The American manufacturing renaissance is still defying expectations.

Over the last 12 months, manufacturers have added 224,000 jobs. That’s the biggest annual gain since 1998, according to Wall Street economist Joe LaVorgna. Since the 2016 election, the economy has added 263,000 manufacturing jobs. Last month, 31,000 new manufacturing jobs came online.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, according to the Very Wise People. Donald Trump’s promises to bring back manufacturing jobs was widely derided as impossible, and his supporters were mocked as suckers.

“Trump won’t be able to ‘make American great again’ by bringing back production jobs,” Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution wrote.

“What happens when people realize they’ve been taken?” Wharton emeritus professor of management Stephen J. Kobrin asked. “When people realize that he can’t bring back jobs and that they are not better off than they were two years ago, how does he use it–who does he blame it on?”

“Manufacturing jobs are never coming back,” Ben Casselman of FiveThirtyEight declared in the summer of 2016.

Instead of focusing on reviving the manufacturing sector, politicians should focus on managing its decline, the Very Wise People insisted.

“[R]ather than play to that anger [over lost manufacturing jobs], candidates ought to be talking about ways to ensure that the service sector can manufacturing’s former role as a provider of dependeable decent-paying jobs,” Casselman wrote.

Why was it supposed to be impossible to revive manufacturing? Globalization couldn’t be reversed. Automation would make human manufacturing jobs redundant. Trump had offered “few specifics” about how he would change policies to benefit workers.

“The larger problem for Trump and his supporters is that there is very little reason to think that any set of policies could meaningfully reverse the long-term decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs,” Casselman wrote shortly after the election.

So how wrong were the Very Wise? Just about as wrong as they could possibly be.

“The manufacturing sector is adding jobs at a faster pace than the rest of the economy, which hasn’t happened much over the past half-century,” Justin Fox writes at BloombergView.

It’s clear that a number of the Trump policies and Trump-related phenomenon are helping:

1. The massive tax cut on businesses appears to be helping a lot and may have even started helping before it was passed.
2. The perception that the regulatory environment will no longer be a drag on businesses, particularly manufacturing businesses.
3. The revival of domestic oil and gas, another key Trump campaign promise, contributes to manufacturing jobs.
4. Consumers sentiment and business optimism are at or near decades-long record highs.
5. Manufacturers know Trump has their back and will make efforts to aid their export efforts and fend off cheap imports.
6. Foreign manufacturers are moving jobs into the U.S. in hopes of avoiding tariffs they fear are coming.

Of course, Trump is far from a place where he can fly a “mission accomplished” banner over the U.S. economy. As Alan Tonelson points out, wages remain flat for manufacturing. And manufacturing employment is still 8.24 percent below its pre-recession peak of 13.7 million jobs.

There’s more to do. But the revival of manufacturing does not look as challenging today as it did a few years ago.

The state of California and the sanctuary city laws that make it a safe-haven for criminal illegal aliens is likely responsible for at least 5,000 crimes that were committed by criminal illegal aliens released by local authorities rather than being handed over to federal immigration officials.

According to data conducted for Breitbart News by the Center for Immigration Studies’ Director of Policy Jessica Vaughan, the state of California — which refuses to hand over criminal illegal aliens to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency — makes up about half of all non-cooperation with federal immigration officials in the U.S.

For example, roughly 50 percent of the ICE detainers — the hold that federal immigration officials place on a criminal illegal alien — ignored by local sanctuary city authorities across the U.S. occurred in California.

In mid-2017, ICE Director Thomas Homan revealed that about 10,000 criminal illegal aliens had been released by sanctuary cities across the U.S. and went on to commit more crimes. This figure, though, could be even higher for the year of 2017.

Based on this data, Vaughan told Breitbart News that it is “reasonable to assume” that about half of those crimes committed by released criminal illegal aliens occurred in the state of California.

“That is 5,000 crimes that occurred that could have been prevented if they had cooperated with ICE as federal law provides,” Vaughan told Breitbart News. “What is the cost to Californians for that crime spree?”

“Surely it is a lot more than the cost of the few minutes of a California jail officer’s time to notify ICE, or to keep the offenders in custody for ICE for a few hours,” Vaughan said. “But California politicians like Gov. Brown, Xavier Becerra, and Libby Schaaf would rather have the crime, apparently.”

This estimate was gathered by provided ICE data, as the agency says it has no way of tracking the figure of how many exact criminal illegal aliens have been released into the public by California’s sanctuary laws.

“Lack of cooperation from sanctuary jurisdictions means that they do not notify ICE when they release an individual on whom we have filed a detainer, so we have no way of knowing exactly how many such individuals they have released,” an ICE official told Breitbart News. “We often become aware of an alien’s release from a jurisdiction when we re-encounter the alien later during targeted enforcement.”

As Breitbart News reported, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf recently warned criminal illegal aliens ahead of a regional raid by ICE, helping convicted illegal alien sex offenders, armed robbers, and drunk drivers escape deportation.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice is now investigating Schaaf for obstruction of justice. About 47 percent of likely voters say the DOJ should prosecute Schaaf for obstruction of justice, while only 36 percent of likely voters say the DOJ should not prosecute the mayor.

Sessions announced a DOJ lawsuit against the state of California, challenging three of its sanctuary state laws that protect criminal illegal aliens from deportation by ICE.

I suggest this guy prepare his will TODAY, because I got a hunch he’ll be needing it sooner rather than later. ………………………………………………. …………………………………………………… …………………………………………………

A discussion on Twitter that reportedly occurred sometime last weekend perfectly encapsulated the mind-boggling inanity of the average gun-control zealot’s thought processes.

According to Brandon Morse of RedState, who captured a screenshot of the discussion, an unnamed pro-gun advocate had asked a gun-control zealot by the name of Andrew Fallows what he would do if an armed robber broke into his home.

“Get between them and my loved ones, try to talk them down, and die with a clean conscious if they kill me,” Andrews replied.

That’s just plain retarded.

Morse explained why:

Fallows just essentially said that he would die, and then leave his family to whatever horrors the armed criminal or criminals have in store for them, all with a clean conscience.

This guy is so enveloped in the leftist narrative that guns are a pure form of evil, that his clean conscience is a result of being obedient to that narrative instead of putting the safety and well being of his family first.

Exactly.

It’s stunning as well because, even if one lacks a gun for whatever reasons (some of them perhaps legal), there are other options available: trying to hide, dialing 911, attacking the perpetrator with something else (a knife, a rake, pepper spray, whatever), attempting to flee the premises, etc.

The point is that “try[ing] to talk them down” and possibly dying in the process should be a last resort, at best. Yet here we have a staunch anti-gun zealot saying, “Buck it, I’ll try them first.”

It’s asinine, as was Fallows’s attempted follow-up defense of his own stupidity:

I value human lives over firearms. I don’t respect someone who doesn’t. I don’t know how to even converse with someone who doesn’t. I’ve tried a dozen times in the past month. All I’ve done is stress myself out. For my health, I need a break.

— Andrew Fallows (@kaldrenon) March 3, 2018

If I’m attacked with a gun, the problem isn’t that I don’t have a gun. The problem is that I’ve been attacked with a gun.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t have a right to protect themselves. I’m saying it’s insane to say that the solution to a problem is to let it keep happening.

— Andrew Fallows (@kaldrenon) March 5, 2018

Fallows is among those vastly misguided and naive liberals who appear to believe that simply banning the ownership of guns would somehow eradicate crime.

In reality, it wouldn’t even eliminate gun crime. And shockingly enough, even the readers at World Star Hip Hop seem to comprehend this.

Responding to a story Wednesday about a bunch of kids skipping school this week to chant for gun control outside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office, one astute reader bluntly noted, “If a [criminal] wants a gun he can get one in 20 mins. Gun reform isn’t gonna do shit.”

Actually, nearly anything that’s illegal can already be obtained from the black market, including drugs, military weapons, you name it. But I’m not here to talk about prohibition.

I’m here instead to point out that Fallows — as well as the countless other liberals like him — lives in a fantasy world.

A very dangerous one, in fact, that could conceivably one day lead to not only his own murder, but the murder of his wife and children as well.

So if I were him, I’d reconsider immediately!