Republican National Committee Announces 2020 Convention Senior Staff

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CHARLOTTE, N.C. /PRNewswire/ — Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and Republican National Convention (RNC) President and CEO Marcia Lee Kelly today announced the senior staff team for next summer’s Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina – the “Queen City” – from August 24 to August 27, 2020.

“Thanks to Marcia’s leadership, the Republican National Convention will be organized by a group of highly accomplished individuals,” said McDaniel. “This group will work together to ensure the 2020 Republican National Convention will be an exceptional and first-class experience for everyone attending this historic event as we nominate President Trump for re-election,” said McDaniel.

“I’m thrilled to announce this group of talented individuals, each of whom brings a wealth of experience to the 2020 RNC,” said Kelly. “Their combined talents and enthusiasm will help ensure that next summer’s convention will be a wonderful and historic event for delegates, attendees, media, and the entire Charlotte region.”

Members of the 2020 Republican National Convention Senior Staff Team are:

  • Stephen “Max” Everett, Vice President and Chief Information Officer 

Everett joins the team for his sixth convention, having previously served as the Chief Information Officer for the 2004 and 2016 conventions. He brings over two decades of experience in providing innovative solutions and managing risk for both public and private sector organizations. Everett was most recently the Chief Information Officer for the U.S. Department of Energy, overseeing the Department’s information technology (IT) portfolio, serving as an advisor to the Deputy Secretary and Secretary, and leading various functions within the Office of the Chief Information Officer. Everett received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas and a J.D. from the University of Houston. As Vice President, Everett is responsible for the management, strategy, and execution of major convention initiations. As Chief Information Officer, Everett is also responsible for the convention’s IT infrastructure.

  • Christina “CC” Cobaugh, Chief of Staff and Director of Ticketing

This will be Cobaugh’s second convention, having previously worked on the executive team for the 2016 convention. She most recently served as the Executive Secretary and Policy Coordinator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative under Ambassador Robert E. Lighthizer. Prior to joining the Administration, she served on the executive team for the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee and was a policy analyst and Director of Business Development for Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. Cobaugh holds a bachelor’s degree from Louisiana State University and a master’s degree from the University of New Orleans. In her role as Chief of Staff, Cobaugh executes the convention’s overall vision, mission, values, and strategic goals. Additionally, as Director of Ticketing, Cobaugh is responsible for the management and distribution of all tickets to the 2020 Republican National Convention and to all related convention events.

  • Christine Lesko, Chief of Infrastructure

Lesko previously served as Director of Venues for the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the Senior Director of Major Events for the Cleveland Cavaliers/Quicken Loans Arena, where she led the staff of the facility at “The Q” during the 2016 Republican National Convention. Lesko holds a bachelor’s degree from Baldwin Wallace College. She is responsible for coordinating all infrastructure efforts related to the 2020 Republican National Convention including flow and signage, the general contractor, information technology, official providers, and media operations.

  • Thomas F. Maxwell III, Chief Financial Officer

Maxwell brings decades of experience on campaign finance issues and will be serving in his third Republican National Convention. He is the founder of MAXimum Compliance, LLC – a campaign finance consulting firm whose clients include members of Congress, political action committees, joint fundraising committees, Super PACs, National Party Committees, and non-profits. He has also served as the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) director at the National Republican Senatorial Committee and as a reports analyst at the FEC. Maxwell holds a bachelor’s degree in History from Southern Methodist University. For the 2020 Republican National Convention, Maxwell is responsible for managing the convention budget and serving as a steward for the COA’s treasury.

  • Dan McCarthy, Chief of Public Affairs and Director of External Affairs

McCarthy began his career with the 2000 Republican National Convention, followed by a stint with Victory 2000 on the Bush/Cheney transition team. In 2001, he joined the Bush Administration, serving in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs. For the next decade, he worked for Anheuser-Busch InBev, the largest beer company in the world, ultimately serving as Senior Director of National Affairs. McCarthy started his external affairs firm, DMM Strategies, to bring his significant and unique experience in both corporate and public policy to clients. Originally from Cleveland, McCarthy holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame. He serves as the primary point of contact and coordinator for all external groups interested in participating in the 2020 Republican National Convention.

  • Jonathan Oringdulph, Chief of Logistics and Director of Intergovernmental Coordination and Permitting

Oringdulph brings decades of logistics experience to the Republican National Convention. He has served 25 years in the U.S. Navy and has been assigned at the White House since 2004. He most recently served as the Director of Presidential Food Service and was responsible for programs supporting the White House Military Office. His military experience includes Navy Contracts Officer at Naval Air Systems Command; Flag Supply Aide to the Superintendent of the Naval Academy; a mobilization to Afghanistan as a logistics advisor; and Chief of Staff for Special Operations Command Forward, North and West Africa. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Aeronautics from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, as well as an MBA and a master’s degree in Project Management from Keller School of Business Management. Oringdulph serves as the 2020 Republican National Convention’s liaison to the city of Charlotte and is responsible for coordinating the logistics efforts of security, transportation, hotels and venues.

  • Whitney Nichols Andersen, Director of Media Operations

Andersen brings a wealth of experience in operations and logistics, having recently served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor to the Director of Management and Administration in the White House. She previously served as the Assistant Director for Ticket Management and Fulfillment during the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee and was the Deputy Director of Operations during the 2016 Republican National Committee. Andersen holds a bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies from American University. She is responsible for directing all operational and logistical planning for traditional and digital media organizations for the 2020 Republican National Convention.

  • Anastasia Hardin-Cole, Director of Official Proceedings

This will be Hardin-Cole’s fourth consecutive convention, having previously worked in Media Operations and External Affairs for the Republican National Convention. She brings extensive business, communications, and political experience from her time with the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee, various foreign affairs positions, and public affairs firms. Hardin-Cole attended Babson College in Wellesley, MA, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Business, with a focus on Entrepreneurship and Global Business Management. Hardin-Cole manages a comprehensive 2020 Republican National Convention program in collaboration with the Executive Producer, the RNC, and campaign leadership.

  • Dustin Hendrix, Director of Transportation

Hendrix joins the 2020 Republican National Convention after serving in various capacities, including over two decades as a Naval Officer at the U.S. Department of Defense, an Aircrew Expert in conjunction with Boeing, and as the Commanding Officer of the Fleet Area Control and Surveillance Facility in Jacksonville, FL. Hendrix holds a bachelor’s degree from Wabash College, an EMBA from the Naval Postgraduate School, and an M.S. from the University of Florida. Hendrix is responsible for the development and implementation of a transportation management plan for the convention in support of all events including media site visits, the Welcome Party, and all events scheduled during convention week.

  • Dee Dee Lancaster, Director of Logistics Flow and Signage

Lancaster has over two decades of experience developing strong strategic planning initiatives and logistics, resulting in successful events for her clients. Lancaster has worked with four Presidential Inaugural Committees, the Republican National Committee, and multiple Republican National Conventions. A New Orleans native, Lancaster holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Louisiana State University. She is directly responsible for mapping out the signage plan to ensure a well-branded and seamless wayfinding system for convention delegates and guests.

  • Joy Lee, Counsel

Prior to this role, Lee served as counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on House Administration; Senior Counsel at a national public policy and advocacy organization; Associate Counsel at the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee; and a member of the legal team for the 2016 Republican National Convention. A native of South Korea, Lee earned her B.A. in Communications at the University of Maryland, and her law degree at Washington and Lee. She oversees the legal operations of the convention and ensures full compliance with applicable laws and regulations. In addition, Lee provides legal guidance on a wide range of issues, including regulatory compliance, risk management, contract negotiation, and intellectual property management.

  • Diandra Lopez, Director of Delegate Experience

Lopez joins the convention team with an extensive work history, which includes management positions at Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group and VIP guest relations. Lopez organized the planning and execution of hotel events during the United Nations General Assembly, New York City Marathon, and Thanksgiving. Lopez is tasked with creating and executing an exceptional experience for the RNC delegates and stakeholders prior to, during, and following the convention. Lopez looks forward to applying her hospitality experience and leadership background to the 2020 Republican National Convention.

  • Mallory McGough, Director of Administration

McGough brings years of private management experience, having previously worked for several organizations, including Knock Knock Children’s Museum and the American Cancer Society, both in Baton Rouge, LA. Prior to that, she spent five years in Nashville, working in events and athletics operations management. McGough also worked for Congressman Pete Sessions, running his internship program in Washington, D.C., and serving as Grassroots Coordinator of his re-election campaign in Dallas. A Lake Charles, Louisiana native, McGough attended Louisiana State University and graduated with bachelor’s degrees in Political Science and Communications. McGough also holds a master’s degree from Belmont University. For the 2020 Republican National Convention, McGough is tasked with coordinating daily operational functions, streamlining management systems, maintaining business efficiency, and overseeing human capital development.

  • Robert O’Donnell, Director of Security

O’Donnell has extensive experience as a senior security and law enforcement leader, with over two decades serving in the U.S. Secret Service and leading the Dignitary Protective Division. O’Donnell holds a bachelor’s degrees in Sociology and Criminal Justice from Villanova University. He is directly responsible for the overall security plans for the Charlotte Convention Center, Spectrum Center, and any additional footprints associated with the 2020 Republican National Convention.

  • Russell Peck, Director of Community Affairs 

Peck has worked in North Carolina in various capacities and led campaigns throughout the East Coast, most recently serving as a Regional Political Director for the Republican National Committee covering the Southeast United States, and as Campaign Manager for the Pat McCrory Committee both in 2016 and 2012. He is the former Executive Director of the North Carolina Republican Party and was a Senior Vice President of Mercury Public Affairs in Raleigh, NC. In 2019 he founded Oaklee Strategies, a North Carolina-based Public Affairs firm. Peck holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from Florida State University. He facilitates public and private sector engagement activities in order to advance the collaborative initiatives of the 2020 Republican National Convention and Host Committee.

  • Christopher Reese, Director of Executive Operations

Reese previously served as the Operations Manager and as a Staff Assistant in the Executive Office of the President. Prior to his time in the Administration, Reese served as Deputy Director of Treasury during the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Business Marketing from the University of Central Florida. Reese manages all operational, scheduling, and logistical activities within the Executive Office for the 2020 Republican National Convention.

  • James Sample, Director of Operations

Sample oversees all operational, technical, and maintenance support for the 2020 Republican National Convention. He has extensive large-scale event production and project management experience, having worked as the Senior Projects Manager for an exhibits and events design firm. Sample worked for the 2016 Republican National Convention as the Buildout and Permits Manager, and also served as an Event Manager at the Indiana Convention Center and Lucas Oil Stadium. An Indianapolis native, Sample attended Indiana University and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Communication and Culture. Sample oversees all operational aspects of the preparations for, and running of, the 2020 Republican National Convention.

  • Rebecca Wasserstein, Director of Hotels & Venues

Wasserstein brings a wealth of experience to her role, having most recently served as Special Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Travel Office. Prior to her time in the Administration, Wasserstein served as the Assistant Director of Credential Management during the 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee and supported Media Operations during the 2016 Republican National Convention. Wasserstein’s resume also includes various campaign leadership positions in statewide, U.S. Senate, and Presidential campaigns. Originally from Cleveland, Wasserstein holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Affairs from Ohio State University. In her role as Director of Hotels & Venues, she is responsible for overseeing all hotel and venue logistics from the initial contracting phase to the final group placements.

The 2020 Republican National Convention will be held at the Spectrum Center from August 24 to 27, 2020. Nearly 50,000 visitors are expected to arrive in Charlotte for the event, including delegates, alternate delegates, members of the media, and other guests.

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4 Big Questions About the IG Report on FBI Surveillance of Trump Campaign

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An internal watchdog’s report on Justice Department surveillance of President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign is slated to arrive in early December—about the same time as a likely House vote on whether to impeach the president.

“Now what you’re going to see, I predict, will be perhaps the biggest scandal in the history of our country,” Trump said Friday of the pending report from the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Trump commented on the expected report and House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry in a phone interview with “Fox & Friends.”

Here is what’s known about what will happen next.

Congress is moving to impeach the president. But will their plan to remove him from office succeed? Find out more now >>

1. What’s Going to Be in IG Report?

The report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the FBI’s actions in obtaining a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page will be released Dec. 9. Horowitz is scheduled to testify two days later before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The inpector general’s investigation reportedly will conclude that an FBI lawyer wrongfully altered an email regarding the application for the FISA warrant. The lawyer previously had expressed a strong anti-Trump bias, according to news reports.

However, these news reports say, Horowitz determined that there were proper legal grounds to seek the FISA warrant.

 2. Who Is Kevin Clinesmith?

The FBI lawyer in question reportedly is Kevin Clinesmith, who was identified as “Attorney 2” in the June 2018 inspector general’s report about the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to do official business as secretary of state.

Clinesmith worked with line FBI agents on the surveillance warrants targeting Page.

The coming report is expected to conclude that Clinesmith altered an email message that he received from another federal official. The report is expected to say that the FBI lawyer sent the altered message to supervisors who were working to obtain the FISA warrant, without informing them of the changes he made.

After Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Clinesmith sent a text message saying he was “just devastated,” and that “it’s just hard not to feel like the FBI caused some of this,” according to the previous inspector general’s report regarding the Clinton email probe.

Clinesmith’s texts apparently were referring to the FBI’s brief reopening of its email investigation weeks before Election Day.

“I am so stressed about what I could have done differently,” he also says in a text message.

In another message, Clinesmith wrote of Trump: “This is the tea party on steroids. And the GOP is going to be lost, they have to deal with an incumbent in 4 years. We have to fight this again. Also [Vice President Mike] Pence is stupid.”

In another text exchange, Clinesmith wrote, “Viva le resistance.”

The IG report referred to the sender of these texts as “Attorney 2,” but he is widely reported to be Clinesmith.

At the time, Clinesmith said he only was expressing his personal views, which he said did not affect his work.

Clinesmith was part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team investigating a potential conspiracy between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government to influence the 2016 election. The probe found no evidence of conspiracy.

Clinesmith worked for the FBI’s National Security Branch, reporting to then-General Counsel James A. Baker, who also came under scrutiny for sharing classified information with the media. Baker was replaced and reassigned in December 2017, then resigned from the FBI in May 2018.

Baker reportedly met with a lawyer from Perkins Coie, the Seattle-based law firm representing the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election cycle.

3. How Does IG Report Affect Impeachment?

The IG report doesn’t have any legal connection with House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry.

The lawmakers accuse Trump of pressuring the Ukraine government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden in exchange for $391 million in congressionally approved military assistance.

However, the report due Dec. 9 could tie into a larger political narrative, said Peter Flaherty, president of the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group.

“I don’t know exactly what to expect from the IG report, and I expect we’ll learn more,” Flaherty told The Daily Signal. “It does appear it will be critical of the anti-Trump sentiment in the DOJ and will help balance the debate.”

“The IG report is a vehicle for information that Adam Schiff does not want to talk about,” he said, referring to the California Democrat who is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s point man on impeachment as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Some Trump defenders contend that many of the allegations of the impeachment inquiry involve appointed State Department and intelligence officials having a policy disagreement with the president.

The IG report could buttress accounts of a bureaucratic push against Trump by appointed Justice Department officials during the campaign and after the election, said Curt Levey, a constitutional lawyer and president of the Committee for Justice, a conservative legal group.

“Even if the IG report demonstrates many felonies from inside the Justice Department, it doesn’t have anything to do with the impeachment investigation of Trump,” Levey told The Daily Signal. “What it could do is tie into a broader skepticism of the entire Trump impeachment process, and the perceptions it’s about getting Trump.”

4. How Will IG Report Affect Criminal Probe?

While the IG’s findings could have at best an indirect political effect on the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, they directly affect U.S. Attorney for Connecticut John Durham’s criminal investigation into government surveillance of the Trump campaign.

As inspector general, Horowitz cannot bring criminal charges or issue subpoenas. Durham, who has a reputation for being a tough prosecutor in public corruption cases, can do both.

“Will the IG report show there was a major law enforcement effort to stop Trump? Was it illegal?” Levey said. “There is a lot of activity that is horrible, such as the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page texts. It was fireable, but it wasn’t illegal. With the FISA court, it depends. We might find something shocking, but [that] isn’t actually illegal.”

Levey noted that many investigations that are hyped—such as the Mueller probe—turned out to be duds.

Regardless of that, both sides should be concerned that federal law enforcement could be motivated by politics and attempt to influence an election, Flaherty said.

“It remains to be seen whether Horowitz’s testimony will be a general tongue-lashing or lead to indictments for wrongdoing,” Flaherty said.

Flaherty said he anticipates that Durham, in the ongoing criminal probe, will bring charges for making false statements to investigators and obstructing justice.

“I don’t think Durham will issue a report,” Flaherty said. “If we are going to see a narrative, it will come in the form of indictments.”

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Are Thought Crimes Impeachable?

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A Note for our Readers:

As we speak, Congress is moving to impeach the president.

We do not have all the facts yet, but based on what we know now, there does not seem to be an impeachable offense.

The questions stand: In drafting the Constitution, how did America’s founders intend for impeachment to be used? How does the impeachment process work, and what can history tell us about whether or not President Trump faces the real threat of being removed from office?

The Heritage Foundation is making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET YOUR FREE COPY NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Climategate: Ten years later

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This month marks the tenth anniversary of “Climategate” – the release of thousands of emails to and from climate scientists who had been (and still are) collaborating and colluding to create a manmade climate crisis that exists in their minds and computer models, but not in the real world. The scandal should have ended climate catastrophism. Instead, it was studiously buried by politicians, scientists, activists and crony capitalists, who will rake in trillions of dollars from the exaggerations and fakery, while exempting themselves from the damage they are inflicting on everyday families.

Few people know the Inconvenient Facts about the supposed manmade climate and extreme weather “crisis.” For example, since 1998, average global temperatures have risen by a mere few hundredths of a degree. (For a time, they even declined slightly.) Yet all we hear is baseless rhetoric about manmade carbon dioxide causing global warming and climate changes that pose existential threats to humanity, wildlife and planet. Based on this, we are told we must stop using fossil fuels to power economic growth and better living standards. This is bad news for Africa and the world.

We keep hearing that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels cause rising global temperatures. But satellite data show no such thing. In fact, computer model predictions for 2019 are almost a half degree Celsius (0.9 degrees F) above actual satellite measurements. Even worse, anytime a scientist raises questions about the alleged crisis, he or she is denounced as a “climate change denier.”

A major source of data supporting the human CO2- induced warming proposition came from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Then on the morning of 17 November 2009 a Pandora’s box of embarrassing CRU information exploded onto the world scene. A computer hacker penetrated the university’s computer system and took 61 Megs of material that showed the CRU had been manipulating scientific information to make global warming appear to be the fault of mankind and industrial CO2. Among many other scandals, the shocking leaked emails showed then-CRU-director Prof. Phil Jones boasting of using statistical “tricks” to remove evidence of observed declines in global temperatures.

In another email, he advocated deleting data rather than providing it to scientists who did not share his view and might criticize his analyses. Non-alarmist scientists had to invoke British freedom of information laws to get the information. Jones was later suspended, and former British Chancellor Lord Lawson called for a Government enquiry into the embarrassing exposé.

The affair became known as “Climategate,” and a group of American University students even posted a YouTube song, “Hide the Decline,” mocking the CRU and climate modeler Dr. Michael Mann, whose use of the phrase “hide the decline” in temperatures had been found in the hacked emails.

So what is the truth? If one considers the composition of the atmosphere and equates it to the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the extra plant-fertilizing CO2 added to the atmosphere since California became the 31st state of the United States in 1850 is less than the thickness of tiles under the Tower.

Can this tiny increase really explain any observed global warming since the Little Ice Age ended, and the modern industrial era began? Since California became a state, the measured global rise in atmospheric temperature has been less than 1C. But most of this increase occurred prior to 1940, and average planetary temperatures fell from around 1943 until about 1978, leading to a global cooling scare. Temperatures rose slightly until 1998, then mostly remained stable, even as carbon dioxide levels continued to rise. Rising CO2 levels and temperature variations do not correlate very well at all.

Moreover, during the well-documented Medieval Warm Period from about 950 to 1350, warmer global temperatures allowed Viking farmers to raise crops and tend cattle in Greenland. The equally well documented 500-year Little Ice Age starved and froze the Vikings out of Greenland, before reaching its coldest point, the Maunder Minimum, 1645-1715. That’s when England’s River Thames regularly froze over, Norwegian farmers demanded compensation for lands buried by advancing glaciers, and priests performed exorcism rituals to keep alpine glaciers away from villages. Paintings from the era show crowds of people ice skating and driving horse-drawn carriages on the Thames.

Industry and automobile emissions obviously played no role in either the MWP or the LIA.

These dramatic events should ring warning bells for any competent, honest scientist. If the Medieval Warm Period occurred without industrial CO2 driving it, why should industrial CO2 be causing any observed warming today? Europe’s great plague wiped out nearly a quarter of its population during the Little Ice Age. The warm period brought prosperity and record crops, while cold years brought misery, famine and death.

Ten years before Climategate, Dr. Mann released a computer-generated graph purporting to show global temperatures over the previous 1500 years. His graph mysteriously made the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and Maunder extreme cold years disappear – and planetary temperatures spike suddenly the last couple decades of twentieth century. The graph had the shape of a hockey stick, was published worldwide and became a centerpiece for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Many scientists were highly suspicious of the hockey stick claims. Two of them, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, completely discredited Mann’s computer program and revisionist history. Of course, that did not stop former US vice president Al Gore from using the discredited graph in his doom and gloom climate change movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

The hacked CRU emails also showed exchanges between Mann and Jones, in which they discussed how to intimidate editors who wanted to publish scientific views contrary to theirs, to suppress any contradictory studies. In one email, Jones expressed his desire to get rid of the “troublesome editor” of the Climate Research journal for daring to publish differing views. The editor got sacked.

When University of Colorado climate skeptic Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. asked the CRU for its original temperature readings, he was told the data had been (conveniently) lost. Lost!?! Do professionals lose something as valuable as original data? Many suspected they just didn’t want anyone to expose their clever manipulations and fabrications.

But if industrial carbon dioxide did not cause recent global warming, what did? A Danish research group, led by Prof. Henrik Svensmark, has found a very credible match between levels of sunspot activity (giant magnetic storms) on our Sun and global temperatures over the last fifteen hundred years. This all-natural mechanism actually fits the evidence! How terribly inconvenient for alarmists.

Cosmic rays from deep space constantly impinge on the Earth’s upper atmosphere and produce clouds, much like high-flying jets leave white contrails behind their engines. More clouds can trap heat, but they also cause global cooling because not as much sunlight strikes the Earth. More sunspots mean a stronger magnetic shield, therefore fewer cosmic rays reaching Earth, thus less cloud cover and more global warming. The Sun is currently in a near-record period of low sunspot activity.

All sorts of interest groups are suppressing this information. Maybe worse, when Climategate broke, “climate justice” campaigner for Friends of the Earth Emma Brindal said bluntly: “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.” Not protecting Earth from manmade CO2 emissions or natural and manmade climate change – but redistributing wealth and resources, according to formulas that self-appointed ruling elites decide is “socially just.”

Climate campaigners also oppose “excessive” air travel for business or pleasure, 4×4 vehicles as “unnecessary luxuries,” and modern homes for Africans. Some even say Africans must continue living in mud huts and avoid the use of electricity and modern farming technologies. Minor US actor Ed Begley has said “Africans should have solar power where they need it most: on their huts.” They, Al Gore, Phil Jones and Mike Mann are exempted from these restrictions, of course.

Real social justice and human rights mean everyone has access to abundant, reliable, affordable energy, especially universally important electricity. Not from expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels. From fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants.

We in the developing world will no longer let climate truth be suppressed. We will not allow loud, radical activists to put the brakes on African economic development, jobs, and improved health and living standards, in the name of advancing their anti-human, wealth redistribution agendas.

Author

Kelvin Kemm

Dr Kelvin Kemm is a nuclear physicist and CEO of Nuclear Africa (Pty) Ltd, a project management company based in Pretoria, South Africa. He is the recipient of the prestigious Lifetime Achievers Award of the National Science and Technology Forum of South Africa. He does international consultancy work in strategic development.

© All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: Climate Change Fears and Polarization

‘Coup’ Concerns Suddenly Don’t Seem So Far-Fetched

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For most of the last three years, Donald Trump’s critics have scoffed at supposed “conspiracy theories” that claimed a “deep state” of bureaucrats were aborting the Trump presidency.

We have been told the word “coup” is hyperbole that reveals the paranoid minds of Trump supporters. Yet oddly, many people brag that they are proud members of a deep state and occasionally boast about the idea of a coup.

Recently, former acting CIA chief John McLaughlin proclaimed in a public forum, “Thank God for the deep state.” Former CIA Director John Brennan agreed and praised the “deep state people” for their opposition to Trump.

Far from denying the danger of an unelected careerist bureaucracy that seeks to overturn presidential policies, New York Times columnists have praised its efforts to nullify the Trump agenda.

Congress is moving to impeach the president. But will their plan to remove him from office succeed? Find out more now >>

On the first day of the impeachment inquiry, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff called his initial two witnesses, career State Department diplomats William Taylor Jr. and George Kent.

Far from providing damning evidence of criminal presidential behavior, Taylor and Kent mostly confined themselves to three topics: their own sterling resumes, their lack of any firsthand knowledge of incriminating Trump action, and their poorly hidden disgust with the manner and substance of Trump’s foreign policy.

Oddly, both had little clue that their demeanor and thinly disguised self-importance were a perfect example of why Trump got elected—to come up with new ideas antithetical to the conventional wisdom of unelected career bureaucrats.

Taylor and Kent announced that they are simply high-minded civil servants who serve the presidential administrations of both parties without bias.

But by nature, the huge federal bureaucracy counts on bigger government and more taxes to feed it. So naturally, the bureaucracy is usually more sympathetic to big-government progressives than to small-government conservatives.

Taylor and Kent cited their anguish with Trump’s foreign policy toward Ukraine—namely that it did not go through official channels and was too unsympathetic to Ukraine and too friendly to Russia.

If so, one might have thought the anguished bureaucrats would have similarly gone public during the Obama administration.

After all, Vice President Joe Biden took over the Obama administration’s Ukrainian policy at a time when his son Hunter Biden was knee-deep in Ukrainian affairs. As a consultant for a Ukrainian natural gas company, Hunter Biden made a reported $80,000 a month without expertise in either the energy business in particular or Ukraine in general.

Also, Trump’s policies have been more anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian than those of the Obama administration. Trump armed the Ukrainians; Obama did not. Trump imposed new sanctions against Russia, used force against Russian mercenaries in Syria, beefed up NATO defenses, pulled the U.S. out an asymmetrical missile treaty with Russia, and pumped more oil and gas to lower world prices—much to the chagrin of oil-exporting Russia.

In contrast, Obama was the architect of “reset” with Russia that reached its nadir in a hot mic exchange in which Obama offered a quid pro quo, vowing more flexibility on issues such as U.S.-sponsored missile defense in Eastern Europe in exchange for Russia giving Obama “space” to concentrate on his reelection.

Trump’s critics have also radically changed their spin on “coups.” To them, “coup” is no longer a dirty word trafficked in by right-wing conspiracists. Instead, it has been normalized as a possibly legitimate means of aborting the Trump presidency.

Mark Zaid, the attorney representing the Ukraine whistleblower, boasted in two recently discovered tweets of ongoing efforts to stage a coup to remove Trump.

Retired Adm. William H. McRaven recently wrote an op-ed for The New York Times all but calling for Trump’s ouster—”the sooner the better.”

No sooner had Trump been elected than Rosa Brooks, a former Defense Department official during the Obama administration, wrote an essay for Foreign Policy magazine discussing theoretical ways to remove Trump before the 2020 election, among them a scenario involving a military coup.

In September 2018, The New York Times published an op-ed from an anonymous White House official who boasted of supposedly widescale efforts inside the Trump administration to nullify its operations and subvert presidential directives.

Such efforts to oppose Trump are often self-described as “The Resistance,” a reference to the underground French fighters resisting the Nazis in World War II.

Trump’s opponents often have praised the deep state precisely because unelected career officials are seen as the most effective way to sabotage and stymie his agenda.

A “coup” is no longer proof of right-wing paranoia, but increasingly a part of the general progressive discourse of resistance to Trump.

In these upside-down times, patriotism is being redefined as removing a president before a constitutionally mandated election.

(c) 2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

COMMENTARY BY

Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of the book “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.” You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.  Twitter: .

RELATED VIDEO: Brad Johnson on the last day of the impeachment hearings.

A Note for our Readers:

As we speak, Congress is moving to impeach the president.

We do not have all the facts yet, but based on what we know now, there does not seem to be an impeachable offense.

The questions stand: In drafting the Constitution, how did America’s founders intend for impeachment to be used? How does the impeachment process work, and what can history tell us about whether or not President Trump faces the real threat of being removed from office?

The Heritage Foundation is making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

NEW poll today: The more Americans see, the more they oppose impeachment

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If you’re finding it difficult to keep up with all the noise surrounding House Democrats’ ever-changing impeachment saga, you’re not alone. Democrats themselves are having a tough time keeping their stories straight lately.

First, the left had an alleged “quid pro quo” in mind. When that argument didn’t poll well, Democrat leaders changed the accusation to “extortion.” Next came “bribery,”—then back to the original “quid pro quo” catchphrase this morning.

Yes, it’s dizzying. Democrats in Congress right now are throwing every accusation they can think of at the wall, crossing their fingers that something finally sticks. That isn’t a new trick: It’s actually been their only real action item since Election Day 2016.

 President Trump: “I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.”

Today turned out to be a bad day for Democrats and their media echo chamber to resurrect the old “quid pro quo” narrative. In lengthy testimony before Congress today, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland put that false accusation to rest.

When Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) tried to put words in Ambassador Sondland’s mouth, the Ambassador was crystal clear:

“President Trump, when I asked him the open-ended question—as I testified previously, ‘What do you want from Ukraine?’—his answer was, ‘I want nothing.’”

No matter how the left tries to spin it, that is the only relevant takeaway from today’s sham hearing. Why? First, because it’s based in fact, not third-party conjecture. Second, it was stated under oath by the only person in these hearings who has ever even spoken directly to President Trump. The other witnesses could only offer opinion and speculation.

And just like that, the Swamp’s carefully choreographed narrative collapsed—again.

The big problem for House Democrats is that after weeks of testimony, they still have no actual evidence to justify effectively shutting down Congress to put Americans through this charade. New polling out today from Marquette University Law School shows that Americans in Wisconsin, for example, now oppose impeaching and removing President Trump by double-digit margins.

But Democrats from Impeachment Czar Schiff to far-left “Squad” member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) already promised their base that they would impeach President Trump—so no matter what the facts or evidence say, the show must go on.

Even Speaker Nancy Pelosi is beginning to sense how bad this looks for her party. In a desperate letter to colleagues, she encouraged Democrats to stick with the plan—and put in writing that it would be a “weak response” to wait until next year’s election to let the American people decide for themselves who their President should be.

Democrats have told us repeatedly they have no interest in a fair, impartial hearing. It’s time to take them at their word. Fortunately, a majority of Americans may already have.

“At impeachment hearing, irrelevant opinions by Trump critics masquerade as facts”

Must-read: Full statement from Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham 

© All rights reserved.

6 Reasons to Believe Left Hates America

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Whenever leftists are charged with not loving or even with hating America, they respond angrily, labeling the question absurd, mean-spirited, and an example of right-wing McCarthyism.

But there can be little doubt that the left has no love for America, just as there can be little doubt that liberals and conservatives love America. Love of America is one of the many dividing lines between liberalism and leftism. (For a description of six differences between liberalism and leftism, please see my PragerU video “Left or Liberal?”)

Here are six reasons to believe the left hates America:

1. No one denies that the international left—the left in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere—hates America. Therefore, in order to argue that American leftists do not hate America, one would have to argue that on one of the most fundamental principles of international leftism—hatred of America—American leftists differ with fellow leftists around the world: All the world’s left hates the U.S., but the American left loves it.

Congress is moving to impeach the president. But will their plan to remove him from office succeed? Find out more now >>

This, of course, makes no sense. Leftists around the world agree on every important issue. Why, then, would they differ with regard to America? Has any leftist at The New York Times, for example, written one column critical of the international left’s anti-Americanism?

2. Leftists want to “fundamentally transform” the United States. Five days before the 2008 presidential election, candidate Barack Obama told a huge audience in Columbia, Missouri, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

More recently, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced that she plans to “fundamentally transform our government,” that America needs “big, structural change,” and that her proposed Accountable Capitalism Act would bring about “fundamental change.”

Likewise, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said earlier this year, “We’re going to try to transform the United States of America,” and last month he said, “This campaign is about fundamental change.”

Examples are legion.

So, here’s a question: How can one claim to love what one wishes to fundamentally transform?

The answer is obvious: It isn’t possible.

If a man were to confide to you that he wants to fundamentally transform his wife, would you assume he loves his wife? If a woman were to tell you she wants to fundamentally transform her husband, would you assume she loves him? Of course not.

3. Leftists have contempt for the American flag.

I am unaware of a single left-wing individual or organization that has condemned NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for refusing to stand for the flag during the playing or singing of the national anthem that precedes NFL games. To the contrary, on the left, he is universally regarded as a hero. Indeed, Nike anointed him as one, making him its brand model.

Leftists might respond that Kaepernick’s public refusal to stand for the flag and national anthem says nothing about his love for America, as it is only a form of protest against racial injustice. But that is nonsense. Would leftists argue that anyone who publicly refuses to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day really loves Dr. King?

4. Leftists routinely describe America as racist, sexist, xenophobic, imperialist, genocidal, homophobic, obsessed with money, and morally inferior to most Western European countries. No moral person could love such a place. As one person commenting on a Paul Krugman column wrote, “Does loving your country mean you love or ignore the fact that we destroyed Iraq, shot down an Iranian commercial airliner, and waged a brutal war in Asia for reasons that today make no sense?”

5. America is the most successful country in world history—while being the most committed to capitalism and remaining the most religious of all the industrialized democracies. To the extent that America is great, that means two of the institutions the left most loathes—Christianity and capitalism—are also great.

6. Love is, among other things, an emotion. So, here is a question about leftists’ emotions: Do any leftists get the chills when the national anthem is played or when they see the American flag waving as the anthem is played? Given their rhetoric, it is most unlikely. Yet, every person I know who loves America does get a chill at such moments. Do leftists, as opposed to some liberals and conservatives, display the flag on any national holiday? How many leftists even own a flag?

Finally, if leftists do not love America, what do they love?

According to their own rhetoric, they love the planet—Mother Earth, as they frequently refer to it. And they love animals.

They really love power, and they claim to love material equality.

They don’t love Western culture—and they now dismiss praise for it as a euphemism for white supremacy.

Interestingly, while they often claim to love humanity, many don’t seem to love people. They give less charity and volunteer less time to the downtrodden than conservatives, for example. They have much less interest in having children and making families. They are far more likely than conservatives to cut off relations with friends or relatives with whom they differ politically. And if they really loved people, they would love capitalism because only capitalism has lifted billions of people from poverty.

But most of all, they love … themselves.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

COMMENTARY BY

Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager is a columnist for The Daily Signal, nationally syndicated radio host, and creator of PragerU. Twitter: .

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A Note for our Readers:

As we speak, Congress is moving to impeach the president.

We do not have all the facts yet, but based on what we know now, there does not seem to be an impeachable offense.

The questions stand: In drafting the Constitution, how did America’s founders intend for impeachment to be used? How does the impeachment process work, and what can history tell us about whether or not President Trump faces the real threat of being removed from office?

The Heritage Foundation is making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET YOUR FREE COPY NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Pompeo: Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) are ‘not inconsistent with international law’ [Video]

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Pompeo is right. As is explained in The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, no one but Israel has any legal right to the land known as the “West Bank.”

“Pompeo announces reversal of longstanding US policy on Israeli settlements,” by Jennifer Hansler, Nicole Gaouette and Jeremy Diamond, CNN, November 18, 2019

(CNN)US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday announced a major reversal of the US’ longstanding policy on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, rejecting a 1978 State Department legal opinion that deemed the settlements “inconsistent with international law.”

The announcement, which breaks with international law and consensus, is the latest in a string of hardline, pro-Israeli moves that are likely to inflame tensions between the Trump administration and Palestinians and widen the divide between the Trump administration and traditional US allies in Europe.

“After carefully studying all sides of the legal debate, this administration agrees with President Reagan: the establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not, per se, inconsistent with international law,” Pompeo said, citing President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 assessment that the settlements were not “inherently illegal.”

Pompeo said the US government is “expressing no view on the legal status of any individual settlement” or “addressing or prejudging the ultimate status of the West Bank.”

He said the conclusion was “based on the unique facts, history and circumstances presented by the establishment of civilian settlements in the West Bank.”…

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column with video is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Left progressive antisemitism must be a US electoral ‘wedge’ issue

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As the Democratic primaries approach, leading candidates seem to be reinforcing their anti-Israel credentials to appease their progressive base. Antisemitism already is a ‘wedge’ issue – although Democrats are urging voters to ignore it.

The left’s anti-Israel agenda has been energized recently by radical politicians using their Congressional visibility to slander the Jewish State and its supporters with classical slurs and stereotypes.  Simultaneously, there has been an increase in antisemitic agitation among progressives invoking blood libel imagery and repugnant myths of disproportionate Jewish wealth, influence, and disloyalty.

Such is the backdrop against which Democrats are urging Jewish voters not to treat Israel as a “wedge issue” during the 2020 election season, though what they are really asking is for Jews to ignore the pro-BDS, anti-Israel, and antisemitic vitriol being spewed by reactionaries who influence party doctrine and to overlook party leadership’s appeasement of the left and disregard of hateful prejudice.

By lamenting the use of Israel as a “wedge issue,” Democrats are acknowledging that it already is and that their base’s hostility towards the Jewish State is motivated not by policy concerns, but by antisemitism.  And just as they did in 2016, they are enlisting Jewish party loyalists to promote the fiction that conservatives pose a more serious threat to fellow Jews, despite public opinion research indicating that antisemitic sentiment is prevalent among radicals, progressives and left-wing Democrats.  The same surveys suggest conservative Republicans are more likely to support Israel and condemn Jew-hatred.

The antisemitic Squad

These trends help explain some recent disturbing Democratic behaviors, including the failure to censure Representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for their inflammatory rhetoric and for validating antisemitic public figures like Louis Farrakhan.  Examples of moral disingenuity abound, as when Democrats criticized the Netanyahu government for blocking Tlaib and Omar from a planned trip to Israel that was to be sponsored by an anti-Israel organization. Supporters of the congresswomen were unconcerned that their proposed visit was neither planned as part of an official Congressional delegation nor intended to serve any legitimate governmental purpose.

The Israeli government had initially agreed to allow Tlaib and Omar entry into the country, but withdrew its approval after determining they would not be part of the scheduled Congressional delegation and that their itinerary was intended to disparage Israel and promote boycotts.  The purpose of the trip was no surprise considering it was to be partially sponsored and coordinated by Miftah, the anti-Israel organization founded by Hanan Ashrawi, a PLO Executive Committee member and outspoken Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions advocate, who was barred by the State Department from entering the United States last May.

It seems incongruous that Democrats who express concern about Jewish voters could defend Tlaib or Omar in light of their aspersions against Israel and sponsorship of House Resolution 496, a bill essentially supporting the antisemitic BDS movement.  Though that bill was defeated in a rare display of bipartisanship, its limited support came mainly from progressive Democrats, including Tlaib, Omar, and Ocasio-Cortez. Liberal support for such politicians – or for any who express contempt for Israel, condone violence against Israelis, or spread loathsome stereotypes – suggests that party loyalty and disdain for President Trump often outweigh any sense of Jewish fealty or recognition of antisemitism on the left.

Despite progressive hostility regarding Jewish national rights and affinity for traditional conspiracy theories, Democrats argue their support for Israel and opposition to prejudice are unshakable; and when mentioning leftist antisemitism at all, they chalk it up to aberration or misunderstanding.

Anti-Jewish bigotry is not limited to the “hard left,” however, but rather has infected the party’s mainstream:

  • Congressman Ted Lieu of California, for example, evoked the ancient canard of Jewish disloyalty with a tweet questioning the allegiance (and demanding the resignation) of David Friedman, US Ambassador to Israel;
  • Democratic presidential hopefuls, including Corey Booker, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, implicitly impugned Israel’s integrity when they snubbed last year’s AIPAC conference.
  • Not a single Democrat vying for the party’s nomination criticized Bernie Sanders (who has falsely accused Israel of killing thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza) for using Linda Sarsour as a campaign shill
  • None have defended Israel against apartheid claims that are facially absurd.

According to the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute of 2002, apartheid is a humanitarian crime “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”  Considering the freedoms that characterize Israeli society – where Arabs are professionals, judges, and legislators and have a higher standard of living than anywhere in the Arab-Muslim world – it is unconscionable when Democrat politicians refuse to defend Israel against spurious charges of racist oppression.

As the Democratic primaries approach, leading candidates instead seem to be reinforcing their anti-Israel credentials to appease their progressive base.

  • The Warren campaign, for example, brought aboard Max Berger, founder of the liberal group IfNotNow, whose members have attempted to infiltrate Taglit Birthright and Jewish summer camp programs to indoctrinate youth against Israel.
  • And Pete Buttigieg stated his intention to cut aid to Israel (though as a foreign policy neophyte he articulated no credible reason for singling out Israel)
  • Warren, Sanders and other prominent Democrats made similar statements at this year’s J Street conference.

It is important to note that:

  • Whereas most potential nominees did support an anti-BDS resolution in the Senate, they have uniformly failed to sanction antisemites within their party, who have instead been rewarded with prestigious appointments to influential committees.
  • Furthermore, the refusal of House Democrats to pass a resolution specifically condemning antisemitism or sanctioning Omar’s outrageous remarks indicates an odious tolerance for bigotry, as long as it targets Israel and comes from the left.

Discomfort regarding Israel is systemic because most Democrats continue to cling to the two-state paradigm, though it is based on revisionist Palestinian mythology that denies Jewish history and is rejected by most Israelis.

Sadly, Jewish liberals are often willing to ignore progressive antisemitism and instead direct their outrage at Mr. Trump (who despite his foibles is the most pro-Israel president ever to occupy the White House), while criticizing Israel for supposedly occupying “Palestinian” lands and oppressing Palestinian-Arabs.  However, “occupation” exists only in the minds of revisionist zealots and propagandists, who must ignore historical and geopolitical reality to justify their position.

Falsified history and ignorance

Progressives’ knowledge of Israeli history is typically sketchy and exhibits little understanding of (or respect for) the Jews’ unbroken connection to their homeland, which is supported by the historical, archeological, and scriptural records.  Moreover, their anti-Israel criticisms are characterized by a refusal to acknowledge Jewish history or the pedigree of lands comprising the modern Jewish State and territories. Instead, liberal angst focuses on the rights of Palestinian-Arabs, whose history is a contemporary political invention of questionable foundation.  The two-state fantasy seeks to restore Palestinian-Arabs to a country that never existed in a land where they never established cultural institutions, exercised political sovereignty, or exhibited any indicia of nationality or statehood.

This historical awareness is crucial for countering the revisionism embraced by progressives who impute ancient stereotypes to the Jewish State – including modern reworkings of the Blood Libel, classical global conspiracy theories, and the myths of disproportionate Jewish influence, power and perfidy.  It is also necessary for dispelling ridiculous and apocryphal claims that Palestinians are descended from ancient Phoenicians or Canaanites – assertions that are intended to imply aboriginal validity but which crumble under the weight of objective scrutiny.

The role of Jewish progressives

For generations, Americans have been rejecting normative Jewish values in favor of progressive ideals that contravene traditional Judaism.  Though most liberal Jews profess support for Israel, their true feelings should be judged not by self-serving affirmations, but by their political priorities and alliances.  Their proclamations of fidelity to Israel are contradicted by the endorsement of candidates who delegitimize the Jewish State, staff campaigns with anti-Israel activists, or snub Jewish organizations like AIPAC.  Moreover, they cannot claim fairness to Israel if they tolerate BDS, support organizations like J Street, or provide forums in their synagogues for Israel-hating artists, activists, and politicos. Or, if they believe hatred of Jews and Israel is merely a partisan “wedge issue.”  Such thinking betrays the elevation of temporal politics over authentic Judaism and concern for cultural survival.

What would Jewish liberals say if Democratic leaders were to ask African-Americans, feminists, or gay activists to disregard racism, misogyny, or homophobia as “wedge issues”?  Certainly, they would denounce such pleas as offensive and lambaste those with the temerity to make them. And liberal rabbis would be shouting from the rooftops about cultural insensitivity and beseeching their congregants to hit the streets in protest.

So how can they accept Democratic condescension that exhorts them to ignore antisemitism within their party and excuse party leadership for trivializing the problem and protecting the perpetrators?

Whether their obsessive political loyalties arise from ignorance, delusion, or self-rejection, the end result is always the same – the abandonment of Jewish kith and kin, the denial of history and heritage, and the devaluation of the Jewish spirit.

EDITORS NOTE: This Israel National News column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

FBI Data: Anti-Muslim hate crimes under Trump are below Obama levels in 2014

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The media has put out numerous pieces based on bad data and hate crime hoaxes claiming that President Trump was responsible for a rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes. Now the FBI data is out and it actually shows that anti-Muslim hate crimes under Trump are below Obama levels in 2014.

Does that mean that Obama was actually responsible for anti-Muslim hate crimes while Trump is a beacon of tolerance? If the media were logically consistent, instead of narratively consistent, then sure. But since the media is narratively consistent, that’s not the conclusion it will draw.

 By the numbers: Of 4,571 reported attacks the bureau tracked, aggravated assaults were up 4%, simple assaults up 15% and intimidation up 13%. The report also shows that assaults targeting Muslims, Arab Americans and African Americans have gone down, while violence against Latinos has risen.

The report says 485 hate crimes were reported against Latinos in 2018, compared to 43 in 2017.

270 hate crimes were reported against Muslims and Arab Americans — the lowest since 2014.

1,943 hate crimes were reported against African Americans — the lowest since 1992.

Guess which one of those numbers the media will play up and blame on President Trump?

Hint: It’s the negative one of the three.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

The Origins of the Thought Police—and Why They Scare Us

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In a sense, “1984” is largely a book about the human capacity to maintain a grip on the truth in the face of propaganda and power.

There are a lot of unpleasant things in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. Spying screens. Torture and propaganda. Victory Gin and Victory Coffee always sounded particularly dreadful. And there is Winston Smith’s varicose ulcer, apparently a symbol of his humanity (or something), which always seems to be “throbbing.” Gross.

None of this sounds very enjoyable, but it’s not the worst thing in 1984. To me, the most terrifying part was that you couldn’t keep Big Brother out of your head.

Unlike other 20th-century totalitarians, the authoritarians in 1984 aren’t that interested in controlling behavior or speech. They do, of course, but it’s only as a means to an end. Their real goal is to control the gray matter between the ears.

“When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will,” O’Brien (the bad guy) tells the protagonist Winston Smith near the end of the book.

We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him.

Big Brother’s tool for doing this is the Thought Police, aka the ThinkPol, who are assigned to root out and punish unapproved thoughts. We see how this works when Winston’s neighbor Parsons, an obnoxious Party sycophant, is reported to the Thought Police by his own child, who heard him commit a thought crime while talking in his sleep.

“It was my little daughter,” Parsons tells Winston when asked who it was who denounced him. “She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?”

We don’t know a lot about the Thought Police, and some of what we think we know may actually not be true since some of what Winston learns comes from the Inner Party, and they lie.

What we know is this: The Thought Police are secret police of Oceania—the fictional land of 1984 that probably consists of the UK, the Americas, and parts of Africa—who use surveillance and informants to monitor the thoughts of citizens. The Thought Police also use psychological warfare and false-flag operations to entrap free thinkers or nonconformists.

Those who stray from Party orthodoxy are punished but not killed. The Thought Police don’t want to kill nonconformists so much as break them. This happens in Room 101 of the Ministry of Love, where prisoners are re-educated through degradation and torture. (Funny sidebar: the name Room 101 apparently was inspired by a conference room at the BBC in which Orwell was forced to endure tediously long meetings.)

Orwell didn’t create the Thought Police out of thin air. They were inspired to at least some degree by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), a complicated and confusing affair. What you really need to know is that there were no good guys, and it ended with left-leaning anarchists and Republicans in Spain crushed by their Communist overlords, which helped the fascists win.

Orwell, an idealistic 33-year-old socialist when the conflict started, supported the anarchists and loyalists fighting for the left-leaning Second Spanish Republic, which received most of its support from the Soviet Union and Josef Stalin. (That might sound bad, but keep in mind that the Nazis were on the other side.) Orwell described the atmosphere in Barcelona in December 1936 when everything seemed to be going well for his side.

The anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing … It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle, he wrote in Homage to Catalonia. [E]very wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle … every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized.

That all changed pretty fast. Stalin, a rather paranoid fellow, was bent on making Republican Spain loyal to him. Factions and leaders perceived as loyal to his exiled Communist rival, Leon Trotsky, were liquidated. Loyal Communists found themselves denounced as fascists. Nonconformists and “uncontrollables” were disappeared.

Orwell never forgot the purges or the steady stream of lies and propaganda churned out from Communist papers during the conflict. (To be fair, their Nationalist opponents also used propaganda and lies.) Stalin’s NKVD was not exactly like the Thought Police—the NKVD showed less patience with its victims—but they certainly helped inspire Orwell’s secret police.

The Thought Police were not all propaganda and torture, though. They also stem from Orwell’s ideas on truth. During his time in Spain, he saw how power could corrupt truth, and he shared these reflections in his work George Orwell: My Country Right or Left, 1940-1943.

…I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.

In short, Orwell’s brush with totalitarianism left him worried that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”

This scared him. A lot. He actually wrote, “This kind of thing is frightening to me.”

Finally, the Thought Police were also inspired by the human struggle for self-honesty and the pressure to conform. “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe,” Rudyard Kipling once observed.

The struggle to remain true to one’s self was also felt by Orwell, who wrote about “the smelly little orthodoxies” that contend for the human soul. Orwell prided himself with a “power of facing unpleasant facts”—something of a rarity in humans—even though it often hurt him in British society.

In a sense, 1984 is largely a book about the human capacity to maintain a grip on the truth in the face of propaganda and power.

It might be tempting to dismiss Orwell’s book as a figment of dystopian literature. Unfortunately, that’s not as easy as it sounds. Modern history shows he was onto something.

When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, it was revealed that the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, had a full-time staff of 91,000. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but what’s frightening is that the organization had almost double that in informants, including children. And it wasn’t just children reporting on parents; sometimes it was the other way around.

Nor did the use of state spies to prosecute thoughtcrimes end with the fall of the Soviet Union. Believe it or not, it’s still happening today. The New York Times recently ran a report featuring one Peng Wei, a 21-year-old Chinese chemistry major. He is one of the thousands of “student information officers” China uses to root out professors who show signs of disloyalty to President Xi Jinping or the Communist Party.

The First Amendment of the US Constitution, fortunately, largely protects Americans from the creepy authoritarian systems found in 1984, East Germany, and China; but the rise of “cancel culture” shows the pressure to conform to all sorts of orthodoxies (smelly or not) remains strong.

The new Thought Police may be less sinister than the ThinkPol in 1984, but the next generation will have to decide if seeking conformity of thought or language through public shaming is healthy or suffocating. FEE’s Dan Sanchez recently observed that many people today feel like they’re “walking on eggshells” and live in fear of making a verbal mistake that could draw condemnation.

That’s a lot of pressure, especially for people still learning the acceptable boundaries of a new moral code that is constantly evolving. Most people, if the pressure is sufficient, will eventually say “2+2=5” just to escape punishment. That’s exactly what Winston Smith does at the end of 1984, after all. Yet Orwell also leaves readers with a glimmer of hope.

“Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad,” Orwell wrote. “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

In other words, the world may be mad, but that doesn’t mean you have to be.

COLUMN BY

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, and Fox News.

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EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column with images is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

How To Make The National Security Council Great Again

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Very few political problems can actually be solved by Washington’s favorite solution: throwing more money at it. Here’s one that can: the much-in-the-news turmoil on the National Security Council (NSC) staff.

But first, you may ask: what’s the problem? If you interpret the recent spate of anti-Trump leaks and congressional testimony from NSC staffers as “heroic military officers and civil servants standing up to a dastardly illegitimate president,” then clearly you think the current system is fine. But if you think elections should have consequences, that presidents should be entitled to hire people who agree with them, and shouldn’t have to face constant leaking, criticism and disloyalty from their own team, then the problem is obvious.

ery few political problems can actually be solved by Washington’s favorite solution: throwing more money at it. Here’s one that can: the much-in-the-news turmoil on the National Security Council (NSC) staff.

But first, you may ask: what’s the problem? If you interpret the recent spate of anti-Trump leaks and congressional testimony from NSC staffers as “heroic military officers and civil servants standing up to a dastardly illegitimate president,” then clearly you think the current system is fine. But if you think elections should have consequences, that presidents should be entitled to hire people who agree with them, and shouldn’t have to face constant leaking, criticism and disloyalty from their own team, then the problem is obvious.

It should be obvious, then, that to fulfill both these roles the NSC staff needs to be well-aligned with the president’s views. Yet if one thing is clear from the impeachment brouhaha, it’s that a great many former and current staffers on the Trump NSC do not agree with his views. Nearly all of the recent leaks and public statements from disgruntled staffers don’t, in fact, allege that the president broke the law or abused his power but rather complain that he’s pursing “wrongheaded” policy. In particular, the opening statement of Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, the former NSC “country director” for Ukraine, made clear that his real beef with President Donald Trump was that the president might set a policy “inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency.” (RELATED: Trump Teases Evidence That Alexander Vindman Is A ‘Never Trumper’)

Well, but who’s supposed to set policy? The president, or the “interagency” — which is just a fancy term for bureaucrats? Presidents are elected; bureaucrats aren’t. The entire purpose of elections is to confer a grant of latitude, within constitutional parameters, to make policy according to the convictions of the elected and their voters. Especially in a government as big as the United States’, that’s difficult for any president to do without a cadre of staff committed to those convictions.

Why doesn’t Trump have such a staff? Simple: because he doesn’t have the money to hire them.

The “business model” of the NSC is to rely on “detailees” — that is, career officials at other agencies who are loaned, or “detailed,” to the organization, typically for a year or two. There are three core reasons why detailees make up more than 80% of the NSC staff, which in recent years has fluctuated between 200 and 400 “professionals” (i.e., not counting administrative assistants and such).

First, it is thought that having a wide range of backgrounds and experiences — diplomatic, military, intelligence, etc. — on the staff will broaden the NSC’s institutional knowledge and versatility. Detailees “understand the system” and “know how to get things done.” They also have extensive contacts within the bureaucracy which they can “leverage” to help smooth the operations of government. And by being exposed to the inner core of American policy-making, they further develop their own skills and bring valuable experience back to their “home agencies.”

Second, by law anyone who works at the NSC must have a very high security clearance, no exceptions. Clearing people from scratch can take months and cost thousands. Detailees, on the other hand, are for the most part already cleared to the appropriate level. Most of them can walk in the door and start working the day they’re selected.

Third and most important, the NSC’s budget is tiny — by Washington standards, microscopic. The money available for “direct hires” is small, and most of it goes to permanent administrative staff that doesn’t turn over with a new administration. That leaves very little for hiring “professional” staff — typically the national security adviser himself, his deputy, and a handful of others. That’s it.

It should not shock anyone to hear that the vast majority of career national security officials favor the government line. They after all are the government. This means that in practice they’re mostly liberal Democrats, for liberal Democrats are the party of government and thus government attracts liberal Democrats. Not entirely, of course. There’s also a smallish cadre of centrist Democrats, Republicans and independents rounding out the federal menagerie. But one type you won’t find are serious critics — in either or neither party — of Beltway groupthink. Anti-establishment presidents — anti-establishment Republicans especially — are therefore inherently at a disadvantage under the current system.

That in mind, let’s reconsider the reasons for the reliance on detailees. The first is not bad as far as it goes. But do the benefits of institutional knowledge and career development so outweigh a president’s prerogative to hire people he wants, who agree with his agenda, that the overwhelming majority of the NSC staff should always be from permanent Washington?

Legally, everyone in the executive branch works for the president. But the NSC is the president’s personal national security staff, the people who work most directly for him in the chain of command, who are physically closest to him, who provide him information and material daily, and who are most responsible for seeing that his directives are carried out throughout the vast national security bureaucracy.

A balance could surely be struck. The government being large, there will always be at least a few people within it who are aligned with any president’s convictions. But when the number of detailees the NSC is obligated to hire is well into the hundreds, finding a sufficient number to staff an anti-establishment president is difficult and probably impossible.

The solution is simple: give the NSC more money: say, one or two hundred million dollars (its current budget is not even $15 million). That sounds like a lot to ordinary folk but it’s couch-cushion change in a federal budget that now tops four trillion. The notion that “we can’t afford this” is transparently phony. Money could easily be found to enable the NSC to hire most of its professional staff directly. Detailing could then be practiced strategically, to bring in people who actually believe in and want to further the president’s agenda.

More money could also solve the security clearance issue. Background investigations are conducted by other agencies — typically the FBI — who have to clear personnel for a wide range of positions across the government and whose first priority is more than likely not NSC personnel. Clearances are expensive and time-consuming because investigators have to do fieldwork and their caseloads and backlogs are enormous. Others have proposed reforming the process and reducing the number of positions that need high-level clearances. I’m all for that, but it won’t solve the NSC’s problem — at least not soon. But budgeting for investigators who work directly for the NSC and whose sole task is to clear NSC officials would.

Another simple, and cost-free, reform would be to allow the NSC to “adjudicate” and “hold” — that is, maintain on its own books — the clearances of all its direct hires. Forgive me for getting into the weeds, but this detail is important. To work at the NSC, one must be cleared to TS/SCI, or “Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information.” Under current practice, only the CIA can hold the SCI portion of that clearance for NSC direct hires. What this means is that Langley can disallow a president’s choice for the NSC by denying the SCI portion of his clearance — “Top Secret” alone doesn’t cut it. Theoretically this power is not supposed to be abused for political reasons, but there’s no guarantee it never is. True, a president can overrule a refusal, but that rarely happens, in part because presidents and their staffs know that if they take on the “Intelligence Community,” its well-connected operatives will retaliate with a leak war no White House can win.

But there’s no reason why NSC clearances must be held anywhere but the NSC. In fact, that’s precisely where they were held until very recently, when the Obama administration sent them to the CIA — presumably to give that agency a veto over future NSC staff. That’s an administrative matter that can easily be reversed by order of the president.

Some will no doubt object that these proposals, if enacted, would give the president too much latitude to appoint “unqualified” people. But let’s unpack what that means. If the concern is that people with suspect pasts will be given security clearances they shouldn’t have, remember that the investigators doing the background checks will still be career civil servants — and we’re all supposed to trust career civil servants, right? As government officials, they’re still likely to have typical government biases. But at least their first loyalty will not be to specific agencies with institutional interests in blocking critics, dissidents and Washington outsiders from serving a disruptive president.

Others will voice concern — disingenuously — that without government officials, the NSC will lack sufficient expertise to deal with the world’s complexities. But the proposal is not to deny the NSC recourse to sitting officials; the president could still detail over as many as he wants. It’s to end the practical requirement that he rely almost solely on career staff. More important, it’s arrogant and untrue to suggest that no one outside government has subject-matter expertise or good ideas. There are in fact many foreign policy experts — in academia, think tanks, and the private sector, among other places — who could do these jobs as well or better than career civil servants the president doesn’t know (and who likely voted against him). Indeed, by looking outside the government, the president is more likely to find staff whose views align with his own — a factor which is at least as reliable a predictor of how good they will be at their jobs than their credentials.

To object to a president hiring his own people is tantamount to saying that elections shouldn’t matter. It’s obvious that most of official Washington believes this, but at least until recently, they were reluctant to say it. There is of course an electoral remedy to the problem of a president hiring people you think he shouldn’t: run against him and beat him.

It’s hard not to conclude that the current system is designed to limit presidential — and therefore electoral — control of American foreign policy, to prevent change. But so long as we maintain our ostensibly democratic system, our democratically elected presidents should have the resources to hire people who actually want to help them carry out their Constitutional duties, according to the views that got them elected in the first place.

The core purpose of the NSC is to help the president govern, not thwart his agenda. Let’s make the NSC great again!

Michael Anton is Lecturer in Politics and Research Fellow at Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center in Washington, D.C and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. He served on the NSC staff from 2001-2005 and 2017-2018.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

COLUMN BY

Michael Anton

Senior Fellow, Claremont Institute.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

VIDEO: How Marxism weaponized homosexuality, artists, and a fresh look at Gramsci and the Long March

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Posted by 

This is the 4th clip of the Polish intellectual Ava Lon has done for us, as part of a series from this video. The man who made it, is well known in Poland for explaining the nature of leftism and Marxism. The First three clips can be found on our D Tube channel, as well as here.

Direct link

Third clip from the same video

Second clip from the same video

First clip from the same video

(Will add other clips as they are found. The original entire clip in Polish can be seen here below)

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VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS of the now open ‘impeachment’ process

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Posted by Eeyore

More will be added as the day progresses.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column with videos is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Ilhan Omar and ‘Western Imperialism’ by Hugh Fitzgerald

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On November 3, at a political rally with Bernie Sanders in Minneapolis, Ilhan Omar exclaimed that she was happy to have endorsed, and to campaign for, a candidate who “will fight against Western imperialism and fight for a just world.”

One would like to know what Omar meant by “Western imperialism.” The Americans never had an imperial empire; they never turned the Philippines and Cuba, that they had won in the Spanish-American War, in 1898, into colonies; there was no large-scale settlement of Americans in either place. There never has been an American colony in Africa; Liberia was not an American colony, but rather was intended to be an independent state populated by former slaves. The only place in the Americas where the United States has not a colony but a “territory” is Puerto Rico. Far from being exploited by American imperialists, Puerto Rico receives $21 billion a year from the American government. The Puerto Ricans apparently do not feel they are victims of American “imperialism” who demand independence – in 2018, 500,000 of them voted for statehood, while only 7,000 wanted independence.

Perhaps Ilhan Omar was thinking of the British as the quintessential “Western imperialists.” But the British Empire is long gone. The British pulled completely out of what is present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh in 1947. They are nowhere else, as an imperial power, in Asia, including Hong Kong, which they turned over to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. In the Middle East, the British were in Iraq only as holders of the Mandate, tasked with guiding that country to full independence, as was achieved in 1932. The British also helped create the Emirate of Transjordan, which was never a British colony. There was a small British garrison in what was called the Crown Colony of Aden, but there were no “British colonists” in evidence; Aden was merely an entrepot to resupply ships going to and from India. In South America, the colony of British Guiana became independent in 1966. British Honduras, another colony, became independent, as the country of Belize, in 1981. In Africa, all of Britain’s former colonies, with one exception, had received their independence by 1968. That one exception was Southern Rhodesia, which received its independence, and a new name – Zimbabwe – in 1980. What examples of British imperialism does Ilhan Omar have in mind? Bermuda? Anguilla?  Two tiny vacation spots that are not exploited by British colonials, but profit handsomely from Western tourism? Does she really think those islands would want to sever their ties to Great Britain?

Or could Omar be thinking of the French “imperialists”? Where are those French colonies that so offend her? The French left their last colony in North Africa, Algeria, in 1962, nearly 58 years ago. The vast territories of French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa were given their independence by 1960. Perhaps Ilhan Omar has some vague notion that the French still rule these lands. As for the two Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, and the two even smaller islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon in the North Atlantic, these are not colonies, but juridically parts of France itself, with full representation in the French Parliament.

There is one great imperialism that we can be sure Ilhan Omar does not recognize. This is the imperialism of the Muslim Arabs, who not only managed to conquer many lands and many peoples, but to impose their religion, and even their ethnic identity, on those peoples. Many of those peoples who converted to Islam, whether willingly, or out of a desire to escape the onerous conditions imposed on them as dhimmis (tolerated non-Muslims under Muslim rule), were so eager to identify with their conquerors, that that they took Arab names, and in some cases, assumed as well the name “Sayyid,” which meant they were declaring themselves to be descendants of Muhammad’s own tribe, the Quraysh. That is why the writer V. S. Naipaul, the scholar of Islam Anwar Sheikh, and many others have described Islam as the most successful imperialism in history, because those who are its victims identify completely with those victimizing them. Naipaul writes about this in Among the Believers — the Pakistanis, Malays, and Indonesians who , he discovered, all want to be “little Arabs.”

This desire makes sense. After all, the Message of Allah was delivered in Arabic, and to a 7th-century Arab. Ideally, the Qur’an must be read and recited in Arabic. Muslims who prostrate themselves in prayer must always turn toward Mecca, in Arabia. They make the Hajj, too, to the same city of Mecca, again in Arabia. As a consequence of all this, Arabs enjoy the highest prestige among Islamic peoples, and non-Arab Muslims seek to identify with them.

Many of those victims of Muslim Arab imperialism were taught to regard their own pre-Islamic histories as of no interest or significance; they dismissed those pasts as belonging to the Jahiliyya, the Time of Ignorance. A good example of this is the singular lack of interest shown by Muslim Pakistanis in the spectacular remains of Mohenjo-Daro, which dates from 2500 B.C., and is one of the world’s earliest major cities. But it is from the pre-Islamic times of ignorance, and consequently is of no significance to Muslims.

Among those conquered by Muslim Arabs, many people replaced their indigenous languages with Arabic; speakers of Coptic in Egypt, Aramaic in Syria, and Tamazight in North Africa have noticeably decreased over the centuries. Even after the conquered peoples converted to Islam, as non-Arabs they were regarded as inferior. The Berbers in North Africa, the region’s original inhabitants, today suffer from Arab cultural supremacism within their own lands, where their language, Tamazight, for a long time was prohibited from being taught or recognized as an official language – now it can again be taught in a few schools – and Berber culture continues to be suppressed. The Kurds, too, though Muslim, have been on the receiving end of Arab imperialism, that reached its apotheosis in Saddam Hussein’s murderous Anfal campaign, when his Arab soldiers murdered 182,000 Kurds.

Many may not know that the greatest mass murder in history was that conducted by Muslims in India, during several centuries of Mughal rule, when 70-80 million Hindus were killed. Those Hindus who chose to convert were the ancestors of today’s Muslims in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Does Ilhan Omar even know how Islam spread, through conquest, in India, and how many Hindus were its victims, and how many converted to Islam to avoid being killed? Perhaps she can be asked publicly about these matters; her display of ignorance will be most telling..

Where else do we see Muslim imperialism on display? Wherever Muslims are murdering non-Muslims in order to increase their own power, as with Boko Haram in Nigeria, and Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, or with Muslims killing Copts in Egypt. These are attempts to strike terror in the hearts of non-Muslims, and if possible, to frighten some to convert, and to seize the lands, and sometimes to murder, those who refuse. Muslim imperialism is on the march, in a different way, even within European countries. Muslims have managed to carve out for themselves many No-Go areas, where non-Muslims fear to tread, and firemen enter only with police protection, and the police themselves enter only in groups. It’s a new kind of imperialism, where the conquerors enter not as armed invaders, but as economic migrants, then begin to live,  just as Western imperialists used to do, off the indigenous peoples in the countries they conquered. They do this without having to conquer others with weapons. Merely by being allowed to live in these Infidel lands in Europe, they find they can have every conceivable benefit lavished upon them: free or subsidized housing, free medical care, free education, unemployment benefits, family allowances. The huge sums transferred to these Muslim migrants by the state can be seen as a new form of imperialism, where one people lives off of another, in a conquest that is conducted through non-violent means, perfected by those Muslims who have been allowed to settle deep behind what they have always been taught are enemy lines, the lines of Dar al-Harb. This Islamic imperialism is just as effective as imperialist conquest in the classic sense, and is all the more dangerous for not being recognized by its victims for what it is.

A few questions might be addressed to the self-assured Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is so eager to fight alongside Bernie Sanders against “Western imperialism.”

Ms. Omar, can you give us examples of “Western imperialism” today that you think need to be addressed? Just to refresh your memory, the last American quasi-colony, the Philippines, received its full independence in 1946. Puerto Rica is a territory, not an exploited colony; it receives $21 billion in aid from the American government each year; in 2017, 97% of Puerto Ricans voted for statehood; that certainly suggests they do not feel exploited by the United States. The last two British colonies of any size, Southern Rhodesia and British Honduras (now Belize), received their independence in 1980 and 1981, respectively. The small city-state of Hong Kong that was by then the very last Crown Colony was turned over to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, much to the regret of its inhabitants. The last French colony to receive independence was Algeria, in 1962. A handful of tiny French islands – Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Pierre and Miquelon — are now politically fully part of France, sending delegates to the French Parliament. So we remain puzzled about your determination to fight a non-existent “Western Imperialism.” Please tell us what you had in mind.

Ilhan Omar might consider abandoning her attempt to find examples of that “Western Imperialism” that so concerns her and to consider other imperialisms, outside the West. She might look into the Muslim Arabs who have not only conquered many peoples outside of Arabia during the past 1,400 years, but have convinced those peoples to identify completely with their conquerors, the Arabs, even taking Arab names upon conversion, and in some cases, assuming the name “Sayyid”  in order to identify themselves as descendants of the tribe of the Prophet.

Does she recognize the conquest by Muslim Arabs of many lands and peoples as “imperialism,” or is that something that she insists pertains only to the Western powers?

She might be asked what she makes of Egypt, where the entire population consisted of Coptic Christians before the Arabs arrived. How did that country go from being nearly 100% Coptic to becoming  85% Muslim? Does Ilhan Omar have any comment on how the Coptic Christians who remain are treated by the majority Muslims? She might be asked, too, what happened to the Zoroastrians of Persia, who disappeared almost entirely when the Muslim Arabs conquered that land, save for a group that found refuge in India where, ever since, they have been known as the Parsees. She might be asked, too, to comment on the situation of those Berbers today in North Africa, that is,  those Berbers who have managed to withstand Arabization in Algeria and Morocco, who have had to fight hard to retain their Berber language, culture, and identity.

There are so many more questions she might be asked, but let’s end our inquiry with two final questions for the Congresswoman.

“Ms. Omar, the Muslim imperialists who conquered India murdered between 70 and 80 million Hindus over several centuries of Muslim rule. Would you care to tell us what you make of that fact? And even today, Muslim terrorists, some based in Pakistan, still target Hindus in India. Think of those who have attacked the Parliament Building in New Delhi or, in 2008, hit 10 different sites in Mumbai. What do you believe they are after? Much of Indian territory was in 1947 given over to the creation of Muslim Pakistan (then West Pakistan) and Muslim Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Yet Muslim terrorists continue to strike within India. Do they now want to conquer the rest of India? Does their Jihad against India’s Infidels have no end?

“And one last thing, Congresswoman.  The late scholar of Islam, Anwar Sheikh, who had grown up as a Muslim, famously wrote that ‘Islam is the vehicle for Arab supremacism.’ Would you care to discuss what he meant by that lapidary formulation?”

Raising these matters might just make Ms. Omar more hesitate to inveigh against “Western Imperialism” and possibly cause her to tiptoe very carefully around the subject of “imperialism” altogether, now that she realizes that others are ready and willing to discuss the Arab and Muslim varieties, that have been much more extensive, and have claimed many more victims, than anything done by “Western imperialists.” Should she choose, uncharacteristically, to shut up entirely about “imperialism,” that is an outcome devoutly to be wished.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

VIDEO: ‘Popular Vote’ Movement Would Shift Power to Big Cities, Experts Warn

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The Electoral College is under threat from states looking to enact legislation that ignores local voters in favor of national election results, experts said during a panel Thursday at The Heritage Foundation.

Responding to a wave of 15 states that have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact since the 2016 election, they argued that the Founders instituted the Electoral College to ensure stability and representation to all states.

“We only got the Constitution because the Constitutional Convention persuaded the states to enter into a federation arrangement,” Allen Guelzo, a history professor at Gettysburg College, said. “Federalism is in the bones of our nation, and I would be concerned that we can’t start removing bones without the whole body collapsing.”

The panel, titled “The Fight to Preserve the Electoral College,” featured Guelzo as well as Trent England, executive vice president of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, and Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at Heritage.

The demand for socialism is on the rise from young Americans today. But is socialism even morally sound? Find out more now >>

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is a legislative partnership among states that agree to award all their electoral votes in future elections to whichever candidate wins the national popular vote, disregarding the results of ballots cast in each individual state.

The compact would take effect only once enough states join to determine an election by awarding all 270 electoral votes needed to secure a presidential win.

So far, 15 states and the District of Columbia have joined the compact. Lobbyists actively are looking to expand the agreement to more states whose leaders were upset by the results of the 2016 election, when Republican Donald Trump won the presidency despite losing the national popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Guelzo argued that the Electoral College slows down presidential elections by design, providing legitimacy to the presidency and combating voter fraud.

“The Electoral College embodies a fundamental instinct of the Founders, which is to say ‘slow down,’” he said, adding that “gridlock is not actually an accident.”

The history professor pushed back on objections to the Electoral College, including by some analysts who have argued that the current system violates the principle of one person, one vote.

“If one man, one vote is to be the rule, then as soon as a president loses popular support we ought to have another vote,” Guelzo said. “So we could have presidential elections every six months, three months, eight months—every time there’s an unpleasant tweet.”

England based his arguments on the 2000 election, when Republican George W. Bush lost the national vote to Democrat Al Gore and a recount in Florida for that state’s electoral vote threatened to decide who sits in the Oval Office.

“This is not just going on in blue states, this is going on across the country,” England said of the movement to bypass the electoral college. “This is a serious threat wherever you live. Red state, purple state, there are people there lobbying to hijack the Electoral College.”

England said the movement for states to bypass the Electoral College without going through the difficult process of amending the Constitution gained renewed strength after the 2016 election.

Grassroots activists and lobbying organizations, he said, are driving a message that misleads many voters about the facts of the current electoral system.

Von Spakovsky, manager of Heritage’s Election Law Reform Initiative, turned to voting numbers to argue that rural areas would be left behind if the Electoral College were abolished.

“The whole point of the Electoral College is to balance the states’ demands for greater representation and sovereignty against the risk of what James Madison liked to call the tyranny of the majority,” von Spakovsky said.

Looking again at the 2000 election, he warned that without the Electoral College, the chaos that voters and the nation at large experienced during the Florida recount would be extended to every state and county across the nation, as candidates demanded recounts in every region that potentially could sway an election in their favor.

As a result, von Spakovsky said, the decisions of the president would be seen as illegitimate by significant portions of the nation, and voter fraud would run rampant in areas unprepared to deal with it.

“What we’ve had for over 200 years with the Electoral College system is unbelievable stability,” he said.

“There is no reason to change it now.”

COLUMN BY

Aaron Credeur

Aaron Credeur is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

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