53percenter's Blog

Despite the best efforts of the socialist left and their Parkland puppets, the National Rifle Association is alive and well…

The nation’s foremost defenders of the Second Amendment were targeted by an organized, well-funded and anti-American pressure campaign led by fascist punk David Hogg and his Twitter mob following the horrific massacre at a South Florida High School last year.

The media joined with the socialists to crush the NRA and while the organization suffered a series of body blows, they are still standing and on Friday, President Donald J. Trump addressed the annual convention in Indianapolis before a raucous crowd of enthusiastic patriots.

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The president also dealt another blow to the globalist gangsters when he announced that the U.S. would be pulling out of the United Nations arms treaty.

Via Reuters “Trump pulling U.S. out of U.N. arms treaty, heeding NRA”:

President Donald Trump told the National Rifle Association on Friday he was pulling the United States out of an international arms treaty signed in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama but opposed by the NRA and other conservative groups.

Trump told members of the gun lobby at an annual meeting he intends to revoke the status of the United States as a signatory to the Arms Trade Treaty, which was never ratified by the U.S. Senate.

“We’re taking our signature back,” Trump said to thousands of cheering attendees, many wearing red hats emblazoned with the Republican president’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

On Twitter, Trump called the decision a defense of “American sovereignty.” In reversing the U.S. position on the pact, he wrote, “We will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on your Second Amendment freedoms.”

The NRA has long opposed the treaty, which regulates the $70 billion business in conventional arms and seeks to keep weapons out of the hands of human rights abusers. The lobbying group argues it would undermine domestic gun rights, a view the Obama administration rejected.

The agreement covers weapons exports, ranging from small firearms to tanks, but not domestic sales.

Trump said the United Nations would soon receive formal notice of the withdrawal.

The event wasn’t without controversy as some asshole hurled a cellphone at the POTUS, a stupid and futile gesture.

WATCH: Cell phone thrown as President Trump takes stage at NRA event. https://t.co/EETkKAi5dv pic.twitter.com/OzV6VyN247

— The Hill (@thehill) April 27, 2019

The culprit’s aim was as bad as his judgment and it didn’t take long before he was arrested.

The NRA along with Trump is a bulwark against the disarmament of millions of law-abiding Americans which is supported by Democrats led by Rep. Eric Swalwell who all understand that they will be unable to impose their vision of a totalitarian socialist utopia with themselves in command as long as the citizenry is able to fight back.

Things just got real for Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh, a Democrat who rules over a city that has become one of the biggest shitholes in America.

On Thursday morning, the FBI raided Pugh’s home as the scandal-plagued politician’s woes continue to mount over her alleged chicanery involving bulk sales of her self-published series of children’s books and kickbacks.

Pugh has been on an indefinite leave of absence for alleged health reasons and has faced numerous calls for her resignation although she continues to collect her paycheck.

On Thursday morning, things just got real for Mayor Pugh.

Among the locations being raided by the FBI in Baltimore:
+ City Hall
+ Two homes owned by Mayor Catherine Pugh
+ The Maryland Center for Adult Training
+The office of Pugh’s attorney, Steven Silverman
+ Home of Pugh aide Gary Brown Jr. https://t.co/KpinYvK3cC

— The Baltimore Sun (@baltimoresun) April 25, 2019

Via The Associated Press, “Searches by FBI, IRS add to Baltimore mayor’s mounting woes”:

Federal agents raided the homes and City Hall offices of Baltimore’s embattled mayor on Thursday amid dramatically widening investigations to determine whether she used bulk sales of her self-published children’s books to disguise kickbacks.

The multiple early-morning searches pushed the latest political scandal for Maryland’s largest city to a crescendo after weeks of uncertainty and mounting pressure for Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh to step down. The politically isolated first-term mayor, who has long been an avid runner, slipped out of sight April 1, citing deteriorating health, just as the governor called on the state prosecutor to investigate allegations of “self-dealing” by the embattled Democrat.

Gov. Larry Hogan joined calls for her immediate resignation after news broke of the Thursday morning raids, as agents with the FBI and the IRS criminal division carried boxes of evidence out of her City Hall suite. Agents also scoured her two Baltimore homes, the home of an aide and a nonprofit organization she once led.

As for Pugh? There are conflicting reports as to her whereabouts leading to speculation that she has gone on the lam.

Baltimore mayor whereabouts unknown as FBI, IRS raid her office, homehttps://t.co/2SjkE6hrSG pic.twitter.com/F575BtdH4D

— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) April 26, 2019

According to the Washington Times, “Baltimore mayor whereabouts unknown as FBI, IRS raid her office, home”:

Since April 1, Ms. Pugh has been on a self-imposed, paid leave of absence “to recover from pneumonia.” She has denied any wrongdoing related to her financial dealings, and legal analysts noted that Thursday’s raids did not mean Ms. Pugh has been charged with any crimes.

But her absence has fed questions and rumors about her location. News anchor Rick Ritter for Baltimore’s CBS-TV affiliate WJZ said on Twitter that she had fled the state.

Pugh spokesman James Bentley told The Washington Times on Thursday that he did not know where Ms. Pugh was and would not comment “on speculation about the mayor’s whereabouts.”

Meanwhile, the Mayor’s Office of Public Affairs did not respond to phone calls or emails. A quick survey of its news websites revealed that no updates had been posted since April 1.

In a statement, Ms. Pugh’s attorney, Mr. Silverman, pushed back on the idea his office had been “raided” and said federal agents served a subpoena to collect her original financial records related to her children’s book work.

“We will continue to defend the Mayor, who is entitled to the presumption of innocence,” Mr. Silverman said.

His office told The Times they had no further comments to offer.

The city that was famously portrayed in HBO’s gritty crime series The Wire is every bit as much a sewer of incompetence and political corruption in real life and Pugh has been a major reason as her priorities have catered to those who are race-obsessed social justice warriors at the expense of productive citizens who are fleeing the city in droves.

Among Pugh’s priorities have been the use of taxpayer money to fund the defense of illegal immigrants, banning styrofoam containers, getting rid of civil war monuments and authorizing city resources to send 60 busloads of student activists to last year’s David Hogg lead anti-Second Amendment rally in D.C.

Now just when it looked like she had become a serious player in Democrat machine politics, she is fighting for her survival.

Sometimes life comes at you fast.

“Are you a U.S. citizen?”

Only in self-defeating, sovereignty-eroding America is the idea of asking whether people living in America are American citizens for the American census a matter of controversy.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the Trump administration can include a citizenship question on the high-stakes 2020 Census questionnaire. Thank goodness, the conservative majority indicated support for allowing it. There’s already such a question on the annual American Community Survey administered by the Census Bureau. It was asked in long-form questionnaires sent to a sample of households in 2000. And it was regularly asked in historical census forms from 1820-1950.

But we live in a Trump-deranged age, so now it’s tantamount to an international human rights crime to ask anyone about citizenship status at any time for any reason. Heaven forbid we inconvenience or discomfit legal noncitizens or illegal immigrants with a question!

Open borders activists, left-wing immigration lawyers and identity politics radicals exploded on cue:

—Former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder decried the “unconstitutional and irresponsible action” to “suppress the count in minority communities.”

—The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee fumed about the “political stunt that unfairly targets immigrant communities throughout our country in an attempt to SILENCE immigrants and benefit Republicans.”

—Histrionic social justice actress Alyssa Milano called it an “attack on immigrant communities and our democracy itself.”

—Jorge Luis Vasquez Jr. of LatinoJustice, funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, vented that a citizenship question would “damage all our daily lives for decades.”

—Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, another Soros-funded outfit, which sued over the citizenship question, blasted the “scheme to hijack the 2020 Census.”

—The Soros-funded Asian Americans Advancing Justice lobbying group condemned Trump as “racially and politically motivated.”

Let’s all practice our deep pranayama breathing and ground ourselves in reality. It’s the radical left, much of it fueled with Soros’ money, that has hijacked the U.S. Census, not President Donald Trump. “No Illegal Immigrant Left Behind” is crucial to their strategy. Why?

Remember: The Census is used to divvy up seats in the House as a proportion of their population based on the head count. The redistribution of power extends to presidential elections because the Electoral College is pegged to the size of congressional delegations. More people equal more seats. More illegal immigrants equal more power. Indeed, the Center for Immigration Studies determined that in the 2000 election cycle, the presence of noncitizens (illegal immigrants, temporary visitors and green card holders) caused nine seats in the House to switch hands. California added six seats it would not have had otherwise. Texas, New York and Florida each gained a seat. Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin each lost a seat. Montana, Kentucky and Utah each failed to secure a seat they would otherwise have gained.

Our Founding Fathers explicitly warned against the perils of foreigners manipulating representation by overwhelming the country. Immigration scholar and author Daniel Horowitz points to Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story’s prophetic admonition: “If aliens might be admitted indiscriminately to enjoy all the rights of citizens at the will of a single state, the Union might itself be endangered by an influx of foreigners, hostile to its institutions, ignorant of its powers, and incapable of a due estimate of its privileges.”

Statesman Roger Sherman similarly emphasized the need to “guard against an improper mode of naturalization” by states adopting “easier terms.”

Too late. Multiple illegal immigrant amnesties, coupled with massive legal immigration, failure to deport visa overstayers and the metastasis of sanctuary policies, have taken their toll. Moreover, our constitutionally mandated decennial count has become a full-employment program for ideologically driven liberal interest groups cashing in on the census-gathering process and reshaping the electoral landscape. During the last census under President Barack Obama, with $300 billion in federal funding at stake, social justice groups from Soros-funded ACORN to Soros-funded Voto Latino to the Soros-allied SEIU were enlisted to count heads and help noncitizens feel “safe.”

The Census boondoggle has become a tax-subsidized national future Democratic voter outreach drive. Soros’ operations, along with 77 other liberal foundations, have invested $30 million to make illegal immigrants count. The Open Society Institute’s grantees and partners on coopting the Census for Democrat gains include the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, Miami Workers Center, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Southwest Workers Union, New York Community Trust, New York Foundation, Center for American Progress, People for the American Way and the Funders Census Initiative. A recently leaked internal board document revealed that the Soros network has coordinated efforts for the past four years to “influence appropriations for the Census Bureau” and add new racial and ethnic categories.

The Census Bureau will need 500,000 temporary workers to conduct the count in what will already be a hyperpolarized election year. However the Supreme Court rules on the citizenship question, the Trump administration must ensure that Open Borders Inc. does not co-opt the enumerator corps. As SorosWorld well understands:

Power lies not just with who is being counted, but who’s doing the counting.

Michelle Malkin’s email address is [email protected] To find out more about Michelle Malkin and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

The Florida state Senate approved legislation to ban sanctuary cities that shield criminal illegal aliens from being deported, a plan that is now likely headed to Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) desk.

On Friday, the Florida state Senate passed the sanctuary city ban on a 22 to 18 vote, with only one Republican, state Sen. Anitere Flores, voting against the measure along with every elected state Senate Democrat.

The sanctuary city ban, one of DeSantis’s leading initiatives since becoming governor, comes with strict enforcement mechanisms designed to prevent localities and counties from shielding criminal illegal aliens from being deported by federal immigration officials.

For example, the plan includes a fine of $5,000 that the state can impose on a jurisdiction for every day that they have a sanctuary policy in place.

The bill passed 22-18, Florida is going to ban sanctuary cities. Congrats to @JoeGruters and @GovRonDeSantis

— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) April 26, 2019

The sanctuary city ban now heads back to the state House, where it was already approved, for passage with new amendments and is likely to soon head to the desk of DeSantis to be signed into law.

Should Florida implement a sanctuary city ban, they will be only the second state with one of the largest foreign-born populations in the country to do so. The first state with a significant foreign-born population to ban sanctuary cities was Texas last year.

Today, Florida has the fourth largest foreign-born population in the county, with more than 4.1 million illegal aliens, legal immigrants, and foreign-born naturalized citizens. California, Texas, and New York continue to have the largest foreign-born populations in the county. California, a sanctuary state, has almost as many foreign-born residents as New York, Texas, and Florida combined, with more than 10.5 million illegal aliens, legal residents, and foreign-born naturalized citizens living in the state.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. 

April 27 marks the seven-year anniversary of the first op-ed piece that I had published. Not surprisingly, the platform willing to accept something from a conservative high school senior was Breitbart. Then as now, Breitbart was willing to provide a place for otherwise unheard voices to be expressed.

The headline for that 2012 column was “Liberal Bias Starts in High School Economics Textbooks.” 

I pointed out that Krugman’s Economics for AP, written by Margaret Ray and David A. Anderson, and adapted from Paul Krugman and Robin Wells’ Economics (Second Edition), was being used as the textbook to teach the principles of economics to our supposedly best and brightest young people.

In that text, Krugman, who never met a free market he wished to remain free, dismissed the success of Ronald Reagan’s economic policies without any presentation of arguments to the contrary.  In my 2012 editorial I wrote:

Throughout the entire textbook, there are historical, factual, and statistical distortions. For example, Chapter 36 (“The modern macroeconomic consensus”) contains 16 sweeping generalizations such as: “Nearly all macroeconomists now agree… There is now a broad consensus… Today, most macroeconomists believe… Almost all macroeconomists now accept…” (pp. 355-58). None of these assertions are backed up with even a single citation. If a student were to submit an essay with such disregard for basic evidence, it would ensure a failing grade.

I enjoyed looking back at that piece and reading the brief bio line at the end that identified me as a “…high school senior who will be attending Baylor University.” It also identified me as the co-founder of SOS Liberty. I could not have imagined then that Baylor and SOS were a dream and that Turning Point USA would become my reality. Much has changed in the past seven years.

And much hasn’t changed at all.

In an April 23 article on a Powerline blog titled, AP History Textbook Calls Trump “Racist,” Questions his Mental Stability, Paul Mirengoff reports that by 2020 AP high school students will be reading from a text that characterizes the President as someone whose opponents questioned his mental health, and as someone who ran a campaign that permitted racists to come out of the American shadows.

Mirengoff exposes the textbook author’s intent in citing “Clinton supporters’” concerns about Trump as opposed to citing objective facts as “a device to plant the idea that President Trump is mentally unstable, a proposition for which there is no basis other than raw hatred of the man.”

Mirengoff’s contention reads almost exactly the same as mine offered seven years ago.

This issue has been studied over time and across curricula. In 2017, Intellectual Takeout reported on a study of psychology texts that showed political bias in  favor of team left’s politically correct models of human behavior. Historian Dr. Burton Folsom, retired from Hillsdale College in 2016, has been pointing out examples of liberal bias in textbooks all the way down to the elementary level for decades.

It is one thing for a teacher to present a set of facts to a student and then attempt to persuade them as to how they should be interpreted. While it stands opposed to the goals of education, at least this practice allows someone else to counter the teacher’s efforts in indoctrination by pointing out different conclusions that could be drawn from the facts.

When the facts themselves are misrepresented, we are dealing with a very different form of treachery. This masks the indoctrination. Consider the following two hypothetical examples, derived from my 2012 column on Krugman and Reganomics:

In the first case, a professor could make the following statement: Reagan implemented large tax cuts in the 1980s. The decade also experienced significant economic growth and an increase in tax revenue. However, neither of these events had anything to do with Regan’s tax cut and the positive economic developments happened despite Reagan.

That’s a teacher taking facts and indoctrinating his student by forcing his personal opinion on them.

Now consider this not-so-hard-to-imagine excerpt from a textbook: The 1980’s evidenced a significant growth in tax revenue and GDP despite an attempt by President Reagan to create the exact opposite effect by cutting taxes.

This is what the authors of textbooks are up to. They want to make it appear as though the teachers aren’t trying to influence the students.  They are just teaching them facts right out of the textbook! 

The best indicator that one is about to engage an intelligent mind is by finding a sign that says “open” hanging at its entrance. An open mind is one that is willing and able to accept and contemplate facts as they are presented. The surest way to trick an open mind and turn it into a closed one is to corrupt the input of facts.

This is the intent of liberal educators and textbook authors in the United States and elsewhere in Western nations today. It is the reason why all conservatives need to heed the warnings and whistle-blowing of people like Paul Mirengoff, Burt Folsom, and others.  We need to be involved in school boards and curriculum committees so that the education establishment can’t get away with the unchallenged alteration of history.

Dishonest curriculum being forced upon high school students is what motivated me to write my first op-ed piece seven years ago today. It is the reason I apparently need to keep writing.

Friday on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” Harvard University law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz reiterated his position that there was no actionable obstruction of justice committed by President Donald Trump based on the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

Dershowitz said Trump cannot be guilty of obstruction for performing duties allowed under his constitutional presidential powers.

“[I]n my introduction in the Mueller report, I go through the elements of obstruction of justice,” he said. “The act itself has to be illegal. It can’t be an act that is authorized under Article Two of the Constitution.”

That included the firing of then-FBI Director James Comey, he contended.

“It’s not even a close case,” Dershowitz explained. “The best analogy is president George H. W. Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger on the eve of his trial in order to stop the Iran-Contra investigation. The special prosecutor said he did it for that reason. Nobody suggested obstruction. It can’t be obstruction of justice if the president is acting within his authority. Nixon obstructed justice because he acted outside his authority, destroying evidence, paying hush money, telling his subordinates to lie to the FBI.”

Dershowitz warned Democrats, including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), there would be consequences if Democrats continued to pursue impeachment.

“I am telling her all of the time,” he added. “She better start listening, because it’s going to come back to hurt the Democrats. I am a Democrat. I’m a liberal. I want to see the Constitution complied with, I want the Democrats to do the right thing, get back to the business of legislating.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

Sometimes, a few sentences tell you more about a person — and, more importantly, an ideology — than a learned thesis. That is the case with tweets from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama two days ago in response to the mass murder of more than 300 Christians and others in Sri Lanka.

Their tweets are worth serious analysis because they reveal a great deal about the left. Of course, they reveal a great deal about Clinton and Obama, too, but that doesn’t interest me.

And that, too, is important. Many Americans — especially conservatives and “independents” — are more interested in individual politicians than in political ideologies.

Many conservatives have long been fixated on Clinton — so much so that probably any other Democrat would have defeated Donald Trump, as conservative anger specifically toward her propelled many people to the polls. Similarly, Republican Never-Trumpers are fixated on Trump rather than policy. They care more about Trump’s personal flaws than about the mortal dangers the left poses to America and the West or about the uniquely successful conservative policies Trump promulgates.

And independents all claim to vote “for the person, not the party.”

Only leftists understand that one must vote left no matter who the Democrat is, no matter who the Republican opponent is. Leftists are completely interchangeable: There is no ideological difference among the 20 or so Democrats running for president. Mayor Pete Buttigieg is not one degree to the right of Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren.

That is why it is important to understand Clinton and Obama’s tweets: to understand the left, not to understand her or him.

Here are the tweets:

Obama: “The attacks on tourists and Easter worshippers in Sri Lanka are an attack on humanity. On a day devoted to love, redemption, and renewal, we pray for the victims and stand with the people of Sri Lanka.”

Three hours later, Clinton tweeted: “On this holy weekend for many faiths, we must stand united against hatred and violence. I’m praying for everyone affected by today’s horrific attacks on Easter worshippers and travelers in Sri Lanka.”

As they both spelled “worshipers” the same idiosyncratic way and used the term “Easter worshippers,” it is likely they either had the same writers or Clinton copied Obama.

Here’s what’s critical: Neither used the word “Christians.” And in order to avoid doing so, they went so far as to make up a new term — “Easter worshippers” — heretofore unknown to any Christian.

When Jews were murdered at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Clinton mentioned the synagogue in a tweet. But in her post-Sri Lanka tweet, despite the bombing of three churches filled with Christians, Clinton made no mention of church or churches. In a tweet after the massacre of Muslims in New Zealand, she wrote that her heart broke for “the global Muslim community.” But in her latest tweet, not a word about Christians or the global Christian community.

Obama similarly wrote in his tweet about New Zealand that he was grieving with “the Muslim community” over the “horrible massacre in the Mosques.” But in his tweet about Sri Lanka, there is no mention of Christians or churches.

The reason neither of them mentioned Christians or churches is that the left has essentially forbidden mention of all the anti-Christian murders perpetrated by Muslims in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and of all the Muslim desecration of churches in Europe, Africa and anywhere else. This is part of the same phenomenon — that I and others have documented — of British police and politicians covering up six years of rape of 1,400 of English girls by Muslim “grooming gangs” in Rotherham and elsewhere in England.

Essentially, the left’s rule is that nothing bad — no matter how true — may be said about Muslims or Islam and nothing good — no matter how true — may be said of Christians or Christianity.

Clinton’s post-New Zealand tweet also included these words: “We must continue to fight the perpetuation and normalization of Islamophobia and racism in all its forms. White supremacist terrorists must be condemned by leaders everywhere. Their murderous hatred must be stopped.”

She made sure to condemn “Islamophobia,” but she wrote not a word about the far more destructive and widespread hatred of Christians in the Muslim world, seen in Muslims’ virtual elimination of the Christian communities in the Middle East, the regular murder and kidnappings of Coptic Christians in Egypt and the murder of Christians in Nigeria. She calls on “leaders everywhere” to condemn “white supremacist terrorists,” one of the smallest hate groups on Earth, but never calls on leaders everywhere to condemn Islamist terrorists, the largest hate group on Earth.

These two tweets tell you a lot about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. But far more importantly, they tell you a lot about the left.

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