Fear of the Left: The Most Powerful Force in America Today

By DENNIS PRAGER

The dominant force in America and many other Western countries today is fear of the Left.

This is a result of the fact that the most dynamic religion of the past 100 years has been neither Christianity nor Islam. It has been leftism. Whoever does not recognize this does not understand the contemporary world.

Leftism — in its incarnations, such as Marxism, Communism, and socialism; expressed through egalitarianism, environmentalism, and feminism; in its denigration of capitalism and Western civilization, especially in America and Israel; in its supplanting of Christianity and Judaism; through its influence on Christianity and Judaism; in its celebration of race; and in its replacing of reason with romanticism — has almost completely taken over the news and entertainment media and institutions of education.

There is a largely (though not entirely) nonviolent reign of ideological terror in America. In almost every area of life, people fear antagonizing the Left.

Last week, before my speech at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a man employed by the university (I will not say in what department) walked over to me, looked around to see whether anyone was watching, and whispered in my ear, “I’m a conservative.”

This happens just about everywhere I speak. People whisper — yes, whisper — that they are conservative or they support Trump. The last time I experienced people looking around to check whether they were seen speaking to me was with dissidents in the Soviet Union.

People call my radio show from all over the country to say that their fellow musicians, nurses, teachers, or employees do not know that they are conservative, let alone that they support the president.

I have called contemporary conservatives in America Marranos, the name given during the 15th-century Spanish Inquisition to Jews who hid their Judaism while appearing to be Catholics, lest they be persecuted. I do not compare the consequences: Losing one’s friends or employment is not the same as losing one’s home or one’s life. But otherwise, the label is apt.

Because of my widely covered conducting of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra at the Walt Disney Concert Hall last summer, members of some of the most prestigious orchestras in America have opened up to me, telling me they are conservative but would never reveal this fact to their fellow musicians. They fear either losing their position or, more likely, being socially ostracized.

Why are so many Democrats shocked when a Republican is elected president? Because, as they themselves say, they “don’t know anyone” who voted for the Republican. The primary reason for this is that the people in their lives who voted for Donald Trump — professional colleagues, and even friends and relatives — are afraid to tell them.

There are two reasons the Left labels most conservatives and all Trump supporters “white supremacists,” “neo-Nazis,” and “racists.” One is to defeat conservatives without having to defeat conservative ideas. The other is to instill fear: Speak out and you will suffer the consequences.

Parents call my radio show and ask what they should tell their children at college when they ask whether they should risk receiving a lower grade for divulging their conservative politics in a paper or on an exam.

It is becoming more and more common for leftist mobs to gather in front of a conservative’s home, scream epithets at the conservative’s family members, and vandalize the home. Just last week, the Associated Press reported:

Protesters are targeting the northern Virginia home of the National Rifle Association’s top lobbyist . . . Chris Cox . . . as well as his wife’s nearby decorating business. . . . Libby Locke, a lawyer for the Cox family, said the vandalism included spraying fake blood and defacing the home with stickers.

Left-wing student mobs routinely take over the offices of university deans, professors, and even presidents. The few non-left-wing professors on any campus understand their lives will be made miserable if they speak out. The widely reported case of liberal biology professor Bret Weinstein at Evergreen State College in Washington is directly on point.

In May 2017, Professor Weinstein was surrounded by about 50 left-wing students, who screamed curses at him outside of his classroom for refusing to participate in an event during which white people were asked to leave the campus for a day.

On May 24, 2017, Weinstein tweeted: “The police told me I am not safe on campus. They can not protect me.”

Within a few months, left-wing students and the left-wing Evergreen administration made life so miserable for the lifelong liberal professor that he left the university.

Since the Left began spreading the lie that a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo., shot a black youth because he, like most police officers, was a racist, police officers in many cities have feared taking proactive measures to prevent violent crime in black neighborhoods. They fear the left-wing mob known as the news media will ruin their reputation and end their career.

In the recent case of a Philadelphia Starbucks manager who asked two black men to purchase something before giving them the code to the restroom, Starbucks immediately appeased the left-wing mob. The company didn’t wait until any facts came out; it simply abandoned the manager and announced it would close every U.S. store one day in May to educate all Starbucks employees about “unconscious bias.”

These are only a few examples of the left-wing intimidation that dominates much of American life.

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Yes, Obama's Iran Nuke Deal Really Was the Sum of All Lies

Benjamin Netanyahu's damning report of Iran's lies undermines the whole foundation of the deal

Just yesterday, we wrote about the upcoming negotiations and policy considerations surrounding Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal — how President Donald Trump was facing pressure from European allies to once again waive sanctions and continue pretending everything is all well and good. Soon after we published, along came Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to effectively nuke the idea that Iran has ever done anything but lie about its nuclear program.

Israeli intelligence collected a massive amount of intelligence — literally half a ton of materials — proving that Iran hid its nuclear weapons program for two decades. And the U.S. has verified it. “I am here to tell you one thing: Iran lied,” Netanyahu said. “After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret files.” He continued, “We’ve known for years that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons program called Project Amad. We can now prove that Project Amad was a comprehensive program to design, build and test nuclear weapons. We can also prove that Iran is secretly storing Project Amad material to use at a time of its choice to develop nuclear weapons.” Those weapons include a goal of five 10-kiloton nuclear warheads, all to go with its ballistic missile program that Obama allowed to continue.

As part of the ruse, Iran ensured that some of its program was dual-use — nuclear energy, not weapons. But it continued covert work on nuclear weapons, particularly at its Fordow facility, and lied to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about that work and Project Amad. So much for what it insisted were “peaceful purposes.”

Obama’s nuclear deal was built on lies, just as we said from the beginning. The worst part is that Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, weren’t duped — they were part of the con, all in search of a legacy for Obama. And what a horrible legacy it was, too.

Bloomberg’s Eli Lake observes, “Advocating for a pact in 2015, John Kerry said American agencies had ‘absolute knowledge’ about the regime’s past nuclear efforts. Oops.” Except it wasn’t an “oops.” Team Obama deliberately looked the other way and deceived the world. Now, Lake says, “Beyond the fate of the nuclear deal, the Israeli intelligence also presents a crisis for the [1970] Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a member. If verified, it shows that Iran has systematically lied to weapons inspectors for nearly 20 years. If Iran doesn’t pay a price for its deception, then what is to stop future rogues from following the Iran model?”

Even if Trump now pulls out of the deal, however, Europe may stand by it. The Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan argues, “Yet while Israel’s intelligence community, the Mossad in particular, deserves immense credit for successfully seizing and extricating this material from an Iranian stronghold, it is unlikely to persuade Europe’s big three (Britain, France and Germany) to join Trump in withdrawing from the deal. To persuade those leaders to do so, Netanyahu would have needed to show evidence of continuing, covert Iranian efforts either to construct a nuclear weapon or to secretly enrich uranium beyond the low-level cap the current agreement allows for medical research. That was not on display [Monday].”

Time will soon tell what Trump does, but in discussing Netanyahu’s report in a Monday press conference, he made another important strategic point: Pulling out of the Iran deal would send “the right message” to North Korea.

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Prosecution for Immigration Crimes Rising Again

Fell under first year of Trump, but now returning to Obama levels

Prosecutions of criminal immigration offenses are projected to rise almost 20 percent in FY 2018, a new report from the Transaction Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) shows.

TRAC bases its estimates on the 7,020 new criminal immigration prosecutions in March of 2018, an increase of 23.9 percent from the previous month. TRAC projects that, if the federal government continues to prosecute criminal immigration offenses in accord with this trend, there will be more than 70,000 prosecutions by fiscal year's end.

Criminal immigration offenses importantly do not include simple illegal immigration, which is a civil, rather than criminal offense. Rather, criminal offenses include acts such as reentry of a previously deported person, the smuggling of illegal immigrants, or visa or other document fraud.

Prosecutions for criminal immigration offenses are historically quite low, TRAC noted, with fewer than 20,000 per year under the last term of the Clinton administration and the first term of the Bush administration. They increased some under Bush's second term, but only really took off with the swearing in of President Barack Obama. The number of criminal immigration prosecutions almost reached 100,000 in 2013.

Immigration prosecutions began to decline thereafter, likely due to a more selective prosecution policy during Obama's second term. That trend continued in the first year of President Donald Trump's administration: Fiscal year 2017 saw the fewest prosecutions of any administration in a decade. This is likely due in part to the conspicuous decline in immigration in Trump's first year, a phenomenon often referred to as the "Trump effect."

However, as immigration rates rise again, so too are prosecutions. The most common charges faced by defendants are entry at improper time or place and reentry subsequent to deportation, combined making up well more than half of all charges. Charges unsurprisingly concentrate within the federal judicial districts along the southwestern border; a previous Free Beacon analysis found that those regions were responsible for the plurality of federal offenses, primarily due to the concentration of immigration offenses.

While immigration charges concentrate along the southwestern border, certain districts are seeing less activity than they used to, TRAC noted. Texas's northern district, Florida's southern district, and the eastern district of Michigan were all immigration crime hot spots twenty years ago, but have now fallen out of the top ten.

This renewed concentration of criminal immigration offenses along the southwestern border helps to explain why earlier this month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions implemented a "zero tolerance" policy for immigration offenses in that region. Under the Obama administration, the Department of Justice generally sought to prosecute only violent or criminal immigration offenders. Sessions has instructed U.S. attorneys to prosecute all offenders to the maximum extent allowable by law.

This zero tolerance has been shown historically to drive down illegal immigration levels, according to Sessions, a claim he based on analysis by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency which has in turn been questioned by the Department of Homeland Security.

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