The Globalist Mindset: They Hate You

Here, here!

The Globalist Mindset: They Hate You
 Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness


Against what or whom is the contemporary Western public pushing back?
The French non-Parisians against new green taxes on already unaffordable gasoline? Broke southern European Union nations against the financial demands of German bankers? The Eastern Europeans against French and German open-border mandates?

The British masses against both the EU and their own government that either cannot or will not follow the will of the people and implement Brexit? The American populists against outsourcing, offshoring, and illegal immigration?

The common target of all these populist pushbacks is an administrative and cultural elite that shares a set of transnational and globalist values and harbors mostly contempt for the majority of their own Neanderthal citizens who are deemed hopelessly unwoken to environmental, racial, gender, and cultural inevitabilities.

In a word, the Ivy League, Oxbridge, and the Sorbonne masters of the universe assume that the world is on a predetermined trajectory. We are to follow an arc of history bending toward state-managed social justice if you will—to end up as a sort of global Menlo Park, Malibu, Upper West Side, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Schwabing, or Kensington. No wonder, it is their ethical duty of transnationals to goad the fated, but sometimes stalled, process along.

Like Aristocrats of Old

Voters in consensual societies are often assumed too ignorant of the world beyond their borders, too encumbered with traditional racial, ethnic, gender, religious, and nationalist prejudices, and too ill-informed to know what is good for them. No wonder that sometimes hoi polloi must either vote repeatedly until they get it right, or follow executive and judicial fiats issued from their betters on high. In the globalist mindset, Brexit passed not because it was felt to be good by a majority or even advantageous for the United Kingdom, but because racists, xenophobes, nativists, protectionists, and chauvinists deluded the clueless public into thinking a pre-EU, and more racist and sexist Britain was somehow superior.

A postelection depressed Hillary Clinton had to travel all the way to Mumbai, India to find a more enlightened audience that would appreciate her insight that the ogre Trump had beat her because:

If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle, places where Trump won. What that map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that own two-thirds of America’s Gross Domestic Product. I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to solve it.

The globalist elite is certainly transnational and is sickened by localism, traditionalism, and autonomy. Monsieur Macron shares much more in common with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Justin Trudeau than he does with rural Frenchmen. It is almost as if in 2019 our elites are emulating the interlocking aristocratic families of late 19th-century Europe, but instead of being common descendants of Queen Victoria they are the godchildren of Menlo Park, Brussels, Strasburg, Davos, and Wall Street.

Donald Trump’s efforts to deregulate the U.S. economy, demand reciprocal trade with China, Mexico, or Germany, rout ISIS, open up federal lands for natural gas and oil exploration, build pipelines, lower taxes, and grow the economy at best are seen as misguided parochial boosterism and at worse the sort of selfish nationalism that ignores expert global and world-is-flat consensus. In either case, the common denominator is that the world community can ill afford another U.S. president who has not been stamped, vetted, or audited by an Ivy League law or business school, a prior Washington D.C. federal office, or Wall Street firm.

Angela Merkel—who recently pronounced that nations must be “prepared to give up their sovereignty”—and her ilk are representations of the same sort of values as those of Hillary Clinton’s circle. Elites do not see their fellow citizens in exceptional terms of the affinities of a common language, shared history, or sovereign geography. Instead, they envision themselves as Socratic citizens of the world. They are an international siblinghood with common blue-chip educations, wealth, and long service in the administrative state. The anointed alone “see” and “grasp” what is really going on with the world, and therefore what really needs to be done right now, at all costs, regardless of the opposition from what Hillary wrote off as “all that red in the middle.”

International Crusading

Globalism is both an ideology and a culture of behavior. The creed is that the Western world, given its colonial and imperialist past, has a duty both to make amends to the former third world through magnanimously lending the global community elite Western expertise—whether through Kyoto- or Paris-like climate accords, foreign interventions guided by Western humanitarian principles, asymmetrical trade agreements, open borders, or U.N. mandates.

The globalist alone knows how global warming threatens us and how the ignorant masses must sacrifice to cool things down, how nationalism supposedly causes world wars, how sexism, racism, and homophobia have warped Western, but non-necessarily non-Western, society, and how human nature can be modified to avoid these pathologies through greater coercion, more relevant social education, improved material conditions, and greater secular ecumenicalism—a far better religion than calcified Christendom. The Western consumer—fat, “lazy,” played out—surely does not need any more affluence or income. His nation, therefore, can afford to subsidize, through his superfluous lifestyle, far nobler international crusades for mankind.

The nation-state then is passé. Transnational organizations, the larger and more powerful the better, tame mindless Western chauvinism, while enhancing and making invaluable alternative post-Western paradigms. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, the chief executive officer of the World Bank, the Secretary-General of NATO, the Director-General of the World Trade Organization, a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, the President of the Council of Foreign Relations, the president of CNN Worldwide, all these are certainly to be listened to in a way an elected senator from Kansas, the nuts who stirred up the gilets jaunes, the unhinged Poles and Bulgarians who wanted to build fences on their borders, or renegade British MPs pushing for Brexit should not be.

Globalist penance for past sins is accomplished in a variety of ways. Non-Westerns are not to be held to symmetrical value systems. Islamic countries can destroy churches, Western nations consider mosques sacrosanct. Illegal immigration force feeds diversity onto a tired and exhausted Western public in dire need of having its horizons expanded by the other. Dumping, patent and copyright theft, and technological appropriation are sins only for wayward Westerners.

The elite must never be subject to the sometimes unfortunate ramifications of their own ideologies—any more than a laboratory scientist need be singed when he recklessly puts the wrong volatile ingredients into his beaker mix. Open-borders architects in the U.S. need not put their children in schools overwhelmed by illegal immigrants. Walls are useless on borders but effective around Malibu and Napa estates. The elite need not live in neighborhoods where European languages are rarely spoken; others less liberal need such exposure and enlightenment. French citizens must pay high gas taxes for their huge carbon footprints, French elites fly private jets to conduct profitable business in the carbon-rich Gulf, India, and China.

“Noble” Ends, Unethical Means

Globalists generally assume that their own privileged material conditions are pitiful wages for the greater good they do and so justify their material hypocrisies, as if they were wounded wild fawns forced to rely on rich artificial shrubbery of suburban gardens. They often share the greatest disdain for the rural and muscular classes of their own countries who lack the sophistication of the elite and the romanticism of the distant poor. If worse comes to worst, such impediments can simply die off and be replaced by more fertile, more energetic immigrants from the former Third World happy to have a shot at Western material conditions and the general welfare state, and who are at least thankful and appreciative of their benefactors and so more than willing to be receptive to globalist, transnational, and redistributive bromides.

Globalism ultimately is an offspring of elite progressive universities, think tanks, foundations, government institutions, and borderless corporatism. All the old progressive boilerplate—anti-trust legislation, prohibitions on monopolies, product liability—ceases when vast multibillion-dollar tech fortunes put their money into progressive causes, and thereby remind us that sometimes noble ends justify unethical means of obtaining them.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter have a perfect right to monopolize, to warp political expression, and to censor free speech if they devote their billions to enacting global climate, political, or social justice change, in the manner that here at home the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and NSA—at times in conjunction with their foreign counterparts—justifiably had to monitor, use informants, and spread libelous smears on reckless Cro-Magnons like Donald J. Trump, who would harken us back to an embarrassing nationalist and sovereign past. Illegality has its uses.

Whom do the globalists despise?

The carbon spewing Winnebago owners, the snowmobilers, the jet skiers, the Glock packers, the Elks Clubbers, the lathe workers, the 101st Airborners with molôn labé tattooed on their arms, the 7-11 owners, the nutty Brit who speaks reverentially of Churchill, the dumb grubby French guy on a tractor who has no clue that his diesel engine must soon be replaced by three-hour batteries, the wacko Greek who cannot appreciate a boatload of noble Libyans landing on the beach below his ancestral olive grove in Crete, the limited Czech who clings to the hokey belief that residents in the Czech Republic should still speak Czech—in other words, all the autonomous cranks, and odd ballers who did not get the message, are not yet on board, and should have been by now long past woke.


About the Author: Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).

California's State-Sponsored Voter Fraud

Shades of Venezuelas' Maduro... send this along to every one you know!

California's State-Sponsored Voter Fraud

Paul Ryan Is Right: California’s Election Laws Are Vulnerable To Fraud

Watching every single contested congressional race flip from Republican to Democrat days after the election is, as Paul Ryan put it, weird. Here are six reasons California's election laws are deeply flawed.

Bre Payton, The Federalist

Outgoing House Speaker Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) made headlines Thursday morning when he said GOP losses in the state of California were suspicious at a Washington Post Live event.

“California just defies logic to me,” Ryan said about the Golden State’s election results. “We were only down 26 seats the night of the election, and three weeks later, we lost basically every California contested race. This election system they have — I can’t begin to understand what ‘ballot harvesting’ is."

California’s Wacky Election Laws, Explained

Watching every single contested congressional race flip from Republican to Democrat days after the election is, as Ryan put it, weird. While Here are six reasons California’s electoral system is deeply flawed.

1. The DMV automatically registers people to vote, even illegal immigrants.
Virtually everyone who interacts with the state’s DMV gets automatically registered to vote under California’s Motor Voter program, but this program is riddled with errors and has even registered illegal immigrants. In September, the Los Angeles Times reported that 23,000 voters were registered incorrectly by the DMV. Less than a month before the election, DMV officials revealed that an additional 1,500 people were registered to vote when they should not have been, including some illegal residents, minors too young to vote, and felons who were supposed to be ineligible.

2. ‘Ballot Harvesting’ allows political operatives to drop off other people’s ballots.
A new state law allows third parties to pick up ballots and drop them off at polling locations on behalf of that person, a practice known as “ballot harvesting.”

In video footage that surfaced last month, a woman who identifies herself to a California resident as Lulu is seen knocking on someone’s door and offering to deliver their absentee ballot, but “only to, like, people who are supporting the Democratic Party.”


In an e-mail to supporters, Orange County GOP chair Fred Whitaker attributed the party’s losses in longtime Republican districts to ballot harvesting, the San Fransisco Chronicle reported.

‘The number of election day vote-by-mail drop-offs was unprecedented — over 250,000. This is a direct result of ballot harvesting,’ Whitaker wrote. ‘That directly caused the switch from being ahead on election night to losing two weeks later. … We have to develop a response to this new law that allows us to remain competitive while recognizing the realities of Republican voter attitudes towards handing over their ballot.’

In his remarks Thursday, Ryan singled out this practice as a contributing factor to the GOP losses, saying they were confusing and bizarre. Watching the woman in the aforementioned video say she’s collecting ballots but only for Democratic voters is definitely odd and emphasizes how those picking up the ballots have an incentive to mess with them.

What would a ballot collector working on behalf of a liberal group do to a ballot cast by someone who answered the door wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat? Would that ballot actually get taken to the polls, or tossed in the trash?

And what about low-information voters who hadn’t been planning to cast a ballot? If someone showed up at their door asking for their ballot, would they feel obligated to quickly fill it out and give it to them? There seems to be very little benefit for the actual voter (I mean, how hard is it to drop a filled-out ballot in one’s mailbox on election day?) and a huge incentive for the “harvester” to act shady.

3. California allows voters to register to vote and cast a ballot on Election Day.
That’s right. On Election Day, one can show up to a polling location and register to vote and cast a ballot all on the same day by taking advantage of the Conditional Voter Registration process, which is explained in this YouTube video featuring millennials with pastel-colored hair who could not get it together and register to vote on time like the rest of us.

4. Voters can cast a ballot at the “wrong” polling place. 
California allows provisional ballots, which are essentially regular ballots that get put into a special envelope before they’re stuffed into the box. These are for people who show up at the “wrong” polling location or who changed their mind about voting by mail but want to vote anyway, according to California’s Secretary of State website. These ballots are then supposed to be checked against other rolls to make sure the person did not vote twice, but there are reasons to doubt the state’s ability to properly execute this.

5. Counties are allowed to mail absentee ballots to every voter in the county.
“This election, every voter in Madera, Napa, Nevada, Sacramento and San Mateo counties received an absentee ballot — whether they requested one or not,” Shawn Steel writes for The Washington Times. “Beginning in 2020, every county in California except one will be allowed to follow suit.”

6. Absentee ballots that arrive a week later will still be counted.  
Unlike most other states, absentee ballots cast in California do not need to be delivered by Election Day, but merely postmarked on that day. This means absentee ballots can come pouring in up to a week later and alter the outcome of the election.

While a number of these programs and laws certainly make it more convenient for voters, they also create a nightmare scenario for quick election results tallying and a number of vulnerabilities in the integrity of the electoral system. Mailing a ballot to every voter in the county, allowing these ballots to arrive up to a week after Election Day, and allowing individuals to register to vote and cast a ballot on the day of an election give ample opportunity for an individual intent on committing voter fraud to do so.

California needs to rethink its program that has enabled an unknown number of illegal immigrants and minors to be improperly registered to vote. It needs to tighten deadlines on voters in order to get a quicker count that doesn’t take weeks to tabulate.

Fortunately, there haven’t been reports of widespread fraud that would necessitate drastic measures to ensure the results were legitimate. But after the debacle in Florida, watching every single contested congressional race flip from red to blue weeks later is not a good look. California’s legislature and secretary of state need to take Republican concerns about election integrity seriously.

Betsy DeVos Strikes a Blow...

Betsy DeVos Strikes a Blow for the Constitution
David French, National Review

The proposed Title IX rules highlight how bad things have become on campus.

The Department of Education has issued its long-awaited proposed regulations reforming sexual-assault adjudications on college campus. Not only will these rules restore basic due process and fairness to college tribunals, but they also — given how basic the changes are — highlight just how ridiculous university kangaroo courts have become.

First and perhaps most important, the rules will not only require colleges to permit cross-examination of witnesses (including the accuser), but will also prohibit universities from relying on the statements of any witness who refuses to submit to cross-examination.

Cross-examination is so fundamental to adversary proceedings that it’s is simply incredible that some universities have been prosecuting and expelling students without permitting the accused’s representative to question his accuser. Prohibiting cross-examination irrevocably stacks the deck against the accused. The Supreme Court has rightly called cross-examination “the greatest legal engine ever invented for discovery of the truth.”

But you don’t have to trust SCOTUS; the importance of cross-examination is among the most ancient of legal principles. Consider Proverbs 18:17: “In a lawsuit the first to speak seems right, until someone comes forward to cross-examine.”

Interestingly, however, the proposed rules prohibit the accused himself from cross-examining the accuser — instead requiring that questioning come from an “advisor.” While some complain this limits the rights of the accused, as a practical matter advisers (attorneys, for example) are far better equipped to cross-examine witnesses than are undergraduates or young graduate students.

In addition to mandating cross-examination, the proposed rules grant both parties “equal opportunity to inspect and review evidence obtained as part of the investigation that is directly related to the allegations raised in a formal complaint.”

I know what you’re thinking. “Wait. Not only did some schools deny cross-examination, but they also denied the accused access to the relevant evidence in his case, including exculpatory evidence?” Yes, they did deny access to evidence. It wasn’t uncommon for accused students to walk into hearings with only a cursory understanding of the charges against them and partial access to evidence, and then have to respond — on the fly — without access to any legal help.

Yes, the kangaroo courts could be that bad.

But that’s not all. While the proposed rules permit schools to retain the “preponderance of the evidence” standard (as opposed to higher standards such as “clear and convincing evidence”), they do not permit university procedures to disfavor students. Universities are “required to apply the same standard of evidence for complaints against students as they do for complaints against employees, including faculty.” This provision inhibits powerful campus constituencies from negotiating more favorable deals on due process.

The rules also dispense with the single investigator/adjudicator model that allowed universities to place a single person in the position of investigator, prosecutor, and adjudicator. There were no safeguards against bias. Again, this requirement is so basic that it’s simply stunning that it has to be articulated.


In a crucial change, the proposed rules protect the First Amendment by significantly tightening the definition of some forms of sexual misconduct. As Reason’s Robby Soave explains, “Under the previous system, administrators were obliged to investigate any unwanted conduct of a sexual nature, which is a fairly wide swath of behavior. Some officials even interpreted this to include mundane speech that happened to involve gender or sex.”

The new proposed rules, by contrast, apply controlling language from the Supreme Court to define sexual harassment as sexual assault, quid pro quo harassment, and “unwelcome conduct on the basis of sex that is so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to the recipient’s education program or activity.”

Through this change, the DOE finally conforms its harassment definition to the language of Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, a case that defined the standard for peer-on-peer hostile-environment sexual harassment. The Davis standard serves the purpose of protecting students from true harassment and protecting students from arbitrary, truly subjective claims of offense.

The new regulations aren’t perfect, of course. I still have the pipe dream of reserving adjudication of crimes and other unlawful acts to actual criminal and civil courts. But that was never likely to happen. Also, the proposed rules permit both the accuser and the accused to appeal adverse decisions. Permitting the accuser to appeal creates a form of double jeopardy that would not be permitted in criminal cases, but this is more of a nitpick. After all, the accuser (plaintiff) can appeal in civil-court cases, so it’s difficult to argue that permitting such appeals presents constitutional problems.

What is stunning, however, is the reaction of some on the legal left to the proposed changes. The ACLU said this:

The proposed rule would make schools less safe for survivors of sexual assault and harassment, when there is already alarmingly high rates of campus sexual assaults and harassment that go unreported. 

It promotes an unfair process, inappropriately favoring the accused and letting schools ignore their responsibility under Title IX to respond promptly and fairly to complaints of sexual violence.

And this:

We will continue to support survivors.

When I read those tweets, there was a disturbance in the legal Force, as if the voices of generations of ACLU civil libertarians cried out in anguish and were suddenly silenced by wokeness. The old-school ACLU knew there was no contradiction between defending due process and “supporting survivors.” Indeed, it was through healthy processes that we not only determined whether a person had been victimized, but also prevented the accused from becoming a “survivor” of a profound injustice.

I hate to use arguments that sound remotely like “arc of history” determinism, but the college procedures DeVos is abolishing were so manifestly unfair and prone to grotesque abuse that they were not sustainable. Courts by the dozens — and judges from across the ideological spectrum — were ruling against universities, sometimes with the strongest of words. If the Department of Education didn’t make systematic changes, courts were going to force its hand — case by agonizing case.

In short, Betsy DeVos did what she had to do. And she did it well. Today is a good day for due process. It’s a good day for the First Amendment. And it’s a good day for college students across the land.


David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. @davidafrench

Veterans Day 2018

Muzzling the White House Press Corps

Muzzling the White House Press Corps

Bill O'Reilly, billoreilly

Critical mass has been reached concerning the hostility between CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta and President Trump.  The display at the press conference this week was embarrassing and unnecessary.

The back story is important here.  CNN is the lowest rated cable news network even though it has embraced a “hate-Trump” posture.  Every on-air person in the organization well understands they are encouraged to incorporate a negative tone into anything Trump.

MSNBC also has that philosophy - and its personnel is better at bringing the hate than the CNN people, with one exception: Jim Acosta.

As someone who has interviewed five presidents, I know it is a difficult task. 

Viewers expect straightforward questions that elicit information.  But often presidents do not want to answer certain queries and that’s when things can get bumpy.

Do you insist on an answer?  Do you point out the dodge?  How do you handle a president who is hostile to you?

Skilled journalists know that you can be persistent without being disrespectful.  A reporter might not like the president, but he or she should always respect the office.  That doesn’t mean you forgo tough questions, I never did that, but it does mean you think about your tone and phrasing.

Mr. Acosta does not do that.  He apparently wants to goad Donald Trump into a confrontation.  Here’s how Acosta lighted the fuse the other day.

“As you know, Mr. President, the caravan is not an invasion...”

First of all, that is Acosta’s opinion.  It is a statement, not a question.  Acosta knows that the President has labeled thousands of migrants heading for the southern border an invasion.  So the White House correspondent for CNN is deliberately taking a contrarian point of view trying to provoke a response, rather than asking why Mr. Trump considers the march an invasion.

It is Jim Acosta’s job to get information to CNN viewers, not be captain of the debate team.  If he wants to give opinions, CNN should give him a primetime show. 

And then there’s the tone.  In a followup, Acosta actually asked a question.  But did so in an accusatory way.

“But do you think that you demonized immigrants ...?”

President Trump obviously does not think he did that.  So why the edge on Acosta’s part?  Why the fuse?

All he had to say was something like this: “Mr. President some people believe that you have overreacted to the migrant situation and used it for political gain. Have you considered that?”

Tough but fair, right?

But again, CNN does not want to secure information from President Trump, the network wants to make him look bad.  And Mr. Acosta is happy to do that by being as insulting as possible.

Predictably, President Trump lashed out at Mr. Acosta calling him rude and a bad person.  That’s gold for CNN as it hits the internet all over the world, and Acosta gets to play the victim. 

Another successful day at the office.

I really hate to say this, but the Trump administration would be in the right if it pulled Acosta’s credentials.  The well is simply filled with too much poison and presidential press meetings are being disrupted by the CNN-driven carnival.

Maybe the network brings back Larry King to replace Acosta.

Well, that may be over-adjusting.

House of cards

He huffed and he puffed and blew the cards down...

Rage Makes You Stupid

Rage Makes You Stupid
Kevin D. Williamson, National Review

People have the strongest feelings about the things they know the least about.

What are we supposed to think about political rage?

Before and after the arrest of Cesar Sayoc, the suspect in the recent string of bombs sent to prominent Democrats and media figures, we were treated to any number of homilies about “rage” and its origins in “toxic” political rhetoric. Many of these homilies were pointed directly or indirectly at President Donald Trump and his immoderate Twitter habits. That political rage is necessarily linked to political violence was assumed, and sometimes asserted, but rarely argued.

Five minutes before that, rage was all the rage. Rebecca Traister, an editor for New York magazine, has just published a book celebrating the “revolutionary power” of anger, which was celebrated at The Atlantic on 4 October under a headline noting the “seismic power” of “rage.” On 21 September, the Washington Post affirmed that “rage is healthy, rational, and necessary for America.” On Friday, NBC news praised a television show for depicting “anger as righteous and necessary.” Before that, it ran a segment encouraging certain political partisans to “embrace their rage.”

Earlier in the year, Leslie Jamison wrote a very interesting and intelligent essay for The New York Times Magazine exploring anger as a “tool to be used, part of a well-stocked arsenal.” Right as the bombing suspect was being arrested in Florida, Rewire shared “All the Rage That’s Fit To Print,” its assessment of four books on “fury.”

I’ve omitted the word “women” in several instances above, on the theory that we’re all adults here, and that we would recognize the obvious hypocrisy and illogic of any “my rage good, your rage bad, bad, bad,” construct.
Except . . .

On 28 September, the admirable Max Boot published a lamentation of “Republican rage” in the Washington Post, arguing that Howard Beale, Network’s embodiment of outrage, “would feel right at home in the Republican party.” On the same day, The Week, which may be the least intelligent non-pornographic publication in these United States, was also in a the mood for lamentation, anguished over “the rage of Brett Kavanaugh.” The day before, Esquire moaned that “This Was the Hour of White Male Rage.” On Thursday, the Washington Post tied incendiary devices to “incendiary rhetoric,” while Philippe Reines, who used to work for that weird lady who recently disavowed civility in quite specific terms, went on MSNBC to insist that “Donald Trump’s Rhetoric Can’t Be Ignored in Wake of Bombs.” Eugene Robinson encouraged Democrats to “get mad” and “get even” — “harness your rage,” as the headline in the Chicago Tribune put it — even though he blasted Brett Kavanaugh for being “rage-filled.” Ta-Nehisi Coates has written “in defense of political anger,” and Darryl Pinckney, writing in The New York Review of Books, gave readers 4,000 words on “The Anger of Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

And then there are the Subarus, legions of them with bumper-stickers reading: “If You Aren’t Outraged, You Aren’t Paying Attention.”

The signals, then, are decidedly mixed.

Put me in the anti-rage camp. Rage makes you stupid.

(Rage and Wild Turkey . . . . Well, enough said.)

I’m sometimes described as an angry writer, which always surprises me. I am much, much more frequently bored by American politics than outraged by it. (More than one cable-news producer has suggested to me that I should present with more outrage.) Senator Feinstein does not fill me with rage; she has the exact aspect of a woman who is very, very sad that the bingo game didn’t break her way this time, and it is difficult to be angry at that. I do not think she should be in the Senate, but I do hope that wherever she ends up, there’s someone there to make her a nice cup of hot tea.

Our politics is full of performative outrage, histrionics that are designed to imbue unserious people with an air moral seriousness and to keep the rubes emotionally invested long enough to get them to a commercial break. It almost inevitably is the case that people have the strongest feelings about the things they know the least about; people who actually know about any subject of genuine interest understand that such subjects tend to be complicated, and that expressions of outrage, however cathartic, do not render them any less recondite. Compare Paul Krugman on economics to Paul Krugman on politics and you’ll see what I mean.

I would suggest that we make a concerted effort to abolish cheap outrage from our political discourse, but that proposal would be stillborn: There’s just too much money in outrage. Instead, I would suggest taking a different attitude toward those histrionics, understanding that what people such as Sean Hannity and Chris Hayes are engaged in is not really political discourse at all, but something much more like sports commentary or The Real Housewives of Wherever: The emotional frisson is the point, and the political content is just a McGuffin, the ball in this cynical game of for-profit fetch.

At the very least, we do ourselves the favor of understanding that political rhetoric, however rage-filled or — dread cliché — “toxic,” belongs to an entirely separate category of human endeavor than sending people bombs in the mail, that exhortations to vote are a different thing from exhortations to violence, that Ann Coulter speaking on a college campus is a different thing from firebombing the building in which she is scheduled to speak. There are many voices in our politics that do in fact countenance violence, from Slavoj Žižek (“for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate”) to every dimwit who has promised to “Punch a Nazi.”

Sorting all that out sometimes requires careful thinking, which is difficult to manage when you are high on rage.

The caravan is an attack on America -- Stop the caravan now

Peace at the Mexican/Guatamala border...

The caravan is an attack on America -- Stop the caravan now
Newt Gingrich, Fox News

The caravan of about 4,000 migrants from Central America seeking to enter Mexico and then the United States illegally is attempting to invade and attack the U.S.

This assertion will almost certainly be denounced by the usual sources as being hateful or offensive, but it is long past time we stop letting the left prevent us from using words that clearly communicate reality.

The fact is: Thousands of people have openly stated their intention to break American law and invade our country. Other people, some of them Americans, are funding this deliberate effort to invade America.

If you think “invade” is too strong a word, watch this video of the caravan tearing down fences separating Guatemala and Mexico while waving the Honduran flag (the country these people no doubt plan to claim asylum from). How is this not an invasion?

We cannot allow ourselves to be intimidated by the heart-wrenching pictures and misleading words the left-wing media will doubtlessly manufacture if this caravan arrives at our border.

We also must reclaim our narrative from those on the left. We cannot allow them to demonize us and distort what we stand for and what we are trying to do.
Let me be clear about where I stand.

I strongly favor legal immigration. I am happy that America remains the most welcoming country in the world for legal immigrants.

According to Pew Research, in 2015 there were a little more than 30 million legal immigrants in the U.S. This is higher than the population of Texas – our second-most populous state. I think this is a great thing that makes America stronger. It is simply a lie to say I oppose immigration.

Furthermore, I have worked very hard to get sound, responsible immigration reform for decades.
In October 1986, when I served in the House, I voted for the Simpson-Mazzoli Immigration Reform Act, which granted amnesty to about 3 million people (originally estimated to be 300,000). I voted for the bill in return for two commitments: to control the border and to establish a guest worker program.

Similarly, President Reagan wrote in his diary that he would reluctantly sign the bill. “It’s high time we regained control of our borders and (Simpson’s) bill will do this,” the president wrote.

The harsh lesson of 1986 was that liberals took the amnesty for 3 million illegal immigrants and then broke their word on controlling the border and creating an effective guest worker program.
Finally, on a personal level, I spent much of my childhood living in foreign countries (my dad spent 27 years in the infantry, and I now live part-time in Rome, Italy).

I outline my record to make clear that I don’t fit any of the nasty stereotypes with which the left smears those who threaten them (see “the Kavanaugh effect”). And neither do the vast majority of Americans who want a functional immigration system that reflects American values.

The very idea that thousands of people believe (or are being told) they have a right to invade America and demand that we take care of them tells you how sick the system has become.
The time to draw the line and fight for an honest immigration and border control policy is now.
The caravan is the perfect symbol of the arrogance – the organized effort to destroy the rule of law – and the contempt for the American system that the left exhibits every day.

We have been so conditioned by a half-century of political correctness doctrine (developed and sustained by the liberal news media, college professors, and left-wing politicians) that we have forgotten how to tell the truth about illegal immigration.

The truth is: Illegal immigration has substantially increased the risk for Americans.

MS-13, the vicious El Salvadoran gang, killed 17 people on Long Island in New York in a 17-month period in 2016. The gang has an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 members in the United States.
Fentanyl and opioids also come across the uncontrolled southern border. Last year, more than 72,000 Americans died from drug overdoses – more than the number of Americans killed during the eight years of the Vietnam War.

There is a substantial safety impact of uncontrolled borders and the routine breaking of the law by illegal immigrants.

If America is to survive, we must win some key arguments about facts and prove that much of what left-wing politicians say – and what the liberal news media report – is simply wrong.
If America is to survive, we must heed George Orwell’s warning in his great essay “Politics and the English Language” that “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."
Nothing could more accurately characterize the left’s speech about political correctness and the unending effort of the left to shut down language that exposes the hypocrisy and falsehood of its members’ positions – especially when it comes to their animus toward American sovereignty and defending the border.

As I wrote in my New York Times best-seller “Trump’s America: The Truth About Our Nation’s Great Comeback,” the liberal media have actively participated in creating propaganda designed to manufacture sympathy for the lawbreakers and delegitimize those who would defend American sovereignty and the rule of law.

When House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., says to Harvard Kennedy School students that Democrats are for controlling our borders, she is simply lying. When she goes on to say, “we do need to guard our borders, and we do need to have immigration reform,” you have to wonder how stupid she thinks we are.

There is no evidence of any Democrat-backed program that would be effective in controlling illegal immigration. The Democrats oppose the border wall in any form. They would hobble or abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).

Democrats favor so-called sanctuary cities and states in order to shield illegal immigrants from the legal immigration process.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has introduced an open borders bill, which every Democratic Senate incumbent has co-sponsored.

The national vice chair of the Democratic Party campaigns in a T-shirt that says in Spanish “I don’t believe in borders.”

Democrats only ever favor complicated, impossible-to-implement legal systems, which create opportunities for people to enter and stay in America illegally.

Not only do Democrats oppose controlling the border and stopping illegal immigration, they welcome illegal immigrants as an offset to legal American voters.

Consider what Pelosi said in El Paso to immigration rights activists: “We believe that we will have leverage when we win in November. And why is that important? Because it gives leverage to every family” who came to America illegally.

Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia, is even clearer in her commitment to illegal immigrants. In a recent speech, she said the blue wave is comprised of “those who are documented and undocumented.” There could not be a clearer indication of the Democrats’ belief that illegal immigrants are an integral part of their coalition.

The San Francisco Democrats have even adopted a new regulation to allow illegal immigrants to vote in city elections.

The caravan invasion is a useful starting point to insist on an honest debate about our future as a country.

Every Democrat should be forced to answer these six questions before the election:

1. Do you think 4,000 or more people should be allowed to invade the United States whenever they want to, and, if so, how big and how frequent do you think the next caravans will be?  
2. Who do you think is paying for these efforts to undermine American sovereignty, break American laws, and impose foreign will on the United States?  
3. When you are told it is only a small number of people in this first caravan, how do you respond to the fact that we already have an estimated illegal immigrant population of 1.8 million Central Americans, 650,000 South Americans, and 425,000 immigrants from the Caribbean. Does that change the scale of the problem? If caravans are accepted the numbers will grow dramatically in a very short period.  
4. When you learn that the Gallup World Poll estimates that 29 percent of people in Latin America and the Caribbean (that would be about 197 million people) want to migrate – and 29 percent of those people (about 57 million) want to come to the United States – does this change your concern about controlling the border?  
5. When you learn that beyond our hemisphere, the Gallup World Poll estimates that millions more would come to the United States if they could, does that increase your interest in controlling the border?  
6. If you do not think this caravan should be allowed to illegally enter the United States as an invasion of our sovereign border, what would you do to stop it?

If Democrats really wanted to control the border, how do we have an estimated 11 million-plus illegal immigrants currently in the United States – and a system that can be gamed so easily that people have continued to brazenly and openly break the law?

This caravan attack is the right place to draw the line and say “no more.”

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., is right. Congress should come back and pass the laws that would enable Americans to re-establish the rule of law at the border and protect our country with dignity and authority.

President Trump is right. Stop the caravan now.

If you want to defend America, let your House member and senators know how you feel.

Who Will Save Democrats from Their Leaders?

Who Will Save Democrats from Their Leaders?
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review

In a better time, we would be talking not about Eric Holder but about real Democratic leaders.

‘When they go low” . . . that’s where they are sure to find Eric Holder.

Sometimes, the former attorney general is excusing hard-Left, unrepentant, anti-American FALN separatists by helping a Democratic president spring them from imprisonment for their terrorist crimes.

Sometimes, he is helping a Democratic president commute the sentences of hard-Left terrorists whose only regret was their failure to shoot it out against police who interrupted another bombing spree in their war against the United States.

Sometimes, he is volunteering his legal services and his status as a former top Justice Department official to file a “friend of the court” brief on behalf of the al Qaeda jihadist who was apprehended while plotting a second wave of 9/11 mass-murder attacks.

Sometimes, he is defying congressional committees investigating his Justice Department’s reckless, politically driven “gun-walking” scheme gone awry — the Fast and Furious “investigation” that armed murderous Mexican drug gangs and got a border-patrol officer killed.

Sometimes, he is sharing a podium with his friend Al Sharpton, who is threatening to incite mayhem — as Sharpton is wont to do — if police fail to trump up a racially charged case rather than let the evidence determine whether to indict.

Sometimes, he is trying to keep his story straight about that time when, as a Columbia undergrad, he proudly joined other campus radicals in occupying a building and the dean’s office — forcible intimidation to extort political concessions.

And sometimes, Holder is just engaged in old-fashioned political corruption: helping a Democratic president circumvent the Justice Department in carrying out the pay-to-play pardon of a notorious fugitive.

But if there is anyone who knows about “going low,” it is Mr. Holder. He is, after all, the first attorney general in American history to be held in contempt of Congress.

And low is exactly where Holder — along with Hillary “No Civility Unless We Win” Clinton and the rest of the social-justice arriére-garde — has taken a once-great political party.

In a better time, we would not be talking about Eric Holder. He would be dismissed as a fringe radical who endorses forcible, extortionist tactics against political adversaries (and then, in familiar Holder fashion, spends the next day pretending he didn’t say what he said). In a better time, we would be asking why anyone would care what Eric Holder says, about anything.

But today, Holder is important. Today, he is a mainstream Democratic leader. Today, his antics illustrate two things we fail to bear in mind at our peril.

First, the high-minded airs put on by the hard left are a fraud, and a dangerous one.

Note that the wind-up for Holder’s dimwitted pitch that Democrats must “kick” their Republican rivals was his invocation of Michelle Obama’s precious summons: “When they go low, we go high.” But that’s been a con job from the moment she said it.

Mrs. Obama rode into the White House on her husband’s admonition, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” That would be the same Barack Obama whose political coming-out party was held in the living room of his good friends, the “small ‘c’ communist,” unrepentant former terrorists Bernardine Dohrn (“The Weathermen dig Charles Manson”) and Bill Ayers (on his bomb for the Pentagon: “Everything was absolutely ideal. . . . The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them”).

That would also be the same Barack Obama who rationalized leveraging political advocacy with extortion — what “community organizers” like to call “direct action.” Here’s an excerpt from Obama’s 1990 encomium to radical icon Saul Alinksy:

The debate as to how black and other dispossessed people can forward their lot in America is not new. From W.E.B. DuBois to Booker T. Washington to Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, this internal debate has raged between integration and nationalism, between accommodation and militancy, between sit-down strikes and boardroom negotiations. The lines between these strategies have never been simply drawn, and the most successful black leadership has recognized the need to bridge these seemingly divergent approaches.

Militancy? Yeah, the mob — the Democrats’ front line of shock troops — is still sorting out “the need to bridge” that “seemingly divergent approach” to ordinary politics in a pluralistic, ideologically diverse republic. Of course, it’s only a problem if you take Michelle’s “go high” nostrum seriously. Democrats don’t, because they understand it’s a game: The pursuit of “social justice” (translation: getting their way by shredding your liberties) is always considered “going high,” regardless of how militant the tactic. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask Steve Scalise and Rand Paul.

That brings us to the second point Eric Holder’s incitements should clarify.
The latest regression to the 1970s “any means necessary” politics that today’s Democrats have reincarnated was triggered by Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. But don’t be confused. The fact that Kavanaugh was the occasion for Democratic anarchy does not mean he was the cause.

This was not about Brett Kavanaugh. This was about power. The character assassination heaped on Kavanaugh would have been used against any President Trump nominee poised to shift the Supreme Court rightward. Remarkably, Democrats now kick themselves for not attacking the nominee even more viciously. Doesn’t matter who the nominee was. The real objective was not to destroy Kavanaugh but to convey what Democrats have in store for any conservative who seeks high public office. If you don’t grasp that, you’re not paying attention.

Most conservatives see government as a necessary evil; they would like a limited United States government that reflects this suspicion and the Framers’ emphasis on liberty. Most Democrats see government as a desirable good; they would like an active United States government that rights wrongs and addresses the complex challenges of modern, globally interconnected society. Many brilliant, able people have been that kind of Democrat — the kind of patriot who loves America as it is but strives to improve it, not radically alter it. The country needs those Democrats to take their party back.

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY — Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. @andrewcmccarthy

It's one left-wing riot after another, but leftist leaders have decided the problem is YOU

It's one left-wing riot after another, but leftist leaders have decided the problem is YOU

Tucker Carlson, Fox News  

The crack political team over at The Washington Post has uncovered a brand new species of fake news they think you need to know about: Imaginary left-wing mobs.

In a piece posted this week, The Post explained that in order to win the midterm elections, those Republicans have "cast the Trump resistance movement as an angry mob."

Now, “cast” is, of course, used here as a synonym for misrepresented. The Washington Post wants you to know that these mobs are not real. They're an illusion. 

That may surprise you, because you may have recently seen videos of prominent Republicans being chased out of restaurants by screaming progressives. You may have even read news accounts about how a Republican congressman named Steve Scalise was shot with a high-powered rifle by a Bernie Sanders supporter.

You may have seen college campuses descend into rioting simply because conservatives showed up to talk.

And just this past weekend, you may have watched transfixed as groups of hysterical young people yelled at Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and then pounded in rage on the front doors of the Supreme Court.

All of this may have given you the mistaken impression that there is a threat of disorder and lawlessness from the left building in this country, some of it funded by a man that The Washington Post neutrally describes as “philanthropist” George Soros.

Well, rest easy, says The Post. In fact, all of this talk of left-wing mobs "taps grievances about the nation's fast-moving cultural and demographic shifts." In other words, this is racism, and it's designed says, The Post, "for the benefit of white voters, particularly men."

Wow, so the angry left-wing mobs you thought you had been watching on television turn out to be merely a hallucination. They're a fever dream concocted by those diabolical magicians over at Fox News.

Thank heaven, you can wake up now. None of it is real. -- It's 1996 again.

But wait, has anyone told the angry left-wing mobs about this? They seem to believe that they exist.

In Portland, Oregon, they're still blocking traffic and breaking things and screaming at old ladies in wheelchairs.  Apparently, they don't get The Washington Post in Oregon.

I guess you just can’t believe your lying eyes.

Some reports - and there haven't been many reports, but some - describe these protesters as ANTIFA, others say they're Black Lives Matter. It doesn't matter. What you're actually looking at is the youth wing of the Democratic Party. These are their shock troops.

“Go to the Hill today," Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said recently. "Get up and please get up in the face of some Congress people.”

Added Rep. Maxine Waters: D-Calif.: “If you see anyone from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get up and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they are not welcome.”

Well, they obeyed. The left always obeys. Obedience is the whole point of their program. And now, normal people across the country, nevertheless, are becoming concerned.

“So many frankly unhinged people and unstable people out there," said Kelley Paul, wife of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who was attacked by a deranged neighbor over the summer. "And when they hear someone on their side telling them ‘get up in their face,‘ they take that literally, and they think that that gives them a license to be very aggressive, be harassing."

The senator's wife now sleeps with a loaded gun by her bedside. That's what it has come to as Hillary Clinton says there's no being civil with Republicans, and top Democratic lawmakers urge angry citizens to harass people who simply don't share their worldview.

But if you read the Washington Post, you might believe it was all your fault - and all in your head. 

Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," Oct. 9, 2018.

THE KAVANAUGH SMEAR AND THE FBI: A CONNECTION?

Do you smell that fetid swamp smell? BH

THE KAVANAUGH SMEAR AND THE FBI: A CONNECTION?
John Hinderacker, Powerline

James Kunstler is a liberal who has a site called Clusterf*** Nation. Although a liberal, he casts a cold, intelligent eye on the follies of our time. The linked post begins by questioning why anyone would believe Christine Ford. What follows is an explosive theme:

I believe that the Christine Blasey Ford gambit was an extension of the sinister activities underway since early 2016 in the Department of Justice and the FBI to un-do the last presidential election, and that the real and truthful story about these seditious monkeyshines is going to blow wide open.

Stunning if true.

It turns out that the Deep State is a small world. Did you know that the lawyer sitting next to Dr. Ford in the Senate hearings, one Michael Bromwich, is also an attorney for Andrew McCabe, the former FBI Deputy Director fired for lying to investigators from his own agency and currently singing to a grand jury? What a coincidence. Out of all the lawyers in the most lawyer-infested corner of the USA, she just happened to hook up with him. 

It’s a matter of record that Dr. Ford traveled to Rehobeth Beach Delaware on July 26, where her Best Friend Forever and former room-mate, Monica McLean, lives, and that she spent the next four days there before sending a letter July 30 to Senator Diane Feinstein that kicked off the “sexual assault” circus. Did you know that Monica McClean was a retired FBI special agent, and that she worked in the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York under Preet Bharara, who had earlier worked for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer? 

Could Dr. Ford have spent those four days in July helping Christine Blasey Ford compose her letter to Mrs. Feinstein? Did you know that Monica McClean’s lawyer, one David Laufman is a former DOJ top lawyer who assisted former FBI counter-intel chief Peter Strozk on both the Clinton and Russia investigations before resigning in February this year — in fact, he sat in on the notorious “unsworn” interview with Hillary in 2016. Wow! What a really small swamp Washington is!

Of all the gin joints lawyers in all the towns in all the world, she walks in with one from the FBI. Funny coincidence.

None of this is trivial and the matter can’t possibly rest there. Too much of it has been unraveled by what remains of the news media. And meanwhile, of course, there is at least one grand jury listening to testimony from the whole cast-of-characters behind the botched Hillary investigation and Robert Mueller’s ever more dubious-looking Russian collusion inquiry: the aforementioned Strozk, Lisa Page, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bill Priestap, et. al. I have a feeling that these matters are now approaching critical mass with the parallel unraveling of the Christine Blasey Ford “story.” 

The Democratic Party has its fingerprints all over this, as it does with the shenanigans over the Russia investigation. Not only do I not believe Dr. Ford’s story; I also don’t believe she acted on her own in this shady business. What’s happening with all these FBI and DOJ associated lawyers is an obvious circling of the wagons. They’ve generated too much animus in the process and they’re going to get nailed. These matters are far from over and a major battle is looming in the countdown to the midterm elections.

The Democrats’ Russia hoax and their smearing of Judge Kavanaugh are two of the most appalling episodes in recent political history. Are they, in some fashion, related? I have no idea. Stay tuned.