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Fighting to preserve capitalism

There is a real challenge to American capitalism, but it doesn’t come primarily from progressives or “socialism.”  The current threat to American capitalism comes from big corporations and the favors our government grants them as major political donors. 

Anti-competitiveness — the outcome of government working for its big corporate donors — is no friend to capitalism or the consumer.  The Founders warned about this, and presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to FDR fought against this.  Political leaders — at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue — who indulge an anti-competitive juggernaut may be the biggest enemy to long-term economic success.  

Take giant mergers, of the sort the both Roosevelts fought against — do those serve the average American?  Most recently, a Sprint/T-Mobile merger has been approved by the Justice Department.  Who is served by the creation of three mega-carriers instead of four?  That question is not political — it is economic.

Monopoly and oligopoly (which is a market controlled by the few) always and everywhere raises prices, lowers quality, and eliminates the incentives which attach to competition. Indulging crony politics, reducing competition, and favoring oligopoly — from left or right — hurts the consumer. 

Megamergers, when they result in declining competition, traditionally cause consumer price increases, less innovation, decreased investment, and slower wage growth. Let’s only hope that the ten state AGs fighting the merger will prevail in court, before the next conversation is how to re-inject competitiveness into the cellphone industry. Influence pedaling, political interference with market economics, and corruption of free markets run deep in today’s Washington.

Anti-competitive impulses and decisions are not the only challenge to capitalism posed by our government.  Another comes from insufficient oversight over the process of deregulation.  Consider the Boeing 737-max, now grounded after two fatal incidents.  Federal regulators at the FAA appear to have relaxed oversight of new aircraft, with catastrophic results.  Who was hurt?  Not just the flying public but employees of the company. 

By all appearances, the FAA gradually handed off key elements of aircraft oversight to manufacturers, leading to potential conflicts of interest, unjustified assumptions, and insufficient scrutiny over a key flight safety system.

Unbridled capitalism, without consumer vigilance and government oversight, can lead to material errors in judgment, elevation of shortcuts, and quarterly profits over the public interest.  Even Ronald Reagan believed that government had a role in assuring the public good in the context of free markets, and that when that role is amputated — or minimized to the point of insignificance — we all lose. 

Of course, common sense is not limited to one or another economic sector.  This applies to air safety, air quality, fuel efficiency, auto safety standards, and a variety of other industries.  When regulation is removed arbitrarily, risk jumps and the public often suffers. When corporate greed prevails, our country loses.  Greed is no friend of capitalism — or the consumer.

The message for Democrats should be clear.  They should not demean capitalism, but make it function in a way that is fair, guided by quality and price competition, with attention to public safety, and delinked from political interests.  Contrast this vision with the approach of the current administration. America is about individual promise, a free nation that benefits from free markets, not monopolies and oligopolies — which always reduce choice, raise prices, resist quality improvements, and turn to politics for protection.  They are inherently the enemy of the hardworking middle class. 

When government favors big corporations over small businesses and consumers, it is really not pro-business or pro-capitalist at all.  From breakneck aviation and to the aggravation of subsidizing agribusiness, government coddling of big corporations is never good for the individual.  If that sounds like common sense, we see the world the same way — and so do most Americans.

Perry Gershon is a widely recognized business leader and national commentator on business, trade, policy and politics. A congressional candidate for New York’s first district, he holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.B.A. from the Univ. of California, Berkeley.

There is a real challenge to American capitalism, but it doesn’t come primarily from progressives or “socialism.”  The current threat to American capitalism comes from big corporations and the favors our government grants them as major political donors. 

Anti-competitiveness — the outcome of government working for its big corporate donors — is no friend to capitalism or the consumer.  The Founders warned about this, and presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to FDR fought against this.  Political leaders — at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue — who indulge an anti-competitive juggernaut may be the biggest enemy to long-term economic success.  

Take giant mergers, of the sort the both Roosevelts fought against — do those serve the average American?  Most recently, a Sprint/T-Mobile merger has been approved by the Justice Department.  Who is served by the creation of three mega-carriers instead of four?  That question is not political — it is economic.

Monopoly and oligopoly (which is a market controlled by the few) always and everywhere raises prices, lowers quality, and eliminates the incentives which attach to competition. Indulging crony politics, reducing competition, and favoring oligopoly — from left or right — hurts the consumer. 

Megamergers, when they result in declining competition, traditionally cause consumer price increases, less innovation, decreased investment, and slower wage growth. Let’s only hope that the ten state AGs fighting the merger will prevail in court, before the next conversation is how to re-inject competitiveness into the cellphone industry. Influence pedaling, political interference with market economics, and corruption of free markets run deep in today’s Washington.

Anti-competitive impulses and decisions are not the only challenge to capitalism posed by our government.  Another comes from insufficient oversight over the process of deregulation.  Consider the Boeing 737-max, now grounded after two fatal incidents.  Federal regulators at the FAA appear to have relaxed oversight of new aircraft, with catastrophic results.  Who was hurt?  Not just the flying public but employees of the company. 

By all appearances, the FAA gradually handed off key elements of aircraft oversight to manufacturers, leading to potential conflicts of interest, unjustified assumptions, and insufficient scrutiny over a key flight safety system.

Unbridled capitalism, without consumer vigilance and government oversight, can lead to material errors in judgment, elevation of shortcuts, and quarterly profits over the public interest.  Even Ronald Reagan believed that government had a role in assuring the public good in the context of free markets, and that when that role is amputated — or minimized to the point of insignificance — we all lose. 

Of course, common sense is not limited to one or another economic sector.  This applies to air safety, air quality, fuel efficiency, auto safety standards, and a variety of other industries.  When regulation is removed arbitrarily, risk jumps and the public often suffers. When corporate greed prevails, our country loses.  Greed is no friend of capitalism — or the consumer.

The message for Democrats should be clear.  They should not demean capitalism, but make it function in a way that is fair, guided by quality and price competition, with attention to public safety, and delinked from political interests.  Contrast this vision with the approach of the current administration. America is about individual promise, a free nation that benefits from free markets, not monopolies and oligopolies — which always reduce choice, raise prices, resist quality improvements, and turn to politics for protection.  They are inherently the enemy of the hardworking middle class. 

When government favors big corporations over small businesses and consumers, it is really not pro-business or pro-capitalist at all.  From breakneck aviation and to the aggravation of subsidizing agribusiness, government coddling of big corporations is never good for the individual.  If that sounds like common sense, we see the world the same way — and so do most Americans.

Perry Gershon is a widely recognized business leader and national commentator on business, trade, policy and politics. A congressional candidate for New York’s first district, he holds a B.A. from Yale and an M.B.A. from the Univ. of California, Berkeley.

via American Thinker Blog

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/

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Little Stalins

Assessing the Democratic stable of candidates based largely on debate performances is fodder for all manner of analogy and descriptors.

Comparing the debates to a reality game show is popular.  Few if any of the candidates display any retail political savvy or charm.  That they are a circular firing squad, a pack of hyenas devouring each other, and/or coffee klatch of resentful scare-mongers are all apt observations in one way or another. 

Let me propose yet another: that they are mostly a bunch of little wannabe Stalins.

That applies especially to the two avowed socialists of the group, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  But while not all of the candidates evidently share Sanders’s affection for the old USSR — he spent his honeymoon there, after all — they do share a kind of authoritarian stridency that reminds of the great mustachioed one.

Here Warren is the worst.  Warren makes you search for a word stronger than humorless.  Is it the 1/1000 Cherokee in her?  Are all American Indians so resolutely grim?

Even Stalin managed a genuine smile and a laugh now and then, after a good purge or government induced famine.  Google “Stalin smiles” and “Warren smiles.”  Stalin actually looks a somewhat human.  Warren looks like somebody told her to bare her teeth and bite.

Warren castigated the semi-rational John Delaney for raising objections to her ludicrous health care proposals with this demagogic applause line:

“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for…”

Since when is the president supposed to “fight for” stuff?  In a republic, the president is supposed to reflect the will of the people, not battle to impose her will on the nation.  Later, Warren-supporters joked that she’d murdered Delaney, perhaps inadvertently reflecting the hostility to much of the U.S. that seems seethe within her.  

Now, so far as I know, Warren’s never actually killed anybody and probably won’t get the chance.  But she’s clearly anxious to scramble America and make it into the omelet she thinks it should be.

Warren supposedly has a proposal for everything, a know-it-all who will tell us how to live our lives, what doctors to see, what we can do with our money, who will be our neighbors, how or whether we will get the energy we need.   That’s what she’s “fighting for.”

Sanders is almost as bad, though perhaps a bit more Trotsky than Stalin.  Like Trotsky, the party doesn’t really like him, and he was deliberately marginalized last election, though the DNC hasn’t yet put an axe in his skull.  And yes, part of that is that like Trotsky, Sanders is a Jew.  Trotsky’s party turned on its Jews just as the Democrats have.  Yet Sanders and the other Jewish Democrats remain so addled by ideas of universalism and generational groupthink that they can’t tell their friends from enemies. 

Sander’s own Stalin moment in the debate came when, like Warren, he angrily attacked another debater who questioned the consequences of a complete government takeover of national health care.  Ohio representative Tim Ryan suggested that Sanders could not know for sure that Medicare for All would provide mostly Democrat union members with better health care than their already very good plans.

“I do know it!  I wrote the damn bill!” Sanders shouted, as if he was berating a wayward apparatchik.  Another applause line, another minor victory for a would-be little Stalin.  As if authoring a bill suddenly makes things true on the ground.  Bernie shall write it, and it will be so!  Just as Obamacare let you keep your doctor. 

Sanders gets a partial pass, though — not only for the Trotsky stuff, but for his shocking resemblance to Larry David.  He’s a bit funny, even if he doesn’t mean to be.

And that’s the last part.  Whether Warren or Sanders, Harris or Biden, Buttigieg or Booker, there is not a shred of humor among them.  A smiling Stalin doesn’t equate to a man with a sense of humor as opposed to someone pleased with his own power.  Similarly, these sometimes smiling candidates seem to be happy only with themselves and the idea that one day, they’ll be powerful like the current president they so loathe.

At least that guy’s got a sense of humor.  You might not like Trump, agree with him, or approve of his style.  But he’s pretty funny.  Stalin wasn’t, nor are the little Stalins who would replace him.  That will be hard for them to do unless they can make some more voters crack a smile or two.  So far, none of them are doing that.

Assessing the Democratic stable of candidates based largely on debate performances is fodder for all manner of analogy and descriptors.

Comparing the debates to a reality game show is popular.  Few if any of the candidates display any retail political savvy or charm.  That they are a circular firing squad, a pack of hyenas devouring each other, and/or coffee klatch of resentful scare-mongers are all apt observations in one way or another. 

Let me propose yet another: that they are mostly a bunch of little wannabe Stalins.

That applies especially to the two avowed socialists of the group, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.  But while not all of the candidates evidently share Sanders’s affection for the old USSR — he spent his honeymoon there, after all — they do share a kind of authoritarian stridency that reminds of the great mustachioed one.

Here Warren is the worst.  Warren makes you search for a word stronger than humorless.  Is it the 1/1000 Cherokee in her?  Are all American Indians so resolutely grim?

Even Stalin managed a genuine smile and a laugh now and then, after a good purge or government induced famine.  Google “Stalin smiles” and “Warren smiles.”  Stalin actually looks a somewhat human.  Warren looks like somebody told her to bare her teeth and bite.

Warren castigated the semi-rational John Delaney for raising objections to her ludicrous health care proposals with this demagogic applause line:

“I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for…”

Since when is the president supposed to “fight for” stuff?  In a republic, the president is supposed to reflect the will of the people, not battle to impose her will on the nation.  Later, Warren-supporters joked that she’d murdered Delaney, perhaps inadvertently reflecting the hostility to much of the U.S. that seems seethe within her.  

Now, so far as I know, Warren’s never actually killed anybody and probably won’t get the chance.  But she’s clearly anxious to scramble America and make it into the omelet she thinks it should be.

Warren supposedly has a proposal for everything, a know-it-all who will tell us how to live our lives, what doctors to see, what we can do with our money, who will be our neighbors, how or whether we will get the energy we need.   That’s what she’s “fighting for.”

Sanders is almost as bad, though perhaps a bit more Trotsky than Stalin.  Like Trotsky, the party doesn’t really like him, and he was deliberately marginalized last election, though the DNC hasn’t yet put an axe in his skull.  And yes, part of that is that like Trotsky, Sanders is a Jew.  Trotsky’s party turned on its Jews just as the Democrats have.  Yet Sanders and the other Jewish Democrats remain so addled by ideas of universalism and generational groupthink that they can’t tell their friends from enemies. 

Sander’s own Stalin moment in the debate came when, like Warren, he angrily attacked another debater who questioned the consequences of a complete government takeover of national health care.  Ohio representative Tim Ryan suggested that Sanders could not know for sure that Medicare for All would provide mostly Democrat union members with better health care than their already very good plans.

“I do know it!  I wrote the damn bill!” Sanders shouted, as if he was berating a wayward apparatchik.  Another applause line, another minor victory for a would-be little Stalin.  As if authoring a bill suddenly makes things true on the ground.  Bernie shall write it, and it will be so!  Just as Obamacare let you keep your doctor. 

Sanders gets a partial pass, though — not only for the Trotsky stuff, but for his shocking resemblance to Larry David.  He’s a bit funny, even if he doesn’t mean to be.

And that’s the last part.  Whether Warren or Sanders, Harris or Biden, Buttigieg or Booker, there is not a shred of humor among them.  A smiling Stalin doesn’t equate to a man with a sense of humor as opposed to someone pleased with his own power.  Similarly, these sometimes smiling candidates seem to be happy only with themselves and the idea that one day, they’ll be powerful like the current president they so loathe.

At least that guy’s got a sense of humor.  You might not like Trump, agree with him, or approve of his style.  But he’s pretty funny.  Stalin wasn’t, nor are the little Stalins who would replace him.  That will be hard for them to do unless they can make some more voters crack a smile or two.  So far, none of them are doing that.

via American Thinker Blog

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President Trump Moves to Reverse Negative Precedents Set by Former CIA Director and Anti-Trump CNN Analyst Michael Hayden

General Michael Hayden was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency for Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.  President Trump is working on reversing the precedents Hayden created while Director.

The CIA under General Michael Hayden set some very disturbing precedents which he failed to address in his book or in his ramblings on CNN.  President Trump appears to want to reverse them.

President Trump appears to want to bring back accountability for abuses of power among CIA leadership.  Another effort by the President is in protecting the rank and file. These efforts will go a long way in restoring confidence in the CIA rank.

Hayden was an Air Force General and yet for the first time in US military history a senior US Air Force colonel was investigated, indicted and convicted by Italy for a crime of kidnapping that had been authorized at the senior most levels of the CIA and the NSC.  The US refused to assert a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), a standard procedure when any military officer is in trouble for even drunken behavior.

According to former CIA agent Sabrina De Sousa, also under General Hayden, another precedent that has direct impact on emboldening the CIA into using senior foreign intelligence surrogates in covert operations – then imposing state secrets to protect them – while sacrificing the rank and file.

The CIA’s Inspector General Helgerson wanted to investigate Milan rendition – Jose Rodriguez (chief of staff for Haspel) said no – and asked Hayden to convene an
Accountability Review Board. The results were highly restricted so only a handful of members of Congress had access to it.

Former CIA Director Hayden appeared to be against his agents in the rank and file. 

Unfortunately, the CIA never recovered with John Brennan taking over the CIA in Obama’s second term.

Hayden is also loose with his facts.  Former CIA Director went on CSPAN in September 2018 and accused The Gateway Pundit of posting racist remarks in our report on former Army Ranger Alejandro Villanueva who plays for the Pittsburgh Steelers.  This was untrue and a malicious smear.  The Gateway Pundit sent Hayden an attorney’s letter demanding a retraction.

President Trump is attempting to show the rank and file in the CIA that he will support them and correct the precedents set by former Directors Hayden and Brennan.

The post President Trump Moves to Reverse Negative Precedents Set by Former CIA Director and Anti-Trump CNN Analyst Michael Hayden appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

via The Gateway Pundit

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After Ratcliffe withdraws, can Trump get a DNI that is not a Deep State tool?

I wish that I had a more encouraging answer to the question the title of this blog post poses. Representative John Ratcliffe’s withdrawal of his name from consideration as the next Director of National Intelligence brings to mind Senator Chuck Schumer’s warning to President Trump just before his inauguration in 2017:

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

This warning constitutes a “Kinsley gaffe” – accidentally telling the truth about Washington, DC.  It not only predicted the appointment of Robert Mueller to pursue the Russia Hoax, it probably explains why Ratcliffe’s nomination was so quickly torpedoed.

President Trump blamed the media:

 

 

 

 

I am certain that Rep. Ratcliffe and his family hated the media attacks on him and dreaded the media ordeal that was sure to follow, but in the end, I suspect that both he and President Trump realized that he was unlikely to be confirmed by the Senate. For one thing, he may have slightly exaggerated his role in prosecuting terrorists:

 Ratcliffe, Republican of Texas, had said on his House website and in campaign materialthat he had tried suspects accused of funneling money to the Hamas terrorist group. But instead, an aide said, Mr. Ratcliffe had investigated side issues related to an initial mistrial, and did not prosecute the case either in that proceeding or in a successful second trial.

This may be a gray area, since he was US Attorney and therefore responsible for the work of his staff, but anything that can be used to impugn his integrity is enough for those who want to protect the intelligence community from skeptical scrutiny by representatives of the taxpayers who fund their work.

Sundance of Conservative Treehouse, among others, has long been a critic of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) for being allied with, and in essence in the back pockets of Deep State intel figures. He writes:

The epicenter of the deepest defensive mechanism of the Deep State is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).  The SSCI is the bunker, the intelligence manipulation operations headquarters. The SSCI is where the political nuclear weapons (black files and IC gathered political surveillance research) are housed.  As a direct consequence the SSCI is the most corrupt and manipulative committee in all of congress. (snip)

Let me be perfectly clear.  The issue is the SSCI.

The weaponized issues of corrupt DC endeavors are always associated with the SSCI.   It is also not coincidental that ODNI Dan Coats was Senator Dan Coats…. and where was his tenured membership prior to becoming Director of National Intelligence?   Yup, the SSCI.

Pressure is now building for President Trump to appoint Sue Gordon, currently the Deputy DNI – and therefore acting DNI once Coats leaves the position – as his permanent replacement.  But if President Trump thought her a reliable ally in getting to the bottom of the attempt by the intelligence community – in alliance with foreign intelligence services – to pull off the Russia Hoax coup, he would have chosen her, not Ratcliffe, in the first place.

But where is Trump to find someone with the expertise, guts, and spotless background (nothing short of perfection, since the intelligence community can dig up everything a person has ever done) to win Senate confirmation? Them line that Kevin Costner immortalized (in a CIA conspiracy theory Oliver Stone movie, to be sure) seems appropriate:

“Now, we’re through the looking glass here, people.”

At least AG Barr has the power to declassify documents, and push to uncover secrets from the intelligence community. Perhaps if strong enough evidence to ensure convictions of James Comey or any of the FBI underlings, especially those in the counterintelligence operation, is in hand, such people can be persuaded to turn state’s evidence in return for leniency. And they can implicate other members of the intelligence community. Or, perhaps the investigators in Italy, where the top levels of their intelligence agency have resigned in the wake of their collaboration with the coup plotters, can provide evidence that would be stonewalled here. Or maybe even Britain, where Boris Johnson now commands MI 5 and MI 6, can help uncover the miscreants.

But Chuck Schumer’s warning continues to resonate. They may become the most famous words in his long political career. Our Republic teeters on a knife edge if unelected intelligence bureaucrats can scheme to undo a presidential election and escape accountability.

Photo credit: US Congress

I wish that I had a more encouraging answer to the question the title of this blog post poses. Representative John Ratcliffe’s withdrawal of his name from consideration as the next Director of National Intelligence brings to mind Senator Chuck Schumer’s warning to President Trump just before his inauguration in 2017:

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

This warning constitutes a “Kinsley gaffe” – accidentally telling the truth about Washington, DC.  It not only predicted the appointment of Robert Mueller to pursue the Russia Hoax, it probably explains why Ratcliffe’s nomination was so quickly torpedoed.

President Trump blamed the media:

 

 

 

 

I am certain that Rep. Ratcliffe and his family hated the media attacks on him and dreaded the media ordeal that was sure to follow, but in the end, I suspect that both he and President Trump realized that he was unlikely to be confirmed by the Senate. For one thing, he may have slightly exaggerated his role in prosecuting terrorists:

 Ratcliffe, Republican of Texas, had said on his House website and in campaign materialthat he had tried suspects accused of funneling money to the Hamas terrorist group. But instead, an aide said, Mr. Ratcliffe had investigated side issues related to an initial mistrial, and did not prosecute the case either in that proceeding or in a successful second trial.

This may be a gray area, since he was US Attorney and therefore responsible for the work of his staff, but anything that can be used to impugn his integrity is enough for those who want to protect the intelligence community from skeptical scrutiny by representatives of the taxpayers who fund their work.

Sundance of Conservative Treehouse, among others, has long been a critic of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) for being allied with, and in essence in the back pockets of Deep State intel figures. He writes:

The epicenter of the deepest defensive mechanism of the Deep State is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).  The SSCI is the bunker, the intelligence manipulation operations headquarters. The SSCI is where the political nuclear weapons (black files and IC gathered political surveillance research) are housed.  As a direct consequence the SSCI is the most corrupt and manipulative committee in all of congress. (snip)

Let me be perfectly clear.  The issue is the SSCI.

The weaponized issues of corrupt DC endeavors are always associated with the SSCI.   It is also not coincidental that ODNI Dan Coats was Senator Dan Coats…. and where was his tenured membership prior to becoming Director of National Intelligence?   Yup, the SSCI.

Pressure is now building for President Trump to appoint Sue Gordon, currently the Deputy DNI – and therefore acting DNI once Coats leaves the position – as his permanent replacement.  But if President Trump thought her a reliable ally in getting to the bottom of the attempt by the intelligence community – in alliance with foreign intelligence services – to pull off the Russia Hoax coup, he would have chosen her, not Ratcliffe, in the first place.

But where is Trump to find someone with the expertise, guts, and spotless background (nothing short of perfection, since the intelligence community can dig up everything a person has ever done) to win Senate confirmation? Them line that Kevin Costner immortalized (in a CIA conspiracy theory Oliver Stone movie, to be sure) seems appropriate:

“Now, we’re through the looking glass here, people.”

At least AG Barr has the power to declassify documents, and push to uncover secrets from the intelligence community. Perhaps if strong enough evidence to ensure convictions of James Comey or any of the FBI underlings, especially those in the counterintelligence operation, is in hand, such people can be persuaded to turn state’s evidence in return for leniency. And they can implicate other members of the intelligence community. Or, perhaps the investigators in Italy, where the top levels of their intelligence agency have resigned in the wake of their collaboration with the coup plotters, can provide evidence that would be stonewalled here. Or maybe even Britain, where Boris Johnson now commands MI 5 and MI 6, can help uncover the miscreants.

But Chuck Schumer’s warning continues to resonate. They may become the most famous words in his long political career. Our Republic teeters on a knife edge if unelected intelligence bureaucrats can scheme to undo a presidential election and escape accountability.

Photo credit: US Congress

via American Thinker Blog

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Another ungrateful migrant creates a new ‘narrative’ for ingratitude

Rep. Ilhan Omar was just an opening act. Now, another ungrateful migrant has come out of the woodwork to tell us how awful we are and how ingratitude for being allowed to come here is the rightful state for migrants.

Calcutta-born Suketu Mehta, a bitter revanchist who would have been ripped to shreds as a fourth-rate, fourth world ‘intellectual’ by V.S. Naipaul (too bad he’s not alive) puts forth the argument in the Washington Post that immigration is a reparation. His piece is titled ‘I am an uppity immigrant. Don’t expect me to be grateful.” Based on what he says, it’s clear he views migration to the U.S. as an entitlement solely because America is so very, very bad — and as a lagniappe, because he’s so very, very good. He writes:

I’ve been told to “go back” ever since 1977, when I enrolled in an extravagantly racist all-boys Catholic school in Queens, N.Y. — birthplace of President Trump, who recently became the biggest, loudest mouthpiece for this line of rhetoric when he tweeted that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” The idea is: White Americans get to decide who is allowed to come in and what rules we are to follow. If you come here, don’t complain. Be grateful we took you in. “Go back” is a line that’s intended to put immigrants in our place — or rather, to remind us that our place in this country is contingent, that we are beholden to those who came here earlier.

To this I say: No, we are not. I take my place in America — an imperfect place — and I make it my own; there’s a Constitution that protects my right to do so. I will not genuflect at the white American altar. I will not bow and scrape before my supposed benefactors. I understand the soul of this nation just as well, if not better, than they do: a country that stole the futures of the people who are now arriving at its borders, a cacophonous country, an exceptional country, but one that seems determined to continually sabotage its journey towards a more perfect union. Nobody powerful ever gave the powerless anything just because they asked politely, and immigrants don’t come hat-in-hand. I am an uppity immigrant. I am entitled to be here. Deal with it.

The West has despoiled country after country through colonialism, illegal wars, rapacious corporations and unchecked carbon emissions. And now their desperate migrants are supposed to be grateful to be let in by the back door at the mansions of the despoilers, mansions built with the stolen treasure of the migrants’ homelands?

Meanwhile, he describes the awfulness of America, laying out the lousy condition of deep blue cities – which have been made that way by people who … vote exactly the same way in America that they did in their home countries.

It’s hideous garbage. Why is it so bad? Because guys like Mehta are “much honored” U.S. intellectuals and when they write something in a prestigious magazine or newspaper, their claims not only get talked about, they become a new “narrative.” We saw that already with Ta Nehesi Coates, a guy who’s gotten a lot of academic and foundation honors and then wrote a big case in The Atlantic for reparations. Since doing that, reparations are now the new Democrat narrative. Mehta now wants to make the Omar narrative the normal thrust of thinking here in the states among the academic elites and by extension, the Democrats who suck up to them. I first encountered the idea that illegal migrants are ‘owed’ by America about five years ago in Murietta, California by a leftist protest leader who had an arm full of tattoos and told me he had been a communist guerrilla in El Salvador in the 1980s. He was a walking argument for immigration reform because how the heck did he get in here. Migrants, he explained, were entitled to come here as punishment to America, he said with a straight face. I wrote him off as a V.S. Naipaul-style left wing clown at the time. Well, now his thinking has gone mainstream and Mehta, who must think he’s better than all of us based on his giant string of collected academic and foundation awards, (something that wouldn’t have happened had he stayed in Calcutta), now has picked up the torch.

It’s a massive shift in sentiment, actually – and does highlight the dangers of the U.S. taking in self-important migrants who have pretentions of grandeur. These are people Eric Hoffer warned about.

As Charles Cooke at National Review writes, migrants really do owe America a debt of gratitude:

 Legally, Ilhan Omar has exactly the same rights as someone born here. And she should, without exception. Culturally, though, the idea that Omar does not “owe a special debt of gratitude to the” United States is ridiculous, as is the idea that Omar’s views of the United States should not be affected by that debt. Of course she should be grateful! The United States saved her from a warzone, let her stay, accepted her as a citizen, and then elected her to Congress. If one can’t be grateful for that, what can one be grateful for?

Should Omar “temper her critiques of American politics and culture”? That depends. Again: Legally, Omar should enjoy every Constitutional protection available. And, as a matter of course, she should feel able to take part in the political process on the same terms as everyone else. But, culturally, it is absolutely reasonable for Omar’s critics to look at her behavior and say, “really, that’s your view of us?” It’s absolutely reasonable for Omar’s fellow Americans to dislike her and to shun her as a result. It is absolutely reasonable for them to consider her an ingrate — or to believe, as David does, that she is “a toxic presence in American politics.” And it is absolutely reasonable for them to wonder aloud how a person who hails from a dysfunctional, dangerous place built atop dysfunctional, dangerous institutions can exhibit the temerity — the sheer gall — to talk about America in the way that she does. There is a big difference between saying “I oppose current federal tax policy” or “I want more spending on colleges” or “the president is an ass,” and saying that America needs complete rethinking. As this Washington Post piece makes clear, Omar isn’t just irritated by a few things. She thinks the place is a disaster.

Peggy Noonan explained what that migrant gratitude looked like. 

I think we must end with an affirming flame. It has to do with that hopeless place, our southern border.

Members of Congress often go to detention centers and make it worse. They summon complaints, say people drink from the toilet, call it a concentration camp. All the border police are just good Germans following orders. The illegal aliens are victims, the guards Nazis. That goes over badly in America, which has a heart but doesn’t like being manipulated and is weary of being bullied.

…

But this week on “CBS This Morning,” Norah O’Donnell toured the largest detention facility on the border and talked to a young mother from Venezuela with a 2-year-old son. She told her story. For months at home she’d heard nothing but gunfire. She fled alone with her son, just the two of them on the long trek north. She wept as she talked.

She was a person of modesty and dignity.

She said she had warm food here. They provided Pampers for the baby. Ms. O’Donnell said: But you are sleeping on the floor. Yes, said the mother, “on a mat.”

She showed no resentment, expressed no demand. She was just grateful.

We’ll take 1,000 of her over any Suketu Mehta any day. People like her can stay as long as they like because they are the only people capable of being happy here. Mehta sure isn’t happy and he’s never going to be happy in a country like the U.S. The only thing that’s ever going to make him happy is power. He should look for a third world country to take over for that kind of thing.

Image credit: Montage by Monica Showalter, from public domain sources

Rep. Ilhan Omar was just an opening act. Now, another ungrateful migrant has come out of the woodwork to tell us how awful we are and how ingratitude for being allowed to come here is the rightful state for migrants.

Calcutta-born Suketu Mehta, a bitter revanchist who would have been ripped to shreds as a fourth-rate, fourth world ‘intellectual’ by V.S. Naipaul (too bad he’s not alive) puts forth the argument in the Washington Post that immigration is a reparation. His piece is titled ‘I am an uppity immigrant. Don’t expect me to be grateful.” Based on what he says, it’s clear he views migration to the U.S. as an entitlement solely because America is so very, very bad — and as a lagniappe, because he’s so very, very good. He writes:

I’ve been told to “go back” ever since 1977, when I enrolled in an extravagantly racist all-boys Catholic school in Queens, N.Y. — birthplace of President Trump, who recently became the biggest, loudest mouthpiece for this line of rhetoric when he tweeted that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” The idea is: White Americans get to decide who is allowed to come in and what rules we are to follow. If you come here, don’t complain. Be grateful we took you in. “Go back” is a line that’s intended to put immigrants in our place — or rather, to remind us that our place in this country is contingent, that we are beholden to those who came here earlier.

To this I say: No, we are not. I take my place in America — an imperfect place — and I make it my own; there’s a Constitution that protects my right to do so. I will not genuflect at the white American altar. I will not bow and scrape before my supposed benefactors. I understand the soul of this nation just as well, if not better, than they do: a country that stole the futures of the people who are now arriving at its borders, a cacophonous country, an exceptional country, but one that seems determined to continually sabotage its journey towards a more perfect union. Nobody powerful ever gave the powerless anything just because they asked politely, and immigrants don’t come hat-in-hand. I am an uppity immigrant. I am entitled to be here. Deal with it.

He says he understands the soul of this country better than we do — and then goes on to describe the natural beauty of the country towards the end of his piece as something no different from the beauty of other countries. Obviously, he’s incapable of feeling for a place the way a native or grateful naturalized American does, but nobody told him. He describes any effort to oppose illegal migration as an expression of white supremacism. He doesn’t seem to notice that the federal bureaucracies that enforce legal immigration are staffed by people of all colors, as is the U.S. government. He’s firm in thinking America is solely a white-run act.

The essay is hard to read because it’s so incredibly hateful and militant in its ingratitude. Migrants are entitled to come here, legally and illegally, because America despoiled their countries, it had nothing to do with their voting choices or their cheers for demagogues promising them free health care, bags of beans or terrorist payment packages to families for their votes. He cites Somalia, Palestine and Central America as his examples, blaming America first and foremost for those countries’ conditions, and oh, by the way, his list wouldn’t exactly include his own homeland of India. Oops. But here he goes:

The West has despoiled country after country through colonialism, illegal wars, rapacious corporations and unchecked carbon emissions. And now their desperate migrants are supposed to be grateful to be let in by the back door at the mansions of the despoilers, mansions built with the stolen treasure of the migrants’ homelands?

Meanwhile, he describes the awfulness of America, laying out the lousy condition of deep blue cities – which have been made that way by people who … vote exactly the same way in America that they did in their home countries.

It’s hideous garbage. Why is it so bad? Because guys like Mehta are “much honored” U.S. intellectuals and when they write something in a prestigious magazine or newspaper, their claims not only get talked about, they become a new “narrative.” We saw that already with Ta Nehesi Coates, a guy who’s gotten a lot of academic and foundation honors and then wrote a big case in The Atlantic for reparations. Since doing that, reparations are now the new Democrat narrative. Mehta now wants to make the Omar narrative the normal thrust of thinking here in the states among the academic elites and by extension, the Democrats who suck up to them. I first encountered the idea that illegal migrants are ‘owed’ by America about five years ago in Murietta, California by a leftist protest leader who had an arm full of tattoos and told me he had been a communist guerrilla in El Salvador in the 1980s. He was a walking argument for immigration reform because how the heck did he get in here. Migrants, he explained, were entitled to come here as punishment to America, he said with a straight face. I wrote him off as a V.S. Naipaul-style left wing clown at the time. Well, now his thinking has gone mainstream and Mehta, who must think he’s better than all of us based on his giant string of collected academic and foundation awards, (something that wouldn’t have happened had he stayed in Calcutta), now has picked up the torch.

It’s a massive shift in sentiment, actually – and does highlight the dangers of the U.S. taking in self-important migrants who have pretentions of grandeur. These are people Eric Hoffer warned about.

As Charles Cooke at National Review writes, migrants really do owe America a debt of gratitude:

 Legally, Ilhan Omar has exactly the same rights as someone born here. And she should, without exception. Culturally, though, the idea that Omar does not “owe a special debt of gratitude to the” United States is ridiculous, as is the idea that Omar’s views of the United States should not be affected by that debt. Of course she should be grateful! The United States saved her from a warzone, let her stay, accepted her as a citizen, and then elected her to Congress. If one can’t be grateful for that, what can one be grateful for?

Should Omar “temper her critiques of American politics and culture”? That depends. Again: Legally, Omar should enjoy every Constitutional protection available. And, as a matter of course, she should feel able to take part in the political process on the same terms as everyone else. But, culturally, it is absolutely reasonable for Omar’s critics to look at her behavior and say, “really, that’s your view of us?” It’s absolutely reasonable for Omar’s fellow Americans to dislike her and to shun her as a result. It is absolutely reasonable for them to consider her an ingrate — or to believe, as David does, that she is “a toxic presence in American politics.” And it is absolutely reasonable for them to wonder aloud how a person who hails from a dysfunctional, dangerous place built atop dysfunctional, dangerous institutions can exhibit the temerity — the sheer gall — to talk about America in the way that she does. There is a big difference between saying “I oppose current federal tax policy” or “I want more spending on colleges” or “the president is an ass,” and saying that America needs complete rethinking. As this Washington Post piece makes clear, Omar isn’t just irritated by a few things. She thinks the place is a disaster.

Peggy Noonan explained what that migrant gratitude looked like. 

I think we must end with an affirming flame. It has to do with that hopeless place, our southern border.

Members of Congress often go to detention centers and make it worse. They summon complaints, say people drink from the toilet, call it a concentration camp. All the border police are just good Germans following orders. The illegal aliens are victims, the guards Nazis. That goes over badly in America, which has a heart but doesn’t like being manipulated and is weary of being bullied.

…

But this week on “CBS This Morning,” Norah O’Donnell toured the largest detention facility on the border and talked to a young mother from Venezuela with a 2-year-old son. She told her story. For months at home she’d heard nothing but gunfire. She fled alone with her son, just the two of them on the long trek north. She wept as she talked.

She was a person of modesty and dignity.

She said she had warm food here. They provided Pampers for the baby. Ms. O’Donnell said: But you are sleeping on the floor. Yes, said the mother, “on a mat.”

She showed no resentment, expressed no demand. She was just grateful.

We’ll take 1,000 of her over any Suketu Mehta any day. People like her can stay as long as they like because they are the only people capable of being happy here. Mehta sure isn’t happy and he’s never going to be happy in a country like the U.S. The only thing that’s ever going to make him happy is power. He should look for a third world country to take over for that kind of thing.

Image credit: Montage by Monica Showalter, from public domain sources

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Deep State Strikes Again: Forces Out Pro-Trump State Dept. Adviser Kiron Skinner — Outspoken Critic of Failed Democrat Policies in Black Community and Abroad

Deep State Strikes Again…
The State Department fired pro-Trump adviser Kiron Skinner this week.

Skinner was a first of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s small circle of influential aides to leave the State Department.

Several State Department officials threatened to quit if Kiron Skinner was not removed from office.
So the State Department fired her.

Skinner is an outspoken critic of Democrat policy in the US and abroad.

Politico reported:

Kiron Skinner, the director of Policy Planning, was told Thursday that she was being dismissed, a Trump administration official said. A senior State Department official also confirmed the firing, saying that several members of Skinner’s staff had threatened to quit if she wasn’t removed.

Two other State Department officials said Skinner acted unprofessionally in multiple ways, including yelling in public spaces and using homophobic language. She retaliated against employees by kicking them out of their offices and even alleged that some people were having affairs, the two officials said.

“It was an abuse of authority,” one of them said.

Skinner did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday, but high-profile diplomats and academics issued statements of support on her behalf.

Former Secretary of State George Shultz described her as a “first-class scholar” who “adheres steadfastly to the principles of honesty and integrity.”

The historian Niall Ferguson said he was disappointed to hear of her departure and has “never known her to be anything but cool, calm and collected.”

Skinner was an outspoken critic of failed Democrat policies in the black community.

And Skinner was a staunch supporter of President Trump and critic of Hillary Clinton.

The post Deep State Strikes Again: Forces Out Pro-Trump State Dept. Adviser Kiron Skinner — Outspoken Critic of Failed Democrat Policies in Black Community and Abroad appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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The Numbers Don’t Look Good For Dem’s Radical Positions In This Election…

They should be looking for the exits with these numbers… Yikes! MSNBC polling guy dumps cold ice all over #DemDebate tonight. Decriminalizing border crossings, Medicare For All, healthcare for immigrants…all unpopular with voters. pic.twitter.com/TIMyCGdKZN — Andrew Clark (@AndrewHClark) July 31, 2019

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Trump Destroys Leftist Narrative with More Sanctions on Russia

President Donald Trump has levied more sanctions on Russia in response to a chemical attack on a former spy and his daughter on British soil last year. According to Yahoo News, Trump issued an executive order on Thursday that packs another round of punishment on the Kremlin, which has taken no responsibility for its actions.…

The post Trump Destroys Leftist Narrative with More Sanctions on Russia appeared first on Conservative Tribune.

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Arrest Reports From Kamala Harris Years Disappear From California DOC Website

Whole lot of effort to help Kamala. Via Daily Caller: California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation website has removed public access to several key incarceration reports as a part of a site redesign. The move, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, comes as its former attorney general, Kamala Harris, is drawing scrutiny from fellow […]

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PRAGER: How To Tell If A Trump Supporter Is Racist

Every non-liberal leftist — that is, nearly every Democrat running for president, New York Times and Washington Post columnist, CNN and MSNBC host, and your left-wing brother-in-law — labels every Trump supporter and, of course, President Donald Trump, a “racist.”

And they don’t stop there. Leftists don’t only label the half of the country that supports the president “racist,” they label all whites and America itself “racist.” If your son or daughter attends or recently attended an American university, it is close to certain he or she was repeatedly told that America and all whites are racist. According to the left, whites are divided between those who admit they are racist and those who don’t admit it.

Every conservative and many liberals know this is a big lie. The great question is: Do leftists believe it? It is impossible to know. But this we do know: If you repeat something often enough, and if your Weltanschauung (worldview) and that which gives your life meaning are dependent upon believing something, you will eventually believe it.

So here is a way to show it is a lie.

Ask any white conservative, including one who supports Trump, the following three questions:

1) Do you have more in common with, and are you personally more comfortable in the company of, a white leftist or a black conservative?

2) Would you rather have nine white leftists or nine black conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court?

3) Would you rather your child marry a black Christian conservative or a white non-Christian liberal?

A white racist would prefer the whites in each case.

I have asked these questions of thousands of Trump supporters at lectures and on my radio show. Not once has a white Trump-supporting conservative said he or she would be more comfortable in the presence of a white leftist than a black conservative, or would prefer an all-white liberal Supreme Court to an all-black conservative Supreme Court. Not once has a white Christian conservative said he or she would prefer their child marry a white non-Christian liberal to a black Christian conservative.

If you’re an honest leftist, this should present a powerful challenge to your belief that all white conservatives are racist.

But it won’t. Leftists have too much at stake to confront the truth about conservatives. Everything the left has ever believed has depended upon lying about opponents. From the day Stalin labeled Trotsky — who served as the head of the Red Army and who, along with Lenin, founded the Bolshevik Party — a “fascist,” leftists have lied about their opponents.

Some liberals lie and some conservatives lie, but the truth is both a liberal and conservative value. It has never been a left-wing value. Any leftist who would commit himself to the truth would cease being a leftist. He would either become an anti-left liberal or an anti-left conservative.

“America is racist.” “Whites are racist.” “Trump supporters are racist.” These are all big lies.

So, then, given how important it is to leftists to maintain the lie of conservative racism — along with xenophobia, misogyny, transphobia and Islamophobia — how would they rebut conservatives’ answers to these questions?

Presumably, they would argue that every conservative who responds to these questions as I described is lying.

But these questions are important — no matter how much leftists ignore or dismiss them — because they perform an important service for conservatives.

I know this from Jewish history. There was so much Jew-hatred in the medieval Christian world that Jews sometimes wondered if there was any truth to the attacks on them. When a whole society denigrates a group, members of the denigrated group start wondering whether any of the attacks on them have any truth. But when the charge of blood libel — that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood to bake matzos for Passover — arose, it liberated Jews from taking any of the anti-Semites’ attacks seriously. Every Jew knew the blood libel was a lie — Jews never consumed animal blood, let alone human blood.

Every conservative knows his responses to these three questions are heartfelt and true, so these questions can help conservatives come to see the left’s charge of conservative racism as medieval Jews came to see the anti-Semites’ blood libel charge: as a lie.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest book, published by Regnery in April 2018, is “The Rational Bible,” a commentary on the book of Exodus. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

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