53percenter's Blog

The gun control “Ban Assault Weapons Now” is pushing a ballot initiative to ban the ownership of “assault weapons” in the state of Florida.

The group’s steering committee includes gun control Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Parkland), and committee members include Parkland students who survived the February 14, 2018, attack on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Fox 35 reports that the group is working with a “California-based company” for petitions in order to get the necessary signatures to get the initiative on the ballot for 2020. Outside companies/groups/financiers have been a big part of the gun control initiatives that changed Washington state from gun-friendly to one of the most stringently gun-controlled states in the union.

And even though Nevada’s 2016 gun control initiative was proclaimed null and void, it did pass, and that passage largely depended on the fact that it was “bankrolled” by Michael Bloomberg’s gun control group.

“Ban Assault Weapons Now” explains their goal:

Florida law allows its citizens to propose amendments to the state constitution by petition, which will then be placed before voters in a general election. The NRA and gun manufacturers may hold sway over politicians, but they don’t control our voices, our votes. The numbers are on our side. According to a February 20th poll from MSNBC, 67 percent of Americans support an assault weapons ban. A poll from Florida Atlantic University reports that 70 percent of Florida voters favor an assault weapons ban.

A focus on banning “assault weapons” is misplaced, as they are not the weapons of choice for mass shooters. The Rockefeller Institute of Government studied a 50-year time-frame and found that handguns were the weapon of choice by a margin of three to one. But handguns are also the weapon of choice for the nearly 18 million concealed carry permit holders who carry a firearm for self-defense daily.

Rather than type of gun, the real problem is time. And time is on any attacker’s side when they step into a gun-free zone to attack innocents. For example, Breitbart News reported that the Parkland attacker paused five times to reload during his attack. He had no reason to be in a hurry, as no one could shoot back at him.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has released its latest doomsday climate report. This organization, part of the federal government, has been in business for a long time, releasing nonsense reports concerning the supposed global warming threat.  I attended meetings of the federal advisory committee associated with the program in 2011 and wrote an article about that particular circus. Federal advisory committees are supposed to be committees of experts with a diversity of viewpoints. The committee in 2011 consisted of supposed experts with only one point of view, that we are threatened by doomsday global warming.

The USGCRP suffers from a lack of imagination. Its reports imitate the style and approach of the United Nations International Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). The USGCRP uses the IPCC as a trusted source. The problem is that the IPCC is not to be trusted. One idea broached at the 2011 meeting is present in the 2018 report.  In 2011 the activists wrestled with the problem that nobody was paying much attention to their reports. They decided that there should be customized reports for different parts of the U.S. The idea was that people would be more concerned if there were specific doomsday predictions for their neighborhood. The country was divided into regions as shown in the map below. Doomsday forecasts for the regions are taken from climate models, sometimes supplemented by a procedure known as downscaling.

The trouble with climate models is that their output is not a plausible representation of the climate of the Earth. The in words of the distinguished climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, no climate skeptic: “…none of the climate states in the models corresponds even remotely to the current observed climate.”

The climate models are very large black boxes. They are far too complicated to make sense of what is going on. The way the models are used to create predictions or projections of future climate is determined by political, not scientific considerations. The results of the many models are simply averaged together to create an ensemble of climate models that is used to make the doomsday predictions. Instead of using the best model to make predictions, all the models are used as if every model is as good as every other model.

The reason for this is political. If a “best” model were selected, the scientifically correct approach, that would be breaking the rice bowl of all the losing modeling groups. That would lead to a loss of unity among the many modeling groups supping at the various government troughs. People mutually looting the government treasury stick together. If they fight with each other, they all lose.

The 468 page report released by the USGCRP is filled with speculative claims presented as if they are established science. The authors use “expert Judgement” to support their conclusions. The experts have an obvious financial and emotional stake in global warming doomsday scenarios. If the global warming doomsday is shown to be imaginary, the experts will lose their financial support and in many cases their jobs.

The climate of the last 118 years is a clear demonstration of the fallacy of using climate models to predict the future climate. Carbon dioxide, according the theories supported by the IPCC and the USGCRP, had insignificant influence on climate prior to 1975. Yet, from 1910 to 1940 the Earth warmed strongly, not as a response to CO2. What caused that early century warming? No one knows. It is a mystery to this day. The only thing we know for sure is that it was not caused by CO2.

From 1975 to 2000, a very similar strong warming took place. According to the apostilles of global warming, that late century warming was caused exclusively by CO2. How do they know that the late century warming was not caused by the same mysterious force that caused the early century warming? They don’t, but they claim it because it is politically convenient. From 2000 to the present there has been little global warming, probably none if the influence of tropical El Nino events is discounted.

There are many ways to explain anything that happens in the climate. The lack of warming in the 21^st century is often explained by claiming that heat is hiding in the ocean. Conveniently, there are no good measurements of heat hiding in the ocean.

The early versus late century warming is only one example of many contradictions in global warming theory. The contradictions and holes in the theory are ignored and swept under the rug. Global warming theory is politically motivated science, not real science. Scientists are behaving like other special interests dependent on government funding. They make up doomsday theories supported by a cloud of incomprehensible scientific jargon.

The many scientists that dispute this junk science are ruthlessly attacked and marginalized. There is an extensive literature written by global warming skeptics, many of whom are credentialed scientists. This body of literature is ignored rather than refuted. Rather than engage the skeptics in honest debate, the doomsday promoters accuse them of being paid off by oil companies.

Some of the things other than CO2 and greenhouse gases that can affect climate are the overturning circulation of the oceans, the magnetic field of the sun, the periodic cycles of ocean temperature, and chaotic variation. These other forces affecting climate are invoked only when they are convenient for explaining failures of the CO2 theory. In addition, there may be unknown forces, yet to be discovered.

The brazenness of the fake science is often shocking. Supposedly many Pacific islands are going to be flooded by sea level rise to be caused by global warming. These islands survived 400 feet of sea level rise at the end of the ice age 10,000 years ago, a much faster sea level rise than is currently taking place. They survived because they are coral islands that grow upward as the sea level rises. This is  not a secret, but the advocates of global warming terror use these islands as an example of horrible things that will be caused by global warming. One wonders why the New York Times does not expose this brazen fraud.

Junk science and fake science are not limited to global warming. They are invading many important areas of science. For example, the danger of low level radiation has been exaggerated by persistent use of a model not supported by data. The supposed danger of PM2.5 or small particles, smaller than 2.5 microns, that are suspended in the air, has been exaggerated without good evidence. The danger of DDT was exaggerated with the result that millions of children were killed by malaria. In each case there are special interests that profit from spreading junk science. Stories predicting disaster sell and the science establishment is selling.

The global warming scare is used to provide ideological support for wind and solar energy. Billions of dollars have been wasted on useless wind and solar energy. My book, Dumb Energy, explains in detail why this so-called renewable energy is economically useless. Wind and solar are not even effective for reducing CO2 emissions.

The corruption of science has its roots in the political funding of science by the federal government. Somehow we have to make it less profitable for scientists to make up science. Peer review is a joke and doesn’t work. Certainly it would help if the public and the media were skeptical about any scientific theory that predicts a disaster unless we do what the scientists and their allies want us to do.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has released its latest doomsday climate report. This organization, part of the federal government, has been in business for a long time, releasing nonsense reports concerning the supposed global warming threat.  I attended meetings of the federal advisory committee associated with the program in 2011 and wrote an article about that particular circus. Federal advisory committees are supposed to be committees of experts with a diversity of viewpoints. The committee in 2011 consisted of supposed experts with only one point of view, that we are threatened by doomsday global warming.

The USGCRP suffers from a lack of imagination. Its reports imitate the style and approach of the United Nations International Panel On Climate Change (IPCC). The USGCRP uses the IPCC as a trusted source. The problem is that the IPCC is not to be trusted. One idea broached at the 2011 meeting is present in the 2018 report.  In 2011 the activists wrestled with the problem that nobody was paying much attention to their reports. They decided that there should be customized reports for different parts of the U.S. The idea was that people would be more concerned if there were specific doomsday predictions for their neighborhood. The country was divided into regions as shown in the map below. Doomsday forecasts for the regions are taken from climate models, sometimes supplemented by a procedure known as downscaling.

Source: US Global Chnage Research Report

The trouble with climate models is that their output is not a plausible representation of the climate of the Earth. The in words of the distinguished climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, no climate skeptic: “…none of the climate states in the models corresponds even remotely to the current observed climate.”

The climate models are very large black boxes. They are far too complicated to make sense of what is going on. The way the models are used to create predictions or projections of future climate is determined by political, not scientific considerations. The results of the many models are simply averaged together to create an ensemble of climate models that is used to make the doomsday predictions. Instead of using the best model to make predictions, all the models are used as if every model is as good as every other model.

The reason for this is political. If a “best” model were selected, the scientifically correct approach, that would be breaking the rice bowl of all the losing modeling groups. That would lead to a loss of unity among the many modeling groups supping at the various government troughs. People mutually looting the government treasury stick together. If they fight with each other, they all lose.

The 468 page report released by the USGCRP is filled with speculative claims presented as if they are established science. The authors use “expert Judgement” to support their conclusions. The experts have an obvious financial and emotional stake in global warming doomsday scenarios. If the global warming doomsday is shown to be imaginary, the experts will lose their financial support and in many cases their jobs.

The climate of the last 118 years is a clear demonstration of the fallacy of using climate models to predict the future climate. Carbon dioxide, according the theories supported by the IPCC and the USGCRP, had insignificant influence on climate prior to 1975. Yet, from 1910 to 1940 the Earth warmed strongly, not as a response to CO2. What caused that early century warming? No one knows. It is a mystery to this day. The only thing we know for sure is that it was not caused by CO2.

From 1975 to 2000, a very similar strong warming took place. According to the apostilles of global warming, that late century warming was caused exclusively by CO2. How do they know that the late century warming was not caused by the same mysterious force that caused the early century warming? They don’t, but they claim it because it is politically convenient. From 2000 to the present there has been little global warming, probably none if the influence of tropical El Nino events is discounted.

There are many ways to explain anything that happens in the climate. The lack of warming in the 21^st century is often explained by claiming that heat is hiding in the ocean. Conveniently, there are no good measurements of heat hiding in the ocean.

The early versus late century warming is only one example of many contradictions in global warming theory. The contradictions and holes in the theory are ignored and swept under the rug. Global warming theory is politically motivated science, not real science. Scientists are behaving like other special interests dependent on government funding. They make up doomsday theories supported by a cloud of incomprehensible scientific jargon.

The many scientists that dispute this junk science are ruthlessly attacked and marginalized. There is an extensive literature written by global warming skeptics, many of whom are credentialed scientists. This body of literature is ignored rather than refuted. Rather than engage the skeptics in honest debate, the doomsday promoters accuse them of being paid off by oil companies.

Some of the things other than CO2 and greenhouse gases that can affect climate are the overturning circulation of the oceans, the magnetic field of the sun, the periodic cycles of ocean temperature, and chaotic variation. These other forces affecting climate are invoked only when they are convenient for explaining failures of the CO2 theory. In addition, there may be unknown forces, yet to be discovered.

The brazenness of the fake science is often shocking. Supposedly many Pacific islands are going to be flooded by sea level rise to be caused by global warming. These islands survived 400 feet of sea level rise at the end of the ice age 10,000 years ago, a much faster sea level rise than is currently taking place. They survived because they are coral islands that grow upward as the sea level rises. This is  not a secret, but the advocates of global warming terror use these islands as an example of horrible things that will be caused by global warming. One wonders why the New York Times does not expose this brazen fraud.

Junk science and fake science are not limited to global warming. They are invading many important areas of science. For example, the danger of low level radiation has been exaggerated by persistent use of a model not supported by data. The supposed danger of PM2.5 or small particles, smaller than 2.5 microns, that are suspended in the air, has been exaggerated without good evidence. The danger of DDT was exaggerated with the result that millions of children were killed by malaria. In each case there are special interests that profit from spreading junk science. Stories predicting disaster sell and the science establishment is selling.

The global warming scare is used to provide ideological support for wind and solar energy. Billions of dollars have been wasted on useless wind and solar energy. My book, Dumb Energy, explains in detail why this so-called renewable energy is economically useless. Wind and solar are not even effective for reducing CO2 emissions.

The corruption of science has its roots in the political funding of science by the federal government. Somehow we have to make it less profitable for scientists to make up science. Peer review is a joke and doesn’t work. Certainly it would help if the public and the media were skeptical about any scientific theory that predicts a disaster unless we do what the scientists and their allies want us to do.

The old joke that if it weren’t for double standards, the MSM would have no standards at all certainly applies to the cascade of hysterical media coverage of the use of tear gas to repel rock-throwing invaders at the San Ysidro border crossing.  When the Obama administration used tear gas at the border to repel invaders, there was no tidal wave of outrage.

Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times reminds us:

The same tear-gas agent that the Trump administration is taking heat for deploying against a border mob this weekend is actually used fairly frequently – including more than once a month during the later years of President Barack Obama’s administration, according to Homeland Security data.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has used 2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile, or CS, since 2010, and deployed it 26 times in fiscal 2012 and 27 times in 2013.  The use dropped after that, but was still deployed three times in 2016, Mr. Obama’s final full year in office. …

Border authorities also use another agent, pepper spray, frequently – including a decade-high record of 151 instances in 2013, also under Mr. Obama.  Pepper spray, officially known as Pava Capsaicin, was used 43 times in fiscal year 2018, according to the CBP numbers.

Senator Brian Schatz – evidently ignorant of this track record – beclowned himself with the invocation of a war crime of “chemical weapons” before deleting his ridiculous tweet.

The fact is that rock-throwers assaulting border guards were lucky that such restraint was exercised during their assault.  As I predicted yesterday, nobody in the MSM admits that the Obama administration not only used bullets in response to rock-throwers attacking border guards, a Department of Justice study justified it.

The new angle being used by some is to decry “using tear gas on children.”  Don Lemon of CNN went on a rant yesterday denouncing President Trump for this sin, and for not acknowledging that children were being used as human shields during the border assault, much as Saddam Hussein used innocent civilians to deter bombing of his war-making facilities.  Allowing such human shields to achieve their goal only encourages more abuse of innocents.

CNN screen grab via Grabien.

That stream visible behind the children is sewage.  What kind of parent brings young children traipsing across a river of sewage to attack a border?  That is child abuse, but nary a peep from Lemon or any of the other Trump critics about that.

Update: The picture used by Lemon is apparently faked – posed, as this tweet shows:

#FakeNews Media all share same photo of “women & kids gassed”.



Perpetrators of invasion instantly become victims in new #FakeNews narrative.



Congratulations, you’ve been #Hoaxed! 😀✊🏿✊🏽✊ pic.twitter.com/ISkExrlc2T

— 🇺🇸#WalkAway Mexican J.Lo. (@jetrotter) November 26, 2018

The old joke that if it weren’t for double standards, the MSM would have no standards at all certainly applies to the cascade of hysterical media coverage of the use of tear gas to repel rock-throwing invaders at the San Ysidro border crossing.  When the Obama administration used tear gas at the border to repel invaders, there was no tidal wave of outrage.

Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times reminds us:

The same tear-gas agent that the Trump administration is taking heat for deploying against a border mob this weekend is actually used fairly frequently – including more than once a month during the later years of President Barack Obama’s administration, according to Homeland Security data.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has used 2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile, or CS, since 2010, and deployed it 26 times in fiscal 2012 and 27 times in 2013.  The use dropped after that, but was still deployed three times in 2016, Mr. Obama’s final full year in office. …

Border authorities also use another agent, pepper spray, frequently – including a decade-high record of 151 instances in 2013, also under Mr. Obama.  Pepper spray, officially known as Pava Capsaicin, was used 43 times in fiscal year 2018, according to the CBP numbers.

Senator Brian Schatz – evidently ignorant of this track record – beclowned himself with the invocation of a war crime of “chemical weapons” before deleting his ridiculous tweet.

The fact is that rock-throwers assaulting border guards were lucky that such restraint was exercised during their assault.  As I predicted yesterday, nobody in the MSM admits that the Obama administration not only used bullets in response to rock-throwers attacking border guards, a Department of Justice study justified it.

The new angle being used by some is to decry “using tear gas on children.”  Don Lemon of CNN went on a rant yesterday denouncing President Trump for this sin, and for not acknowledging that children were being used as human shields during the border assault, much as Saddam Hussein used innocent civilians to deter bombing of his war-making facilities.  Allowing such human shields to achieve their goal only encourages more abuse of innocents.

CNN screen grab via Grabien.

That stream visible behind the children is sewage.  What kind of parent brings young children traipsing across a river of sewage to attack a border?  That is child abuse, but nary a peep from Lemon or any of the other Trump critics about that.

Update: The picture used by Lemon is apparently faked – posed, as this tweet shows:

#FakeNews Media all share same photo of “women & kids gassed”.



Perpetrators of invasion instantly become victims in new #FakeNews narrative.



Congratulations, you’ve been #Hoaxed! 😀✊🏿✊🏽✊ pic.twitter.com/ISkExrlc2T

— 🇺🇸#WalkAway Mexican J.Lo. (@jetrotter) November 26, 2018

You often see it at the bottom of news stories or in less prominently placed news stories, from the more serious local news outlets near the scene of the Tijuana caravan encampment:

Migrants are taking a look at the lay of the land and deciding to pack up and go home.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Outside the Benito Juárez migrant shelter in Tijuana, dozens stood in line Monday for a chance to return to their home country, a day after chaotic clashes at the border dimmed their hopes of entering the United States.Members of the Central American migrant caravan slumped in a line late afternoon to ask for return passage, after traveling for more than a month and trekking thousands of miles by foot, by bus and crammed into the beds of trucks for days.

Some were tired and reluctantly surrendered their dream of going to the United States, rather than face months more in the overcrowded and unsustainable conditions in Tijuana shelters.

Others said they had economic duties to fulfill in Central America. And a small handful said they did not want to face any legal consequences for the violent confrontations with border agents and Mexican federal police on Sunday.

The Associated Press reported similarly:

There was a steady line outside a shelter at a tent housing the International Organization for Migration, where officials were offering assistance for those who wanted to return to their home countries.

As did CBS8 of San Diego:

SAN DIEGO (NEWS 8) – Giving up and going home. More than a thousand Central American migrants are doing just that. 

Frustrated and saying there is no chance of a better life in the United States, they boarded vans that will take them back where they came from. 

There seems to be a feeling of desperation even hopelessness in Tijuana among many migrants who made the long journey from Central America to seek asylum in the US. But as the president has repeatedly said, they have to do it the legal way. 

That is proving to be harder than many migrants thought. Vans were seen leaving from Tijuana to El Salvador yesterday. So about 100 people are already being deported.

Obviously, the great grand bid to storm the gringo border and jump in and avail oneself of all the welfare benefits the U.S. has to offer, leftwing lawyers in tow, has failed, and migrants, as it turns out, with no fear of returning to their home countries after all, (contrary to their organizers’ asylum arguments), are going home. Some of them even have the bus fare. Turns out the free stuff wasn’t free. Their quest to enter the U.S. on Tijuana’s hospitality is not popular. And the leftist organizers, promising these migrants instant entry as well as a Chavista-sized banquet of free stuff, courtesy of the gringos, stand exposed as frauds.

So now the migrant caravan is breaking up, and those who seek to enter the U.S. are going to be forced to do it legally. And President Trump, as well as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have said they are welcome to do that, so it’s not as if a door is shut.

But what we have here – and the media is never going to admit it – is something called winning, a victory for rule of law. Anyone who wants to enter the U.S. — worldwide — has gotten the message from this caravan charge and its big media buildup — that the U.S. is holding firm in defending the integrity of its borders. Any entry to the U.S. must be legal entry. The scruffy barbed border fencing, the double walls, the troops at hand, cobbled together as they were, along with the resolution and will of our leaders, really did do the job. Anyone wanting to bust a border is better off heading to western Europe. Trump — and the voters who sent him to Washington to get this job done – stands victorious. Surprise, surprise, Congress has now gotten serious about border wall funding.

You often see it at the bottom of news stories or in less prominently placed news stories, from the more serious local news outlets near the scene of the Tijuana caravan encampment:

Migrants are taking a look at the lay of the land and deciding to pack up and go home.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Outside the Benito Juárez migrant shelter in Tijuana, dozens stood in line Monday for a chance to return to their home country, a day after chaotic clashes at the border dimmed their hopes of entering the United States.Members of the Central American migrant caravan slumped in a line late afternoon to ask for return passage, after traveling for more than a month and trekking thousands of miles by foot, by bus and crammed into the beds of trucks for days.

Some were tired and reluctantly surrendered their dream of going to the United States, rather than face months more in the overcrowded and unsustainable conditions in Tijuana shelters.

Others said they had economic duties to fulfill in Central America. And a small handful said they did not want to face any legal consequences for the violent confrontations with border agents and Mexican federal police on Sunday.

The Associated Press reported similarly:

There was a steady line outside a shelter at a tent housing the International Organization for Migration, where officials were offering assistance for those who wanted to return to their home countries.

As did CBS8 of San Diego:

SAN DIEGO (NEWS 8) – Giving up and going home. More than a thousand Central American migrants are doing just that. 

Frustrated and saying there is no chance of a better life in the United States, they boarded vans that will take them back where they came from. 

There seems to be a feeling of desperation even hopelessness in Tijuana among many migrants who made the long journey from Central America to seek asylum in the US. But as the president has repeatedly said, they have to do it the legal way. 

That is proving to be harder than many migrants thought. Vans were seen leaving from Tijuana to El Salvador yesterday. So about 100 people are already being deported.

Obviously, the great grand bid to storm the gringo border and jump in and avail oneself of all the welfare benefits the U.S. has to offer, leftwing lawyers in tow, has failed, and migrants, as it turns out, with no fear of returning to their home countries after all, (contrary to their organizers’ asylum arguments), are going home. Some of them even have the bus fare. Turns out the free stuff wasn’t free. Their quest to enter the U.S. on Tijuana’s hospitality is not popular. And the leftist organizers, promising these migrants instant entry as well as a Chavista-sized banquet of free stuff, courtesy of the gringos, stand exposed as frauds.

So now the migrant caravan is breaking up, and those who seek to enter the U.S. are going to be forced to do it legally. And President Trump, as well as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have said they are welcome to do that, so it’s not as if a door is shut.

But what we have here – and the media is never going to admit it – is something called winning, a victory for rule of law. Anyone who wants to enter the U.S. — worldwide — has gotten the message from this caravan charge and its big media buildup — that the U.S. is holding firm in defending the integrity of its borders. Any entry to the U.S. must be legal entry. The scruffy barbed border fencing, the double walls, the troops at hand, cobbled together as they were, along with the resolution and will of our leaders, really did do the job. Anyone wanting to bust a border is better off heading to western Europe. Trump — and the voters who sent him to Washington to get this job done – stands victorious. Surprise, surprise, Congress has now gotten serious about border wall funding.

Under the Obama Administration, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) law enforcement officials, including Border Patrol agents, utilized tear gas against migrants at or near the border at least 80 times between FY2012 and early FY2017.

CBP officials reported the use of tear gas and pepper spray to push back “assaultive” caravan migrants attempting to enter the U.S. illegally on Sunday. The agency began using these particular sprays during the Obama administration in 2010.

Breitbart News confirmed the CBP began using tear gas (2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile – CS) in 2010, though the available usage data initiates in FY2012.

The agency also reportedly began using pepper spray (Pava Capasaicin) at about the same time.

“CBP takes Sunday’s employment of use-of-force very seriously. CBP reviews and evaluates all uses of force incidents to ensure compliance with policy,” a CBP spokesman told Breitbart News in response to an inquiry. “Over 1,000 individuals who were part of the so-called caravan attempted to cross illegally into the U.S. by breaching sections of the fence and using vehicle lanes in and near the San Ysidro Port of Entry. This group ignored law enforcement agencies in Mexico and assaulted U.S. Federal Officers and Agents assigned to respond to the situation in San Diego.”

“As a response to the assaults and to defuse this dangerous situation, trained CBP personnel employed less-lethal devices to stop the actions of assaultive individuals attempting to break into the U.S.,” the spokesman continued. “CBP has been preparing for weeks for events like the one on Sunday. We have seen the use of violence by members of this so-called caravan who have attacked law enforcement personnel in Guatemala, Mexico and now the U.S. CBP will consider using all approved and available resources to protect travelers, caravan members, and our agents and officers.”

The CBP use of force reports show CS tear gas used 126 times since 2012. Officials utilized pepper spray a total of 540 times during that same period.

The current CBP Use of Force Policy handbook (dated May 2014) requires all officers and agents to be trained in the use of all weapons utilized in operations, including less than lethal devices, such as these types of sprays. It also requires the officers and agents to be exposed to the sprays as part of the course of instruction.

During a telephone conference call with news media on Monday, CBP Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan said, “Yesterday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and officers in San Diego effectively managed an extremely dangerous situation involving over 1,000 individuals who sought to enter the U.S. unlawfully in large groups. They did so safely and without any reported serious injuries on either side of the border.”

“As we’ve articulated for several weeks, we have been concerned about the size of the caravan, its primarily single-adult composition, and the aggressive and assaultive behavior at both the Honduras-Guatemala border and the Guatemala-Mexico border,” the commissioner continued. “U.S. government officials have noted the presence of criminals in the group, and the Government of Mexico has arrested over 1,000 caravan members for criminal violations in Mexico.”

“In the course of these events, individuals engaged in active assaults, throwing dozens of projectiles at CBP law enforcement personnel,” McAleenan explained. “Our Border Patrol agents were able to counter this activity, address the attempted group entry, and resolve the assaults with presence and less-lethal device deployments. Elements of the group then staged west of the port of entry and sought to press into the United States in the area of the Tijuana River channel. This group again became assaultive, with rocks and other projectiles thrown at our agents. Again, four agents were struck by projectiles in these assaults.”

Despite media reports to the contrary, CBP officers and agents operating under the Trump Administration responded the same way they did during the Obama Administration when, in 2013, migrants rushed the same stretch of border, Breitbart News’ Neil Munro reported.

Democrat congressional leaders and Hollywood activists teamed up to condemn the Trump Administration’s use of force in defending the border but ignored President Obama’s prior, identical response.

Pop star Rihanna accused the Trump Administration of “terrorism” for spraying tear gas at the border. Others called for the president’s impeachment over the clash.

Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said the migrant caravan members are like the Jews fleeing the Holocaust, while Vermont Senator and possible 2020 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called President Trump’s use of force “authoritarian.”

See additional Breitbart News coverage of the Migrant Caravan here.

How supportive of women!

Via Daily Wire:

For liberal women, feminism only goes so far. Sure, they’re all for independence among their sisters — unless they disagree with them politically. Then, it’s claws out.

Take Barbra Streisand. The limousine liberal thinks all women who voted for President Trump are stupid, saying they “don’t believe enough in their own thoughts” to vote another way than their husbands.

“A lot of women vote the way their husbands vote; they don’t believe enough in their own thoughts. Maybe that woman who’s so articulate, so experienced and so fit for the presidency [Hillary] was too intimidating,” Streisand said, according to the Daily Mail.

Keep reading…

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered at Hillsdale College on September 27, 2018, during a two-week teaching residency as a Eugene C. Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Journalism.

Six years ago I wrote a book about Barack Obama in which I predicted that modern American liberalism, under pressures both fiscal and philosophical, would either go out of business or be forced to radicalize. If it chose the latter, I predicted, it could radicalize along two lines: towards socialism or towards an increasingly post-modern form of leadership. Today it is doing both. As we saw in Bernie Sanders’ campaign, the youngest generation of liberals is embracing socialism openly—something that would have been unheard of during the Cold War. At the same time, identity politics is on the ascendant, with its quasi-Nietzschean faith in race, sex, and power as the keys to being and meaning. In the #MeToo movement, for example—as we saw recently in Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle—the credo is, “Believe the woman.” In other words, truth will emerge not from an adversarial process weighing evidence and testimony before the bar of reason, but from yielding to the will of the more politically correct. “Her truth” is stronger than any objective or disinterested truth.

In the Claremont Review of Books, we have described our current political scene as a cold civil war. A cold civil war is better than a hot civil war, but it is not a good situation for a country to be in. Underlying our cold civil war is the fact that America is torn increasingly between two rival constitutions, two cultures, two ways of life.

Political scientists sometimes distinguish between normal politics and regime politics. Normal politics takes place within a political and constitutional order and concerns means, not ends. In other words, the ends or principles are agreed upon; debate is simply over means. By contrast, regime politics is about who rules and for what ends or principles. It questions the nature of the political system itself. Who has rights? Who gets to vote? What do we honor or revere together as a people? I fear America may be leaving the world of normal politics and entering the dangerous world of regime politics—a politics in which our political loyalties diverge more and more, as they did in the 1850s, between two contrary visions of the country.

One vision is based on the original Constitution as amended. This is the Constitution grounded in the natural rights of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution written in 1787 and ratified in 1788. It has been transmitted to us with significant Amendments—some improvements and some not—but it is recognizable still as the original Constitution. To simplify matters we may call this “the conservative Constitution”—with the caveat that conservatives have never agreed perfectly on its meaning and that many non-conservatives remain loyal to it.

The other vision is based on what Progressives and liberals, for 100 years now, have called “the living Constitution.” This term implies that the original Constitution is dead—or at least on life support—and that in order to remain relevant to our national life, the original Constitution must be infused with new meaning and new ends and therefore with new duties, rights, and powers. To cite an important example, new administrative agencies must be created to circumvent the structural limitations that the original Constitution imposed on government.

As a doctrine, the living Constitution originated in America’s new departments of political and social science in the late nineteenth century—but it was soon at the very forefront of Progressive politics. One of the doctrine’s prime formulators, Woodrow Wilson, had contemplated as a young scholar a series of constitutional amendments to reform America’s national government into a kind of parliamentary system—a system able to facilitate faster political change. But he quickly realized that his plan to amend the Constitution was going nowhere. Plan B was the living Constitution. While keeping the outward forms of the old Constitution, the idea of a living Constitution would change utterly the spirit in which the Constitution was understood.

The resulting Constitution—let us call it “the liberal Constitution”—is not a constitution of natural rights or individual human rights, but of historical or evolutionary right. Wilson called the spirit of the old Constitution Newtonian, after Isaac Newton, and that of the new Constitution Darwinian, after Charles Darwin. By Darwinian, Wilson meant that instead of being difficult to amend, the liberal Constitution would be easily amenable to experimentation and adjustment. To paraphrase the late Walter Berns, the point of the old Constitution was to keep the times in tune with the Constitution; the purpose of the new is to keep the Constitution in tune with the times.

Until the 1960s, most liberals believed it was inevitable that their living Constitution would replace the conservative Constitution through a kind of slow-motion evolution. But during the sixties, the so-called New Left abandoned evolution for revolution, and partly in reaction to that, defenders of the old Constitution began not merely to fight back, but to call for a return to America’s first principles. By seeking to revolve back to the starting point, conservatives proved to be Newtonians after all—and also, in a way, revolutionaries, since the original meaning of revolution is to return to where you began, as a celestial body revolves in the heavens.

The conservative campaign against the inevitable victory of the living Constitution gained steam as a campaign against the gradual or sudden disappearance of limited government and of republican virtue in our political life. And when it became clear, by the late 1970s and 1980s, that the conservatives weren’t going away, the cold civil war was on.

***

Confronted by sharper, deeper, and more compelling accounts of the conservative Constitution, the liberals had to sharpen—that is, radicalize—their own alternative, following the paths paved by the New Left. As a result, the gap between the liberal and conservative Constitutions became a gulf, to the extent that today we are two countries—or we are fast on the road to becoming two countries—each constituted differently.

Consider a few of the contrasts. The prevailing liberal doctrine of rights traces individual rights to membership in various groups—racial, ethnic, gender, class-based, etc.—which are undergoing a continual process of consciousness-raising and empowerment. This was already a prominent feature of Progressivism well over a century ago, though the groups have changed since then. Before Woodrow Wilson became a politician, he wrote a political science textbook, and the book opened by asking which races should be studied. Wilson answered: we’ll study the Aryan race, because the Aryan race is the one that has mastered the world. The countries of Europe and the Anglophone countries are the conquerors and colonizers of the other continents. They are the countries with the most advanced armaments, arts, and sciences.

Wilson was perhaps not a racist in the full sense of the term, because he expected the less advanced races over time to catch up with the Aryan race. But his emphasis was on group identity—an emphasis that liberals today retain, the only difference being that the winning and losing sides have been scrambled. Today the white race and European civilization are the enemy—“dead white males” is a favored pejorative on American campuses—and the races and groups that were oppressed in the past are the ones that today need compensation, privileges, and power.

Conservatives, by contrast, regard the individual as the quintessential endangered minority. They trace individual rights to human nature, which lacks a race. Human nature also lacks ethnicity, gender, and class. Conservatives trace the idea of rights to the essence of an individual as a human being. We have rights because we’re human beings with souls, with reason, distinct from other animals and from God. We’re not beasts, but we’re not God—we’re the in-between being. Conservatives seek to vindicate human equality and liberty—the basis for majority rule in politics—against the liberal Constitution’s alternative, in which everything is increasingly based on group identity.

There is also today a vast divergence between the liberal and conservative understandings of the First Amendment. Liberals are interested in transforming free speech into what they call equal speech, ensuring that no one gets more than his fair share. They favor a redistribution of speech rights via limits on campaign contributions, repealing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and narrowing the First Amendment for the sake of redistribution of speech rights from the rich to the poor. Not surprisingly, the Democratic Party’s 2016 platform called for amending the First Amendment!

There is, of course, also a big difference between the liberal Constitution’s freedom from religion and the conservative Constitution’s freedom of religion. And needless to say, the liberal Constitution has no Second Amendment.

In terms of government structure, the liberal Constitution is designed to overcome the separation of powers and most other checks and balances. Liberals consistently support the increased ability to coordinate, concentrate, and enhance government power—as opposed to dividing, restricting, or checking it. This is to the detriment of popular control of government. In recent decades, government power has flowed mainly through the hands of unelected administrators and judges—to the point that elected members of Congress find themselves increasingly dispirited and unable to legislate. As the Financial Times put it recently, “Congress is a sausage factory that has forgotten how to make sausages.”

***

If one thinks about how America’s cold civil war could be resolved, there seem to be only five possibilities. One would be to change the political subject. Ronald Reagan used to say that when the little green men arrive from outer space, all of our political differences will be transcended and humanity will unite for the first time in human history. Similarly, if some jarring event intervenes—a major war or a huge natural calamity—it might reset our politics.

A second possibility, if we can’t change the subject, is that we could change our minds. Persuasion, or some combination of persuasion and moderation, might allow us to end or endure our great political division. Perhaps one party or side will persuade a significant majority of the electorate to embrace its Constitution, and thus win at the polling booth and in the legislature. For generations, Republicans have longed for a realigning election that would turn the GOP into America’s majority party. This remains possible, but seems unlikely. Only two presidents in the twentieth century were able to effect enduring changes in American public opinion and voting patterns—Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. FDR inspired a political realignment that lasted for a generation or so and lifted the Democratic Party to majority status. Ronald Reagan inspired a realignment of public policy, but wasn’t able to make the GOP the majority party.

Since 1968, the norm in America has been divided government: the people have more often preferred to split control of the national government between the Democrats and the Republicans rather than entrust it to one party. This had not previously been the pattern in American politics. Prior to 1968, Americans would almost always (the exceptions proved the rule) entrust the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Presidency to the same party in each election. They would occasionally change the party, but still they would vote for a party to run the government. Not so for the last 50 years. And neither President Obama nor President Trump, so far, has persuaded the American electorate to embrace his party as their national representative, worthy of long-term patriotic allegiance.

Trump, of course, is new to this, and his party in Congress is basically pre-Trumpian. He did not win the 2016 election by a very large margin, and he was not able to bring many new Republicans into the House or the Senate. Nonetheless, he has the opportunity now to put his mark on the party. In trying to do so, his populism—which is not a word he uses—will not be enough. He will have to reach out to the existing Republican Party as he has done, adopt some of its agenda, adopt its electoral supporters, and gradually bring them around to his “America first” conservatism if he is to have any chance of achieving a political realignment. And the odds remain against him at this point.

As for moderating our disagreements and learning to live with them more or less permanently, that too seems unlikely given their fundamental nature and the embittered trajectory of our politics over the last two decades.

So if we won’t change our minds, and if we can’t change the subject, we are left with only three other ways out of the cold civil war. The happiest of the three would be a vastly reinvigorated federalism. One of the original reasons for constitutional federalism was that the states had a variety of interests and views that clashed with one another and could not be pursued in common. If we had a re-flowering of federalism, some of the differences between blue states and red states could be handled discreetly by the states themselves. The most disruptive issues could be denationalized. The problem is, having abandoned so much of traditional federalism, it is hard to see how federalism could be revived at this late juncture.

That leaves two possibilities. One, alas, is secession, which is a danger to any federal system—something about which James Madison wrote at great length in The Federalist Papers. With any federal system, there is the possibility that some states will try to leave it. The Czech Republic and Slovakia have gone their separate ways peacefully, just within the last generation. But America is much better at expansion than contraction. And George Washington’s admonitions to preserve the Union, I think, still miraculously somehow linger in our ears. So secession would be extremely difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is that it could lead, as we Americans know from experience, to the fifth and worst possibility: hot civil war.

Under present circumstances, the American constitutional future seems to be approaching some kind of crisis—a crisis of the two Constitutions. Let us pray that we and our countrymen will find a way to reason together and to compromise, allowing us to avoid the worst of these dire scenarios—that we will find, that is, the better angels of our nature.

On September 28, I left for El Salvador.  On October 19, I went to Los Angeles for Politicon, where I represented Urban Game Changers Texas in six presentations.  On October 27, I led a conference in Killeen, Texas.

On November 5, four colleagues and I launched our website announcing a conference in Oklahoma for next February, called “God’s Voice: A Biblical Response to the Queering of the Church.”  It provoked a strong reaction.

On November 6, the midterm elections took place.  On November 8, I flew to Washington for a summit of faith leaders in education, organized by the White House and conducted at the Department of Education.

I felt confirmed in my conservative beliefs.  But I am also more skeptical of the conservative movement’s strategies.

What the Conservative Movement Looks Like

We conservatives tend to neglect our strongest points and try to win based on our weakest points.  We have hoped that Trump’s economic progress would carry us through the midterms and position us well for 2020.  This bodes disaster for us.  Economic fundamentals rise and fall.  Trump’s economy will eventually slow down and contract.  Our free-market values can promise prosperity, but only for a season.

Moral values paint a different picture.  Civilization provides a long history of success for nations with conservative values.  While economic fortunes rise and fall, cultural transformations can be irreversible.  When you lose a value like chastity or godliness, it is entirely possible never to regain it.  Your nation may unravel and become defunct in its decadent state.

On moral issues, our values and the left’s values show a starker contrast.

Our values could resonate powerfully, if we worked hard to proclaim them and to denounce the false values of the left.  We don’t do that, as you can see by looking at how conservatives deal with the all-important issue of education.

Education Is the Biggest Issue for 2020

To save America, conservatives need to dismantle the enormous social machineries the left has set up, especially in our schools and churches.  Time and again, our side avoids attacking the left’s strongholds, opting for evasive arguments that focus on “liberty,” “freedom of conscience,” “local control,” “deregulation,” and “small government.”

All these catchwords are good ideas, but they are amoral in and of themselves.  Unless we supplement these ideologies with strong advocacy for our specific ideals – responsibility, faith, chastity, obedience to God, decency, family integrity, and the Western tradition – the conservative case for “liberty” merely advances relativism and thereby allows the liberals to pervert us with their falsehoods and distorted values.

We must also publicly repudiate the left’s false pretenses of tolerance, equality, utopian sexual license, etc.  But this entails denouncing the left on specifics, not objecting to the left’s mismanagement of due process (i.e., proving the left immoral, not complaining that the left will not let us talk).

Liberty arguments presume an underlying relativism.  In the world of education, this is catastrophic.  While the left has placed its moral advocates in power in every educational institution in America, including private Christian schools, so-called “conservative” colleges like Grove City College, and every public school in America, American conservatives have collectively refused to embattle educators who advance godless and perverted liberal ideology.

At the summit on November 9, the depth and resilience of the swamp shocked me.  After almost two years of a Trump presidency, education officials have doubled down on the alternatives that have failed conservatives since the Reagan Era.  The Department will take no position on curriculum, quality of research, content, ethics, or appropriateness of things like sex education or trans policies.  Kenneth Marcus, the head of the office of civil rights for the department, stated explicitly that his office will deal with racial and sexual discrimination but will do nothing about discrimination against people based on religious beliefs.

I presume that conservatives agree with Marcus’s approach because they think this will protect Christian schools from lawsuits.  Such a calculation becomes quicksand.  Christian schools get infiltrated and turn into fraud engines.  People will see easy money in charging Christian parents for an education that ends up involving all the filth and perversion that takes place in public schools (look at how Catholic schools have devolved).  In the meantime, the massive numbers of Christians in federally funded schools can get no relief from the increasing repressiveness of LGBT, feminist, and other liberal curricula.

Oldies but Goodies: Greatest Hits from Our Losing Playbook

We need a revolution.  This is basically too much work, too costly, and too shocking for conservatives, so instead, the right wing returns to its vomit like the dog of Proverbs.  One conservative panacea is to issue vouchers, which will prove fruitless due to the pervasiveness of the left’s moral rot in all schools.  Parents will take their children out of an urban school full of sexual perversion and place them into a suburban school full of sexual perversion where classmates have more money to spend on drugs and lax parents are more approving of social decadence.  School “choice” presents the same conundrum.

Homeschooling comes up as the constant refrain.  This would be a great conservative alternative for individual families, if there were not a widespread rot in popular culture brought on by the homeschoolers’ peers enrolled in schools run by depraved liberals.  Like Lot homeschooling his daughters in Sodom, this delays the inevitable collision with the cultural decadence promoted in public schools.

Homeschooling provides a pleasant experience for some individuals, assuming they do not turn into the odious Kathryn Brightbill.  But the vast majority of Christian conservatives cannot afford to homeschool, and our movement’s avoidance and refusal when it comes to fighting to dismantle the educational establishment leaves those conservatives in a worse position.

At the college level, the conservative answers suffer from similar myopia.  One “solution” has been to avoid fighting with secular liberal colleges and to create a bubble of our own institutions.  We congregate in alternative colleges like Wheaton or Pepperdine, only to see them become another liberal abyss as liberals infiltrate them the way the LGBTs have infiltrated Azusa Pacific.  I’ve had awful run-ins with graduates of Hillsdale, Liberty, and Baylor.  Let’s not even talk about Catholic colleges.

Another “solution” is to harp on free speech and beg for a chance to bring conservative speakers to campus.  This becomes, first of all, a money-making scam for self-promoting raconteurs (remember Milo’s whirlwind tour of campuses?).

The campus brushfires caused by the Ben Shapiros, Jordan Petersons, and Christina Hoff Sommerses do nothing to diversify the university faculty.  Most college students neither participate in extracurricular activities like a conservative club nor go to hear guest lecturers talk.  The colleges’ main influence consists of the thousands of hours youths spend listening to professors teach in the classroom – and this gets more and more biased, even as the Ben Shapiro cottage industry grows in fame and fortune.  To reverse the bias on the faculty, conservatives would have to use government to coerce university administrations and committees to drop their current criteria of teaching, publications, and service.  Conservatives will not do this because it sounds like interfering with local control (which it is and should be!).

Many times, these “conservative” speakers do not share our social values but oppose socialism, political correctness, and rules against Halloween costumes.  They may or may not describe themselves as libertarian.  At Politicon I saw that calling someone a “socialist” does not instill alarm in anyone under the age of forty.  It is a word that shocks people at Heritage and means nothing to the people we hope to turn Republican.

The emphasis on conservative guest speakers backfires.  After these firebrands leave campus, the faculty become more ferocious against conservative colleagues (wherever they may hide).  The whole affair swells the already outrageous student activities budgets with the high price of honoraria and security.  We need to force colleges to strip away their godless involvement in people’s social lives, political engagement, and cultural development, not add a frivolous layer of conservative expenses to make the bloat worse.

Conservative intellectuals, to the extent such a small constituency exists, do not want schools’ structures to change.  This leads to the advice from ostensible sages like Robert George, who tell young conservatives on campus to work from within, navigate through the Ph.D., and delay change until they have tenure.  This never happens.  Even when you do get tenure, your story ends the way mine did in 2016.

After 20 years in higher education, I know that colleges will not change if you sue them, embarrass them, or protest them.  They will change only if you cut off their money.

At one panel at Education, a speaker revealed that 40% of higher education spending comes from the federal government.  Why don’t we just threaten to cut off all their money? Lobby Trump’s people to force DeVos and her people to issue policy guidance the way they just did regarding Title IX.  Lobby Trump to fire DeVos if she won’t do it.  And let’s find revolutionary people to run for Congress who will bring this scenario to the public arena, proposing legislation even if we know that it will fail many times before passing.

Read this old gem for a playbook of how.  Lay down eligibility requirements for tax exemptions, student loan funding, and grants or other outlays that would force them to offer job training programs, eliminate tenure, abolish non-instructional spending, and cut out bad curricula like gender studies.  (By the way, Hungary did this!)

Conservative platitudes about local control, staying out of colleges’ business, not seeking to police ideas, and leaving curricula to the experts are insane!  The left has no scruples about micromanaging content, values, and ideas.  At some point, we do have to crush the left if we want to save our country.

The Churches Are Just as Bad, but That’s a Different Article.

Two massive institutions – the schools and the churches – are entirely controlled by the left now.  They militate against conservatives and mobilize for elections.  The Democrats will have an unbeatable and renewable army that will overwhelm the right.  The conservatives’ answers all involve leaving the left alone on details and instead asking that people have the freedom to disagree with them.  This will never work because the “details” of the left involve taking over every part of society and forcing total compliance on everyone.

Conservatives have to destroy the left’s social machine, which means two Herculean labors.  First, they must crush the teachers’ unions and dismantle education as we know it by taking over the federal government and using its powers.  Second, they must carry out a massive Christian reformation by staging aggressive takeovers of the major denominations and using the central denominations’ power to purge churches of unorthodox teaching.

In an ideal world, we could hold on to our discreet small-government ideals and stay above the fray, claiming we do not want to interfere with others.  But remember what Paul said in Ephesians:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Think of the tasks that faced kings like Hezekiah and Josiah.

One task is an electoral one, and the other an ecclesiastical one.  They both require a frightening amount of work, steel nerves, and unflinching discernment in the wake of massive propaganda.  The churches are a more tragic case but just as much of a problem for conservatives.  More on that another day.

In the meantime, let’s get to our war rooms.

Robert Oscar Lopez can be followed at English Manif.

That old cliché holds here: “I can’t say I have all the answers.”  My musings today may sound critical of others.  They are.  But they apply to myself, too.  At any rate, we must face reality: conservatives cannot keep doing what we have been doing for the last thirty years.

I offer this critique having been through two months of intense political experience.

On September 28, I left for El Salvador.  On October 19, I went to Los Angeles for Politicon, where I represented Urban Game Changers Texas in six presentations.  On October 27, I led a conference in Killeen, Texas.

On November 5, four colleagues and I launched our website announcing a conference in Oklahoma for next February, called “God’s Voice: A Biblical Response to the Queering of the Church.”  It provoked a strong reaction.

On November 6, the midterm elections took place.  On November 8, I flew to Washington for a summit of faith leaders in education, organized by the White House and conducted at the Department of Education.

I felt confirmed in my conservative beliefs.  But I am also more skeptical of the conservative movement’s strategies.

What the Conservative Movement Looks Like

We conservatives tend to neglect our strongest points and try to win based on our weakest points.  We have hoped that Trump’s economic progress would carry us through the midterms and position us well for 2020.  This bodes disaster for us.  Economic fundamentals rise and fall.  Trump’s economy will eventually slow down and contract.  Our free-market values can promise prosperity, but only for a season.

Moral values paint a different picture.  Civilization provides a long history of success for nations with conservative values.  While economic fortunes rise and fall, cultural transformations can be irreversible.  When you lose a value like chastity or godliness, it is entirely possible never to regain it.  Your nation may unravel and become defunct in its decadent state.

On moral issues, our values and the left’s values show a starker contrast.

Our values could resonate powerfully, if we worked hard to proclaim them and to denounce the false values of the left.  We don’t do that, as you can see by looking at how conservatives deal with the all-important issue of education.

Education Is the Biggest Issue for 2020

To save America, conservatives need to dismantle the enormous social machineries the left has set up, especially in our schools and churches.  Time and again, our side avoids attacking the left’s strongholds, opting for evasive arguments that focus on “liberty,” “freedom of conscience,” “local control,” “deregulation,” and “small government.”

All these catchwords are good ideas, but they are amoral in and of themselves.  Unless we supplement these ideologies with strong advocacy for our specific ideals – responsibility, faith, chastity, obedience to God, decency, family integrity, and the Western tradition – the conservative case for “liberty” merely advances relativism and thereby allows the liberals to pervert us with their falsehoods and distorted values.

We must also publicly repudiate the left’s false pretenses of tolerance, equality, utopian sexual license, etc.  But this entails denouncing the left on specifics, not objecting to the left’s mismanagement of due process (i.e., proving the left immoral, not complaining that the left will not let us talk).

Liberty arguments presume an underlying relativism.  In the world of education, this is catastrophic.  While the left has placed its moral advocates in power in every educational institution in America, including private Christian schools, so-called “conservative” colleges like Grove City College, and every public school in America, American conservatives have collectively refused to embattle educators who advance godless and perverted liberal ideology.

At the summit on November 9, the depth and resilience of the swamp shocked me.  After almost two years of a Trump presidency, education officials have doubled down on the alternatives that have failed conservatives since the Reagan Era.  The Department will take no position on curriculum, quality of research, content, ethics, or appropriateness of things like sex education or trans policies.  Kenneth Marcus, the head of the office of civil rights for the department, stated explicitly that his office will deal with racial and sexual discrimination but will do nothing about discrimination against people based on religious beliefs.

I presume that conservatives agree with Marcus’s approach because they think this will protect Christian schools from lawsuits.  Such a calculation becomes quicksand.  Christian schools get infiltrated and turn into fraud engines.  People will see easy money in charging Christian parents for an education that ends up involving all the filth and perversion that takes place in public schools (look at how Catholic schools have devolved).  In the meantime, the massive numbers of Christians in federally funded schools can get no relief from the increasing repressiveness of LGBT, feminist, and other liberal curricula.

Oldies but Goodies: Greatest Hits from Our Losing Playbook

We need a revolution.  This is basically too much work, too costly, and too shocking for conservatives, so instead, the right wing returns to its vomit like the dog of Proverbs.  One conservative panacea is to issue vouchers, which will prove fruitless due to the pervasiveness of the left’s moral rot in all schools.  Parents will take their children out of an urban school full of sexual perversion and place them into a suburban school full of sexual perversion where classmates have more money to spend on drugs and lax parents are more approving of social decadence.  School “choice” presents the same conundrum.

Homeschooling comes up as the constant refrain.  This would be a great conservative alternative for individual families, if there were not a widespread rot in popular culture brought on by the homeschoolers’ peers enrolled in schools run by depraved liberals.  Like Lot homeschooling his daughters in Sodom, this delays the inevitable collision with the cultural decadence promoted in public schools.

Homeschooling provides a pleasant experience for some individuals, assuming they do not turn into the odious Kathryn Brightbill.  But the vast majority of Christian conservatives cannot afford to homeschool, and our movement’s avoidance and refusal when it comes to fighting to dismantle the educational establishment leaves those conservatives in a worse position.

At the college level, the conservative answers suffer from similar myopia.  One “solution” has been to avoid fighting with secular liberal colleges and to create a bubble of our own institutions.  We congregate in alternative colleges like Wheaton or Pepperdine, only to see them become another liberal abyss as liberals infiltrate them the way the LGBTs have infiltrated Azusa Pacific.  I’ve had awful run-ins with graduates of Hillsdale, Liberty, and Baylor.  Let’s not even talk about Catholic colleges.

Another “solution” is to harp on free speech and beg for a chance to bring conservative speakers to campus.  This becomes, first of all, a money-making scam for self-promoting raconteurs (remember Milo’s whirlwind tour of campuses?).

The campus brushfires caused by the Ben Shapiros, Jordan Petersons, and Christina Hoff Sommerses do nothing to diversify the university faculty.  Most college students neither participate in extracurricular activities like a conservative club nor go to hear guest lecturers talk.  The colleges’ main influence consists of the thousands of hours youths spend listening to professors teach in the classroom – and this gets more and more biased, even as the Ben Shapiro cottage industry grows in fame and fortune.  To reverse the bias on the faculty, conservatives would have to use government to coerce university administrations and committees to drop their current criteria of teaching, publications, and service.  Conservatives will not do this because it sounds like interfering with local control (which it is and should be!).

Many times, these “conservative” speakers do not share our social values but oppose socialism, political correctness, and rules against Halloween costumes.  They may or may not describe themselves as libertarian.  At Politicon I saw that calling someone a “socialist” does not instill alarm in anyone under the age of forty.  It is a word that shocks people at Heritage and means nothing to the people we hope to turn Republican.

The emphasis on conservative guest speakers backfires.  After these firebrands leave campus, the faculty become more ferocious against conservative colleagues (wherever they may hide).  The whole affair swells the already outrageous student activities budgets with the high price of honoraria and security.  We need to force colleges to strip away their godless involvement in people’s social lives, political engagement, and cultural development, not add a frivolous layer of conservative expenses to make the bloat worse.

Conservative intellectuals, to the extent such a small constituency exists, do not want schools’ structures to change.  This leads to the advice from ostensible sages like Robert George, who tell young conservatives on campus to work from within, navigate through the Ph.D., and delay change until they have tenure.  This never happens.  Even when you do get tenure, your story ends the way mine did in 2016.

After 20 years in higher education, I know that colleges will not change if you sue them, embarrass them, or protest them.  They will change only if you cut off their money.

At one panel at Education, a speaker revealed that 40% of higher education spending comes from the federal government.  Why don’t we just threaten to cut off all their money? Lobby Trump’s people to force DeVos and her people to issue policy guidance the way they just did regarding Title IX.  Lobby Trump to fire DeVos if she won’t do it.  And let’s find revolutionary people to run for Congress who will bring this scenario to the public arena, proposing legislation even if we know that it will fail many times before passing.

Read this old gem for a playbook of how.  Lay down eligibility requirements for tax exemptions, student loan funding, and grants or other outlays that would force them to offer job training programs, eliminate tenure, abolish non-instructional spending, and cut out bad curricula like gender studies.  (By the way, Hungary did this!)

Conservative platitudes about local control, staying out of colleges’ business, not seeking to police ideas, and leaving curricula to the experts are insane!  The left has no scruples about micromanaging content, values, and ideas.  At some point, we do have to crush the left if we want to save our country.

The Churches Are Just as Bad, but That’s a Different Article.

Two massive institutions – the schools and the churches – are entirely controlled by the left now.  They militate against conservatives and mobilize for elections.  The Democrats will have an unbeatable and renewable army that will overwhelm the right.  The conservatives’ answers all involve leaving the left alone on details and instead asking that people have the freedom to disagree with them.  This will never work because the “details” of the left involve taking over every part of society and forcing total compliance on everyone.

Conservatives have to destroy the left’s social machine, which means two Herculean labors.  First, they must crush the teachers’ unions and dismantle education as we know it by taking over the federal government and using its powers.  Second, they must carry out a massive Christian reformation by staging aggressive takeovers of the major denominations and using the central denominations’ power to purge churches of unorthodox teaching.

In an ideal world, we could hold on to our discreet small-government ideals and stay above the fray, claiming we do not want to interfere with others.  But remember what Paul said in Ephesians:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Think of the tasks that faced kings like Hezekiah and Josiah.

One task is an electoral one, and the other an ecclesiastical one.  They both require a frightening amount of work, steel nerves, and unflinching discernment in the wake of massive propaganda.  The churches are a more tragic case but just as much of a problem for conservatives.  More on that another day.

In the meantime, let’s get to our war rooms.

Robert Oscar Lopez can be followed at English Manif.