Jesus Was Not a Socialist

Recently, Speaker Paul Ryan was confronted with the following question from a Dominican nun: How do you reconcile your political philosophy (meaning conservatism and its defense of the free market) with Christ’s teaching that we should always stand on the side of the poor and the destitute?

Of course, the question presupposes that Speaker Ryan and all who share his political views reject their moral obligation to stand with the poor.  That glaring flaw notwithstanding, the question is still valid, particularly in light of the fact that those of us who truly attempt to live out a Christian life ought to be continuously asking this question, not only as it relates to our political beliefs, but also as it relates to every action we undertake.

How do we reconcile what we’re doing with the teachings of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?

There are actually two separate answers to the Sister’s question, both leading squarely to the adoption of a conservative view of government.

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Socialist policies are abject failures

The first is a practical one, and one that stands as irrefutable: Because socialism does not work!

The left argues that to properly apply Jesus’s teachings to governmental design, government must actively and zealously take wealth away from the hands of the haves and place it in the hands of the have nots. But this approach undercuts what it means to be a person — and certainly a Christian.

Christians believe that each individual has a direct and immutable relationship with God. We believe that we are placed on this earth for a reason, and that reason is a divine one, and that such a purpose is intertwined with promoting goodness and charity to our fellow men.

But these callings are placed on us as individuals, not as a group.

If God’s mandate had been placed on government, then there would be no direct relationship with God. Rather, our purpose would be merely to support the state. We would live, work, and die only at the pleasure of government, which was entrusted to carry out God’s plan.  An absurd result indeed!

No. Socialism does not work, and pursuing socialistic solutions to the challenges of poverty and suffering will only result in furthering the man’s suffering and to suppressing the very Christianity leftists are using to validate their quest.

Jesus’ interest is man, not government policy

But there is a second and more compelling reason why Christ’s teachings will not result in a socialist government, and it centers on Jesus’s audience.

Jesus did not come to live amongst us to speak of “Poli Sci.” In fact, the only time Jesus Christ was presented with a question dealing with politics, he rejected addressing it completely.

In Matthew 22, the Pharisees plotted to set a legal trap for the Messiah. Shrewdly, one of them asked Jesus about the appropriateness of paying a tax to Caesar. Detecting the snare, Jesus first responded by calling his inquirer a hypocrite. Then, after asking whose image appears on the denarius, he astutely responded, “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God.”

As was true of so many of Jesus’s answers, not only did he refuse to take the bait placed before him, but his answer opened even more insights regarding man’s relationship with God and what was expected of us here on earth.

So what belongs to Caesar? Worldly things.

Laws belong to Caesar. Taxes belong to Caesar. Political philosophy belongs to Caesar.

And what belongs to God? Only your soul.

Jesus came to save men’s souls. And as such his calling is meant to serve as a mandate to each and every one of us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and to sacrifice for his or her wellbeing . . . as individuals!

Jesus, governmental formula was immaterial to his mission and his analysis. So, in Jesus’s world, there is no call for a government that redistributes wealth by fiat. There is only a call for each of us to stand with the afflicted, not under the banner of government, but through our covenant with God.

The reality is that government needs to be designed in a manner conducive to a self-sufficient society and respectful of the rights of man. Socialism has consistently failed in the former and ignores the latter. Observance of restraints in government inevitably leads to a government whose power springs from the people and interferes as little as possible with the liberties of its citizens.

And the only guarantee that such a society will work for the oppressed and the poor is if there exists a close association between each individual in that society and God.

Sadly, our more recent national experience has been one that has disrupted such a close association; and with devastating consequences.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act.

Video: On the social media giants’ war on the freedom of speech

On August 29, I spoke at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Wednesday Morning Club in Los Angeles on the social media giants’ new practice of shutting down voices that don’t follow the Leftist agenda.

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TRANSCRIPT

DAVID HOROWITZ: And I wanted to say that Robert Spencer is a very special person. He created Jihad Watch, which is part of our arsenal to defend our civilization against its enemies without and within who are very numerous.

I want to thank Joyce for bringing Robert to us and for supporting him while he’s part of our universe.

The reason you don’t see a lot of Robert is he lives on the East Coast. So this is a special day. Robert is special in two ways. First of all, he’s one of the most courageous individuals on the right. (Applause)

Because we, at the Center, have taken on the Islamists, and have been doing it for 15-20 years, all of us are hated. I don’t know if you’ve watched all these blacklists going up all over the place, but we’re all hated, but none of us are hated as much as Robert. And the reason is – as you know, those of you who’ve seen him know he’s a very mild-mannered person. The reason that he’s hated is because he’s so knowledgeable. He has invested so much energy. He’s written, I don’t know if it’s a dozen books now, all of them really indispensable, and there are copies out there, and that’s why we’re holding this event, for his new one.

But he’s put the intellectual energy. It’s easy to just be discouraged by the lying of the Left. I mean, for an intellectual, it’s very dispiriting to engage, well, with the Islamists, with the so-called liberals. They lie all the time. They don’t deal with — When you refute their lies, they call you names and attack you.

So just as somebody who does what Robert does, I can tell you to have support like this is really important, but it takes an inner fortitude to do what Robert has done. I want to thank him for doing that — (Applause)

ROBERT SPENCER: I am very grateful for all your kind words and, yes, you know, the flagship publication of the David Horowitz Freedom Center is Front Page Magazine, and if you go to Front Page Magazine, on the masthead it says, “Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” (Laughter) And they’re getting out. (Laughter) Now, it’s happening.

We have seen, especially after the incident in Charlottesville, which apparently was a Neo-Nazi psychopath who drove his car into a crowd of Leftists — I say “apparently” not because I subscribe to any wild conspiracy theories or anything of that kind, but there are a lot of questionable aspects to that whole incident. One of the most notable ones being that the organizer of the Alt-Right or Neo-Nazi or White Supremacist or whatever it was demonstration was a member of the Occupy Movement and an Obama organizer just last year. And so you gotta wonder did he undergo such a rapid conversion to this supposed Far-Right and become its leader in such a short time, or is there more to this than meets the eye?

But in any case, whatever happened there, the Left has been using the incident at Charlottesville to try to once again overreach and make sure that no dissenting view can be enunciated, that absolutely nothing except the Far-Left agenda can be spoken in the public square.

And after Charlottesville, they have been using it, using that incident to move in for the kill. And one of the chief weapons that they have been using in doing this is, of course, the notorious hate group list of the Southern Poverty Law Center. And the Southern Poverty Law Center, as many of you know, started out in the ‘70s. I was one of its early donors, and I wish I could get that money back. (Laughter) But, anyway, it was fighting the Klan and Neo-Nazis, and who could object?

But, of course, the Klan and the Nazis, in real life, aside from what you might read in the New York Times or here on CNN, in real life, the Klan and Neo-Nazis are negligent forces — negligible forces, I should say, excuse me — that don’t have any significant power and are not menacing people on a large scale in the United States today. This is not to excuse them. It’s just to recognize that there’s a great deal of hysteria surrounding them today, in large part because of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

By the end of the ‘70s, the Southern Poverty Law Center was victorious. It had fought the Klan in several lawsuits. It had won, and the Klan was a spent force. So what it should have done was go out of business, vote itself out of existence at that time, but, of course, as we know, organizations don’t do that. They just find other things to refocus upon, and the SPLC decided to become essentially an attack dog for the Left by lumping in perfectly legitimate organizations with real hate groups and thereby try to tar, marginalize and ultimately destroy groups that were perfectly legitimate, but which enunciated a point of view that the Southern Poverty Law Center opposed.

It’s a really very, very clever tactic, diabolically clever, but undeniably clever. And we saw how it worked right after Charlottesville when CNN published their list, 917 hate groups in the United States. Only in the small print did the initial CNN reports say this is according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Nowhere did CNN explain that the Southern Poverty Law Center does not include any groups that are not on the Right, any groups on the Left as hate groups. You cannot be a hate group and be on the Left, as far as the SPLC is concerned. Nowhere did they explain why the SPLC is a neutral arbiter of what constitutes a hate group at all or what qualifies them to tell us what is a hate group and what isn’t. Nowhere was this explained. All it said was, “Here are the hate groups in your area.”

And it was really quite a remarkable thing to scroll through this list. I don’t know if any of you saw it, but it made — even though I was appalled and disgusted, because, of course, there was Jihad Watch and the David Horowitz Freedom Center and other perfectly legitimate groups, many of which I’m personally involved in as well, they were right next to these groups like the Skinheads for White Supremacy and the Neo-Nazis for Aryan Ascendance. And so you’re reading along and it’s just absolutely weird, and it made me wonder can anybody really be taking this seriously that it says, “Bloodthirsty Aryans for Death. David Horowitz Freedom Center.” (Laughter) How can you possibly think this is a real list? But they do.

And not only that, it’s been an annoyance for years that we have been listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but after Charlottesville, it’s much more than an annoyance. It has been used to attempt to deny us a platform entirely. And you need to know that there are very, very concerted efforts now to cut off the so-called hate groups from any access to the primary means of communication, and, most notably, all of the things that give you a significant platform on the internet.

Recently, this fellow wrote me — somebody I’d never known — and he sent me a notice that he’d gotten from YouTube, and the YouTube notice said, “Your playlist has been barred — has been blocked from YouTube as inappropriate.” And you know what the title of the playlist was? “Robert Spencer.”

My videos are still on YouTube on my channel. I think that they targeted this guy because he told me in his email that he just — he had actually forgotten he had this and he had just set aside a few of my videos because he wanted to watch them later. And I think they went after him and not after my own Jihad Watch channel on YouTube because they knew that if they went after me directly, there would be an outcry, but they could get rid of his and nobody would particularly notice, because he’s not a public figure.

And this is not just happening to me. Pamela Geller, who many of you know, who I’ve worked with on many occasions, she has had recently several of her YouTube videos removed, and these are not new ones. These are videos going back to 2007. Now, a 10-year-old video that was on YouTube for 10 years obviously, YouTube didn’t think it violated their guidelines for 10 years, and, now, suddenly, it does, because there is this concerted effort to cut a platform out from under all of us.

You may recall also recently there was the imam at the Islamic Center of Riverside, California, Ammar Shahin, who prayed in front of video cameras that Allah please destroy the Jews and annihilate them down to the last one, and that this got a little bit of notice, because the Middle East Media Research Institute published the video, and I published the video on Jihad Watch. And not long after that, I got a notice from Twitter, because all of the Jihad Watch posts go up immediately on Twitter. That’s sort of a standard thing. And Twitter notified me that one of my tweets was being removed for hate speech, and it was the tweet about Ammar Shahin calling for the annihilation of the Jews.

Now, mind you, they weren’t upset about Ammar Shahin. They weren’t upset that he had called for the annihilation of the Jews. They were upset that I had reported upon it. Now, you might think that that’s absurd, but this has been something that’s been going on for years.

In the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which is 57 Muslim governments worldwide, 56 states and the Palestinian Authority, a very powerful organization, the largest voting bloc at the UN, since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation, for years, has been publishing regular reports on Islamophobia, and it goes like this: If an imam says, “Kill them wherever you find them,” then the Organization of Islamic Cooperation would say, “Well, that’s legitimate religious expression, and he has to have his freedom to quote the Qur’an, because that is three times in the Qur’an, and if you say anything about it, then you are a hateful, bigoted Islamophobe.”

And then comes along Spencer or Geert Wilders or somebody of that kind and they say, “Look, this imam said, ‘Kill them wherever you find them’” — that goes in the Islamophobia list for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. It’s not that they don’t want these things propagated; they don’t want us to know they’re being propagated, and that’s what this is all about. So Ammar Shahin was fine. My reporting on Ammar Shahin got flagged by Twitter as hate speech.

Now, there is even more. For years, if you went to Google and you typed in the word, “jihad,” then my website, Jihad Watch, would be the first to show up. And I ask you to pardon me for so many — all this being so self-referential, but they are — as I am one of the people they’re trying to shut down, a lot of this is happening to me, so I can’t really avoid talking about personal incidents.

In any case, for many years, because Google worked on the basis of the congruence of the subject matter to the search and the number of — and the popularity of the site, because Jihad Watch was and is a popular site, it would show up first if you searched for jihad.

Now, if you search for jihad — and I ask you to do this, but when you do it, be careful, because you probably have a cache and a history and that will skew your results, but if you clear your cache and your history and then search for jihad, Jihad Watch will not show up on even the first page, much less first. It will probably show up on the second page or after that.

Now, why is that? There is an imam in Texas named Omar Suleiman, and Omar Suleiman, he recently started to complain to Google, and he said, “Your Google searches are filled with hate-filled Islamophobia.” And Google said, “Oh, will you please help us to cleanse our Google searches?” And he said, “Yes, I’m very busy, but I’d be happy to help.” And he did, so that, now — and it’s noteworthy that this was only reported by the Anadolu Agency, which is a Turkish news agency. This was not reported by any news agency in the United States, but I found it at the Anadolu Agency, that working with Omar Suleiman, Google has now skewed its search results, so that no longer do you get, when you search for anything regarding Islam — Islam, jihad, Sharia law, whatever — if you search for a word like that, you don’t get the site that comes up because it is in line with the subject matter of what you’re searching for and is the most popular site. That’s no longer how it works. The way it works now is that you only get material that tells you how Islam is a religion of peace.

And if you search for jihad now, the first thing you will get is a site that says, “Jihad, a misunderstood concept in Islam.” And if you click on it, it’ll tell you all about how jihad is spiritual struggle and has nothing to do with terrorism. And this — Meanwhile, of course, there are jihad terrorists who are justifying their actions by pointing to the Qur’an and making recruits among peaceful Muslims by invoking Islamic teachings, but you will get none of that from your Google search. You will not have any idea why any of that is happening.

Now, it was — interesting was that Omar Suleiman quoted in the Anadolu Agency article, he said, “We don’t want Google to censor legitimate criticism of Islam. We only want Google to censor hate-filled Islamophobia.”

Now, have you ever heard the Council on American-Islamic Relations or any other Muslim group in the United States say, “Hey, that’s legitimate criticism of Islam.”? They never do that.

I myself was dismayed when I published my first book way back in 2002, and I thought — I was very naïve. I thought, “There’s going to be a discussion about this.” (Laughter) “There’s going to be a public debate about these issues that I’ve raised about Islam.” The book was called Islam Unveiled, Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest-Growing Faith. And there was nothing.

Instead, there were just charges: “hate-filled Islamophobia.” And I thought, “Wait a minute. How can it be hate-filled Islamophobia? I’m saying these are the passages of the Qur’an. These are the aspects of Islam that terrorists are using to make recruits and to spread their ideology. What’s hate filled? If anything’s hate filled, they are.”

But that was far too rational. They didn’t want to have a rational discussion. They wanted to shut down discussion. As the Front Page masthead says, “Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out.” They wanted to make sure that any and all criticism of Islam, any and all discussion of how Islam is used by terrorists, all of that would be tarred as hate-filled Islamophobia. That’s how we ended up on the hate-group list to start with.

And when they say — When Omar Suleiman and the others say, “We only want to censor hate-filled Islamophobia and not criticism of Islam,” the dirty little secret they’re not telling you is is that any criticism of Islam they consider and explicitly call “hate-filled Islamophobia,” and this is a tactic in line with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, once again. The OIC, for years, has been pursuing at the UN initiatives to compel the United States and the governments of Western Europe, and Canada as well, to criminalize, as Mark pointed out, incitement to religious hatred.

Now, incitement to religious hatred, besides being a very elastic term and quite obviously referring only to criticism of Islam — because nobody ever gets upset when there’s criticism of Judaism or Christianity — it is also an initiative that’s in line with the blasphemy laws that are encoded in Sharia Islamic Law. Islamic Law, on penalty of death, forbids you to criticize Allah, the Qur’an, Mohammed or Islam in general, on penalty of death. And what is the whole point of terrorism? Why were the planes flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? Why are all these terrorist attacks going on in the first place?

The whole point of them is all to weaken and destabilize and ultimately destroy the governments of free nations, so that the resulting chaos can be exploited by Islamic groups, and, ultimately, Islamic law will be established in the West. The whole point of jihad is to install Sharia.

And one other way in which this initiative is being carried out is by working to make the West accept elements of Sharia voluntarily, and, now, we’re doing it. Under the guise of hate speech, these Sharia blasphemy laws are being encoded now in the West. And it’s not a matter of law. It’s a matter of, as Hillary Clinton put it, peer pressure and shaming.

You may have heard a few weeks ago that Richard Dawkins was scheduled to speak in Berkeley, and, of course, he was going to speak about his atheist writings. In his atheist writings, he attacks all religions, and he’s very scathing about Christianity because it’s the dominant religion in the Western world, but he also attacks Islam. And he was invited by a Leftist group that is very happy that he attacks religions, especially Christianity.

But then they cancelled him, and in the cancellation notice they explained that he was being cancelled because they had discovered that he criticized Islam, and that was beyond the pale, because these good Leftists have internalized the idea that criticizing Islam is wrong in itself. It’s ipso factor racist, bigoted, Islamophobic and hateful, no matter under what circumstances it is done and no matter by whom it is done.

And so they have internalized what the OIC wants us all to accept, that criticism of Islam is forbidden. And this is a very, very far advanced initiative already. You may recall that in San Bernardino on December 2, 2015, 15 people were murdered by a couple of Islamic jihadis at a Christmas party, and the neighbors were interviewed right after the attack, you may recall, the neighbors of the attackers, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. And the neighbors said, “Yes, you know, we saw a lot of suspicious things. We saw people coming and going at all hours. We saw people who had looked very unsavory. We saw all sorts of things very suspicious going on at this house?” “Did you call the police?” “Oh, no. We didn’t want to get involved in racial profiling.” And so 15 people are dead.

Same thing happened in Fort Dix longer ago, 10 or 12 years ago now. There was a young man who foiled a jihad plot, but when he found out about it, he hesitated, and he went to a friend and he said, “I’ve seen these very disturbing things. Should I go to the police or would that be racist?” And the idea that anybody would even think for a second that it was racist to oppose an Islamic jihad massacre shows how far advanced this initiative has already come. And, now, it is being given teeth as the platforms are being cut out from under us.

Did you know that just a couple of months ago the Vice President of Facebook, Joel Kaplan, traveled to Islamabad? Now, that’s not really Variety Vacationland, and he was not vacationing. He was on a mission. He met with high Pakistani government officials, most notably Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, the Interior Minister of Pakistan, and he assured the Pakistani Government that Facebook would remove all material that was considered blasphemous in Islam.

This is yet another story that was not reported in the Western press. I found it in the Pakistani press. They were very happy about it. And Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan was there saying, “We explained to Mr. Kaplan that the Islamic religion is the number one thing important to us, and we do not, we cannot stand for seeing it insulted.” And that all sounds like maybe you could understand his point of view until you realize that counter-terror analysis is considered to be insulting to Islam when it discusses the motivating ideology behind the jihad threat, and Facebook has signed on to that.

And so it was that in the middle of February at Jihad Watch we used to get, for years, 20,000 referrals a day from Facebook. In other words, 20,000 people a day would see a Jihad Watch story in their Facebook News Feeds and click on it and go to Jihad Watch and read it. Twenty-thousand people a day.

In the middle of February one day — February 11th, I believe it was — it dropped to 2,000 and has stayed there. It’s actually less now. It’s about 1,000 a day from Facebook. You can still go to Facebook and see the Jihad Watch page. You can still click on links, but by some algorithms and by removing it from people’s news feeds, they have dropped off 90 percent of the referrals from Facebook. Did 90 percent of the people who were reading Jihad Watch from Facebook suddenly lose interest and decide it was a religion of peace? Probably not. Probably they just don’t see it anymore, and they don’t see it anymore because Facebook is explicitly and avowedly complying with Islamic blasphemy laws at the behest of the Government of Pakistan. It sounds unbelievable. I still can’t believe it telling it to you now, but I saw the news story. I saw the photos of Joel Kaplan with Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan sitting there in Islamabad.

And that coincided with another demand from the German government. The German government, of course, Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany was caught on a hot mic, you may recall, a couple of years ago demanding to Mark Zuckerberg, the President of Facebook, that he remove hate speech. Now, that coincides perfectly with the Pakistani Government and their demand to Facebook, because by hate speech, Merkel meant criticism of her disastrous migration policies that are overwhelming Germany and the rest of Europe with Muslim migrants who have been responsible for a massive crime wave and are destabilizing the societies of Western Europe. That’s all hate speech. You can’t talk about it.

And, incidentally, when Twitter removed my post about Ammar Shahin, they told me that even if they had decided to keep it up it would probably still not be visible in Germany because Germany is cracking down very hard on this. They’re good at that, you know. They have a history of doing this kind of thing, and it’s coming back. I think that Angela Merkel will go down in history as the second-most successful chancellor of Germany right behind Adolf Hitler in terms of getting her agenda across, but that agenda is frankly against freedom.

Now, after Charlottesville, meanwhile, I got a notice from PayPal, because PayPal was also implementing the Southern Poverty Law Center hate-group list, that Jihad Watch could no longer accept donations from PayPal. And, after a few days, I was finally able to find another platform and get Jihad Watch onto that to get donations, and I got about $15,000 in donations, for which I am very grateful. I am only mentioning it to you now, however, because, at the same time, after the Charlottesville attack, JPMorgan Chase, Apple and MGM Resorts and James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s son, all pledged millions of dollars to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Millions. And so, you know, I’m very glad to get $15,000, and they have millions on the other side. Absolutely millions.

And I do exhort you, if you have any dealings with any of those — JPMorgan Chase, Apple, MGM — please withdraw. Find something else to put your money in — (applause) — at this point, because Georgette pointed out to me before the talk just now that here you are listening to me, and I’m grateful for your being here and discussing these issues because they are of absolutely pressing importance, but if you have your money in JPMorgan, you are also financing the effort to silence me and David and Mark and everybody else who is fighting this, and so the contradiction ought to be ironed out.

The fact is that in the Soviet Union, there was samizdat literature, you may recall, that it was too dangerous to print things for the most part and people would type out stories that dissented from the Soviet Government’s line and would copy them out by hand, in many cases, or type out multiple copies — cause even to have a carbon was dangerous — and distribute these things. And they were miniscule in their power, miniscule in their distribution, and, yet, ultimately, the Soviet Government viewed them as a very grave threat because they were telling the truth. And the truth was obvious despite all the —

This is why propaganda has to be so repeated all the time. You know, we’re constantly bombarded with articles and feature stories and television shows telling us that Islam is peace and it’s a religion of peace and it teaches peace. Why do we keep having to hear this? Because it’s so obviously false, and we keep having to be told, “Ignore what you hear. Don’t believe your lying eyes. Believe us.” Propaganda needs constant repetition to put itself over.

And so the Soviet government saw this samizdat literature as a grave threat, even though it was so small and powerless, because it had the great weapon of truth on its side, and that’s what we have in this.

They’re going to continue to try to close the platforms on us. PayPal relented after a huge outcry and restored me and Pamela Geller and a few others who had been dropped, but there were many others I’ve heard about, like Politically Incorrect in Germany and several other sites, that have been dropped from PayPal and have not been restored and have no recourse, because they don’t have the platforms that we have to marshal opinion.

I urge you to be aware of this, to lend all support that you possibly can to people that are fighting this, but also never to lose hope, to continue to speak the truth and to stand for the truth, and know that the Soviet Government in its great anxiety over the Samizdat literature reveals the weakness at the heart of totalitarianism. And totalitarianism is on the march and trying to advance in the U.S., but, as David pointed out, they always overreach, and they’re overreaching now. And so we still have a chance to preserve freedom and to preserve a society in which the freedom of speech is respected, but that calls on every one of us to become an activist and to fight in whatever sphere that we can to preserve this, the greatest society in the history of the world.

And thank you very much for being here. (Applause)

QUESTION: With all these treasonous corporations and search engines and everything else, is there any discussion of creating new search engines and websites that would take the place of the PayPals and the Facebooks? Because we’re just getting slaughtered.

ROBERT SPENCER: There is discussion of creating new platforms, and that’s something that I hope proceeds. You would need people of immense wealth to be able to give them enough reach to be able to stand up and compete. These companies are essentially monopolies, and, not only that, but they’re essentially judgement proof, because there’s a thing called the Communications Decency Act that Barack Obama shepherded through while he was president, and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act actually protects the social media platforms from legal challenge, so they can act as monopolies and they can destroy the freedom of speech and deny it to people who don’t follow the Leftist line and there’s nothing we can do. We can’t sue them.

So there is actually a lawsuit proceeding, and I’m a participant in it, to challenge that Section 230 and to challenge the U.S. Government, but it’s a very strange thing because we didn’t sue Facebook. We sued the government, and the government said, “You’re suing the wrong guy. You should have sued Facebook.” And so it’s a big legal game — you know how lawyers are — and that is still proceeding.

QUESTION: But rather than litigating against them, just compete against them. Create our own …

ROBERT SPENCER: Yes. I’m all for it. There are efforts. There’s a thing called Gab, which is competing with Twitter, but it’s much smaller. They need massive financing. There’s no alternative Facebook that I know of, but, ultimately, I think, the only thing we can do is try to work toward breaking the power of these groups, and that’s something that I hope that will be done. (Applause)

QUESTION: Hi, Robert.

ROBERT SPENCER: Hi, Mallory.

QUESTION: First, I’d like to point people to an article that I published maybe a year-and-a-half ago on American Thinker called, “Why I Love Hate Speech,” that was an article in support of Pamela Geller and the fact that they have a fatwa on her and they’re trying to behead her.

But what I wanted to say, Robert, is that I had — the insight I had when you were telling us about Joel Kaplan was that what we need to take from the Joel Kaplan anecdote is that he is terrorized. The whole point is that they have succeeded, and what they have done is they have literally terrorized people. And Joel Kaplan is actually afraid that if he doesn’t go there to Pakistan and have the meeting with this man that he will be beheaded.

ROBERT SPENCER: That’s very likely, yeah.

QUESTION: This is the problem. I think — don’t you agree with me? And maybe you could say some words about this — that our approach needs to be now instead of attacking these people who are attacking us to attack the whole concept of being terrorized and how we simply cannot allow ourselves to be terrorized.

ROBERT SPENCER: Well, you know, that’s very true and very important, but, unfortunately, it’s going the other direction. I have to note, for example, in the book, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Free Speech (and Its Enemies), I have a chapter called, “From Rushdie to Geller,” and it’s about how in 1989, when Salman Rushdie got his death fatwa from the Islamic Republic of Iran for writing The Satanic Verses he was celebrated as a hero, and there was all sorts of material in the Western press about how the freedom of speech was important and that Rushdie was somebody who had to be stood with and defended.

Now, fast forward that 26 years later to 2015 and when Pamela Geller put on, and I aided her in putting on, the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, that was attacked by terrorists. We were — She was absolutely excoriated, not only on the Left, but by people on Fox, people who are Conservatives. Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham and Donald Trump criticized her and said, you know, “What are you doing drawing Mohammed? You should know better. You have to show respect.”

And nobody seems to understand anymore the principles of free speech that everybody took for granted and understood in 1989, and that the idea that you don’t give in to violent bullying, violent intimidation, but you stand up to the bully. Something that we all learned in fifth grade everybody has forgotten, and everybody takes for granted now, it seems to me, where far too many people, even among so-called conservatives, take for granted the idea that if somebody’s bullying you, you just give him what he wants. If they’re telling you, “We’ll kill you if you draw Muhammad,” then you must not draw Muhammad, and they don’t recognize the implications of this for the freedom of speech and for a free society. Yeah, I think that, in great degree, Mallory, that’s because we have been terrorized and that terrorism keeps happening because it works and that we need to recognize that and grow some — regain some spine.

DAVID HOROWITZ: Conservatives have a natural aversion to politics, cause it’s so ugly and you have to step on principles all the time and make pacts with the devil. However …

SEVERAL SPEAKERS: Can’t hear you.

DAVID HOROWITZ: I’m sorry. I say conservatives have a natural aversion to politics, and I’m here as a former radical to say, look, we won the last election. There is now a Trump Party within the Republican Party.

The way to deal with this, it seems to me — I mean, it just occurred to me while I’m listening to you — we have antitrust laws. Break up Facebook. Break up Google. We also — there’s talk about converting them into — treating them as public utilities, which they are. So, for us, our power now is in the political realm. All these other things we can do, but Google is — it’s the biggest corporation in the history of the world. You can’t fight them by forming your own little things. It’s a monopoly and we have, as I say, antitrust laws.

So I would say those of you who are involved in Republican Party politics, find the relevant committees, find the relevant — there’s got to be somewhere in the Congress a good person. You know, talk to the Freedom Caucus. Put this on the agenda. That’s the way to fight them.

I will tell you if we just — and we will do this at Front Page — create a drumbeat invoking antitrust laws, and you have — you know, I’m going to ask you probably to write the article, because — well, that evidence that you proposed, that will scare the bejesus out of Zuckerberg and the executives there.

I think more they fear — More than being beheaded, they fear losing money in the whole Muslim world. That’s what that’s about. It’s political.

And the best thing that’s happened to the Right — since I’ve been part of it — it started with the Tea Party — is that conservatives who despise politics and think that politics only takes place every four years or every two years for Congress, the conservatives are finally marching. They’re organizing, and this has grown dramatically.

When we talk even about universities, I mean, there are now large conservative student movements. When I came into the Right, there was no conservatives — You know, it’s the first thing I looked — “Where are the troops? Where’s the ground war? Where’s the armies?” And, actually, one of the really good campus organizations, Young America’s Foundation, their board of directors did not — I said, “Why — Why — You have representatives on 1,000 campuses. Where are your chapters?” “Oh, our board won’t let us form chapters.”

Well, that’s changed. Charlie Kirk has an organization with — I think he has like 1,000 colleges. Things are really changing, but they’re changing in the political realm, and it requires, I know, a big internal shift for conservatives to get, you know, dirty in their — you know, just jump in and start fighting. That’s where we can win.

As I was saying at lunch, there are three very important Senate races, one in Alabama, one in Nevada and one in Arizona, and the anti-Trump Republicans, the pro-McConnell Republicans are losing in all three. And Jeff Flake, who wrote this preposterous book attacking his own president, is losing by 47 to 20, and that’s even before Joe Arpaio gets into the race. (Laughter)

ROBERT SPENCER: Thank you. Yeah, you know, I think it’s very, very important if we could make antitrust legislation targeting Google, Facebook, Twitter, all of them an issue in 2018 and 2020. (Microphone feedback.) Leftist microphone. (Applause)

QUESTION: Robert, I just wondered if you could address the silencing of free speech, Donald Trump’s free speech, by people like McMaster, where he’s not allowed to say “radical Islam” anymore. And can you turn to him or anyone in the administration anymore for help with this or, as John Bolton said the other day, the doors are closed.

ROBERT SPENCER: It’s very curious because, of course, Donald Trump appointed all these people, and I don’t really — I don’t have his ear. I don’t know why he appointed them, but it does seem as if everyone, except for Steve Miller, who, of course, was formerly with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, he is the only one left that I know of who is aware of what’s really important about that issue.

Of course, Donald Trump campaigned for president rebuking Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for not daring to say “radical Islamic terrorism.” When I saw that, I thought he meant he was going to restore study of the motivating ideology of jihad terrorists to government and law enforcement.

You may find this hard to believe, but in 2011, Barack Obama ordered all counter-terror training materials scrubbed of any reference to Islam, so that ever since then, up ‘til now, if you were to join the FBI today and you say, “I want to go into counter-terror,” you’ll learn all about Right-Wing Extremists and Constitutionalists and Militiamen and so on and White Supremacists and Neo-Nazis, but you won’t hear a thing about Islamic jihadis, and you won’t know anything about them. You have to know your enemy to defeat him, and we do not know the enemy. It’s a matter of policy that we do not know the enemy.

So I thought Trump was going to change that, but then he appointed people who have the Obama point of view on this, that you cannot name Islam in connection with terrorism, because it will get the Muslims on our side angry and embolden the jihadis. This is preposterous because the Muslims, if they’re really on our side, know full well where the terrorism is coming from, and if they’re really on our side should not have any problem with fighting it.

But, in any case, that is the dominant view among the National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and many others in the Trump administration, and he prescinded from saying Islamic terrorism for the very first time in his speech about Afghanistan several weeks ago, prompting the resignation of one of the last people who was speaking about this with any remote degree of honesty, Sebastian Gorka, who specifically referred to Trump’s failure to address this regarding Afghanistan as the reason for his resignation.

So it’s a very strange situation what’s going on with the White House. It seems as if everybody who was in favor of the agenda the president campaigned upon is gone, and people who are actively against it are in positions of power.

But, at the same time, whenever we get really distressed about this, just step back and think about what it would be like now if Hillary Clinton were President, and consider the fact that we’re even speaking about this issue instead of just taking for granted that we’re going to continue to ignore what the enemy is all about and that we’re even speaking about restricting illegal immigration and restricting North Korea from its adventurism and all these things that wouldn’t even be on the table were Hillary Clinton president. So things aren’t as bad as they might seem in microcosm.

And we can also hope that the president, who has always displayed good instincts in understanding these issues, will recover some sense of what he was elected for and continue to pursue it, and he doesn’t really need people around him to do that. He just needs himself and Twitter. (Laughter)

MICHAEL FINCH: Thank you so much, Robert.

ROBERT SPENCER: Thank you. (Applause)

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Racism and Catholicism

Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky: A helping hand to the poor affirms life; failing to objectively challenge the human spirit effectively denies human dignity.

There’s an old joke about President Calvin Coolidge, known to be a man of few words. He attends services one Sunday, while Mrs. Coolidge remains at the White House. On his return, the first lady asks him about the preacher’s sermon topic. “Sin.” What did he say about it? “He was against it.”

Like “Silent Cal,” most of us also stand firm against it.

Full-on fighting occurred in front of the Charlottesville Police Station. All the officers stood by and watched, never arresting or stopping the violence throughout the entire day. Photo by Michael Nigro/Newscom.

After Charlottesville, the U. S. bishops established a new Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism. In a podcast, the chairman of the committee, Bishop George V. Murry of Youngstown said racism was America’s “original sin.” But racism is rarely well defined and cannot be reduced to mere dislike or even hate.

Dislike is an emotion. Aquinas distinguishes between hate as an emotion, and hate as a sinful choice (hate cultivated and acted upon). Hence, I use “dislike” with respect to the emotion and “hate” in the sinful sense.

There are many reasons to dislike people – without sinning.  You may dislike the Beatles or rap, or unfamiliar foods. Lots of us are humiliated and appalled by the “culture” (really lack of culture) members of our own race have adopted.

But our emotions should be controlled by reason. When we allow our dislikes to devolve into a hatred, and desire for harm to others and unjust discrimination, we sin against God and man.  Add a desire to harm another person on racial grounds, and we commit the sin of racism.

But we can also be unwitting and patronizing racists under the guise of sentimental affection.

Click here to read the rest of Father Pokorsky’s column . . .

Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky

Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky

Father Jerry J. Pokorsky is a priest of the Diocese of Arlington. He is pastor of St. Catherine of Siena parish in Great Falls, Virginia.

‘Social Justice Collective’ Calls for Four-Year Universities to Ban Veterans, Cites NRA Ties

It’s admittedly getting more and more difficult to separate fact from fiction these days, especially when it comes to the increasingly bizarre world of anti-gun social justice crusaders. But it is apparently true that a publication recently appeared on the campus of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS) arguing that “we must ban veterans from four-year universities.” Among the reasons the author of the essay cites is that “veterans usually are associated with extremist right-wing groups such as the tea party and the NRA.”

The publication also faults veterans for “openly mock[ing] the ideas of diversity and safe spaces for vulnerable members of society,” frightening fellow students with their “overwhelming presence,” and making “insensitive jokes.”  Nevertheless, it denies any intention to deprive veterans of an education, explaining that they “should be allowed to attend trade schools, or maybe even community colleges.” It asserts, however, that veterans’ military service has left them “permanently tainted” and “no long [sic] fit for a four-year university.”

report by Colorado Springs news station KKTV said the publication, identifying itself as Issue #1 of the Social Justice Collective Weekly, was posted on a UCCS bulletin board and was also available “in the library and other places,” before students began removing them. A notation on the bottom right of the newsletter states, “UCCS University Center Approved for posting.” The report goes on to state that KKTV viewers contacted an email address included on the publication and were told by the editors of publication that those behind it are “using fake names to protect themselves.” Whether or not these individuals are current or former students of UCCS is unknown. KKTV was not successful in its own attempt to elicit comment from the producers of the publication.

The university, for its part, has not denied that the publication was distributed on campus or that its posting on the bulletin board had been approved. A UCCS spokesman told KKTV, however, that the article “has nothing to do with the school and does not represent the institution’s views.” The university also claimed that “anyone is allowed to post items on the board” (although why, if that’s the case, posting must be “approved” is not explained).

On August 25, UCCS Chancellor Venkat Reddy issued a press release defending veterans as “positive and valued members of our academic and campus community,” with “experience and viewpoints that enrich our discussions.” Chancellor Reddy also defended the right of the article’s author – identified as Terry Steinawitz – to air anti-veteran views. “I reject the notion that we should censor those who denigrate others,” Venkat stated, “as censorship would have silenced many voices over the decades who needed to be heard.” He went on to insist that UCCS’ “core values” include various forms of non-discrimination and that “[p]eople earn the right to study at UCCS by virtue of hard work and individual effort, and we do not bar the door.”

Although it’s tempting simply to dismiss the publication as satire or the work of extremely immature and underexposed students encountering more worldly peers for the first time, it is largely consistent with the climate on many college campuses toward firearms and those who use them. We’ve recently reported on a campus-wide lockdown caused by an art student with a glue gun, a lawsuit by college professors claiming the Second Amendment itself requires universities to BAN law-abiding students from possessing firearms on campus, and a geography professor who taught class in protective combat gear because he fears students who lawfully carry concealed handguns on campus. We’ve also chronicled how a University of Kansas professor called for the death of NRA members’ children as a token of “God’s justice.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, public opinion polling shows a far greater percentage of Americans who are highly confident in the military than in universities. And more Americans have a favorable opinion of the NRA than express high confidence in higher education.

We certainly agree with Chancellor Reddy that, whatever their motivations, the producers of the anti-veteran publication at the UCCS have a First Amendment right to express their opinions. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether they are merely jokers or the more usual intellectually shallow, self-contradictory, elitist, and exclusionary types who haunt academia these days. America’s veterans will not require a safe space to lick their wounds after reading this document. For they, like the NRA, know that protecting freedom is not a job for those who are easily offended, defeated, or deterred or who require thanks from otherwise helpless people who depend on the security their efforts provide.

A Republic Tested: What Hurricane Harvey taught us

I had a dear friend of mine tell me the other day about people coming together in Texas during Hurricane Harvey, helping each other, looking out for each other. She wanted to show everyone how Texans take care of their own. Now she is a proud Texas lady and I love her dearly…salt of the earth, but her comment made me think…..was this really about Texas, and the only answer I could come up with is, no. The answer that I did come up with in my mind, however, is, I believe, far more heartening.

Coast Guard rescues infant in Hurricane aftermath in Houston. Photo: Redditt

When a disaster of this magnitude strikes, the one thing that you can always count on is that it will immediately lay bare the good and the bad in people, and Houston was no different. The good rallied from everywhere; They came from Louisiana as the “Cajun Navy” with their camo and boats hauled by pick up trucks with, “Proud to be a Redneck” bumper stickers. They came from nearby Oklahoma and from other areas of the country. They came with boats and paddles, with food and gear. They came with guns and guts, but mostly they came with their hearts and their hands. There were even displaced Northern Yankees like my own son who, even though high and dry and well provisioned, went out every day looking for those who could be helped.

We often forget that Latin phrase which adorns every coin and dollar bill that passes through our hands; E Pluribus Unum, From Many…One! We need to always remind ourselves that we are never in this alone, but always count on the faith, strength, and generosity of others to help us through trying times. We are the United States and when difficult times come to one state, it comes to us all.

Our unity and strength has been strained and tested as of late. With riots and tearing down statues, there will always be those that work to divide us. They are the vocal minority and somehow they are always the loudest voice in the room. They espouse hatred, bigotry, and divisiveness. They mean to shock us with their antisocial behavior and rhetoric, and there are times when we feel that our social fabric is about to unravel, but at the end of the day they are just the same garden variety nonsense that we’ve seen before; remember the sixties?

As Dr. Benjamin Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1776, someone hollered out to him, “Well Doctor, what have we; a Republic or a Monarchy?” To which Franklin replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

Harvey came and with it came the strength and unity of the American people. State to state, shoulder to shoulder, we have come together, looked devastation in the eye and beat it back as one people. Harvey was more than a devastating and terrifying storm, it was a message to all who would seek to bring their violent hate and social discontent to our door, any door within these fifty United States; Doctor Franklin’s Republic is alive, well and united and from state to state, and Harvey reminded us that an attack on one, is an attack on us all.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Houston Police SWAT officer Daryl Hudeck carrying Catherine Pham and her 13-month-old son, Aiden, after rescuing them from their home surrounded by floodwaters from Tropical Storm Harvey Aug. 27 in Houston. AP photo/David J. Phillip

On the Wrong Side of America’s Cultural War

As a Jew it is sad for me to have to agree with Melanie Phillips that American Jews are on the wrong side of America’s Cultural War.

Jews are reputed to be highly educated and reasonably smart people. Therefore it is hard for me to understand that a majority support the very people who are enemies of the Jewish people and Israel.

These Jews have forgotten the lesson that supporting your enemies does not endear you to them, they will eventually destroy you.

ON THE WRONG SIDE OF AMERICA’S CULTURE WAR

By Melanie Phillips

In America, four liberal rabbinic organizations have scrapped their participation in the annual conference call in which the president traditionally offers his greetings for the Jewish New Year.

Their reason? President Donald Trump’s statements about the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville were “lacking in moral leadership and empathy for the victims of racial and religious hatred.”

After that rally, which gave rise to a violent counterprotest and the murder of a young woman when a white supremacist driver plowed his car into a group of “antifa” (or anti-fascist) protesters, Trump provoked widespread fury by observing there had been violence on both sides.

According to the liberal rabbis, responsibility for the violence “does not lie with many sides, but with one side: the Nazis, alt-right and white supremacists who brought their hate to a peaceful community.”

Yes, they did so; and the fatality was caused by a white supremacist. But until that point, violence had mainly come from the antifa attacking the far-right rally, which although obnoxious was legal; indeed, the antifa had come equipped with baseball bats and other weapons.

There is now ample evidence of the hatred, intimidation and violence these supposed anti-fascists direct – not just against far-right extremists, but against all conservatives and white people, and Israel, too.

Last weekend on the Berkeley campus, more than a hundred antifa members attacked a small number of Trump supporters, injuring six, while screaming their true intention – to destroy the USA.

If anyone is “lacking in moral leadership and empathy” for the victims of hatred, it’s surely those liberal rabbis.

Faced with left-wing aggression and bigotry, many American Jews display a high degree of cognitive dissonance. That’s because they think not as Jews, but as leftists – not least because they can’t discern the difference.

Left-wing antisemitism is running at epidemic level. Demonization of Israel based on lies, double standards and a near-supernatural attribution of cosmic malevolence is the default position on the Left.

Liberal American Jews aren’t merely allowing their liberalism to supersede their Judaism. They are actively siding with the enemies of the Jewish people and the Western civilization built on Jewish values.

They fell over themselves to have their annual Rosh Hashana conference call with former president Barack Obama, a man who refused to say that the slaughter at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris in 2015 was an antisemitic attack.

They voiced no outrage when Rep. Keith Ellison, who once had close ties to the profoundly Jew-hating, black racist organization Nation of Islam, supports Hamas and who has a history of troubling remarks about Jews, was elected vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Instead, Trump is himself smeared as a supporter of white supremacism. The proof is supposed to be that the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, David Duke, supports him.

Read more.

These Nuns are Selling Off the Faith by Michael Voris

The symbolism of statues is very important. It’s why the socialist Lefties are going after them with such fury because symbols mean something.

TRANSCRIPT

The symbolism of statues is very important. It’s why the socialist Lefties are going after them with such fury because symbols mean something.

In Catholicism, statues are more than just symbols although they have symbolic value as well. They are also reminders, meaning they actively bring to mind thoughts of the Church Triumphant, those Catholics who are now in Heaven who have achieved faith’s goal — their salvation. As such, we in the Church Militant, use statues as inspiration as we make intercessory prayer to the saints to help us also achieve faith’s goal.

Catholics have a crazy devotional life toward the saints. After all, they were once in the Church Militant, as well, and they understand our travails of working out our salvation in fear and trembling — the weight of the Cross.

The tossing out of statues by modernists in the Church following Vatican II and the ensuing decades was something other than just differing tastes in art and aesthetics. It was about theology, about Catholic identity, about changing how Catholics viewed themselves in relation to the world. Catholic statues stood as a kind sentinel, guarding against the encroachment of the world. Their presence reminds us of the heavenly, directs our thoughts to the heavenly and as such passes a sort of judgment on worldliness. In years gone by, you couldn’t walk into a truly Catholic home without at least one statue and quite often several.

Same for parishes, religious houses, and schools, most especially schools, which is why what a Dominican school in California is doing is so outlandish. The nuns at San Domenico School in San Anselmo in luxurious Marin County just north of San Francisco, have pulled down 90 percent of the statues around their well-to-do campus. Just 18 remain of what was originally 180. The sisters’ reasoning? They don’t want to “alienate” non-Catholic parents or students. What about Catholic parents and students who want the statues present because, well, after all, that’s what they pay the $30,000 a year tuition bill for — a Catholic education. Oh, did we mention that along with the statutes, the Catholic education has hit the bricks too, courtesy of the nuns who don’t want to alienate anyone except good Catholics?

Yes, the official line from the nuns about Catholic religious instruction on campus is “It’s really about empowering each student and giving them the information so they can discover their own purpose, their own truth. We believe the best way to understand your own faith is to learn about the faiths of others.” And that about says it all.

See, the statues are more than just symbols in this fight for identity, especially Catholic identity. Their presence speaks to the reality of Truth, divinely revealed Truth that large quarters of the Church just don’t want to deal with anymore. It’s not even certain they actually believe in Truth, divinely revealed or not, as well as even the Divine Itself to be perfectly clear.

Eighty percent of the 660 students are not Catholic with one out of five boarding at the school — a preferred course of action for “raising” their young among wealthy internationals. They hail largely from various parts of Asia and are Buddhists, Hindus or Muslims. At $30,000 a pop at a minimum, we bet the administration doesn’t want to alienate their customers, er, students. This entire sad episode would have gone completely unnoticed, stayed entirely under the radar except for the fact that it happened to coincide with the statue hysteria sweeping across the country. Sadly, for the nuns and their bureaucrats, their timing couldn’t have been worse.

Like so many other people and quarters of the Church, including many clergy, the officials at San Domenico have no desire to concern themselves with the souls in their charge because they do not want to alienate people and lose their money. This love of money and worldly acclaim, not to mention carrying through with psychosexual problems among a homosexual clergy rampant in the Church, is bringing the Church to its knees throughout the West. These nuns are living off the reputation of solid Catholic education and discipline while presenting themselves as a non-offensive education where students can arrive at their own truths.

One of two things should happen here — either take down all the statues and crucifixes and what not or put them all back up. Take them all down and be honest about who you really are and what you really think and drop the facade of Catholicism or put them all back up and profess The One True Faith and bring these young minds to Our Blessed Lord but stop trying to have it both ways you hypocritical ladies.

There was a time when orders of religious women had integrity and guts and love of the Faith but these financial charlatans and swindlers are revolting with their duplicity and double-dealing. How can you “empower” a 7 year old to arrive at “his own truth” or a 10 year old or 12 year old? C’mon ladies, drop the facade. You aren’t Catholic in any meaningful sense of the word. What a load of garbage.

You want to turn a tidy profit on wealthy, essentially agnostic, international families who want to dump their progeny in a boarding school with you pretending to hold forth a “values education,” which is rooted in nothing since you just tossed out the visible images of what such an education is rooted in. Socialist nuns and administrators, as well as bishops and priests and chancery rats and so forth — all too common in the Church these days — there’s not a thing about them that is Catholic. So they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with hiding behind the Church’s skirts when it profitable for them to do so.

EDITORS NOTE: This video originally appeared in The Church Militant.

VIDEO: Fr. Martin is a Heretic and he should be Silenced by Michael Voris

Last month you may remember a close ally of the Pope, Fr. Antonio Spadaro, took aim at us here at Church Militant, calling us essentially haters and users of religion to foment “hate.” The uneducated and uninformed diatribe came out in a magazine closely watched and read by influencers all around the globe and is approved by the Vatican secretary of state.

TRANSCRIPT

Last month you may remember a close ally of the Pope, Fr. Antonio Spadaro, took aim at us here at Church Militant, calling us essentially haters and users of religion to foment “hate.” The uneducated and uninformed diatribe came out in a magazine closely watched and read by influencers all around the globe and is approved by the Vatican secretary of state.

What we say here at Church Militant is completely in line with Church teaching — 100 percent, always, and we are concerned about never letting anyone away from Catholic truth because we have to answer to Almighty God for anyone lost because of what we say. When we say things critical of current conditions in the Church, it’s because those who are supposed to end the confusion and do the right thing don’t, and souls are led astray.

So for the good of souls in general and the leaders who are too pantywaist to open their mouths and are overly concerned with the status quo, we say what should be said by them. As a result, they ban us from speaking on Church property and so forth. Here in Detroit, the archdiocese has taken great pains to blackball us behind the scenes because we won’t go along with their watered-down, highly Protestantized, Catholic-lite approach to evangelization. So we get hammered privately in meetings and discussions and so forth. It will all come out in the wash on the Last Day, but it’s too bad the standard applied to us isn’t applied to even clergy who do actual damage to souls with their heresy.

Up until just this week, when he was disinvited to speak at a gala dinner in New York City for the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, Fr. James Martin, for example, was allowed to maraud all over the world with his incessant gay garbage, and nary a word is offered in protest. In fact, high-powered, career-minded cardinals, who know a large portion of the Church is ruled by homosexuals, choose to support and promote this heretical priest. This is why we feel pretty darn safe in saying there will be no escape for them when they die, unless they repent.

They are allowing souls to be damned so they can advance their careers and popularity with all the “right” clerics. It’s also why they never talk about Hell. They don’t want to believe it’s real or that people go there, because down deep, they know that is exactly where they are on the road to. So they persecute faithful Catholic laity and applaud and promote heretical priests.

If you want to know what the English bishops looked like who turned the Church over to Henry VIII during the 16th-century Revolt, look no further than most of the American bishops, especially the ones higher up the food chain, because that’s how they got higher up.

Father Martin, who Cdls. Timothy Dolan and Blase Cupich and Sean O’Malley and Donald Wuerl can’t seem to get enough of, actually tweeted out last week that Jesus “learned” from the Syro-Phoenician woman whose daughter he cast a demon from. Learned? Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Eternal Logos, “learned” from a creature that His mission was for all people? Well, thank God that woman came along or all us non-Jews would be kind of left out of salvation, right?

What a stupid but mostly heretical notion, yet there he is spewing his theological idiocy everywhere — and no one saying a word to him about it.

Why doesn’t fellow Jesuit, Fr. Spadaro, write an article about Martin like he did about us here at Church Militant? He does, after all, share a name with another arch-heretic. And why doesn’t the archbishop of Detroit, or practically any other bishop in the United States, issue statements saying the heretic is not allowed to speak on Church property in their dioceses? Because they don’t want to get slammed, that’s why. Martin is all about the gay thing, and they know that if they say anything about him or call him out or forbid him in their diocese, then the gay hammer will drop on them.

But when it comes to Church Militant, well, it’s open season on us. We can easily be labeled divisive and all that stupid stuff. For the record, just what exactly do we say in public that many bishops and priests not say in private? Is what we say incorrect, not truthful, unfaithful? No, and these cowards and careerists know what we are saying is true. That’s why they come after us — publicly and privately. Yet they give heretics a complete pass. Well, that won’t go on forever. These men are destroying Catholic truth, and we are trying to preserve it and advance it as best we can.

They aren’t going stop until God stops them, one way or another, and we aren’t going to stop either. So let’s nestle in for the long fight and get to it. Heretics versus Catholics. Game on!

RELATED ARTICLE: The Vatican Joins the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

EDITORS NOTE: This video originally appeared on The Church Militant.

Make it official: Declare Antifa a Domestic Terrorist Organization

Some wise soul has created a White House petition to designate antifa a terrorist organization. As of this writing, 314,725 people, including this author, have signed. With the exception of perhaps the Muslim Brotherhood and whatever ISIS/al-Qaeda cells in operation in the U.S., there are few, if any, domestic groups more deserving of that title.

The petition says:

Terrorism is defined as “the use of violence and intimidation in pursuit of political aims”. This definition is the same definition used to declare ISIS and other groups, as terrorist organizations. AntiFa has earned this title due to its violent actions in multiple cities and their influence in the killings of multiple police officers throughout the United States. It is time for the pentagon to be consistent in its actions – and just as they rightfully declared ISIS a terror group, they must declare AntiFa a terror group – on the grounds of principle, integrity, morality, and safety.

Antifa groups openly declare what they are: anarchists, communists and other Marxist/Leninists of various stripes, dedicated to seeing America destroyed. The red and black of the antifa flag (shown below) is the symbol of anarcho-syndicalists, i.e. anarchists allied with labor (isyndicates).

The modern antifa movement, in both symbolism and rhetoric, recalls a similar communist movement in Weimar Germany called Antifaschistiche Aktion, which engaged in street battles with Hitler’s brownshirts (Sturmabteilung).

Leftists make extensive use of symbolism. Perhaps Obama – a self-described “union man” and extreme leftist as well, signaled his sympathy for anarcho-syndicalists when, during his 2008 victory speech, his entire family wore red and black — Michelle in particular stood out with that hideous black widow spider outfit. How did we ever get such a horrid couple? But I guess it was not unprecedented: Hillary and Bill set the standard.

In any event, during his presidency Obama advanced the antifa cause with his inexcusable persecution of George Zimmerman, the “White Hispanic” who killed Trayvon Martin in self-defense. Obama’s constant, dishonest, and inexcusably irresponsible racist agitation that inspired deadly race riots in Baltimore, Maryland and Ferguson, Missouri, and the insane mass shootings of police also advanced the antifa cause.

As the first affirmative-action president, Obama got a pass for that and much else. He should be in prison. He and the Democrat Party that supported him have blood on their hands. They may be about to get more.

His entire modus operandi was to define America as “racist” and “bigoted.” Taking it to the next level, antifa justifies its violence on the contrived narrative of a racist America now taken over by “fascists” with the election of Donald Trump.

Antifa openly declares its goal is to make America ungovernable. Democrats have signed on to this strategy too. Insanity is described as doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. Do the Democrats not understand why they really lost?

But there is nothing new in the “racist” “fascist” narrative. The true enemy, according to Karl Marx, has always been capitalism. According to standard Marxist-Leninist dogma, capitalism is “racist, imperialist, and oppressive,” hence America is inherently, unsalvageably racist. And since America is the most prominent example of these claimed evils, the real goal has always been to destroy America.

But Marx’s theories are absurd. Anyone with even an elementary grasp of economics sees right through the flaws in Marx’s theories. Capitalism is the driver of economic prosperity for all, and the only true source of economic growth.

Navigating this inconvenient truth, Marx used a much more sinister technique to lure in adherents: greed and envy. While claiming that Marxism frees people from selfish preoccupation with material wealth, it simultaneously rests its attraction on promising increased wealth through income redistribution — with no compensating increase in output or productivity.

Those at the lower end of the income scale were encouraged to believe they could expect a better standard of living without lifting a finger. This doesn’t work in the real world — transferring resources from productive uses elsewhere does not reproduce productivity. It destroys it. But Marxists have never sought the results they promise, only the power that their lies deliver.

By implying that capitalist wealth is obtained illegitimately — i.e. by stealing it “off the backs of labor,” Marxists give people a rationalization for receiving unearned income through what we all know at the core of our hearts is nothing more than legalized theft. Only they call it “social justice.”

And while stoking the fires of resentment by suggesting lower-income people are having their rightful incomes stolen, Marxists have unleashed one of the most dangerous of human emotions: envy. Many of us have been infected with it to some extent at some point in our lives, but sooner or later we recognize it for the poisonous, destructive and entirely unworthy human emotion it is.

In its worst forms it can lead to murder, and throughout history it has prevented many societies from advancing past Stone Age development. Dr. Jack Wheeler calls it the Evil Eye:

Among the Yanomamo and other tribes deep in the Amazon rain forests… it is an accepted practice that when a woman gives birth, she tearfully proclaims her child to be ugly… She does this in order to ward off the envious black magic of the Evil Eye, the Mal Ojo, that would be directed at her by her fellow tribes people if they knew how happy she was with her beautiful baby.

The fundamental reason why certain cultures remain static and never evolve… is the overwhelming extent to which the lives of the people within them are dominated by envy and envy avoidance: as anthropologists call it, the envy barrier.

Any effort to progress in those societies is sabotaged by the group. Wheeler quotes sociologist Helmut Schoeck, who describes it as:

A self-pitying inclination to contemplate another’s superiority or advantages, combined with a vague belief in his being the cause of one’s own deprivation… Whereas the socialist believes himself robbed by the employer, just as the politician in a developing country believes himself robbed by the industrial countries, so primitive man believes himself robbed by his neighbor, the latter having succeeded by black magic in spiriting away to his own fields, part of the former’s harvest.

Free market capitalism, by allowing the entrepreneurial spirit of the individual to flourish, has allowed for unprecedented advances in human development and affluence. But it is truly a novel innovation in societal organization. Most societies throughout history have instead fallen victim to the all-too-common maladies of human greed, envy, and corruption. Indeed, these negative human motives are ever present. Overcoming them requires constant vigilance, resourcefulness and commitment.

Our constitutional republic was set up to promote the prosperity found only in liberty. Following the Constitution’s enactment, Benjamin Franklin was famously asked, “Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin responded, “A republic… if you can keep it.” The clear implication is that the tendency toward despotism is baked into human nature. Resisting its attractions requires an informed, committed, moral constituency.

Communism is the polar opposite of free market capitalism. It cannot compete honestly. It thrives on envy and destroys everything it touches. Communists are the evolutionary endpoint to human depravity.

Even the communists themselves do not believe the “racist, sexist, xenophobe” narrative that they constantly spew. The true goal is to destroy our credibility through intimidation and shaming. The reality of this strategy is demonstrated by its history of use.

Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union’s first leader, is believed to be the first to lay out this strategy, and has been credited with saying, “We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth… We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”

Lenin is the secular god of Marxism-Leninism. His ideas thus advanced and evolved as the decades rolled on. In 1943 the Soviet Communist Party sent the following message to the communist parties of the world:

Members and front organizations must continually embarrass, discredit and degrade our critics. When obstructionists become too irritating, label them as fascist or Nazi or anti-Semitic… constantly associate those who oppose us with those names that already have a bad smell. The association will, after enough repetition, become `fact’ in the public mind.

Over the subsequent years they have added in, “sexist, homophobe, xenophobe,” and the latest epithet, “Islamophobe.” I’m sure they will dream up more. Name your phobia. There is not a shred of reality to the accusations. It is a tactical ploy to shame, discredit and silence opponents. And it has been very effective.

Facing little official resistance, antifa is now suggesting its violence is justified, and that its opponents should be silenced and oppressed. After all, if you are the saviors of the world, and your opponents are horrible racists, sexists, homophobes, etc., etc., why question or second-guess your actions at all?

But this tactic too, has a long, sordid history. Lenin is also credited with saying:

Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes is right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.

The German Communist Herbert Marcuse advanced Lenin’s idea with his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” Marcuse was one of the better known members of the so-called Frankfurt School. Founded in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research, the school was disbanded when Hitler rose to power, and its professors fled. Most came to America.

The Frankfurt School was reconstituted at Columbia University. Marcuse taught there before heading to Harvard, Brandeis, and finally the University of California, San Diego. He mentored Angela Davis, the black American Communist involved at the time with the Black Panthers, first at Brandeis, then at UC San Diego, which she attended specifically because he was there.

Marcuse and his fellow Frankfurt School Marxists created Critical Theory, an intellectual tool to deconstruct the West through constant criticism. Echoing the Soviets, their teaching relentlessly accused Western societies of being “the world’s greatest repositories of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, fascism, and Nazism.”[1]

Especially ironic is the “anti-Semitism” charge. The antifa thugs shout it out even though American leftists have joined the Islamists in creating a virulently anti-Semitic atmosphere at college campuses throughout the U.S. But even that is old-hat. While communist Antifaschistiches were in the streets vilifying Nazis for killing Jews, the Soviet Union was busy killing them too, but Stalin was an equal opportunity mass murderer — not satisfied with killing Jews alone.

Anyway, Marcuse’s understanding of the First Amendment had a peculiar twist. Leftists certainly could speak out, but it was a form of “repressive tolerance” because in a capitalist society ruled by racism, sexism, and so forth, their ideas would never get a fair hearing.

In order to correct Marcuse’s claimed oppressive imbalance, he suggested that — again recalling Lenin — those oppressed by the society had a special right to lie, intimidate, and engage in violence and law-breaking to get their way:

Under the conditions prevailing in this country, tolerance does not, and cannot, fulfill the civilizing function attributed to it by the liberal protagonists of democracy, namely, protection of dissent… I believe that there is a ‘natural right’ of resistance for oppressed and overpowered minorities to use extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate…

And in order to get a fair hearing they needed a head start:

Not “equal” but more representation of the Left would be equalization of the prevailing inequality… Given this situation, I suggested in “Repressive Tolerance” the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction, as a means of shifting the balance between Right and Left by restraining the liberty of the Right, thus counteracting the pervasive inequality of freedom (unequal opportunity of access to the means of democratic persuasion) and strengthening the oppressed against the oppressors…

Marcuse further described the types of people who needed to have their freedom restricted:

[It] would include the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behavior — thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.

Our Social Security/Medicare system currently has a currently projected unfunded liability of $127 trillion. I have a problem with that. So does that make me a racist? Should my freedoms be curtailed because I hold such “extremist” views? According to Marcuse, apparently so.

Antifa and indeed the entire Left establishment have used Marcuse’s arguments to justify what they are doing. Some cite Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, but Alinsky just developed Marcuse’s idea a little further.

Antifa is simply exploiting the moment. These ideas have been gaining traction for 100 years. With the dumbing down of our education system, and the systematic suppression of the terrors of communism, antifa is taking full advantage of the misperceptions that our media and popular culture have been incubating for years.

But the fact is that communism, socialism, and anarchism represent all the worst aspects of human nature. And they have justified it with the worst of lies. They have been violent for years, and have largely gotten away with it for reasons that defy explanation. Today they are publicly advocating violence, and using the false “racist” narrative to justify it.

As the antifa thugs seek to push this country toward civil war, it is way past time to identify communism for what it is and them for the treasonous, vicious, subversive domestic terrorists they are. We need to officially recognize antifa as a terrorist organization. Sign the petition and ask your member of Congress to support legislation that will put a stop to this anarchy. If we don’t act now, we may not get another chance.

[1] Buchanan, Patrick. The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002. 80.

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Hurricane Harvey nature — Not man

How many solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars would we have needed in order to prevent the recent tragic flooding of Houston?

That question is absurd, but that is exactly the kind of daffy reasoning you’ll get when you ask climate campaigners to talk about a tragedy like Hurricane Harvey.

New York Times climate blogger Andrew Revkin joined meteorologists Eric Holthaus and Marshall Shepherd for a podcast blaming Harvey on global warming.  They called for rushing out so-called “attribution studies” linking Harvey to climate change … … which of course, in their minds, is largely your fault.

They want to strike while Harvey is fresh in our collective minds.  Not to worry, they say, all these “studies” will be “peer reviewed” (no doubt from their friends in the alarmist movement).  Oddly, they decried Houston’s dense urbanization.  Usually team warming calls for us all to crowd together as closely as possible to “decrease our carbon footprints.”  Has the wind shifted on that one?

Marc Morano is posting details about climate scientist Michael Mann’s, and the efforts of other alarmists, to blame Harvey on global warming over at Climate Depot.  Check in frequently for updates as they break.

That Harvey’s flooding was anthropogenic, rather than natural, is nonsense.

As Harvey made landfall, CFACT sent out a reminder of the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900 that leveled the city; killing six to twelve thousand Texans.  Parts of America lie in areas where tropical revolving storms are likely.  The entire eastern seaboard is to some degree perpetually vulnerable.

Recently America went 4,324 days without a major hurricane, a natural occurrence that confounded the global warming narrative.  The warming crowd was talking about never-ending Texas drought.  Look how quickly they’ve switched to a future of extreme rain!  They’re counting on us to have short memories.

Former NASA climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer, who manages temperature satellites at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, posted a graph plotting major Texas hurricane strikes (in red) with Gulf of Mexico water temperatures.  The graph (below) shows no correlation between hurricanes and the naturally fluctuating temperature of the Gulf.

Dr. Spencer also recently wrote a new book, An Inconvenient Deception: How Al Gore Distorts Climate Science and Energy Policy, which is a direct takedown of the many deceptions and outright lies in Al Gore’s recent Inconvenient Sequel.  We recommend you get a copy for yourself at Amazon.  Dr. Spencer’s book has become a best-seller and is out-selling the book Gore had published to accompany his film.

The massive flooding in Houston may become the most expensive natural disaster in American history.  There is a simple reason for this.  The property under water in Houston has become extremely valuable.  Houston developing into a valuable gem of a city is an example of something truly man-made.  So is the massive relief and recovery effort now underway.  Neither would be possible without the power of the free market the warming folks seek to destroy.

Houston is suffering.  Texans needs all of our prayers and assistance.

Thank you to everyone in Texas ferrying people to safety in their own small boats, opening their homes, businesses and churches to those needing shelter, and doing all they can to help.  You are, unlike the climate hustlers seeking to exploit this hurricane for shallow political purposes, an inspiration to us all.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Texas Major Hurricane Intensity Not Related to Gulf Water Temperatures

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Make America Great Again (MAGA) Performance Review

It is time for the Make America Great Again (MAGA) performance review. How have Candidate Trump’s campaign promises fared in President Trump’s White House?

When ex-president Obama promised President Trump the customary peaceful transition of power President Trump believed him – it was a devastating mistake and catastrophic for MAGA. Our new President is a savvy businessman and America needs his business expertise – but government business is even dirtier and more corrupt than the New York real estate business.

In real estate it is far easier to identify your enemies – in government the swamp creatures are camouflaged by their ever-changing colors, deceitful smiles, and ability to adapt. Swamp creatures are entirely self-serving – there are no teams or loyalties in the swamp – just survival.

For eight years ex-president liar-in-chief Obama staffed the United States government with Globalists, Islamists, and Leftist activists. His hope and change agenda was designed to destroy American democracy and replace it with socialism. Obama followed Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” to create the social chaos required for seismic social change. Obama weaponized his pro-Muslim agenda and used it in his information war to destabilize America and create social chaos. He staffed the government with Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR members. Obama weakened the military and national security apparatus with training manuals rewritten to satisfy his MB/CAIR advisers that deliberately deleted any mention of Islam as the ideological inspiration for jihad terror. He used Common Core to re-educated our youth with a revisionist curriculum that rejects Judeo-Christian traditions and exalts Islam as a religion of peace. Obama was the media’s globalist darling and they covered up his crimes against America to advance the globalist agenda of their owners.

Make America Great Again advances Americanism. MAGA is the new program that President Trump brought to Washington to oppose globalism. So, after seven months what does the MAGA performance review reveal? A shocking reorganization from MAGA to GAMA – Globalists are Management Again.

In a stunning reversal of staffing all the President’s men are OUT and all the ex-president’s men are IN. This is a catastrophic management upheaval. It is simply impossible for President Trump to fulfill his campaign promises to MAGA with an oppositional staff that rejects Americanism, a Washington swamp that embraces globalism, a biased mainstream media that protects the globalists, a pro-Muslim educational system that idealizes globalism, and a national security apparatus that denies Islamic ideology is the inspiration for jihadi terrorism.

How did this happen? How does a dream become a nightmare? How does unlikely Candidate Trump become President Trump and then lose his way?

Thought precedes behavior. Businessman Trump built an empire by trusting his own vision. He began with a vision, listened to the advice of trusted advisors, evaluated the information through the prism of his own thoughts and values, and then made decisions.

Candidate Trump became President Trump by trusting his own vision. He began with a vision MAGA, listened to the advice of trusted advisors, evaluated the information through the prism of his own thoughts and values, and then made decisions.

President Trump brought his MAGA vision to Washington but the globalist traps were already set. There was no peaceful transition of power as promised. Instead, the swamp offensive began. The first attack was on General Michael Flynn, a true America-first patriot who understood the clear and present danger of radical Islam. General Flynn had the information to expose Obama’s insidious master plan to destabilize and destroy America from within. The globalist swamp needed to destroy General Flynn’s credibility to survive and so they did. But the creatures were not satisfied and the swamp attacks continued.

President Trump’s America-first MAGA team that was designed to oppose and dismantle the existing globalist swamp in Washington was attacked relentlessly and has itself been devoured by the swamp creatures instead. Team members Michael Flynn, K.T. McFarland, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, Derek Harvey, Rich Higgins, Adam Lovinger, Steve Bannon, and Sebastian Gorka – all disappeared. Obama loyalists H.R.. McMaster, Dina Habib-Powell, Allison Hooker, Fernando Cutz, Andrea Hall, Rear Admiral David Kriete, Jessica Cox, Stephanie Morrison, Heather King, and Robert Wilson – all reappeared. Why?

The immediate and complete dismantling of the Trump team was necessary for the globalist forces to control the information. Control of the information is what controls public opinion. Public opinion is the weapon of choice in an information war. Obama’s globalist Common Core re-education curriculum was designed to tilt American youth toward future globalism and Islam. The ongoing globalist media assault on President Trump was designed to discredit his Americanism and tilt American public opinion toward globalism and Islam. The coordinated globalist assault on President Trump’s America-first team was deigned to control the information the President receives and tilt his opinion away from his signature Americanism toward globalism and Islam.

So, who controls the information that President Trump now receives in this information war? Who controls the re-education of President Trump? How influential are the opinions of President Trump’s children who have been educated toward globalism and raised on John Lennon’s “Imagine” instead of the “Star Spangled Banner.” Whoever controls the information controls the future. Sadly, the MAGA performance review indicates that GAMA has replaced MAGA. The GAMA globalists who replaced Trump’s America-first MAGA team now control the information in the President’s daily briefings.

The MAGA performance review concludes:

  1. Ivanka and Jared Kushner have become impediments to President Trump’s America-first agenda and should no longer serve in any official capacity.
  2. The West Wing Democrats are impediments to President Trump’s America-first agenda and should no longer serve in any official capacity.
  3. The leftover Obama replacement team is committed to sabotaging MAGA.

The MAGA performance recommendation is:

  1. President Trump fire the entire team of West Wing Democrats including Cohn and Tillerson – You’re Fired!
  2. President Trump fire the leftover Obama replacement team starting with H.R. McMaster – You’re Fired!
  3. President Trump rehire the America-first Trump team loyalists and staff his administration with personnel committed to MAGA – You’re Hired!

The MAGA performance review forecast:

  1. The short term upheavals resulting from the massive firing and hiring recommendations will salvage MAGA and allow the President to pursue and achieve his ambitious campaign promises.
  2. If President Trump does not regain control of the information and continues to allow GAMA to control it he will lose his presidency and ability to govern. He will become insignificant.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Goudsmit Pundicity website.

Where Did Antifa Come From?

Click for AUDIO version.

Unless you have been living under a rock lately, you are probably now familiar with the term, “Antifa,” but are not too sure what it represents. In a nutshell, it is an abbreviated form of “Anti Faschists,” and is at the heart of the violent protests plaguing America. Antifa was there at Charlottesville, VA, in Phoenix, AZ for the Trump rally, at the desecration of several Civil War monuments, and more recently at the heart of the violent Berkeley, CA protests. These were ugly hostile environments the police had difficulty controlling.

Make no mistake, Antifa promotes anarchy, and proudly proclaims itself as such in their literature and web pages. They are also communists with a deep aversion to capitalism. They claim their group descends from a like-titled European group of the early 20th century. However, I could find no evidence today’s Antifa knows what Fascism truly means. They claim to want to destroy what they call the “American Plantation.” From their perspective, they see slavery in every minority group and abhor their white Christian “masters.” Yet, many of their members are middle class whites. They want liberation and freedom ON THEIR TERMS, not as defined by the Constitution. As such, they advocate the overthrow of the United States government and are committed to combating any sign of support for the government or any other opinion conflicting with their own. And, No, they are most definitely not advocates of free speech as prescribed by the First Amendment.

In reality, Antifa’s roots are planted in the Occupy Wall Street Movement of 2011, a group of people seeking social and economic reform. Interestingly, the Occupy movement quickly faded from view following the re-election of President Barack Obama in 2012. However, after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, a period of social unrest grew, all aimed at resisting the new president at every turn. The tactics, unfortunately, were less peaceful and more militaristic. Consequently, Antifa began to flourish.

Antifa’s numbers are relatively small, but they are getting organized and beginning to recruit impressionable millennials either in school or fresh out of college. Many professors preach Socialist dogma to their students thereby influencing their motivation and perspective. As a result, they foster Antifa recruits.

Currently, the tactics of Antifa appear to be based on a “Minute Man” approach whereby whenever a major demonstration is led by Republicans, such as a pro-Trump rally, they rush to the scene and engage in vocal and violent confrontation. The theory is that if they do this enough times, they hope to suppress any outward signs of support for the president. It’s called “intimidation.” They also hope to spin the media to promote their values.

Antifa is now in the process of creating a network of chapters throughout the United States, the latest being in Philadelphia. Such meeting places are used to recruit and train new members in various organizational and communications tactics. The concern though is the teaching of terrorism, complete with military training.

The mouthpiece for Antifa is the web page “It’s Going Down,” which spreads information and encourages support for the group. The main web page for the group is titled, “Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement,” which articulates their purpose and activities. They also claim to rely on donations and have established an Internet Fund drive. The irony here is that Antifa are devout anti-capitalists, yet when asked “Why do we ask for money?”, they claimed, “Sadly we have not freed ourselves from capitalism. We too need to eat and pay the bills.”

Antifa makes no pretense they are unwilling to use violence to serve their needs and have demonstrated their willingness to do so. Photos on their web site and elsewhere proudly display a variety of weapons and recruits learning how to use them. However, these are predominantly young people who want to graduate from playing “Call of Duty” on a computer to actually facing violent confrontation. I suspect many are naive about what they are doing and do not realize the consequences of their actions. This becomes a dangerous scenario that could lead to the deaths of either themselves or their opposition. Should they develop a well equipped arsenal, someone is bound to eventually pull a trigger and all Hell will break loose.

As real as the prospect of violence is, Democrats have been slow in condemning Antifa; only recently has Nancy Pelosi spoken against them, but we have yet to hear from Chuck Schumer, the Clintons, and former President Barack Obama. Their silence only serves to encourage the Antifa movement, not to suppress it. Even the Main Stream Media appears reluctant to take them to task.

Make no mistake, Antifa is worse than all of the left-wing nut jobs combined, including the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter. They are misguided, armed, and view themselves as international terrorists. This is not about “American Plantations”; it’s about the overthrow of the United States government. If you hear someone sympathize with Antifa, be sure to straighten them out.

Keep the Faith!

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Huffington Post. All trademarks both marked and unmarked belong to their respective companies.

MGM Resorts funding terror linked CAIR, Southern Poverty Law Center and ADL

Yahoo News reports:  MGM to match employee donations to civil rights groups,

LAS VEGAS (AP) — One of the largest employers in Nevada is launching a donation match program benefiting civil rights organizations in light of the deadly Charlottesville protests.

MGM Resorts International, the largest casino operator on the Las Vegas Strip, said Friday that it would match employee donations made to the Southern Poverty Law Center, NAACP, Anti-Defamation League, Human Rights Campaign, Council on American Islamic Relations, OCA National-Asian Pacific American Advocates and League of United Latin American Citizens.

CEO Jim Murren made the announcement in a letter, saying he felt compelled to speak out against “the degradation of basic human dignity” following the deadly attacks in Charlottesville and Barcelona in recent days.

He said the company champions diversity and inclusion. Murren said MGM believes in free speech but that it would not tolerate hate.

MGM Resorts International owns the following resort properties:  Bellagio, Beau Rivage, Circus Circus, Delano, Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay Resort, MGM Grand, Mirage, Monte Carlo, New York New York, The Signature and Vdara Hotel & Spa.

MGM Resorts is funding:

Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR):

  • One of MGM Resort’s partners is located in a country that declared CAIR a terrorist organization.  MGM Resorts is in a 50-50 partnership with Dubai World.  Dubai is one of seven emirates that makes up the United Arab Emirates country.  The United Arab Emirates’ ministerial cabinet listed the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as one of 83 banned terrorist organizations on November 15, 2014.  More info.
  • Eight former CAIR officials were sentenced to prison or deported because of their support for terrorism.
  • Omar Ahmad, Chairman and founder of the Council on American Islamic Relations, told a Muslim crowd “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faiths, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.”
  • More of terror-linked CAIR’s history and agenda is posted here.

Southern Poverty Law Center.

  • The Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) wrongful labeling of some conservative organizations as hate groups unjustly harms reputations, threatens public safety and brands their followers as hate people.  Some of the organizations the SPLC wrongfully lists as hate groups include D. James Kennedy Ministries, Family Research Council, Liberty Counsel and American Family Association.  The Southern Poverty Law Center wrongfully lists many more conservative organizations as hate groups.  Millions of Americans belong to and support these organizations.
  • In 2012, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate catalogue made headlines in 2012 when a domestic terrorist who carried out a politically-motivated shooting at a Christian organization, the Family Research Council (FRC), admitted he got his target list from the SPLC.”  Source Judicial Watch.  On August 15, 2012 Floyd Lee Corkins II, wielding a 9mm pistol along with two magazines and 50 rounds of ammunition, entered the lobby of Family Research Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters.  Corkins shot an employee, 46-year-old Leonardo Johnson, in the left arm.  While injured, Johnson assisted others who wrestled the gunman to the ground until police arrived and placed the gunman under arrest.  During his FBI interview Corkins was asked how he chose his target. His response was “Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups. I found them online”.  Source Wikipedia.
  • In 2014, under the Obama administration, the FBI cut ties with the Southern Poverty Law Center.  The Department of Justice used to provide access to the hate propaganda published online by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  However, the Department of Justice removed the SPJC as a reference after more than a dozen conservative organizations complained about the erroneous labeling and public safety threats that accompany it.   Source Judicial Watch.
  • Congressman Steve Scalise and four others were gunned down in a rampage by James T. Hodgkinson who liked the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Facebook page.  In 2014, the Southern Poverty Law Center repeatedly implied that Scalise associated with white supremacists and other groups the organization had deemed “hate groups,” including the Family Research Council.  Source SPLC.    In 2015, SPLC implied that because Scalise lives in the same state as Ku Klux Klan members, he “associated” with them.  Source SPL.

Anti-Defamation League (ADL)

  • In 2014, under the Obama administration, the FBI cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League.  The Department of Justice used to provide access to the propaganda published online by the Anti-Defamation League.  Source Daily Caller.

The Council on American Islamic Relations agenda to normalize Sharia tenets that are antithetical to the rights afforded by the Constitution of the United States is a very legitimate concern to tens of millions of American.  Americans concerned about CAIR’s history and agenda should not be silenced and censored in the name of political correctness and leftist bias.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s name calling and labeling is offensive and alarming to the millions of Americans who belong to and support many conservative organizations that are wrongfully listed as hate groups.  SPLC’s list puts these organizations’ employees and the people who support them in a bull’s eye target for leftists’ hate and possible violence.

MGM Resorts International certainly has the right to support whatever organizations it chooses.  You have the same right to express your disappointment and patronize companies that do not support organizations that target conservatives with hate labels.

Florida Family Association has prepared an email for you to send to express concern to MGM Resorts officials regarding its plan to fund CAIR, Southern Poverty Law Center and ADL.

To send your email, please click the following link, enter your name and email address then click the “Send Your Message” button. You may also edit the subject or message text if you wish.

Click here to send your email to express concern to MGM Resorts officials regarding its plan to fund CAIR, Southern Poverty Law Center and ADL.

Contact information:

MGM Resorts International
Kirk Kerkorian, Founder
3600 Las Vegas Blvd S
Las Vegas, NV 89109-4303
Main: (702) 650-6900

James Joseph Murren, CEO
jmurren@mgmresorts.com

Christopher Nordling
Executive Vice President of Operations
cnordling@mgmresorts.com

Jodi Myers
Vice President Customer Development
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corpcommunications@mgmresorts.com

RELATED ARTICLE: Council on American Islamic Relations Conducted Sensitivity Training for Philadelphia Teachers

The ‘Broken Window’ Democrat Party and Rise of ‘Political Crime in America’

James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982 wrote in The Atlantic an article titled “Broken Windows.” Wilson and Kelling introduced the Broken Windows Theory (BWT) which used broken windows as a metaphor for disorder within neighborhoods. The theory links disorder and incivility within a community to subsequent occurrences of serious crime.

Wilson and Kelling wrote:

[A]t the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.) [Emphasis added]

Read more.

The Rise of Political Crime

The key notion put forward by Wilson and Kelling is that “at the community level, disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence.” Once order breaks down you have a growing number of people committing more and more serious crimes.

We are seeing the rise of “political crimes” in our neighborhoods, towns and cities.

Occupy Oakland riot.

In 2011 Democrats began encouraging people to “break windows” by supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement. Senator Bernie Sanders stated, “The Occupy Wall Street protests are shining a national spotlight on the most powerful, dangerous and secretive economic and political force in America.” Actor Woody Harrelson said, “I’m an anarchist and I do think things such as Occupy Wall Street are about getting a little closer to the solution.”

In a Weekly Standard column titled “Pelosi on Occupy Wall Street Protesters: ‘God bless them’,” John McCormack wrote:

During a press conference Thursday afternoon, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi praised those participating in the “Occupy Wall Street” protests. “God bless them,” Pelosi said, “for their spontaneity. It’s independent … it’s young, it’s spontaneous, and it’s focused. And it’s going to be effective.”

Read more.

Occupy Wall Street began breaking windows, literally.

The Democrat Party, and then President Obama, failed to repair the broken windows beginning with the Occupy Oakland riots in California, which inextricably lead to the 2013 riots in Sanford, Florida, 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri and most recently the 2017 riots and death in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In fact, the Democrats are encouraging breaking windows, because “it has always been fun” so long as its the other party that gets hurt.

Violence begets more violence: From Sanford, Florida to Ferguson, Missouri

Ferguson, Missouri riot.

Fast forward to Ferguson, Missouri which experienced protests and riots that began the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014. Officer Wilson was acquitted of any wrong doing, which lead to more protests and riots.

This incident coupled with the shooting on February 26, 2013, in Sanford, Florida, when George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old mixed race Hispanic man who was a neighborhood watch coordinator, fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American high school dropout. Zimmerman, under Florida’s stand your ground law, was acquitted of Martin’s shooting. The Obama Department of Justice reviewed the case for any civil rights violations but this was dropped citing “insufficient evidence.”

After the Trayvon Martin shooting former President Obama on July 19, 2013 said:

You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son.  Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.  And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.

These remarks by former President Obama inextricably led to Ferguson and the empowerment of the Black Lives Matter movement which was created on July 13, 2013.

Charlottesville, Virginia and beyond

The Black Lives Matter website states:

Black Lives Matter is a chapter-based national organization working for the validity of Black life. We are working to (re)build the Black liberation movement.

This is Not a Moment, but a Movement.

#BlackLivesMatter was created in 2012 after Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman, was acquitted for his crime, and dead 17-year old Trayvon was posthumously placed on trial for his own murder. Rooted in the experiences of Black people in this country who actively resist our dehumanization, #BlackLivesMatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society. Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes.

Antifa face off against neo-Nazis as cars plow into the crowds.

August 12, 2017 saw riots, mayhem and a murder committed in Charlottesville, Virginia when two extremist groups faced off one against the other. Disorder and incivility were on full display near the home of Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the Democrat Party.

Since the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump we have witnessed a coalition of Democrats, the anti-Fascist (ANTI-FA) movement, neo-Nazis and Black Lives Matter working to cause discord and incivility. Calls for the death of politicians and their supporters are part and parcel of the daily news.

Even Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a Democrat member of the Missouri State Senate, openly hoped for the assassination of the President of the United States.

These are all broken windows leading to more broken windows and eventually leading to more violent crimes, destruction and even death.

Why we must fix, not break, windows!

Is it too late to fix these broken windows? No. Not if the Democrat Party stands firm against anymore breaking of windows. Let’s all pray that they come to their senses and call for windows to be repaired, not broken.

When people see it’s alright to break windows the question is: What will they break next? We know that violence begets more violence. Where will the Democrat Party, and its base, break the next window?

We must be window lovers and resist the window breakers.

Remember …if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken.

RELATED ARTICLES: 

In a World of Real Evil, the Left Fights Fake Evil

Antifa violence brings no outrage from Democrats, after dire warnings about right-wing violence | Fox News

Why the Media are in a Never-ending Hunt for Right-wing Violence

Where Did Antifa Come From?

The left’s war on Christianity and why it hates Trump – American Thinker

The ‘merciless four’ EU countries whose leaders do get it!

See my previous post for background on my title!

Here is the title of this EU Bulletin story:

The Merciless Four Strike Again: Visegrad Group Sticks to “Zero Refugee Policy”

Poland and Hungary are still sticking to their unwillingness to accept any refugees despite the busy migrant relocations going on in the rest of the bloc.

Both countries are still refusing to take part in the EU-mandated resettlement despite the fact that the European Commission has initiated an infringement procedure against Warsaw, Budapest and Prague for “non-compliance” with their legal obligations on relocation.

Polish Minister of the Interior and Administration, Mariusz Blaszczak, informed Brussels that Poland has applied for cancellation of the infringement procedure.

Mr Blaszczak reiterated his country’s position when he said that “stating that the relocation system will heal the refugee problem is false, it’s a lie. EU policy is harmful, not to say suicidal, as regards open borders, ”adding that “Poland will not accept any refugees.” He also said that Poland did not agree that the Treaty grants the Commission rights to interfere in the national powers with regard to security, integration and social issues.

“Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, Berlin, Manchester, Barcelona. How many more European cities must be still attacked by terrorists to make European Union wake up?

To make the European Commission finally admit that ‘blindly’ accepting everyone who reaches Europe’s coast is like looping a rope around Europe’s neck,” Mr. Blaszczak pointed out.

All four Visegrad countries – Hungary, Poland and the Czech and Slovak Republics – have joined their forces against the EU’s 2015 migrant resettlement program that sought to resettle 160,000 refugees across EU states.

See my ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive here.  And here are all my previous posts on Poland.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image of protests is courtesy of the Middle East Eye. Two years ago the Polish people began to let it be known that they wouldn’t be pressured in to taking the EU’s migrant boat people.