The West Has Lost its Way Since the Cold War

Marxism is still vigorous and ready to pounce despite the Soviet implosion

Jon Hall

Since the liberation of Europe’s Soviet Bloc in 1989 and the demise in 1991 of the Soviet Union itself, the West has become so pathetic that one might be forgiven for having a little wistful nostalgia for the Cold War era. At least back then, thirty years ago, Pakistan and North Korea didn’t have the bomb, China didn’t have an economy so huge that it threatened to eclipse America’s, and Europe hadn’t been invaded by millions of unassimilable Muslims allowed to just walk in.

When the Soviet Union broke up, the West had an historic opportunity to try to export freedom to Russia and make the world a better place. But we were told that the Cold War had ended and that the West had won, and that communism was dead. Some even said it was the “end of history.”

The West was deluding itself. The need of some individuals to control others and the meek acceptance of it by those being controlled may well be genetic. The idea that the gene for tyranny or oppression might have died is like thinking rudeness (or even sin) could be eradicated. The socialist authoritarianism of the Soviets didn’t end with the end of the Cold War; it regrouped, adapted, and waited.

American conservatives may be heartened by Britain’s vote to leave the socialist European Union, but have the Brits really come to their senses? Huge swaths of them still want socialism, which was recently given evidence by Oliver Wiseman, the editor of CapX. On May 11 in The Weekly Standard, Wiseman tells us about a looming threat to the U.K. in “Old Labour, Old Danger”:

Before Jeremy Corbyn was unexpectedly elected Labour leader in 2015, he led a career of far-left obscurity, catching the attention of the public now and then only thanks to his support for Hamas, Hugo Chávez, and anyone lined up on his side in what he sees as a global battle against capitalism and the West. Three years later, he is the bookmakers’ favorite to be Britain’s next leader.

But according to Wiseman, Corbyn isn’t the main threat to Britain’s future, it’s Corbyn’s fellow Marxist John McDonnell, “shadow chancellor of the exchequer,” who would take over the British economy were Corbyn to become prime minister. Wiseman writes: “It is just possible that the real drag on the British economy isn’t Brexit, but the Marxists waiting in the wings”:

According to a recent profile in the Financial Times, the members of a trade union book club that McDonnell ran in the early 1980s used to joke that he prescribed the same book every week: Das Kapital. In 2006, he said that the biggest influences on his thought were “The fundamental Marxist writers of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, basically.” In 2013, speaking about the financial crisis, he said, “I’m honest with people: I’m a Marxist. This is a classic crisis of the economy -- a classic capitalist crisis. I’ve been waiting for this for a generation... [For] Christ’s sake don’t waste it.” The man who could soon be in charge of the British economy is someone who sees a recession not as a time to limit economic damage, but as a chance for revolution.

One takeaway from Wiseman’s fine article is that the British people have been corrupted; they want their Big Government handouts. Wiseman reports that a majority actually support “Labour’s flagship economic policy of renationalization of utilities and the railways.” The British people may be too addled to grasp that their problems were not caused by capitalism but by the socialism they’ve had going back to Clement Attlee. Britain’s National Health Service wasn’t some creation of “rapacious” capitalists. Churchill and Thatcher couldn’t steer the U.K. completely away from socialism, because the citizenry was already hooked on “free stuff.”

I found that profile of McDonnell at the Financial Times Wiseman referred to; it’s a bit long but quite worth reading. But know that the FT gives nonsubscribers one free read only; if you leave the webpage and attempt to return you’ll be kept out. So you might want to print it or save it as a PDF right away. The print button is on Jim Pickard’s byline. The profile appeared on March 1.

McDonnell believes he is on the brink of making history, should the government collapse because of Brexit. “Our objectives are socialist. That means an irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people,” he explains. “When we go into government, everyone will be in government.”

Or, as Mussolini once said, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” McDonnell is also inspired by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who cleaved to a belief in cultural hegemony whereby socialism would triumph by infiltrating education, the media, and even the church.

Throughout the West, the Left has taken over the “commanding heights” of the culture. We see fatuous Hollywood actors consorting with foreign tyrants in their socialist paradises. Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is “way cool,” and revered by maleducated young people. Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may soon be a member of Congress. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War a new front has opened in the Eternal War between freedom and oppression, and it’s internal.

On June 30, National Review ran “Slavoj Žižek, Fashionable Revolutionary,” a fine article by Christian Alejandro Gonzalez. Žižek is a Marxist flunky straight out of central casting, and he’s on the payroll of British and American universities. (Perhaps “academic freedom” has gone a bit too far):

“Our task today,” Žižek writes… “is to reinvent emancipatory terror.” One cannot achieve true liberation without wanton violence… we must decide: Should we embrace “revolutionary-democratic terror?”…

"During the moment of revolutionary fervor, passivity is tantamount to complicity with the forces of reaction. Anyone who does not participate in the terror is fit for elimination… Those unwilling to inflict slaughter on behalf of revolution are “sensitive liberals”…

[W]hat makes the Žižek phenomenon truly remarkable is not that he openly advocates the mass murder of civilians, not that he is taken seriously by the Western academic establishment… It is, rather, that the terror he endorses is ultimately nihilistic… Seduced by the aesthetics of revolution rather than committed to a serious pursuit of justice, Žižek’s philosophy collapses under the weight of its incoherence.

In John le Carré’s 1974 Cold War novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the British Secret Service has a double agent at the very top. In the 2011 adaptation for cinema, many liberties were taken with the novel. Even so, that wasn’t enough to keep the author from appearing in a singing of the Soviet national anthem, (he’s the elderly guy on the right who stands as the anthem begins; video excerpt). One of the changes was this bit of added dialog which occurs after the mole has been brought to ground and is waiting to be sent to the USSR in a spy swap: “I had to pick a side, George. It was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one. And the West has grown so very… ugly, don’t you think?”

But the West was rather handsome thirty years ago before the end of the Cold War. Although he may be adept at dialectics, le Carré’s traitor to the West understands very little about aesthetics and even less about morality; he’s even more deluded than those he betrayed.

If the West is indeed growing ugly, perhaps it’s because we’re becoming like the East; perhaps it’s because we give vile clowns employment at our universities. Perhaps our growing ugliness is the result of throwing in with awful ideas, like socialism. The West needs to get back to being the West.

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Choking on the Cost of 'Medicare for All'
   
Last month, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken socialist, beat 10-term Congressman Joe Crowley, the fourth-highest-ranking House Democrat, in the primary election for New York's 14th congressional district.

Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a former organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign. She's also a vocal advocate of "Medicare for All" -- a government takeover of America's healthcare system. Support for single-payer health care is now a requirement for securing many Democrats' votes.

But candidates who advocate single-payer on the campaign trail are increasingly balking once they actually get their hands on the levers of power. That's because single-payer is cost-prohibitive. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool leftists admit as much, after they take office and have to figure out how to pay for their campaign promises.

Single-payer's champions generally paint a lovely picture of healthcare utopia. Patients go to see the doctor of their choice whenever they like, get treatment, and leave the clinic without paying a cent. No copays, no deductibles, no cost-sharing, and no referrals -- health care is "free" at the point of service.

In reality, health care doesn't magically become free; people just pay for it outside the doctor's office, in the form of higher taxes.

Many Democrats have walked back their enthusiasm for single-payer after getting a look at the just how much public money they'd have to come up with.

Last month in North Carolina, Democratic State Representative Verla Insko moved to kill her own pro-single-payer bill. An assessment from the state legislature's Fiscal Research Division pegged the cost of single-payer at $70 billion, $42 billion of which would have to come from the state. That latter figure is almost twice the state budget.

The Civitas Institute, a free-market think tank in North Carolina, estimated that implementing single-payer would cost a whopping $101 billion just in year one.

North Carolina's tale is only the latest example of single-payer dreams crumbling after confronting reality. Last year, California State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a Democrat, pulled the plug on single-payer legislation passed by the state Senate after deeming it "woefully incomplete." Even that was an understatement -- the bill was silent on how it would raise the $400 billion needed to fund single-payer each year.

In 2014 in Vermont, then-Gov. Peter Shumlin -- a long-time single-payer advocate -- gave up on a single-payer plan after he learned it would cost $4.3 billion annually. That amount was equivalent to 88 percent of the entire state budget. He reluctantly concluded that the proposed funding mechanism for single-payer -- a 12.5 percent state payroll tax and a sliding-scale individual tax of up to 9.5 percent of income "might hurt our economy."

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders, America's foremost proponent of single-payer, admitted in June that "there will be pain" if the nation adopts the government-run system he favors. The plan he touted on the presidential campaign trail in 2016 would have cost $1.4 trillion per year, according to his own estimates. To pay for it, he called for a new 2.2 percent income tax, a 6.2 tax on employers, and higher taxes on the wealthy.

An independent analysis of Sanders's plan conducted by the left-leaning Urban Institute estimated that it would cost $32 trillion over 10 years.

And those are just the financial costs. Socialized medicine's human costs are even greater. Single-payer systems the world over ration care and force patients to wait for treatment.

The United States can barely afford its existing healthcare obligations. In 2017, the federal government spent more than $700 billion on Medicare -- a 65 percent increase over just 10 years. Annual costs per capita are expected to increase 4.6 percent per year over the next decade. And the latest Medicare Trustees report, released in June, reported that the Part A Trust Fund, which covers payment for hospital care, will be depleted in 2026. That's three years earlier than previous projections. At that point, workers' payroll taxes earmarked for Medicare will no longer cover the program's costs.

In other words, America is struggling to pay for "Medicare for Some" -- much less "Medicare for All." As pro-single-payer candidates like Ocasio-Cortez will soon discover, no amount of enthusiasm for single-payer can overcome basic math.

SOURCE 

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The Numbers Are In, And It’s Looking Pretty Bad For Senate Dems In November

Democrats are in for an uphill battle in November’s midterm elections as they struggle to overtake the GOP-led Senate, according to an Axios and SurveyMonkey poll of key states released Tuesday.

Although Democrats only need to pick up two seats to gain the majority in the Senate, they are struggling to control 10 states already held by Democratic senators. These states are now predominantly red states with voters who are strong supporters of President Donald Trump. They include Indiana, Missouri, Montana and North Dakota, all of which Trump won in 2016, while his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton couldn’t even win over 40 percent of voters in any of those states, according to a Politico report.

Chances of flipping most states where Republican senators are up for reelection seems slim, with states like Nebraska, Utah and Wyoming most likely a solid GOP win, according to polling data by RealClearPolitics. Democrats’ only hope will be to replace GOP Sen. Jeff Flake from Arizona as he retires with one of their own, while simultaneously defeating GOP Sen. Dean Heller in Nevada

Midterm prediction polls show that in an effort to add two seats to Democrats’ existing 26, they will likely lose races in Nevada, Florida and Indiana, which will squash any chances of overtaking Republicans in the Senate races, according to the Axios and SurveyMonkey poll. The poll surveyed 12,677 registered voters from June 11 to July 2 with a margin of error of five percent.

The poll suggests that 49 percent of voters would vote for GOP Gov. Rick Scott over Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson in Florida, 52 percent would vote for GOP Rep. Kevin Cramer over Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, and 49 percent would vote for Republican Mike Braun against Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly in Indiana.

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Trump Hits Two More Countries With Visa Sanctions For Refusing To Take Back Deportees

The Trump administration has hit certain government officials from Burma and Laos with visa sanctions as punishment for both countries’ refusal to take back their citizens the U.S. is trying to deport, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Tuesday.

Going forward, the U.S. embassy in Rangoon, Burma, will halt the issuance of tourist and business non-immigrant visas to senior officials in the ministries of Labor, Immigration, Population and Home Affairs. In Laos, the U.S. mission will no longer grant tourist and business nonimmigrant visas to senior officials from the Laotian Ministry of Public Security.

The restrictions also apply to the officials’ immediate families, DHS said.

The sanctions come after a review by DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who determined that Burma and Laos have “denied or unreasonably delayed” accepting citizens ordered removed from the U.S. They will remain in place until Nielsen notifies Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that cooperation on deportees has improved, according to DHS.

“The decision to sanction a recalcitrant country is not taken lightly,” the department said in a statement. “DHS makes significant efforts, in collaboration with the State Department, to encourage countries to accept the prompt, lawful return of their nationals who are subject to removal from the United States. Those efforts include diplomatic communications at the highest level of government.”

Tuesday’s announcement is not the first time the Trump administration has resorted to the use of visa sanctions against countries that don’t cooperate on deportations. Washington slapped Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cambodia in 2017 with varying levels of visa restrictions after then-acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke named all four as recalcitrant countries

Although the immigration code allows U.S. authorities apply visa sanctions on countries that refuse to take back their citizens, the punishment had rarely been used before the Trump administration. Until 2017, Washington had resorted to visa sanctions against non-accepting countries just twice — Guyana in 2001 and then Gambia in 2016.

The Trump administration has put heavy diplomatic pressure on countries that resist accepting deportees and has been able to convince some to become more cooperative. Since January 2017, DHS has removed eight countries — including Iraq and Somalia — from a list of recalcitrant countries maintained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The 12 nations still on the list as of last July were China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Iran, Cambodia, Burma, Morocco, Hong Kong, South Sudan, Guinea and Eritrea.

A Supreme Court decision, Zadvydas v. Davis, prevents the government from holding aliens with final orders of removal beyond six months if there is no “significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future.” ICE says it has had to release Burmese and Laotian nationals into the U.S. because neither country has an established process for issuing travel documents to their citizens who’ve been ordered removed.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Illegal Immigrant Kills Two Officers — Fined $280

Yet open-borders advocates pretend that immigration enforcement is the problem.

It sounds surreal: An illegal immigrant with a years-old rap sheet has to pay just a few hundred bucks after a vehicle crash killed two law enforcement officers. Unfortunately, this actually happened in Maryland. The fatal wreck occurred on Dec. 8, 2017, when Guatemalan national Roberto Garza Palacios “fatally struck an FBI agent and a fire investigator on the side of a Maryland highway,” The Washington Post reports. Yet on June 25, Garza Palacios “paid a $280 fine, concluding a case of negligent driving lodged against him.” The illegal immigrant “did not have to appear in court and did not receive jail time.”

According to the Post, “While he drove in a ‘careless and imprudent manner,’ prosecutors found, his actions did not rise to a ‘gross deviation’ from careful driving or a ‘reckless disregard’ for human life — the conditions needed to support more-serious charges.” But that’s hardly all there is to this heart-wrenching story. The post further notes:

On May 3, officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement took [Roberto Garza Palacios] into custody at his home in Gaithersburg and charged him with overstaying and violating the terms of a work visa that had expired in 2009, according to ICE officials. Three years earlier, ICE learned he had been arrested in Montgomery County and asked jail officials to place a hold on him, but that request was not honored and Garza Palacios was released, according to county and federal officials. … Garza Palacios had previous traffic and criminal convictions. In a 2015 case, he pleaded guilty to driving while impaired. Around that time, he also served about four months in jail after being arrested for smashing windows on about 16 cars and lighting a sofa on fire near a construction site. After the traffic case concluded, [one of the victim’s widows] said that particularly given Garza Palacios’s record, the penalty in the recent case seemed woefully inadequate.

No kidding. Authorities are currently determining whether Garza Palacios should be deported (that’s a no-brainer), but two deaths could have been avoided had Garza Palacios been deported when he was originally flagged and had he not been afforded sanctuary despite his record. Today, the Left wants to abolish ICE. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) even called the agency a “deportation force.” Yet Garza Palacios’ evading deportation resulted in two people being needlessly killed. Whether intentional or not, this is what open-borders advocates condone.

SOURCE

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Leftists Ramping Up Administration Confrontations

Two more incidents over the weekend add to the growing list of violent episodes against Republicans.

Who are the real fascists? “If you see anybody from [Trump’s] Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd! And you push back on them! And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!” stated Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) last month in her call to harass and bully anyone associated with President Donald Trump and, more broadly, the Republican Party. In the weeks since, it has become increasingly clear that leftists have taken Waters’ directive to heart. This past weekend saw two more episodes to add to the growing list of leftist harassment.

In Richmond, Virginia, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was confronted in a book store by a woman who called him a “piece of trash.” Upon witnessing the harassing behavior, the store owner told the woman to leave, which she initially refused to do until he called the police. The store owner explained, “Steve Bannon was simply standing, looking at books, minding his own business. I asked [the antagonist] to leave, and she wouldn’t. And I said, ‘I’m going to call the police if you don’t,’ and I went to call the police and she left. And that’s the end of the story.” The owner then noted, “We are a bookshop. Bookshops are all about ideas and tolerating different opinions and not about verbally assaulting somebody, which is what was happening.”

But, as it turns out, the story didn’t end there. Upon learning of the incident, former Hillary Clinton aide Philippe Reines exposed the name and address of the bookstore along with the name of the owner, writing that the woman “took the opportunity to call [Bannon] a ‘piece of trash.’” When Reines was called out for seeking “a public beatdown” of the store, he disingenuously responded, “I’m providing a service to the public by providing the contact information the bookstore posted on their website — presumably with the hope of being contacted. I present facts [without] encouraging any behavior.” But he absurdly added, “I’d point out through [sic] it’s possible this woman stopped a book burning.”

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was exiting a restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, when he and a colleague were surrounded by several people and harangued with shouts of “Abolish ICE” and “No justice, no peace.” At one point an individual is heard shouting, “We know where you live, Mitch. We know where you live.” Eventually, as McConnell enters his car and drives off, someone says, “We did good, fellow citizens.”

It should come as little surprise that Democrats have increasingly approved of the tactics of fascism as their party has increasingly embraced the agenda of the extreme Left. Rather than attempting to defend the “merits” of this bankrupt ideology (which is understandable, given the fact that leftist ideology is opposed to the whole concept of merit), they instead have supported the tactics of intimidation via verbal assault and shaming in seeking to pressure Republicans and conservatives to kowtow to their political demands. Are any elected Democrats willing and bold enough to definitively break with their party and call out this dangerous and deeply divisive behavior of the unhinged Left?

SOURCE

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McConnell Destroys Democratic Opposition To Potential SCOTUS Nominee

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke on the Senate floor Monday attacking Democratic opposition to President Donald Trump’s future Supreme Court nominee, citing Democrats’ historical panic at conservative SCOTUS nominees.

“Back in 1975, they assailed the nomination of John Paul Stephens. They said he lacked impartiality and opposed women’s rights … So these far left groups have been at the same scare tactics for over 40 years,” McConnell said. “This far left rhetoric comes out every single time. The apocalypse never comes.”

“No matter their qualifications, no matter their record, no matter their reputation, it’s the same hyperbole, the same accusations, the same old story,” McConnell said.

McConnell also cited the nomination of David Souter, who turned out to be a fairly liberal justice under former President George H. W. Bush.

“Guess what left-wing pressure groups said about David Souter right after President Bush selected him? That’s right. The very same things you’re hearing today. The same things you’ve heard from these same corners about every Supreme Court nominee named by a Republican president,” McConnell said in the speech.

McConnell also cited several Democrats’ opposition to the nominee without knowing who he or she will be, in particular California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris’s statement that Trump’s SCOTUS nominee will signal “the destruction of the Constitution of the United States.”

Harris predicted “the destruction of the constitution” on “Hardball with Chris Matthews” in June shortly after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation, according to The Daily Caller on June 27.

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Big Labor Hit with Another Class Action Suit

Janus decision spurs Washington State suit seeking back wages

The fallout from the Supreme Court's landmark Janus ruling continued as Washington state workers filed suit to recover their lost wages from forced unionism.

Several home health aides are suing Service Employees International Union Local 775 and the state to recover money deducted from Medicaid reimbursements designed to fund the care of disabled or elderly people. The state government automatically sent more than 3 percent of the provider payments to the union, despite the fact that workers never agreed to become members. The practice, according to the suit, violates both the U.S. and state constitutions.

"Plaintiffs and class members are not union members and never consented for the union or the state to withdraw union dues or dues equivalent fees from their wages, yet the state deducted such fees from their pay," the suit says. "Defendants conspired to deprive Plaintiffs and class members of their First Amendment rights by deducting union fees from their wages without their clear, prior, affirmative consent."

For years Washington state forced such providers, many of whom are caring for relatives, to pay a portion of those reimbursements to the union. The practice only stopped when the Supreme Court declared a similar policy in Illinois unconstitutional. That 2014 ruling led to the Supreme Court's June decision declaring mandatory payments to public sector unions, including SEIU, an unconstitutional violation of free speech in Janus.

The caregivers are receiving pro bono representation from the Freedom Foundation, a pro-free market think tank in the state. Foundation labor expert Maxford Nelson said the policy was exploitive and "wrong on every level."

"Any business that tried to charge customers without their permission would have the state attorney general trying to shut them down," he told the Washington Free Beacon. "We believe extracting union dues from caregivers' Medicaid checks without permission is not only unfair, but violates caregivers First Amendment rights."

The home health providers are asking for "punitive damages against defendants … because their conduct, described above, was and is motivated by evil motive or intent, or involves reckless or callous indifference to the federal and state rights of plaintiffs and class members." They also are asking the judge to force the union and state to pay for legal fees. The Washington aides are not the first to demand that unions refund forced unions dues and fees. Former government workers have filed class action suits in seven states, including Washington, to repay past deductions.

Nelson said the Janus decision has settled the question of forced fee payments and "made it clear that unions can't take money out of public employees' pay without their affirmative consent." He said the onus should be on the unions to win the support of public sector workers or personal medical aides and that both groups are motivated by political support, rather than care for the aides.

"We believe the same principle protects these caregivers against being exploited by unions like SEIU 775 and politicians like Gov. Inslee," Nelson said. "SEIU 775 wants to fill its own coffers and Gov. Inslee wants union campaign contributions, so they assume silence means consent and take caregivers' money until and unless the caregiver objects."

SOURCE

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Trump Hits Another Home Run With Supreme Court Pick Brett Kavanaugh



President Donald Trump announced on Monday night his nomination of D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh, who was included in The Heritage Foundation’s original list of potential Supreme Court nominees, is a very promising choice.

Kavanaugh is a committed textualist. As Kavanaugh succinctly stated in a book review published in the Harvard Law Review, “The text of the law is the law.” He has reiterated this view in many of his opinions.

In Fourstar v. Garden City Group, Inc. (2017), he wrote, “It is not a judge’s job to add to or otherwise re-mold statutory text to try to meet a statute’s perceived policy objectives. Instead, we must apply the statute as written.” And in District of Columbia v. Department of Labor (2016), he write, “As judges, we are not authorized to rewrite statutory text simply because we might think it should be updated.”

Kavanaugh is a critic of Chevron deference, under which courts show considerable deference to executive branch agencies in interpreting arguably ambiguous statutes. In his view, “Chevron itself is an atextual invention by courts. In many ways, Chevron is nothing more than a judicially orchestrated shift of power from Congress to the Executive Branch.”

And in 2017, while delivering the Joseph Story Distinguished Lecture at The Heritage Foundation, Kavanaugh spoke eloquently about the judiciary’s essential role in maintaining the separation of powers and concluded:

Statutory interpretation is inherently complex, people say. It is all politics anyway, some contend. I have heard all the excuses. I have been doing this for 11 years. I am not buying it. In my view, it is a mistake to think that this current mess in statutory interpretation is somehow the natural and unalterable order of things. Put simply, we can do better in the realm of statutory interpretation. And for the sake of the neutral and impartial rule of law, we must do better.

His record as a judge reflects a skepticism toward Chevron deference. Indeed, Kavanaugh has written or joined dozens of opinions finding an agency’s actions unlawful as well as many dissenting opinions (some of which were ultimately vindicated by the Supreme Court) in which the court’s majority upheld agency actions.

For example, he dissented from his court’s ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency could disregard cost-benefit analysis when considering a proposed rule in Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA (2012). The Supreme Court later reversed that decision, citing Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion.

And in U.S. Telecom Ass’n v. FCC (2017), a case involving net neutrality, Kavanaugh dissented from the court’s refusal to hear the case en banc. He argued that the Federal Communications Commission was not entitled to Chevron deference because Congress had not explicitly delegated authority to the FCC to treat the internet like a public utility subject to regulation.

As for the Second Amendment, Kavanaugh wrote a dissenting opinion in Heller v. District of Columbia (2011)—a follow-on case to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling acknowledging the Second Amendment’s protection of an individual right to keep and bear arms. Kavanaugh would have held D.C.’s ban on the possession of semi-automatic rifles unconstitutional, stating that “Heller and McDonald leave little doubt that courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, history, and tradition, not by a balancing test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny.”

Anticipating the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Kavanaugh ruled in Emily’s List v. FEC (2009) that the commission’s regulations limiting independent political expenditures by non-profit organizations violated the First Amendment. Kavanaugh also wrote the majority opinion in South Carolina v. Holder (2012), upholding South Carolina’s voter ID law.

Kavanaugh has been criticized by some on the right for not going far enough in opinions he wrote involving religious liberty (Newdow v. Roberts and Priests for Life v. HHS), abortion (Garza v. Hargan), and Obamacare (Seven-Sky v. Holder).

In evaluating each of these decisions, it is worth remembering that Kavanaugh sits on a court in which a majority of the judges were appointed by Democratic presidents and would certainly not be considered conservative jurists.

Moreover, a good conservative judge might well decide to fashion an opinion in a way designed to maximize the likelihood that a closely-divided Supreme Court would ultimately agree to hear the case and adopt his position, a strategy that Kavanaugh has effectively utilized on several occasions over the years. As Kavanaugh stated during his Story Lecture at Heritage, “[W]hen Justice Kennedy says something, I listen.”

In short, Kavanaugh has been playing the long game to advance an understanding of the laws and Constitution that is faithful to the text and original meaning.

Approach to the Law

In a 2017 speech at Notre Dame Law School, Kavanaugh spoke about Scalia’s impact on the law and the late justice’s view that federal judges “should not be making policy-laden judgments.” Kavanaugh remarked, “I believe very deeply in [the] visions of the rule of law as a law of rules, and of the judge as umpire. By that, I mean a neutral, impartial judiciary that decides cases based on settled principles without regard to policy preferences or political allegiances or which party is on which side in a particular case.”

He elaborated on what Scalia stood for as a judge:

[R]ead the words of the statute as written. Read the text of the Constitution as written, mindful of history and tradition. The Constitution is a document of majestic specificity defining governmental structure, individual rights, and the role of a judge. Remember that the structural provisions of the Constitution—the separation of powers and federalism—are not mere matters of etiquette or architecture, but are essential to protecting individual liberty. … Remember that courts have a critical role, when a party has standing, in enforcing those separation of powers and federalism limits.

Though Kavanaugh was speaking about Scalia, his words could very well describe his own approach to the law and his commitment to the Constitution.

Much more HERE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Toxic Race-Mongering of the Left

Imagine a world in which leftists, by some magic, were unable to accuse their political opponents of racism. Racism, sexism, all of the various make-believe phobias — these charges were suddenly somehow off-limits during political discussion. Instead, at all the leftist venues — The New York Times, the TV network news departments, CNN and the rest — the commentators had to accept that their political opponents were people of good will with the best interests of the country at heart. They had to ask themselves — and even possibly ask actual conservatives — what it was about border security that seemed important to them, why social spending might be destructive, why Islam might be incompatible with western thought, why teachers' unions were impeding the rise of the poor and so on.

If that magical moment ever occurred, we might start to have an intelligent political debate in this country. But don't hold your breath.

The current status quo serves the short-sighted power aims of the worst of the Democratic party, that is the far left, too well for them to abandon it. Scream racism at every disagreement and you might convince meaning-seeking millennials that leftism provides them a cogent moral framework, you might scare blacks out of noticing that they are thriving under Donald Trump's policies, you might convince women that Trump's boorish words are somehow worse than Bill Clinton's actions.

But the long-term costs of these political gains are great. The constant cries of racism have kept race at the center of the American political discussion long after most Americans would happily let the subject go. The attacks on anyone who demands reform from Islam have allowed radical Islamists to range free in their communities while moderates are unprotected. The anti-male cries of sexism have reduced women to perpetual victims, perpetually dissatisfied with life.

And, perhaps most importantly, leftist race mongering turns leftists into political idiots. It isn't until you engage with your political opponents that you learn the strengths and weaknesses of your arguments and can therefore adjust them or even change your mind entirely. If all you do is scream racism at people, you pump yourself full of self-righteousness and become increasingly radicalized and therefore increasingly at odds with reality and common sense.

A perfect example of the left-wing dynamic occurred on Fox News, of all places, the other day. Conservative political activist David Bossie — a man I know and like — was in a fierce debate with Democrat strategist Joel Payne. As things got heated, David told Payne, "You are out of your cotton-pickin' mind." Payne took immediate exception to the term and left-wing venues immediately declared it a racial slur. As a result, David was temporarily suspended from commentating on Fox and was forced to apologize before he could return.

A short-term victory for leftists, no doubt. It plays into their decades-long project of depicting right-wingers as inherently racist, of making them double-think every word that comes out of their mouths, and of winning arguments, not through reason, but through diversion and personal attack.

But the long-term costs are enormous. "Cotton-pickin'" is a 1950s American euphemism for "damn" that has no racial connotations I'm aware of. It's just something people of the Bossie-Klavan generations say. By using the term to Payne, David demonstrated he wasn't thinking about Payne's race in the least. If he had been, he would have been more careful with his words. Instead, he spoke to Payne as he would speak to anyone. It was man-to-man stuff, one American to another. Payne has now lost the right to be treated like that. He must be — what the left wants him to be — black above everything. Bossie treated him as an equal human, a brother American. Leftism made it so he can't be treated that way. Congratulations, leftism.

On top of this, fake charges of racism give real racism a kind of panache. Since only good non-racist people can be cowed into silence with false charges, nasty real racists, willing to speak their minds, come across as bold and honest instead of like the jerks they are. When you cry Racist Wolf long enough, you leave the real wolf free to roam.

Eventually, one hopes that insightful black Americans will begin to see that while the left's race mongering may offer them the short-term political power of victimhood, the long-term costs in inequality and social exclusion are too high. On that day, the left will have to get by on the strength of their ideas alone. That will not be pretty.

SOURCE

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It’s Not Socialism, It’s Racism

The myth of the media’s new Socialist It Girl

After the ’10 census, New York lost two congressional seats. Overpriced, lacking any growth industries except tourism and community organizing, the state just couldn’t keep up with the rest of the country.

New York had been bleeding congressional seats since the rise of the suburbs. After the massacre of ’10, its congressional delegation was the smallest since 1823. And it’ll lose more seats after the next census.

But the ’10 massacre also forced Rep. Joe Crowley out of the 7th Congressional District and into the 14th. The 7th became gerrymandered a district built like a Frankenstein’s monster out of parts of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens that had nothing geographically in common except Puerto Rican populations who will keep voting for Rep. Nydia Velázquez, a Democrat, until the city sinks beneath the waves.

Crowley, who is paler than birch trees, had no shot at the new 7th. But he settled down comfortably in the 14th, winning 70% of the vote by just showing up, without the fuss of a primary challenge. While representing a Hispanic district in Queens, he was allegedly living comfortably in Arlington, Virginia.

That was never going to last.

New York City’s working class white population is an endangered species. If you’re not on welfare or earning well in the six figures, you can’t afford to live there. Crowley’s district was 46% Hispanic. It had the second highest share of Latino voters in New York. The machine pol was living on borrowed time.

It’s hard to imagine a more vulnerable politician than doughy Joe, the echo of a 19th century political establishment of barstools and crony government jobs, used to winning ¾ of the vote in safe districts and who had forgotten how to compete in an election (if he ever knew how) facing a Hispanic district.

Of course that’s not the story you see in the media.

Instead the media thrills to its own fake news of how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the "girl from the Bronx", a Socialist candidate and “giant-slayer”, impossibly defeated Rep. Crowley. And that’s accompanied by analysis of how her victory is proof of the inevitable triumph of Socialism. The media has even begun trying to ‘Obamaize’ her with stories about her brand of lipstick selling out.

The fake news narrative has nothing to do with the truth about Cortez and the reality of the 14th.

The simple truth is that the Democratic Socialists of America and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put in time and money into a district that the Democrats hadn’t bothered to protect because Republicans couldn’t win it. The secret to Cortez’s victory wasn’t socialism. It was her last name.

Nor is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “girl from the Bronx”. She’s the daughter of an architect from a pricey suburb in Westchester County. Her father, a Pratt Institute grad, was a founder of KOR which stood for Kirschenbaum & Ocasio-Roman Architects. The Ocasio (rather than the Kirschenbaum) part of the name meant that it operated as a “certified minority business enterprise” which came with assorted privileges.

MBEs are able to cut in line and get all sorts of lucrative government contracts. All it takes is having a minority grandfather and your company is entitled to drink from a river of government cash flowing only to MBE companies. And if your ancestry is whiter than that of Senator Elizabeth Warren, you can always find a minority partner and then let the good times roll. At the expense of the working tax-paying stiffs.

After her father cashed in on affirmative action while living in Westchester County, his daughter cashed in her minority card in a New York City election even though she has far more in common with the white hipster Bernie Sanders supporters who provided the muscle for her campaign than any of the minorities living in a housing project in Queens or the Bronx. But that’s also why the media loves Cortez.

She’s one of them: a suburban leftist with a bio consisting of studying International Relations at Boston U, working on immigration issues for Ted Kennedy, serving as the National Hispanic Institute's Social Entrepreneur in Residence, producing a web series, shuttling between trendy lefty protests and founding what appears to a defunct social justice publishing house.

This isn’t the biography of an urban minority politician, but an upscale lefty hipster drifting after college from one activist gig to another, developing the contacts that put her in the right place at the right time. These are the bios of ten thousand professional lefties who infest the non-profit sector. They’re all angry, self-righteous and interchangeable. The minorities among them hail from wealthy areas.

And like all upscale lefties, they love putting on as much working class cred as they can get away with.

The media is using Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to push the Democrats even further to the left. But her victory is no argument for socialism. It is evidence that the left can win an election if the turnout is really low and a Hispanic district is being represented by a boring white Democrat who lives in Virginia. Since the 14th is a minority district, Cortez will probably be able to hold on to it until she’s older than Maxine Waters. Or unless the coming redistricting after New York loses more seats changes its racial composition. And Cortez and her Socialism will go down hard in an Asian or African-American district.

The unspeakable truth is that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez didn’t win because of her views but because the Democrats have created a political racial tribalism that is as bad as that of any third world country.

It’s not Socialism that will send Cortez to Congress. It’s racism.

The 14th district has the second highest share of Latino voters in New York. The 13th has the highest. Before Crowley bit the dust, Rep. Rangel, an elder statesman of the Congressional Black Caucus, barely survived a 2012 challenge by Adriano Espaillat, a Dominican former illegal alien, when his Harlem district’s racial demographics shifted. Frantic efforts were made to dig up Rangel’s “Latino roots.” Rangel finally eked out a victory by a little over 1,000 votes. He didn't show up in 2016. And Espaillat beat Rangel's chosen African-American successor but not after some embarrassing race-baiting by both sides.

Nobody in the 13th or 14th needs Socialism. They’re already living it. Their phones, food, education, medical care, transportation and, their jobs (if they have them) all come from the government.

The 14th dumped the old white guy for the same reason that the 13th dumped the old black guy. They were the wrong color. And the 13th, 14th, and the other multicultural voting districts of Dem strongholds can’t be satisfied with getting their free phones from a political representative of another race.

The media has been marketing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the new Obama. And that’s what she is. Her lesson isn’t that socialism works. The details of her politics were as incidental to the voters of the 14th as Obama’s policies were to his most dedicated base. It’s that racism works. Just ask a Democrat.

SOURCE

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White Millennials Are Leaving the Democratic Party as 'Walk Away' Campaign Picks Up Steam,/b>

White millennials are equally divided between supporting Republicans and Democrats in this year's critical midterm elections, as a campaign urging people to "Walk Away" from the Democratic Party has picked up steam online.

Young people do not like President Donald Trump, but whites between the ages of 18 and 34 said they are equally likely to vote for a Republican as for a Democrat in the elections for Congress this November. A full 39 percent said that "if the election for U.S. Congress were held today," they would vote for the Republican in the district where they live. Another 39 percent said they would vote for the Democrat.

This represented a nine-point shift away from Democrats since 2016. That year, only 33 percent of young white voters said they would elect a Republican to Congress, while 47 percent said they would choose a Democrat.

Young white men made the greatest shift toward the GOP. In 2016, nearly half of them (48 percent) said they would vote for a Democrat, while only 36 percent said they would vote Republican. This year, 46 percent said they would choose a Republican, while only 37 percent said they would vote Democrat — a 21 percent shift in favor of the GOP.

The poll surveyed 16,000 registered voters between 18 and 34, with a 1 percent margin of error.

Democrats have been hoping for a "blue wave," resulting from Americans across the country voting against Republicans as Trump's party. Indeed, midterm elections tend to favor the party out of power, and Republicans do hold the House, the Senate, and the presidency.

However, there are signs that Republicans may win the 2018 midterm elections as the anti-establishment underdog. How? By campaigning against the excessive Trump derangement syndrome across the media, Hollywood, and college campuses.

This is the premise of the "Walk Away" campaign. Brandon Straka, a gay man from Nebraska, identified himself as "The Unsilent Majority" and launched a campaign urging people to reject the Left — for the same reasons he became a liberal.

In the "Walk Away" viral video, Straka denounced racism, misogyny, "tyrannical group think," junk science, "hate," and "a system which allows an ambitious, misinformed, and dogmatic mob to suppress free speech, create false narratives, and apathetically steamroll over the truth." He said he became a liberal for these reasons, and he "walked away" for the very same reasons.

"For years now, I have watched as the left has devolved into intolerant, inflexible, illogical, hateful, misguided, ill-informed, un-American, hypocritical, menacing, callous, ignorant, narrow-minded, and at times blatantly fascistic behavior and rhetoric," Straka declared.

#WalkAway Campaign Urges Fed-Up Democrats to Leave the Party
Straka's video has racked up more than 492,000 views on YouTube and nearly 2 million views on Facebook.

Some millennials might be rejecting the Left as it pushes for control over the way people think, but others merely prefer the economic growth associated with the Republican Party.

Terry Hood, a 34-year-old African American who works at a Dollar General store in Baton Rouge, La., told Reuters that while he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, he will consider a Republican for Congress this year.

"It sounds strange to me to say this about the Republicans, but they're helping with even the small things," Hood said. "They're taking less taxes out of my paycheck. I notice that."

President Trump powerfully turned the "blue wave" narrative on its head last month, predicting a "red wave." Perhaps he was on to something.

SOURCE



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Boycott Fail: Chick-fil-A Rules

For a third year in a row, Chick-fil-A has been crowned the top fast food chain in America.

Endless boycott campaigns led by liberal activists against the company haven’t slowed down Chick-fil-A’s pure dominance.

“Chick-fil-A was named America’s top fast-food restaurant for the third year in a row in the 2018 American Customer Satisfaction Index’s Restaurant Report, which surveyed more than 22,500 American consumers,” as reported by the Ledger-Enquirer.

Chick-fil-A beat Pizza Hut, Arby’s, Taco Bell, Subway, and Starbucks to claim the number one slot.

With a satisfaction score of 87, Chick-fil-A dominated the next 3 closest chains in Panera Bread (82), Papa John’s (82), and Subway (81).

The report also notes, “The chicken specialist dominates the rankings with the highest score across both restaurant categories, and its food quality continues to rate higher than the competition. Chick-fil-A maintains a wide lead over chicken rival KFC, as the Yum! Brands chain slips 1% to 77.”

The Atlanta-based company has held the top spot for three years now, which means their popularity only climbed following the backlash over CEO Dan Cathy expressing support for traditional marriage. The controversy reached such a fever-pitch that even city mayors tried to ban them from doing business.

Just this year, the Left became venomous in their war against the fast-food chain, with at least two major publications begging people to boycott the business: the New Yorker and Huffington Post.

Chick-Fil-A’s support of our military, willingness to say ‘Merry Christmas,’ stringent franchise requirements, incredible food, and friendly service continues to set the bar high for fast food chains.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Never Trumpers Suffer Yet Another Utter Humiliation

Kurt Schlichter

Last week was especially glorious not just because we rejected the latest GOPe amnesty scheme, not just because we defunded the left's union cash extortion machine with the Janus decision, and not just because Justice Kennedy is leaving to be the swing vote on his retirement community HOA. It was especially glorious because these enormous victories - these latest enormous victories - were the direct result of normal Americans giving the gimps, grifters, and geebos of Never Trump the George Costanza treatment by doing precisely the opposite of our alleged betters' political instincts.

Everything they told us was wrong. If we had done what they demanded, we would not be revelling in the joy of conserva-victory. We would be resigned to yet another defeat. "But Gorsuch" indeed, you never-been-kissed band of losers.

If we had listened to Never Trump, we'd have voted for Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and we would not only have Merrick Garland (or worse) on the SCOTUS but now she'd be picking another pinko who agrees with the lib bloc that the First Amendment has hitherto unknown asterisks that prevent conservatives from using it, that a bunch of other rights that aren't in the Constitution actually are, and that the Second Amendment stuff about not infringing on our right to keep and bear arms really means libs can totally infringe on our right to keep and bear arms.

Let's leave aside our booming economy and crushing ISIS and pulling out of the climate scam and maybe peace with North Korea. Just these two Supreme Court picks makes Trump the most important and successful conservative president since The Big R. And we wouldn't have any of it if that nattering pack of insufferable sissies had had their way.

But even today, this dwindling band of bow-tied nimrods still whine despite these manifest conservative triumphs. And their numbers grow fewer as the evidence grows in support of an undeniable conclusion: The election of Donald Trump was a conservative triumph of a magnitude we are only beginning to fully appreciate.

A lot of us had our doubts, but Trump assuaged them by doing something we never expected to see a GOP politician actually do - keep his promises. I was hardcore anti-Trump long ago - I was not Never Trump, only Never Hillary. I was loud and proud for Ted Cruz, with zero trust in a New York playboy whose attachment to conservative ideology seemed intermittent at best.

I write about my transformation at length, and with considerably more colorful language, in my upcoming book Militant Normals, which drops in October. But suffice it to say that I, as have a bunch of fellow Trump-doubters, came around because Trump performed. He did what he said he would. Promises made, promises kept. He promised winning, and delivered winning, and damnit, we normal conservatives are here to win.

A principled loser is just another kind of loser - an especially annoying kind because he never seems to shut his Zima-hole about his precious principles.

And the remaining rump of Never Trumpers is here to lose. That's their goal. Team Muh Principles always intended to lose. Oh, they try to play off their objections to the president as purely one of style. It's because Donald Trump is so.so.so.oh well I never. But their displeasure with Trump's aesthetic deficiencies is not the sole, nor even the most significant, reason for their fury at the orange-y interloper. They are really mad because, under Trump, these dorks can't get the White House to return their calls.

Trump threw the Fredocons out of the family business. They are nothing to us. They are not brothers-in-arms and they are not friends. We don't want to know them or what they do. We'd take them out in a figurative row boat onto Lake Tahoe but we don't want to be seen hanging around with them.

We ruined their scam. They miss the cruise ships, filled with marks handing over cash to mingle with second-tier scribes from magazines put out by lesser sons of greater fathers that we stopped reading when they stopped mattering. Never Trump wants to once stand on a sold-out cruise ship's bridge, pale puny arms spread wide, shouting, "I'm a minor duke of the world!"

They've been stripped of their silly status, but that silly status - "Oh, I am an assistant fellow at the Institute to For Conservative Studies and Mailing List Compilation" - was all they had. In the DC milieu they want to return to, they were never kings, or even princes (though they sure dig the hereditary titles vibe), but just minor royalty jealously guarding their little, tiny fiefdoms. Sure, the liberal establishment ran things, but the Professional Cons had their own petty gigs pretending to resist, pretending to care, all the while treading water in a sea of mediocrity and ineffectuality.

That was enough for them though - they got enough money to survive and got occasional talk show invitations, and they were secure in their place. So what if Hillary crushed Jeb! or whoever - who cared? You just ramped up your fake opposition pose and let the subscriptions and donations roll in. But the marks caught on. The Normals went for an outsider who had zero interest in making sure Conservative, Inc., kept humming along.

Never Trumpers blame Trump (and, by extension, uppity normal like us who dared defy them) for taking that all away, for prying them out of their safe, lucrative sinecures feeding the suckers the line that they were there in the swamp fighting for us. We figured out that they had really reached their own secret truce with the establishment. The official conservative opposition pretended to fight and the establishment pretended it was really an opposition.

The punchline pundits like George Will still cling to the hope that someday, somehow the rubes will fall back into line and things are going to be back to business as usual. Will started the week off by announcing, to great fanfare among the liberals who wish his ilk was still the soft, yielding, useful face of conservatism, that all of us should vote for Democrats in November to show Trump who's boss. But this conservative insurgency is all about us showing George and his doofus pals who's boss. It's not them. Not anymore.

I discuss the Never Trumpers extensively in Militant Normals because their combination of condescension, greed, and betrayal was a huge factor in creating the desperation that turned Normal Americans toward the most unlikely conservative hero imaginable. And in my book, I ruthlessly exploit my ability to use the kind of colorful language that fully describes them and their doings.

This week was a watershed for achieving the conservative renaissance the True ConservativesT that populate the dwindling Never Trump movement promised us for decades and never could, and never actually wanted to, deliver. Their response to it, not surprisingly, was more whining about how Trump is icky. How humiliating it must be to wake up every morning as a putative conservative who dreads looking at Twitter for fear of seeing yet another conservative grand slam by the guy who you thought was really dumb and yet who keeps cleaning your clock.

It's still kind of sad to watch the spectacle of these clowns still making fools of themselves. The liberals never respected them, though they'll still let them do panel hits on the occasional MSNBCNN show to help out with the narrative, and we Normals don't care anymore. Never Trumpers are Fredo, except Fredo at least had the dignity to go away.

SOURCE

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Trump delivers again. U.S. Manufacturing Jobs Up 362,000

Manufacturing jobs in the United States increased by 36,000 last month, climbing from 12,677,000 in May to 12,713,000 in June, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In December 2016, the month before President Donald Trump took office, there were 12,351,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States. Since then, U.S. manufacturing jobs have increased by 362,000.

“Manufacturing added 36,000 jobs in June,” said the BLS summary of the employment situation for the month. “Durable goods manufacturing accounted for nearly all of the increase, including job gains in fabricated metal products (+7,000), computer and electronic products (+5,000), and primary metals (+3,000). Motor vehicles and parts also added jobs over the month (+12,000), after declining by 8,000 in May. Over the past year, manufacturing has added 285,000 jobs”

BLS has tracked the monthly manufacturing employment in the United States since January 1939. During that time, manufacturing employment in the United States peaked at 19,553,000 in June 1979. Since that peak, U.S. manufacturing jobs have declined by 6,840,000—or 35 percent.

SOURCE

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Hispanic-Latino Unemployment Rate Hits Lowest Level on Record in June

The national seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate for Hispanics and Latinos in the U.S. labor force fell to the lowest level on record in June of 2018, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data released Friday show.

In June, the unemployment rate for Hispanics and Latinos, aged 16 and up, was 4.6%, down from its May level of 4.9%. Before June’s record, the lowest monthly Hispanic-Latino unemployment rate since BLS began tracking the statistic in 1973 was 4.8%.

While the Hispanic-Latino unemployment rate had been as low as 4.8% in five months, four of those months were during the administration of President Donald Trump; the lone exception being October of 2006:

June 2018: 4.6%
October 2006: 4.8%
June 2017: 4.8%
October 2017: 8%
November 2017: 4.8%
April 2018: 4.8%

During the 17 full months of the Trump administration, beginning in February 2017, Hispanic-Latino unemployment has averaged 5.0%.

In contrast, the national Hispanic-Latino unemployment rate averaged 9.4% during President Barack Obama’s eight years (96 months) in office, impacted by the 2008 recession, which officially ended in June of 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

SOURCE

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Obama Voter Turned Gun-Lover, Black Woman Reveals What Really Drove Her To Vote Trump

The mainstream media and the Democratic Party have gleefully counted on support from the black community for years.

Their messaging has been clear: At best, Republicans don’t care about black people, and at worst, are made up largely of racists. Unless you want to betray your race, you must vote Democrat.

So, you can imagine Democrats’ dismay at the growing movement of black Americans who are — as some have put it — leaving the Democratic plantation after waking up to the fact that the Democratic Party is bad news for African-Americans.

That brings us to Antonia Okafor. She’s a young African-American woman who voted for Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012.

Fast forward to 2018: She’s now a gun-toting, Donald Trump-supporting conservative.

In a video for The Daily Signal, Okafor gave some insight into her journey from the left to the right. “I’m Antonia Okafor and I am a former two-time Obama voter and Democrat,” she said. “How does that happen? Basically common sense.”

“Realizing that the values that I grew up with, that my family instilled in me — working hard, personal responsibility, education being one of the greatest equalizers and then a gun also being one of the greatest equalizers as well,” Okafor continued. “Realizing that those things are conservative and not realizing I really was identifying as a Democrat just because I felt, as a woman, or as a black person, that I had to be.”

Okafor then explained some realizations that changed the game for her.

“That ah-ha moment for me was not too long ago. After the Obama travesty that were the 8 years, 2008 to 2016, I realized that the economy, for one, still sucks. Not like what NPR told me for all this time that we’re in a good state when it comes to the economy. And then also that for the first time in history my generation was going to do worse than my parents’ generation, the generation that came to America to make sure that their kids had a different, better life.”

“That wasn’t going to happen because of the policies that came along with this charismatic man that we so naively put into office. That I so naively put into office,” she continued.

After 8 years of Obama, Okafor was ready for a different direction. “In 2016, I voted for Trump because he’s a Republican and he, I believe, is always going to be first and foremost someone who advocates for the Second Amendment and also for our life,” she said.

“That’s what people should be looking at. They shouldn’t just be looking at this charismatic face. They should be looking at the fact that it’s not the person in office who’s going to really directly do something to change your individual life. It’s the policies that they put forth that are really going to affect you.”

She’s absolutely right. Democrat politicians like Barack Obama are able to put on a good face for the black community, but at the end of the day, his policies did nothing to help them.

SOURCE

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Pence Defends Immigration Agency, Rips Democrats

Vice President Mike Pence on Friday accused Democrats of making opposition to the federal immigration agency central to their party, calling for an end to “spurious attacks” on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In an address at ICE headquarters infused with electoral politics, Pence noted that some prominent Democrats had called for the abolition of the agency charged with detaining and deporting migrants entering the country illegally. He said President Donald Trump would fully support immigration enforcement agents and warned that the abolition of ICE would lead to more illegal immigration, human trafficking, violent crime and the proliferation of drugs and “vicious gangs.”

“It isn’t just the expression of the radical left that has been speaking out against ICE. The truth is that opposition of ICE has moved to the center of the Democratic Party itself,” Pence said in a speech to ICE employees. “Just when you thought the Democrats couldn’t move farther to the left, leading members of the Democratic Party, including candidates for higher office, are actually openly advocating the abolition of ICE.”

“The American people have the right to their opinions, but these spurious attacks on ICE by our political leaders must stop,” Pence said.

The dispute over the federal agency has emerged as a political fault line after the Trump administration began separating migrant children from their parents after they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, leading to nationwide protests last weekend. Trump has made border security a focus of his message as he aims to prevent a Democratic takeover of Congress in the November midterm elections.

Pence made no mention of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy or the caring for unaccompanied children, who are overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services. As the vice president was greeting ICE employees after the speech, he did not respond to a shouted question from a reporter asking if separating children “was a Christian thing to do.”

ICE has come under fire from Democratic Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, all of whom were named by Pence as seeking the abolition of the agency. The three Democrats are among a large field of potential 2020 challengers to Trump.

While some Democrats in the House and Senate have raised the prospect of eliminating ICE, no top Democrats in the House or Senate have called for such a move.

Gillibrand has said ICE is not “working as intended” and pushed for separating the criminal justice aspect of the agency from immigration issues. Responding to Pence’s speech, she tweeted that immigration “is a strength of America. Our country needs a new agency that works, and it needs bipartisan immigration reform.”

Warren has called Trump’s immigration policies “immoral” and said the U.S. needs to rebuild its immigration system “from top to bottom, starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our values,” while de Blasio has said ICE’s time “has come and gone.”

In his remarks, Pence also referred to a “leading candidate” for New York governor who had “appallingly called this agency a ‘terrorist organization.'”

Cynthia Nixon, an actress and liberal activist challenging New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the state’s Democratic primary, tweeted that she could “think of no better description than to call ICE a terrorist organization, and I will wear any criticism from @mike_pence as a badge of honor.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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The Never-Trumpers Are Never Coming Back

Pat Buchanan concludes below that it was overseas meddling which was the big mistake of the pre-Trump GOP. I disagree.  I think Americans give foreign policy low priority whichever way it goes.

It is what is happening at home that matters. And there are few things more obvious in most of America than the presence of Hispanic illegals.  Americans don't like that transformstion of their society by people who have much lower standards all-round, with immigrant criminality a major concern.  It is the failure of the GOP to take a strong stand on immigration that doomed them and paved the way for Trump  -- "the wall".

And the GOP was also bullied by Leftists into accepting that any expression of national pride among Americans was "racist". But the average American is proud of his great country so again that was an opening for Trump -- MAGA.

So as Buchanan says the old GOP had its priorities wrong and it won't come back


With never-Trump conservatives bailing on the GOP and crying out for the Party of Pelosi to save us, some painful truths need to be restated.

The Republican Party of Bush I and II, of Bob Dole and John McCain, is history. It's not coming back. Unlike the Bourbons after the Revolution and the Terror, after Napoleon and the Empire, no restoration is in the cards.

It is over. The GOP's policies of recent decades — the New World Order of George H.W. Bush, the crusades for democracy of Bush II — failed, and are seen as having failed. With Trump's capture of the party they were repudiated.

There will be no turning back.

What were the historic blunders?

It was not supporting tax cuts, deregulation, conservative judges and justices, or funding a defense second to none. Donald Trump has delivered on these as well as any president since Reagan.

The failures that killed the Bush party, and that represented departures from Reaganite traditionalism and conservatism, are:

First, the hubristic drive, despite the warnings of statesmen like George Kennan, to exploit our Cold War victory and pursue a policy of permanent containment of a Russia that had lost a third of its territory and half its people.

We moved NATO into Eastern Europe and the Baltic, onto her doorstep. We abrogated the ABM treaty Nixon had negotiated and moved defensive missiles into Poland. John McCain pushed to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, and even to send U.S. forces to face off against Russian troops.

Thus we got a second Cold War that need never have begun and that our allies seem content to let us fight alone.

Europe today is not afraid of Vladimir Putin reaching the Rhine. Europe is afraid of Africa and the Middle East reaching the Danube. Let the Americans, who relish playing empire, pay for NATO.

Second, in a reflexive response to 9/11, we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, dumped over the regime in Libya, armed rebels to overthrow Bashar Assad in Syria, and backed Saudi intervention in a Yemeni civil war, creating a humanitarian crisis in that poorest of Arab countries that is exceeded in horrors only by the Syrian civil war.

Since Y2K, hundreds of thousands in the Middle East have perished, the ancient Christian community has all but ceased to exist, and the refugees now number in the millions. What are the gains for democracy from these wars, all backed enthusiastically by the Republican establishment?

Why are the people responsible for these wars still being listened to, rather than confessing their sins at second-thoughts conferences?

The GOP elite also played a crucial role in throwing open U.S. markets to China and ceding transnational corporations full freedom to move factories and jobs there and ship their Chinese-made goods back here, free of charge.

Result: In three decades, the U.S. has run up $12 trillion in merchandise trade deficits — $4 trillion with China — and Beijing's revenue from the USA has more than covered China's defense budget for most of those years.

Beijing swept past Italy, France, Britain, Germany and Japan to become the premier manufacturing power on earth and a geo-strategic rival. Now, from East Africa to Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean, and from the South and East China Sea to Taiwan, Beijing's expansionist ambitions have become clear.

And where are the Republicans responsible for building up this potentially malevolent power that thieves our technology? Talking of building a Reagan-like Navy to contain the mammoth they nourished.

Since the Cold War, America's elites have been exhibiting symptoms of that congenital blindness associated since Rome with declining and falling empires.

While GOP grass roots have begged for measures to control our bleeding southern border, they were regularly denounced as nativists by party elites, many of whom are now backing Trump's wall.

For decades, America's elites failed to see that the transnational moment of the post-Cold War era was passing and an era of rising nationalism and tribalism was at hand.

"We live in a time," said U2's Bono this week, "when institutions as vital to human progress as the United Nations are under attack."

The institutions Bono referenced — the U.N., EU, NATO — all trace their roots to the 1940s and 1950s, a time that bears little resemblance to the era we have entered, an era marked by a spreading and desperate desire of peoples everywhere to preserve who and what they are.

No, Trump didn't start the fire.

The world was ablaze with tribalism and was raising up authoritarians to realize nationalist ends — Xi Jinping, Putin, Narendra Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, Gen. el-Sissi in Egypt — before he came down that escalator.

And so the elites who were in charge when the fire broke out, and who failed to respond and refused even to recognize it, and who now denounce Trump for how he is coping with it, are unlikely to be called upon again to lead this republic.

SOURCE

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Nerve agents not found in samples from Syria's Douma – interim OPCW report

No traces of any nerve agents have been found at the site of a suspected chemical attack in the Syrian city of Douma, an interim report issued by the OPCW says. However, traces of chlorine were found at the site.

“Various chlorinated organic chemicals were found in samples” from two locations in the Damascus suburb of Douma, which were examined by specialists from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an interim OPCW document said. The chemicals were found in two samples taken from canisters found in Douma, the report said. The report confirmed the absence of any traces of nerve agents, such as sarin, at the site.

The OPCW sent a fact-finding mission to Douma in April, around a week after the alleged incident. During the same month, Russia said that chlorine containers from Germany, which apparently belonged to militants, were found in the liberated parts of Douma.

Later, the Russian military found an entire laboratory operated by militants in central Douma, which was capable of producing chemical weapons. The lab had some sophisticated equipment, including an industrial chemical reactor, which was apparently used by the militants to create toxic agents. The footage, taken by Russian journalists inside the facility, also showed vast stockpiles of various chemicals, some of which were produced in Germany, as well as empty mortar shells that can be filled with poisonous substances.

The purported chemical incident in Douma allegedly took place on April 7. A week later, Washington and its allies launched a massive retaliatory missile strike against Syria, without waiting for the OPCW to start its investigation of the incident.

The OPCW report comes about a week after the OPCW was granted authority not only to investigate whether any alleged chemical attack took place, but also to assign blame for them. Moscow then warned that the move that actually drove a wedge between some key OPCW members  could lead to a situation, which the chemical watchdog would be used as a political tool.

SOURCE

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Trump administration expands government's deportation powers

The Trump administration has expanded the government’s deportation powers, issuing guidelines urging officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — the agency that oversees legal immigration and naturalization — to begin the removal process for people who use fraudulent documents or who illegally took government benefits.

USCIS officers have always had powers, but in the past had usually referred cases to other parts of Homeland Security for decisions on deportation.

But new guidance memos reviewed by The Washington Times show USCIS is now pushing to advance its own role in policing illegal immigration.

“For too long, USCIS officers uncovering instances of fraudulent or criminal activity have been limited in their ability to help ensure U.S. immigration laws are faithfully executed,” L. Francis Cissna, the agency’s director, said in announcing the changes publicly. “This updated policy equips USCIS officers with clear guidance they need and deserve to support the enforcement priorities established by the president, keep our communities safe, and protect the integrity of our immigration system from those seeking to exploit it.”

The memos tell agency employees to be on the looking for people who apply for naturalization or another legal immigration benefit but who have criminal records, used fraudulent documents, lied about their applications or had abused public benefit programs.

SOURCE

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Teen Wearing A MAGA Hat Gets Attacked In Restaurant By Unhinged Leftist

This is what the Democrats have enabled. In 2016, there was no shortage of Democratic intimidation tactics against Trump supporters. In 2017, nothing changed. Here we are in 2018 and the war on Trump supporters continues.

A Texas teenager who supports President Trump says he was assaulted by a drink-throwing stranger at a Whataburger restaurant — all because he was wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat.

The incident, which was captured on video and has since gone viral, reportedly happened Tuesday at one of the burger chain’s restaurants in San Antonio.

“You ain’t supporting s— n—-!” the man is heard saying on camera after tossing a large drink in the direction of the person filming the video.

The individual, who has not been identified, then walks away while carrying the red hat. The man is heard muttering “b—- a– motherf——” as one of the other teens sitting at the table appears stunned.

The 16 year-old, Hunter Richard, had his hat ripped off and hair yanked when the unhinged man decided to act like an animal.

Hunter told station WOAI, “I support my President and, if you don’t, let’s have a conversation about it instead of ripping my hat off. I just think a conversation about politics is more productive for the entire whole rather than taking my hat and yelling subjective words to me.”

This is the type of “tolerance” the Democrats have enabled. The left sees no foul in Trump supporters being harassed in public.

Why is it always President Trump supporters who are the ones seen on video getting harassed, assaulted, and mocked by leftists?

Because the political left has ZERO tolerance. They’re animals who allow their media masters to control them and their emotions.

Social media outrage sent the video viral. The man was then fired by his employer, a local bar called Rumble bar.

The bar posted on Facebook: “It came to our attention earlier this evening that a part-time employee was captured on cell phone video assaulting another person at a local eatery. The assault took place, presumably, because this employee did not agree with the other individual’s political stance.”

The post added, “We have since terminated this employee, as his actions go against everything that this establishment stands for. THIS BAR IS A SAFE SPACE FOR EVERYONE! No matter your race, creed, ethnicity, sexual identity, and political stance, you are welcomed here!”

Nothing is a surprise at this point with the anti-Trump crowd.

UPDATE:  The Hispanic attacker, Kino Jimenez, was arrested without incident at his Universal City home, San Antonio Police said Thursday night. He is charged with felony theft. Mug shot of the thug below:



SOURCE

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Angry Leftist Stalks Woman Who Posed With Rifle For Grad Photo

Kaitlin Bennett, the recent Kent State University grad who posed with her AR-10 rifle in a now-viral photo, was stalked by an angry leftist while she dared eat out in public in Ohio last week:

 This weekend, a leftist took photos of me at a restaurant, tweeted them out saying she'd punch me in the head if someone sent her $50, told her friends I should die, & told the manager to kill himself. This is EXACTLY why I carry

No wonder she carries a gun. The stalker, naturally, posted the photos to Twitter:  Is this the gun slinging slasher from KSU someone help

But she did delete the one where she solicited $50 to punch Kaitlin in the head. Note the bottom message where the stalker says Kaitlin “should not go out in public anymore” if she doesn’t want to be bothered while eating:

Kaitlin: No matter how much the left libels, harasses, and threatens me for supporting the 2nd amendment, I promise that you will not break me or get me to shut up. You're messing with the wrong girl if you thought you could.

SOURCE

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Big swing towards Trump among young whites

Democrat advantage wiped out

Young white Americans are fleeing the Democrat Party en masse following the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, a new poll reveals.

The latest Reuters/Ipsos Poll surveyed more than 16,000 registered voters between the ages 18 to 34 over the course of the last three months of 2018. This same poll was conducted in 2016 around the same time period.

Young white Americans, in 2016, favored Democrats over Republicans in 2016 by a 47 to 33 percent margin. Since Trump’s election — and his booming economy which has secured high-paying jobs and record job opportunities — young white Americans’ favoritism for Democrats has disappeared.

Today, 39 percent of young white Americans say they favor Republicans, while another 39 percent of young white Americans say they favor Democrats.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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Was it all due to Disraeli?

It was mostly in the 18th century that Britain invented the industrial society but in the course of the 19th century most of Europe had caught up and reached a degree of industrialization that was comparable with Britain. Railways were even snaking out across the vast plains of Russia.

And the social problems that industrialization brought were similar too. Economies that had mostly been populated by peasant farmers had rapidly transformed into economies inhabited by factory workers. And compared to their hardscrabble and often hungry life back on the farm, the industrial worker had a greatly improved life. He rarely went hungry and he could even keep a dog. Whippets were very popular.

No matter how good the worker had it, however, he could see that the bosses had it a lot better. And that generated anger. And anger generated unrest, including violent unrest.

So where was society going, many people asked? They were in a totally new situation so the past was no guide. The one thing that was clear however was that the old stability was gone and real violence threatened. The unrest had to be suppressed in some way if an orderly society was to continue.

But that was easier said than done. There was a lot of energy behind the unrest and a new middle class had emerged which produced a new breed of intellectuals. And Karl Marx was only one of those intellectuals. There was an intellectual ferment all over Europe. Even the Pope got involved with his encyclical "De rerum novarum".

And there was certainly all sorts of agitation in Germany. Bismarck, however, kept the peace with his tough stance and ever changing alliances and policies that kept everyone off balance. But there was nobody similar in France so all sorts of revolutionary movements rose and fell.

So if you looked just at Europe in the late 19th century, you saw what looked like an ever bubbling cauldron of unrest that had to be contained in some way lest it degenerate into total anarchy. It was not a pretty sight and it bode ill for the future. Would peace and quiet ever resume? If it were to resume, how could it be done? It looked very much like Bismarck's iron fist was the only viable model. Europe was in danger of reverting to an oriental despotism where a King of some sort kept order through widespread brutality. The energy behind the unrest was great so even greater energies had to be deployed to suppress it.

But what about Britain? The British empire was at its height in the late 19th century. For much of that time the Prime Minister was Benjamin Disraeli, a Jew by ancestry but a nominal convert to the Church of England. Nobody asked him if he believed in the CofE's "39 articles of religion" for the excellent reason that many of the clergy did not believe in them either.

Disraeli showed that democracy was viable in the industrial era. The survival of democracy was not a foregone conclusion. The world has always been ruled by kings before great flowering of democracy in ancient Greece and Rome. But vigorous and transformative though those flowerings were, they eventually succumbed to the Macdeonian monarchy and Caesar respectively. They resumed the normal human form of government: Monarchy. Would the flickering light of democracy in 19th century Europe go the same way?

With Solomonic wisdom, Disraeli saw another way. He was greatly assisted by the fact that democratic trditions were particularly strong in Northern Europe, of which Britain was a part. Disraeli built on that. The fundamental feature of democracy is consultation -- consultation with many if not all of the people governed. In Britain, that process had become pretty corrupt. Those consulted were only a small part of the population. Disraeli decided to widen that. In so doing he worried a lot of people. If you gave the vote to ordinary working people what would they do? Would they seize all the wealth for themselves?

Disraeli solved that problem by making friends with the workers. He praised Britain's great history of liberty and civility and implied that the workers were part of that. And his giving them the vote unasked was certainly a persuasive proof of his high regard for the workers. It would not be stretching it much to say that Disraeli asked all Britons to help him make Britain great again. And it worked. Disraeli made the Conservative party the party that stood for the welfare of the whole nation.

So there was unrest in Britain but it was minimal. Most workers felt proud to be part of Britain and supported the orderly functioning of British society. And to this day, Communist movements have never at anytime gained significant traction in British society. Jeremy Corbyn is doing his best but there just are not the votes in Britain for anything really destructive or extreme.

But amid all this, Britain was arguably the most powerful nation in the world They even marchied into Washington and burnt the White House down in 1848. And the British navy ruled the waves. So the picture of dynamism and power that radiated from democratic Britain was a powerful argument for all things British, including its method of government. Disraeli made democracy the ideal -- though it was often an ideal that was respected rather than implemented. So even ghastly tyrannies such as North Korea feel obliged to call themselves democratic in order to claim some shred of legitimacy.

Because we don't have access to alternative history it is difficult to know how the world would have gone without Disraeli but that he saved democracy for the world seems probable to me.

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Is Abolishing ICE the New Liberal Litmus Test?

By Patrick J. Buchanan 

"No Borders! No Nations! No Deportations!" "Abolish ICE!"

Before last week, these were the mindless slogans of an infantile Left, seen on signs at rallies to abolish ICE, the agency that arrests and deports criminal aliens who have no right to be in our country.

By last week, however, "Abolish ICE!" was no longer the exclusive slogan of the unhinged Left. National Democrats were signing on.

Before his defeat in New York's 14th Congressional District, Joe Crowley, fourth-ranked Democrat in the House, called ICE a "fascist" organization.

After Crowley's rout by a 28-year-old socialist who called for killing the agency, Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York declared ICE to be "a cruel deportation force (that) we need to abolish."

Cynthia Nixon, a candidate for governor of New York, described ICE as a "terrorist organization.terrorizing people who are coming to this country.. We need to abolish ICE."

A star of "Sex and the City" castigated the men and women of ICE as terrorists at St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church in Manhattan. One wonders what the pastor thought of this Christian message.

Friday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio joined the clamor: "We should abolish ICE." Over the weekend, Senator Elizabeth Warren signed on: "President Trump seems to think that the only way to have immigration rule is to rip parents from their family (and) treat rape victims and refugees like terrorists and to put children in cages."

What ICE does is "ugly" and "wrong," said Warren.

"We need to rebuild our immigration system from top to bottom starting by replacing ICE with something that reflects our morality."

Wisconsin Democratic Congressman Mark Pocan plans to introduce legislation to do exactly that-abolish ICE.

President Donald Trump describes this latest liberal campaign as social and political insanity: "You get rid of ICE, you're going to have a country that you're going to be afraid to walk out of your house."

What is going on here?

Democrats, having just gone through the worst week in memory for progressives, are in imminent danger of losing it altogether.

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that not only is the Trump travel ban constitutional, government unions have no right to extract "agency fees" from workers who do not wish to support the union.

Such fees violate the First Amendment rights of government workers not to promote policies or ideas in which they disbelieve.

Then came word that Justice Anthony Kennedy, the "swing vote" on the Supreme Court who was crucial to decisions that established abortion, homosexuality and same-sex marriage as constitutional rights, will be stepping down.

And Trump informed the press that he would announce Kennedy's successor on July 9, to be drawn from a list of 20 jurists and legal scholars, all of whom have been vetted by the Federalist Society.

Panic ensued.

"I'm scared. You're scared. We're all scared," says Warren in a video her campaign has released.

On Bill Maher's show, leftist film director Michael Moore called for a million citizens to surround the Capitol to prevent a vote on Kennedy's successor. How Moore's million-man march proposes to get into Mitch McConnell's Senate chamber was left unexplained.

At a fundraiser in Berkeley, California, Barack Obama tried to calm his terrified minions: "All these people that are out here kvetching and wringing their hands and stressed and anxious and constantly watching cable TV and howling at the moon, `What are we going to do?' Their hair is falling out."

But liberal elites making fools of themselves is a less serious matter than the savage slanders Democrats are hurling at the 20,000 men and women of ICE who are daily protecting us and our country.

ICE, after all, was established to prevent another 9/11, when real terrorists, some of whom had overstayed their visas, massacred 3,000 innocent people, most of them Americans.

This vilification of ICE, writes Deputy Director Thomas D. Homan, represents both an injustice and an act of ingratitude:

"Since September 2016, ICE has arrested nearly 5,000 criminal aliens in New York-individuals with a criminal conviction in addition to their violation of immigration laws. Many of these arrests were conducted at large in the community which ICE is increasingly forced to do due to sanctuary policies in the state that prevent us from taking custody of criminal aliens in the secure confines of a jail.

"Governor [Andrew Cuomo] supports these policies at the expense of the safety of the very same communities he took an oath to protect."

Whatever one may think of Trump's policy of "zero tolerance" of immigrants who break into our country, for elites to smear the 20,000 men and women who risk their lives to keep us safe as "terrorists" and "fascists" is an especially egregious form of liberal ingratitude.

What is it in the DNA of the Left that it is always ready to enlist in any new war on cops?

The issue of 2018: should we, or should we not, abolish ICE and embrace the progressive alternative of open borders?

SOURCE 

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The Democratic Party Has a Death Wish

By Roger L Simon

Last week I wrote that the Democrats were having a nervous breakdown. I was wrong.  It's worse.  They actually have a death wish or what Freud called a "death drive" (Todestrieb). They literally want to extinguish themselves and/or their party, or many of them do. At least they're acting that way.

That was the first thing that crossed my mind watching the explosion of demonstrations by liberals and progressives (I'll spare you the scare quotes) across the country evidently mortified that families were being separated at the border -- something that had been happening for decades without their protesting or, in ninety-nine percent of the cases, their even knowing about it. Now it was the greatest cause c‚lŠbre since, well, whatever was the greatest cause c‚lŠbre three days before.

The polls show the vast majority of Americans think they're cracked and want, as do citizens of almost all countries, secure borders and legal immigration.

So why are they doing this?  Do they secretly want open borders?  Are they actually wannabe socialist revolutionaries out to change American society at its core?  Maybe some are, but if you truly wanted those things, you would behave differently and not so counter to your own interests, alienating with your behavior the very people you claim you want to convince.

As I mentioned, I think the reality is worse -- and infinitely sadder.  You don't have to be a Freudian (and I'm not) to see the Austrian doctor had a point about our unconscious desires. He was far from the first. Ages before, the ancient Greeks personified this death wish in Thanatos, a minor god in their pantheon but not so minor in our lives.

All of us have moments of self-sabotage, but what we are witnessing with the Democratic Party now is a massive expression of this, approaching self-destruction.  Trump hatred has released something far deeper than anger at one person. The rage is projected outward at a supposedly unjust country, but also equally at themselves, mocking or inverting everything they previously stood for.  The party, as Eddie Scarry writes in the Washington Examiner, is in deep crisis.  Who knows what will come out the other end or if it will?

At this point, they don't know what they want, only what they want to destroy.  This is a symptom of depression, as explained by William Berry in a Psychology Today article entitled "How Recognizing Your Death Drive May Save You."

    Freud believed that most people channel their death instinct outward. Some people, however, direct it at themselves. Depression has often been described as " anger turned inward." Many with suicidal ideation make disparaging and aggressive self-statements. This also relates to Freud's theory; some people are driven to destroy themselves.

    In her excellent post, "The Inner Voice That Drives Suicide," Lisa Firestone, Ph.D discusses how a critical inner voice convinces people "it is better to end their lives than to find an alternative solution to their suffering." This inner voice may originate in the death drive.

Can this also be true of political parties?  Well, they're also composed of people, n'est-ce pas?  If I had advice to give the Democrats at this point, it might be the subtitle of Berry's article: "Your Death Drive Is Out to Destroy you.  Tame it."

But on second thought, why bother?  Was it Sun Tzu, Machiavelli or Napoleon who said "Never interfere with an enemy when he is in the process of destroying himself"?

SOURCE 

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Terror Plot 104 Targets the Fourth of July

On July 1, the FBI arrested Demetrius Pitts for planning a terrorist attack in Cleveland on the Fourth of July. This plot was the 104th Islamist terror plot or attack against the U.S. homeland since 9/11 and the 91st plot or attack that was homegrown.



The FBI first became aware of Pitts at the end of 2015 when he sent pro-terrorism Facebook messages to a political commentary show.

Over the course of the next few years, he continued to post on social media, increasingly threatening violence against the U.S. The FBI began a deeper investigation that revealed his desire to conduct an attack in the U.S. or travel abroad to join a terrorist organization.

In June 2018, an undercover FBI agent posing as an al-Qaeda “brother” met with Pitts. Pitts expressed a desire to attack government and military targets, with a variety of violent methods.

When told by the undercover agent that there were other “brothers” willing to carry out an attack, Pitts began planning an attack. He planned an attack on July Fourth.

The attack would involve weapons ranging from remote control cars with bombs that they would give to the children of military members, to a van filled with explosives. He decided the attack should be near the fireworks at Voinovich Park and that the nearby U.S. Coast Guard station would be a great target. Pitts thought of himself as the mastermind, while others would actually carry out the attack.

Pitts used his phone to do surveillance of various sites around Cleveland, including the Coast Guard station. He also made videos pledging himself to do violence against the U.S. and calling on others to rise up as well. He helped with logistics in finding a vehicle for the car bomb against the Coast Guard station and believed the bombing was ready to go for July Fourth.

Pitts also began to think beyond this attack and that he could plan or commit additional attacks. He said that he had nothing to live for and that he knew Philadelphia well and would plan or commit an attack there on Labor Day. He was interested in federal buildings and landmarks in the city. He was arrested on July 1.

Targeting the military and mass gatherings like the Independence Day fireworks are the two most common targets of Islamist terrorists.

Also common is that the FBI foiled this plot with a successful sting operation. Stings and the use of undercover officers or informants are some of the FBI’s most successful tactics to deeply investigate terrorists while keeping the public from any imminent harm.

This case also shows the disturbing reality that the FBI must keep an eye on certain radical individuals for years before they move to action.

Such long-term investigations consume limited resources and cannot always be sustained. Indeed, this has sometimes led to terrorists slipping through the cracks, as was the case with Omar Mateen, the shooter at the Pulse nightclub in 2016.

Mateen had been investigated by the FBI for about a year beginning in 2013 but not enough evidence was found to justify continuing the investigation.

Thankfully, this was not the case this time. The FBI kept track of Pitts and stopped him before he could engage in violence.

This Fourth of July, let’s thank the hardworking men and women of the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities for all they do to keep us safe at home.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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