Writing in the Financial Times this week Martin Sandbu concludes an otherwise well-informed analysis of the battles of 2016 and the political ideologies of globalism versus nationalism with the trite call to arms: “It is time for such a bold, centrist radicalism again.”

Emboldened centrists, however, are the cause of societal and political pressures faced across the Western world today.

The excesses of the elites from Poland, to the United Kingdom, across to the United States are the fundamental commonalities in these three nations mentioned by Sandbu in his article entitled The battles of ideology that will define our age.

Sandbu, an Oxford and Harvard graduate, will have no problem identifying the origins of Third Way politics, popularised by London School of Economics professor Anthony Giddens, and enacted in earnest by President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The Third Way was a supposed fusing of capitalism and social justice — the corporate world, and the nanny state. In 20th century nomenclature, this could have passed for soft fascism. But by the end of the 20th century and beginning of 21st, the school of thought that expanded government and government programmes, imbibed of state control over drinking, smoking, working time regulations, and more became known as “new capitalism”. 

At least that’s what Blair called it, and it gave these radical new centrists of their time the ability to label themselves whatever they wanted to suit their contemporaneous predicaments. Literally the first page of the former British Prime Minister’s 2010 autobiography A Journey begins with a barely comprehensible game of hop scotch around the political spectrum:

This is not to say that ideals or values no longer matter—they matter hugely, and the progressive/conservative divide (a more modern version of left/right) still has relevance… I remain unequivocally on the progressive side of politics, but I am fiscally more conservative, and on markets, liberal… governments have to liberate themselves from ideology based on left/right… You find those who call themselves progressives and conservatives on both sides of the debates about immigration.

On literally the first page, Blair goes from endorsing the relevance of the left-right divide to decrying it, demanding “liberation” for governments.

And he’d be right, were he not so wrong.

Blair’s contention that “left” or “right” is less applicable than another measure is not atrocious. But he crudely misidentifies the two camps as being, instead, “open minded” and “closed minded”. This is a trick of rhetoric used to disparage those who believe in the nation state, versus those who accept the globalist view:

The open-minded see globalisation as an opportunity; the closed-minded as a threat, a process driven by greed and big business, in which we are helpless pawns. The open-minded are accepting of those of different faiths and cultures; the closed-minded regard them as alien and corrupting. Above all, the open-minded embrace new ideas and change, seeing the potential for advancement; the closed-minded tend to defend the status quo.

In reality this is quite simply the worldview espoused by international socialists versus a worldview taken by traditionalist conservatives. So despite the attempts to reframe the debate, Blair ends up in the same place he started.

Not only does Blair probably not get this himself, but he doesn’t get that the rest of us now get it too.

Sandbu’s article in the FT — while lauding French president Emmanuel Macron, the European Union, and Canada — abrogates any attempts at foreplay and begins referring to nationalists, nationists, and conservatives as “isolationist”. Again, it’s a thinly veiled attempt at disparagement, leveraging buzzwords we are supposed to think evil of.

In truth, opposition to socialist internationalism, globalism, or corporatism (I’m using Sandbu’s own trick, see?) is not isolationism but rather, measuredness. It is in fact those he refers to as isolationists that are the moderates. The opponents of mass migration are, more often than not, not against all immigration for instance. In other words, they are the radical new centre.

He mentions Hungary, still a European Union member state, of which the Orban government is in turn a member of the centrist European People’s Party in the European Parliament. In Poland, the supposedly “far right” government’s party is a member in turn of the neo-liberal Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists in the Brussels parliament.

“In the long term,” Sandbu concludes, “liberals have cause for hope: withdrawing from the liberal order will surely bring lasting harm to countries where isolationists are now in charge”.

It is a faulty assertion not lost on the most regularly published readers’ letter writer to the paper, Daniel Aronoff, a PhD candidate at MIT.

Aronoff responded to the piece on Thursday morning, writing:

Implicitly, [Sandbu] assumes the economic benefits of liberalism are beyond dispute; that the root cause of populist discontent are structural changes that have skewed income towards the rich and that the order can be preserved by implementing progressive policies to distribute the wealth generated by liberalism more equitably. This argument ignores three key concerns articulated by populist leaders.

First, a country that runs a chronic trade deficit suffers a drain on demand, which can cause wage stagnation and underemployment. This danger was recognised by the pre-eminent 20th century liberal, J M Keynes, who proposed a mechanism to eliminate large trade imbalances. Alas, the “Keynes Plan” was not incorporated into the post-world war two trade system. Therefore, President Donald Trump’s claim that the US economy is harmed by its trade deficit is coherent and correct.

Second, a country that loses its capability to produce vital military equipment onshore is made vulnerable to foreign threats to cut off supplies.

Third, many people who support populist candidates look with indignation on the idea that a redistributive handout can moderate their grievances. They want the opportunity to earn a decent wage by contributing to their society and they are upset that their tax dollars are being spent in ways they do not condone. Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and current Breitbart editor [sic], upends the neoliberal watchword “It’s the economy, stupid” when he states that it’s not the economy and that we’re a civic society with borders and values. Mr Bannon has his finger on the pulse of populism and his perception should be given serious consideration, whether or not one agrees with his aims.

Those who wish to preserve the rules-based order — and I count myself among them — need to climb out of their echo chamber, open their minds and listen.

What Aronoff refers to as “populism” is in a redefining of the word perhaps coined by Bannon himself. In reality the more traditional version of “populism”, another derogatory term when deployed by the political establishment — would’ve been better used to describe Blair, Clinton, Obama et al.

Populists of the Third Way by default, if not explicitly, argued that political leaders couldn’t have definitive ideologies and that piecemeal political platforms were the wave of the future. No greater example exists than how Blair managed to reconcile the hardline socialism of his party with his self-confessed “liberal-conservative” market views. Instead of standing for something, Blair ran on the “Cool Britannia” mantra, eschewing substance for style, diverting from debate and embracing governance by charisma.

There is some of that left in the new populism, though not without ideology too.

In other words, neoliberals are pretty much just mad they couldn’t find a way to marry philosophy and popularity, while it would seem the right has.

Raheem Kassam is the editor in chief of Breitbart London

“Guy came to me a couple of years ago begging me to help him find money,” said Breitbart News’s Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon of National Review’s former publisher Jack Fowler.

Bannon’s comments came during Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily in conversation with co-host Alex Marlow.

Describing the National Review as “pathetic,” Breitbart News’s Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon recalled how the ostensibly conservative news media outlet’s former publisher Jack Fowler begged him for fundraising help several years ago:

The National Review publisher, this is how pathetic they are. Guy came to me a couple of years ago begging me to help him find money. They’re not a for-profit thing, they lose money. It’s just a cash drain, their donors aren’t coming out… Begging with his tin cup out. “Hey, introduce me to some donors. We need money. We’re broke.”

National Review’s financial difficulties, said Bannon, were related to its management’s lack of understanding of the “new media” landscape. He contrasted National Review’s ineptitude in this dimension with Andrew Breitbart’s aptitude: “Here’s the thing they never got that [Andrew Breitbart] got: Andrew understood new media.”

“These guys are just a magazine nobody reads with a website nobody goes to,” surmised Bannon. “Nobody read them, anymore. Nobody pays attention. They have no influence.”

The wife of National Review Online’s (NRO) David French previously sought to monetize a relationship with former Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK), said Bannon:

I think his wife was trying to suck up to the Palin family. They were sucking up to Palin family years ago. Another disaster. They were trying to do one of the girls’ biographies, or something, and that’s what these kind of people do, right? Hey kinda go from thing to thing to thing to try to pay the rent. How do you take a guy like that seriously?

Despite broadly staking out a “Never Trump” editorial position (with some dissent) and seeking to subvert then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign, National Review markets itself as a “conservative” news media outlet.

Breitbart News is about “the voice of the people,” said Marlow, “that’s why we’re populists.” This news media outlet is displacing the previously held influence of ostensibly conservative news media outlets, added its Editor-in-Chief: “That’s what this is about, that’s this year’s been about, and it’s about the diminishing voice of the pundits.”

The ostensibly conservative “Never Trump” commentariat, added Marlow, had damaged its political bona fides among grassroots conservatives:

Never Trump had the toughest year [in 2017]. It’s gotta be these guys who tried to help Hillary Clinton to win an election because Trump wasn’t a true conservative. But what have we gotten? We’ve gotten an across-the-board conservative president. We’ve gotten a guy who’s deconstructing the administrative state, gotten us incredible judges, passed a tax cut that was championed by basically all Republicans.

Donald Trump’s presidency amounts to an “unbelievable moment for conservatives,” added Marlow, noting that “Never Trump fought against the man that got all that done.”

Ostensibly “Never Trump” conservatives, said Bannon, had lost their political credibility by offering de facto support to an existential threat to America manifested in the Clintons; framing them as beyond political redemption: “So a lot of these guys are saying now, “oh, my gosh. He actually may be a conservative.” Guess what? Too late. You don’t get to redo it. Too late. You wanted Hillary Clinton. You wanted the total destruction of this country… We don’t care what you have to say.”

 

LISTEN:

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.

From the perspective of communications and messaging, President Trump’s first year in office has been an almost unqualified triumph, much to the chagrin of his many detractors.

While some of this success has been due to unanticipated developments, much more of it is the result of the president’s shrewd political instincts for engaging in the right battles with the right opponents at just the right moment.

When Trump went after the courts for putting a stay on his executive order imposing restrictions on travel from countries with active terrorist networks, the commentariat declared it a bridge too far and a public relations disaster because it would be perceived as both discriminatory and unconstitutional. Now, both public and courts are siding with his common sense measures to protect American citizens.

When he went after professional football players for disrespecting the American flag and the national anthem, the media pronounced that, once again, Trump was picking unnecessary and ill-considered fights on controversial, racially-tinged issues that would backfire on him. Now, football fans are increasingly turned off as a public sick of posturing and privileged millionaires showing contempt for the country that enabled their success side with the president.

When Trump accused the Obama administration of illegally surveilling his campaign and his associates in order to bring down his presidency with false charges of collusion with the Russians, howls of outrage were heard on both sides of the aisle in establishment Washington. Now, recently released emails show that, if anything, the president had underestimated the degree to which the Obama administration and the conflicted and very biased Deep State agencies cooperated to cover up illegal behavior on the part of Hillary Clinton and pursue phony investigations into Trump campaign activities in a heavy-handed attempt to insure a Clinton victory.

When Trump did what every President since Clinton promised to do, by moving our embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem the Deep State reacted with ominous predictions about recriminations to our embassies and personnel spanning the globe and a destabilizing effect on the Middle East peace process; none of which seems to be even remotely true.

The most important part of the story of our economy’s growth this past year has been the massive deregulation that has been undertaken, and is underway, throughout all federal agencies.  Business owners of all sizes have been the beneficiaries and American workers get the benefits.  Again, this has been something initiated unilaterally by Trump and has not had to endure the legislative wranglings that have tied up and maligned large parts of Trump’s agenda – like building the wall, stopping illegal immigration and sending the ‘dreamers’ back to their god-forsaken homes.

Not only that, but the faux-outrage of Hollywood and the media at Trump’s locker room banter in the Access Hollywood tapes (the release of which were, of course, another orchestrated attempt between the media and the Washington establishment of both parties to take him down) looks positively quaint now in the wake of the revelations of abusive and predatory behavior among their own ranks that was not only tolerated — but virtually encouraged — for decades.

On every issue where Trump has led White House messaging (often through his much maligned but highly effective early-morning tweeting), he has controlled the debate and usually trounced his baffled and often clueless opponents as a result of his ability to connect directly with his voters. But where he has allowed himself to be guided by DC’s professional Republican class, with their supposedly indispensable knowledge of how governing and legislating actually work, Trump has met with debacle after debacle for his agenda.

In large part, this is because the agenda of establishment Republicans inside the Beltway is still completely at odds with that of the man that won them the White House by ignoring stale GOP policy priorities and pushing a populist agenda that carried him over the top in Rust Belt states that hadn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate in a generation. The sad truth is that the people who control this administration’s overall strategy are more representative of the policy priorities of GOP Hill leadership and their all-powerful donor class than they are of the economic populism Trump ran on. Hugely popular Trump agenda items like building the wall, the renewal of our crumbling national infrastructure and tougher trade and immigration measures have, time and again, been shunted aside in favor of failed and unpopular attempts to rehash the debate over repealing Obamacare.

The coming year offers great promise to build the wall, reform immigration to fully realize campaign promises, continue the massive deregulation already begun, and fix our nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

Robert Wasinger served in senior advisory and liaison roles in President Donald Trump‘s campaign and transition team, after extensive experience on Capitol Hill.

Many low-wage employers are importing cheap foreign labor by offering them immigration and citizenship instead of pay, so helping boost profits by sidelining blue-collar Americans.

The companies can sideline Americans and hire lower-wage foreigners because of the federal citizenship-instead-of-pay EB-3 green card immigration program.

Each year, the federal governments EB-3 program offers 5,000 green cards to unskilled foreign employees of American companies. The green cards can be converted into citizenship cards after five years. It is a small corner of the fed’s cheap-labor immigration policy, which provides roughly 1 million green cards to foreign consumers and workers each year, including 150,000 cards to high-skill foreign employees of American companies.

EB-3 allows employers to hire thousands of low-skill foreign workers by promising to help them file for one of the 5,000 EB-3 immigration cards.

The 5,000-per-year immigration cards are effectively a hugely valuable, taxpayer-paid, deferred bonus for the foreign workers, their spouses, children and chain-migration relatives. Those benefits of a card are so large that many foreign workers pay tens of thousands of dollars to middlemen so so they can work at low-wage EB-3 jobs in the United States.

The huge costs of that bonus are paid by all Americans, and they include classroom spaces for the foreign children and health coverage for older parents, alongside many other welfare and anti-poverty programs. The economic costs paid by Americans also include reduced pressure on companies to hire and train Americans at good wages, and reduced pressure to buy American-made labor-saving machinery.

However, agency officials working for President Donald Trump have begun to tighten curbs on the cheap-labor immigration program, which was created by Congress. According to ProPublica:

As the program has accelerated in recent years, it has been co-opted by a handful of companies and foreign consultants who have used it to bring in immigrants willing to work for low pay in often-dangerous jobs. In the U.S., the program is now dominated by a handful of poultry processors with poor safety records, one janitorial firm and a single fast-food franchisee. Overseas, a cottage industry of migration agents has popped up charging steep fees for “migration assistance,” even as the law bars the selling of green card sponsorship and other recruiting fees …

Demand is now so high that some foreign migration consultants have developed a lucrative niche charging between $20,000 and $130,000 for assistance accessing the jobs offered by employers in the program, which usually pay less than $20,000 a year. Turning the common immigration narrative upside down, the program often attracts middle-class professionals, such as engineers like Yeom and office workers, who are willing to take a steep fall down the economic ladder for the chance to raise their children in the U.S. …

Beginning at the end of the Obama administration and accelerating under President Donald Trump, U.S. immigration agents and embassy officials have been clamping down on the program and increasing reviews of visa petitions, according to immigration attorneys, employers and foreign workers.

Read the entire story here.

The ProPublica article focuses on workers hired by the chicken industry, which includes Case Farms. According to the article,  “The Labor Department has certified [green cards for] 568 foreign workers for Case Farms in the past three years.”

The EB-3 program is established by Congress, and it will continue — despite agency curbs — until it is repealed.

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

But the federal government inflates the supply of new labor by annually accepting 1 million new legal immigrants, by providing work-permits to roughly 3 million resident foreigners, and by doing little to block the employment of roughly 8 million illegal immigrants.

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

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

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

 

 

In a letter on Thursday to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, House intelligence committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) blasted the Justice Department for not fully producing documents related to the Trump dossier, subpoenaed by the committee four months ago.

“At this point it seems the DOJ and FBI need to be investigating themselves,” Nunes wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Breitbart News.

Nunes said in the letter that several weeks ago the Justice Department informed the committee that basic investigatory documents (FBI Form FD-302s) subpoenaed on August 24 “did not exist.”

“However,” Nunes wrote, “shortly before my meeting with you in early December, DOJ subsequently located and produced numerous FD-302s pertaining to the Steele dossier, thereby rendering the initial response disingenuous at best.”

“As it turns out, not only did documents exist that were directly responsive to the Committee’s subpoenas, but they involved senior DOJ and FBI officials who were swiftly reassigned when their roles in matters under the Committee’s investigation were brought to light,” he said.

Nunes did not reference who those officials were, but it has been widely reported that senior FBI official Peter Strzok was removed from the special counsel and reassigned to human resources after Robert Mueller found he sent anti-Trump texts. Strzok had also played key roles in the Clinton email investigation and the FBI’s initial Russia probe.

Senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr was also removed from his position as associate deputy attorney general after it came to light that he had met with the author of the dossier as well as a co-founder of Fusion GPS, the firm behind it. His wife, Nellie Ohr, was also found to have worked for Fusion GPS.

FBI General Counsel James Baker is also being reassigned at the FBI.

Nunes said, given the content and impact of these “supposedly newly-discovered” documents, the committee was no longer able to accept the Justice Department’s refusal to provide other requested documents — FBI Form FD-1023s that document meetings between FBI officials and FBI confidential human sources.

Nunes is now demanding that the DOJ and FBI hand over all requested documents no later than January 3, 2018.

Those documents, he said, include but are not limited to:

• All responsive FD-1023s, including all reports that summarize meetings between FBI confidential human sources and FBI officials pertaining to the Steele dossier;
• All responsive FD-302s not previously provided to the Committee; and
•In addition to the FD-302s and FD-1023s, certain responsive analytical and reference documents that were specifically identified and requested by the Committee, and supposedly subject to imminent production, as of December 15.

If DOJ withholds any relevant documents, it must provide a written legal justification from Rosenstein personally, Nunes wrote. He also requested dates in January 2018 for interviews with:

• Former DOJ Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr;
• FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) Peter Strzok;
• FBI Attorney James Baker;
• FBI Attorney Lisa Page;
• FBI Attorney Sally Moyer; and
• FBI Assistant Director for Congressional Affairs Greg Brower.

Nunes also noted other outstanding requests:

The Committee further reminds you of these other outstanding requests for information:
• Details concerning an apparent April 2017 meeting with the media involving DOJ/FBI personnel, including DOJ Attorney Andrew Weissman (due December 13) and
• The remaining text messages between SSA Strzok and Ms. Page (due December 15).

“Unfortunately, DOJ/FBI’s intransigence with respect to the August 24 subpoenas is part of a broader pattern of behavior that can no longer be tolerated,” Nunes wrote.

Nunes has threatened to begin drawing up a resolution to hold Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress.

The Los Angeles Times points out an odd bit of presidential trivia as 2017 comes to a close: President Donald Trump could become the first president since Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower not to visit the State of California in his first full year in office.

The Times reports:

Trump is about to become the first president since Dwight D. Eisenhower 64 years ago to skip a visit to California during his first calendar year in office. And he doesn’t appear to have any plans to take Air Force One to the country’s most populous and economically powerful state before he marks his first full year in office Jan. 20.

Even past presidents who, like Trump, didn’t win the state’s electoral votes made it a destination, if only for California’s allure as the Golden State of campaign cash.

The Times notes that California might be a problematic destination for Trump in particular because the state has declared itself to be “ground zero” for the so-called “Resistance” to his presidency. State politicians have sued the administration over almost all of its major policies, and thousands of activists have organized regular protests against Trump in the Golden State, even taking over Hollywood’s vaunted Gay Pride festival for the purpose.

Trump has also accused California of allowing voter fraud, which he alleged earlier this year had cost him a popular vote victory over Hillary Clinton because of the large margin she ran up in the state. (Without California, Trump would have won the popular vote nationwide as well as the Electoral College vote.)

The president did provide rapid disaster aid for California to aid with flooding as well as wildfires in 2017.

There are still three weeks left before the first anniversary of Trump taking office, but he seems to have no plans to visit before then.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

German domestic intelligence has warned of a growing number of Islamic extremist women who are taking over the Salafist scene, as their men head to prison, and are radicalising the next generation of young jihadis.

The Agency for the Protection of the Constitution in North Rhine-Westphalia claims that the Islamic extremist scene is becoming increasingly more influenced by women. Burkhard Freier, head of the regional branch of the agency, said that the women have come into prominence and they have at least 40 female radicals under observation, Die Welt reports.

“The men have realised that women can network much better and therefore are much more able to tie the scene together and keep it alive,” Freier said.

According to the agency head, the real danger is that the women are creating Salafist communities in which mothers preach extremism and raise their children as young jihadis in a parallel society.

“This makes Salafism a family affair, it begins to create something that is much harder to liquidate, namely a Salafist society,” Freier said and added that “every jihadist terrorist we’ve seen in Europe in recent years came from the Salafist scene.”

“There is an increasing number of underage Salafists who fantasise about violence,” Frier noted.

Police confirm 15-year-old girl who stabbed police officer was ISIS youth https://t.co/tLolBfZPZA http://pic.twitter.com/UTdFoZff3F

— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) April 16, 2016

Women, particularly young women, have proven to be actively involved in Salafist extremist groups like Swiss Burqa advocate Nora Illi who was recently arrested in Vienna protesting the Austrian full-face veil ban.

Others, like German Muslim teen Linda Wenzel, travelled to the Middle East to join Islamic State. The 16-year-old currently faces the death penalty after she was captured by forces liberating territory from the terror group’s control.

She is said to have served as a female enforcer of the strict Sharia law endorsed by the extremist group.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com 

Russell Kirk set out sixty years ago to refresh the minds of his fellow American about the beliefs “we Americans live by.”

First published in 1957, Kirk’s The American Cause maintains its power to refresh our minds about why we love America and what that love requires of us.

The book was not a set of political slogans or a history of American politics. Kirk, who was a columnist for National Review and had become famous as one of the leading lights of the post-war conservative movement after publishing The Conservative Mind, had grown concerned that many of his countrymen were badly prepared for the task of “defending their own convictions and interests and institutions” against enemies both external and internal. Many Americans needed a brief reminder of why their way of life was worth defending.

Kirk organizes his book around three quintessential American principles and how these are put into practice through American institutions and habits. The first is the “moral principle,” which centers around the nature of man and his relation to God. We can see its function in a healthy division between church and state, where tolerance is practiced and religious faith is honored.

The second principle is political, which is based on the concept of ordered liberty and embodied in our constitutional structure of a federal republic with strong states.

The third, however, may be the most interesting for us–in part because it has largely been lost in the intervening years. The economic principle of a “Free Economy” would probably be unrecognizable to many who call themselves conservatives or libertarians today. Here is how Kirk described it:

Now in the economic realm, what is the American cause? It seems to be the defense of an economic system which allows men and women to make their own principle choices in life, which reinforces political liberty, which adequately supplies the necessities of life, which recognizes and guides beneficently the deep-seated human longing for competition and measurable accomplishment. What we call the “free economy” does those these thing.

An economy focused merely on maximum efficiency or productivity is one that has lost its proper focus, according to Kirk. It must also contribute to the maintenance of “a decent society.” An American economy organized as a “free economy” must provide its people with fruitful work, sufficient leisure, and “hopeful competition.”

It will not take much to convince Breitbart readers that our economy has failed this test in recent years. Opening the American market to imports from mercantilist China and low-wage competition from developing nations has devasted large parts of our country. The destructive impact on American manufacturing, in particular, has been far worse than even pessimists foresaw. In many areas of the country, “fruitful work” and “hopeful competition” are more legends than reality, something that might have existed for our ancestors but has not been seen in generations.

Here is how Kirk described the American economy of the 1950s:

A free economy is one in which men and women can make their own choices. They can choose the kind of work they want to do, and where they want to do it. They can buy what they choose, and abstain from what they choose. They can work when they like, within limits, and rest when they like. They can change their occupations and employers and their material circumstances much as they like. These are great benefits: they help to satisfy the fundamental human longing for self-reliance. They make men and women free.

In the name of “free trade,” we killed the free economy. Now, many Americans find their opportunities limited and, if they complain, they are told they should move and take what is on offer in a far-off city. Rather than changing occupations and employers as much as they would like, they find themselves shuffling between low-paying jobs and working whatever hours their employers demand. They cannot buy the things they want but are forced to buy health insurance.

Our men and women are not free. Our economy is not a free economy; it is a servile economy. It more closely resembles the economy of a colony than a free republic.

Kirk praised America of the 1950s because its “wealth is very widely and equitably distributed.”

“Never before, in any civilized society, has there been a greater equality of incomes than there is now in America,” Kirk wrote. “So far as material achievement can satisfy human longings, nevertheless, we Americans have gone further than have any other people; and we have diffused our prosperity more widely throughout our nation.”

The last two decades have seen the process reverse. Prosperity has become concentrated in the hands of the few; inequality of income has risen to mind-bending ratios. This is not unprecedented in the history of civilized society. But it is not an economy built on what Kirk saw as the principles of America.

Kirk did not think the economy of the 1950s was perfect. He warned that prosperity was only the starting place, not the goal.

Kirk wrote:

We have many grave problems. We need to humanize mass production, and to restore craftsmanship and personal accomplishment to work, and to teach ourselves how to make our leisure something better than boredom. We need to infuse into modern industrial life a sense of community and purpose and hope and deep-rooted security.

It was easy enough for those with open minds to hear this idea in the words President Donald Trump spoke on the day of his inaugural. Kirk was describing the economics of American greatness in the 1950s–while Trump was promising to “Make America Great Again” by restoring the institutions and ideas that had been forsaken in the passing decades.

Today, we call this patriotic faith in a free economy “economic nationalism.” Russel Kirk simply referred to it as the economic principle of the American cause.

CNN has always been left-leaning but in the Age of Trump the biased network has gone into full fake news mode to attack the President. Hardly a week goes by without the beleaguered network having to retract a false or misleading story and that’s on top of their journalist decision to pass partisan opinion off as hard news. While that’s bad, it gets worse because CNN nimrod Brian Stelter is mad as hell at competitor Fox News for spreading accurate information.

You have to know this is Trump related. The president sent out a tweet, which always gets the left scarring around like a cockroaches when the kitchen light comes on:

While the Fake News loves to talk about my so-called low approval rating, @foxandfriends just showed that my rating on Dec. 28, 2017, was approximately the same as President Obama on Dec. 28, 2009, which was 47%…and this despite massive negative Trump coverage & Russia hoax!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2017

“While the Fake News loves to talk about my so-called low approval rating, [Fox & Friends] just showed that my rating on Dec. 28, 2017, was approximately the same as President Obama on Dec. 28, 2009, which was 47%…and this despite massive negative Trump coverage & Russia hoax!” Trump wrote.

To which Stelter replied:

This is a prime example of how “Fox & Friends” does a disservice to viewers: https://t.co/ErJBOTAHbo

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) December 29, 2017

“This is a prime example of how “Fox & Friends” does a disservice to viewers,” wrote Stelter, linking to Trump’s tweet.

What exactly is the “disservice” that Fox & Friends is doing to it’s viewers? Providing accurate information? That’s what Stelter has his panties in a bunch over? Well, his initials are “BS.”

Even the Trump-hating fraudsters at Newsweek believe this information to be true:

TRUMP APPROVAL RATING SAME AS OBAMA AFTER FIRST YEAR, AT LEAST ACCORDING TO ONE POLL

President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, have at least one thing in common: identical approval and disapproval ratings in one national poll after their first year in office.

Rasmussen Reports’ latest poll showed Thursday that Trump had a 46 percent approval rating compared to a 53 percent disapproval figure, which were near the same percentages Obama received at the end of 2009.

Okay, so we have established that the information presented by Fox & Friends is factual, not an opinion and not a lie. Getting back to Brian Stelter, he calls reporting this information a disservice to people. In other words he’s saying, “ how dare Fox spread the truth.” He’s outraged that a competing news network isn’t a lying sack of shit like CNN.

Looking at it in a slightly different and funnier way, Trump accused the liberal media of being fake news and CNN responded by attacking Fox for being real news. I doesn’t get any crazier than that, folks.

The left has long suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome and what we are starting to see is that the President is literally breaking these fragile liberals. They are so damaged by him that they can no longer function or form semi-coherent thoughts.

CNN’s credibility has suffered greatly because of their biased and fraudulent coverage of Donald Trump. Their reaction to regain some respect has been to be even more full of shit, which seems like an odd way to go. With Brian Stelter attacking Fox for spreading accurate information it’s clear CNN no longer cares what anyone thinks. If they can’t be a trusted news network they have decided to be the least reliable news possible.

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