The Boy Scouts World Scout Jamboree, which is held every four years and next will be held in West Virginia in 2019, may offer something to Scouts that would have been unthinkable years ago: condoms.
Scouts from around the world will attend the event, which will be guided by the World Scout Committee’s handbook, which offers health and safety guidelines for the event. On page 11 of the handbook, it reads, “The Host Organization must ensure that condoms are readily and easily accessible for all participants and IST (International Service Team] at a number of locations on the site … When making this information available onsite, consideration shall be given to the various cultures and beliefs present.”
The handbook also writes, “The use of alcohol shall not be permitted on the Jamboree site. Some exceptions may be made for adults in confined areas, in accordance with the host country’s habits.”
As The Blaze notes, an announcement on the event’s page states, “For the first time, a world jamboree will be hosted by three national Scout organizations: Scouts Canada, Asociación de Scouts de México, and the Boy Scouts of America.”
John Stemberger, Florida Family Policy Council president and chairman of the board of Trail Life News, a Christian Scouting group, stated:
In light of the mandatory condom policy, it is not clear how far down the rabbit hole the Boy Scouts will continue to fall. With the addition of condoms and alcohol, the World Jamboree is starting to sound more like a 1960s Woodstock festival rather than a campout that parents would want to send their children to! All of this should be deeply disturbing to the churches that are chartering Boy Scout Troops. These policies present a clear youth protection problem that the BSA absolutely refuses to recognize. The fact that they are requiring that condoms be “readily accessible” and are communicating this to everyone—including youth participants—shows that the BSA is both anticipating and facilitating sexual conduct between minors at this event. These policies are both outrageous and completely irresponsible.
Russell Kirk wrote in his seminal work, The Conservative Mind, that the last of the truly great statesmen, those being the champions of traditionalist, hierarchical, and organic society rooted in a transcendent morality, order, and class-based system, all got swept away in the early nineteenth century as the ideals of the French Revolution spread globally like wildfire. As liberalism evolved into something increasingly technocratic and clinical, the political sphere slowly absorbed and compartmentalized its most depersonalized tenets.
This was actualized on the American political scene in the early 1960s, when President Kennedy appointed his cadre of “Whiz Kids,” led by Rob McNamara, Walt Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger, McGeorge Bundy, et al. – those disciples of the technocratic application of neo-liberal economic theory as a means to effect sweeping capital accumulation through rapid, self-sustained growth and free trade policies. Once advanced societies achieve a maximum threshold of efficiency, the societal evolution culminates in an age of mass consumerism, manifested in the outsourcing of traditional manufacturing industries in accord with the principle of comparative advantage. This happened to be the guiding thesis of Rostow’s magnum opus, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, and it seems to likewise perfectly encapsulate the modus vivendi of the power-brokers in Washington ever since.
Where President Trump figures into all of this is his propensity to cut past the conventional wisdom deeply seated in the historical attributes of the neo-liberal dogma that has for generations, and especially since the Cold War, subsumed the Washington political establishment. Our president’s willingness, if not outright eagerness, to flex the muscles of heterodoxy – expressed early on through his withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Paris climate accord – has been in keeping with his campaign promise to uproot the Washingtonian swamp.
But it could have been argued with some credence that Trumpism, insofar as that might qualify as an acceptable political ideology – contrasted with Reaganism, for instance – was heretofore logically vacuous and purely reactionary. Those doubts, however credible they were initially, ought now to be dispelled in reflecting on the administration’s actions to date. President Trump’s almost unilateral decision to implement steel and aluminum tariffs, for example, shows quite demonstrably a governing philosophy oriented away from the orthodoxy that has longed typified economic and foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.
For these reasons, our president has moved the fulcrum of American politics closer to his natural intuition, which makes traditional conservatism a viable alternative within a party that has long been entrenched in its neo-liberal orientation. As a governing principle, President Trump has, in his colorful way, so far demonstrated an uncanny devotion to a refashioned and purer conservatism that would behoove a Russell Kirk or a G.K. Chesterton, to say nothing of the avowed fusionist, William F. Buckley, if each could bear witness to what is presently happening.
Specifically, the reason the tariffs were paramount to rendering this value judgment is that they signify a policy measure radically divergent from mainstream “Republicanism.” As an extension of the president’s “ideology” – namely, the abstract reasoning that informs particular policy measures – the tariffs are wholly consistent with this global outlook. This is an ideology averse to the neo-liberal global order in its prioritization of a revamped nationalism – even though it should be noted that traditional conservatism was never considered “ideological” or “nationalistic,” as those terms connote a materialistic perversion of classical political theory.
Nonetheless, these broader ideas, supplemented with the actions touched on above, can be discerned as constituent elements ordered toward a grander, but predictively methodical vision that threatens seismic change to the neo-liberal status quo. In this sense, Trump’s acting ideology represents more a paradigm shift vis-à-vis existing policy norms, at least in consideration of the mainstream policies since the Cold War, than anything else.
Moreover, the matter and means by which the tariffs were effectuated as public policy bespeak a greater, palpable worldview or ideology to which our president systematically adheres. Indeed, he had several of his advisers, including his top economic adviser, who helped spearhead his tax cuts – outwardly criticize this decision. Despite such opposition, our president nevertheless prevailed all the same in his original vision, supported largely by his own gut instinct in addition to a small cadre of renegade advisers.
Trump’s going through with the tariffs may have been an act largely intuitive on principle, but it was an intuition backed by a concrete philosophical reality – one that had previously been articulated by a long line of political philosophers, who, while espousing the virtues of the free market, never believed that unchecked capitalism is the be-all, end-all “of political economy and morals.”
There is, in addition to the above, another element to the president’s ideology, suggesting that it is not something newly unearthed, amorphous, or novel, but actually a worldview long cultivated and indicative of a greater ordered understanding of man and society, which had prior to now been only vaguely known.
This part is realized whenever our president places himself caustically into the arena of culture wars, be it through the castigations of the media elite or his lambasting the NFL or Hollywood for its flagrantly unpatriotic displays or his tapping into what made America “great.” Trump is tactfully accentuating what part of the civic society, in both classical and Christological definitions, is most important: the culture. Markets, banking, and financial services are purely and simply outgrowths of a stable civic society. For these reasons, two of our greatest Founding Fathers – Thomas Jefferson and John Adams – knew next to zilch about these domains (though this was largely unnecessary, as the republic was a still a fledgling, agrarian society), considering them a defamation of the burgeoning American experiment.
Fast-forward to today. We are largely the benefactors of a society wrought by those establishment wonks. While the deleterious results of bureaucratic and technocratic governance are revealing themselves as not only a system ineffectual, but a system unsustainable, President Trump has proved that an overhaul to conventional politics is possible, though difficult to maneuver. Whether the void in modern politics will be filled by a rebirth of classicism – that being a renaissance of cultural renewal, anchored by a state that espouses natural law and a Judeo-Christian moral code – remains nothing more than a lofty ideal at this point.
But if there is any saving grace in the worldwide populist revolt, it is that liberal practitioners are for once and for all having to come to terms with the fact that their largely nihilistic worldview is unsustainable. The plague of modernity is likely not precipitated by the philosophical culmination of Aristotelianism through Nietzsche, as some have championed; rather, somewhere along the line, a seismic break from classical philosophy instigated the aimless orientation in which modern man now finds himself. So long as liberalism continues to show signs of fatigue, and so long as President Trump retains his clout within the American political sphere, the peripatetic condition modern man now finds himself in will eventually show its cosmological transience.
That does not necessitate that man’s resurrection through the movement away from de facto liberalism guarantee a cultural renewal. That remains but a dream in the current age, but there’s presently a gap to be filled in politics, and our society would do itself good to exploit that hole with classical tenets. It is a long shot, for sure, but conservatives should want to reorient man back to those ancient virtues that long grounded Western civilization for centuries before, and provided the spark for humanity’s intellectual and spiritual blossoming ever since.
Paul Ingrassia is a graduate of the Fordham University, a former White House intern for President Trump, and a contributor to National Review Online.
Russell Kirk wrote in his seminal work, The Conservative Mind, that the last of the truly great statesmen, those being the champions of traditionalist, hierarchical, and organic society rooted in a transcendent morality, order, and class-based system, all got swept away in the early nineteenth century as the ideals of the French Revolution spread globally like wildfire. As liberalism evolved into something increasingly technocratic and clinical, the political sphere slowly absorbed and compartmentalized its most depersonalized tenets.
This was actualized on the American political scene in the early 1960s, when President Kennedy appointed his cadre of “Whiz Kids,” led by Rob McNamara, Walt Rostow, Arthur Schlesinger, McGeorge Bundy, et al. – those disciples of the technocratic application of neo-liberal economic theory as a means to effect sweeping capital accumulation through rapid, self-sustained growth and free trade policies. Once advanced societies achieve a maximum threshold of efficiency, the societal evolution culminates in an age of mass consumerism, manifested in the outsourcing of traditional manufacturing industries in accord with the principle of comparative advantage. This happened to be the guiding thesis of Rostow’s magnum opus, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, and it seems to likewise perfectly encapsulate the modus vivendi of the power-brokers in Washington ever since.
Where President Trump figures into all of this is his propensity to cut past the conventional wisdom deeply seated in the historical attributes of the neo-liberal dogma that has for generations, and especially since the Cold War, subsumed the Washington political establishment. Our president’s willingness, if not outright eagerness, to flex the muscles of heterodoxy – expressed early on through his withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Paris climate accord – has been in keeping with his campaign promise to uproot the Washingtonian swamp.
But it could have been argued with some credence that Trumpism, insofar as that might qualify as an acceptable political ideology – contrasted with Reaganism, for instance – was heretofore logically vacuous and purely reactionary. Those doubts, however credible they were initially, ought now to be dispelled in reflecting on the administration’s actions to date. President Trump’s almost unilateral decision to implement steel and aluminum tariffs, for example, shows quite demonstrably a governing philosophy oriented away from the orthodoxy that has longed typified economic and foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.
For these reasons, our president has moved the fulcrum of American politics closer to his natural intuition, which makes traditional conservatism a viable alternative within a party that has long been entrenched in its neo-liberal orientation. As a governing principle, President Trump has, in his colorful way, so far demonstrated an uncanny devotion to a refashioned and purer conservatism that would behoove a Russell Kirk or a G.K. Chesterton, to say nothing of the avowed fusionist, William F. Buckley, if each could bear witness to what is presently happening.
Specifically, the reason the tariffs were paramount to rendering this value judgment is that they signify a policy measure radically divergent from mainstream “Republicanism.” As an extension of the president’s “ideology” – namely, the abstract reasoning that informs particular policy measures – the tariffs are wholly consistent with this global outlook. This is an ideology averse to the neo-liberal global order in its prioritization of a revamped nationalism – even though it should be noted that traditional conservatism was never considered “ideological” or “nationalistic,” as those terms connote a materialistic perversion of classical political theory.
Nonetheless, these broader ideas, supplemented with the actions touched on above, can be discerned as constituent elements ordered toward a grander, but predictively methodical vision that threatens seismic change to the neo-liberal status quo. In this sense, Trump’s acting ideology represents more a paradigm shift vis-à-vis existing policy norms, at least in consideration of the mainstream policies since the Cold War, than anything else.
Moreover, the matter and means by which the tariffs were effectuated as public policy bespeak a greater, palpable worldview or ideology to which our president systematically adheres. Indeed, he had several of his advisers, including his top economic adviser, who helped spearhead his tax cuts – outwardly criticize this decision. Despite such opposition, our president nevertheless prevailed all the same in his original vision, supported largely by his own gut instinct in addition to a small cadre of renegade advisers.
Trump’s going through with the tariffs may have been an act largely intuitive on principle, but it was an intuition backed by a concrete philosophical reality – one that had previously been articulated by a long line of political philosophers, who, while espousing the virtues of the free market, never believed that unchecked capitalism is the be-all, end-all “of political economy and morals.”
There is, in addition to the above, another element to the president’s ideology, suggesting that it is not something newly unearthed, amorphous, or novel, but actually a worldview long cultivated and indicative of a greater ordered understanding of man and society, which had prior to now been only vaguely known.
This part is realized whenever our president places himself caustically into the arena of culture wars, be it through the castigations of the media elite or his lambasting the NFL or Hollywood for its flagrantly unpatriotic displays or his tapping into what made America “great.” Trump is tactfully accentuating what part of the civic society, in both classical and Christological definitions, is most important: the culture. Markets, banking, and financial services are purely and simply outgrowths of a stable civic society. For these reasons, two of our greatest Founding Fathers – Thomas Jefferson and John Adams – knew next to zilch about these domains (though this was largely unnecessary, as the republic was a still a fledgling, agrarian society), considering them a defamation of the burgeoning American experiment.
Fast-forward to today. We are largely the benefactors of a society wrought by those establishment wonks. While the deleterious results of bureaucratic and technocratic governance are revealing themselves as not only a system ineffectual, but a system unsustainable, President Trump has proved that an overhaul to conventional politics is possible, though difficult to maneuver. Whether the void in modern politics will be filled by a rebirth of classicism – that being a renaissance of cultural renewal, anchored by a state that espouses natural law and a Judeo-Christian moral code – remains nothing more than a lofty ideal at this point.
But if there is any saving grace in the worldwide populist revolt, it is that liberal practitioners are for once and for all having to come to terms with the fact that their largely nihilistic worldview is unsustainable. The plague of modernity is likely not precipitated by the philosophical culmination of Aristotelianism through Nietzsche, as some have championed; rather, somewhere along the line, a seismic break from classical philosophy instigated the aimless orientation in which modern man now finds himself. So long as liberalism continues to show signs of fatigue, and so long as President Trump retains his clout within the American political sphere, the peripatetic condition modern man now finds himself in will eventually show its cosmological transience.
That does not necessitate that man’s resurrection through the movement away from de facto liberalism guarantee a cultural renewal. That remains but a dream in the current age, but there’s presently a gap to be filled in politics, and our society would do itself good to exploit that hole with classical tenets. It is a long shot, for sure, but conservatives should want to reorient man back to those ancient virtues that long grounded Western civilization for centuries before, and provided the spark for humanity’s intellectual and spiritual blossoming ever since.
Paul Ingrassia is a graduate of the Fordham University, a former White House intern for President Trump, and a contributor to National Review Online.
Although President Trump is currently fulfilling one campaign promise after another, turning the economy around and making significant advancements on the international stage in North Korea, Israel and Iran you would never know it if you followed the mainstream media.
GOP leaders are trying to get a DACA amnesty through the House, and are trying to negotiate a “third alternative” bill with President Donald Trump, House Whip Steve Scalise told a Fox TV interviewer on Sunday.
“However you feel about the DACA and how to solve that problem, which we want to solve, [Democrats] are standing the way of securing our border which most Americans agree should be a top priority,” he told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures. “We’ll work with President Trump to get that done … We’re working with the Freedom Caucus, and we’re not that far apart.”
Scalise declined to describe the “third alternative” which GOP leaders — led by House Speaker Paul Ryan — are trying to develop with Trump.
Scalise suggested the bill would be somewhere between the no-strings ‘Dream’ amnesty being pushed by 20 business-first GOP representatives and the comprehensive reform package developed by Rep. Bob Goodlatte and Rep. Michael McCaul, the two chairmen of the House Judiciary and House homeland security committees. “We’re … working with the President to see if there is some third alternative,” he said.
Scalise suggested the “third alternative” bill would swap a big amnesty for cash to build a border wall, and did not mention the main immigration-law reforms offered by Trump in his State of the Union Speech.
Ryan has zig-zagged as he tries to win the DACA amnesty in his last few months in office, amid the growing risk of a populist rejection in November. He praised Trump’s reforms as “extremely reasonable” during his May 17 press conference, just six days after apparently excluding them during his May 11 press conference.
The problem for Americans is that GOP leaders and many GOP legislators want an amnesty, said Rosemary Jenks, policy director for NumbersUSA. “That’s been clear from the get-go — we have too many GOP legislators who want amnesty just as badly as the Democrats do,” she told Breitbart News. She continued:
The American people are willing to go along with a limited amnesty if they get the end of chain-migration, get mandatory E-Verify, border security, the establishment of American sovereignty — and yet that is not what Republican leadership wants.
It is not clear if Trump will accept a Ryan plan that junks his popular four-part reform plan just before the November elections — but sources say Ryan’s first proposal was rejected May 15. Ryan is not running for reelection in November and will retire in January.
Trump’s aide, Kellyanne Conway also appeared on the Bartiromo show, where she called for a wall but did not mention the President’s State of the Union plan.
Trump offered to trade amnesty for 1.8 million illegals in exchange for closing the border-law loopholes, ending chain-migration and ending the visa lottery. Instead, Conway just stressed the importance of building a border wall, saying “That border wall needs to be funded … This need to get done … We need to be a sovereign nation that has physical borders.”
Scalise declined several opportunities to say he and Ryan would whip reluctant GOP legislators to vote for the Goodlatte/McCaul bill in any future debate. Despite his pending retirement, Ryan has a lot of power to make wavering GOP legislators support the Goodlatte bill.
Scalise merely said:
We’re going to bring the Goodlatte/McCaul bill to the floor. I think that is the right answer. It deals with wall funding. it secures the border. It solves the DACA problem in a way that we are in sync with the president. Unfortunately, the votes aren’t there yet to pass it and we’re working on some other alternatives with President Trump … the votes aren’t there to pass it.
The Goodlatte bill includes a variety of immigration-law reforms that would end chain migration, end the visa lottery, and ensure mandatory use of E-Verify to exclude illegals from jobs. It would also close the many legal loopholes which allow hundreds of thousands of migrants to overwhelm border fences and win “catch and release” so they can get blue-collar jobs serving white-collar Americans in Democratic-run cities, such as Washington D.C.
But the Goodlatte bill also tries to buys support from business groups by offering tens of thousands of extra foreign college-graduates — including 6,000 extra foreign nurses — each year, plus a huge population of several hundred thousand guest-workers for the food industry, plus work-permits for the 700,000 registered DACA illegals. The bill would not reduce the current population of roughly 1.5 million college-graduate visa-workers.
Investors and business groups want even more foreign workers and have allied with Democrats to oppose any cuts in legal migration. The business/progressive coalition opposes the Goodlatte bill because it would reduce the inflow of new workers, consumers, and voters, and would also constrict progressives’ claimed power to convert poor foreigners into Americans.
Business groups are now providing campaign aid to 11 of the 19 GOP candidates who have signed the pro-amnesty “Discharge Petition,” with the tacit approval of Speaker Ryan. One of the 20 GOP signers of the petition has already resigned from Congress.
Let’s follow the money through the discharge-petition, amnesty and cheap-labor maze. Spoiler: Starts with Ryan, goes through a Super PAC, sent to GOP amnesty advocates, then converted into $ for investors. https://t.co/sUXqtaIacy
GOP leaders are not trying to block the discharge petition, said Jenks. “I have watched for far too many years the leaders of both parties shut down discharge petitions in a heartbeat with [the withdrawal of] campaign financing and committee chairmanships. It has happened over and over for decades, yet is not happening here.”
However, “I believe Steve Scalise is the only member of the leadership who is actually trying to get a more conservative solution,” said Jenks. “If [Majority Leader’] Kevin McCarthy want to stop the discharge petition, he could stop it in a heartbeat … Scalise does not have those tools— he does not have the ability to cut off funding, so he is doing what he can.”
If the GOP signature-count gets to 25, then the business-first Republicans will ally with all 193 Democrats to pass their amnesty bill out of the House, likely in June or early July. The complicated vote is expected to allow many GOP legislators to vote for a doomed pro-American bill — giving them a campaign-trailed talking point — before allowing them to vote for and pass a disguised amnesty bill.
Even if the business groups gather more than 25 GOP amnesty supporters, Ryan has the power to block the floor vote. So far, he has not publicly threatened to block the floor, or even to deny campaign aid and committee assignments to the 19 Republicans as they split the party before the November election.
Ryan has long supported the hiring of cheap foreign workers in place of middle-class Americans.
The rising wages in a good economy are a growing concern for Democratic planners, but Ryan offered investors a raise in the supply of workers by forcing passage of farm bill which cuts food stamps. Scalise endorsed the policy of forcing people to work, saying:
If you want to be on welfare, it should be a safety net — if you are able to work, you should not be on welfare.
We need to get work requirements in welfare because now companies are looking to hire people. Why should people that are able-bodied sitting at home getting taxpayer money when they could be out in the workforce and become part of the American dream?
The 2018 tax bill is providing companies with extra funds to invest in new projects. Some that money will go to Americans employees via higher wages in a high-pressure/low-immigration economy — unless Ryan can also supply business with imported workers for the extra jobs created by the tax cuts.
The proposed amnesty bill may fail, along with the many prior amnesty bills pushed by Ryan and others.
Amnesty advocates rely on business-funded “Nation of Immigrants” push-polls to show apparent voter support for immigration and immigrants.
The alternative “choice” polls reveal most voters’ often-ignored preference that CEOs should hire Americans at decent wages before hiring migrants. Those Americans include many blue-collar Blacks, Latinos, and people who hide their opinions from pollsters. Similarly, the 2018 polls show that GOP voters are far more concerned about migration — more properly, the economics of migration — than they are concerned about illegal migration and MS-13, taxes, or the return of Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.
WASHINGTON, DC — Over 100 conservative leaders are sending an open letter to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), urging him to run for Speaker of the House.
Conventional wisdom says that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is heavily favored to be the establishment Republican choice to lead the chamber if the GOP holds on in November’s midterm elections. But many conservatives want a choice, and 114 leaders signed a letter asking for Jim Jordan to be the alternative.
“The present House Republican leadership has proven that it’s part of ‘the Swamp.’ Consequently, a vote to promote any member of today’s House GOP leadership is a vote for the Swamp,” the letter begins. “It’s time to Clean House.”
“There must be a real race for Speaker of the House,” the letter continues. “Now. No backroom deals. A real race, starting this spring, to make every incumbent and candidate commit on the record, as a campaign issue, whether they’ll vote to save the Swamp or drain it.”
“America needs you to declare yourself as a candidate for Speaker at once,” the conservative leaders say to Jordan. “We write to you on behalf of millions of Americans who want Congress to drain the Swamp.”
The letter lays out the polling data on how many Americans are frustrated with both parties and makes the case for why a non-establishment Speaker candidate is needed to motivate the Republican base and intrigue moderate voters to believe that change is available.
These conservative leaders continue:
You must take the lead. You have demonstrated over your years on Capitol Hill an unwavering commitment to our constitutional liberties and conservative principles of free market economics, budgetary discipline, traditional values and a strong national defense. You have worked to drain the Swamp, not fill it further. And we all know what the current House Republican leadership really thinks of you and those who share your beliefs. You have established a record of responsible leadership of the kind our times demand.
“The present House Republican leadership has failed,” the letter concludes. “It is part of the problem. You are the solution. This is your moment. We pray you will seize it, knowing that if you do, we will do everything we can to help you succeed.”
The first signatory is Edwin Meese III, who was the counselor to the president for President Reagan’s first term and the 75th U.S. attorney general during Reagan’s second term.
The letter continues with some leaders who focus on the full range of conservative policy and political issues, including:
Ginni Thomas, Liberty Consulting
Brent Bozell, Media Research Center
David Bozell, ForAmerica
Ken Cuccinelli, Senate Conservatives Fund
Colin Hanna, Let Freedom Ring
Susan Carleson, American Civil Rights Union
Stephanie Coleman, Liberty Action Network
The letter also has leaders from economic conservative organizations, including Jenny Beth Martin from Tea Party Patriots and Adam Brandon from FreedomWorks.
Various social conservative leaders likewise signed it, including Kelly Shackelford from First Liberty Institute, Morton Blackwell from the Weyrich Lunch, and Sandy Rios from the American Family Association.
National security conservatives also supported the letter, including Frank Gaffney from the Center for Security Policy and Elaine Donnelly from the Center for Military Readiness.
These leaders and their organizations know that a widespread display of support could potentially catapult Jordan into the Speaker’s office, with some hoping as a fallback that it could, at a minimum, lead to a power-sharing arrangement that gives constitutional conservatives a seat at the table.
The election for Speaker will occur in January 2019 when the new Congress is sworn in after the November midterm election.
Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski.
Last week, reports indicated Stefan Halper, a Cambridge professor and longtime aide to some of Washington’s most powerful figures, was outed as an FBI informant planted inside Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The New York Post writes:
Halper made his first overture when he met with Page at a British symposium. The two remained in regular contact for more than a year, meeting at Halper’s Virginia farm and in Washington, DC, as well as exchanging emails.
The professor met with Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis in late August, offering his services as a foreign-policy adviser, The Washington Post reported Friday, without naming the academic.
…
Days later, Halper contacted Papadopoulos by e-mail. The professor offered the young and inexperienced campaign aide $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to London, ostensibly to write a paper about energy in the eastern Mediterranean region.
Here are a few fast facts about Halper’s history in politics.
Got His Start in Nixon/Ford Years
The Stanford and Oxford-educated Halper started his career in government in 1971 as a member of President Richard Nixon’s Domestic Policy Council. The foreign policy expert served as the Office of Management and Budget’s Assistant Director of Management and Evaluation Division between 1973-1974. Halper then served as an assistant to all three of President Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staffs — Alexander Haig, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney — until 1977.
Accused of Leading a Spy Ring Inside Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Campaign
The Reagan-Bush presidential campaign hired Halper to serve as Director of Policy Coordination in 1980 and would later be embroiled in the Debategate affair, a scandal in which CIA operatives were accused of leaking the Carter campaign’s foreign policy positions to the Republican ticket.
Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.
Halper also worked as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs during President Ronald Reagan’s first term.
Had a Stint as a Bank Executive
In 1984, Halper was chairman of three financial institutions — National Bank of Northern Virginia, Palmer National Bank, and George Washington National Bank. White House official Oliver North wired loaned funds from the Palmer National Bank to a Swiss bank account, which were later used to aid the contras.
Believed Hillary Clinton Would Be a Better Steward for U.S.-UK Relations
In March 2016, Halper told Russia’s Sputnik News that he believed then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton would prove to be a steadier hand in preserving the “special relationship” enjoyed by the United States and Britain.
“I believe Clinton would be best for US-UK relations and for relations with the European Union. Clinton is well-known, deeply experienced and predictable. US-UK relations will remain steady regardless of the winner although Clinton will be less disruptive over time,” Halper said.
Mark Penn — Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist during her 2008 presidential campaign who has served the Clinton family since the mid-90s — lowers the boom on Robert Mueller, Rod Rosenstein, Christopher Steele, the Clinton Foundation, and the intelligence community’s “deep state,” laying out the absurdity and the danger of the Obama administration’s abuse of surveillance and law enforcement against political enemies.
The “deep state” is in a deep state of desperation. With little time left before the Justice Department inspector general’s report becomes public, and with special counsel Robert Mueller having failed to bring down Donald Trump after a year of trying, they know a reckoning is coming.
At this point, there is little doubt that the highest echelons of the FBI and the Justice Department broke their own rules to end the Hillary Clinton “matter,” but we can expect the inspector general to document what was done or, more pointedly, not done. It is hard to see how a year-long investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a secret “no aides allowed” meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.
With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.
But it is backfiring. They started by telling the story of Alexander Downer, an Australian diplomat, as having remembered a bar conversation with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. But how did the FBI know they should talk to him? That’s left out of their narrative. Downer’s signature appears on a $25 million contribution to the Clinton Foundation. You don’t need much imagination to figure that he was close with Clinton Foundation operatives who relayed information to the State Department, which then called the FBI to complete the loop. This wasn’t intelligence. It was likely opposition research from the start.
In no way would a fourth-hand report from a Maltese professor justify wholesale targeting of four or five members of the Trump campaign. It took Christopher Steele, with his funding concealed through false campaign filings, to be incredibly successful at creating a vast echo chamber around his unverified, fanciful dossier, bouncing it back and forth between the press and the FBI so it appeared that there were multiple sources all coming to the same conclusion.
I don’t know about you, but for me, the names of James Comey and Robert Mueller have become symbolic of a delusional paranoia to where I am continuously overwhelmed by a chronic persecution complex as though these two were following me around everywhere I go – mind you, not nice at all. Time to go to the shrink maybe. To add insult to injury, as far as I am concerned, every day there seems to be a new twist in the infamous investigation of the alleged collusion of Donald Trump with Russia in the interference of the latter with the 2016 Presidential elections.
According to the Media Research Center, broadcast television news coverage of President Trump was 90% negative in the first quarter of 2018. This is not an aberration for the negative coverage has been constant since Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign on June 16, 2015.
