The truth will set us all free

The truth will set us all free

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation was star-crossed from the start. His friend and successor as FBI director, James Comey, by his own admission prompted the investigation -- with the deliberate leaking of classified memos about his conversations with President Donald Trump to the press.

Mueller then unnecessarily stocked his team with what the press called his "dream team" of mostly Democratic partisans. One had defended a Hillary Clinton employee. Another had defended the Clinton Foundation.

Mueller did not at first announce to the press why he had dismissed Trump-hating FBI operatives Lisa Page and Peter Strozk from his investigative team. Instead, he staggered their departures to leave the impression they were routine reassignments.

But Mueller's greatest problem was his original mandate to discover whether Trump colluded with the Russians in 2016 to tilt the election in his favor.

After 15 months, Mueller has indicted a number of Trump associates, but on charges having nothing to do with Russian collusion. They faced inordinately long prison sentences unless they "flipped" and testified against Trump.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation was star-crossed from the start. His friend and successor as FBI director, James Comey, by his own admission prompted the investigation -- with the deliberate leaking of classified memos about his conversations with President Donald Trump to the press.

Mueller then unnecessarily stocked his team with what the press called his "dream team" of mostly Democratic partisans. One had defended a Hillary Clinton employee. Another had defended the Clinton Foundation.

Mueller did not at first announce to the press why he had dismissed Trump-hating FBI operatives Lisa Page and Peter Strozk from his investigative team. Instead, he staggered their departures to leave the impression they were routine reassignments.

But Mueller's greatest problem was his original mandate to discover whether Trump colluded with the Russians in 2016 to tilt the election in his favor.

After 15 months, Mueller has indicted a number of Trump associates, but on charges having nothing to do with Russian collusion. They faced inordinately long prison sentences unless they "flipped" and testified against Trump.

We are left with the impression that Mueller cannot find much to do with his original mandate of unearthing Russian collusion, but he still thinks Trump is guilty of something.

In other words, Mueller has reversed the proper order of jurisprudence.

Instead of presuming Trump innocent unless he finds evidence of Russian collusion, Mueller started with the assumption that the reckless raconteur Trump surely must be guilty of some lawbreaking. Thus, it is Mueller's job to hunt for past crimes to prove it.

While Mueller so far has not found Trump involved in collusion with foreign citizens to warp a campaign, there is evidence that others most surely were colluding -- but are not of interest to Mueller.

It is likely that during the 2016 campaign, officials at the Department of Justice, FBI, CIA and National Security Agency broke laws to ensure that the outsider Trump lost to Hillary Clinton. FBI and DOJ officials misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to obtain warrants to surveil Trump associates. National security officials unmasked the names of those being monitored and likely leaked them to the press with the intent to spread unverified rumors detrimental to the Trump campaign.

A spy on the federal payroll was implanted into the Trump campaign. Hillary Clinton's campaign team paid for research done by a former British intelligence officer working with Russian sources to compile a dossier on Trump. Clinton hid her investment in Christopher Steele's dossier by using intermediaries such as the Perkins Coie law firm and Fusion GPS to wipe away her fingerprints.

As a result of wrongful conduct, more than a dozen officials at the FBI and DOJ have resigned or retired, or were fired or reassigned. Yet so far none of these miscreants has been indicted or has faced the same legal scrutiny that Mueller applies to Trump associates.

Hillary Clinton is not facing legal trouble for destroying subpoenaed emails, for using an unlawful email server or for the expenditure of campaign money on the Steele dossier.

No president has ever faced impeachment for supposed wrongdoing alleged to have taken place before he took office -- not Andrew Johnson, not Richard Nixon, and not even Bill Clinton, who lied about his liaisons with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. With the effort to go back years, if not decades, into Trump's business and personal life, we are now in unchartered territory.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation was star-crossed from the start. His friend and successor as FBI director, James Comey, by his own admission prompted the investigation -- with the deliberate leaking of classified memos about his conversations with President Donald Trump to the press.

Mueller then unnecessarily stocked his team with what the press called his "dream team" of mostly Democratic partisans. One had defended a Hillary Clinton employee. Another had defended the Clinton Foundation.

Mueller did not at first announce to the press why he had dismissed Trump-hating FBI operatives Lisa Page and Peter Strozk from his investigative team. Instead, he staggered their departures to leave the impression they were routine reassignments.

But Mueller's greatest problem was his original mandate to discover whether Trump colluded with the Russians in 2016 to tilt the election in his favor.

After 15 months, Mueller has indicted a number of Trump associates, but on charges having nothing to do with Russian collusion. They faced inordinately long prison sentences unless they "flipped" and testified against Trump.

We are left with the impression that Mueller cannot find much to do with his original mandate of unearthing Russian collusion, but he still thinks Trump is guilty of something.

In other words, Mueller has reversed the proper order of jurisprudence.

Instead of presuming Trump innocent unless he finds evidence of Russian collusion, Mueller started with the assumption that the reckless raconteur Trump surely must be guilty of some lawbreaking. Thus, it is Mueller's job to hunt for past crimes to prove it.

While Mueller so far has not found Trump involved in collusion with foreign citizens to warp a campaign, there is evidence that others most surely were colluding -- but are not of interest to Mueller.

It is likely that during the 2016 campaign, officials at the Department of Justice, FBI, CIA and National Security Agency broke laws to ensure that the outsider Trump lost to Hillary Clinton. FBI and DOJ officials misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in order to obtain warrants to surveil Trump associates. National security officials unmasked the names of those being monitored and likely leaked them to the press with the intent to spread unverified rumors detrimental to the Trump campaign.

A spy on the federal payroll was implanted into the Trump campaign. Hillary Clinton's campaign team paid for research done by a former British intelligence officer working with Russian sources to compile a dossier on Trump. Clinton hid her investment in Christopher Steele's dossier by using intermediaries such as the Perkins Coie law firm and Fusion GPS to wipe away her fingerprints.

As a result of wrongful conduct, more than a dozen officials at the FBI and DOJ have resigned or retired, or were fired or reassigned. Yet so far none of these miscreants has been indicted or has faced the same legal scrutiny that Mueller applies to Trump associates.

Hillary Clinton is not facing legal trouble for destroying subpoenaed emails, for using an unlawful email server or for the expenditure of campaign money on the Steele dossier.

No president has ever faced impeachment for supposed wrongdoing alleged to have taken place before he took office -- not Andrew Johnson, not Richard Nixon, and not even Bill Clinton, who lied about his liaisons with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. With the effort to go back years, if not decades, into Trump's business and personal life, we are now in unchartered territory.

The argument is not that Trump committed crimes while president -- indeed, his record at home and abroad is winning praise. The allegations are instead about what he may have done as a private citizen, and whether it could have reversed the 2016 election.

The only way to clear up this messy saga is for Trump to immediately declassify all documents -- without redactions -- relating to the Mueller investigation, the FISA court warrants, the Clinton email investigation, and CIA and FBI involvement with the dossier and the use of informants.

Second, there needs to be another special counsel to investigate wrongdoing on the part of senior officials in these now nearly discredited agencies. The mandate should be to discover whether there was serial conflict of interest, chronic lying to federal officials, obstruction of justice, improper unmasking and leaking, misleading of federal courts, and violation of campaign finance laws.

It is past time to stop the stonewalling, the redacting, the suppression, the leaking to the press and the media hysteria. The government must turn over all relevant documents to two special counsels and free each to discover who did what in 2016.

Americans need the whole truth to ensure equality under the law and to thereby set us free from this nearly two-year nightmare.

The Agenda(s) That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Er, agendas....

The Agenda That Dare Not Speak Its Name
The Democrats' plans for 2019—and beyond

Matthew Continetti, Free Beacon

The Democrats have decided that agendas are overrated. Back in May, the party unveiled its "Better Deal" program, calling for expanded broadband access, an increase in the minimum wage, and paid family and sick leave. Voters didn't bite. So last month the Democrats came up with "For the People," which simplifies the platform to infrastructure spending, lowering health care costs, and draining the swamp. Again, crickets.

What to do? Party leadership has declared that it's every cis-het man for himself. "We trust our candidates to know their districts and the challenges facing their communities better than anyone," House campaign chair Ben Ray Luján tells the New York Times. Translation: If you are Conor Lamb, run as a gun-friendly champion of the working class. If you are Rashida Tlaib, feel free to announce that you would vote against aid for Israel and to call for bi-nationalism that would end the Jewish State. Texas Democrat Colin Allred, following Hillary Clinton, says everyone should be able to buy into Medicare. Maine Democrat Jared Golden, following Bernie Sanders, says, "We need to move towards a universal health care system, like Medicare-for-all."

Such diversity of approach troubles the philosopher kings of Forty-First Street. Discarding a "Washington platform," write Sheryl Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos, is "a risky strategy." It leaves unanswered the question of what the Democratic Party stands for. It "could raise questions among voters about how Democrats would govern." Questions to which there are few substantive answers.

The truth, though, is that the Democrats do have an agenda. They just can't say it aloud. The reason Democrats seek power in 2018 is to obstruct President Trump wholly and without exception, to tie down his administration using the subpoena powers of a dozen committees, and ultimately to lay the groundwork for his impeachment. The Democratic grassroots expects nothing less.

But the Democratic leadership understands that this unspoken agenda is unpalatable to the rest of the country. Swing voters may long for institutional checks against Trump, but they are leery of impeachment. Suburbanites may be annoyed by the president's tweets, but they still believe that both sides should "put aside their differences" and "get something done." The Times notices that many of the Democrats running in Republican-held districts "rarely mention the president by name." What these candidates understand is that explicitly making the 2018 election about Trump—which it certainly is—risks motivating Trump supporters to rally to his defense.

Better to keep quiet, have Trump loom in the background, and adapt to local circumstances as much as possible. Or as Nancy Pelosi put it recently, "Do whatever you have to do, just win."
Now, concealing the agenda of obstruction, investigation, and impeachment is one way to address the problem of an anxious middle. But it also creates another problem: Without cohesion, discipline, and guidance from above, the loudest and most extreme figures and ideas are free to capture the public's attention. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer can talk about insurance premiums until they are blue in the face, but the headlines and cable channels will be filled instead with mentions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Keith Ellison, Ilhan Omar, Andrew "Never That Great" Cuomo, Elizabeth "Racist From Front to Back" Warren, Cynthia "Let's Just Be Socialists" Nixon, and campaigns to abolish ICE, line items of $32.6 trillion for single-payer health care, and other vagaries of democratic socialism.

Generic candidates may win either the House or both the House and Senate for the Democrats. In so doing, however, they would bring into office radicals empowered by the election returns and unaccountable to party authority. And so a Democratic victory soon would be followed by Democratic infighting. There would be a battle over the future of Pelosi, a squabble over committee assignments, a clash over which single-payer health bill is brought to the floor. All of these struggles would distract from and potentially inhibit the larger campaign against Trump.

We've been here before. Republicans sought to harness the energy of the Tea Party in the 2010 election, only to miss several opportunities for Senate pickups because of unelectable candidates produced by ideological zeal. The desire on the part of Republicans to confront the president they despised led them to misunderstand the separation of powers and overreach in both the debt-ceiling fight of 2011 and the government shutdown of 2013. Lacking a coherent agenda beyond opposition to President Obama, the Republican House became his chief foil. Frustrated by impotence amid rising expectations, the Republican base became increasingly discontented and open to alternatives from outside the political establishment.

Sublimating their real agenda while avoiding intra-party debates may be enough for the Democrats to win in 2018. But that victory, should it happen, has a price. The bill comes due in 2020.

Explain the Chinese spy, Sen. Feinstein

Explain the Chinese spy, Sen. Feinstein

Marc A. Thiessen, The Washington Post

Imagine if it emerged that the Republican chairman of the House or Senate intelligence committee had a Russian spy working on their senate staff.

Think it would cause a political firestorm? Well, this week we learned that Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., had a Chinese spy on her staff who worked for her for 20 years, who was listed as an "office director" on payroll records and served as her driver when she was in San Francisco, all while reporting to China's Ministry of State Security though China's San Francisco Consulate. The reaction of the mainstream media?

Barely a peep.

Feinstein acknowledged the infiltration, but downplayed its significance.

"Five years ago the FBI informed me it had concerns that an administrative member of my California staff was potentially being sought out by the Chinese government to provide information" Feinstein said in statement -- which means the breach took place while Feinstein was heading the intelligence committee.

But, Feinstein insisted, "he never had access to classified or sensitive information or legislative matters" and was immediately fired. In other words: junior staffer, no policy role, no access to secrets, quickly fired -- no big deal.

But it is a big deal. I asked several former senior intelligence and law enforcement officials how serious this breach might have been. "It's plenty serious," one former top Justice Department official told me. "Focusing on his driver function alone, in Mafia families, the boss's driver was among the most trusted men in the crew, because among other things he heard everything that was discussed in the car."

A former top CIA clandestine officer explained to me what the agency would do if they had recruited the driver of a senior official like Feinstein. "We would have the driver record on his phone all conversations that Feinstein would have with passengers and phone calls in her car. If she left her phone, iPad or laptop in the car while she went to meetings, social events, dinners, etc., we would have the driver download all her devices.

If the driver drove for her for 20 years he would probably would have had access to her office and homes. We would have had the source put down an audio device in her office or homes if the opportunity presented itself. Depending on the take from all of what the source reported, we would use the info to target others that were close to her and exhibited some type of vulnerability."

"In short," this officer says, "we would have had a field day."

It seems improbable that Feinstein never once discussed anything sensitive in her car over a period of years. But let's assume that Feinstein was extraordinarily careful and never discussed any classified information in front of her driver or on any devices to which he had access. Even so, one former top intelligence official told me, "someone in that position could give an adversary a whole bunch on atmospherics and trends and attitudes which are from time to time far more important than the things we call secrets."

He added "It's like [having access to her] unclassified emails." (And we all know no one ever exposes classified information on unclassified emails). Washington is understandably focused on the threat from Russia. But according to FBI director Chris Wray, "China from a counterintelligence perspective represents the broadest, most pervasive, most threatening challenge we face as a country." It was China, after all, which hacked the Office of Personnel Management in 2015, stealing the SF-86 security clearance forms of many thousands of executive branch employees in the most devastating cyberattack in the history of our country.

Beijing has successfully recruited FBI agents and State Department employees as spies, and has used information from U.S. informants to kill dozens of CIA sources inside the regime. And now, we know they recruited a high value senate staffer who worked in immediate proximity to the head of the senate intelligence committee.

Feinstein owes the country a detailed explanation of how she let a Chinese spy into her inner sanctum. And the media should give this security breach the same attention they would if it involved Russia and the Republicans.

The Origins of Our Second Civil War

*update, a response by Mike Walker, below article...

The Origins of Our Second Civil War
Victor Davis Hanson, National Review


Globalism, the tech boom, illegal immigration, campus radicalism, the new racialism . . . Are they leading us toward 1861?

How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?

Almost every cultural and social institution — universities, the public schools, the NFL, the Oscars, the Tonys, the Grammys, late-night television, public restaurants, coffee shops, movies, TV, stand-up comedy — has been not just politicized but also weaponized.

Donald Trump’s election was not so much a catalyst for the divide as a manifestation and amplification of the existing schism.

We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968. Left–Right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography — always history’s force multiplier of civil strife. Red and blue states ensure that locale magnifies differences that were mostly manageable during the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton.

What has caused the United States to split apart so rapidly?

Globalization
Globalization had an unfortunate effect of undermining national unity. It created new iconic billionaires in high tech and finance, and their subsidiaries of coastal elites, while hollowing out the muscular jobs largely in the American interior.

Ideologies and apologies accumulated to justify the new divide. In a reversal of cause and effect, losers, crazies, clingers, American “East Germans,” and deplorables themselves were blamed for driving industries out of their neighborhoods (as if the characters out of Duck Dynasty or Ax Men turned off potential employers). Or, more charitably to the elites, the muscular classes were too racist, xenophobic, or dense to get with the globalist agenda, and deserved the ostracism and isolation they suffered from the new “world is flat” community. London and New York shared far more cultural affinities than did New York and Salt Lake City.

Meanwhile, the naturally progressive, more enlightened, and certainly cooler and hipper transcended their parents’ parochialism and therefore plugged in properly to the global project. And they felt that they were rightly compensated for both their talent and their ideological commitment to building a better post-American, globalized world.

One cultural artifact was that as our techies and financiers became rich, as did those who engaged in electric paper across time and space (lawyers, academics, insurers, investors, bankers, bureaucratic managers), the value of muscularity and the trades was deprecated. That was a strange development. After all, prestige cars, kitchen upgrades, gentrified home remodels, and niche food were never more in demand by the new elite. But who exactly laid the tile, put the engine inside the cars, grew the arugula, or put slate on the new hip roof?

In this same era, a series of global financial shocks, from the dot-com bust to the more radical 2008 near–financial meltdown, reflected a radical ongoing restructuring in American middle-class life, characterized by stagnant net income, family disintegration, and eroding consumer confidence. No longer were youth so ready to marry in their early twenties, buy a home, and raise a family of four or five. Compensatory ideology made the necessary adjustments to explain the economic doldrums and began to characterize what was impossible first as undesirable and later as near toxic. Pajama Boy sipping hot chocolate in his jammies, and the government-subsidized Life of Julia profile, became our new American Gothic.


High Tech
The mass production of cheap consumer goods, most assembled abroad, redefined wealth or, rather, disguised poverty. Suddenly the lower middle classes and the poor had in their palms the telecommunications power of the Pentagon of the 1970s, the computing force of IBM in the 1980s, and the entertainment diversity of the rich of the 1990s. They could purchase big screens for a fraction of what their grandparents paid for black-and-white televisions and with a computer be entertained just as well cocooning in their basement as by going out to a concert, movie, or football game.

But such electronic narcotics did not hide the fact that in terms of economics the lifestyles of their ancestors were eroding. The new normal was two parents at work, none at home; renting as often as buying; an eight-year rather than three-year car loan; fewer grandparents around the corner for babysitting or to assist when ill; and consumer service defined as hearing taped messages of an hour before reaching a helper in India or Vietnam.

High-tech gadgetry and the power to search the Internet did not seem to make Americans own more homes, pay off loans more quickly, or know their neighbors better. If in 1970 a nerd slandered one on the sidewalk and talked trash, he might not do it twice; in 2018, he did it electronically, boldly, and with impunity behind an array of masked social-media identities.

The Campus
Higher education surely helped split the country in two. In the 1980s, the universities embraced two antithetical agendas, both costly and reliant on borrowed money. On the one hand, campuses competed for scarcer students by styling themselves as Club Med–type resorts with costly upscale dorms, tony student-union centers, lavish gyms, and an array of in loco parentis social services. The net effect was to make colleges responsible not so much for education, but more for shielding now-fragile youth from the supposed reactionary forces that would buffet them after graduation.

But if campus materialism was at odds with classroom socialism, few seemed to notice. Instead, the idea grew up that one had no need to follow concretely the consequences of his abstract ideology. Or even worse, one’s hard-left politics — the louder and more strident the better — became a psychological means of squaring the circle of denouncing the West while being affluent and enjoying the material comforts of the good life.

Universities grew not just increasingly left-wing but far more intolerant than they were during the radicalism of the Sixties — but again in an infantile way. Speakers were shouted down to prove social-justice fides. “Studies” courses squeezed out philosophy and Latin. History became a melodramatic game of finding sinners and saints, rather than shared tragedy. Standards fell to accommodate poorly prepared incoming students, on the logic that old norms were arbitrary and discriminatory constructs anyway.

The curriculum now was recalibrated as therapeutic; it no longer aimed to challenge students by demanding wide reading, composition skills, and mastery of the inductive method. The net result was the worst of all possible worlds: An entire generation of students left college with record debt, mostly ignorant of the skills necessary to read, write, and argue effectively, lacking a general body of shared knowledge — and angry. They were often arrogant in their determination to actualize the ideologies of their professors in the real world. A generation ignorant, arrogant, and poor is a prescription for social volatility.

Frustration and failure were inevitable, more so when marriage and home-owning in a stagnant economy were now encumbered by $1 trillion in student loans. New conventional wisdom recalibrated the nuclear family and suburban life as the font of collective unhappiness. The result was the rise of the stereotypical single 28-year-old — furious at an unfair world that did not appreciate his unique sociology or environmental-studies major, stuck in his parents’ basement or garage, working enough at low-paying jobs to pay for entertainments, if his room, board, and car were subsidized by his aging and retired parents.

Illegal Immigration
Immigration was recalibrated hand-in-glove by progressives who wanted a new demographic to vote for leftist politicians and by Chamber of Commerce conservatives who wished an unlimited pool of cheap unskilled labor. The result was waves of illegal, non-diverse immigrants who arrived at precisely the moment when the old melting pot was under cultural assault.

The old black–white dichotomy in the United States was being recalibrated as “diversity,” or in racialist terms as a coalition now loosely and often grossly inexactly framed as non-white versus the (supposedly shrinking) white majority. Compensatory politics redefined illegal immigration once it was clear that not just a few million but perhaps one day 20 million potential new voters would remake the Electoral College. Difference was now no longer a transitory prelude to assimilation but a desirable permanent and separatist tribalism, even as it became harder to define exactly what ethnic and racial difference really was in an increasingly intermarried society. We soon went from the buffoonery of a wannabe Native American Ward Churchill to the psychodrama of an Islamist, anti-Semitic Linda Sarsour.

The Obama Project
We forget especially the role of Barack Obama. He ran as a Biden Democrat renouncing gay marriage, saying, “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.” Then he “evolved” on the question and created a climate in which to agree with this position could get one fired. He promised to close the border and reduce illegal immigration: “We will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws.” Then he institutionalized the idea that to agree with that now-abandoned agenda was a career-ender.

Obama vowed to “work across the aisle” and was elected on the impression that he was a “bridge builder” who would heal racial animosity, restore U.S. prestige abroad, and reignite the economy after the September 2008 meltdown. Instead, he weaponized the IRS, the FBI, the NSC, the CIA, and the State Department and redefined the deep state as if it were the Congress, but with the ability to make and enforce laws all at once. “Hope and Change” became “You didn’t build that!”

President Obama, especially in his second term, soon renounced much of what he had run on. He raised taxes, stagnated what would have been a natural recovery, weighed in on hot-button racialized criminal cases, advanced a radical social agenda, and polarized the country along lines of difference.

Again, Obama most unfortunately redefined race as a white-versus-nonwhite binary, in an attempt to build a new coalition of progressives, on the unspoken assumption that the clingers were destined to slow irrelevance and with them their retrograde and obstructionist ideas. In other words, the Left could win most presidential elections of the future, as Obama did, by writing off the interior and hyping identity politics on the two coasts.

The Obama administration hinged on leveraging these sociocultural, political, and economic schisms even further. The split pitted constitutionalism and American exceptionalism and tradition on the one side versus globalist ecumenicalism and citizenry of the world on the other. Of course, older divides — big government, high taxes, redistributionist social-welfare schemes, and mandated equality of result versus limited government, low taxes, free-market individualism, and equality of opportunity — were replayed, but sharpened in these new racial, cultural, and economic landscapes.

What Might Bring the United States Together Again?
A steady 3 to 4 percent growth in annual GDP would trim a lot of cultural rhetoric. Four percent unemployment will make more Americans valuable and give them advantages with employers. Measured, meritocratic, diverse, and legal immigration would help to restore the melting pot.

Reforming the university would help too, mostly by abolishing tenure, requiring an exit competence exam for the BA degree (a sort of reverse, back-end SAT or ACT exam), and ending government-subsidized student loans that promote campus fiscal irresponsibility and a curriculum that ensures future unemployment for too many students.

Religious and spiritual reawakening is crucial. The masters of the universe of Silicon Valley did not, as promised, bring us new-age tranquility, but rather only greater speed and intensity to do what we always do. Trolling, doxing, and phishing were just new versions of what Jesus warned about in the Sermon on the Mount. Spiritual transcendence is the timeless water of life; technology is simply the delivery pump. We confused the two. That water can be delivered ever more rapidly does not mean it ever changes its essence. High tech has become the great delusion.

Finally, we need to develop a new racial sense that we are so intermarried and assimilated that cardboard racial cutouts are irrelevant. Our new racialism must be seen as a reactionary and dangerous return to 19th-century norm of judging our appearance on the outside as more valuable than who we are on the inside.

Whether we all take a deep breath, and understand our present dangerous trajectory, will determine whether 2019 becomes 1861.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.

_____________________________________

A response from Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

Bruce,

Have read Hanson since studying for the MA in military history. He is a brilliant scholar.

Having written that, there is no comparison to today as compared to where we were in 1860.

The Slavery issue had been dividing there nation since the late 1810s if not earlier.

It took decades to polarize the nation to the point where civil war became inevitable.

None of that is present today as bad as things are -- and they are bad.

That is why Hanson is correct when he writes that economic success can defuse much of the tension.

Why?

Because unlike the years leading up to the 1861-1865 Civil War, today most people are not interested in the political wars.

As long as normal life is good and getting better then a civli war is extremely if not impossibly unlikely.

One final point, the way to cure the left's domination in colleges and universities is not an exit exam. In my opinion, two strategies have to be followed: 

(1) Do not fund or donate to a college or university if it does not adopt the University of Chicago free speech code. 

(2) Conservatives and libertarians have to start a civil rights movement for ideological diversity on campus -- and that means discrimination lawsuits and lobbying for legislation the state and federal level: 
No program or mandatory guidelines to recruit and retain conservative and libertarian instructors and professors = No state or federal funding.

The Hollowing-Out of the California Dream

The Hollowing-Out of the California Dream
Joel Kotkin, City Journal

For minorities in the Golden State, opportunity and upward mobility are hard to come by.

Progressives praise California as the harbinger of the political future, the home of a new, enlightened, multicultural America. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill has identified California Senator Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of immigration and race. Harris wants a moratorium on construction of new immigration-detention facilities in favor of the old “catch and release” policy for illegal aliens, and has urged a shutdown of the government rather than compromise on mass amnesty.

Its political leaders and a credulous national media present California as the “woke” state, creating an economically just, post-racial reality. Yet in terms of opportunity, California is evolving into something more like apartheid South Africa or the pre-civil rights South. California simply does not measure up in delivering educational attainment, income growth, homeownership, and social mobility for traditionally disadvantaged minorities. All this bodes ill for a state already three-fifths non-white and trending further in that direction in the years ahead. In the past decade, the state has added 1.8 million Latinos, who will account by 2060 for almost half the state’s population. The black population has plateaued, while the number of white Californians is down some 700,000 over the past decade.

Minorities and immigrants have brought much entrepreneurial energy and a powerful work ethic to California. Yet, to a remarkable extent, their efforts have reaped only meager returns during California’s recent boom. California, suggests gubernatorial candidate and environmental activist Michael Shellenberger, is not “the most progressive state” but “the most racist” one. Chapman University reports that 28 percent of California’s blacks are impoverished, compared with 22 percent nationally. Fully one-third of California Latinos—now the state’s largest ethnic group—live in poverty, compared with 21 percent outside the state. Half of Latino households earn under $50,000 annually, which, in a high-cost state, means that they barely make enough to make ends meet. Over two-thirds of non-citizen Latinos, the group most loudly defended by the state’s progressive leadership, live at or below the poverty line, according to a recent United Way study.

This stagnation reflects the reality of the most recent California “miracle.” Historically, economic growth extended throughout the state, and produced many high-paying blue-collar jobs. In contrast, the post-2010 boom has been inordinately dependent on the high valuations of a handful of tech firms and coastal real estate speculation. Relatively few blacks or Latinos participate at the upper reaches of the tech economy—and a recent study suggests that their percentages in that sector are declining—and generally lack the family resources to compete in the real estate market. Instead, many are stuck with rents they can’t afford.

Even as incomes soared in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco after 2010, wages for African-Americans and Latinos in the Bay Area declined. The shift of employment from industrial to software industries, as well as the extraordinary presence—as much as 40 percent—of noncitizens in the tech industry, has meant fewer opportunities for assemblers and other blue-collar workers. Many nonwhite Americans labor in the service sector as security guards or janitors, making about $25,000 annually, working for contractors who offer no job security and only limited benefits. In high-priced Silicon Valley, these are essentially poverty wages. Some workers live in their cars, converted garages, or even on the streets, largely ignored by California’s famously enlightened oligarchs.

CityLab has described the Bay Area as “a region of segregated innovation.” The Giving Code, which reports on charitable trends among the ultra-rich, found that between 2006 and 2013, 93 percent of all private foundation-giving in Silicon Valley went to causes outside of Silicon Valley. Better to be a whale, or a distressed child in Africa or Central America, than a worker living in his car outside Google headquarters.

For generations, California’s racial minorities, like their Caucasian counterparts, embraced the notion of an American Dream that included owning a house. Unlike kids from wealthy families—primarily white—who can afford elite educations and can sometimes purchase  houses with parental help, Latinos and blacks, usually without much in the way of family resources,  are increasingly priced out of the market. In California, Hispanics and blacks face housing prices that are approximately twice the national average, relative to income. Unsurprisingly, African-American and Hispanic homeownership rates have dropped considerably more than those of Asians and whites—four times the rate in the rest of the country. California’s white homeownership rate remains above 62 percent, but just 42 percent of all Latino households, and only 33 percent of all black households, own their own homes.

In contrast, African-Americans do far better, in terms of income and homeownership, in places like Dallas-Fort Worth or greater Houston than in socially enlightened locales such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. Houston and Dallas boast black homeownership rates of 40 to 50 percent; in deep blue but much costlier Los Angeles and New York, the rate is about 10 percentage points lower.
Rather than achieving upward class mobility, many minorities in California have fallen down the class ladder. This can be seen in California’s overcrowding rate, the nation’s second-worst. Of the 331 zip codes making up the top 1 percent of overcrowded zip codes in the U.S., 134 are found in Southern California, primarily in greater Los Angeles and San Diego, mostly concentrated around heavily Latino areas such as Pico-Union, East Los Angeles, and Santa Ana, in Orange County.

The lack of affordable housing and the disappearance of upward mobility could create a toxic racial environment for California. By the 2030s, large swaths of the state, particularly along the coast, could evolve into a geriatric belt, with an affluent, older boomer population served by a largely minority service-worker class. As white and Asian boomers age, California increasingly will have to depend on children from mainly poorer families with fewer educational resources, living in crowded and even unsanitary conditions, often far from their place of employment,  to work for low wages.

Historically, education has been the lever that gives minorities and the poor access to opportunity. But in California, a state that often identifies itself as “smart,” the educational system is deeply flawed, especially for minority populations. Once a model of educational success, California now ranks 36th in the country in educational performance, according to a 2018 Education Week report. The state does have a strong sector of “gold and silver” public schools, mostly located in wealthy suburban locations such as Orange County, the interior East Bay, and across the San Francisco Peninsula. But the performance of schools in heavily minority, working-class areas is scandalously poor. The state’s powerful teachers’ union and the Democratic legislature have added $31.2 billion since 2013 in new school funding, but California’s poor students ranked 49th on National Assessment of Education Progress tests. In Silicon Valley, half of local public school students, and barely one in five blacks or Latinos, are proficient in basic math.

Clearly, California’s progressive ideology and spending priorities are not serving minority students well. High-poverty schools are so poorly run that disruptions from students and administrative interruptions, according to a UCLA study, account for 30 minutes a day of class time. Teachers in these schools often promote “progressive values,” spending much of their time, according to one writer, “discussing community problems and societal inequities.” Other priorities include transgender and other gender-related education, from which parents, in some school districts, cannot opt out. This ideological instruction is doing little for minority youngsters. San Francisco, which the nonprofit journalism site Calmatters refers to as “a progressive enclave and beacon for technological innovation,” also had “the lowest black student achievement of any county in California,” as well as the highest gap between black and white scores.

Ultimately, any reversal of this pattern must come from minorities demanding a restoration of opportunity. Some now see the linkage between state policy and impoverishment, which has led some 200 civil rights leaders to sue the state Air Resources Board, the group that enforces the Greenhouse Gas edicts of the state bureaucracy. But perhaps the ultimate wakeup call will come from a slowing economy. After an extraordinary period of growth post-recession, California’s economy is clearly weakening, as companies and people move elsewhere. Texas and other states are now experiencing faster GDP growth than the Golden State. Perhaps more telling, the latest BEA numbers suggest that California—which created barely 800 jobs last month—is now experiencing far lower income growth than the national average, and scarcely half that of Texas, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona, Missouri, or Florida. Out-migration of skilled and younger workers, reacting to long commutes and high prices, seems to be accelerating, both in Southern California and the Bay Area.

One has to wonder what will happen when the California economy, burdened by regulations, high costs, and taxes, slows even more. Generous welfare benefits, made possible by taxing the rich, could be threatened; conversely, the Left might get traction by pushing to raise taxes even higher. The pain will be relatively minor in Palo Alto, Malibu, or Marin County, the habitations of the ruling gentry rich—but for those Californians who have already been left behind, and for a diminishing middle class,  it might be just beginning.

Joel Kotkin serves as Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (COU).

The American Character At A Crossroads

The American Character At A Crossroads

Here is the question:

When the going gets tough and real peril exists do you want to flee with those seeking safe spaces…

or

…join with those who have the mettle and presence of mind to wade into the killing ground and end the peril?

I will wade in because I lived and still live amongst the best of best in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Michael M. Walker, 

Col, USMC (Ret)

Obama Decries the Political Habits That Drove His Career

Famed double talker....

Obama Decries the Political Habits That Drove His Career
Jim Geraghty, National Review


Yesterday, President Obama stood in a cricket stadium in Johannesburg, South Africa, and said a lot of things that could, or should, get conservatives nodding in agreement. But as he offered a grim assessment of both modern American politics and the broader geopolitical scene, you had to wonder when, if ever, he would confront the fact that he had a lot to do with the shaping of modern American politics and the broader geopolitical scene. He certainly had more influence on it than you or I did.

Obama pointed out that history’s many horrific systems of oppression can’t be simplified to a simple narrative of racism: “Whites were happy to exploit other whites when they could. And by the way, blacks were often willing to exploit other blacks. And around the globe, the majority of people lived at subsistence levels, without a say in the politics or economic forces that determined their lives.”

And he took a shot at identity politics: “You can’t [change minds] if you insist that those who aren’t like you — because they’re white, or because they’re male — that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”

Of course … this is the president who made Al Sharpton his “go-to man on race” and who said Latinos needed to “punish” their “enemies.” It’s great that Obama realizes that identity politics can be corrosive to civil society and that they can Balkanize a once-thriving, relatively harmonious society. It just would have been good to hear this wisdom from a president instead of an ex-president.

Obama offered a nostalgic look at the close of the Reagan-Bush era, when a wave of freedom and liberation swept the globe in the aftermath of the Cold War:
As a law student, I witnessed [Nelson Mandela] emerge from prison, just a few months, you’ll recall, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I felt the same wave of hope that washed through hearts all around the world.

Do you remember that feeling? It seemed as if the forces of progress were on the march, that they were inexorable. Each step he took, you felt this is the moment when the old structures of violence and repression and ancient hatreds that had so long stunted people’s lives and confined the human spirit — that all that was crumbling before our eyes.

For Americans and the rest of the world, life in the ’90s was better and safer than it was at the beginning of the 1980s — which is why it is unwise for adults who should know better to say things like, “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country” in 2008. Some might even say comments like that are “strikingly ungracious.” Perhaps “Make America Great Again” and “American Carnage” are unduly dark and pessimistic assessments of the country — but they simply echoed the apocalyptic perspective of Democrats in the latter years of the Bush presidency.

Obama said yesterday, “For once solidly middle-class families in advanced economies like the United States, these trends have meant greater economic insecurity, especially for those who don’t have specialized skills, people who were in manufacturing, people working in factories, people working on farms.” Had he focused on this more during his presidency, would Hillary Clinton have lost?

Obama lamented, “In the West, you’ve got far-right parties that oftentimes are based not just on platforms of protectionism and closed borders, but also on barely hidden racial nationalism.” Would those parties have flourished if the Barack Obamas and Angela Merkels of the world had taken citizens’ demands for border security and carefully scrutinized immigration more seriously? How much faith was lost in U.S. immigration controls when the 9/11 hijackers, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the San Bernardino terrorists entered the country legally? Is anyone surprised that many Germans bristled when Merkel decided, unilaterally, to allow in more than 1 million migrants — many of them fleeing the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan?

Former United Kingdom prime minister Gordon Brown was caught on a hot mike calling one of his own supporters a “bigoted woman” because she lamented people staying on public assistance for too long and asked where all of the recent immigrants were coming from. If you’re wealthy and powerful, your life is insulated from a lot of problems in society. Among those problems is illegal immigration, and because you’re not dealing with any crime, any overcrowded schools, any language barriers, you see it as harmless, or even as an economic benefit.

Later in his speech, Obama added, “In the West’s current debate around immigration, for example, it’s not wrong to insist that national borders matter; whether you’re a citizen or not is going to matter to a government, that laws need to be followed; that in the public realm newcomers should make an effort to adapt to the language and customs of their new home.”

How different would the Obama era look if he had emphasized that message at every opportunity?

Obama said progress requires “laws that root out corruption and ensures fair dealing in business.” Does he think the Clinton Foundation fits into that vision? How about the former Obama Treasury secretary Tim Geithner’s tax evasion? How about former congressman Charlie Rangel’s tax evasion? The six-figure and seven-figure sums of unpaid taxes of Tom Daschle, Claire McCaskill, or Al Sharpton? Does Obama grasp why the public might virulently recoil when those who support higher taxes escape serious consequence for not paying their own?

Obama declared, “It’s not just money that a job provides; it provides dignity and structure and a sense of place and a sense of purpose.” Amen, Mr. President! How long have conservatives made this argument in various welfare-to-work proposals?

Some parts of Obama’s speech were great, such as when he directly attacked the idea that human rights, freedom, and pluralism were incompatible with some cultures: “We have to resist the notion that basic human rights like freedom to dissent, or the right of women to fully participate in the society, or the right of minorities to equal treatment, or the rights of people not to be beat up and jailed because of their sexual orientation — we have to be careful not to say that somehow, well, that doesn’t apply to us, that those are Western ideas rather than universal imperatives.”

But in that light, a more generous assessment of the Bush administration’s “freedom agenda” is warranted. It wasn’t naïve or unrealistic or happy talk; it was principled.

Discussing partisanship and division, Obama said, “Maybe we can change their minds, but maybe they’ll change ours. And you can’t do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponents have to say from the start.” That’s a great message. But this is the man who responded to GOP criticism of his stimulus package with, “I won.”

And when Obama complained, “Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up,” a lot of Americans no doubt heard, “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, and if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” ringing in our ears. Obamacare was passed with the necessary assistance of a pack of lies, with its architect gloating about the “stupidity” of the American voter and boasting that the “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.” Obama hates cynical, dishonest politics — up until the moment he needs it.

Identity politics, cynicism, tolerance of corruption, hardline partisanship, shameless dishonesty, a shallow obsession with celebrities, an appetite for utopian slogans instead of serious and realistic proposals, demagoguery … if all of these forces play bigger roles in American politics in 2018 than they did in 2008, whose fault is that?

Is Phony Appreciation of America’s Intelligence Agencies Better Than an Honest Disregard?

Look, if President Trump thinks that the meddling in the 2016 election was committed by the Russian government but “could be other people also — a lot of people out there,” as he ad-libbed during his press conference at the White House yesterday, then he doesn’t really “accept our intelligence community’s conclusion.”

Yes, it’s great that this administration has been tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush, or Clinton. But no one worries about the Russia stance of Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, or James Mattis. None of them have ever said nice things about Putin, or talked repeatedly about how well they think they would get along with the Russian dictator, or had a lot of business dealings with Russians, or offered moral equivalence along the lines of, “Do you think our country is so innocent?”

It’s not surprising that an administration filled with Pence, Haley, Pompeo, Mattis, and the likes of John Bolton, Rick Perry, Dan Coats, and John Kelly would be tough on Russia. But none of them can speak for the country the way the president of the United States can and does. What we’ve seen is that when given the opportunity to confront Putin and Russia about issue after issue, President Trump whiffs or holds back. The lone exception I can think of came in April of this year, when Trump tweeted, “Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!”


JIM GERAGHTY — Jim Geraghty is the senior political correspondent of National Review. @jimgeraghty

Congrats, Trump voters. You’ve been vindicated.

Congrats, Trump voters. You’ve been vindicated.
Marc A. Thiessen, American Enterprise Institute

For those conservatives who voted for Donald Trump because of the Supreme Court, congratulations: You’ve been vindicated.

Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, she would have replaced the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia with a liberal jurist — giving the Supreme Court a left-wing activist majority for a generation. Because Trump won, Neil M. Gorsuch was confirmed to replace Scalia, securing the court’s 5-to-4 conservative majority.

This week, the dividends of that appointment for conservatives were apparent in two landmark conservative rulings. In National Institute of Family Life Advocates v. Becerra, the high court ruled that the state of California cannot force crisis pregnancy centers to advertise access to abortion to their clients, in violation of the owners’ conscience. And in Janus v. AFSCME, the court ruled that public workers cannot be forced pay union dues to support public policies with which they fundamentally disagree. These were critical 5-to-4 rulings that buttressed the First Amendment freedoms of all Americans.

Trump was able to preserve the status quo before Scalia’s passing. But now, with the news that Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is retiring, Trump has a chance to do something much bigger: He can not only preserve but also expand the court’s conservative majority. If he replaces Kennedy — a swing vote who often joined the court’s liberal bloc on important matters — with a reliable conservative in the mold of Scalia and Gorsuch, the president may have transformed the court for a generation.

To do this, Trump will have to break the mold of his Republican predecessors. Over the past three decades, presidents from his party have picked seven justices, and several have turned out to be disappointments to conservatives. President Ronald Reagan picked three justices (Sandra Day O’Connor, Scalia and Kennedy), but only one, Scalia, was a consistent conservative. President George H.W. Bush picked one solid conservative (Clarence Thomas) and one (David Souter) who was not. George W. Bush did better, appointing two conservatives, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and John G. Roberts Jr. But even Roberts disappointed conservatives when he cast the deciding vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act in a stroke of judicial activism. If Trump picks not one, but two reliable conservative justices, he will secure the best record of Supreme Court appointments by any modern Republican president.

Liberals understand exactly what is at stake. That means whomever Trump picks will face a barrage of attacks unprecedented even by the standards of past confirmation brawls. But thanks to the Democrats’ imprudent decisions to break precedent and change Senate rules to confirm lifetime appointments to the federal circuit court under President Barack Obama, and then to filibuster Gorsuch, Senate Republicans need only a simple majority to confirm Trump’s choice. So long as Republican senators stick together, Trump’s nominee will be confirmed.

Already some Democrats are protesting that the Senate should not confirm a Supreme Court justice during a midterm election year. Sorry, the Senate confirmed Obama appointee Elena Kagan in August 2010, just before the midterm elections — and did so with a bipartisan 63-to-37 vote. Democrats are grasping at straws because the timing couldn’t be worse for them as they seek to gain control of the Senate in November. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has announced that the confirmation vote will take place in the fall, which would put Kennedy’s replacement on the bench when the court’s new term begins on the first Monday in October. Pity the Democratic senators such as Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Joe Donnelly (Ind.), who are running for reelection in states Trump won by double digits. Their political survival depends on being perceived as centrists, and they will now have to spend months campaigning while caught in the crossfire of a liberal-conservative battle royal over a Trump-nominated Supreme Court justice. Vote yes, and their liberal base will be apoplectic; vote no, and their pro-Trump constituents could revolt.

For all these reasons, Trump’s appointee is likely to be confirmed. If that happens, Trump will have led one of the most consequential conservative presidencies in modern American history. Not only is Trump expanding the conservative Supreme Court majority, he is also moving at record pace to fill the federal appeals courts with young conservative judges who will preside for decades. Imagine if it were Clinton making all these appointments. The consequences for human life, religious liberty, the Second Amendment and limited government would have been disastrous.

Instead, the choice of the next Supreme Court justice is in President Trump’s hands. So, to all the conservatives who cast their ballots in 2016 for just this moment — you did the right thing.

Today's Neo-fascists states

Today's Neo-fascists States
Mike Walker, Col USMC (ret)

I argue that fascism-nationalist socialism has proven far more resilient than ever imagined.

It is no stretch of the imagination to say that today at least a dozen countries or more are what can best be described as neo-fascist.

Why is that so hard to grasp? 

A better question is: How can anyone in America or the United Kingdom or Australia grasp the concept at all?

The English-speaking world never came to grips with the true political reality (and danger) of fascism-nationalist socialism. 

When it “flowered” in the first half of the 20th century, we English-speakers never evolved beyond a one-dimensional Second World War caricature and subsequently were so consumed by the Cold War that we never adequately reflected on why and how it rose to power during the interwar years.

Several generations later, we still see it as little more than wartime propaganda – a cartoon scene of warmonger dictators, silly uniformed followers making odd arm gestures and racist killers of Jews.

We yet are in denial that it was embraced seriously in Europe, Asia and South America by tens of millions and none, save Germany, resorted to the horrific insanity of genocide – but all gripped bloody tyranny ever firmly.

And therein lies not just the rub, but also the peril.

Until we discard our simplistic "racist vision" we will never be safe.

In the aftermath of the horror of The Great War, absolute or even quasi-absolute monarchies were discarded with relief. 

Absurdly, liberal free market liberal democracies were dismissed as failing states soon to be relegated to the dustbin of history.

The two utopian illusions that emerged from the ashes were communism and fascism-nationalist socialism. For the indulgent intelligentsia, that was the future.

Fascism emerged as a dreadfully appealing dream of a society built upon beneficial and classless socialism that put the workers first and governed by a single party in control of a powerful centralized state that defined and enforced collective national unity and conformity.

Fascism-nationalist socialism enticingly offered a comforting state-sponsored cocoon immersed in Orwellian "goodthink."

Once you wash away the terrors of the Second World War and look objectively at the interwar era, you see how fascism-nationalist socialism gained favor...and why it still appeals.

More chillingly, you see that the collapse of communism in the 1990s did not auger in a new era – one of inevitable evolution towards democratic free-market liberalism.

Instead we entered a twisted return to the 1920s absent communism with two competing visions: Neo-fascism (without the racism and genocide) versus Liberal Democracy.

Unfortunately, even I would not outwardly label these countries as fascist or neo-fascist because the of the 20th century stigma...but nonetheless, they are neo-fascist in everything but name.

That explains Venezuela, Nicaragua, Erdogan’s Turkey, Putin’s Russia, Angola, Nepal, and a number of others.