captors who forced him and his crew down to their knees.

The leadership being provided in the US Navy by some of Obama’s politically correct, pre-screened Flag selectees, continue to drive Obama’s Social Experiment On Diversity into the training of the fleet and at the US Naval Academy to this day. Witness the celebration of Gay Pride Month at the Pentagon and on US Naval Bases, despite the fact that “military regulation” specifically prohibits promoting any political agendas on US Military installations.

The military discipline exhibited by the officers and the all-male crews aboard Chinese Navy ships, with their heightened state of readiness, because they are not being hamstrung by Obama’s Social Experiment On Diversity. Obama’s Social Experiment On Diversity continues to negatively affect the character, make up, military discipline, unit cohesiveness, training, unit moral, and “Combat Effectiveness” of the US Navy. Admiral James Lyon’s below listed Op Ed discusses China’s Blue Water Navy.

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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China’s aggressive, bullying tactics in the South China Sea

Admiral James A Lyons, Jr. USNA ’52. USN (Ret) former Commander-in-Chief, US Pacific Fleet

May 31, 2018

Countering China’s Blue Water Navy

Based on China’s massive military expansion over the last two decades, particularly the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Navy, their goal is clearly to challenge the U.S. Navy’s dominance, not only in the Western Pacific, but globally. In a recent hearing before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on 17 May 2018, that was clearly pointed out by two experts on the Chinese threat, Rick Fisher and Captain James Fanell, USN (ret). They explained how the Chinese Navy dramatically expanded from a coastal force to a global threat, capable of challenging the U.S. Navy’s dominant position in the Western Pacific today, and globally in the next decade.

China’s aggressive, bullying tactics in the South China Sea

This new reality is particularly challenging, with the serious decline in our overall military capability and readiness, as a result of the Obama administration’s disastrous sequestration mandate. As a result we now have the smallest Navy since prior to World War I. Nowhere is the Chinese challenge more serious than in the Western Pacific, particularly in the South China Sea. Hegemony over the South China Sea is essential for China to achieve its goal of conquering the free and democratic island of Taiwan. However, the South China Sea is an international strategic waterway through which over $5 trillion worth of commerce transits on an annual basis. The South China Sea remaining free from the threats of China’s Communist regime is critical for not only world commerce but also for our allies Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and certainly Taiwan.

China has continued its aggressive and bullying tactics by creating several artificial islands on contested rocks and shoals in the South China Sea. They have built an air and naval base on Woody Island in the Paracel Group, and also have built new large naval, air, and missile bases on Fiery Cross Reef, Subic Reef, and Mischief Reef. There are now three completed runways of approximately 10,000 feet that can accommodate about 24 aircrafts each. As Rick Fisher pointed out to the Committee, reports in May 2018 indicate that China has now deployed 400-Km range YJ-12 supersonic anti-ship missiles as well as 200-Km range HQ-9B fourth generation surface-to-air missile (SAMs), which would allow the PLA to deny access to most military aircraft as well as commercial airlines and shipping traffic. These man-made islands, in effect, are stationary aircraft carriers. The good news is that since they can’t move, they are vulnerable.

The islands were militarized in spite of a declaration by China’s President Xi Jinping on 25 September 2015, at the White House, saying that that he would not militarize these islands. The double talking should not come as a surprise. As a result, China has been uninvited to participate in this year’s bi-annual RIMPAC multinational naval exercise in the Pacific. They never should have been invited in the first place as it was a form of “appeasement!”

As Fisher pointed out, having built this series of extended bases in the Spratly Island region with no serious opposition, China can plan much greater island-building efforts for the future. Make no mistake, China’s goal is to exercise hegemony over the First Island chain, which includes Taiwan, and eventually, out to the Second Island chain which includes Guam, our key Western Pacific base. Should China be successful in defeating Taiwan, it would be a great strategic win as it would provide greater access for China’s nuclear ballistic submarine fleet to the Pacific open waters.

China’s “Belt and Road” initiative in the Indian Ocean

Likewise, China’s “Belt and Road” initiative in the Indian Ocean, under the guise of developing commercial ports, is providing cover for the development and use of facilities by the Chinese Navy in Sri Lanka and Pakistan. China has also reached into Latin America by attempting to reignite the Falklands War. Fortunately, with a change in the Argentine government that initiative has failed.

The Trump administration’s task, in confronting the Chinese totalitarian threat, is similar to what President Reagan faced in confronting an aggressive Soviet Union in 1981. President Trump has taken a page out of the Reagan playbook by embarking on an aggressive Navy ship building program, but regretfully it is only planned to build the Navy back to 355 ships. To meet our worldwide commitments and raise the deterrence equation, the Navy needs 400 ships. With our reduced domestic shipbuilding capacity it would take more than two decades to achieve that goal. Regretfully, time is not on our side. China will be ready to move more aggressively by 2025. Therefore, to achieve the desired number of ships, we need to think outside the box. We should consider contracting with our allies for constructing ship hulls or more complete frigate-size ships. We also need to reactivate ships from the Navy’s Reserve Fleet and update them with modern equipment. It’s called the Fleet Rehabilitation and Modernization (FRAM) program.

We also need new strategic thinking with our allies in the Western Pacific to counter the rising Chinese threat. The Trump administration has made a move in that direction by calling for Australia, Japan, India, and the U.S. to form a “Quad.” This is a step in the right direction, but it needs to be expanded into a Pacific-type NATO organization which should include all our allies including India. Taiwan should initially be made an associate member. In that regard, Taiwan needs to be equipped with sufficient defense equipment by no later than 2020 to provide a capability to prevent any successful invasion by China. A preplanning staff needs to be established on Guam as soon as possible with all member countries participating. We must quickly raise the deterrence equation by not only increasing our force levels, but also by developing aggressive exercises in contested areas. Time is of the essence.

James A. Lyons, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, was commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations.

Well Bill, I’ve taken a knee too many times because of our flag. Fortunately I haven’t had to do so in a long while. I’m sure I would have great difficulty getting to a standing position if I did so today. When I took a knee it was with a cloth of red, white and blue folded in the shape of a triangle with only a field of blue and white start showing. The cased colors having done its duty, I presented to the family telling them to please accept it as a small token of our nations gratitude for their love one’s sacrifice and service. It’s a hard thing to look them in the eyes and see grief and hope lost for they know they will never see their loved one again. Looking at the children was the worse. What do you say to them that they can understand? I guess it’s fitting to remember all those times today as today is a day of remembrance. A day that we honor them. I wonder how those pampered snowflakes would hold up under such circumstances. Rips your gut out.

Butch DuCote
Master Gunnery Sergeant of Marines

[sent Memorial Day, 2018]

It was written by Stanislaus Drew and Ted Nugent posted it on his Facebook page – yes, THAT Ted Nugent.

Take a little trip to Valley Forge in January. Hold a musket ball in your fingers and imagine it piercing your flesh and breaking a bone or two. There won’t be a doctor or trainer to assist you until after the battle, so just wait your turn. Take your cleats and socks off to get a real experience.

Then, take a knee on the beach in Normandy where man after American man stormed the beach, even as the one in front of him was shot to pieces, the very sea stained with American blood. The only blockers most had were the dead bodies in front of them, riddled with bullets from enemy fire.

Take a knee in the sweat soaked jungles of Vietnam. From Khe Sanh to Saigon, anywhere will do. Americans died in all those jungles. There was no playbook that told them what was next, but they knew what flag they represented. When they came home, they were protested as well, and spit on for reasons only cowards know.

Take another knee in the blood drenched sands of Fallujah in 110 degree heat. Wear your Kevlar helmet and battle dress. Your number won’t be printed on it unless your number is up! You’ll need to stay hydrated but there won’t be anyone to squirt Gatorade into your mouth. You’re on your own.

There are a lot of places to take a knee where Americans have given their lives all over the world. When you use the banner under which they fought as a source for your displeasure, you dishonor the memories of those who bled for the very freedoms you have. That’s what the red stripes mean. It represents the blood of those who spilled a sea of it defending your liberty.

While you’re on your knee, pray for those that came before you, not on a manicured lawn striped and printed with numbers to announce every inch of ground taken, but on nameless hills and bloodied beaches and sweltering forests and bitter cold mountains, every inch marked by an American life lost serving that flag you protest.

No cheerleaders, no announcers, no coaches, no fans, just American men and women, delivering the real fight against those who chose to harm us, blazing a path so you would have the right to “take a knee.” You haven’t any inkling of what it took to get you where you are, but your “protest” is duly noted. Not only is it disgraceful to a nation of real heroes, it serves the purpose of pointing to your ingratitude for those who chose to defend you under that banner that will still wave long after your jersey is retired.

If you really feel the need to take a knee, come with me to church on Sunday and we’ll both kneel before Almighty God. We’ll thank Him for preserving this country for as long as He has. We’ll beg forgiveness for our ingratitude for all He has provided us. We’ll appeal to Him for understanding and wisdom. We’ll pray for liberty and justice for all, because He is the one who provides those things. But there will be no protest. There will only be gratitude for His provision and a plea for His continued grace and mercy on the land of the free and the home of the brave. It goes like this, GOD BLESS AMERICA!

by Stanislaus Drew

Your Address

Your three elected federal members of congress

Re: Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP)
I have recently viewed an interview of Peter Pry, Ph.D., regarding the inadequacy of our defense of our electric grid. Among the many revelations from Dr. Pry, is that protecting our electronic infrastructure would cost less than three billion dollars. Another, is that North Korea, Iran, China, and the Russian Federation, are all decades ahead of us, and are capable of completely destroying the United States and Canada.
What are you doing to protect us?
Respectfully,
Your Signature

The Nature of Progressive Insensitivity
By Victor Davis Hanson

May 15, 2018 6:30 AM

Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Pa., July 27, 2016. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
Why do so many famous social-justice crusaders turn out to be racist and sexist?

Former vice president Joe Biden is back in the news yet again. For a second time, he seems surprised that poor residents of the inner city are capable of doing sophisticated jobs:

We don’t think ordinary people can do things like program, code. It’s not rocket science, guys. So, we went and we hired some folks to go into the neighborhoods and pick 58 women, as it turns out, from the hood, for a 17-week program, if my memory serves me correctly, to learn how to code.

In 2014 Biden had said about the same thing about women from the “hood”:

They asked me to come by this program they had at a community college in the inner city in Detroit. And I walked in and — I think it was a 15-week program — and it was a group of women from the neighborhood. Or, from “the hood.”

What was the point of emphasizing “hood” instead of just “neighborhood”?

Maybe the same condescending reason that the impulsive Biden once in 2016, speaking to a black audience, attacked Mitt Romney with the slavery slander:

He is going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, unchain Wall Street. He is going to put y’all back in chains.

Earlier, Biden had scoffed:

In Delaware, the largest growth of population is Indian Americans, moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.

The locus classicus of Biden’s racialist sloppiness, of course, was his famous putdown-praise of 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama:

I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that liberal politicians and celebrities should be the least likely to express such racist condescension, if only out of cynical careerist and political concerns. Progressives see bloc minority, gay, and female support as vital to their project. The entire thrust of progressive charges of “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” usually lodged against less enlightened and less affluent whites, is that the elite are confident they’ve created a partnership of solidarity with minority activists. All deplore the supposed Neanderthal, red-state, and Trump-supporting white middle class.

Few may now remember the post-election rant of Melinda Byerley, an obscure founder of the Silicon Valley company Timeshare CMO. She became a window into the mind of the furious 2016 progressive voter — and infamous for five minutes for her candid, embittered, post-election Facebook posting that soon was enshrined as a credo explaining why miffed coastal elites hated people unlike them:

One thing middle America could do is to realize that no educated person wants to live in a sh**hole with stupid people. Especially violent, racist, and/or misogynistic ones. . . . When corporations think about where to locate call centers, factories, development centers, etc., they also have to deal with the fact that those towns have nothing going for them.

Certainly, those who blast the clingers, deplorables, and irredeemables cannot themselves be racist or sexists or misogynists or homophobes.

By now, the number of MeToo accusers in the post–Harvey Weinstein era is legion. But increasingly, the most prominent of those accused of sundry harassments and, on occasion, assaults are liberal media and celebrity icons such as Tom Brokaw, Garrison Keillor, Matt Lauer, Ryan Lizza, Charlie Rose, and Tavis Smiley. How can that be?

Aside from the charges of treating women poorly are often the additional writs of racism. Some women, for example, have alleged that Weinstein has replied most vehemently to charges from his non-white victims, such as Lupita Nyong’o and Salma Hayek.

Among all the charges of lurid and cruel behavior leveled against social-justice warrior and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the strangest and most disturbing might have been his racial slurring of his Sri Lankan girlfriend, the Harvard-educated activist writer Tanya Selvaratnam. The socially crusading Schneiderman allegedly called her his “brown slave” and told her to refer to him as her “master.”

Joe Biden’s putdown of Barack Obama in 2008 apparently was xeroxed by liberal icon and former senator Harry Reid, who likewise dismissed Obama as a veritable racial chameleon, a “light-skinned African with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

Reid also once addressed an Asian-American audience and sermonized, “I don’t think you’re smarter than anybody else, but you’ve convinced a lot of us you are.” In the question-and-answer follow-up, Reid offered: “One problem that I’ve had today is keeping my Wongs straight.”

Both liberal Dan Rather and Bill Clinton in the past had offered racist putdowns of Obama that no deplorable or irredeemable would have considered: Here is Rather’s, speaking to Chris Matthews in 2010:

The Republicans will make a case and a lot of independents will buy this argument. . . . a version of, “Listen he’s a nice person, he’s very articulate” this is what’s been used against him, “but he couldn’t sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.”

And here is Bill Clinton, describing Obama in 2010: “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

Remember in 2008, in one of her earlier incarnations, a once national-populist Hillary Clinton was running against Obama by galvanizing the so-called white working classes. Often, she was not shy about saying so: “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” Clinton bragged. As evidence, she cited an Associated Press story that found, in her words, “how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” she concluded.

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There is.

Of course, progressive Obama himself has played the racialist card on occasion. In his memoir Dreams from My Father, he described Gerald Kellman, the first boss he had as a community organizer: “Still, there was something about him that made me wary. A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.” Obama had once positioned his own grandmother as the moral equivalent of the racist and anti-Semitic Jeremiah Wright, his pastor for two decades. He went on to dub her a “typical white person.”

Cable news anchor and anti-Trump activist Joy Reid apparently had posted an entire corpus of homophobic rants in years past. The late Helen Thomas had a history of anti-Semitic slurs. And Ta-Nehisi Coates is never held to account for many of his overt anti-white invectives.

There are various stock explanations for liberal prejudicial outbursts that earn the additional wage of hypocrisy — given progressives’ self-identification as the protectors of minority rights and racial sensitivities.

One, and the most charitable, might be that when one talks about race and gender nonstop, one is more likely to misspeak. Such an interpretation assumes, of course, that these revelations are not windows into one soul, as progressives allege of foul-sounding conservatives.

Was the reprehensible treatment of victimized women felt to be a small price to pay to protect high-profile progressives who were on the front lines of social justice?

Two, do not forget the cynical notion of deterrence. Humans are not necessarily nice people but behave well out of fear of punishments. In such a reductionist view, conservatives assume that one malapropism or sloppy phrase can end a career. Certainly, if a U.S. senator had compiled a record of racially insensitive rhetoric comparable to Joe Biden’s, he would long ago have been ostracized. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly is currently being blasted for clinically and quite accurately describing current waves of immigrants from southern Mexico as mostly poorer, less well educated, and for a variety of reasons less able or willing than earlier waves of immigrants to assimilate quickly. Kelly has certainly has not talked pejoratively about anyone’s skin color in the manner of a Biden, Reid, or Obama.

What exempted Harvey Weinstein or Eric Schneiderman from an accounting years ago was likely progressive cost-benefit considerations — or perhaps even more disturbing rationales. Was the reprehensible treatment of victimized women felt to be a small price to pay to protect high-profile progressives who were on the front lines of social justice? And did Weinstein and Schneiderman bake such calculations into their behavior?

Could not a few women be sacrificed on the altar of progressivism to allow far more to be helped? An even darker corollary is that the monsters like Weinstein and abusers like Schneiderman may have felt they deserved to be sexually rewarded for their progressive fides by progressive like-spirited women — much as feminist reporter Nina Burleigh, during the Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky imbroglio, said she’d have been happy to sexually service Clinton if meant keeping him out of trouble and thus preserving the feminist agenda.

A cynic would conclude that once deterrence is lost and perpetrators have no fear of career or legal consequences, they feel justified in doing as they please and therefore can double down on their crudity. Al Franken certainly seemed surprised that a pro-feminist such as himself should be held accountable for a randy uninvited grab or two.

One analogy is the case of Obama adviser Ben Rhodes, who, in the context of the Iran deal, scoffed at the “echo chamber” and “know nothing” White House press. The Obama administration realized that it was far less likely to be held accountable by the liberal media if it surveilled Associate Press or Fox News reporters, if it weaponized the IRS, if it jailed as a scapegoat for the Benghazi attacks an obscure video-maker, if it warped the FISA courts, and if it improperly surveilled and unmasked political opponents. And so it did all that and more in the absence of media deterrence.

One of the great ironies of the entire 21st-century obsession with race is the fact that supposedly racist lower-middle-class whites are often more likely than gentry whites to live among non-whites.

There is a third and more controversial exegesis. There is a certain progressive profile that is, in truth, biased or at least tribal. One projects one’s own prejudices onto others in the abstract, as a sort of psychological squaring of one’s own shortcomings — or the failure to live the race and class diversity one preaches.

In the last 30 years, we’ve seen the growth of an entire new class of bicoastal gentrified urban elites who are ostensibly — on matters of race, class, and sex — hyper-progressive. But are they really?

Often their rhetoric is belied by their own behavior, if gauged by where they live, where they put their children in school, and the people with whom they socialize. One of the great ironies of the entire 21st-century obsession with race is the fact that supposedly racist lower-middle-class whites are often more likely than gentry whites to live among non-whites. The diversity they experience is a natural expression of shared work, neighborhoods, school, and class, not an artificial and boutique variant of the university, the media, or entertainment.

Also, when one by act and deed demonstrates more comfortability with one’s own tribe, that de facto apartheid can be hard to turn on and off. In contrast, a white truck driver who lives with Mexican Americans, or a Mexican-American carpenter who lives in a working-class neighborhood of whites, realizes there are consequences to racialist slurs. And they are not confined to Twitter virtue-signaling or Internet mobbing but often are muscular and can be dangerous.

I have found race, class, and gender tensions far greater at Stanford University than in San Joaquin Valley rural communities, where difference is incidental and not so essential to one’s person. Perhaps the reason is that people share a lower middle-class existence, or that muscular work tends to outweigh rhetoric and abstraction. When one works and lives alongside someone of a different appearance, there is no need or time or affluence to create a façade of identity politics.

Finally, there is a final and mostly cynical explanation for the recent spate of progressive intolerance. Those who are by nature or habit intolerant mask their resulting guilt or fear by progressive virtue-signaling and occasional inadvertent revelations of their own moral selves.

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In other words, perhaps liberal Harvey Weinstein and social-justice kingpin Eric Schneiderman really did have more contempt for their non-white targets, just as Harry Reid may feel more comfortable with his own kind. And one way that such progressives square the circle of that reality is with an unimpeachable progressive façade — and just maybe that reality is now becoming widely known.

The Ideology of Illegal Immigration
By Victor Davis Hanson

April 10, 2018 6:30 AM

Signs at an immigration reform rally in Chicago, March 27, 2014. (Jim Young/Reuters)
Gang members next door and dead dogs dumped in your yard? Don’t complain, or you’ll be called racist.

Illegal immigration has become so deeply embedded for so long within contemporary power politics, demography, and cultural change, so charged with accusations of racism, nativism, and xenophobia, that we have forgotten its intrinsic contradictions.

We saw a glimpse of reality with the recent “caravan” of Central Americans. With a strong wink and nod from their Mexican hosts, the travelers assumed an intrinsic right to march northward into the United States. Had they done so, they would have confirmed the impression, advanced during the last administration, that the border is porous and that a sovereign United States and its citizenry have scant legal right to secure it.

How did we get to such a point of absurdity?

The ideology of illegal immigration rests on certain illogical assumptions that must not be questioned. Immigration exactly is one-way. But why exactly do we simply accept that without inquiry? What is it about a free-market, constitutional, transparent, and law-abiding America that draws in millions desperate to abandon their homes in otherwise naturally rich landscapes in Mexico and Central America?

In the absence of intellectual honesty about the need for political and economic reform in Latin America, mythologies can abound. Millions are desperate to enter a country antithetical to the protocols of their own. They are even more desperate to stay here — even as many mask that paradox by expressing ethnic and cultural chauvinism, along with anger at their hosts. Witness the signs, flags, and symbols of many open-borders, anti-immigration-enforcement rallies. Apparently, nations that create conditions that drive out their own can be the objects of romance, but only at a safe distance.

The ethos of the Mexican government has become surreal. Its racist and imperial classes welcome the flight of 10 percent of its indigenous population. It assumes that the United States cannot, must not, adopt immigration laws similar to its own. Driving out one’s own people apparently vents social tensions in lieu of reform, and the government is thereby exempted from accountability for its utter failures. About $30 billion arrive in return as remittances, many of these transferences subsidized by American social services and entitlements.

To hide the asymmetry, Mexico becomes accusatory, playing the same role that China does with trade. The aggressive party is always the victimized. Mexico constantly warns us that an anti-American, left-wing presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, may soon be elected.

No other country in the world — certainly not Mexico or China — would allow its open borders to become as politically weaponized as America’s.

But what exactly would the feisty Obrador do in anger: Punish the U.S. by closing the southern border, unilaterally quit NAFTA, accommodate the repatriation of 12 million of its citizens, build a wall of his own, forbid the emigration of the impoverished of Oaxaca, expel U.S. companies and investments, cut off the reception of billions of dollars in American remittances, drive out U.S. citizens, or demand the extradition of its own citizens now in American jails and prisons? And what would be the U.S. reaction to such “punitive” measures?

Promises, promises?

The illegal-immigration project will ultimately fail because although its politics are transparent, its practice is incoherent, and chaos is therefore its only possible end. With the exception of an ailing European Union, no other country in the world — certainly not Mexico or China — would allow its open borders to become as politically weaponized as America’s. Yet no other nation is so faulted as illiberal as is the uniquely liberal United States. The result is a growing American exasperation. Ingratitude and hypocrisy stir human passions like few others traits.

The entire vocabulary of illegal immigration has become Orwellian. Once descriptive nouns and adjectives such as “alien” and “illegal” have melted into “undocumented” and “immigrant” and then into just “migrant,” ostensibly to mask the reality of both legal status and the fact that migrants go in one direction — and there is an existential difference between immigrants and emigrants.

Illegal immigration is defended as a gift to the United States, as if without millions of illegal arrivals, America would ossify. But aside from the fact that the labor participation rate of America is about 62 percent of the available work force, and millions have given up on seeking jobs, when the proponents of illegal immigration south of the border are asked politely to withdraw their supposed beneficence and generosity, they react with furor and slander rather than with gratitude and relief.

Once someone makes a decision to enter a country illegally — his first decision as an incoming alien — and thus breaks a U.S. law with impunity, then most subsequent decisions are naturally shaped by the idea of exemption. Zealots argue that entering the U.S. illegally is merely a civil infraction. But the IRS in 2017 identified some 1.2 million identity-theft cases, in which illegal aliens had employed illegitimate or inconsistent social-security numbers to file tax returns — and implicitly thereby cause innumerable problems for the U.S. tax system.

So much of the discussion of illegal immigration is predicated not just on fantasy, but on Soviet-style censorship, and not just of speech, but of our very thoughts.

Any U.S. citizen who did that would be charged with a career-ending felony. And identity theft — the great unspoken twin of illegal immigration — is not just a minor infraction, as I can attest from having my name and checking-account number stolen by an illegal alien. False checks, identical in color and style to my own, were then printed up by him with his name and phony address on them, albeit using my banking router number at the bottom; he then cashed the checks at a compliant rural store, using a false identity, stamped on the back in the form of a fraudulent driver’s license and bank credit card. Multiply that reality thousands of times over per month — but never dare to suggest that such a crime is connected with illegal immigration or even constitutes much of a crime.

So much of the discussion of illegal immigration is predicated not just on fantasy, but on Soviet-style censorship, and not just of speech, but of our very thoughts. Taboo are suggestions that illegal immigration could be a prime reason that California now has the highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation; the highest number of welfare recipients (one of three in the United States), with a fifth of the state living below the poverty level; and now a fourth of all hospital admittances found to be suffering from diabetes or prediabetes; or that national rankings of infrastructure quality place the state nearly last in the country.

Talk of race has approached something like Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking Glass, in which everything is upside down. “La Raza” — until recently the nomenclature of the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy organization — has supposedly nothing to do with race, while others who would never have an odious desire to use its odious English equivalent, “The Race,” are deemed racists for their objections to La Raza terminology.

Residency is deliberately conflated with citizenship, as if the two are legally and morally equivalent. But again, nowhere else in the world is this true, and certainly not in Mexico. I have lived abroad for over two years. As a guest in Athens, I followed Greek politics closely. I paid steep Greek sales taxes and assorted fees and tariffs as a legal resident alien. But at no time did I imagine that taxes or my physical presence as a lawful guest on Greek soil allowed me to interfere with the politics of my host, much less to issue demands on Athens, or to give me de facto the same legal rights as Greek citizens. As a legal alien, I surely did not think I could vote. I knew better than to tell Greeks that their country was not to my taste. And I knew fellow aliens who overstayed visas, worked without permits, and did not register as foreign residents. At least before the days of the latest incarnations of the European Union, the resulting fines were stiff, and expulsions were uncontested.

Illegal immigration is embedded not within racial and political ecumenicalism but within an exclusionary ethnic and political matrix. There would be no lectures about principle and logic from a Jorge Ramos or Vicente Fox were a million a year from China or Africa entering the southwestern United States illegally — except as likely voices of opposition to such unlawful and asymmetrical influxes in their own countries’ neighborhoods. In our upside-down world, calls for diverse, legal, meritocratic, and measured immigration are considered xenophobic, precisely because they would be racially blind and not predicated on current racial and ethnic chauvinism.

Without illegal immigration at current levels, the powers of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage would turn most immigrants into Americans within two to three generations, as in the past. That fact apparently frightens ethnic chauvinists, who disguise the advantages they gain from identity politics by smearing those who wish to at least make race and ethnicity incidental and not essential to our characters. If Univision eventually went the way of 19th-century German-language daily periodicals, what would a Jorge Ramos do?

For those who live at the nexus of illegal immigration, life is lived quite differently than in the past, from the trivial to the existential. A few examples suffice. Last night I was awakened by automatic gunfire on the road at 2 a.m.; the shots came from a long-ago-sold farmhouse of one who was a friend and neighbor for 50 years, but whose house is now rented out to gang members, many from Mexico. No worry, within an hour, the shrieks of resumed cockfighting returned as usual.

Do PETA members object to illegal immigration? We play a sort of rescue-dog roulette. Dogs are tossed and dumped on the side of road, without licenses, vaccinations, unneutered and unspayed, and often injured. After we reach our limit of adoptions — six presently — we try to vaccinate, neuter, license, and heal additional strays that wander in off the road, put shiny collars with tags on their necks, and let them feed and roam near our fenced yard. Then a welcomed reverse but invisible process can sometimes follow: theft. Dogs formerly dumped are now recycled, as it were, snatched stealthily by new owners who steal back mysteriously “improved” pets rather than throw out a dog.

In rural California, the law as it once was is now often inoperative, if not sometimes nonexistent. Utility and common practice substitute. In my neighborhood, I assume that zoning and building-codes statutes apply only to those who are citizens and have the means to pay for permits and possible fines. Everyone else does what he pleases, assuming either that it would be illiberal to fine the Other or not cost-effective in a bankrupt state.
Related Story
Caught at the Border

Illegal immigration and environmentalism war with each other. But the former usually is exempted from any green audit. No one much cares, certainly not law enforcement or the state and federal environmental agencies, that roadsides outside Central Valley towns are littered with abandoned appliances, furniture, tires — and toxic and wet garbage. I suppose if it became a county issue, the complainers would first be called whiners and then nativists. So silence reigns. In a pre-civilization manner, the law-abiding of all races and classes quietly pick up the garbage in their environs each week.

When I find a dumped rotten canine carcass with a rope still around its skeletonized neck or a tossed disemboweled chicken, I surely must not privilege my own culture and think that dog- or cockfighting is barbaric.

Behind the official silence is apparently the apologia that poverty prevents proper disposal, or that illegal arrivals still naturally follow protocols found south of the border, or that the citizen hosts are a bit too anal retentive and judgmental in harping about mere moldy mattresses or old televisions set in their alleyways or orchards.

Again, the logic of illegal immigration is that the guilty host must accommodate the uninvited but more virtuous guest, not vice versa. When I find a dumped rotten canine carcass with a rope still around its skeletonized neck or a tossed disemboweled chicken, I surely must not privilege my own culture and think that dog- or cockfighting is barbaric. Perhaps the pile of used hypodermic needles dumped by my barn were left by accident? Today I pick up sacks of wet garbage with the owner’s name and address on several bills: Does one redeliver back to the dumper, and if so, armed or not? Or does one find it not cost-effective to do so? (Do not suggest “call the authorities” — that is a complete waste of time.) These are the small, mostly trite decisions that a person at the nexus of illegal immigration makes every day.

When a foreign gang member drives in, without English fluency, looking for the house of a drug seller, or asking about a neighbor’s trailer of prostitution, I don’t impose my values on him, but offer a polite, “No lo se.” Live and let live as it were — given the alternative of possibly facing criminal exposure by calling authorities and thereby by aiding and abetting ICE.

Most assume that if hit by an illegal-alien driver (with a license or not), the latter, if unhurt, flees the scene of the accident. Only a naïf would think that registration or insurance would ever be found on the abandoned vehicle. When someone scrapes my car in the parking lot, the driver, if caught, sometimes wants a quick cash transaction to avoid calling the police.

When Jerry Brown or Nancy Pelosi lectures the state on its illiberality, or on the immigration sins of Donald Trump, or the advantages of nullification and a sanctuary state, we assume that these are just the penultimate chest poundings and virtue signals of rich septuagenarians about to go into apartheid retirements in Napa or Grass Valley.

In that context, all of their legacies above make perfect sense.

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

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.