Month: January 2020

Do you think Donald Trump has done a good job of managing the economy?

James Carville says Trump is the greatest threat to America since the fall of communism.  It is easy to laugh away such a declaration, but I think there is an invaluable truth expressed.  Trump is as important in stature as the United States’ most formidable military and political opponent of the twentieth century.  Trumpism as an ideological force has the mass and acceleration of a Soviet Empire that threatened to conquer the world.  Nobody speaks about the Bush Doctrine in such terms.  Nobody confuses the Obama Doctrine or the Carter Doctrine as projecting that kind of power.  Yet here we are, just three years after the election, and somehow the belittled and mocked hotel owner from Queens has stumbled into creating a movement that matches in strength and potency what took Marx, Lenin, and Stalin over a century to perfect.  Consider the fear that Carville and his ilk must harbor about what is to come.

What does he see that makes him tremble so?  In a word, greatness.

How could he not?  When you see a man being endlessly ridiculed and scorned brush off those insults with ease and smile back, you know something is different.  When you watch a 6’3″ sack of energy bustling across the stage four or more times a day in suit and tie before tens of thousands of spectators watching his every move, and he seems more rested and comfortable than the press gallery a third his age, you know you haven’t seen this before.  When his enemies spend years using the combined forces of corporate media, the legal system, and the intelligence agencies to dispose of him one way or another, and the man responds with an off-the-cuff one-liner that shows he could not care less, you know you are dealing with something rare.

Carville hates the man because he knows what he is.  Donald Trump is a world-historical figure.  He is not merely a part of history; he is an agent warping it with his own gravity.  His ideas and actions represent a firm break from the prevailing paradigms of the past.  His is an original voice arguing aggressively against the status quo.  If everything about this moment feels different, that’s because it is.  We are all witnesses to history’s play, but few generations see a world-historical figure ascend to its stage.  

The media are blind to the moment, but future historians will see.  Almost everything in the public sphere is now defined in relation to Donald Trump.  

He stood on the dais during his inauguration and practically said, “See all these Republicans and Democrats and their great plans for our country?  I’m going to destroy them all and burn down most of what they’ve built since World War II.”  No wonder both sides joined hands with the Deep State and attempted to do by coup what Hillary could not.  Winning the American presidency is one thing, but shining a bright light on what the American government has become is something else entirely.  

Consider how many powerful ideas Donald Trump has cast into the national consciousness.  He has exposed both major parties as socialist globalist cults more concerned with government health care and foreign nation-building than a policy for American freedom.  He has exposed how free trade can never be free when based on slave labor.  He has exposed how the silent destruction of towns across the Midwest came not from China’s comparative advantage, but from American companies’ use of slavery by proxy.  He has redirected investment away from Wall Street and toward Main Street for the first time in over thirty years and has unleashed three decades’ worth of pent up entrepreneurial energy in the very towns long deemed dead.  He has questioned how the federal government can have any legitimacy if it fails at enforcing its very own immigration laws.  

Not one Nobel laureate imagined this American renaissance of GDP and stock market surge, record-low unemployment, wage growth, and low inflation in one bubbling cauldron.  It took a change agent.  Not one foreign policy mandarin suggested unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit of the American oil man in order to destroy our enemies’ power over us permanently.  It took a change agent.  Not one State Department official questioned why the United States was still subsidizing Europe’s generous socialist welfare system seventy years after WWII.  It took a change agent.  Nobody wondered why we were enriching China at our own expense and preparing for a world where a communist dictator would lead.  It took Donald Trump.

Without worry or apology, Donald Trump stands before the world with a giant mirror, and the world does not like what it sees.  At a time when Western governments have found common cause with murderous dictators in demanding limits to free speech and free minds, Donald Trump goes to Poland and excoriates European socialism as the newest iteration of human bondage.  He celebrates the very Western civilization that the West now works to bury.  More than anyone on the world stage, he argues for individual freedom as the indispensable ingredient for civilization itself and free nations as the essential bulwark against international governance and tyranny.  In speech after speech across the globe, he stands alone and pushes back against the weight of history’s currents.  

The world has noticed.  It is Donald Trump to whom Nigerian Christians turn for survival from Islamic terror.  It is Donald Trump who has strengthened Israel by keeping promises his predecessors lacked the fortitude to see through.  It is Donald Trump whose name is often whispered by freedom-fighters in Venezuela, whose American flag is respected by regime protesters in Iran, and whose image is waved by thousands demanding freedom in Hong Kong.  Nobody clamoring for freedom is waving pictures of Angela Merkel in the air, but in Hong Kong and Taiwan, a photoshopped image of Donald Trump as Rocky Balboa is easy to find.  At a time when the German chancellor argues for limiting free expression, those people most desperate to escape China’s yoke see the American president as the only fighter who might help set them free.  He is our American president, but he belongs to the world now, too.

Because he is actively working to destroy entrenched ideas and institutions, his opposition is clear-eyed and equally aggressive.  Rather than the traditional political tug-of-war that pits adverse interests against each other without significant movement toward any direction, President Trump as a world-historical driver of change is engaging in pitched battle with winner-takes-all stakes.  

Whether he ultimately succeeds in shifting various equilibriums is irrelevant to his role in history.  In victory or defeat, he represents a firm marker against which past and future events will be viewed.  What his fiercest adversaries are only now realizing is that Trump has shifted the trajectory of history permanently.  He is not operating on their terms; they are all actors in the Trump Era.

How do you go up against an era?  That’s like going up against a season.  Whether you like it or not, summer and winter are with us.  No wonder James Carville is afraid.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

James Carville says Trump is the greatest threat to America since the fall of communism.  It is easy to laugh away such a declaration, but I think there is an invaluable truth expressed.  Trump is as important in stature as the United States’ most formidable military and political opponent of the twentieth century.  Trumpism as an ideological force has the mass and acceleration of a Soviet Empire that threatened to conquer the world.  Nobody speaks about the Bush Doctrine in such terms.  Nobody confuses the Obama Doctrine or the Carter Doctrine as projecting that kind of power.  Yet here we are, just three years after the election, and somehow the belittled and mocked hotel owner from Queens has stumbled into creating a movement that matches in strength and potency what took Marx, Lenin, and Stalin over a century to perfect.  Consider the fear that Carville and his ilk must harbor about what is to come.

What does he see that makes him tremble so?  In a word, greatness.

How could he not?  When you see a man being endlessly ridiculed and scorned brush off those insults with ease and smile back, you know something is different.  When you watch a 6’3″ sack of energy bustling across the stage four or more times a day in suit and tie before tens of thousands of spectators watching his every move, and he seems more rested and comfortable than the press gallery a third his age, you know you haven’t seen this before.  When his enemies spend years using the combined forces of corporate media, the legal system, and the intelligence agencies to dispose of him one way or another, and the man responds with an off-the-cuff one-liner that shows he could not care less, you know you are dealing with something rare.

Carville hates the man because he knows what he is.  Donald Trump is a world-historical figure.  He is not merely a part of history; he is an agent warping it with his own gravity.  His ideas and actions represent a firm break from the prevailing paradigms of the past.  His is an original voice arguing aggressively against the status quo.  If everything about this moment feels different, that’s because it is.  We are all witnesses to history’s play, but few generations see a world-historical figure ascend to its stage.  

The media are blind to the moment, but future historians will see.  Almost everything in the public sphere is now defined in relation to Donald Trump.  

He stood on the dais during his inauguration and practically said, “See all these Republicans and Democrats and their great plans for our country?  I’m going to destroy them all and burn down most of what they’ve built since World War II.”  No wonder both sides joined hands with the Deep State and attempted to do by coup what Hillary could not.  Winning the American presidency is one thing, but shining a bright light on what the American government has become is something else entirely.  

Consider how many powerful ideas Donald Trump has cast into the national consciousness.  He has exposed both major parties as socialist globalist cults more concerned with government health care and foreign nation-building than a policy for American freedom.  He has exposed how free trade can never be free when based on slave labor.  He has exposed how the silent destruction of towns across the Midwest came not from China’s comparative advantage, but from American companies’ use of slavery by proxy.  He has redirected investment away from Wall Street and toward Main Street for the first time in over thirty years and has unleashed three decades’ worth of pent up entrepreneurial energy in the very towns long deemed dead.  He has questioned how the federal government can have any legitimacy if it fails at enforcing its very own immigration laws.  

Not one Nobel laureate imagined this American renaissance of GDP and stock market surge, record-low unemployment, wage growth, and low inflation in one bubbling cauldron.  It took a change agent.  Not one foreign policy mandarin suggested unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit of the American oil man in order to destroy our enemies’ power over us permanently.  It took a change agent.  Not one State Department official questioned why the United States was still subsidizing Europe’s generous socialist welfare system seventy years after WWII.  It took a change agent.  Nobody wondered why we were enriching China at our own expense and preparing for a world where a communist dictator would lead.  It took Donald Trump.

Without worry or apology, Donald Trump stands before the world with a giant mirror, and the world does not like what it sees.  At a time when Western governments have found common cause with murderous dictators in demanding limits to free speech and free minds, Donald Trump goes to Poland and excoriates European socialism as the newest iteration of human bondage.  He celebrates the very Western civilization that the West now works to bury.  More than anyone on the world stage, he argues for individual freedom as the indispensable ingredient for civilization itself and free nations as the essential bulwark against international governance and tyranny.  In speech after speech across the globe, he stands alone and pushes back against the weight of history’s currents.  

The world has noticed.  It is Donald Trump to whom Nigerian Christians turn for survival from Islamic terror.  It is Donald Trump who has strengthened Israel by keeping promises his predecessors lacked the fortitude to see through.  It is Donald Trump whose name is often whispered by freedom-fighters in Venezuela, whose American flag is respected by regime protesters in Iran, and whose image is waved by thousands demanding freedom in Hong Kong.  Nobody clamoring for freedom is waving pictures of Angela Merkel in the air, but in Hong Kong and Taiwan, a photoshopped image of Donald Trump as Rocky Balboa is easy to find.  At a time when the German chancellor argues for limiting free expression, those people most desperate to escape China’s yoke see the American president as the only fighter who might help set them free.  He is our American president, but he belongs to the world now, too.

Because he is actively working to destroy entrenched ideas and institutions, his opposition is clear-eyed and equally aggressive.  Rather than the traditional political tug-of-war that pits adverse interests against each other without significant movement toward any direction, President Trump as a world-historical driver of change is engaging in pitched battle with winner-takes-all stakes.  

Whether he ultimately succeeds in shifting various equilibriums is irrelevant to his role in history.  In victory or defeat, he represents a firm marker against which past and future events will be viewed.  What his fiercest adversaries are only now realizing is that Trump has shifted the trajectory of history permanently.  He is not operating on their terms; they are all actors in the Trump Era.

How do you go up against an era?  That’s like going up against a season.  Whether you like it or not, summer and winter are with us.  No wonder James Carville is afraid.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

Leftist actress and comedienne Kathy Griffin has admitted she resorted to “straight-up begging” for work after being widely denounced after posing for a photo in which she held President Donald Trump’s bloody and decapitated head.

Griffin made the revelations to USA Today, who she talked to in the wake of her 90-second cameo as herself on the Netflix psychological thriller You.  

“I straight up was just begging for five lines on something that would be seen by people that had nothing to do with Trump, nothing that was controversial,” she revealed.

During the interview, Griffin also claimed that showrunner Greg Berlanti admitted to giving her the cameo because of all she had done for the LGBT community.

“You showrunner (Greg Berlanti) called me up, he was so nice he said, you know he’s a gay guy, he said, ‘You know Kathy after all you’ve done for the community, all these decades I’m happy to do this for you,’” Griffin explained.

Griffin, who last year complained that the experience of being hounded left her “unemployable and uninsurable,” added that she had become a different person as a result.

“While the picture has caused me a lot of duress it’s also made me global, everybody knows the crazy red-haired lady from the photo,” she said. “It has made me more fearless and I really feel strongly that whoever comes at me, they have to understand I’ve prevailed against the president of the United States.”

The 59-year-old comic also maintained that she does not plan to stop railing against Trump anytime in the near future. “I’m not going to stop; I’m not going to back down from this president or this administration one bit, and they know it,” she warned.

Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart.com.

In 2016, the Obama administration determined that candidate Trump was an imminent threat to their chosen career criminal candidate Hillary Clinton. They were worried that the power they had amassed, while remaking America, was in jeopardy. Therefore, they decided to use massive amounts of taxpayer money and many agencies to take Trump out. Doesn’t that clearly violate the Hatch Act?

 

The first thing they had to do was get Hillary off from her many violations of the law. They had the Justice Department do a pretend investigation. Then there was a chance meeting of Attorney General Loretta Lynch with Bill Clinton followed up by a pretend interview with Hillary. Then, congenital liar James Comey, who had exonerated Hillary months before, came out and listed all the crimes Hillary had committed but lied that no prosecutor would ever take the case.

 

 Next, they had to go after Trump and his associates.

 

The corrupt Hillary and the DNC obviously couldn’t find truthful information to take out Trump, and couldn’t run on their unpopular policies, so they paid a foreign national, Christopher Steele, more than $10 million to produce a fictional document to take out Trump. The DNC and Hillary also filed fraudulent documents with the FEC claiming these were legal fees.

 

The Obama administration, through the corrupt, politicized Justice department and intelligence agencies, had illegally spied on thousands of Americans during its term and had to figure out a way to mislead the FISA court in order to spy on people surrounding Trump so they came up with the idea to claim Trump was colluding with Russia  despite having zero evidence that was true.

 

They decided that Carter Page was expendable so they claimed he was a spy. They continually lied (they did not make mistakes) to the FISA court about evidence but all they had was the fictional dossier from Steele. An attorney at Justice altered documents and they didn’t even tell the court that the dossier was paid for by the DNC and Hillary. The truth was inconvenient, so they continually lied to the court. All these facts have been evident for years, yet the complicit media hasn’t cared because they also don’t want Trump as president. It is dangerous to America to have an in-the-tank media.

 

The Obama administration also decided they wanted informants in the Trump campaign, so they went after George Papadopoulos to entrap him. He was also expendable.

 

The DNC computers were hacked, and they blamed Russia but refused to let government officials examine the evidence. The fact that they didn’t see evidence didn’t make any difference to the Obama administration, journalists or other Democrats. They just repeated what they were told, like puppets.

 

The Russian collusion story was obviously fake, or they would also have targeted the Clinton campaign which had many connections and contacts with Russia.

 

President Obama obviously wasn’t very concerned because in the summer of 2016 — he gave a stand down order to his cyber security chief to stop investigating Russia.

 

The targeting didn’t work, and Trump was elected. The threat to bureaucrats and Democrat policies was now more imminent than ever so they had to attack harder. The strive to impeach started on day one. President Obama, suddenly, changed the way classified documents could be shared. Susan Rice and others started illegally unmasking names and leaking like a sieve. Somehow only people surrounding Trump were targeted for unmasking.

 

Michael Flynn was now expendable and was targeted, entrapped and the corrupt, politicized Justice department illegally hid exonerating evidence as they bankrupted and charged him.

 

Then, with no evidence, we got the two-year Mueller investigation and endless Congressional investigations vainly searching for a crime to impeach Trump with. Sadly, they couldn’t find any.

 

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, soon to be nominated to the Supreme Court, was also determined to be an imminent threat to the Democrat agenda so they sought to take him out with no evidence. There is no end to the number of people the media and other Democrats will seek to destroy as they quest for and protect their power. They will even seek to destroy white teenagers who dared attend a pro life rally wearing MAGA hats.

 

The election of 2020 was coming up, the economy is good, and Trump is a bigger imminent threat to radical Democrat policies than ever. Magically a whistleblower (leaker) shows up and makes up some stuff about a conversation Trump had with the Ukraine leader even though he wasn’t privy to the conversation. Suddenly whistleblower rules were changed to not require direct knowledge. The leaker went to congenital liar Adam Schiff’s staff before the complain was filed.

 

Trump was such an imminent threat that the Democrats had to rush through impeachment. They still couldn’t come up with actual crimes, so they created fictional ones. Facts again are irrelevant.

 

The threat was so imminent that they rushed the vote without evidence and fact witnesses. Survival of America was at stake. But wait, after the vote, Pelosi violated Trump’s sixth amendment rights and withheld the impeachment articles from the Senate for a month.

 

Now, after three years of targeting and destroying many people surrounding Trump, we have found someone journalists and other Democrats have determined has been unfairly targeted. Iran’s chief terrorist, General Qassem Soleimani.

 

They have questioned whether this terrorist killer, who has been responsible for the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands, including hundreds of Americans, was an imminent threat and should have been killed.

 

My guess is every member of our military, private contractors, Iranian protestors and innocent citizens throughout the Mideast consider themselves under imminent threat every day of the year because of terrorist groups sponsored by Iran and because of Soleimani.

 

President Obama and his administration are responsible for a significant amount of money Iran and Soleimani had to carry out terrorism throughout the world.

 

They lied to get the deal done, bribed the leaders with $1.8 billion, stopped an investigation into drug running, released $150 billion in frozen funds and dropped the sanctions which freed up $100’s of billions. The Europeans also have major responsibilities into ratcheting up the danger of Iran.

 

But Trump is the imminent danger because he killed the terrorist general and Congress must now limit his power. Not once did they have a resolution reigning in Obama as he attacked Libya and used drones to kill, but Trump is the problem and dangerous.

 

The Democrats want to rein in Trump, but they refused to vote for a resolution condemning Iran for taking down the airline and for killing over 1,000 protestors. They won’t even support the protesters against the tyrants. Why is there so little reporting that Iran killed so many of its own people?  The answer is that it doesn’t fit the Democrat agenda.

 

 

House Democrats blocked a resolution on Tuesday that expressed support for oppressed Iranian protesters and condemned Iran for shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane last week that killed 176 people.

 

“Consideration and a vote on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s resolution was blocked … by a vote of 226-191,” The Daily Caller reported. “The resolution would have condemned the Government of Iran for killing 1,500 Iranian citizens who were protesting their government, as well as condemned the Government of Iran for shooting down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing 176 people.”

 

The greatest imminent threat to America’s peace, prosperity and freedom would be to listen to journalists and vote for Democrats as they seek to take out Trump who is trying to return the power and purse to the people as fast as he can and protect us from terrorist sponsoring countries like Iran.

In 2016, the Obama administration determined that candidate Trump was an imminent threat to their chosen career criminal candidate Hillary Clinton. They were worried that the power they had amassed, while remaking America, was in jeopardy. Therefore, they decided to use massive amounts of taxpayer money and many agencies to take Trump out. Doesn’t that clearly violate the Hatch Act?

 

The first thing they had to do was get Hillary off from her many violations of the law. They had the Justice Department do a pretend investigation. Then there was a chance meeting of Attorney General Loretta Lynch with Bill Clinton followed up by a pretend interview with Hillary. Then, congenital liar James Comey, who had exonerated Hillary months before, came out and listed all the crimes Hillary had committed but lied that no prosecutor would ever take the case.

 

 Next, they had to go after Trump and his associates.

 

The corrupt Hillary and the DNC obviously couldn’t find truthful information to take out Trump, and couldn’t run on their unpopular policies, so they paid a foreign national, Christopher Steele, more than $10 million to produce a fictional document to take out Trump. The DNC and Hillary also filed fraudulent documents with the FEC claiming these were legal fees.

 

The Obama administration, through the corrupt, politicized Justice department and intelligence agencies, had illegally spied on thousands of Americans during its term and had to figure out a way to mislead the FISA court in order to spy on people surrounding Trump so they came up with the idea to claim Trump was colluding with Russia  despite having zero evidence that was true.

 

They decided that Carter Page was expendable so they claimed he was a spy. They continually lied (they did not make mistakes) to the FISA court about evidence but all they had was the fictional dossier from Steele. An attorney at Justice altered documents and they didn’t even tell the court that the dossier was paid for by the DNC and Hillary. The truth was inconvenient, so they continually lied to the court. All these facts have been evident for years, yet the complicit media hasn’t cared because they also don’t want Trump as president. It is dangerous to America to have an in-the-tank media.

 

The Obama administration also decided they wanted informants in the Trump campaign, so they went after George Papadopoulos to entrap him. He was also expendable.

 

The DNC computers were hacked, and they blamed Russia but refused to let government officials examine the evidence. The fact that they didn’t see evidence didn’t make any difference to the Obama administration, journalists or other Democrats. They just repeated what they were told, like puppets.

 

The Russian collusion story was obviously fake, or they would also have targeted the Clinton campaign which had many connections and contacts with Russia.

 

President Obama obviously wasn’t very concerned because in the summer of 2016 — he gave a stand down order to his cyber security chief to stop investigating Russia.

 

The targeting didn’t work, and Trump was elected. The threat to bureaucrats and Democrat policies was now more imminent than ever so they had to attack harder. The strive to impeach started on day one. President Obama, suddenly, changed the way classified documents could be shared. Susan Rice and others started illegally unmasking names and leaking like a sieve. Somehow only people surrounding Trump were targeted for unmasking.

 

Michael Flynn was now expendable and was targeted, entrapped and the corrupt, politicized Justice department illegally hid exonerating evidence as they bankrupted and charged him.

 

Then, with no evidence, we got the two-year Mueller investigation and endless Congressional investigations vainly searching for a crime to impeach Trump with. Sadly, they couldn’t find any.

 

Judge Brett Kavanaugh, soon to be nominated to the Supreme Court, was also determined to be an imminent threat to the Democrat agenda so they sought to take him out with no evidence. There is no end to the number of people the media and other Democrats will seek to destroy as they quest for and protect their power. They will even seek to destroy white teenagers who dared attend a pro life rally wearing MAGA hats.

 

The election of 2020 was coming up, the economy is good, and Trump is a bigger imminent threat to radical Democrat policies than ever. Magically a whistleblower (leaker) shows up and makes up some stuff about a conversation Trump had with the Ukraine leader even though he wasn’t privy to the conversation. Suddenly whistleblower rules were changed to not require direct knowledge. The leaker went to congenital liar Adam Schiff’s staff before the complain was filed.

 

Trump was such an imminent threat that the Democrats had to rush through impeachment. They still couldn’t come up with actual crimes, so they created fictional ones. Facts again are irrelevant.

 

The threat was so imminent that they rushed the vote without evidence and fact witnesses. Survival of America was at stake. But wait, after the vote, Pelosi violated Trump’s sixth amendment rights and withheld the impeachment articles from the Senate for a month.

 

Now, after three years of targeting and destroying many people surrounding Trump, we have found someone journalists and other Democrats have determined has been unfairly targeted. Iran’s chief terrorist, General Qassem Soleimani.

 

They have questioned whether this terrorist killer, who has been responsible for the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands, including hundreds of Americans, was an imminent threat and should have been killed.

 

My guess is every member of our military, private contractors, Iranian protestors and innocent citizens throughout the Mideast consider themselves under imminent threat every day of the year because of terrorist groups sponsored by Iran and because of Soleimani.

 

President Obama and his administration are responsible for a significant amount of money Iran and Soleimani had to carry out terrorism throughout the world.

 

They lied to get the deal done, bribed the leaders with $1.8 billion, stopped an investigation into drug running, released $150 billion in frozen funds and dropped the sanctions which freed up $100’s of billions. The Europeans also have major responsibilities into ratcheting up the danger of Iran.

 

But Trump is the imminent danger because he killed the terrorist general and Congress must now limit his power. Not once did they have a resolution reigning in Obama as he attacked Libya and used drones to kill, but Trump is the problem and dangerous.

 

The Democrats want to rein in Trump, but they refused to vote for a resolution condemning Iran for taking down the airline and for killing over 1,000 protestors. They won’t even support the protesters against the tyrants. Why is there so little reporting that Iran killed so many of its own people?  The answer is that it doesn’t fit the Democrat agenda.

 

 

House Democrats blocked a resolution on Tuesday that expressed support for oppressed Iranian protesters and condemned Iran for shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane last week that killed 176 people.

 

“Consideration and a vote on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s resolution was blocked … by a vote of 226-191,” The Daily Caller reported. “The resolution would have condemned the Government of Iran for killing 1,500 Iranian citizens who were protesting their government, as well as condemned the Government of Iran for shooting down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, killing 176 people.”

 

The greatest imminent threat to America’s peace, prosperity and freedom would be to listen to journalists and vote for Democrats as they seek to take out Trump who is trying to return the power and purse to the people as fast as he can and protect us from terrorist sponsoring countries like Iran.

One of the things that obsessed the candidates on during Tuesday’s 7^th Democrat primary debate was climate change. Whatever they say, whatever they promise, it always loops back to that topic.

Bernie, especially, framed the matter in doomsday terms. When he challenged the USMCA trade deal, he skipped over the usual economic grounds for opposing a trade deal and, instead, said that the deal failed on climate grounds (emphasis added):

[E]very major environmental organization has said no to this new trade agreement because it does not even have the phrase “climate change” in it. And given the fact that climate change is right now the greatest threat facing this planet, I will not vote for a trade agreement that does not incorporate very, very strong principles to significantly lower fossil fuel emissions in the world.

[snip]

So I happen to believe — and I hope we will talk about climate change in a moment — if we do not get our act together in terms of climate change, the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our children — and our grandchildren will be increasingly unlivable and uninhabitable.

Bernie’s ominous take on climate change perfectly parallels the take of Kyle Jurek, an Iowa Field Organizer for Bernie’s campaign. Project Veritas introduced America to Jurek on Tuesday through a video in which Jurek gleefully boasted about burning cities, “suiciding” Clintons, and imprisoning or executing those who dissent from his hard-Left world view.

(Interestingly, there is no word from the Sanders campaign about whether they intend to continue employing Jurek. To date, according to Project Veritas, Jurek has received over $10,000 for his work on the Bernie campaign.)

Project Veritas was back today with another video focusing on Kyle Jurek. In it, viewers get to hear more about Jurek’s horrifying and un-American views. He’s especially taken with Soviet gulags. After first stating that these torture institutions that killed well over a million people were significantly better than American prisons, Jurek riffs on the virtue of and reasoning behind imprisoning those who don’t get with the revolution. And if they refuse to fall in line, Jurek thinks killing the opposition is the way to go. Today’s video is, in some ways, a re-hash of yesterday’s video, only worse.

What made this video significantly different from Tuesday’s was listening to Jurek explain why his extremist measures were appropriate. Although one feels that Jurek enjoys violence and power for their own sake, he has a different justification for his violent desires. Unlike your average communist, Jurek doesn’t engage in the usual talk about class warfare, economic equality, or even identity politics. For him, it’s all about avoiding Armageddon:

Yeah, and that’s where we’re at right now. We’re at one of those moments in human history, where it’s, like, we’re fighting for survival, we’re fighting for survival of the entire human race. We’re fighting for the survival of living creatures on Planet Earth and there’s some people that will stop at nothing to preserve that, right?

Like, to see, to see the human race continue into the future. Right? To try and save the f**king planet from f**king destruction. And no matter what country and what laws that exist, they’re irrelevant to, there are things greater than those systems, right?

There are things that are more important than the rule of law in the United States, when it comes down to the existence of the human race. And that’s where we’re at.

Unfortunately, in, like, this is, like, there are very few, there are probably no other points in human history, in, like, recorded human history where, like, the stakes were as high as they are right now. Like, we are at a f**king, we’re, we’re at the end, we’re at the end of the road and, like, the way we choose to go, it’s going to determine like, hey, are we going to continue as a species or are we going to f**king burn up in a f**king century?

Or as Bernie said more pithily, “climate change is right now the greatest threat facing this planet,” and the failure to act will leave it “increasingly unlivable and uninhabitable.” Unintentionally or not, Bernie and the other candidates are giving the most dangerous people in America justification for acting on their instincts. No wonder people are worried, as O’Keefe said at the video’s end, that Jurek might even try to assassinate President Trump. In Jurek’s mind, why shouldn’t he do what he can to save the world from “the greatest threat facing this planet.”

One of the things that obsessed the candidates on during Tuesday’s 7^th Democrat primary debate was climate change. Whatever they say, whatever they promise, it always loops back to that topic.

Bernie, especially, framed the matter in doomsday terms. When he challenged the USMCA trade deal, he skipped over the usual economic grounds for opposing a trade deal and, instead, said that the deal failed on climate grounds (emphasis added):

[E]very major environmental organization has said no to this new trade agreement because it does not even have the phrase “climate change” in it. And given the fact that climate change is right now the greatest threat facing this planet, I will not vote for a trade agreement that does not incorporate very, very strong principles to significantly lower fossil fuel emissions in the world.

[snip]

So I happen to believe — and I hope we will talk about climate change in a moment — if we do not get our act together in terms of climate change, the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our children — and our grandchildren will be increasingly unlivable and uninhabitable.

Bernie’s ominous take on climate change perfectly parallels the take of Kyle Jurek, an Iowa Field Organizer for Bernie’s campaign. Project Veritas introduced America to Jurek on Tuesday through a video in which Jurek gleefully boasted about burning cities, “suiciding” Clintons, and imprisoning or executing those who dissent from his hard-Left world view.

(Interestingly, there is no word from the Sanders campaign about whether they intend to continue employing Jurek. To date, according to Project Veritas, Jurek has received over $10,000 for his work on the Bernie campaign.)

Project Veritas was back today with another video focusing on Kyle Jurek. In it, viewers get to hear more about Jurek’s horrifying and un-American views. He’s especially taken with Soviet gulags. After first stating that these torture institutions that killed well over a million people were significantly better than American prisons, Jurek riffs on the virtue of and reasoning behind imprisoning those who don’t get with the revolution. And if they refuse to fall in line, Jurek thinks killing the opposition is the way to go. Today’s video is, in some ways, a re-hash of yesterday’s video, only worse.

What made this video significantly different from Tuesday’s was listening to Jurek explain why his extremist measures were appropriate. Although one feels that Jurek enjoys violence and power for their own sake, he has a different justification for his violent desires. Unlike your average communist, Jurek doesn’t engage in the usual talk about class warfare, economic equality, or even identity politics. For him, it’s all about avoiding Armageddon:

Yeah, and that’s where we’re at right now. We’re at one of those moments in human history, where it’s, like, we’re fighting for survival, we’re fighting for survival of the entire human race. We’re fighting for the survival of living creatures on Planet Earth and there’s some people that will stop at nothing to preserve that, right?

Like, to see, to see the human race continue into the future. Right? To try and save the f**king planet from f**king destruction. And no matter what country and what laws that exist, they’re irrelevant to, there are things greater than those systems, right?

There are things that are more important than the rule of law in the United States, when it comes down to the existence of the human race. And that’s where we’re at.

Unfortunately, in, like, this is, like, there are very few, there are probably no other points in human history, in, like, recorded human history where, like, the stakes were as high as they are right now. Like, we are at a f**king, we’re, we’re at the end, we’re at the end of the road and, like, the way we choose to go, it’s going to determine like, hey, are we going to continue as a species or are we going to f**king burn up in a f**king century?

Or as Bernie said more pithily, “climate change is right now the greatest threat facing this planet,” and the failure to act will leave it “increasingly unlivable and uninhabitable.” Unintentionally or not, Bernie and the other candidates are giving the most dangerous people in America justification for acting on their instincts. No wonder people are worried, as O’Keefe said at the video’s end, that Jurek might even try to assassinate President Trump. In Jurek’s mind, why shouldn’t he do what he can to save the world from “the greatest threat facing this planet.”

In the 1970s, San Francisco, as was true for most major American cities, had gotten very shabby. While tourists still flocked to the neighborhood directly north of Market Street, where they could find Union Square, fancy stores, and upscale hotels, those who crossed Market Street and headed south found themselves in a four-block-square area of unpleasant squalor. There were always a handful of drunken men sleeping it off in the doorways of decrepit buildings and the sidewalks stank of urine.

By the end of the 1970s, San Francisco began a massive plan to revitalize that area. It tore down the decayed buildings and, in their place, built the Moscone Conference Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Gardens, and the Metreon theater and shopping center. It was all beautiful and inviting. People loved coming to trade shows and conferences in San Francisco, and families happily took their children to the museum, the garden, the skating rink, and the movie theaters.

Things aren’t like that anymore. While it was once just the South of Market region that was icky because of a few sleeping (or rambunctious) drunks, some stinky pee, and some shabby buildings, tourists are discovering that San Francisco’s entire downtown is inundated with hundreds of scary homeless people, mounds of fecal matter, thousands of discarded needles, and clusters of tents and shopping carts.

That the buildings still look nice is irrelevant. To get to them, one has to do the urban equivalent of walking across slippery stones spaced at far intervals in a slimy, alligator-filled swamp.

Ironically, all of this foulness and decay lives cheek by jowl with incredible wealth and excess. San Francisco’s Leftist government has effectively recreated a medieval city, in which the wealthy hide behind gilded walls while the poor wallow in filth and despair. And no, that’s not just a disenchanted native San Franciscan speaking. That’s according to Bloomberg, which reports on the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference being held in San Francisco this week, an event that attracted thousands of bankers and executives:

The JPMorgan gathering at the Westin St. Francis, which attracts about 10,000 people, has long drawn the ire of some attendees. Conference-goers have taken to Twitter and blog posts to express concerns about the homeless situation and watching city officials clean up human feces, all while spending thousands of dollars on hotel rooms and resorting to holding meetings in bathrooms.

[snip]

Most of the hotels in the conference’s vicinity were completely booked weeks ahead of time, with rooms that were available going in some cases for more than $2,000 a night. A more affordable option, the Lombard Plaza Motel, was sold out Monday but had rooms for as much as $500 a night starting Tuesday, according to Alex Patel, a front desk attendant. That’s nearly four times its normal rate.

[snip]

“I’ve been coming to JPM for five years, and the homeless situation has gotten much worse,” Selin Kurnaz, co-founder and CEO of New York-based Massive Bio, said at a party Monday night in the Tenderloin. “I feel unsafe walking around at night, especially as a young woman.”

What’s sad is that, while many people recognize that San Francisco has become a dystopian landscape, too few make the connection between its decay and its hard Left governance. Mental illness and substance abuse are certainly a problem, but letting people get away with everything short of murder, and subsidizing their worst behaviors, is more of a problem.

As the tag line to the movie Field of Dreams so memorably said, “If you build it, they will come.” What’s happening in San Francisco is not how you make the problem go away. It’s simply how you grow your government at the expense of ordinary citizens and businesses:

In the 1970s, San Francisco, as was true for most major American cities, had gotten very shabby. While tourists still flocked to the neighborhood directly north of Market Street, where they could find Union Square, fancy stores, and upscale hotels, those who crossed Market Street and headed south found themselves in a four-block-square area of unpleasant squalor. There were always a handful of drunken men sleeping it off in the doorways of decrepit buildings and the sidewalks stank of urine.

By the end of the 1970s, San Francisco began a massive plan to revitalize that area. It tore down the decayed buildings and, in their place, built the Moscone Conference Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Gardens, and the Metreon theater and shopping center. It was all beautiful and inviting. People loved coming to trade shows and conferences in San Francisco, and families happily took their children to the museum, the garden, the skating rink, and the movie theaters.

Things aren’t like that anymore. While it was once just the South of Market region that was icky because of a few sleeping (or rambunctious) drunks, some stinky pee, and some shabby buildings, tourists are discovering that San Francisco’s entire downtown is inundated with hundreds of scary homeless people, mounds of fecal matter, thousands of discarded needles, and clusters of tents and shopping carts.

That the buildings still look nice is irrelevant. To get to them, one has to do the urban equivalent of walking across slippery stones spaced at far intervals in a slimy, alligator-filled swamp.

Ironically, all of this foulness and decay lives cheek by jowl with incredible wealth and excess. San Francisco’s Leftist government has effectively recreated a medieval city, in which the wealthy hide behind gilded walls while the poor wallow in filth and despair. And no, that’s not just a disenchanted native San Franciscan speaking. That’s according to Bloomberg, which reports on the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference being held in San Francisco this week, an event that attracted thousands of bankers and executives:

The JPMorgan gathering at the Westin St. Francis, which attracts about 10,000 people, has long drawn the ire of some attendees. Conference-goers have taken to Twitter and blog posts to express concerns about the homeless situation and watching city officials clean up human feces, all while spending thousands of dollars on hotel rooms and resorting to holding meetings in bathrooms.

[snip]

Most of the hotels in the conference’s vicinity were completely booked weeks ahead of time, with rooms that were available going in some cases for more than $2,000 a night. A more affordable option, the Lombard Plaza Motel, was sold out Monday but had rooms for as much as $500 a night starting Tuesday, according to Alex Patel, a front desk attendant. That’s nearly four times its normal rate.

[snip]

“I’ve been coming to JPM for five years, and the homeless situation has gotten much worse,” Selin Kurnaz, co-founder and CEO of New York-based Massive Bio, said at a party Monday night in the Tenderloin. “I feel unsafe walking around at night, especially as a young woman.”

What’s sad is that, while many people recognize that San Francisco has become a dystopian landscape, too few make the connection between its decay and its hard Left governance. Mental illness and substance abuse are certainly a problem, but letting people get away with everything short of murder, and subsidizing their worst behaviors, is more of a problem.

As the tag line to the movie Field of Dreams so memorably said, “If you build it, they will come.” What’s happening in San Francisco is not how you make the problem go away. It’s simply how you grow your government at the expense of ordinary citizens and businesses: