WHAT IF TRUMP ENFORCES THE LAW?!

POLITICO: WHAT IF TRUMP ENFORCES THE LAW?!

John Hinderaker, Powerline

I have been saying for a long time that, while our current legal immigration system poses intractable problems, illegal immigration is relatively easy to solve: we only need to enforce our existing laws. Donald Trump’s appointment of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General signals that he intends to do just that. Politico belatedly tumbles, apparently, to what is going on: “Immigration-hardliner Sessions could execute crackdown as AG.”

If confirmed as Trump’s attorney general, the Alabama senator would instantly become one of the most powerful people overseeing the nation’s immigration policy, with wide latitude over the kinds of immigration violations to prosecute and who would be deported.

As the nation’s top cop, Sessions would be able to direct limited department resources to pursuing immigration cases. He could launch federal investigations into what he perceives as discrimination against U.S. citizens caused by immigration. He would be in charge of drafting legal rationales for immigration policies under the Trump administration.

And Sessions, as attorney general, could find ways to choke off funding for “sanctuary cities,” where local officials decline to help federal officials identify undocumented immigrants so they can be deported.

Doesn’t that sound great? And it’s not all, either. But first, this:

Some immigrant advocates are alarmed by the idea of a Justice Department led by someone they see as far outside the mainstream.

It can’t be “far outside the mainstream” to enforce existing federal law. On the contrary, it is the president’s most fundamental constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Barack Obama violated this duty, to his everlasting shame. It also can’t be “far outside the mainstream” for Trump and Sessions to carry out the policies on which Trump campaigned and was elected.

Politico adds much more about the powers Sessions will wield as Attorney General. Strangely, however, the most important point comes near the end:

Sessions would have similarly expansive powers when it comes to enforcing immigration law. The attorney general sets guidelines for the types of violations federal prosecutors should pursue.

Von Spakovksy said a Sessions-led Justice Department could, for example, ramp up enforcement of a current ban on employers hiring those who are here illegally.

“If the employer provision is enforced and the news gets out that the Justice Department is finally enforcing that provision … that will lead to large numbers of individuals self-deporting,” said von Spakovsky, now a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

That is exactly right. The long-promised wall along the Mexican border, already mandated by federal law, may be a good idea but is mostly a distraction. If the executive branch finally carries out its duty to enforce the immigration laws against employers by sending a few farmers, owners of roofing companies, executives of meat packing plants and hotel managers to prison, the job market for illegal aliens will rapidly disappear. The vast majority will then self-deport, to use Mitt Romney’s perfectly appropriate phrase. 

All of this is devoutly hoped for by most Americans. In the first days of the new administration, it looks as though 1) Congress will pass a bill repealing Obamacare, 2) Sessions will start to move against illegal immigration, and 3) President Trump will appoint a conservative to the still-vacant Supreme Court seat. This is a trifecta the likes of which we conservatives have not seen in a long, long time.

MARK FALCOFF: CASTRO’S DEMISE

Scott Johnson, Powerline

I invited our occasional contributor Mark Falcoff to comment on the death of Fidel Castro. Mark writes:

The demise of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro had been predicted for so long (and so wrongly) that it is difficult to believe that he is finally gone at last. What can one say about this man and his country?

Castro always saw himself as a world-historical figure, defying the United States and converting his island (known principally for rum, beaches the rhumba) into “a small country with a big country’s foreign policy”, to quote my college Jorge Dominguez. In retrospect what Castro did was to play two cards skillfully–the card of the Soviets and the card of the hate-America. Let me take each of this points in turn.

The Soviet card. Cuba under Castro was virtually unique among the nations of the world in that it alone voluntarily entered what might be called the Russian Commonwealth of Nations. No other self-respecting country would be caught dead with these losers–the Poles always wanted out, the Baltics wanted out, the Georgians and the Ukranians wanted out. Hell, even the Kazakhs wanted out. 

And here was this little island just off the coast of Florida, practically a state of the United States, that opted to stake its all on Moscow’s game. What a delicious irony that the Soviet empire collapsed first! Nonetheless, during all the years of the alliance with the Soviets, the Cuban state benefited not just from a financial subsidy (ten Marshall plans in constant dollars) but all of the political, diplomatic and military benefits associated with such membership.

But that was nothing compared to the cultural dimension of the Cuban revolution. It was the first and most dramatic revolt against the American Century, and America-haters (not necessarily people on the Left or revolutionary in any way, many of whom by the way were actually Americans) could find in Cuba cheap inspiration. It was the Cubans who went hungry, not the denizens of the Left Bank in Paris or in the smarter precincts of Upper West Side New York, or professors at the University of Dry Gulch (or Harvard) who thrilled to Castro’s speeches and always called him affectionately by his first name.

Indeed, as time went on even people on the Left in Europe and the United States ceased to talk about the revolution’s “achievements in health and education” at all, preferring rather to admit the regime’s failures but assign them entirely to the trade embargo (which they and the Cuban government always called “the blockade”) and regard its very survival as a ratification of its historicity.

The inconvenient truth of Cuban history now stands revealed. A tropical island, it can only survive through dependence on an outside power. During the colonial period and up to 1898 it was Spain. Between 1989 and 1959 it was the United States. From 1959 to 1991 it was the Soviet Union. Since then the Cubans have had to depend on the generosity of the squalid regime in Caracas, a regime which, like the Soviet, seems destined to disappear before the Castro family’s rule in Cuba. Thanks to a combination of emigration, low birthrate (and legalized and subsidized abortion), and a high suicide index, in another dozen years Cuba will have one of the oldest populations in the world. An impoverished country disproportionately old, without friends or patrons, with few possibilities of recovery or rebirth–this is the achievement of Fidel Castro, this and none other.

Mark Falcoff is resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute. His books include Cuba the Morning After: Confronting Castro’s Legacy and Small Countries, Large Issues.

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Why the Dems are Hysterical About Jeff Sessions, and Why They Don't Mean it

Why the Dems are Hysterical About Jeff Sessions, and Why They Don't Mean it

John Hinderaker, Powerline

The Democrats say that they will oppose confirmation of Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, and will smear him with discredited race allegations from 30 years ago. This is rather pathetic: if they can’t come up with anything within the last 30 years, they don’t have much of a case, to say the least. So why are they hysterical about Sessions?

Byron York supplies much of the answer:

Sessions is the Senate’s highest-profile, most determined, and most knowledgeable opponent of comprehensive immigration reform. Democrats are particularly anxious about immigration because of the unusually tenuous nature of President Obama’s policies on the issue. Those policies can be undone unilaterally, by the new president in some cases, and by the attorney general and head of homeland security in other cases. There’s no need for congressional action — and no way for House or Senate Democrats to slow or stop it.

That is correct. As Byron points out, all President Trump and Attorney General Sessions need to do is start enforcing the law–discharging Trump’s Constitutional duty, in other words.

The Democrats’ fanatical commitment to preserving illegal immigration is a big part of the reason why they are demoralized at the thought of Jeff Sessions as AG. I think we can add this, too: Under Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, the Department of Justice became the epicenter of Obama administration corruption. Legions of left-wing ideologues were brought in as DOJ lawyers. The Civil Rights Division became a partisan tool of the Democrats. Holder adopted racist policies, with enforcement of the law depending on the skin color of the victims. Cover-ups abounded, and corruption in other branches of the Obama administration was never prosecuted. Loretta Lynch had her famous tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton.

There are a great many skeletons in Barack Obama’s closet, and many of the bodies are buried–to mix a metaphor–at the Department of Justice. For eight years, Obama and his Justice Department shamelessly stiff-armed Congressional investigations, FOIA requests and court orders. So it is no wonder that Democrats blanch at the thought of the Department of Justice in the hands of a conservative as able and as incorruptible as Jeff Sessions.

So the Democrats have pulled out their old reliable, the race card. Which causes me to wonder: has the race card ever actually worked? The Democrats obviously think that false accusations of racism are political dynamite, but if that were true, why don’t they win more elections?

In the case of Jeff Sessions, we know that the Democrats’ racism charges are insincere. They don’t believe what they are saying about Sessions, they are just trying to smear him in a desperate attempt to deny him confirmation, or else diminish his effectiveness as Attorney General. How do we know that? Because when Sessions ran for re-election to the Senate in 2014, the Democrats didn’t run a candidate against him. They let him win, unopposed. Surely if the Democrats actually believed that Sessions was a racist, they would have tried to prevent his re-election to the Senate. Right? At a minimum, they would have run a candidate against him and tried to explain to the people of Alabama that Sessions is a racist and therefore unfit to be a senator. But they didn’t do this, because they know their smears are baseless. And, of course, the people of Alabama, whom Sessions has served for so long, wouldn’t have been easy to fool.

I don’t think the American people will be fooled, either.

Deaf, blind and dumb....

Finally we will see a common sense approach to the 3rd Caliphate....

Mr President, your legacy... AFTER OBAMACARE

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What legacy? Half-baked ideas, indifference and platitudes....

AFTER OBAMACARE

Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

Our friend Tevi Troy, the author of outstanding books about the presidency, is also CEO of the American Health Policy Institute. During the George W. Bush administration, he served as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services.

Tevi, along with Lanhee Chen of the Hoover Institution, has written an op-ed on Obamacare for the Wall Street Journal (it’s behind the Journal’s pay wall). Their piece has two parts — a look back at the fight waged by the Republican Congress against Obamacare and a look forward at how to replace it.

The two parts of the op-ed are tied together by the fact that the Republican Congress didn’t just vote to repeal Obamacare — it offered plans to replace the legislation. Such plans include House Speaker Paul Ryan’s “A Better Way,” as well as plans from Sens. Richard Burr and Orrin Hatch and Rep. Fred Upton; Rep. Pete Sessions and Sen. Bill Cassidy; Rep. Tom Price, Sens. John McCain and David Perdue; Rep. Phil Roe and the Republican Study Committee; and Sen. Ben Sasse. In addition, conservative scholars and analysts have written “Improving Health and Health Care: An Agenda for Reform.”

Clearly, the GOP does not lack for plans.

What is the nature of these plans? According to Tevi and Chen, most of them “focus first on driving the cost of health care, expanding access to consumer-directed health arrangements like health-savings accounts, and replacing Obamacare exchange subsidies with a refundable tax credit or some other tax benefit to help lower-income Americans afford health insurance.”

Tevi and Chen recommend a four-step approach to the repeal and replace process:

First, states should be given greater latitude through executive action to pursue aggressive reforms to Medicaid.

Second, Republicans in Congress should move immediately to craft a budget resolution and pass it, thereby enabling the use of budget reconciliation legislation to repeal the law — as they did in 2015. 

Third, they should implement transitional reforms that would prevent potential disruptions in coverage gained under [Obamacare], such as for those who benefit from subsidies for marketplace coverage.

Finally, a more extensive replacement bill can then follow.

I’m far from an expert in this field, but nonetheless offer two observations. First, other than people with “pre-existing conditions,” no one would be denied health insurance by virtue of an Obamacare repeal (with no replacement). Many would be denied free health insurance and many others would be denied subsidized health insurance, but that’s not the same thing as being denied health insurance.

Second, Obamacare replacement proposals shouldn’t be evaluated in terms of whether all those who have health insurance as a result of Obamacare will continue to have it. Obamacare has induced some who didn’t want to buy health insurance to purchase it anyway. If these consumers conclude in a post-Obamacare regime that they don’t want to keep paying for insurance, their lack of coverage shouldn’t be deemed a mark against that regime.

In addition, it is highly debatable whether everyone who got free or subsidized health insurance thanks to Obamacare ought to have received it. A Democratic Congress, without support from Republicans, picked the monetary cutoffs for the Medicaid expansion and the subsidies. By no means should these decisions be the benchmark for judging plans that might replace Obamacare.

Everything should be on the table (though I agree with Donald Trump that provisions regarding pre-existing conditions ought to be retained). Thanks to the tireless, and widely derided, efforts of Republican legislators to keep Obamacare on the political and policy agenda for the past six years, I trust that almost everything will be.

Donald Trump’s Astounding Victory: How and Why

Donald Trump’s Astounding Victory: How and Why

Michael Barone, National Review

Many white voters who fill the heartland have dropped their allegiance to the Democratic party.

Astounding. That’s the best word to describe the tumultuous election night and the (to most people) surprise victory of Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton hoped to win with votes of Northeasterners, including those who have moved south along Interstate 95 to North Carolina and Florida (44 electoral votes). Instead, Trump won with votes along the I-94 and I-80 corridors, from Pennsylvania through Ohio and Michigan to Wisconsin and Iowa (70 electoral votes).

This approach was foreseen by RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende in his “Case of the Missing White Voters” article series in 2013. Non-college-educated whites in this northern tier, once strong for Ross Perot, gave Barack Obama relatively high percentages in 2008 and 2012. Many grew up in Democratic union households and were willing to vote for the first black president.

Now they seem to have sloughed off their ancestral Democratic allegiance, much as white Southerners did in 1980s presidential and 1990s congressional elections. National Democrats no longer had anything to offer them then. Hillary Clinton didn’t have anything to offer northern-tier non-college-educated whites this year.

It didn’t help that Clinton called half of Trump supporters “irredeemable” and “deplorables” and infected with “implicit racism.” They may have been shy in responding to telephone or exit polls, but they voted in unanticipatedly large numbers, at a time when turnout generally sagged.

At the same time, Clinton was unable to reassemble Obama’s 2012 51 percent coalition. Turnout fell in heavily black Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Millennial generation turnout was tepid, and Trump carried white Millennials by 5 points. Unexpectedly, Trump won higher percentages of Hispanics and Asians than Mitt Romney did in 2012.

Trump’s surprise victory, owing much to differential turnout, resembles the surprise defeats, defying most polls, of establishment positions in 2016 referendums in Britain and Colombia. In June, 52 percent of Britons voted to leave the European Union — the so-called Brexit, opposed by most major-party leaders and financial elites. In October, 50.2 percent of Colombia’s voters rejected the peace plan with FARC terrorists negotiated by their president.

In both cases, the capital city’s metro area and distinctive peripheries — Scotland, the Caribbean coast — voted with the establishment. But the historical and cultural hearts of these nations — England outside London, the central Andes cordillera in Colombia — rejected and defeated the establishment position.

Something like that seems to have happened here. If you take the pro-establishment coasts — the Northeast except Pennsylvania, the West Coast — the vote as currently tabulated was 58-38 percent for Clinton. That’s similar to Obama’s 60-38 percent margin in these states in 2012.

But the heartland — roughly the area from the Appalachian ridges to the Rocky Mountains, with about two-thirds of the national vote — went 52-44 percent for Trump. Trump didn’t do much better than Romney, who got 51 percent there. But Clinton got only 44 percent of heartland votes, down from Obama’s 47 percent. The Republican margin doubled, from 4 to 8 percent.

British elites responded to Brexit with scorn for their heartland’s voters. Those voting for Brexit were “poorly educated, nativist, unsophisticated, racist, and unfashionable.” You can hear similar invective hurled by American coastal elites (though not, to their credit, Clinton and Obama) at their fellow citizens beyond the Hudson River and the Capital Beltway. “Deplorable” is the least of their insults.

They take glee in noting that Trump ran behind previous Republican nominees among college graduates but well ahead among non-college-educated whites. There’s an echo here of Rush Limbaugh’s scorn for “low-information voters.” But the people who complain about less educated whites voting as a bloc have no complaints about the even larger percentages received by the candidates they favor from black voters. The better approach is to show respect for each voter’s decision, however unenlightened you may consider it.

Trump’s victory undercuts crude projections based on the sophisticated analysis of journalist Ron Brownstein and Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg — namely, that increasing percentages of nonwhites and millennial generation voters will result in an “ascendant” majority producing inevitably Democratic victories. In a closely divided country, election victories are contingent on issues, events, and candidates’ characteristics.

It would be a mistake also to suppose that Trump’s Electoral College victory means that Democrats are doomed to defeat because they lost their hold on non-college-educated whites this year. That depends on decisions and events that have not yet occurred.

— Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics. © 2016 Creators.com

A ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ Lesson for the Digital Age

A ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ Lesson for the Digital Age

Jim Rutenberg, Mediator, The New York Times

All the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country.

The news media by and large missed what was happening all around it, and it was the story of a lifetime. The numbers weren’t just a poor guide for election night — they were an off-ramp away from what was actually happening.

No one predicted a night like this — that Donald J. Trump would pull off a stunning upset over Hillary Clinton and win the presidency.

The misfire on Tuesday night was about a lot more than a failure in polling. It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media.

Journalists didn’t question the polling data when it confirmed their gut feeling that Mr. Trump could never in a million years pull it off. They portrayed Trump supporters who still believed he had a shot as being out of touch with reality. In the end, it was the other way around.

It was just a few months ago that so much of the European media failed to foresee the vote in Britain to leave the European Union. Election 2016, thy name is Brexit.

Election Day had been preceded by more than a month of declarations that the race was close but essentially over. And that assessment held even after the late-October news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was reviewing a new batch of emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

Mrs. Clinton’s victory would be “substantial but not overwhelming,” The Huffington Post had reported, after assuring its readers that “she’s got this.” That more or less comported with The New York Times’s Upshot projection early Tuesday evening that Mrs. Clinton was an 84 percent favorite to win the presidency.

Then came a profound shift, as mainstream media organizations scrambled to catch the bus that had just run them over. By 10:30 p.m., the Upshot projection had switched around, remarkably, to 93 percent in favor of Mr. Trump.

Other major sites also flipped from a likely Clinton victory to a likely Trump victory. John King of CNN proclaimed to his huge election night audience that during the previous couple of weeks, “We were not having a reality-based conversation” given the map he had before him, showing Mr. Trump with a clear opportunity to reach the White House.

That was an extraordinary admission; if the news media failed to present a reality-based political scenario, then it failed in performing its most fundamental function.

The unexpected turn in the election tallies immediately raised questions about the value of modern polling: Can it accurately capture public opinion when so many people are now so hard to reach on their unlisted cellphones?

“I think the polling was a mess,” Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, told me Tuesday night. “But I think a lot of it was interpretation of the polls.”

Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist, said on MSNBC, “My crystal ball has been shattered into atoms’’ because he predicted the opposite outcome. “Tonight data died,’’ he added.

Regardless of the outcome, it was clear that the polls, and the projections, had underestimated the strength of Mr. Trump’s vote, and the movement he built, which has defied all predictions and expectations since he announced his candidacy last year.

And that’s why the problem that surfaced on Tuesday night was much bigger than polling. It was clear that something was fundamentally broken in journalism, which has been unable to keep up with the anti-establishment mood that is turning the world upside down.

Politics is not just about numbers; data can’t always capture the human condition that is the blood of American politics. And it is not the sole function of political reporting to tell you who will win or who will lose. But that question — the horse race — has too often shadowed everything else, and inevitably colors other reporting, too.

You have to wonder how different the coverage might have been had the polls, and the data crunching, not forecast an almost certain Clinton victory. Perhaps there would have been a deeper exploration of the forces that were propelling Mr. Trump toward victory, given that so much of his behavior would have torpedoed any candidate who came before him.

Maybe we’d know a lot more about how Mr. Trump’s plan to build a wall along the southern border would fare in Congress, or what his proposal to make it easier to sue journalists might actually look like. How about his plan to block people from countries with links to terrorism?

Then there was the drop in the global stock market on Tuesday night, which wasn’t just figures on a screen but wealth being erased. The expectations were out of whack, and Wall Street doesn’t do out-of-whack well.

What’s amazing is how many times the news media has missed the populist movements that have been rocking national politics since at least 2008. It failed to initially see the rise of the Tea Party, which led to the Republican wave of elections of 2010 and 2014, which was supposed to be the year the so-called Republican establishment regained control over its intraparty insurgency.

Then, of course, there was Mr. Trump’s own unexpected rise to the nomination. And after each failure came a vow to learn lessons, and not ever allow it to happen again. And yet the lessons did not come fast enough to get it right when it most mattered.

In an earlier column, I quoted the conservative writer Rod Dreher as saying that most journalists were blind to their own “bigotry against conservative religion, bigotry against rural folks, and bigotry against working class and poor white people.”

Whatever the election result, you’re going to hear a lot from news executives about how they need to send their reporters out into the heart of the country, to better understand its citizenry.

But that will miss something fundamental. Flyover country isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind — it’s in parts of Long Island and Queens, much of Staten Island, certain neighborhoods of Miami or even Chicago. And, yes, it largely — but hardly exclusively — pertains to working-class white people.

They think something is so wrong that all the fact-checking of Mr. Trump this year, the countless reports of his lies — which he uttered more than Mrs. Clinton did — and the vigorous investigation of his business and personal transgressions, bothered them far less than the perceived national ills Mr. Trump was pointing to and promising to fix.

In their view the government was broken, the economic system was broken, and, we heard so often, the news media was broken, too. Well, something surely is broken. It can be fixed, but let’s get to it once and for all.

THE LEFT’S IMPULSE TO BULLY IS UNIVERSAL

THE LEFT’S IMPULSE TO BULLY IS UNIVERSAL
John Hinderer, Powerline

It is widely understood that the Left wants to impose censorship on the rest of us, and where it can, it will. The experience of conservative speakers on university campuses is the most obvious proof. But the truth, I think, is worse: it isn’t just censorship. The Left wants to bully disagreement out of existence.

Hence the astonishingly long list of acts of political violence and low-level terrorism that have been carried out by members of the Democratic Party against Donald Trump supporters and Republicans in the current election cycle.

In Europe, the Left’s eliminationist impulse is most often vented against those who disagree with the policy of mass immigration from non-European countries. A striking example has just occurred in Sweden, where the Sweden Democrats hosted, on Friday, an event at which they awarded a prize–the European Freedom Award–to former Czech President Vaclav Klaus. The event took place at Stockholm’s renowned Grand Hotel. It prompted a chorus of outrage against the “far right.”

Stockholm’s Grand Hotel has issued an unprecedented public apology for hosting an awards ceremony for European right-wing politicians, following a storm of angry protest. 

The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats party hired the upmarket hotel, which boasts views over the Royal Palace and Gamla Stan, for its “European Freedom Awards” on Friday evening.

As soon as the news became public, the hotel faced a storm of angry protests on Twitter, with thousands protesting by giving it one-star reviews on its Facebook page. Meanwhile, hotel staff gave anonymous interviews criticising the event, and several customers cancelled event contracts.

So who are the outrageous “far right” figures that brought about this storm of protest?

On Friday, the hotel was still defending its decision to host the awards, which included speeches by Nigel Farage, the unofficial leader of the campaign to bring Britain out of the European Union…

Brexit won. If Brexit is the knock on Farage, it is a majority view, not a “far right” fringe position.

…and Jimmie Åkesson, the leader of the Sweden Democrats.

In the 2014 election, the Sweden Democrats won 49 of the 349 seats in the Swedish Riksdag. As of June, the Democrats polled as the most popular party in Sweden.

The award, styled as an “alternative Nobel”, was won by the Czech politician Václav Klaus.

Klaus, an economist, is by far the most popular Czech politician since that country became independent. He served as President of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013, having been Prime Minister from 1993 to 1998. Klaus’s supposed sins include skepticism toward catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (he is right about that, based on the science) and toward the European Union–a view that he shares with a large and growing number of Europeans.

Nevertheless, the Left’s bullying tactics were too much for the Grand Hotel:

In the press release, the hotel’s chief executive Pia Djupmark claimed that managers had tried to wriggle out of hosting the event as far back as seven weeks ago, but had been unable to do so due to the contract they had signed.

“One of the most difficult things about all of this is that so many people thought that we didn’t understand, that we had no moral compass whatsoever,” she said. “Breaking a contract is a big step, and we decided to stick with our tradition of fair-dealing, that a contract should not be broken. In this case, we should have broken it.”

The hotel claimed that this was the first time in its near 150-year history that it had made a public comment on any of its guests.

“We have always wanted to be a neutral meeting place that does not judge our guests or their opinions and use that to decide whether they are welcome or not,” it said. “At the same time, there is a limit.”

Heh. The limit is reached, apparently, when you disagree with Europe’s left-wing elites, regardless of how widely your views may be shared by the population at large.

Here in the U.S., we are witnessing a populist revolt against bullying liberalism, but what we are seeing here is mild, I suspect, compared with what is in store in Europe. And, of course, when all dissent on what millions see as the most vital issues of the day is barred as “far right,” it is inevitable that unsavory elements will be part of the populist uprising. Having sown the wind, Europe’s Left will, in all likelihood, reap the whirlwind. If the consequences are not to its liking, it has no one to blame but itself.



Col Walker added:

Yeah, divisive persecution and intimidation under the Orwellian doublespeak slogan of "Stronger Together."