As Venezuela Collapses, Inflation Careens Toward 1 Million Percent

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Socialism has turned the once-prosperous nation of Venezuela into poverty-ridden hellscape.

Jarrett Stepman

Jarrett Stepman

Venezuela’s inflation may hit 1 million percent by the end of the year, the International Monetary Fund announced on Monday.

This incredible hyperinflation is reminiscent of Weimar Germany during the years immediately after World War I, in which wheelbarrows full of cash were required to buy bare essential items, like a loaf of bread.

To counter the hyperinflation problem, Venezuela’s answer is to lop off five zeros from its currency value and launch a state-backed cryptocurrency.

It wasn’t that long ago that the left praised socialist Venezuela as a model country, a good comparison to the mean, ruthless system of the United States.

“Since the [Hugo] Chávez government got control over the national oil industry, poverty has been cut by half, and extreme poverty by 70 percent,” wrote New York Times contributor Mark Weisbrot in the wake of socialist President Hugo Chavez’s re-election in 2012. “College enrollment has more than doubled, millions of people have access to health care for the first time and the number of people eligible for public pensions has quadrupled.”

The scale of Venezuela’s collapse is staggering.

Just six years later and the country is a catastrophe. It seems 21st-century socialism hasn’t worked any better than 20th-century socialism, or any other kind of socialism for that matter.

Venezuela’s dire state is not for lack of resources. It is the most oil-rich country in the world and used to be one of the wealthiest nations in South America. Now, it’s teetering on the edge of economic oblivion.

The scale of Venezuela’s collapse is staggering. The economy has halved since 2013 and unemployment has now reached 30 percent. Basic items like baby formula and toilet paper can’t be found on store shelves.

People have turned to “car cannibalism” (or mass carpooling) to minimize the number of vehicles running. Public transportation has ground to a halt.

Hunger strikes by workers in the country’s nationalized electricity company have led to widespread power outages and water shortages.

Venezuela now struggles to pump oil out of the ground as its nationalized oil company is, according to CNN, “forced to import light crude from the United States to dilute the heavy oil it drills in Venezuela.”

Ironically, the policy of nationalization—purportedly to give back to the people—has left those very people destitute.

No country has fallen farther and faster on The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom than Venezuela.

“In 1995, the first year of the index, Venezuela scored 59.8 on its 0-to-100 scale, more than two points above the world average,” wrote Heritage Foundation Research Coordinator Patrick Tyrrell.

That prosperity did not last. Under [Presidents Hugo] Chavez and [Nicolas] Maduro, economic freedom has evaporated, and Venezuela is now one of the most economically repressed countries in the world, second only to North Korea.

With the loss of economic freedom has come the loss of political freedom. Elections have become a sham as the once democratic country has turned into strongman dictatorship under Maduro, where opposition to the regime is quickly and ruthlessly crushed.

Criminality and corruption are rampant. The country is now ruled by a cartel of connected drug kingpins and other thugs who use government power to enrich themselves and their families.

Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have fled the country in a humanitarian crisis that mirrors that of Syria—except this one was not forced by a civil war.

Venezuela is now a country where “millionaires are poor,” as a Venezuelan nurse said recently in an interview with The Guardian.

What’s remarkable is that while this tragedy plays out, the American left continues to flirt with socialism and strains to explain why it would be a good thing for the American people. Millennials, in particular, have been susceptible to embracing it, at least in theory.

Socialism is a philosophy that, at best, has proven to be ideologically bankrupt, having failed to produce anything close to a free-market system. At worst, it is a weapon for petty thug-tyrants to prop themselves up while strangling the nation’s economy and stomping on the rights of citizens with impunity, as has been the case in Venezuela.

Venezuela’s socialism at least started out as “democratic” before it failed and ultimately led to tyranny.

It’s increasingly popular on the left to rebrand socialism as “democratic socialism,” perhaps to distinguish their own ideology from the statist and obviously destructive form of socialism practiced in Venezuela. They see their own socialism as a happier, gentler version of the creed.

But this distinction is evasive.

Venezuela’s socialism at least started out as “democratic” before it failed and ultimately led to tyranny. That’s an easy flip to make without constitutional norms, institutional protections, and a cultural creed of limited government.

American leftists often point to Nordic countries as examples of socialism that “works.” The problem is that while some of those countries provide generous social safety programs, they are not quite socialist.

All of them rank highly on The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. Denmark and Sweden even rate above the United States. In 2015, Denmark’s president insisted that his country was not socialist, but had a “market economy.”

Most of the Nordic countries had thriving economies before they grew their welfare programs, and some have even trimmed those programs in recent years. Finland, for example, which experimented with a universal basic income program, ended it after just two years.

Nordic countries mostly avoided the kinds of government overregulation and intervention that annihilated the economies of Venezuela and other countries in the past century.

So, mission accomplished?

Not quite. Even in these alleged Scandinavian utopias, broad social safety nets and high taxes have produced a country with much lower standards of living than the United States as a whole.

For instance, Americans of Danish descent have a drastically higher income than Danes living in Denmark, as well as lower rates of poverty.

“A common misconception is that the Nordic countries became socially and economically successful by introducing universal welfare states funded by high taxes,” wrote Nima Sanandaji, the author of Debunking Utopia: Exposing the Myth of Nordic Socialism.

In fact, their economic and social success had already materialized during a period when these countries combined a small public sector with free-market policies. The welfare state was introduced afterward. That the Nordic countries are so successful is due to an exceptional culture that emphasizes social cohesion, hard work, and individual responsibility.

Socialist policies erode these cultural norms, undermine individual responsibility and the rule of law, and create a destructive race to the bottom to prove that one is most in need.

Regardless of the distinctions, real or imagined, socialism has proved to be a failure wherever it is tried. Its proponents claim to want to lift up the poor, but all it does is drag down everyone, creating economic misery for rich and poor alike.

The “end of history”—as Marxists call it—for Venezuela is collapse. A fate that may soon befall its socialist neighbors, like Nicaragua.

It’s a good lesson for Americans, especially those with the delusion that we can make it work here.

Reprinted from the Daily Signal.

Trump Further Chips Away at Obamacare by Expanding Short-Term Health Plans

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The Trump administration moved Wednesday to expand health insurance options and affordability for Americans, with a new rule allowing cheaper new and renewable health insurance plans that consumers can use for up to a year.

The Department of Health and Human Services, Labor Department, and Treasury Department released the final rule that allows consumers to buy “short-term, limited duration” health insurance plans that are not subject to the Obamacare requirements. Consumers can have the plans for up to a year, instead of three months under the new rule.

The average monthly premium for an individual with a short-term plan in the fourth quarter of 2016 was $124, compared to $393 for an unsubsidized plan in the Obamacare exchange, according to HHS.

“They can be as much as 50-80 percent lower cost than the Affordable Care Act exchange plans,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar told reporters Wednesday. “We believe this could provide relief for well over 1 million people.”

The new rule is largely a return to the existing rule before 2017, when Americans could keep the plans for almost a year, which changes as President Barack Obama was heading for the exit. To encourage more people to join the exchanges, Obama reduced short-term limited duration coverage to less than three months in an executive action just three weeks before leaving office.

The plans again cover an initial period of one year, as before Obama’s action. The difference is that the plans come with a renewable maximum period of no longer than three years.

Azar said he would like to see Congress repeal and replace Obamacare, but until then, he is going to work to expand more private choices for consumers. He said this would not undermine the Obamacare exchanges, where 87 percent of consumers are subsidized. But this does offer a choice for those who don’t qualify for subsidies, he said.

“If someone decides, ‘I’m paying too much for insurance I don’t value that gives me an inadequate benefit and I find what you allow to be offered here in the short-term, limited duration plans to be something that is more financially attractive and more attractive as a health benefit for me in terms of coverage,’ that type of voting with their feet, I would find quite meaningful,” Azar told The Daily Signal during the press conference Wednesday.

Azar also noted during the press conference the new rule requires more consumer notification of what the cheaper, short-term plans won’t cover.

“These may be a good choice for individuals, but they also may not be the right choice for everybody,” Azar said. “One of the things we are doing is requiring consumer protection notice on the plans. In fact, it’s a more robust notice than President Obama’s administration had on these very same plans to ensure the patient, the consumer, knows going in what they are getting and what they’re not getting through the plan.”

Beyond that, the plans will remain under state regulation, which can decide benefit or rate structure.

The low-cost, sometimes low-coverage, plans could be good for people transitioning from one job to another, students who anticipate a job but aren’t yet employed, independent contractors, and part-time workers, Azar said.

The administration has taken a strong step, but Congress should also act, said Marie Fishpaw, director of domestic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation.

“The Trump administration is right to provide more options to Americans who have suffered under Obamacare and, in many cases, been priced out of health coverage,” Fishpaw said in a statement. “States should have more authority to regulate short-term, limited duration health plans. Unwinding Obamacare’s damaging regulations is just the first step.”

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in October directing executive branch agencies to look for ways to increase choice and competition in the health care market.

A release of three recent reports by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found enrollment in the Obamacare exchanges is only stable for subsidized consumers, but has declined by 20 percent for nonsubsidized consumers. Meanwhile, premiums increased by 21 percent.

“We continue to see a crisis of affordability in the individual insurance market, especially for those who don’t qualify for large subsidies,” CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a written statement. “This final rule opens the door to new, more affordable coverage options for millions of middle-class Americans who have been priced out of ACA plans.”

COLUMN BY

Portrait of Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of HHS Secretary Alex Azar. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/Newscom)

Here’s How School Security Should Be Improved in 4 Easy Steps

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Since publication of an earlier commentary on four steps to achieving better school security, many organizations have been in contact to offer excellent additional ways to reach this desired end state.

Again, there is no simple solution. We cannot just ban guns, or hand them out willy-nilly, and expect our kids to be safe. America must get beyond the political theater and posturing and do the hard work of making our schools secure places for kids to learn and grow.

What is needed is a true system of overall security.

The American people must determine that schools are a big enough priority to take action. Some groups have done so. Organizations like the FASTER (Faculty/Administrator Safety Training and Emergency Response) Program founded in Ohio, or the National Rifle Association’s School Shield program, offer training and support relating to physical security and first aid for any school district that wants it.

There are others as well. The University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education has developed an entire construct of steps to add psychological security measures to achieve balance among the students affected. They do this in their online master’s program in school counseling.

The experts at Defend Systems in Nashville called for a much-increased emphasis in emergency first aid, particularly for trauma wounds. They were spot-on, and this is a great additional call. Defend Systems provides local schools with that critical skill set.

There are still four steps that must be taken to increase security in our schools and decrease the likelihood of a shooting and the number of children who will be harmed. Those steps are really four interconnected pillars: pre-emptive response, access control, hardening classrooms, and on-site incident response.

1. Responding Pre-emptively

In order to pre-emptively stop school violence, it is vital to establish an environment that provides solid psychological security. A promising track is to develop relevant and up-to-date forms and modes of psychological first aid.

Psychological first aid should be a national strategy used as a preventative measure for dealing with more serious psychological trauma. Currently, the development of psychological first aid can be highly effective in smaller sample populations such as schools, a workplace, or a religious or social association, and can be put into practice in everyday life.

As it pertains to schools, and school-age kids, the initial action is to involve the students. Using them as an informational resource can make all subsequent actions more effective. Survey their experiences and then use the information openly (but anonymously) so they can see the follow-through.

Additionally, put students in as many leadership positions in the process as possible. This grows them, and will provide a wealth of insights that the adults might have missed.

All of this will build trust and inclusion that will empower the other pre-emptive actions. The students will be your best source of information. This generation of young people lives in near-constant communication, but it is not always transparent to the staff and faculty. Given that there were warning signs before almost all of the recent school shootings (many of which were stopped), making the students a part of this process is a key.

That said, these warning signs must provoke immediate action. The majority of the shooters have had some mental health or social interaction issues, and people noticed. The Parkland shooter was flagged multiple times, yet no one took action.

This was egregious, but not that abnormal. Police and school officials have to respond to red flags on social media or in overheard conversations. This response must be immediate and highly public. That way, we can stop what we know about, and deter what we don’t.

Teachers must follow due process, but fear of overstepping one’s bounds must not be allowed to obstruct intervention. Worries about giving a student a “black mark” must be swept aside. Troubled individuals—and all those around them—are much better served by stopping them from doing something potentially drastic and deadly. Action must be taken before shots are fired, if at all possible.

2. Control Access to the School

The second pillar is firmly controlling access to school facilities. If a person does not belong in the school, or is attempting to bring in prohibited items such as weapons, they must be denied access. Schools must have limited points of entry (one or at most two), each of which should be monitored and controlled by personnel that can turn people away when needed.

School personnel and students must not be able to “cheat” by opening doors for friends or for parents. Worse yet is opening doors for a stranger, just to be “nice.” Convenience must not be a factor. If a shooter is blocked from entering a school, they are unlikely to do much harm, or at least a lot less.

Controlling access to a school is particularly critical at the beginning and end of the day, but also applies during the remainder of the day. The question, “How did the shooter get in?” is always a pivotal one.

How people enter the building and who monitors the access process are a key set of decisions. They must be tailored to each specific school. Too much security, or too heavy-handed a footprint can add psychological insecurity to the student body, which can do harm even if a shooting never takes place.

A balance must be found and maintained. This decision cannot be driven from outside the school. It must be seen as part of the school’s central “culture.” If students see it that way—which will require research, education as to the reasoning, and a deft touch with both students and parents—they will be far more likely to buy into the practice.

3. Hardening the Classroom

Next, we must do a better job of securing (or hardening) classrooms as potential targets inside the school. Classrooms are often chosen to shelter-in-place, particularly for the youngest kids who are very difficult to move quickly.

All classroom doors have windows to allow observation (and protection for the children), but in an active shooter situation, this becomes a liability. There needs to be a low-cost, fast way of blocking the outside view through the window. Likewise, the doors must be lockable from the inside by the door’s organic lock, and with some sort of very simple, quickly applied additional blocking mechanism.

Within the classroom, teachers must be able to provide their students both cover (protection from gunfire) and concealment (a place to hide). The courageous teacher who hid her young pupils in storage cabinets and then faced the gunman in Sandyhook gave her life, but her quick thinking saved the children.

There are now bulletproof sanctuaries that can be put inside classrooms and can double as “story corners.” While these may be beyond the budgets of most schools, it’s a good model to provoke the imagination. We must devise the best cover and concealment we can find.

As a last resort, teachers and older kids should also make a determination as to how they might actually fight an attacker with improvised weapons available in the class.

The best mode of attack must be specified for each individual classroom, grade level, and teacher. Teachers should first be briefed or taught by an expert what is expected of them. Then, the teachers should devise a specific plan of action for their own classroom. This should be reviewed and, if need be, adjusted so that it provides the maximum protection and the minimum of psychological insecurity.

Once the plan is approved and set, it should be “published” in writing so it is not just in the teacher’s head. (Any substitute teacher should be required to review these plans.)

Lastly, drills should be conducted, first with the teacher alone, then with adults role-playing as the kids, and finally with the actual students. Older kids (high schoolers) can be told what the drills are really for, though teachers should characterize them for younger students as something like “stranger” drills, to avoid any unneeded worry.

4. On-Site Incident Response

That leads to pillar No. 4: Schools must have an on-site response capability that can confront and stop an active shooter.

Law enforcement will do their best to respond in a timely manner, but they will quite often fail. Most active shooter scenarios are done within 3-6 minutes. Few, if any, police or sheriff departments can promise to respond that quickly, especially in non-urban areas. How schools achieve this capability is again a delicate decision.

Every school district or individual school should come to this decision themselves. A highly centralized “solution” is not recommended. The “how” of achieving an adequate on-site response must once again factor in the school culture. This is clearly the most contentious aspect of school security.

There are four main options. (1) A school can have dedicated police assets on campus; (2) they can hire private security personnel; (3) they can seek volunteer security personnel from the community (such as veterans or retired law enforcement); or (4) they can have armed staff and/or faculty.

There are numerous options for schools to attain this on-site capability, and communities must choose what they can support, both budget-wise and within their collective moral structures. Remember: Too much security can be almost as big a problem as too little, so the right solution for each school is critical.

This is about more than just handing out pistols or asking those with concealed carry permits to bring their weapons to work. This will involve protocols for the storage of weapons, psych evaluations for those who volunteer, and extensive training regimens. The training must include negotiation and de-escalation skills, non-lethal control techniques, team response drills, firearms training, and extensive trauma-level first aid.

This all bears emphasis: You must have the correct people as well as the correct training. The firearms training in particular must entail far more than shooting a few dozen rounds at a local range. Shooting in close proximity to non-hostile personnel is the most difficult gun skill to learn—it must be trained and drilled until it is engrained, and only attempted in the correct situations. This is particularly essential if we are going to depend on a volunteer- or staff-based response capability.

The fact that certain individuals will actively deter and respond to threats need not lead to culture of fear among the student body. Local schools and communities will be able to develop their own psychosocial infrastructure that is compatible with each individual’s preferred form of security.

Some students are more attracted to a physical procedure, and therefore will be more likely to respond appropriately based on their training. Likewise, those who are attracted to a psychological facilitation can respond positively and rebound more quickly from the trauma of an attack event.

Both deterring and facilitating through adequately trained response are necessary to maintain psychological strength and resilience. This is needed both in the event and immediately afterward.

One final note of action. No matter how one of these situations plays out, the school and community will be severely traumatized. If a solid base of psychological security has been laid beforehand, along with the physical security measures, the school and student body have the best chance of weathering the tragedy with the least damage.

Strong follow-up support must begin as soon as the site is secured, and it must continue until every need is met. If the kids know the counseling department well from pre-existing relationships, this can go relatively quickly. Bringing in strangers may be needed, but it not optimal. School districts are better served if the counseling department is well and professionally staffed long before any event occurs.

These four steps (and the follow-up) will not guarantee 100 percent safety in our schools, but they will materially increase that security through deterrence, strong defense measures, and adeptness in ending the killing as quickly as possible, and returning to normality as swiftly as possible.

These are not pie-in-the-sky ideas. They are already being applied in hundreds of schools across America. It is time to apply them in all our schools.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Steven Bucci

Steven Bucci

Steven P. Bucci, who served America for three decades as an Army Special Forces officer and top Pentagon official, is a visiting research fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Read his research. Twitter: .

Peter Bucci

Peter S. Bucci is a licensed psychological counselor in Georgia and Michigan with certifications in substance abuse, adolescent treatment, supervision, and trauma-specific training from EMDR International Association. He currently works with adults from high-risk environments.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Muslim Siraj Ibn Wahhaj Was Training Abused Kids at New Mexico Shelter to Commit Mass Shootings at Schools

Parkland Shooter Asked For Help Before Massacre, Was Denied

Beyond Gun Violence Prevention: Student Safety in Today’s Schools

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of a Wellsville, New York, a teacher helping a student. (Photo: B.Fanton Universal Images Group/Newscom)

VIDEO: Dana Loesch Defends Hunting From Anti-NRA Progressives

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“The only people that I actually see using hunting as an excuse to pollute American politics with a toxic agenda are writers like Wes Siler, because he’s actually doing that right here. He’s doing exactly what he’s accusing the NRA of by leveraging hunting as a way to push anti-NRA progressivism.” —Dana Loesch

Trump Seals the Deal for DeSantis

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TAMPA, FL (Aug 1, 2018) – President Donald J. Trump paid a visit to Tampa Bay yesterday to campaign for Republican candidates. He held a rally at the Florida State Fairgrounds which was attended by an estimated 7,000 people and a sizable press corps. The president is no stranger to the Tampa Bay area, having held four rallies here in 2016 when running for president. He understands the importance of Florida as a swing state which helped elect him to office. As such, he wants to keep the state red.

This was my fourth rally which I covered for News Talk Florida, and the second time Mr. Trump visited the fairgrounds. This time around, I sat outside the press pool, up in the stands with the people. Seeing my media credentials, people eyed me suspiciously but started asking me questions about Florida politics and the press in general. Sitting with the people, as opposed to behind the fenced in area for the press, gave me the opportunity to observe the Trump supporters first hand and determine their interests. From this, I sensed there was more electricity in the air, kind of like attending a World Series game or Super Bowl. I overheard one gentleman say, “Wow, this is better than a football game.”

During his introduction, the president recognized political leaders running for office, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (Dist 1) and Rep. Gus Bilirakis (Dist 12). Governor Rick Scott, who is running for the U.S. Senate, could not be there for the meeting, possibly because he wanted to appear neutral on the DeSantis-Putnam contest to replace him as governor.

The president saved the bulk of his praise for Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-D6) who he publicly endorsed for Florida governor. In reality, the rally was designed to solidify Rep. DeSantis’ candidacy. Currently, the representative enjoys a twelve point lead in a Mason-Dixon poll (7/23-25) and a nine point lead in a Florida Atlantic University poll (7/20-21). The president’s endorsement should propel him further to clinch the Republican primary on August 28th.

Rep. DeSantis, whose roots are in Tampa Bay (Dunedin), welcomed the president and thanked him for his endorsement. He went on to support Mr. Trump’s policies on illegal immigration, which resulted in a “Build the Wall” chant by the audience. He was also opposed to Sanctuary Cities and Common Core, and is a proponent of teaching the U.S. Constitution in the classroom.

President Trump also made a plug for Governor Scott to replace Senator Bill Nelson (D), claiming,

“The only time I see Nelson is five months before an election.”

He also attacked the senator’s voting record, claiming he had voted for Obamacare, against the recent Tax cuts, and for Sanctuary Cities.

The president appeared to be in good spirits and was pleased to report how the economy has turned around for the better. Specifically, he mentioned…

  • The Gross Domestic Product was now up to 4.1%.
  • There are 3.7 million new jobs since he has taken office.
  • African-American and Hispanic unemployment is at the lowest levels in history.
  • The unemployment rate for Women is at the lowest level in 65 years.
  • 3.5 million Americans are off of food stamps.
  • Oil production is high.
  • For the first time ever, America has become an exporter of Natural Gas.
  • The country will soon be the largest energy producer.
  • The Trade Deficit was falling.
  • And it was time to straighten out the trade deals.

Although he talked about other things, it was obvious the president understands the importance of the economy as a sales tool for Republican candidates.

“But now, it is time to rebuild our country,” he said. All of this was met with enthusiastic cheers from the audience. The president was also pleased to announce U.S. Steel had opened six new steel mills, and as a surprise, mentioned Newport Steel was going to open a steel mill in Florida. This was particularly well received.

Mr. Trump went on to warn of the consequences of Democrats winning the midterm elections, claiming they want open borders and to abolish ICE, which would result in a higher crime rate and drug trafficking. He also observed, “Democrats are not allowing our values,” meaning patriotism, citizenship, and law enforcement. The president also warned of the Democrats’ attempt to give illegal immigrants the right to vote in our elections. “It is time for voter ID,” he stated which was heartily endorsed by the audience.

To me personally, the most interesting aspect of the evening was the eclectic audience in attendance, representing all walks of life; everything from young to old, blue collar to white. Even though the Democrats claim to be the party of the working people, President Trump has been able to connect to the general public, including steel workers, coal miners, people in manufacturing and construction, farmers, law enforcement, and, of course, the military and veterans. By doing so, he represents a significant threat to the Democrats who are moving towards a socialist agenda. Traditional Democrats should be worried for the future of their party.

The president also took his customary pot shots at the Fake News media. In response to their criticisms about his Avant Garde behavior, he said, “It is a lot easier to act presidential than to do what I do,” implying his results orientation.

Other notes of interest: Ivanka and Eric Trump were in attendance, as well as Eric’s wife, Lara who delivered a remarkably good talk in support of her father-in-law during the warm-up session. Towards the beginning of Mr. Trump’s speech, three or four protesters were ejected from the event, but due to the noisy condition of the event, nobody was sure what they were protesting. I also didn’t see any protesters outside. They may have been there, but they certainly were not as visible as the handful who were there in 2016.

Basically, the Trump Rally solidified the chances for Rep. Ron DeSantis to clinch the Republican candidacy for Florida governor. By bringing out his big gun, the President, Rep. DeSantis has put the other candidate, Adam Putnam, at a distinct disadvantage going into the primary elections on August 28th.

Keep the Faith!

Note: All trademarks both marked and unmarked belong to their respective companies.

RELATED ARTICLE: For the Roaring Economy, We Can Thank Trump and Republicans

RELATED VIDEO: Full rally for President Donald J. Trump in Tampa, Florida on July 31, 2018.

Wind and Solar Power are the Welfare Dependents of the Energy World

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Every turbine and panel that goes up raises the cost of electricity for the community it (allegedly) serves.

Take a look at this hard-hitting editorial at CFACT.org that reveals the hypocrisy of the wind and solar crowd.

Failing the laugh test: Wind, solar power make subsidy accusations

The lavishly subsidized wind and solar power industries apparently don’t like other meth dealers – er, make that energy subsidy recipients – on their federal-pork street corner. The evidence? Wind and solar apologists are squealing with outrage that coal and nuclear power may finally get their own small piece of the action.

For important context, the wind and solar power industries each receive such enormous taxpayer subsidies that all other energy industries combined do not receive as much taxpayer pork as either wind or solar power alone. According to the U.S. Energy Information administration, the net subsidies for coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power combined amount to only 1/9th of the amount of federal renewable energy subsidies (see Table 3: https://www.eia.gov/analysis/requests/subsidy/pdf/subsidy.pdf).

Keeping wind and solar power’s dominance of the energy subsidy racket in mind, wind and solar apologists are making laughable objections to Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s proposal to provide credit – on energy security grounds – to power facilities that can produce electricity 24/7 and can store their fuel onsite. With coal and nuclear power fitting these energy security goals, and wind and solar power falling short, renewable power apologists claim energy security considerations amount to “subsidies” and “bailouts” for coal and nuclear power.

For example, University of Michigan professor Mark J. Perry argued Tuesday in the Washington Examiner that coal and nuclear power “are being pushed out of competitive electricity markets by an abundance of cheap natural gas and renewable energy.” He may be correct that low natural gas prices are giving coal and nuclear power a run for their money, but wind and solar power prices certainly don’t. It is precisely because wind and solar power are so expensive and unreliable that the wind and solar industries need lavish subsidies and renewable power mandates to force consumers to purchase their products.

Perry digs himself a deeper hole by calling energy security considerations a “bailout” and then arguing, “It is time to let natural gas and renewable power earn their fair share of the electricity market, unencumbered by government interference.”

“Unencumbered by government interference”?!! This is a renewable power apologist talking? Forgive us for spewing our coffee all over our keyboard as we read this.

Free-market economists can debate whether the federal government should assign preference to baseload power that is available 24/7 and is relatively immune to supply interruptions. But people championing wind and solar power are the last ones who can criticize coal and nuclear power finally being considered for a small portion of the renewable power industry’s federal energy subsidies.

VIDEO: Dana Loesch Responds to Eric Church’s Attack on NRA Members

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Dana Loesch responds to Eric Church’s unfounded attack on NRA members. “He’s blaming an organization of millions of members. These are people who are his fans. Or at least were his fans. He’s attacking his fans and blaming them for gun violence.”

Didn’t We Already See This Play out With the Dixie Chicks?

Failed American Intelligence

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Offence is the best defense—this was the slogan and policy of the Soviet apparatchiks taught by Stalin. Never admit the crime committed, but accuse the opposition in that exact crime. We, the former Soviet citizens, knew the policy very well watching it for many years. This policy helped the Soviet system to survive for a hundred years, and under Putin’s leadership the current apparatchiks are flourishing in Russia today. Yes, nothing substantial has changed in Russia. The KGB is still running the country with a crony capitalism instead of failed socialism. That’s it. The agenda is still the same—One World Government Under Kremlin’s rule and for Putin to be a President of the world…

The Democrat Party is the No. 1 Enemy of America

The weeks after the Helsinki Trump/Putin Summit were full of Trump criticism, yet I decided not to participate in the hysteria but wait. Then I saw a vocal Trump critic, Brennon, tweet and it became clear to me: the former CIA Director was manipulating Americans through the politics of fear—a typical policy of the Soviet apparatchiks, a coordinated attack against President Trump, accusing him guilty of treason—offence is the best defense. It was a familiar to me hateful, vicious response of the Soviet apparatchiks guilty of that exact crime, accusing the leader of opposition in treason in the best traditions of Stalinist personal destruction. Judge for yourself:

“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of “high crimes & misdemeanors.” It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you?”  11:52 AM – Jul 16, 2018  Addressing Republicans he is taking a position of the Democrats, who are outraged with Trump behavior… Please, pay attention to the hateful and vicious manner of speech—it is not only Soviet tactics; it is also Soviet handwriting and script.

Moreover, the entire Socialist Mafia and media executed the same play-book, warning us a by hundred different voices about the treason committed by President Trump. We have two Socialists: a Trojan Horse Bernie Sanders and a new big mouth Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Both are very well drilled. The collaboration of the media and Socialist mafia doesn’t surprise me—the Soviet media has always promoted the Socialist ideology, it was a requirement of the Soviet Socialist Law. I hope you have already read my column describing Socialist Mafia in America. If not, you can read it now.  I am not alone thinking this way. Listen to a former CIA station Chief Daniel Hoffman:

“A former CIA station chief says that former CIA Director John Brennan “is doing Putin’s bidding” by publicly attacking and speculating about President Donald Trump. In an article at Cipher Brief, a national security website, CIA veteran Daniel Hoffman says that Brennan’s recent remarks play right into Putin’s hands. As a former KGB officer and director of its successor, the FSB, Putin’s weapons of choice for this covert campaign are espionage, and influence operations that target our political differences to weaken and divide us,” writes Hoffman. He argues that Putin “knows what makes our society tick” and understands that “the best way to spoil our democratic process is to link it with a touch of conspiracy, i.e. to the Kremlin.” BRENNAN IS ‘DOING PUTIN’S BIDDING’ WITH ANTI-TRUMP RHETORIC, SAYS FORMER CIA STATION CHIEF, The Daily Caller, Chuck Ross 04/05/2018

I trust this knowledgeable officer, who spent five years working in Moscow. I don’t trust American media and Socialist Mafia that coordinated vicious attacks against President Trump—it is too similar to the brainwashing policy of Soviet fascism—accusing Trump in treason while the crime was committed by another party—offence is the best defense. Perhaps, President Trump made a mistake confusing the DNC hacking and Russian meddling in the 2016 election—it has been his mistake that was exaggerated by the opposition to Pearl Harbor, Christel Night, and 9/11, making Trump the enemy of America. In reality, it is another party, the Democrat Party, which is the No. One enemy of America that collaborated with Russia for decades.

President Trump insisted he has been tough on Russia, describing former President Barack Obama as a “patsy” for the Kremlin. “Obama didn’t do it,” Trump told CNBC in an interview at the White House. “Obama was a patsy for Russia. A total patsy.”  “There’s been no president ever as tough as I have been on Russia.” He said and he is right: his actions and policy are louder than words. I don’t know whether the word “patsy” identifies completely the reality, I’d like to call a spade a spade—Stalin’s Socialism in America, which I named Soviet Fascism, the ideology that the Democrats’ leadership now adhere to.

Do you remember Obama’s open transformation of America’s political system left to us by our Founding Fathers to Socialism? Obamacare was a carbon copy of the socialist medicine implemented to destroy our medical system and create a chaos in the country, if not a total bankruptcy of the American Republic. President Trump is serving our country much better than his predecessor, who with the help of Socialist Mafia was implementing Socialism on our soil by deceiving Americans and marketing a cosmetic version of Socialism to fool you.  Obama is lying in the best traditions of Stalinist Political Correctness, covering up the horror of the real Communism/Socialism, vividly described by myself and Dr. Kengor:

“Too many young Americans are supporting communism. Millennials prefer socialism to capitalism, and 25 percent have a positive view of Lenin. One in four Americans believe that George W. Bush killed more people than Josef Stalin. And 69 percent of Millennials would vote for a socialist for president. They ought to know better. Communism is the most dangerous idea in world history, producing dire poverty, repression, and carnage wherever it has been tried. And no wonder—because communism flatly denies morality, human nature, and basic facts. But it’s always going to be different this time.” The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism by Dr. Paul Kengor, 2017.

I agree, it is going to be different this time, because we have President Trump and brave and knowledgeable Republicans like Rep. Davin Nunes, Bob Goodlatte, and other Republicans who are bringing the Truth to the surface. The Truth was buried by Obama in cahoots with the weaponized top of American Intelligence and Law Enforcement agencies, now under investigation. It was buried to cover-up the crime committed by the “criminal cabal” of the Obama admin. When speaking about upcoming November election and the Democrats, Rep .Nunes correctly said: “One-hundred percent, they are putting all their chips on the Republicans losing the House and all these investigations will shut down.” He is right.

As I repeated many times—Knowledge is Power and unfortunately, knowledge of Russia and its Intel is dangerously low among Republicans like Paul Ryan to confront the “criminal cabal” sufficiently and effectively. How does Ryan know that the actions of Rod J. Rosenstein don’t match High Crime & Misdemeanors? I have just the opposite opinion. Paul Ryan undermined the Republicans in the House. They also failed to go on offence and expose the Democrats for what they really are. And now we are dealing with the united forces of the Democrat leadership and Putin’s KGB confronting the Trump administration, President Trump personally, and his entire family. The Democrats are really the enemy of the American Republic, left to us by our Founding Fathers…

Failed American Intelligence

Our Intel had been paralyzed for several decades.  Writing about the destruction of our Intelligence and Security Apparatus for many years, I also repeated those main ideas, giving you a free functioning anti-American Socialist Mafia in the column published in this e-magazine on July 13, 2018, three days before the Trump/Putin press conference in Helsinki.  Russian interference is not a matter of dispute, it has been going on for a hundred years. That is the reason I am focusing on the anti-American Socialist Mafia that has been coordinated by the KGB since 1969. I am writing about that interference for thirty years and I know that the FBI blocked information about my writings for this particular reason to prevent the public to know the Truth. The absence of the Truth benefits only the Russian interest not the American one. And that fact once more confirms the successful KGB’s information-operation currently intact in America…

I completely agree with President Donald Trump and his assessment of the Obama weaponized Intelligence. He said that he respected the intelligence agencies but not the former prominent figures who made their careers by criticizing his presidency and continue defending it by accusing Trump of the exact crime they themselves committed.

“It’s been terrible,” Trump told CBS anchor Jeff Glor, citing the names of former CIA director John Brennan, former director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, Former Director of the National Security Agency Michael Hayden, former FBI director James Comey, as well as prominent FBI agents Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok.

The president responded to a question from Glor about whether or not he felt that former intelligence agents were “out to get him.” Trump said that he had difficulty trusting their judgement, as they stood vehemently against him. Donald Trump: No Confidence in Intelligence Led by Brennan, Clapper, Comey, BritBart, 18 Jul 2018

I was glad that President Trump mentioned the name of Michael Hayden—he is the man responsible for President George W. Bush seeing the soul in Putin’s eyes. Putin’s soul? It doesn’t exist. What a shame for the Intel! Yet, it is important to preserve the history of the shame to be able to learn from it.  Unfortunately, not only Intel was suffering a lack of knowledge pertaining to Russia. Look at the Senate Democrats, some of them remind me the Soviet “gorlopans,” people who have big mouths and little grey matter. Listening to Senators Warren, Gillibrand, and Blumenthal, I wonder how they got to the US. Senate, what do they know about Russia? I know how Mark Warner did it, skillfully crafted the similarity of his name to the well-known former Republican Senator John Warner, a knowledgeable and smart Senator. Socialists are inextricably connected to Fraud.

The other Soviet “gorlopan,” who defends Obama’s administration is New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. She was fooling you for many years in New York. When Gillibrand had to face a more conservative electorate, she claimed she opposed amnesty for illegal immigrants and held an A+ rating from the establishment gun group, the National Rifle Association. But now she has declared that the first thing Democrats should do if they take back Congress is abolish ICE. Do you remember the agenda of Soviet Socialism, I named Soviet fascism—destruction of the American Republic. Abolishing ICE is a direct road to achieving that. Please remember: all Socialists are deceiving you to have your votes, they are all inextricably connected to Fraud. Read my columns and books, educate yourself about Socialism. Alan West counted seventy Socialist in our Congress, I believe there are more than that.

There are Socialists in the House: Keith Ellison, a Muslim Representative from Minnesota and Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee, chastised Amazon for allowing “hateful merchandise” to be sold on its website. Though he specified concerns about “neo-nazis and white nationalist writers,” his opening paragraph referring to SPLC-designated “hate groups” should be cause for alarm. “The second in command of the Democratic National Committee wants Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to allow the Southern Poverty Law Center to identify “hate speech!” Ellison boldly endorses the SPLC as a “reliable, unbiased arbiter of what is and isn’t a hate group.” However, the SPLC is being challenged in court for tagging groups with broad support such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council with the “hate group” label. This is due to those groups’ opposition to abortion, advocacy for traditional marriage, and other conservative causes.” Deputy Chairman of DNC Wants Amazon to Ban “Hate Crime” Books – But Not Muslim Brotherhood, American Liberty Report. July 2018

Please, read the recent founding of the Daily Caller:

The FBI has an ongoing relationship with the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, Fox News host Tucker Carlson reported.

The SPLC once placed HUD Secretary Dr. Ben Carson on an “extremist watch list,” before backing down and removing him four months later.

The SPLC also works with Amazon, Twitter, Google and Facebook in their efforts to police their platforms.

The SPLC’s work has been plagued by inaccuracies and the group paid out a $3.3 million settlement in April. Peter Hansen reported, 7-28-2018.

Another fraud is just before your eyes. We know today that there were three versions of the Trump/Dossier from three different sources. It is possible, but it doesn’t change the essence and fraudulent concept of the Dossier. When I saw it in 2017, it took me only a couple of seconds to recognize a Russian Fallshivka—a fraud and typical KGB fake product. I reacted to the Dossier immediately, writing and analyzing my impression. The word Dossier is coming from Napoleonic Code of the Russian Law. I can repeat my conclusion testifying under the oath or to the lie detector. Any former Soviet citizens will recognized the Trump/Dossier as the KGB product at once. Read my analyses of the Trump/Dossier: The Global Spy Ring, January 1, 2018, “So we now find out that it was indeed the unverified and Fake Dirty Dossier that was paid for by Crooked Hillary Clinton and the DNC, that was knowingly & falsely submitted to FISA and which was responsible for starting the totally conflicted and discredited Mueller Witch Hunt!” 6:30 AM – Jul 23, 2018  I would insist—the Trump/Dossier is the Russian Fallshivka, a product of the KGB.  No experts of our Intel identified the fraud, moreover, the FBI used it as a legitimate document, spying against President Trump. What a shame! Using the term KGB, I mean the entire Russian Intel—it is a collective image, the reason for that is those three letters are familiar to vast majority of Americans.

The Andropov Legacy in America

Yuri Andropov

The recent action of our Law Enforcement reminded me even more of the Soviet Government: President Donald Trump blasted the federal government and one of his former attorneys Saturday morning for using “perhaps illegal” means to delegitimize his presidency. “Inconceivable that the government would break into a lawyer’s office (early in the morning) – almost unheard of. Even more inconceivable that a lawyer would tape a client – totally unheard of & perhaps illegal,” Trump wrote in a tweet. And Trump is right again: it is his private life years prior to his presidency. What had happened is a typical KGB information-operation on American land–Obama’s socialist legacy where private life belongs to the State.

As a former Soviet defense attorney, I can testify that even in the Soviet Union the attorney/client privilege had existed: it did not guarantee you winning of the case, yet I tried and won some cases. But… in America a lawyer taping a private conversation with a client and now the entire world can see it and get involved!? I called it Sovietization of America and had given you many other examples of ideological similarity with the Soviets in my books and columns. Yet, there is a menacing sign of this similarity–Lanny Davis as a Cohen lawyer. Lanny Davis has been a member of the Clinton Mafia for a long time. Please remember my identification of the Controlled Opposition, I have learned it being a Soviet attorney within the legal community at the time of Yuri Andropov as the KGB Chairman. Controlled Opposition means having a spy who is acting within the real opposition party, who behaves as the forces controlling him command. Considering this, I expect that Mr. Cohen will be a toy in the hand of the Socialist Mafia and Democrat’s leadership to attack President Trump. Knowledge is Power.

Being a former Soviet attorney, I know the corrupt Soviet Socialist System and the methods and tricks it operates on. Living in and learning my adapted country, America, it became obvious to me where the social changes were coming from. Yes, all of that has begun in 1969 by the Andropov/Clinton conspiracy, which continued by Obama/Putin Alliance before your eyes during the last decade. I dedicated many pages to Yuri Andropov, the KGB Chairman 1967-1982. Those fifteen years of his tenure, I served as a defense attorney within the legal community that discussed Andropov all those years. I know Yuri Andropov better than any other chairmen of the KGB and consider him the third ideologue after Lenin and Stalin. It was Andropov who thought globally, and glued the ideology to the Russian Intelligence forever. He is the person who designed the massive infiltration of the KGB agents to the American soil. Here is a description of Andropov’s personality by another KGB General:

“In 1972 the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB Chairman, Yuri Andropov told me a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America that could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter the United States. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe.”  (“Russian Footprints,” by Ion Mihai Pacepa, National Review Online, August 24, 2008.)

General Pacepa wrote in the same article: “According to Andropov… the Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch. Terrorism and violence against Israel and her master, American Zionism, would flow naturally from the Muslims’ religious fervor, Andropov sermonized.” What can better confirm my term Soviet Fascism than those words? They summarized my entire writings. Now you have Andropov’s portrait and I remind you again that under him the infiltration into Western civilization had tripled or quadrupled. Under his watch occurred the bloodiest terrorists’ attacks in the world, from the Munich murder of Israelis in the Olympic Village to the Johnstown tragedy in America.

I called Andropov a conduit between Stalin and Vladimir Putin—who is a devoted disciple of both. Andropov came to power in 1967 and without the truth about Andropov/Clinton conspiracy we have never exposed the crime committed against the American Republic by the “criminal cabal” of our security apparatus and Democrats. If Stalin had the ideas to destroy America, Andropov worked out the strategy and tactics for the KGB of how to achieve that destruction. He had a monumental plan, designed and aimed at the destruction of American capitalism totally through infiltration of the American Media and the security apparatus, transforming both from within into something resembling the Soviet media and KGB, subordinated to the top ideological leadership. Recall now, how our coordinated mainstream media attacked in unison Trump and how often Obama spoke against Law Enforcement to make it obedient to his ideology of Socialism. Andropov’s design has “achieved” a great deal…

For the last nine years, I was writing about Obama/Putin Alliance and the attempt to implement the corrupt system of Soviet Socialism in America, which I named Soviet Fascism. There is no need to repeat the deeds of Obama/Putin Alliance, and remind you about some bad actors, they were described in Socialist Lies: From Stalin to the Clintons, Obamas, and Sanders, Xlibris, 2016. The current book of Jerome Corsi Killing the Deep State is continuing to expose the Obama/Putin Alliance and those bad actors. Look for the recent book by Gregg Jarrett The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump. I would call the current Witch Hunt of President Trump the Russia Hoax as well. The mandate to investigate Russia’s meddling in the 2018 election gradually turned into a dirty laundry exposure against our President. Only Russia is interested in what is going on in America, to divide and paralyze the entire country …

Despite very thoughtful analyses by Gregg Jarrett, the media and some White House reporters have been pushing the Trump-Russia Collusion narrative for two years now, and many of them are not willing to let it go despite the fact that there’s still no “there there.” And I am repeating again: Knowledge is Power! Today the Trump/Russian collusion story has become a destructive narrative in Washington D.C. that overwhelms and prevents the normal functioning of the government and diverts attention from an actually serious foreign threat. Obama’s FBI is a hotbed of anti-Trump so-called conspiracies, it’s where the Obama/Putin Alliance launched their campaign to undermine Donald Trump, putting our country at great risk. Yet, Obama/Putin Alliance of the Democrat Party could only prevail on the prior foundation of the Andropov/Clinton conspiracy of the Democrat Party. To understand that it is necessary to go back and analyze the events and Clinton’s behavior in Oxford in 1969. Read my column Origin of the Washington Spy-Ring and the Swamp, March 31, 2018. I don’t know for how many years our Intel had been sleeping and missing an elephant in the “criminal cabal” –Bill Clinton. And the Clinton Mafia was growing into an international force, corrupting our political system from within…

When the FBI applied for the FISA warrant, the Bureau did not disclose that the dossier was bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democrat National Committee. This is another fraud, which is connecting all bad actors of the “criminal cabal.” Despite an overwhelming fraud, the media desperately tries to keep the Trump/ Russia collusion ‘narrative’ alive, even as evidence fades and bad actors have been exposed. Unfortunately, most Americans have no idea of the massive, deep, and ubiquitous infiltration by the KGB into American institutions. They do not know that two U.S. Presidents had been chosen for them by the KGB.

America has two types of people committing betrayals: those who do not like the system established by our Founding Fathers and are trying to transform it– they are currently collaborating with the KGB to destroy America the Beautiful, and those people who haven’t a clue about the KGB infiltrations, hence becoming their accomplices. Current security people won’t be able to identify them without reading my books and columns. One thing history as taught us that we cannot let up until the enemy is completely defeated.

August is a dangerous month—WW1 started by the Serbian Intel in August 1914. Today is a very dangerous time for the American Republic. We are witnessing the result of an incredible abuse and corruption within the weaponized FBI, CIA, and DOJ by the preceding administrations. In my opinion we are dealing today with a huge international conspiracy to oust President Trump. Moreover, this conspiracy is coordinated and run by the Russian Intelligence. The Russian meddling in the 2016 election and the accusation that Trump colluded with them, is the KGB’s maneuvering trick to cover-up their real collaboration with the Democrat Party for decades. It is not a coincidence that 20-30 of my latest columns described the KGB and its Chairman Yuri Andropov. We are witnessing the disastrous result of failed American Intelligence in August 2018…

Conclusion

First: Anti-Trump “criminal cabal” was manufactured and organized by Russian Intel through Democrats’ leadership and the Clinton Mafia.

Second: Anti-Trump “criminal cabal” consists of two groups: the leadership of the Deep State and the leadership of the Clinton Mafia. Today, Rod J. Rosenstein of the DOJ is a connective link of the two groups.

Third: Anti-Trump “criminal cabal” is run by three individuals: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Vladimir Putin. The three are working together for decades…

Forth: Investigation of this huge case of international espionage and treason requires deep knowledge of Russia and its Intel. The current FBI Director, Christopher Wray did not read my books, he doesn’t know that it took Stalin twenty-nine years to create and establish the Chinese Communist State. The structure, agenda, and ideology were identical in Russia and China. The two National Intelligence Agencies executed the same strategy, tactics, methods, and tricks, working as a hand and glove. Yet, there is a difference today: a billion hardworking Chinese people have achieved substantially more than the alcoholic and drug addled Russians…

Knowledge Is Power!   Good luck America!

RELATED ARTICLE: Germany and Russia’s Secret War Against America

To be continued   www.simonapipko1.com   www.drrichswier.com/author/spipko/

Does Diversity Really Unite Us? Citizenship and Immigration

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By Edward J. Erler, Co-Author, The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on April 11, 2018, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Colorado Springs.

President Trump’s zero-tolerance policy for illegal border crossers has provoked a hysterical reaction from Democrats, establishment Republicans, the progressive-liberal media, Hollywood radicals, and the deep state. What particularly motivated the ire of these Trump-haters was the fact that the zero-tolerance policy would require the separation of parents and children at the border. The hysteria was, of course, completely insincere and fabricated, given that the policy of separating children and parents was nothing new—it had been a policy of the Obama and Bush administrations as well.

Furthermore, where is the compassion for the thousands of American children who are separated from their parents every year as a result of arrests and convictions for non-violent crimes? Many of those arrested are single mothers whose infants become wards of the government until their mothers complete their sentences. No hysteria or effusive compassion is elicited by these separations, confirming that the object of the hysteria surrounding illegal border crossers is to force open borders on the nation under the guise of compassion for children.

President Trump’s preferred solution for ending the influx of illegal immigrants and providing border security is a wall; it is also the preferred solution of the American people. Zero tolerance is an interim policy that—if enforced—will help deter illegal crossers. The hysteria provoked by zero tolerance could have been predicted, but its magnitude and sheer insanity are almost breathtaking. Some prominent constitutional scholars have gone so far as to argue that the government has no constitutional authority to control the border. And this, which seems almost beyond hysteria, from the elite intellectual class that should be most immune to hysteria!

In the meantime, a Federal District Court judge in Southern California has discovered a substantive due process right guaranteeing the right to “family integrity” lurking in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment and has ordered all children reunited with their illegal immigrant parents. Obviously the judge expects the parents to be released from incarceration to join their children, but the Trump administration seems determined to keep parents and children together in detention centers until legal proceedings determine their fate.

More than a century ago, the Supreme Court announced what was considered the settled sense of the matter when it remarked: “It is an accepted maxim of international law . . . and essential to self-preservation, to forbid the entrance of foreigners within [a sovereign nation’s] dominions, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe.” This view was reaffirmed in the recent Supreme Court decision, handed down on June 26, that upheld Trump’s travel ban on foreign nationals from eight countries, six of which have majority Muslim populations.

Part of the complaint against the ban was that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because Trump had displayed “animus” against Muslims in speeches before and after the 2016 election. The plaintiffs argued that the national security reasons for the ban were merely pretexts for Trump’s thinly disguised contempt for the Muslim religion. Although the Court agreed that individual injury could be alleged under the Establishment Clause, the travel ban on its face was neutral with respect to religion, and it was therefore possible to decide the issue on statutory rather than constitutional grounds.

The dissenting opinion in this case would have invalidated the ban on constitutional grounds, based on the idea that the President’s campaign statements and those of his advisers proved that animus against Islam was the real and pervasive motivation for the travel ban. Had this dissenting opinion prevailed, it would have created an anomaly in constitutional jurisprudence. Conceding that the plain language of the travel ban was neutral and therefore constitutional, what rendered the travel ban unconstitutional was Trump’s purported display of animus in his public speeches. If signed by any president other than Trump, there would therefore be no constitutional objections. In other words, in the minds of the dissenters, psychoanalysis of Trump’s motives held greater constitutional significance than the intent of the law expressed in its plain language.

In any case, the majority opinion held that “by its plain language” the Immigration and Naturalization Act “grants the President broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States. The President lawfully exercised that discretion based on his findings . . . that entry of the covered aliens would be detrimental to the national interest.” Few limits have ever been placed on the President’s broad authority to act under the Immigration and Naturalization Act, especially when national security and foreign relations are involved.

In the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump appealed to the importance of citizens and borders. In other words, Trump took his stand on behalf of the nation-state and citizenship against the idea of a homogeneous world-state populated by “universal persons.” In appealing directly to the people, Trump succeeded in defeating both political parties, the media, political professionals, pollsters, academics, and the bureaucratic class. All these groups formed part of the bi-partisan cartel that had represented the entrenched interests of the Washington establishment for many years. Although defeated in the election, the cartel has not given up. It is fighting a desperate battle to maintain its power.

Historically, constitutional government has been found only in the nation-state, where the people share a common good and are dedicated to the same principles and purposes. The homogeneous world-state—the European Union on a global scale—will not be a constitutional democracy; it will be the administration of “universal personhood” without the inconvenience of having to rely on the consent of the governed. It will be government by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, much like the burgeoning administrative state that is today expanding its reach and magnifying its power in the United States. “Universal persons” will not be citizens; they will be clients or subjects. Rights will be superfluous because the collective welfare of the community—determined by the bureaucrats—will have superseded the rights of individuals.

Progressive liberalism no longer views self-preservation as a rational goal of the nation-state. Rather, it insists that self-preservation and national security must be subordinate to openness and diversity. America’s immigration policies, we are told, should demonstrate our commitment to diversity because an important part of the American character is openness, and our commitment to diversity is an affirmation of “who we are as Americans.” If this carries a risk to our security, it is a small price to pay. Indeed, the willing assumption of risk adds authenticity to our commitment.

In support of all this, we are asked to believe something incredible: that the American character is defined only by its unlimited acceptance of diversity. A defined American character—devotion to republican principles, republican virtue, the habits and manners of free citizens, self-reliance—would in that case be impermissibly exclusive, and thus impermissibly American. The homogeneous world-state recognizes only openness, devotion to diversity, and acceptance as virtues. It must therefore condemn exclusivity as its greatest vice. It is the nation-state that insists on exclusive citizenship and immigration policies that impose various kinds of restrictions.

Our progressive politicians and opinion leaders proclaim their commitment to diversity almost daily, chanting the same refrain: “Diversity is our strength.” This is the gospel according to political correctness. But how does diversity strengthen us? Is it a force for unity and cohesiveness? Or is it a source of division and contention? Does it promote the common good and the friendship that rests at the heart of citizenship? Or does it promote racial and ethnic division and something resembling the tribalism that prevents most of the world from making constitutional government a success? When is the last time we heard anyone in Washington talk about the common good? We are used to hearing talk about the various stakeholders and group interests, but not much about what the nation has in common.

This should not be surprising. Greater diversity means inevitably that we have less in common, and the more we encourage diversity the less we honor the common good. Any honest and clear-sighted observer should be able to see that diversity is a solvent that dissolves the unity and cohesiveness of a nation—and we should not be deceived into believing that its proponents do not understand the full impact of their advocacy!

Diversity, of course, marches under the banner of tolerance, but is a bastion of intolerance. It enforces its ideological liberalism with an iron fist that is driven by political correctness, the most ingenious (and insidious) device for suppressing freedom of speech and political dissent ever invented.

Political correctness could have been stopped dead in its tracks over three decades ago, but Republicans refused to kill it when they had the opportunity. In the presidential election campaign of 1980, Ronald Reagan promised to end affirmative action with the stroke of a pen by rescinding the executive order, issued by Lyndon Johnson, that created it. This promise was warmly received by the electorate in that election. But President Reagan failed to deliver his promised repeal. Too many Republicans had become convinced that they could use affirmative action to their advantage—that the largesse associated with racial class entitlements would attract minorities to the Republican Party. By signing on to this regime of political correctness, Republicans were never able to mount an effective opposition to its seemingly irresistible advance.

Today, any Republican charged or implicated with racism—however tendentious, outrageous, implausible, exaggerated, or false the charge or implication may be—will quickly surrender, often preemptively. This applies equally to other violations of political correctness: homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, sexism, and a host of other so-called irrational prejudices. After all, there is no rational defense against an “irrational fear,” which presumably is what the “phobias” are. Republicans have rendered themselves defenseless against political correctness, and the establishment wing of the party doesn’t seem overly concerned, as they frequently join the chorus of Democrats in denouncing Trump’s violations of political correctness. Only President Trump seems undeterred by the tyrannous threat that rests at the core of political correctness.

In addition to the Affirmative Action Executive Order in 1965, there were other actions taken during the Great Society that were meant to transform America. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was sound legislation, authorized by the Fourteenth Amendment and designed to abolish racial discrimination in employment. But the administrative agencies, with the full cooperation of the courts, quickly transformed its laudable goals into mandates that required racial discrimination to achieve racial proportionality in hiring and promotion.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 similarly sought to ban racial discrimination in voting. It too was transmogrified into an act that required racial discrimination in order to achieve proportional results in elections. Proportional results were touted by a palpable fiction as the only reliable evidence of free and fair elections.

The Immigration Act of 1965 was a kind of affirmative action plan to provide remedies for those races or ethnic groups that had been discriminated against in the past. Caucasian immigrants from European nations had been given preference in past years; now it was time to diversify the immigrant population by changing the focus to Third World nations, primarily nations in Latin America and Asia. The goal, as some scholars have slowly come to realize, was to diversify the demographic composition of the American population from majority white to a majority of people of color. There was also some anticipation that those coming from these Third World countries were more likely to need the ministrations of the welfare state and therefore more likely to be captured by the Democratic Party, the party promoting the welfare state.

White middle-class Americans in the 1960s and 70s were often referred to as selfish because their principal interests were improving their own lives, educating their own children, and contributing to their own communities. They showed no inclination to support diversity and the kind of authentic commitment to the new openness that was being advocated by progressive-liberalism. They stood as a constant roadblock to the administrative state, stubbornly resisting higher taxes, increased immigration, and expansion of the welfare state. Once they were no longer a majority, they would be powerless to resist. Demographers say that sometime around 2040 is the day of reckoning when whites will no longer be a majority and will sometime thereafter have to endure the fate they have inflicted on others for so many years. This radical demographic change will be due almost entirely to the immigration reform that was put into motion by the Immigration Act of 1965.

Of course, it is entirely a fiction that the American political system has produced monolithic white majorities that rule at the expense of so-called “discrete and insular minorities.” Whites as a class have never constituted a majority faction in the nation, and the Constitution was explicitly written to prevent such majorities from forming. The fact that, among a host of other considerations, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by a supposed “monolithic white majority” to promote the equal protection rights of minorities belies the idea that it was a majority faction ruling in its own racial class interest.

President George W. Bush, no less than President Obama, was an advocate of a “borderless world.” A supporter of amnesty and a path to citizenship for illegal aliens, he frequently stated that “family values don’t stop at the border” and embraced the idea that “universal values” transcend a nation’s sovereignty. He called himself a “compassionate conservative,” and said on several occasions that we should be more compassionate to our less fortunate neighbors to the south.

President Reagan used this same kind of rhetoric when he signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which provided amnesty for three million illegal aliens. This was touted by Reagan as a way of “humanely” dealing with the issue of illegal immigration. In his signing statement, he said the Act “is both generous to the alien and fair to the countless thousands of people throughout the world who seek legally to come to America.” The Act was supposed to be a one-time-only amnesty in exchange for stronger border control, but only the most naive in Washington believed that the promise of border control would be honored. In fact, illegal immigration continued unabated. The Act also fueled expectations—even demands—for additional amnesties, and delays in implementing new amnesties have been proffered as evidence by immigration activists (including Jeb Bush) that the American people lack compassion.

Any clear-thinking observer, however, can see that compassion is not a sound basis either for foreign policy or immigration policy. Compassion is more likely to lead to contempt than gratitude in both policy areas. The failure of the 1986 amnesty should be a clear reminder of the useful Machiavellian adage that in the world of realpolitik it is better to be feared than loved. Fear is more likely to engender respect, whereas love or compassion is more likely to be regarded as a contemptible sign of weakness. In 1984 Reagan received 37 percent of the Hispanic vote, but after the 1986 amnesty George H.W. Bush received a significantly lower 30 percent. Granted, Bush was no Reagan, but such ingratitude seemed to puzzle Republicans.

Republicans and Democrats alike are reluctant to consider serious measures to control illegal immigration. Republicans want to continue the steady supply of cheap and exploitable labor, and Democrats want future voters. Republicans are thinking only in the short term—they are not thinking politically. Democrats always think politically. President Trump wants to stop chain migration and the diversity lottery. Those who win in the diversity lottery also begin chain migration, as do all legal immigrants. Since 2005, more than nine million foreign nationals have arrived in the U.S. by chain migration, and when they become voting citizens, in all likelihood, two-thirds of them will vote Democrat. Trump knows how to think politically!

Birthright citizenship contributes to a borderless world. Any woman who comes to the United States as a legal or illegal alien and gives birth confers the boon of American citizenship on her child. In these instances, America has no control over who becomes a citizen. Constitutional law experts say it is a settled issue that the Constitution adopted the English common law of birthright citizenship. William Blackstone is cited as the authority for this proposition, having written the authoritative Commentaries on the Laws of England—a work that was well known to our nation’s Founders. What the proponents of birthright citizenship seem to ignore is that Blackstone always refers to “birthright subjects” and “birthright subjectship,” never mentioning citizens or citizenship in his four volume work. Under the common law, anyone born under the protection of the king owed “perpetual allegiance” to the king in return. Blackstone freely admitted that birthright subjectship was an inheritance from the feudal system, which defined the relations of master and servant. Under the English common law there were no citizens—only subjects.

The Declaration of Independence, however, proclaims that the American people “are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown.” Thus, it is clear that the American people rejected the common law as a basis for citizenship. What is substituted in place of “perpetual allegiance” to a king is “the consent of the governed,” with the clear implication that no individual can be ruled without his consent. Consent—not the accident of birth—is the basis for American citizenship.

James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration and the Constitution and later a member of the Supreme Court, perfectly expressed the matter when he wrote: “In America there are citizens, but no subjects.” Is it plausible—is it even remotely credible—that the Founders, after fighting a revolutionary war to reject the feudal relic of “perpetual allegiance,” would have adopted that same feudal relic as the ground of citizenship for the new American regime?

The American people can, of course, consent to allow others to join the compact that created the American nation, but they have the sovereign right to specify the terms and conditions for granting entry and the qualifications for citizenship. Presumably the qualifications for entry and naturalization will be whether those who wish to enter demonstrate a capacity to adopt the habits, manners, independence, and self-reliance of republican citizens and devotion to the principles that unite the American people. Furthermore, it would be unreasonable not to expect that potential immigrants should possess useful skills that will ensure that they will not become victims of the welfare state.

Immigration policies should serve the interests of the American people and of the nation—they should not be viewed as acts of charity to the world. Putting America first is a rational goal. It is the essence of sovereignty. And the sovereign nation-state is the only home of citizenship—as it is the only home of constitutional government.

Edward J. ErlerEdward J. Erler is professor emeritus of political science at California State University, San Bernardino. He earned his B.A. from San Jose State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School. He has published numerous articles on constitutional topics in journals such as Interpretation, the Notre Dame Journal of Law, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He was a member of the California Advisory Commission on Civil Rights from 1988-2006 and served on the California Constitutional Revision Commission in 1996. He is the author of The American Polity and co-author of The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration.

VIDEO: Ex-Muslim Woman Warns, “Do not vote for Abdul El-Sayed For Michigan Governor!”

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Investigative journalist Laura Loomer traveled to Michigan with The United West to investigate Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim candidate running for Governor in Michigan as a Democrat Socialist.

El-Sayed is a Sharia compliant Muslim, but his political platform and talking points directly contradict Islamic law.

Farrah Prudence is an ex-Muslim. Loomer sat down with her and asked her about El-Sayed. According to Farrah, El-Sayed is Sharia compliant and his policies pose a direct threat to women in America given his devout practice of Islamic law, which is inherently misogynistic.

Adam Putnam Lies about the FairTax — Putnam looks more and more like a Charlie Crist republican

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Adam Putnam launched the below ad titled “23% More” on July 24th, 2018. The ad attacks his Florida gubernatorial opponent Congressman Ron DeSantis for his support of the FairTax.

NewsMax reports in an article titled “New Adam Putnam Ad Hits DeSantis on 23% Sales Tax Plan” that the ad states:

“What would a 23 percent sales tax do to Florida’s economy?” asks the ad now on YouTube, dubbing DeSantis as “D.C. DeSantis.”

“If Congressman DeSantis had his way, everything would cost 23 percent more — groceries, gas, home purchases.”

“Congressman DeSantis sponsored legislation to increase sales taxes by 23 percent, hurting families, destroying jobs, devastating tourism. Washington is full of bad ideas and phony politicians. Ron DeSantis and his huge tax increase fit right in,” the ad continues.

Read more.

The problem is Putnam is lying.

Libertarian radio host Neal Boortz, who co-wrote “The FairTax Book,” responded to Putnam’s ad with a tweet: “If you are having trouble understanding the FairTax, perhaps you ought to comment me. I wrote the book.” He followed up, “The Adam Putnam campaign is LYING THROUGH ITS TEETH … and they know it.”

What Putnam doesn’t tell you is that Floridians will benefit from the FairTax because it will eliminate all federal taxes (income, estate, payroll, gift and business). Florida has no state income tax, which is a reason many people relocate to the Sunshine State. Let’s look at the chart below showing the current income tax brackets and rates to understand why Putnam is lying.

You will notice that individuals making more than $38,000 will actually see a tax decrease. Also note that the FairTax gives those below the federal poverty level (FPL) a quarterly refund of estimated sales taxes paid under the FairTax.

Here is the a table of percentages of the FPL guidelines.

Size of
Family Unit		 48 Contiguous
States and D.C.		 Alaska Hawaii
1 $12,140 $15,180 $13,960
2 16,460 20,580 18,930
3 20,780 25,980 23,900
4 25,100 31,380 28,870
5 29,420 36,780 33,840
6 33,740 42,180 38,810
7 38,060 47,580 43,780
8 42,380 52,980 48,750
For each additional
person, add		  4,320  5,400  4,970

The FairTax also eliminates all small business and corporate federal taxes. This saves Florida’s individuals, small business and corporations money by neither having to file tax returns nor hiring tax lawyers and accountants. In its annual survey of Tax Return Preparation Fee Averages, the National Society of Accountants reports the following average fees its members charged to prepare 2014 tax returns: 1040 with state return with no itemized deductions: $159. 1040 with Schedule A (itemized deductions) and state return: $273.

Additionally, Congress will lose its power to use taxes to reward and punish individuals and companies. Congress and career politicians will lose their ability to weaponize the IRS.

When your factor in all of these items it appears that the title of “D.C.” belongs to Putnam, not DeSantis. Putnam wants Floridians to continue to pay federal income taxes. Sounds like Putnam is still part of the swamp.

When the FairTax is implemented Florida will truly become an Income Tax Free state.

RELATED ARTICLE: Misleading Putnam ad twists DeSantis stance on taxes – PolitiFact

For the ‘Sake of the Church’ — Drain the Swamp of Clerics who Commit Sexual Sins

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Brad Miner hopes the McCarrick scandal will benefit the Church. It’s time to drain the swamp of clerics who commit sexual sins, priests and bishops alike. 

A prediction: The McCarrick revelations will turn out to be a good thing. How so? Well, a part of the priest sex-abuse fairy tale is the cover-up.  We know this – and that the cover-up always magnifies the crime.

When a good priest has discovered the homosexual sins of a bad priest (let alone of a bishop), and if that good priest has gone to his pastor or to a bishop (let alone an archbishop), it’s likely that he will hear a version of this:

Thank you, Father. We must do something about this, and we will! But, for the sake of the Church, you must tell no one else. The media will pounce on such a story to discredit Catholicism itself. You’re brave to come forward. But I wouldn’t want you to risk your career by becoming the focus of an ongoing and sensational investigation.

That’s a high hurdle to jump in a Church that values hierarchy and discipline. But my prediction is that a great many priests who know of homosexual (and instances, too, of heterosexual) sins by priests (let alone bishops) will now begin to come forward.

I hope they will – every last one of them. Because the drip, drip, drip of scandal is really hurting the Church. If there’s a levee that needs bursting, we should welcome that: a torrent to cleanse the swamp.

Let the flood come: of resignations and laicizations – perhaps hundreds of them. It will be destabilizing, and as a conservative I shudder at the prospect. But the miasma is now intolerable. The stench of suspicion is falling on every bishop, if not also every priest.

It must also be recognized that clergy engaging in sex-abuse is just a part of the problem. The 2004 John Jay College of Criminal Justice report to the USCCB contains some good data on the crisis. But its purview was limited to the abuse of kids, 17 and under. No research was done about the sexual escapades of priests with men, 18 and older.

Those data would likely reveal a much, much larger scandal – one that would explode a key conclusion of the John Jay researchers as well as the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe and the likes of Fr. James Martin, S.J., namely that the scandals “have nothing whatsoever to do with homosexuality.” This simply cannot be true.

I’ll now tell a tale I’ve alluded to before at TCT. But first I’ll repeat what I’ve said to close friends, some of whom contribute to this website. Had I known in 1973 when I was about to enter the Catholic Church what we all know now about the extent of predatory homosexuality in the priesthood and the numbers of, by definition, sinful homosexual encounters among priests, boys, teens, and men, I would not have become Catholic. Thank God I didn’t know, because – despite these scandals – I cannot imagine any other spiritual home.

Former Vatican official Krzysztof Charamsa “came out” and was fired and defrocked

So . . .

Shortly after I made my profession of faith (I can’t recall the season because it was in California), I came home late from work and missed the 5 PM Mass at the church I attended. The celebrant, shaking hands outside, told me there was a 6 PM at a church a few miles away, so I drove there.

At the end of that Mass, a priest approached me in the parking lot. He said he’d never seen me at Mass before. I explained, an he said:

“I want to ask you something, but I don’t want to shake your faith.”

“How would you do that?”

“It’s something private.”

I held up my hands: Huh?

Short story shorter, he said he wanted to have sex with me.

“You’re under a vow of chastity,” I said.

“No, no. You’re a new Catholic. My vow is celibacy – not to marry – not chastity, yes?”

I went on to my car.

A few months later, back home in Ohio where I grew up, I went again to an evening Mass, and as I was receiving Communion, the priest whispered: “Come see me in the sacristy, okay?”

I’m embarrassed to admit the alarm bells didn’t go off. This guy was subtler. He asked if I’d come with him to say the blessing before a high-school basketball game a few days on.

At the end of the first quarter, he said, “Thanks for the company. I owe you a drink.” So we drove to a bar I’d never seen or heard of in the middle of downtown Columbus. When we got out of the car, he opened the trunk, took off his clerical collar, and put on a jacket that matched exactly the one I was wearing.

I got that sinking feeling. And, yes, the bar was a gay hangout.

“What’ll you have?” he asked.

“Any old beer,” I said, and he went to fetch it.

The bar was five miles from where I lived. I quickly exited, jogged a couple of blocks, and then walked the rest of the way home.

Then I visited a seminary, still considering a vocation to the priesthood. (I’d also visited another seminary and two monasteries.) The vocations director took me to dinner, and it happened again. I won’t repeat now what I said to him then.

At this point, I’d been a Roman Catholic for less than six months. The upshot was: I steered clear of priests for the next fifteen years, pretty much until I met Fathers Neuhaus, Rutler, and Schall.

This anecdotal evidence proves nothing. And I would qualify the meme in L’Affaire McCarrick that, “Everybody knew.” Lots did, but most people had no clue. Unless you were party to the rumor mill, you knew nothing about it.

But I’m not the only adult who was “hit on” by priests. I’m probably not the only guy to whom it happened thrice.

Let’s drain the swamp – for the sake of the Church.

Brad Miner

Brad Miner

Brad Miner is senior editor of The Catholic Thing, senior fellow of the Faith & Reason Institute, and Board Secretary of Aid to the Church In Need USA. He is a former Literary Editor of National Review. His new book, Sons of St. Patrick, written with George J. Marlin, is now on sale. The Compleat Gentleman, is available on audio.

EDITORS NOTE: © 2018 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. The featured image of Pope Francis is by Stefano Rellandini/Reuters.

RELATED ARTICLE: More Fiddling while the House is Burning

VISA Overstays make up 2/3rds of the Annual Increase of Illegal Aliens

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Florida politicians have promised to implement e-Verify statewide. They have not. A recent study shows that Florida ranks third in the number of VISA overstays. Mandating e-Verify in the sunshine state would help solve this problem by eliminating the job magnate, which leads to the largest annual increase of illegal aliens.

In a study titled “The 2,000 Mile Wall in Search of a Purpose: Since 2007 Visa Overstays have Outnumbered Undocumented Border Crossers by a Half Million” Robert Warren
and Donald Kerwin from the Center for Migration Studies found:

  • In 2014, about 4.5 million US residents, or 42 percent of the total undocumented population, were overstays.
  • Overstays accounted for about two-thirds (66 percent) of those who arrived (i.e., joined the undocumented population) in 2014.
  • Overstays have exceeded EWIs [entries without inspection] every year since 2007, and 600,000 more overstays than EWIs have arrived since 2007.
  • Mexico is the leading country for both overstays and EWIs; about one-third of undocumented arrivals from Mexico in 2014 were overstays.
  • California has the largest number of overstays (890,000), followed by New York (520,000), Texas (475,000), and Florida (435,000).
  • Two states had 47 percent of the 6.4 million EWIs in 2014: California (1.7 million) and Texas (1.3 million).
  • The percentage of overstays varies widely by state: more than two-thirds of the undocumented who live in Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania are overstays. By contrast, the undocumented population in Kansas, Arkansas, and New Mexico consists of fewer than 25 percent overstays. [Emphasis added]

Download the full study.

In a Washington Post article titled “Most immigrants who enter the country do so legally, federal data shows” Christopher Ingraham reports:

A September 2017 Office of Immigration Statistics data brief estimated that in fiscal year 2016, the latest year for which complete data is available, there were 170,000 successful illegal border crossings occurring outside of authorized ports of entry. That’s down roughly 90 percent since 2000, and it’s about one-seventh of the roughly 1.2 million immigrants who obtained lawful permanent resident status via a green card, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The number of successful border crossings doesn’t include illegal entries that happened via border checkpoints (people smuggled in via vehicles, for instance) or over sea. That number is not available for 2016, but in previous years it added anywhere from 10 to 20 percent to the total number of illegal entries, according to a 2016 Institute for Defense Analyses report commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security.

The Florida legislature and Florida’s Congressional delegation must take seriously the use of VISA overstays. They need to understand that, while a border wall is necessary, so to is the need to pass legislation to deport those who overstay their VISAs.

RELATED ARTICLE: British woman caught overstaying visa by 160 days slaps immigration officer

I’ve seen what Open Borders can do. Stop them at any cost!

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The noise coming out of the Presidents Trump-Putin Singapore summit, and the furor—both real and manufactured—about family separation, has pushed aside critical debate that will determine our country’s future.  The pressures moving us toward the brink, however, have not stopped; and that must change.

A recent Fox News show explored whether the “abolish ICE” movement is becoming mainstream Democratic Party policy.  Partisans from both sides of the debate weighed in, and while the Democrat activist pushed back on that notion, he just as vehemently opposed ICE’s border enforcement activities.  I wished the moderator asked him if, as his arguments implied, he and others believe that those who came to this country illegally have a legitimate role here, including the right to vote; and that any activity by the United States to prevent others from coming here illegally would be morally wrong and outside the scope of our rights; because this is in fact the effect of the positions he and other Democrats are taking.

As someone who has seen the impact of open borders and lack of border enforcement, I can state unequivocally that nothing less than our national integrity is at stake.  Anyone who favors the sort of open border policies that find excuses for individual incursions in the name of some false human rights claim needs to come on my next mission along India’s borders with Nepal and Bangladesh.  And I should know about human rights as I have been placing my personal safety on the line for them since the turn of the century.  Anyone who believes that policies abetting open borders are not a dagger in our national heart should see the damage they caused and the international conflicts that they enable.

My education began in February 2008.  I was in Panitanki, a small village on the Indian side of the India-Nepal border, less than 50 miles south of Darjeeling—where they grow the famous tea.  I was taking a much needed break from my fight to stop the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Bangladesh; and my local associates brought me there so I could see India’s challenges firsthand.  Not unlike streets in border towns elsewhere, those in Panitanki were lined with small shops and itinerant peddlers hawking every sort of ware, legal and otherwise.  One shop was selling a plastic tote bag with the words Mazel Tov in Hebrew.  How it got there is anyone’s guess since I was probably the only Jew ever to visit the town.  Panitanki’s main road ends in a bridge over the Mechi River, which forms the border between India and Nepal.  As we got closer, the goods got more expensive, and the incoming traffic got more transparent.  A steady stream of trucks, covered wagons, and men carrying large packages on their heads crossed freely into India.  My Bengali colleagues would point to one and say “Arms,” to another and say “Drugs.”  “That other one,” they‘d say, “has counterfeit banknotes.  A big smuggling business.”  We were in the Chicken’s Neck, a 15 mile wide strip of Indian territory, bordered by Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh.  The area is notorious for the sort of smuggling we observed, and it is a known entry point for Islamist and Communist terrorists into India.

The illegal activity is so open that it did not raise so much as an eyebrow among the armed members of India’s Border Security Force—until, that is, they saw me with my video camera.  As we passed a pile of sandbags, two soldiers emerged brandishing their rifles.  “Put away your camera,” they ordered, and said they were confiscating it.  But I refused, asking them what they were afraid I would find.  We went back and forth for a time, knowing that they did not want this to end up on CNN or on the Foreign Minister’s desk; and we eventually worked out a deal.  They agreed not to take my camera, and I agreed not to take any more pictures.  We moved toward the bridge, but there was a problem.  Indians and other South Asians passed freely across the border but as an American, I needed a visa from the Nepalese government.  So the soldiers refused to let me pass, though third country nationals frequently take rickshaws or other conveyances across the border without any difficulty.  A discussion ensued, and we established that the border was in the exact center of the bridge and that if I kept my camera packed and did not go “even one millimeter” into Nepal; we could proceed.  But the soldiers made sure to tell me that if I violated either of those conditions, they would arrest me and confiscate my camera.

So we moved forward under the soldiers’ watchful eyes, which were decidedly more concerned with us than with the open flow of contraband into their country.  As we did, it became clear why they were, and also why the soldiers did not want me taking pictures.  The flow of dangerous contraband across the border was heavy, continuous, and apparent to anyone with eyes, as was their lack of response to it.  It was also the dry season, and from the middle of the bridge, I saw people crossing the dried river bed on either side of the bridge, most carrying large parcels with them.  They were in no hurry and did not seem to fear any official intervention.

But what I saw in Panitanki is only the tip of the iceberg.  When I first started coming to West Bengal, the ruling party was the Left Front, or the Communist Party of India.  Its heavy-handed administration of the state’s economic life had been progressively crushing it for three decades—so badly that it ignored the threat from Bangladesh.  There were very few effective control points along the more than 2,500 mile border, and I should know because I tested it myself.  In 2011, the people of West Bengal ended thirty years of communist rule, electing the Trinamol Congress Party (TMC) and its strongwoman, Mamata Banerjee, who continues as the state’s undisputed leader today.

But if anything, matters on the border with Bangladesh grew worse.  A significant element in Mamata’s coalition is the Muslim vote, including illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.  For the past seven years, the TMC has protected that vote bank by preventing effective action on the border and enabling large numbers of Bangladeshis to settle in India.  I have been shown a hotel in downtown Kolkata, the state’s capital, where new illegal migrants are brought to rest a few days before receiving their “assignment.”  I have watched while illegals cross the border both day and night, often with the connivance of local police; and talked with small voluntary organizations whose missions have been overwhelmed by the lawlessness these policies have made routine.

I have watched villages that had been inhabited by Hindus and Muslims for decades now become devoid of Hindus who were forced out or merely “convinced” to leave.  Every year, as I made my rounds through the villages, I would see more Temples closed and Hindu residents exiting.  I have been in areas like Deganga, where Hindus were victims of sustained violence; and I spent time at the last Hindu home in the Diamond Harbor area, where a lone young woman and her disabled brother fight both attackers and the West Bengal authorities.  In the past three years, I have seen ersatz ISIS headquarters in Kolkata; and the radical religious party, Jamaat e’Islami, from Bangladesh now operates openly in Kolkata and even can boast that none other than Mamata Banerjee has appeared publicly to support it.

Further north in the Indian state of Assam, Bodo tribesman prepare for battle against Bangladeshi “infiltrators,” who they claim have degraded the natural environment, created a black market, and helped drive their children from the area.  Bodos also described skirmishes over the past several years that started with attacks on their people by illegal immigrants.

In fact, anti-Hindu violence has become a regular feature of life in these states that abandoned any attempt to control their international borders.  Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has told them to expect more.

India’s physical integrity suffers from a deadly combination of poor laws that create an open border, and massive corruption that makes pretty much everything possible for those who aim to undermine that nation.  The India-Nepal border is a conduit for illicit activity, including arms and drug smuggling, illegal and impoverished Nepalese immigrants, “mules” for the smuggling enterprises, and for terrorist infiltration.   Bangladeshi terrorists and illegal immigrants have changed the demographics and way of life in northeast India.  And not unlike our own situation here in the United States, illegals have become a political force that one party caters to as its own.

I do not sit with those who are concerned that our country might become “less white” or culturally different from what we were.  It’s always been that way, and is part of who we are.  Even Members of Congress raised both those fears a century ago as they tried to stop (legal) immigration from Eastern and Southern European; a wave that brought people who in fact changed the definition of culturally who was an American; a change for the better.  I do, however, stand to defend our territorial integrity, the rule of law, and our right to enforce it; which the eastern Indian states seem to have abandoned to their existential detriment.

Americans need to look at what open borders have done to India before it’s too late and we awake to wonder when we lost our country.

RELATED VIDEO: America’s Great Wall

The American Left’s Never Ending Selective Outrage

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Repeatedly pointing out the American left’s obvious dishonesty, hypocrisy and selective outrage seems pointless. And yet, I feel compelled to do so.

For example: Fake news media created a 24/7 media firestorm over Trump’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels “before” he became president. Due to recordings by Trump’s lawyer, CNN has excitedly gone 24/7 in making the case that Trump is unfit to serve because of his private life “before” he was elected.

Hypocritically, CNN told us Clinton’s private life was none of our business “while” he was president. The American left did everything in their power to downplay president Clinton’s affair with an intern “while” he was president; using cigars as sex toys, hiding a semen stained dress and lying about his adultery. The American left (democrats, Hollywood and fake news media) trashed the character of all men to minimize president Clinton’s reprehensible behavior. They said no man could resist a young woman coming on to them.

The left’s lie was particularly offensive to me. At that time, my Dad was pastor of a large congregation and my brother was county commissioner of a youth football league. When approached with similar opportunities, neither my dad or brother behaved like president Clinton.

Minimizing president Clinton’s shameful behavior, leftists promoted the absurdly lie that oral sex is not really sex. Cosmetic queen, the late Mary Kay Ash said, “The speed of the leader is the speed of the gang.” President Clinton was our nation’s leader. His bad behavior trickled down; igniting a rise in oral sex among students. 

The American left always portrays Republican wealth as ill-gotten-gain. They ignore Democrats’ wealth to portray them as sympathetic to the common man. There was no leftists’ outrage over their Democrat president Clinton and Monica using Gurkha cigars which cost $25,000 a box ($1000 each) for their sex play. 

Ken Star was assigned to investigate suspected perjury by Bill Clinton regarding his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky. The American left launched a 24/7 shock-and-awe campaign to destroy Star’s life by branding him a pervert obsessed with sex. I knew leftists’ smear of Star was working when my low-info voter Dad chuckled while repeating Ken-Star-is-a-pervert jokes he heard on late night TV. Fake news media, Democrat talking heads and Hollywood insidiously redirected the public’s attention. President Clinton was the adulterer performing sex acts with an intern in the Oval Office and lying about it. And somehow, the American left successfully branded investigator Ken Star the bad guy sex-addict.

Here’s another example of the American left’s selective outrage and glaring hypocrisy. Everyone and their brother knows Hillary Clinton sold access to power and undermined our national security in numerous ways. Can you say “Clinton Cash” boys and girls? This movie exposed Bill and Hillary Clinton as the self-serving money hungry criminals they truly are. 

The book, “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump” exposes more Clinton corruption. It also exposes the American left’s and Deep State’s joint efforts to overturn the 2016 election of our president.

The American left has been ignoring scandals and treasonous acts by the Clintons for decades. The same leftists are frantically waving their arms into the air accusing Trump of treason. They are demanding Trump’s head on an impeachment platter because he did not get into Putin’s face during their press conference. Really? Aren’t these the same media and Washington DC elites who said Trump was an unsophisticated thug who would start a war by being rude to foreign leaders?

Far too many women and blacks have been deceived into believing leftists are their greatest advocates. The truth is leftists pounce upon blacks and women with furious anger who do not share leftists’ hatred for America, straight white men, conservatives, republicans and Christians.

During the 2016 presidential debates, leftists practically demanded that Trump’s manhood be removed for supposedly brutishly invading Hillary’s space. When convenient, Hillary is a fragile abused female. When convenient, Hillary demands equal treatment.

After big Hillary supporter and fundraiser Harvey Weinstein was exposed for sexually assaulting numerous actresses, Hillary was caught having dinner with him. Why isn’t the American left outraged that their supposed champion of women is hanging out with the poster-pervert of the #MeToo Movement?

Leftists were outraged when Trump supposedly stepped too close to Hillary on stage. And yet, leftists had no problem with Bill Maher calling conservative Republican Sarah Palin a “c***”. Keith Olbermann called conservative Republican Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”

The American left thought it was funny when Bill Maher called Sarah Palin and former Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann MILFs (“Moms I’d Like to F***“). 

Leftists pretty much agreed with their social media minions calling Laura Ingraham a “Fox News C***.”

As a black American, it is particularly repulsive watching leftists get away with portraying themselves as great defenders of blacks. These people have attacked me with death threats and racial slurs for simply loving my country and not viewing myself as a victim.

Republican Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele became the first black person elected to a statewide office in Maryland. Leftists had no problem with a white blogger defacing Steele’s photo to make him look like a minstrel. Posted under the despicable photo was this caption, “Simple Sambo Wants to Move to the Big House”. 

Leftists did not care when white talk show host John Sylvester called black Republican former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Aunt Jeremiah. 

Nor did leftists express outrage on behalf of a black woman when white cartoonist, Ted Rall portrayed Secretary Rice as president Bush’s “house nigga”. 

Do you see the pattern folks? Leftists are never outraged when their operatives use sexual and racial smears to punish and silence conservative republican women and blacks.

The American left is filled with angry bitter people without a Godly moral compass. Insidiously, leftists divide Americans into supposed victimized voting blocs. Leftists consider their duped voter’s to be useful idiots, mere pawns in furthering the American left’s anti-Christian and anti-America agendas.

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