If Trump is Hitler, then Obama was Hitler too

Why is Trump’s treatment of migrants ‘fascism’ but Obama’s wasn’t?

Under the Obama administration, hundreds of migrants died every year at the Mexican-US border. Thousands were detained in camps. Children were detained in those camps, too. The average daily population of these detention centres was between 30,000 and 40,000. Children were often the first to be cast out of the country – as one report put it, the border authorities moved unaccompanied children to ‘the head of the line’ for deportation. More undocumented migrants were deported by the Obama administration than by any previous administration. One critic called Obama ‘the most stringent enforcer of immigration laws in American history’.

So, was Barack Obama Hitler? Was that fascism?

To see the double standards, the hypocrisy, the staggering lack of principle in contemporary radical politics, look no further than the discussion of the immigration crisis in the US. As a result of his immigration policies, President Trump is being branded fascistic, the architect of ‘concentration camps’, someone who has, in the words of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, failed to heed the message of ‘Never Again’ – that is, he’s doing something eerily and dreadfully similar to what the Nazis did in the 1930s.

And yet Obama did all these things too. Where were those people back then? They were on their comfortable college campuses or in their swanky New York or London bars, and the 47,000 minors apprehended by the US authorities as they crossed the border in the US in the first eight months of 2014 alone – some of whom were as young as three – never crossed their minds.

Or if they did cross their minds, perhaps fleetingly stirring their dormant morality as they perused their New York Times over a Shake Shack lunch, they didn’t call it fascism. They didn’t compare Obama to Hitler. They didn’t say, ‘This is like the 1930s’. AOC didn’t trek to the processing centres in which children were being crammed into cells and were sleeping under rough blankets and allow a photographer to capture her weeping, as she did with Trump’s detention centres last year. Those painfully staged photos, these much-tweeted, much-cheered displays of hollow virtue, have been shared widely today. And yet they raise an embarrassing and pressing question, not only for AOC but for all of those horrified by Trump’s apparently Hitlerian treatment of migrants – where were your tears when Obama did this?

A horrible photo of a man and his daughter who drowned while crossing the Rio Grande between Mexico and the US has been widely published today. It’s on the front page of the London Evening Standard, which refers to the image as ‘The picture that shames America’. It is held up as proof of Trump’s wickedness. But again that question rises up – why are you more horrified by this death than you were by the thousands of migrant deaths under Obama?

Migrant deaths just over the border in the US have been rising since the mid-1990s and especially during the Obama administration. So in 1996, there were at least 87 deaths of migrants within the US border. In 2012, the year Obama was re-elected, to the whoops and cheers of liberals across the West, there were at least 463. In total, 7,216 people died crossing the US-Mexico border between 1998 and 2017. Where were the frontpage headlines? Why weren’t there massive marches when Obama visited London? Why was there no talk of ‘America’s shame’ or ‘America’s concentration camps’?

The answer to this question is as straightforward as it is disturbing. It’s because the current discussion isn’t really driven by a concern for migrants. Rather, it is driven by an exhausted left’s urge to find an issue on which it might successfully harm its political opponents and, even more importantly, demonstrate its own presumed virtue. The thoroughness with which contemporary radicals reduce every issue to an opportunity for political point-scoring and virtuous public preening is summed up in their sudden, cynical discovery that bad things happen on the Mexico-US border.

Numerous questions are thrown up by the Mexico-US border problem. A key one, which very few of Trump’s critics want to address, is the issue of national sovereignty. Surely it is the right of a nation to determine who may enter the country and how they may do so? The contemporary cult of erasing borders, promoted by everyone from Brussels suits to the supposedly liberal chattering classes, can be seen as an attempt to undermine the idea of the nation itself, and the thing that the nation embodies: the right of a people democratically to determine their country’s affairs and policies, including on immigration.

And a broader question is raised by all this; a question about the state of Western politics in general. Principle and morality seem to have disappeared. Instead, everything is reduced to a shallow Culture War game of moralistic oneupmanship. This is where those AOC photos become important. The way in which, today, this has been turned into a story about her, and about how virtuous she is, is actually grotesque. The narcissism is staggering. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that for her and many other Trump-haters, those detained migrants are little more than props in their own moral drama about themselves and their virtue and decency.

All the time these days, serious political issues – in this case, the issues of borders, democracy and how we treat migrants – are reduced to shallow, soapbox-style opportunities for observers to hysterically denounce politicians they hate and to narcissistically display their own presumed goodness.

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China And U.S. Agree To Restart Trade Talks Following Trump, Xi Meeting

President Trump agreed to restart trade negotiations with China on Saturday after meeting with the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, during a Group of 20 summit in Japan.

The Hill reports,

Trump said during a news conference Saturday afternoon that he would scale back restrictions on Chinese telecom giant Huawei and delay slapping new tariffs on Chinese goods as talks resume between the two countries.

“U.S. companies can sell their equipment to Huawei,” Trump said, explaining that the move was aimed at helping American tech companies that had complained about the ban. The company is on an “entity list” that essentially bars it from buying components from American firms without approval from the U.S. government.

Trump said China, in turn, had agreed to resume large purchases of American farm products and other goods from U.S. companies, though he did not offer further details.

The Trump administration will keep in place the 25 percent tariffs previously levied on roughly half of China’s annual exports to the U.S., according to The New York Times.

The major concessions came after the two economic giants had been locked in an escalating trade war for more than a month, hitting the other with sanctions on billions of dollars worth of goods. Talks came to a standstill in May in the lead-up to the G-20 in Japan.

The Trump administration had insisted that any trade deal with China must address intellectual property theft protections, enforcement mechanisms, tariffs and other barriers to commerce.

Trump struck a cautiously optimistic note late Friday on the prospects of reaching such an agreement with Xi.

“I actually think that we were very close and then we — something happened where it slipped a little bit and now we’re getting a little bit closer,” the president said as he sat down with Xi for a highly anticipated meeting at the G-20 summit.

All eyes had been on the outcome of the Trump-Xi sit-down, given the potential ripple effects for the world economy. Trump previously threatened to implement tariffs on another $300 billion in Chinese goods if the talks did not yield progress.

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David Limbaugh: Making America Great – for All Americans

I know I'm not the only Trump supporter who is tired of progressives maliciously accusing President Trump and his supporters of racism. They've used the slander against conservatives for years, and it has only intensified in the Trump era.

Of all their other nasty smears, they get the most mileage with the race card, so it's unlikely they'll do the right thing and abandon it. They probably wouldn't stand a chance in presidential elections if they were to do so, as they depend on some 90 percent of the African American vote, which they seek to maintain by constantly stirring agitation.

They didn't need Trump as their ideal bogeyman on race, but caricaturing the GOP's leader sure doesn't hurt in perpetuating the fiction. For them Trump is an equal opportunity scoundrel — he's bad in every category, so it's not a great leap to tar him as a racial bigot. His signature issue, immigration, just fell into their lap. Why else would he be such a border hawk if not for his racism? Please don't get me started on this outrage again. Just pray to God that the thrust of their message — that you can't support American sovereignty unless you're a racist — doesn't prevail, or the country truly is finished.

As I've noted before, I'm not sure what percentage of progressives actually swallow this bilge versus those who push it for political gain. But they are pushing it, and it has caused great damage. Many rank-and-file leftists claim they feel threatened in the presence of MAGA hat-wearing citizens. Some writers have likened them to an unsophisticated version of Klansmen because Klansmen had the sense to wear hoods to conceal their identity.

Tolerant leftists believe that Trump supporters provoke them simply by evidencing their support for Trump, because they can't possibly support him without being racists, sexists and homophobes. They wear the hats not to signify their support but as an in-your-face symbol of their unapologetic bigotry.

Can you fathom how sick this is? How out of phase with reality? But it's apparently real to progressives, or they want you to believe it is.

On Tuesday's "Morning Joe," MSNBC's Joy Reid talked about her new book, "The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story."

Co-anchor Willie Geist asked her, "As you write about in the book, the people who heard the phrase 'Make America Great Again,' it meant to them an America that appeared to be slipping away was going to be reclaimed by this man, and their lives would return to what they were. I'm interested in the other side of it. What do you hear when you hear 'Make America Great Again'?"

Reid's response illustrates the extent to which progressives are promoting this delusional malice. "I hear exactly that," said Reid. "I hear make America a country that, in the 1950s, meant white Christian men had dominion over everyone else. That's exactly what it means when I hear it. It's George Wallace. He's just Republican George Wallace, and that message has been resonant and has actually been potent for a very long time. David Duke used that message when he ran for governor of Louisiana; George Wallace obviously used it and — he had a pretty good chunk of the — at the time, the Democratic Party. Richard Nixon used it. It's a common message because you just do have a certain quarter, maybe a third of the country, that does not like the idea that we're becoming a more multiracial society where women have a lot of asserted rights and where they're not on top."

There we have it again: If you are bullish on America, you are advertising your bigotry. Under this standard, at least leftists don't have to fear they'll be accused of bigotry.

When you couple this nonsense with old white guys like Joe Biden — Democratic presidential front-runner, no less — saying Republicans want to put black people back into chains, and tons of other abominable slanders, what are African Americans supposed to think about us?

Well, many progressives don't want them to see the truth: that they have been stoking the flames of racial disharmony to obscure the reality that Republicans, conservatives and other Trump supporters believe in the equal dignity of all human beings, and that the Christians among them — probably the vast majority — believe this is true because we are all made in God's image.

The proof is in the pudding. Trump's economic policies — lower taxes and regulations — have generated explosive growth benefitting most Americans, including minorities, who are prospering and getting back to work at unprecedented numbers.

I realize that experts say you give credence to false allegations when you dignify them with a response, but I'll take my chances, because silence can sometimes be the elephant in the room.

So let's proclaim the message that we do indeed seek to restore and amplify America's greatness for the benefit of all Americans directly — and the world, derivatively. God bless America.

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Sen. Collins: Trump Has a Duty to Enforce Immigration Law, U.S. Needs ‘Stronger Border Security’

Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) said President Donald Trump has a “constitutional duty” to enforce immigration laws and added that America has a “crisis” at the border and needs “to have stronger border security.”

At the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, CNSNews.com asked Sen. Collins, “Article 2, Section 3 of the Constitution says the president ‘shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’ Does the president have a constitutional duty to enforce the immigration laws?”

Senator Collins said,  “The president has a constitutional duty to enforce all duly passed laws by the Congress.”

CNSNews.com then asked, “Should the president deport aliens who are in the United States illegally?”

The senator did not answer the question directly but said, “We have a crisis and we need to have stronger border security. But we also cannot ignore the very serious humanitarian needs that are affecting children who have come to this country through no choice of their own.”

A 2018 study conducted by researchers at Yale University and MIT estimated the illegal immigrant population in the United States to be 22.1 million.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) estimated in 2017 that “the total cost of illegal immigration for the United States – at the federal, state, and local levels – was approximately $116 billion.”

Many Americans have been killed by illegal aliens. FAIR provides details on these cases here and videos here.

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De Blasio: 'There's Plenty of Money in This Country, It's Just in the Wrong Hands'

It's mostly in the hands of those who earned it. Those are the RIGHT hands

The topic of "income inequality" arose at Wednesday's Democrat debate, with various candidates explaining how they would address it.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke not only for himself, but for the Democrat Party in general: "There is plenty of money in this world, and there's plenty of money in this country, it's just in the wrong hands. Democrats have to fix that," he said.

De Blasio also embraced a 70 percent tax rate on wealthy people, although he did not define the term "wealthy."

Here is his full answer to the question, "How would you address income inequality?"

Well, we've been addressing income inequality in New York City by raising wages, by raising benefits, by putting money back in the hands of working people -- $15 minimum wage, paid sick days, pre-k for all, things that are making a huge difference in working people's lives.

But let me tell you, what we're hearing in the first round of questions is that battle for the heart and soul of our party. I want to make it clear. This is supposed to be the party of working people.

Yes, we are supposed to be for 70% tax rate on the wealthy; yes, we're supposed to be for free college, free public college, for our young people. We are supposed to break up big corporations when they're not serving our democracy. This Democratic Party has to be strong and bold and progressive.

And in New York, we've proven that we can do something very different, we can put money back in the hands of working people.

And let me tell you, every time you talk about investing in people and their communities, you hear folks say there's not enough money -- what I say to them every single time is, there's plenty of money in this world, there's plenty of money in this country, it's just in the wrong hands. We Democrats have to fix that.

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