Author: 53percenter

A new report commissioned by the Soufan Center has outlined the threat posed by potential Western Islamic State (ISIS) fighters returning to their countries of origin as the caliphate continues to collapse.

The report, titled “Beyond the Caliphate, Foreign Fighters and the Threat of Returnees,” finds that at least 5,600 men, women, and children from 33 countries who traveled to support the Islamic State have now returned to their country of origin, many of which are in the West.

It also estimates that around 30 percent of the approximately 5,000 people who have gone to Syria from countries in the European Union have returned home. Seven of the 129 who went to join ISIS from the United States are now back on home turf, the report adds.

“It’s a hell of a problem,” Richard Barrett, a senior adviser at the Soufan Center told NBC. “It’s very resource-intensive to identify who these people are, track them down and then to do something about them.”

“We have to be cautious of thinking that all [5,600] would go back and be a problem, but I think it’s fair to assume that probably some will be,” he continued.

The report also outlines how, upon their return, Islamic State terrorists continue to pose a serious threat to national security. It states:

If on return they begin again to feel as rootless and lacking in purpose as they did before they left, then they are unlikely to settle back easily into a “normal” life, and as ISIS increases its external campaign, both through action and propaganda, returnees may be particularly vulnerable to contact from people who were part of the network that recruited them, or appeals for help from ex-comrades in arms.

It also details the potential threat posed by women and children, whose commitment to the caliphate and its ideology is difficult to assess:

A subset of returnees that is even harder to quantify, assess and address is the women and children who joined IS but later went home or were captured and await deportation. Without further research, it will be hard to judge the degree of their commitment to IS and their interest in becoming active rather than passive supporters.

“It’s one of the hardest things of all to rehabilitate children who have been recruited by violent extremist groups,” Barrett said. “Once trained, they are incredibly committed and loyal.”

“They will be a lot of mental health issues,” he continued. “And you can’t just put them in a child detention center—you have to treat them. Some will be turned around quite easily and will follow the next ‘mother figure’ that comes along, but others will be unpredictable, to say the least.”

The report’s release coincides with the caliphate’s continued collapse at the hands of the U.S. led coalition. Last week, coalition forces celebrated the group’s expulsion from the Syrian city of Raqqa, while forces in the Philippines also expelled the terror group from their stronghold of Marawi. Islamic State “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had declared Raqqa the capital of the terrorist state in 2014.

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

Establishment GOP Senators are trying to assemble a cheap-labor amnesty for young illegals which will not protect Americans workers from unscrupulous employers, nor reduce the huge annual inflow of migrants and workers, according to a report in Politico.

The site reported:

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, has convened a working group on immigration that includes himself and GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and James Lankford of Oklahoma, as well as other lawmakers. Sens. David Perdue of Georgia and Jeff Flake of Arizona also are among the Republicans who have been engaged in the talks, according to sources.

“There’s a solution to be had there,” Cornyn said. “But we just need to get on with it.”

… some outlines of an agreement are becoming clearer. For instance, the senators have all but ruled out including a mandatory workplace verification system known as E-Verify in a final DACA agreement, according to multiple lawmakers engaged in the talks.

E-Verify is the government database which companies can use to verify the legality of a job-applicant. Immigration reformers say the job-magnet for illegals must be turned off by requiring all employers use the E-verify system for all job applicants.

w/o E-Verify, there is little pretense that deal makers see controlling illegal employment/immigration as a goal. https://t.co/dlzRIERIZw

— Roy Beck (@RoyBeck_NUSA) October 24, 2017

The Senators are considering vague “beefed-up border security provisions,” but the article did not say if the GOP Senators plan to support the construction of the border wall.

The GOP group is responding to pressure from Democrats and business groups who want the federal government to extend President Barack Obama’s so-called “DACA” amnesty for the 700,000 to 3 million younger illegals. Democrats and business groups also want to block an immigration reform which would reduce the number of immigrants and drive up Americans’ wages.

Instead of merely blocking the latest amnesty threat, immigration reformers are working President Donald Trump to win a major reform that will reduce the annual number of immigrants, and so help raise wages, high-tech investment, and productivity.

Trump has begun by winding down Obama’s DACA amnesty, and so the 690,000 DACA beneficiaries will start losing their work-permits March 5. The gradual loss of the illegal-immigrant workforce will open up hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans, and force companies to compete for workers by offering higher pay.

On October 8, Trump also released his popular principles for vetting any congressional amnesty deal. According to the letter which Trump sent to leaders in Congress:

As President, I took an oath to uphold the Constitution, which makes clear that all legislative powers are vested in the Congress, not the President.

I, therefore, tasked the relevant executive departments and agencies to conduct a bottom-up review of all immigration policies to determine what legislative reforms are essential for America’s economic and national security.  Rather than asking what policies are supported by special interests, we asked America’s law enforcement professionals to identify reforms that are vital to protect the national interest.  In response, they identified dangerous loopholes, outdated laws, and easily exploited vulnerabilities in our immigration system – current policies that are harming our country and our communities.

I have enclosed the detailed findings of this effort.  These findings outline reforms that must be included as part of any legislation addressing the status of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients.  Without these reforms, illegal immigration and chain migration, which severely and unfairly burden American workers and taxpayers, will continue without end.

Immigration reform must create more jobs, higher wages, and greater security for Americans — now and for future generations.  The reforms outlined in the enclosure are necessary to ensure prosperity, opportunity, and safety for every member of our national family.

The only pro-American members of Grassley’s group are Grassley and Perdue.

Grassley is a strong critic of the many federal programs which allow companies to import white-collar and blue-collar workers for jobs in the United States. The programs include the H-1B, L-1, OPT, TN, H-2A, H-2B, which collectively import roughly 700,000 workers per year.

Perdue is promoting his wage-boosting RAISE Act. His poll-tested RAISE Act would help Americans by focusing on the core issue — the number of migrants who enter the country every year to compete against Americans for decent wages. The RAISE Act, which is co-sponsored by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, would reduce immigration numbers by reducing the huge chain-immigration inflow.

Politico, however, suggests his reforms are opposed by the other Senators, saying:

Ideas that do remain in contention among this circle of Republicans include beefed-up border security provisions, limiting some chain migration and measures that one senator described as a “down payment” on shifting the U.S. immigration laws into a merit-based system, according to GOP senators.

Perdue’s focus on number and chain-migration is likely unpopular among the remaining Senators in Grassley’s group, all of whom are pro-amnesty and pro-cheap labor, even though that combination is very unpopular among voters.

For example, Tillis is an aggressive advocate for business’ greater use of cheap-labor migrants and has recruited Lankford to push his SUCCEED amnesty for at least 2.5 million illegals.

Lankford has damaged his own standing with awkward statements, including his declaration that the American economy gains when migrants compete against Americans for good jobs:

The job issue is an interesting issue, because those individuals are already in the job market. Many of these DACA students are actually DACA young adults, they already have access to the job market right now because they’ve been given deferred action. So they are in higher education, they are in the job market, they are currently a part of our economy, currently. That continual competition in our economy doesn’t hurt us, that continues to help us. It actually hurts us to put those individuals out of the economy.

The Tillis-Lankford bill does include a token curb on chain migration by delaying naturalization for 15 years. Democrats, however, will work to reduce the delay and are already pushing the Dream Act, which maximizes chain-migration by allowing naturalization in just three years for illegals who are married to citizens.

Flake has developed his own amnesty bill, but his clout will decline because he announced Wednesday that he will retire from the Senate amid growing home-state opposition to his pro-migrant policies.

Graham is the leading GOP advocates for amnesty and he jump-started the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty to deliver low-wage workers to his home state’s tourism, hospitality, and agriculture industries. Once a DACA amnesty is passed, “we’re going to increase legal immigration so employers don’t have to cheat” by hiring illegals, he said in October 2017. The Politico article notes that Graham wants the nation’s immigration system to help companies, not to help raise Americans’ wages.

Cornyn is pushing a weak border security bill while opposing the E-Verify bill that is bitterly opposed by the farming industry. The food industry is facing tough competition from overseas — and future competition from urban “vertical farm” companies. So it is pushing for cheap immigrant labor via a new H-2C guest worker program instead of investing in labor-saving-productivity boosting, American-made, farm machinery.

According to Politico:

“There are large segments of some important sectors, like agriculture, where we need to do E-Verify with [another] immigration reform to make sure that there’s an adequate legal workforce,” Cornyn said. “And if we start adding too much stuff to the DACA-border security approach, then we get back into comprehensive immigration reform and nothing happens.”

Pro-American reformers worry that Cornyn’s border bill could serve as a fake-tough security measure to muffle public opposition to an amnesty.

The Politico article does not discuss the Democrats’ risky political strategy of favoring migrants over Americans. In 2014, that pro-migrant, pro-business policy helped the Democrats lose nine seats in the Senate.

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing almost 2 million work-permits to foreigners, by providing work-visas to roughly 700,000 temporary workers and doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.

The Washington-imposed economic policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

The cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.

Americans tell pollsters that they strongly oppose amnesties and cheap-labor immigration, even as most Americans also want to favor legal immigrants, and many sympathize with illegals.

Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a growing percentage of the nation’s annual income is shifting to investors and away from employees.

 

 

 

 

 

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan mourned Sen. Jeff Flake’s (R-AZ) decision not to seek re-election, describing his retirement as a loss for “the greater cause of conservatism.”

“I’m saddened Congress is losing my friend Jeff Flake. Throughout his career in public service, Jeff has been a champion of constitutional, limited government and a trailblazer for fiscal restraint,” Ryan said in a statement.

“He as much as anyone helped to end a corrosive earmarking process that enabled runaway spending. Jeff’s retirement is a loss to the Senate and the greater cause of conservatism. I wish him well as he continues to advocate for our principles outside of government.”

Ryan and Flake were natural allies in Congress, both championing the causes of unrestrained free trade and presiding over unprecedented levels of illegal immigration, as well as critics of the Trump agenda.

Flake said in announcing his retirement:

It is clear at this moment that a traditional conservative, who believes in limited government and free markets, devoted to free trade, pro-immigration, has a narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican party. I rise today with no small measure of regret. Regret because of the state of our disunion, regret because of the disrepair and destructiveness of our politics.”

Flake was part of the “Gang of Eight” that proposed the 2013 immigration bill seeking to provide amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, alongside the likes of Sens. Marco Rubio, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham.

“It’s very hard for me to add to the eloquence of my dear friend from Arizona,” McCain said after the decision was announced. “But I do want to say that it has been one of the great honors of my life to serve with a man of integrity, honor, decency, and commitment to not only Arizona but to the United States of America.”

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

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy has announced, along with House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, that the two will be jointly investigating the Department of Justice’s handling of the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, saying that the department’s actions have left “a host of outstanding questions that must be answered.”

“Our justice system is represented by a blind-folded woman holding a set of scales… No entity or individual is exempt from oversight,” the two chairmen said in a statement Tuesday.

The “host of outstanding questions” pertain to subjects including, but not limited to:

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“FBI’s decision to publicly announce the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s handling of classified information but not to publicly announce the investigation into campaign associates of then-candidate Donald Trump;

“FBI’s decision to notify Congress by formal letter of the status of the investigation both in October and November of 2016;

“FBI’s decision to appropriate full decision making in respect to charging or not charging Secretary Clinton to the FBI rather than the DOJ;

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“FBI’s timeline in respect to charging decisions.”

In other words, a good number of the goofy, ridiculously fishy goings on of the Obama-era DOJ are on their way to being brought into the light, and we couldn’t be happier.

Former President Barack Obama’s Justice Department is as scandal-ridden as scandal-ridden gets, with former Attorneys General Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder potentially on the hook for a bevvy of misbehavior.

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Let’s take a look at a couple of the worst incidents:

• Operation Fast and Furious, in which thousands of guns ended up in the hands of Cartel members and Holder became the first sitting cabinet member to be held by the House of representatives.
• Lynch’s infamous “tarmac meeting” with former President Bill Clinton before the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails was announced complete, an incident that even former FBI Director James Comey found problematic, according to Fox News.
• Lynch’s insisting to Comey to refer to the Clinton investigation as a “matter” instead of an investigation, a seemingly-blatant attempt to quash any Democrat scandals during the race for the presidency.

The list could go on, and with so many questions being linked to the FBI, I’d imagine that the walking-and-talking scandal that is James Comey will be a name in the news for some time to come.

We may grow tired of hearing the same names and hearing about the same issues, but it is absolutely vital that justice prevail in Washington.

Obama’s DOJ failed the American people. It’s time things were set straight, and I can’t imagine a more capable man to sort the matter out than the bulldog that is Trey Gowdy.

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Like and share on Facebook and Twitter to spread the word that Trey Gowdy is taking on Hillary Clinton and the Loretta Lynch-era Department of Justice.

How much will this new investigation uncover? Scroll down to comment below!

The scandal of accused serial sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein has raised awareness regarding the abuse of women in the workplace, and that is a good thing.

However, the Weinstein scandal has also provided an avenue for liberals attack masculinity, which isn’t such good thing because it leads them to assume all forms of masculinity are bad.

The term “toxic masculinity” has gained steam over the past couple of years, and it suggests that masculinity is bad for men.

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Weinstein’s exploits will no doubt add fodder to the liberal cause of feminizing men.

Already, the left has come up with a way to counter the evils associated with “toxic masculinity.” For example, men can attend classes to help them combat their manliness.

Rethink Masculinity, a partnership between Collective Action for Safe Spaces, ReThink and DC Rape Crisis Center, is a men’s “consciousness building group in which people identifying as men collectively learn how social constructs of masculinity harm themselves and the people around them.”

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As the name suggests, these types of classes involve unlearning the masculinity that supposedly drives men to behave badly.

Eric Mankowski, associate chair of the psychology department at Portland State University, teaches a course titled “Psychology of Men and Masculinities” which, he says, “deconstruct[s] how masculinity is socialized as a performative mask rather than a biological imperative,” according to The Cut.

It seems like that way of thinking is backward, but that shouldn’t be too surprising coming from a bunch of liberals.

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These kinds of classes are dangerous because they attempt to undo something that isn’t bad.

Despite what the left would have us believe, men and women are different. God made men stronger and more powerful than women so they can, among other things, defend their families and provide for them.

Moreover, masculinity is not toxic. While liberals push to destroy the image of men being strong and powerful, they are moving to effectively emasculate them. Doing so would help the left tear down values conservatives that believe in, and nothing would make them happier.

Worst of all, though, is that the effort confuses — probably deliberately — the kind of behavior Weinstein is accused of with what it means to be a “man.”

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The problem of sexual abuse and violence against women can, and should, be tackled without stripping men of the characteristics that God gave them.

Please like and share this story on Facebook and Twitter to spread the word about how liberals are trying to destroy manliness.

What do you think of the left trying to make men less masculine? Scroll down to comment below!