Let the Palestinian Authority Collapse

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Despite possible short term difficulties, Israel should seize on the impending collapse of the Palestinian Authority as an opportunity to extricate itself from the deadly cul-de-sac, into which the Oslo process has lured it.

It is all or nothing. We will not take any money if they do not give all of it—even if it means the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and an unequivocal declaration that the Oslo Accords are dead.—Ashraf al-Ajami, former Palestinian Authority (PA) minister for Prisoners Affairs, on Israel’s decision to deduct the sums paid to convicted terrorists and/or their families from the tax revenue that Israel collects for the PA, Galei Israel, April 19, 2019.

If the existential goal of the PA—according Ashraf Ajami as well as according to Abu Mazen—is to persist in paying salaries to terrorists, because if it does not pay salaries to terrorists, it breaks up, then perhaps we need to ask what we signed the Oslo Agreement for, if all we did was establish an Authority whose function is to promote terror –Brig-Gen. (res) Yossi Kuperwasser, former Director-General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, Galei Israel, April 19, 2019.

The Oslo Agreements, which spawned the Palestinian Authority, were born in sin. Today that is beyond any reasonable dispute.

Oslo: The product of betrayal and bribery

After all, without the support of Gonen Segev, who was later convicted and imprisoned for drug trafficking and fraud and, several years later, for treason and espionage, they would never have seen the light of day. Indeed, as readers might recall, Segev was elected to the Knesset on a hardline hawkish platform that opposed the very far reaching concessions that the Oslo Agreements entailed. However, he was coaxed (read “bribed”) by Yitzhak Rabin with the lure of a ministerial portfolio, to betray his voters and cross the political lines to endorse the Oslo initiative –that starkly contradicted the core values of the platform on which he was elected.

As a product of both political betrayal and bribery, the Oslo Accords soon began to deliver its heinous results. Thousands of Israelis paid with their lives and limbs for the ill-considered initiative. What was grotesquely dubbed “the peace process” left café’s, buses, and sidewalks strewn with body parts and gore, while the Oslo advocates doggedly refused to admit error, callously dismissing the dead and injured as “victims of peace”.

Sadly, but not foreseeable, Oslo has brought nothing positive to Israel or to Israelis. Indeed, none of the promises of sweeping benefits by its proponents have been fulfilled; while virtually all the dangers, of which its opponents warned, did indeed materialize.

Accordingly, by any reasonable criterion, the jury is no longer out on the Oslo process. As might have been expected from its ignominious genesis, it has proven itself an indisputable—and irredeemable—failure. The time has come to openly acknowledge this inescapable reality.

PA collapse as an opportunity, not a threat

In this regard, there should be a sea-change in the prevailing perception of the significance for Israel of the collapse of the PA and with it, of the entire mendacious Oslowian edifice.

After all, if the only way for the PA to endure is for Israel to collaborate in the financing of the slaughter of its own citizens by transferring “pay-to-slay” funds to perpetrators of terror, grave doubts must be cast on the prudence—indeed, the sanity—of sustaining this state of affairs.

Moreover, for Israel to back down on this issue would not only greatly undermine its credibility—and hence its deterrence capabilities—but would constitute a sharp slap in the face for its staunch allies in the US Senate, who passed the Taylor Force Act to curtail American support for the PA—unless it halts payments to perpetuators of terror and/or their families.

It is generally considered that the imminent financial collapse of the PA comprises a threat to Israel, heralding increasing instability and security problems.

Although this may be true to some extent in the short run, it must be rejected as a long term constraint on Israeli strategic thinking. Indeed, rather than a threat, the impending collapse of the PA should be perceived as an opportunity to extricate the nation from the hazardous cul-de-sac into which the deceptive Oslo process lured it.

Treating the enemy as the enemy

The key to making the transformation from perceiving the collapse of the PA as a threat to an opportunity is to set aside the dictates of political correctness and confront political truth. Thus, rather than persist with the fiction that the PA is a prospective peace partner, it must be treated as it sees itself—i.e. as an implacable enemy.

Accordingly, Israel has no obligation—ethical or otherwise—to sustain the socio-economic edifice of its enemy dedicated to its destruction. Indeed, if anything, its moral duty is to bring about its collapse.

This is particularly relevant—and immediately feasible—for Gaza, where almost a decade and a half of abysmal government by Hamas has caused the widespread breakdown of the civilian infrastructure. Thus, according to Nada Majdalani, Palestinian Director of EcoPeace Middle East in a recent address to the UN Security Council: “97% of the groundwater under Gaza is not suitable for human consumption…Thirty percent of illnesses in Gaza [is] from water-borne pathogens. With a four-hour average of power supply, waste water facilities fail to operate, emptying the equivalent of 34 Olympic-size swimming pools of raw sewage daily into the Mediterranean…”

Significantly, she warned:

“A humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip is happening right now, right before our eyes. If no immediate action is taken in Gaza, people will flee by heading out in boats, just like other Middle Eastern refugees…”

Gaza: A missed opportunity

Regrettably, Israel failed to seize on an earlier opportunity created when head of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a Abu Mazen), cut the funding to Gaza—and acted to relieve the pressures this created by allowing Qatari money to flow into the Hamas-controlled enclave.

This will not only prove futile but detrimental. For as long as Israel remains entrapped within the confines of the policy paradigm that envisions Arab self-rule in Gaza, persisting with the conventional form of humanitarian aid will only perpetuate—but, exacerbate—the humanitarian crisis—see Gaza: Let their people go.

In this regard, I have for decades made the case that the solution to Gaza’s humanitarian plight is not its reconstruction, but its deconstruction. Indeed, there is  rapidly accumulating evidence that the only thing preventing a mass exodos from Gaza is money—or rather, the lack thereof—to facilitate emigration of Gazans to other more stable, less harrowing destinations.

For the humanitarian debacle is Gaza has not been precipitated by a perennial lack of cash (indeed, Gaza has been among the highest per capita recipients of international aid on the planet); or the lack of Israeli largesse in wishing to improve living conditions there (by permitting hundreds of truck-loads a day and millions of tons of merchandize a year into the enclave).

None of this has done anything to blunt the anti-Israel animus of the regime or ameliorate the living standards of the populace. Clearly, persisting with the same policy will serve little purpose other than continuing to enmesh the fate-stricken residents in their present—and deteriorating—predicament.

Callous indifference

Callous indifference to the fate of the people is not confined to the Hamas regime in Gaza. Indeed, it seems no less characteristic of the Ramallah-based PA itself, willing to inflict grave hardship on the public rather than accept a marginally reduced lower amount, with the sums designated for the terrorist recipients deducted from the overall total.

According to UN reports, Israel plans to withhold $140 million in 2019 – approximately $11.5 million each month – in tax revenues over the terrorist payment issue. The sum Israel is withholding comprises 6% of the total tax revenues it collects for the PA. The overall tax revenues collected by Israel represent 65% of the PA’s budget or 15% of the PA’s entire GDP.

Indeed, after over a quarter of a century of endeavor—backed by munificent international aid and almost universal political endorsement—all the attempt to foist self-governance on the Palestinian-Arabs has achieved is a corrupt kleptocracy under the Abbas-led PA, and an arguably no less corrupt tyrannical theocracy under Hamas in Gaza.

Moreover, the cause of peace between the Jewish state and the Palestinian-Arabs has not been advanced one iota. If anything, quite the opposite!

Accordingly, in light of this abysmal and enduring failure, alternative paradigms must be advanced.

If not Oslo, what? A moral alternative.

One of the options for Israel would be of course to stop collecting the taxes (mainly customs duty on imports) and leave it to the PA to collect them itself. But given the perennial culture of corruption, inadequate infrastructure and widespread tax evasion, the net impact on revenues is likely to be dramatic—and unsustainable in the long run.

Another, more radical, but ultimately more effective alternative would be to use the withheld funds to launch an initiative I have long advocated as the only non-kinetic policy option that can ensure the long term survival of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people: A comprehensive initiative for incentivized emigration of Palestinian-Arabs in which non-belligerent Palestinian-Arab residents would receive generous grants that would allow them to find better, more prosperous and more secure lives elsewhere—free from the clutches of the callous cliques, who have led them into their current plight.

The moral rationale for such a measure is clear and compelling: The tax revenues collected by Israel do not belong to Israel. Accordingly, Israel cannot appropriate the money for its own purposes, but it can offer it to the Palestinian-Arabs who have been utterly failed by their leadership, which clearly has no compunction in inflicting further hardship on them!

How to really relieve the humanitarian crisis

Of course, the tax revenues collected by Israel would comprise only a small fraction of the overall sum required for a numerically significant “evacuation-compensation” plan to resettle sufficient numbers of Palestinian-Arabs in third party countries. But the self-induced collapse of the PA, precipitated by its obstinate insistence to sponsor terror, may well be an auspicious opportunity to launch it.

Indeed, the moral superiority of such an initiative over the Oslowian formula, entailing Palestinian statehood, is unassailable.

After all, nobody—not even the most avid two-state proponent—has ever advanced persuasive reasoning why any prospective Palestinian state would be anything other than (yet another) homophobic, misogynistic, Muslim-majority tyranny, whose hallmarks would be: gender discrimination, persecution of homosexuals, religious intolerance and oppression of political dissidents.

Accordingly, the moral question that must be forced into the discourse is this: Why is offering financial inducements to Jews in Judea-Samaria to evacuate their homes to facilitate the establishment of said homophobic, misogynistic tyranny, which, almost certainly, will become a bastion for Islamist terror, morally acceptable; while the notion of offering financial inducements to Arabs in Judea-Samaria to evacuate their homes to prevent the establishment of such an entity, is considered morally reprehensible?

The way forward should therefore be clear—both in terms of moral merit and practical pragmatism. It must, however, begin with allowing the iniquitous and largely dysfunctional PA to collapse. That is the only measure that will allow the eventual humanitarian plight of the Palestinian-Arabs to be effectively addressed.

VIDEO: It All Depends on How You Interpret Islam – NOT!

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Some people think that the answer to a reformed Islam is as simple as interpretation. Good luck

EDITORS NOTE: This Political Islam video is republished with permission.

Transgenderism as a Tool of Humiliation

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Matthew Hanley: Transgender activists are unafraid to make menacing displays of power, to which appeals to basic reason count for nothing.

What if I were to tell you that defining gender by objective reference to genetics, anatomy, and genitalia “has no basis in science”? Would you consider that persuasive – or unhinged?

That, alas, is the viewpoint expressed in the journal Nature, long reputed to be an authoritative scientific publication. They now banish the classification of male and female as “a terrible idea that should be killed off” since it threatens to “undo decades of progress” in reclassifying sex and gender as a “social construct.” You might think Nature would be concerned about cultivating a credibility problem. But what do they have to worry about when colossal lies are the order of the day?

Regarding the “mismatch between gender and the sex on a person’s birth certificate,” Nature applauds the American Academy of Pediatrics for advising physicians to “treat people according to their preferred gender, regardless of appearance or genetics.” Pediatricians doubling as transgender apologists: this surely is the mark of a culture that has made peace with its disdain for children, science, and human nature.

Meanwhile, the American Psychological Association (APA) has issued guidelines warning about the dangers of espousing “traditional masculinity.” But if we are to take the APA at its word, why on earth should medical authorities encourage a female to become a male?  It seems the reigning approach is that troubled females should be entitled to undergo reassignment surgery – an act of mutilation – in order to acquire an unconvincing external appearance, but should also, thenceforth, be encouraged to disdain all the “harmful” traits associated with masculinity.

A related inconsistency is also routinely ignored: if transitioning from one sexual identity to another is so enthusiastically embraced as a good to be facilitated because of our enlightened appreciation of gender “fluidity,” why are there legal obstacles to legitimate approaches to help people transition away from homosexuality?

Though still quite rare, there has been a spike in the incidence of transgender identification in recent years – sometimes in bunches and rather out of the blue.  Going transgender does not necessarily invite derision but, believe it or not, is sometimes pursued as a way to boost popularity among one’s peers. To point that out is not to dismiss the genuine distress some adolescents acutely feel, but largely overcome with the passage of time.

Common sense suggests the transgender surge has been prompted by the Zeitgeist, against which the medical profession, in particular, should be on guard. Yet they have become complicit in its emergence.

We tell ourselves this is a free country.  No one is “forcing” them to peddle the falsehood that a man can become a woman, or vice versa. But just because this is not Mao’s China does not mean that a form of its Cultural Revolution has not made its way here.

So says Anastasia Lin, who left China at age 13 and now resides in Canada.  Writing recently in the Wall Street Journal, she pinpoints the ultimate objective of our politically correct mobs:

The goal is not to persuade or debate; it is to humiliate the target and intimidate everyone else. The ultimate objective is to destroy independent thought.

One can only hope that the extremism exploding all around us may help more people perceive that the target in this case, as with the sexual revolution more broadly, is Christianity itself, along with its social and moral order.  By definition, this means that man himself is in the crosshairs, a point to which many who have adopted the post-Christian quasi-religion of “humanitarianism” are apparently oblivious.

Lin describes how her parent’s generation in China “learned to keep their heads down and to watch what they said, even to their closest friends, for fear of being accused of thought crimes,” in order to lament what is taking hold here as well. Too many of us in any number of professions know how true those words ring.

Coercion in one form or another is mandatory anytime a lie is purveyed to the masses. Examples of this are multiplying before our eyes. A professor at Arizona State University contends, in the American Journal of Bioethics, that parents should not be permitted to prevent their children from acquiring puberty-blocking treatment.

In the inverted thinking so typical of our time, it is the withholding of this “treatment” that constitutes child abuse, rather than the abetting of delusions and the sanctioning of aggressive measures that are often harmful, and in a real sense experimental, since evidence justifying their use is utterly lacking.

For now, that remains a proposal in our country. But the Supreme Court of British Colombia decreed last month that the father of a fourteen-year-old girl may not thwart her quixotic attempt to transition into a boy. She is entitled to puberty blockers that are hers by unnatural right.  Furthermore, the father was put on notice that he also better watch his mouth: calling his own daughter a girl or using female pronouns when referring to her would be considered “family violence,” the truth now being a punishable offense.

And as the night follows the day, he has since been declared “guilty” of that “crime.”

In light of this menacing display of power, basic appeals to reason count for nothing. This is ultimately a matter of competing wills. But taking a strong stance against irrational gender tyrants can work, as Muslims in the UK proved by getting the LGBT-oriented curriculum pulled from their kids’ schools.

That the militant LGBT crowd, having pushed over everyone else, backed down in this context suggests that they are driven primarily by the desire to dismantle Christian sensibility rather than an unwavering belief in gender ideology. Note here the winner in this battle of wills.

If only faith and the art of persuasion were in vogue, more might see that abandoning Christianity and our inbuilt human nature does no favor to man; doing so tends toward ruin, as all too many discover after wading into the transgender abyss.

COLUMN BY

Matthew Hanley

Matthew Hanley is senior fellow with the National Catholic Bioethics Center. With Jokin de Irala, M.D., he is the author of Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West, which recently won a best-book award from the Catholic Press Association. The opinions expressed here are Mr. Hanley’s and not those of the NCBC.

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2019 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.

VIDEO: This Popular Lawmaker Explains How to Talk About Conservatism With Next Generation

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“Young people are looking for a deeper conversation than just red-meat talking points,” says Rep. Dan Crenshaw in an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal. The popular Texas Republican, who was elected to the House in 2018, has already made waves, appearing on “Saturday Night Live” last fall. “There is a generational gap … and I’m trying to close that gap,” says Crenshaw, a veteran. Read the full interview, posted below, or listen to it on the podcast:

Or watch the interview:


We also cover these stories on the podcast:

  • Democratic leaders say they’ve reached preliminary agreement with President Donald Trump to spend $2 trillion on an infrastructure bill.
  • The streets of Venezuela erupted in clashes as interim president Juan Guaido announced the “final phase” of an uprising against the country’s socialist dictator, Nicolas Maduro.
  • As the border crisis continues, Trump is changing the rules surrounding asylum.

The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!

Rob Bluey: We’re joined at The Daily Signal by Congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw: How you doing?

Bluey: Congressman, good to be with you.

Crenshaw: Great to be with you guys.

Bluey: I want to begin by just asking you what it’s been like to serve in Congress these past few months? Obviously, a lot of news coming out of Washington. What’s it like to be a freshman coming to the House?

Crenshaw: It’s a little bit like combat, just with less honesty. That’s what it’s like. I didn’t come into this naïve, I didn’t come into this with any idealistic expectations. I know how Congress is supposed to work and it’s supposed to be somewhat dysfunctional. It’s not supposed to be easy to get representatives from 50 different states to come together and agree on really substantive issues.

It never has been easy, but it is divisive. There’s a lot of games being played, a lot of virtue-signaling happening that I think is unfortunate, and just really gets in the way of …

It’s fine if we don’t agree and we don’t get things done, but let’s at least have a real debate about those things, and that’s what’s lacking, unfortunately. It doesn’t appear to happen in committee. Most of the bills that we’ve seen come to the floor don’t really go through any kind of committee … they don’t really go through a debate in any real way that normal Americans would think it would.

And it’s unfortunate because the result is really nothing gets done. You’re seeing bills come out of the House that have no chance of getting through the Senate, and they know that, so what’s the point?

A lot of Democrats ran saying that they wanted to run to get things done and they don’t care about party, and you hear that kind of rhetoric all the time from the more moderate Democrats, but, in practice, it turns out not to be true at all. They have no intention of working with us.

Bluey: You have such a remarkable story in your own life. Tell us why you chose to run for Congress.

Crenshaw: Well, I never wanted to leave the military, so I got to back up a few steps to help people understand how this came to be. I was wounded in 2012 and I ended up leaving the military in 2016, so for those four years, I was fighting the Defense Department pretty hard to not leave. I wanted a medical waiver, I wanted to keep deploying, and I did go overseas a couple more times, actually, back to the Middle East and in Korea.

Eventually, I just had to be medically retired, late 2016, and I wanted to stay in public service. And I went to the Harvard Kennedy School, I did my masters there, with an eye, so to speak, on some kind of public service, probably national security related, and I almost went that direction. And then Ted Poe, Congressman Ted Poe announced retirement in my district and we just decided overnight to go for it.

Because in the end, it’s about impact. How many different policies can you impact? You can go into the policy world, per se, but you’re very narrowly focused on something if you’re doing that and a lot of people, that’s what they want to do. I cared about a lot of different issues and I wanted to make an impact on all those issues, and in order to make that impact, you need to be in public office. You need to be an elected official.

So we went for it, and we knew why we were running. I was running because I wanted to give conservatives a future, because I worry about that quite a bit, especially with our generation, and that was the message we told people and it worked.

Bluey: Let’s talk about some of those issues that you want to have an impact on. Obviously, being from Texas, immigration is a big issue. I know you’ve talked about spending and health care. If you could pick three of the top issues that you’re really focused on in Congress, what are your priorities?

Crenshaw: My priorities campaigning have remained the same. It’s flooding issues in Houston, so these are not national issues, necessarily, but this is a very big issue for Houston. What does that translate into, in a more national conversation? It’s infrastructure, it’s maybe the way we do disaster relief funding, so these are not really partisan issues, luckily.

If there was just one thing that Democrats and Republicans generally agree on, it’s we want to streamline that system and build out our infrastructure to be better prepared for natural disasters and there’s some very specific things in Houston that we need to do, so that’s a big focus.

Border security’s a huge focus. That was something we ran on, of course. The Rio Grande Valley in Texas is the No. 1 crossing area for illegal immigrants right now, and it’s only getting worse.

On the southern border, we’re seeing 3,000 illegal crossings a day. Those are just the apprehensions, by the way, and Border Patrol generally estimates that they maybe catch 1 in 3, so you can triple that number. And this is crisis-level numbers. We can’t possibly sustain this.

This is fundamentally about whether it’s fair to cut in front of the line. And I think that’s how conservatives need to make this argument. I think we’ve been making the argument in a very poor way for the last couple years and I think that’s why we’ve effectively lost this debate, unfortunately.

Our argument needs to be this. This is unsustainable, we can’t afford it, we can’t absorb this many people at one time, we can’t afford it in our school systems, our hospitals, or our court and law enforcement costs, and it’s not fair.

It’s not moral to legal immigrants. We should want to have legal immigrants. And if we want to have a conversation about even raising quotas for legal immigration, let’s have that debate. That’s a fair debate to have, it usually is, and there’s a lot of good arguments to suggest we need better skilled workers coming into this country in the medium and high school ranges.

But instead of having those debates, we have Democrats that simply want … I mean, at this point, cynically, I have to suggest that they simply want people coming across. Because every argument they give me only leads to that conclusion.

I didn’t always believe that, but after seeing this debate play out, I unfortunately do. So we’ve got to get a handle on our immigration system, and that includes physical infrastructure, it includes reforming our asylum process and how we go through that. That would have an immediate effect. We need to implement that as soon as possible.

Aside from those two issues, I’m on the Budget Committee, so I’m concerned greatly about the debt and what causes that debt. The debates that happen in Congress right now are … It would surprise most people here and all of your viewers, but we actually debate what causes the debt.

So Democrats think it’s tax cuts, we think it’s spending. And I think we have all the numbers on our side to suggest that it’s mandatory spending that truly drives the debt, and it’s health care costs and Social Security and whatnot because it’s 70% of our spending.

They think that history began two years ago and that the tax cuts created a giant debt, which is just fundamentally false, on a mathematical level and a conceptual level, but that’s the debate we have, so that’s what we’re fighting out.

Bluey: Thank you for fighting on those issues. I want to go back to immigration for a moment, because you told a story recently on Sebastian Gorka’s radio program about an 18-year-old woman who came to you and I was hoping that you could share that experience with our listeners because it profoundly impacted me, in terms of the way I think about it, and I’m not sure that people necessarily recognize the scope of the problem. Can you share that?

Crenshaw: Before I tell that story, let’s give everybody the framework of how to understand that story and it is this: Our immigration system incentivizes you to bring a child across. If you don’t bring a child across, if you’re a single adult, there’s a good chance we can quickly adjudicate you and deport you. Our system works OK for single adults.

It doesn’t work OK when you have a child with you. Our system breaks down at that point, that’s where catch and release happens. This truth catches on, eventually, and everybody realizes that they should bring children across. OK, what if you don’t have an actual child? Well, then they find a child. OK, so now it results in child trafficking and Border Patrol will see the same kids recycled with different adults on the border all the time.

And again, it goes back to also that it’s fundamentally immoral and unfair to be able to use this loophole to cut in front of the line, but it incentivizes child trafficking in pretty terrible ways and who are they paying? It’s the drug cartels. They have operational control of the border.

So that’s the framework. And so this particular woman, she was saved by a nonprofit organization that does sting operations and works with law enforcement and actually saves these kids all around the world. It’s really incredible what they do. And they brought her in to tell her story and she was 18, but she was brought to the United States when she was 13.

She was told by these traffickers that they would give her a better life, make her a princess in the United States. She didn’t have a great home life in Mexico and they get her across on their third try. Because the first two times, they were turned back. Third time, as she talks about it, they could just walk her across.

And again, a wall seems so simplistic and so medieval, as the Democrats like to say, but it does work. If there’s a wall there, you won’t just walk across and maybe you’ll go where there’s no wall, but you’ll get caught by Border Patrol and they can at least distinguish—because they have methods of doing this—”OK, are you really a parent or are you not?” And they will separate them if they believe that they’re being trafficked.

But when there’s nothing there, traffickers can just walk these children across and then they send her to New York. And for five years, she was basically raped, every single day, as a slave.

Eventually, she was able to devise a plan to escape and put those traffickers in jail. And I think that case is ongoing, but it’s just heartbreaking to hear that and what the people of good intentions don’t want to believe is that our system incentivizes it. Their good intentions directly incentivize this terrible, terrible behavior and it’s the saddest story you could imagine.

Bluey: It is a tragic story and I thank you for sharing it with us, though, so we can better understand the consequences of what’s going on.

You spoke earlier about the importance of the future of conservatism and you yourself have been able to serve as an inspiration for a lot of young people.

You have prolific social media accounts and your message spreads virally in many different ways. What is it about that that you think has caught on, particularly with younger people?

Crenshaw: Young people are looking for a deeper conversation than just red-meat talking points. That should be very obvious. They want to know why you believe what you believe and I think too many conservatives have gotten too comfortable just spewing the talking points. “Limited government and constitutionalism.” Great. What does that mean? Where did it come from?

Young people are hungry to hear that and so I like to talk about the cultural narratives that lead to the constitutional principles that we had and young people are willing to hear that.

They want to feel like they’re informed, they want to feel like they’re getting a little bit more information than the usual talking points. They want to be independent-minded and they’ll say this often, right? Most young people still identify as independents and they have their mantras of fiscally conservative, socially liberal.

That’s what they’re comfortable in right now, which gives us an opening. It gives us an opening to talk to them and we just have to do it. And we have to do it in their language, also.

So there is a generational gap, I think, and I’m trying to close that gap. And so it’s easy for me to talk to people in their 20s, because I’m close to their age, I grew up with them.

It’s not a lot more complicated than just engaging and going to college campuses and high schools and simply engaging and helping people understand why you came to believe what you believe. That is huge because then maybe they’ll find something they can relate with, so it’s telling a story.

Bluey: And one of the ways that you did engage and relate to people was through “Saturday Night Live,” of course.

“Saturday Night Live,” for those who might not know, while I’m sure many do, poked fun of you in an episode, and then a week later, you chose to show up and go on. Take us back to that moment and why you decided to do it the way you did.

Crenshaw: It was a perfect opportunity because they went far enough to make everybody outraged, but … it was also clear that it was a bit of a misstep.

So we can have space for those missteps and that’s where we get confused sometimes in the public debate because I’ll get slammed, because I’ll criticize somebody, and they’ll say, “I thought you were forgiving.” I’m like, “Well, no, they meant it.” Yeah, I still criticize words. What I don’t do is criticize the intent or character of somebody and that’s the place we need to get to.

And it was not clear that they truly wanted to attack my character. Maybe you could argue they did, but they did call us gross people and then list us, but was I really offended by it, was the question. Is it even possible for me to be offended? You should hear the kind of jokes that we tell on the SEAL teams, … these go far beyond any normal sense of humor. We have very thick skin.

I just wanted to take that moment to say, “We don’t always have to be offended.” We can say it was wrong or we can say you shouldn’t have said that, it wasn’t even funny, but I don’t have to be outraged, I don’t have to be a victim. And that was the place I was trying to get to and it just ended up being a lot of fun.

And it gets to another way to reach people and this is the more shallow … So I gave you the deeper answer before, and the more shallow answer is it’d just be fun and cool. That’s it. Then you will reach a lot of people that way. If they can see something of themselves in you, then they might want to hear some of the deeper ideas that you have.

We forget about how important that is, to engage in pop culture.

Bluey: Absolutely, it’s so important. I want to ask you, finally, you yourself have certainly gained a lot of attention as a Republican member of Congress, but there are those on the other side of the aisle who have gained a lot of attention as well—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar. What’s it like to be in that class, with some of these other people, who almost on a daily basis it seems are front and center in the headlines?

Crenshaw: At first it was sort of funny. Now it’s getting worse. It’s just the truth, it’s becoming more divisive, as they seem to get angrier and angrier and angrier and almost everything that comes out of their mouth is really taking shots at somebody, oftentimes me.

So I’m not sure where to go from there. It’s just getting to this point where I think, try to ignore them as much as possible, unless they’re saying something that I think truly needs to be addressed. But what’s it like? Geez. It’s interesting.

A lot of this plays out in the public sphere. It doesn’t really play out behind closed doors. Again, we don’t really get to debate each other on the House floor or in a committee. Even if we’re in the same committee, and Omar and I are on the Budget Committee, but during a hearing, she’ll only show up when she’s asking questions. And vice versa. All of us are coming in and out. There is not this debate that happens. You almost wish there was, and maybe a lot of people think there is, but very often there isn’t, and people need to understand that.

You’re more debating the people giving a witness testimony. So the only time that we actually interact is on social media because there isn’t another opportunity to really do it. And this is a debate of ideas.

People can be upset about that, but it’s kind of our job, to go up there and publicly debate ideas and do your best not to do ad hominem attacks. And I never have. We get ad hominem attacks all the time because what’s the single line if they disagree with you? You’re a racist, bigot, homophobe, right?

And that’s the wrong way to debate, and I think that undermines their argument in the long run and we just have to keep debating ideas, telling people why we have the right ideas, and stand strong on that.

Bluey: Thank you for keeping the focus on ideas. Thanks for also sharing the insider’s perspective, as a new member of Congress. We appreciate your being with The Daily Signal.

Crenshaw: Thank you. Great to be with you.

Bluey: Congressman Dan Crenshaw, everyone. Thank you very much.

COLUMN BY

Rob Bluey

Rob Bluey is executive editor of The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation. Send an email to Rob. Twitter: @RobertBluey.

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal podcast, video and column are republished with permission.

John Bolton: White House Plans for Post-Maduro Venezuela

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Juan Guaido, Venezuela’s lawful leader under its Constitution, was set to lead a march against Nicolas Maduro, who continued to cling to the South American nation’s presidency with the support of Russia, China, and Cuba.

The U.S. is among more than 50 countries around the world backing Guaido as Venezuela’s only legitimate leader.

After military officials warned Guaido of his pending arrest, he moved up the demonstration and called for the military to turn against Maduro, whose socialist regime has plunged the nation into corruption and poverty.

President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, told reporters Tuesday that “everything is on the table” from the U.S. perspective if the Maduro regime uses military force against civilian protesters.

“If this effort fails, they will sink into a dictatorship from which there are very few possible alternatives,” Bolton said outside the White House.

Bolton added that Venezuela’s defense minister, chief justice, and commander of the presidential guard already publicly backed Guaido as interim president and must step up now.

“They committed to support ousting Maduro,” Bolton said. “It’s time for them now, if the Cubans will let them do it, to fulfill the commitments. It’s time for the rest of the military to show what their own families believe ought to happen, and that is Maduro needs to go.”

Bolton said the Trump administration has planned for some time for the “day after” the Maduro regime collapses, and believes the events Tuesday could be a tipping point:

From the perspective of a humanitarian crisis we face in Venezuela, I hope this is enough to tip Maduro out of power because it’s only when he and his fellow kleptocrats who have plundered the Venezuelan economy for the last 20 years are removed from power that we can put the Venezuelan economy back on its feet for the people. The sooner Maduro is gone, the sooner is the possibility of justice and real economic growth for the Venezuelan people.

Vice President Mike Pence also spoke about the crisis in Venezuela during remarks aboard the USS Harry Truman in Norfolk, Virginia.

“As we stand here today aboard this ship, the people of Venezuela are seeking to reclaim freedom and democracy in their nation—a nation impoverished by dictatorship, socialism, and oppression,” Pence said, adding:

And so we say to President Juan Guaido, to all the freedom-loving people of Venezuela: Estamos con ustedes—we are with you. And America will stand with you in this hemisphere of freedom until your democracy is restored. And to the freedom-loving people of Venezuela, we say: As you stand for freedom, we stand with you. Vayan con Dios—go with God.

Maduro began what he saw as his second term in January after a disputed election fraught with allegations of fraud.

The Venezuelan National Assembly invoked Article 233 of the country’s Constitution to declare Maduro illegitimate, and Guaido, as head of the elected assembly, stood up to fill the void.

Early Tuesday, Guaido told the crowds in Venezuela: “The moment is now.”

“The armed forces have taken the right decision,” Guaido said. “With the support of the Venezuelan people and the backing of our Constitution, they are on the right side of history.”

Maduro said the military has “total loyalty to the people, to the Constitution, and to the fatherland.”

Top military figures, however, are publicly siding with Guaido. In the streets, the military and law enforcement began marching with protesters instead of arresting them, said Ana Quintana, senior policy analyst for Latin America and the Western Hemisphere at The Heritage Foundation.

Government officials who once detained anti-Maduro activist Leopoldo Lopez released him, which is one of the biggest stories going unnoticed, Quintana said.

“More military is defecting during the march toward the presidential palace,” Quintana told The Daily Signal.

Quintana said the situation could change by the minute and Maduro’s ouster is not inevitable.

“It’s absolutely unsustainable, but Russia could deploy more military assets,” she said. “Regime change is dangerous for Cuba, which has 10% to 12% of its GDP tied to Venezuela. The Castro regime survived because of its reliance on first the Soviet Union, and later on [Hugo] Chavez and Maduro.”

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

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

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

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

Computer Program Dubbed ‘Annie’ Making Decisions about Refugee Placement (so we are told!)

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Several people sent me this story from The Atlantic about a new computer program that is being tested by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to determine which American town or city could be the most hospitable to a third worlder arriving in the U.S.

I’m posting it just so you know about it and especially for those of you who came over from Refugee Resettlement Watch and have told me you miss news about refugees.

Before I give you a few snips from the story, you need to know that at present the nine federal resettlement contractors meet on a regular basis in the Washington, DC area and divide up the incoming cases.  One long-time observer refers to the process as “bidding for bodies.”

I would love to be a fly on the wall watching the process because, at the present time, the Trump Administration has drastically reduced the incoming refugee flow and so I suspect there is some squabbling among the ‘humanitarian’ agencies for those few paying customers. (For newbies, refugee contractors are paid by the feds on a per refugee head basis.)

I see some pitfalls in the system described in The Atlantic story.  But, first, here is a bit of it,

How Technology Could Revolutionize Refugee Resettlement

For nearly 70 years, the process of interviewing, allocating, and accepting refugees has gone largely unchanged. In 1951, 145 countries came together in Geneva, Switzerland, to sign the Refugee Convention, the pact that defines who is a refugee, what refugees’ rights are, and what legal obligations states have to protect them.

This process was born of the idealism of the postwar years—an attempt to make certain that those fleeing war or persecution could find safety so that horrific moments in history, such as the Holocaust, didn’t recur. The pact may have been far from perfect, but in successive years, it was a lifeline to Afghans, Bosnians, Kurds, and others displaced by conflict.

The world is a much different place now, though. The rise of populism has brought with it a concomitant hostility toward immigrants in general and refugees in particular.

Does it make you feel better that a computer algorithm will decide if your town or city will be a resettlement site?

Annie’s algorithm is based on a machine learning model in which a computer is fed huge piles of data from past placements, so that the program can refine its future recommendations. The system examines a series of variables—physical ailments, age, levels of education and languages spoken, for example—related to each refugee case. In other words, the software uses previous outcomes and current constraints to recommend where a refugee is most likely to succeed. Every city where HIAS has an office or an affiliate is given a score for each refugee. The higher the score, the better the match.

This is a drastic departure from how refugees are typically resettled. Each week, HIAS and the eight other agencies that allocate refugees in the United States make their decisions based largely on local capacity, with limited emphasis on individual characteristics or needs.

Too funny! Refugee workers fear being replaced by technology! (Maybe this is the only good news in this story!)

There is concern that, as Annie and similar tools improve, an algorithm will take over a critical task—placing refugees—that a human is now performing. Officials at HIAS and the programmers who developed the software told me they were aware of those fears. Their solution: Annie will only ever make suggestions; Monken and her colleagues at HIAS make the final decision.

Read it all here.

What they are not telling you is that much consideration has been given in recent years to place refugees (without notice) into unsuspecting communities (and states) as the Leftwing resettlement contractors (like HIAS) seek to diversify white American towns.

So I can see some resistance coming within their own ranks to a program that presumably is based on job availability, housing capacity, and a ‘welcoming’ environment all to benefit refugees as criteria for algorithms for ‘Annie.’

Although I suppose it is possible that ‘Annie’ has built-in bias toward towns in need of a dose of diversity (as determined by the Libs!). Oh joy! Artificial Intelligence picking your neighbors!

I don’t have the time to address every point made in this article, but here, as I see it, is the largest impediment to their theory—-refugees move!

And, they are free to move in America.

Oftentimes they move within months of placement (called secondary migration) because they want to be near others of their own kind—their own nationality or religion—and are thus forming ethnic enclaves in various parts of the country.

Or, they learn about a new meatpacking plant opening up in the next state and they move for the jobs.  Sometimes they hear that welfare is more generous in another state and move to take advantage of those social service benefits.

The Dems are always yapping about democracy (except when it comes to who decides about the demographic makeup of neighborhoods!)

Personally, if we must take refugees, I would like to see a system where the local community gets a say about refugees being placed in their town or city through an open forum process and let the citizens who live there decide how ‘welcoming’ they wish to be.

As it stands, the nine contractors (with or without ‘Annie’) are deciding on what kind of future your town will have!  And, frankly that is patently unfair.

Trump Set to Declare Muslim Brotherhood to be a Terror Organization

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Al-Jazeera has reported that U.S. President Donald Trump has asked his agency heads to make preparations for declaring the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to be a terrorist organization.  This news comes in the wake of Egyptian President al-Sisi’s recent visit to Washington.  Al-Jazeera is also reporting that this request by Trump has raised a firestorm within the Trump administration, with NSC head Bolton and Sec. State Pompeo supporting the move, but nearly everyone else–including the CIA against it.

While this move by Trump, in my view, is way too little, way too late, it is also disturbing for other reasons.  First off, is the probability that it will be limited to declaring only the Egyptian branch of the MB to be a terrorist organization, while giving the rest of this international organization a free pass–including its front entities here in the United States that are doing so much to curtail free speech while all the time imposing creeping shari’a.

I also find it most disturbing that anyone in the Trump administration, CIA, or Department of Defense would be opposed to the idea of declaring the entire Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, much less be opposed to restricting that designation to just the Egyptian branch (as some of them still are).  This illustrates the need for all of these people to be given some sort of briefing, seminar, or short course on the MB–including a required reading of their manifesto for North America.

Equally disturbing was that Trump did not seem to be able to come up with the idea of declaring even the Egyptian MB a terrorist organization until the Egyptian president briefed him on it.  That tells me that none of Trump’s advisors, including the head honchos at the CIA, thought it worth while to brief the president about the MB.  This reminds me of an incident early in the Trump presidency when he was on the verge of declaring the MB to be a terrorist organization, based on advice from Ted Cruz and other conservatives up on the hill.  But then the king of Jordan came to visit and told him not to do it, because Jordan has 15 MB members sitting in its parliament, and this would make things very difficult for the king.

Trump may well have been getting pressured from other sources as well as the king of Jordan, such as then head of the National Security Council H.R. McMasters, a suspected MB sympathizer and other elements of the administration.

The argument in favor of giving the MB a pass due to its membership in the Jordanian parliament, and that doing so would disrupt U.S. relations with Jordan, was incredibly flimsy and ill-informed.  Four other Arab countries (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE) have all declared the MB to be a terrorist organization, yet all four have continued to maintain solid relations with Jordan and king Abdalla.  Israel and Russia have also declared the MB to be a terrorist organization, and yet they too maintain relations with Jordan.

And now we see the same argument being presented here as Trump is once again considering the idea of declaring the MB to be a terrorist organization.  Only now, it is not only Jordan that has MB members in its parliament, but Tunisia also.  And, this, dear folks, is why Trump felt compelled to scale down his request to declaring only the Egyptian chapter of the MB to be a terrorist organization.  Far too many “experts” in the pentagon, and the intelligence apparatus, are ignorant of what the MB is and what its goals are.  They are also ignorant of the multiple tentacles that the Jihad utilizes.

Just because a MB chapter in say, Tunisia, has publicly eschewed the use of violence to achieve their aims does not mean that the MB international as a whole has eschewed the idea of replacing the U.S. Constitution with shari’a law–including that so-called peaceful MB franchise in Tunisia.

Case in point:  The Egyptian branch of the MB vowed to give up violence when most of them were in prison and incapable of doing anything violent.  This taqiyya innocence helped pave the way for Egyptian Anwar as-Sadat to let the MB out of prison.  They then repaid his act of kindness by spinning off a militant group to assassinate him.   The MB itself has continued to form its own “military wings” where youths are trained in hand-to-hand combat, and the use of other forms of violence.  These actions have taken place on the grounds of the supposedly moderate al-Azhar university (according to Egyptian sources).

This so very peaceful branch of the MB hasn’t hesitated to use violence when other means have failed to attain their goals and/or whenever it appears to them that the use of violence will succeed.

In the meantime, thousands of those “peace-loving” MB members had fled Nasser’s crack down, and ended up teaching in Saudi schools and colleges.  One of the products of this MB educational influence was one Usama bin Laden, a true lover of non-violence he.

All MB groups, and their affiliates and front entities across the globe ascribe to the same founding motto have the same goal in mind, and this is to replace existing non-Islamic governing systems with Shari’a law.  All methods to achieve that goal are on the table:  Violence, emigration, settlement, propaganda, infiltration of political, legal, military, and intelligence organs of the host nation, and up to and including violence whenever possible.  All of these techniques and methods are considered to be a part of the overall jihad, a part of “religious warfare.”

One only has to read their founding motto to understand how they feel about conducting violent jihad when they can get away with it:  “Jihad (religious warfare) is our way, and death on behalf of Allah is the loftiest of our wishes.”

If that is not enough, then these “experts” in our decision-making bodies should look at the Brotherhood’s emblem which features the word w-a’adou underneath two crossed swords.  The word w-a’adou means “and, prepare . . .” and it is the first word of verse 60 in the 8th sura (chapter) of the Qur’an, a verse that goes on to promote the idea of “preparing whatever weapons one can get a hold of so you can terrorize Allah’s enemies and your enemies, and others whom you do not know, but Allah knoweth them.”

What this means for America, is that the MB front entities like CAIR, ISNA, and MSA can continue to harass, demonize, and shut down truth tellers, so that their civilizational jihad may proceed a pace without any interruptions.

The only way to stop this creeping jihad in our own backyard (“aimed at eliminating and uprooting our civil society, civilization, and constitution, and replace it with shari’a”) is to declare the entire international MB to be a terrorist organization.  Then, and only then, can we roll up the MB’s front entities here in the U.S.  Anything less than that is criminal and tantamount to treason.  Because, unless we take this step, we are cooperating with and aiding and abetting a declared enemy who wants to destroy our way of life and replace it with sanctified Jew-hate, wife beating, FGM, child brides and the like.

RELATED ARTICLES: 

Should the Muslim Brotherhood Be Labeled Terrorists?

Turkey’s Islamic Tyranny Warns Trump Not To Ban Muslim Brotherhood

Tunisia: “Islamic sharia law” invoked to shut down LGBTQ rights

CLICK HERE: To read other columns about the Muslim Brotherhood

Mixing Business with Pressure

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Inside the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, workers are already ripping up the ancient teal carpet. By summer, the outside columns will be covered in scaffolding — part of an expensive renovation project meant to give the 100-year-old headquarters a new look. But as far as most conservatives are concerned, the Chamber’s real transformation was already well underway: a radical makeover that’s gone beyond what the building looks like — to what it stands for.

According to the Washington Post, the Chamber is tired of aligning with Republicans and wants to “rebuild” as a more inclusive brand. “We cannot just single-source our politics through one party,” says Tom Wilson, chairman of the organization’s board. It’s time, he insists, to “fundamentally act differently.” That mission has certainly been accomplished in the last handful of years, as the Chamber wades into radical social policies that are increasingly dividing the business community.

In its latest charm offensive to Democrats, the Chamber seemed to make the break with conservatives official — stunning everyone with its endorsement of the most extreme piece of LGBT activism ever introduced: the Equality Act. For an organization whose sole purpose is to protect American enterprise, the move came as a shock to anyone familiar with the oppressive realities of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) H.R. 5. The whole point of the Chamber, FRC’s Peter Sprigg points out, is to “advocate for pro-business policies that create jobs and grow our economy.” Their website even lists “regulatory relief” as a priority issue. So why, Peter asks, would they send a letter to Congress asking, in effect, “Please regulate us more!”

Instead of giving businesses the freedom to set their own policies on “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” the Chamber of Congress thinks the government should force them to adopt restroom policies as unsafe as Target’s. And under this bill, U.S. businesses wouldn’t just be punished for having gender-specific restrooms or showers, they’d also be hauled into court over hiring practices, dress codes, insurance coverage — anything that doesn’t give a unique advantage to people who identify as gay or transgender.

If a day care wants its staff to dress like their biological sex, too bad! If a small family store doesn’t have the money to cover an $89,050 gender reassignment surgery, their loss. Worried about the legal fees for workplace disputes or the cost of a gender-free facility overhaul? Get in line. If the Equality Act passes, the government will be able to dictate what people believe — and torment those who don’t submit. How’s that for the “free” market?

That’s the irony of this debate. The corporate elites who’ve been blinded by this rainbow are actually lobbying for less freedom for themselves. The Chamber of Commerce, like the big wigs at Apple, Google, and others, are demanding conformity on an issue that people should be deciding with their own dollars. If consumers don’t like what a company stands for, they can shop elsewhere! If these politically-correct policies are benefiting LGBT-friendly businesses as much as the Chamber says they are, then why “invite the heavy hand of government to intervene?”

If organizations like the Chamber won’t count the moral costs of H.R. 5, then maybe they’ll count the financial ones. Some LGBT activists, Peter writes, “argue that gender-identity laws benefit the economy as a whole. We can test that proposition empirically. Twenty of the 50 states already have sexual orientation-gender identity laws for employment, public accommodations, and housing [very similar what the Equality Act would impose nationally]. Do those 20 states have an economic advantage over the 30 states that have declined to adopt such laws? The answer, in brief, is no.”

“CNBC published a ‘scorecard on state economic climate’ in July 2018, ranking ‘America’s Top States for Business.’ Six of the 20 highest-ranked states had such laws — but so did nine of the twenty lowest-ranked ones. Forbes published its own list of ‘Best States for Business‘ in November 2018. Of the top seven states, not one had full protections, and only four of the top 13 had them. So did eight of the bottom 13.”

Employment numbers tell a similar story — so do population migrations and the American GDP. There is absolutely no evidence that the Equality Act will help the economy. There is, on the other hand, piles of it proving what most conservatives already know: true freedom is what leads to economic growth. When the Chamber of Commerce needed allies in the fights against taxes and government reform, do you think they called liberal politicians? Of course not. They leaned on the same conservatives they’re betraying in this debate. If Big Business wants to be a willing hostage of LGBT activists and abandon the principles that make companies successful, be our guest. But these same CEOs had better not come knocking when their profits are on the line — not if they’re just going to spend them attacking the conservatives’ values.

Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Born Debate Very Much Alive in Left

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EDITORS NOTE: This FRC column is republished with permission.

VIDEO: The Disarm America Movement Seeks To Rob You Of Your Right To Defend Your Family

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“Every day, citizens across America exercise their Constitutional right to defend themselves, their families, and their communities—that’s a Constitutional right. And they want to take it away from you.” —Donald Trump

EDITORS NOTE: This NRA-ILA video is republished with permission.

Pete Buttigieg’s Marxist Father

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by Christine Niles, M.St. (Oxon.), J.D.

The late father of presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a proponent of the work of Antonio Gramsci, considered the godfather of cultural marxism.

Dr. Joseph Buttigieg served as professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where he was a faculty member for nearly 40 years before his passing at age 71 on Jan. 27.

A founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society, Prof. Buttigieg edited and translated Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, a manifesto on communist revolution. He was also appointed by the Italian minister of culture to a commission of experts supervising Gramsci’s complete works. His articles on Gramsci have been translated into multiple languages.

Professor Buttigieg sat on the advisory board of the journal “Rethinking Marxism,” and was an editor of “Boundary 2,” a journal that also promoted socialist thought. He also participated in the 150th anniversary of Karl Marx & Richard Engels’ Communist Manifesto, whose prose he lauded for its “poignancy.”

Father John Jenkins, controversial president of Notre Dame, praised Prof. Buttigieg after his passing.

“Joe was a superb scholar, an inspirational teacher and a pioneering leader as the inaugural director of the fledgling Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars Program,” said Jenkins.

The obituary on Notre Dame’s website acknowledges Pete Buttigieg’s “gay marriage” to partner Chasten Glezman: “Buttigieg is survived by his wife, Anne Montgomery, who was a member of the Notre Dame faculty for 29 years, and his son, Pete (Chasten Glezman), the mayor of South Bend.”

Antonio Gramsci, Godfather of Cultural Marxism

Gramsci, born in 1891, was founder and leader of the Communist Party of Italy. He’s best known for his writings from prison, when he was jailed under Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime.

Gramsci rejected violent overthrow of capitalist governments in favor of gradual revolution through communist infiltration of the culture and societal structures, implementing socialism through what his disciple Rudi Dutschke called “the long march through the institutions.” Gramsci believed changing ideology in the ruling elite — whether in media, education, courts, politics or other structures — was more powerful and enduring than bloody revolution.

Public enemy number one for Gramsci was the Catholic Church because of the “ideological” hold it had over the masses.

“Gramsci’s principle was that [Communists] must begin by influencing the culture, winning the intellectuals, the teachers, implanting itself in the press, the media, the publishing houses,” said French philosopher Jean-François Revel.

Like Father, Like Son

If Pete Buttigieg’s public witness tells us anything, it’s that he’s a faithful disciple and product of his marxist father. There’s little evidence that the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend has explicitly promoted Gramsci, but Buttigieg’s life and politics bespeak a wholesale rejection of the Catholic faith in which he was baptized in favor of an amoral philosophy that leaves God out of the equation.

In his autobiography, Buttigieg called his dad a “man of the left, no easy thing on a campus like Notre Dame’s in the 1980s.”

“[T]he more I heard these aging professors talk,” Buttigieg said of his parents’ dinner guests, “the more I wanted to learn how to decrypt their sentences, and to grasp the political backstory of the grave concerns that commanded their attention and aroused such fist-pounding dinner debate.”

According to the Washington Examiner, “Pete wrote that his dad was supportive when he came out as gay. He and his husband bought a house in South Bend around the corner from his parents, which gave the couple ‘a good support network despite our work and travel schedules’ when they decided to get a dog.”

The first openly gay presidential candidate, Buttigieg has proudly flaunted his “marriage” to Chasten Glezman, a gay activist who joked during his keynote speech at the 2019 Houston Human Rights Campaign dinner that he “could be the first man in history to pick out the White House china” — referring to duties traditionally reserved to the First Lady.

On abortion, Buttigieg has repeatedly rationalized his stance by claiming that male politicians should not intrude into decisions between a woman and her doctor. He has also offered implicit support for infanticide measures being proposed and enacted in various states.

“Radical leftists in the United States, Europe and Latin America have adopted Gramsci’s methods and have made a point of infiltrating churches, universities and media outlets,” wrote George Marlin. “University curricula teach that all cultures must be equally respected — even the ones that directly contradict Christian values. In the name of human rights, secular humanist organizations have promoted policies that have eliminated Judeo-Christian moral restraints.”

“Pope Benedict XVI has wisely warned that the replacement of the West’s Christian roots with moral relativism has ushered in a ‘confused ideology of liberty [that] leads to a dogmatism that is proving ever more hostile to real liberty,'” Marlin continued, adding that “the Holy Father fears that the West may be entering a new Dark Age in which man exists solely for the benefit of a divinized state and will be stripped of his God-given human dignity.”

Buttigieg, who lived under the shadow of his father and was deeply shaped and molded by his marxist thought, is the perfect embodiment of Gramsci’s philosophy. The presidential hopeful’s popularity among Americans is further evidence that the nation, and with it the West, is indeed entering a new Dark Age.

Watch the panel discuss the Left’s leading presidential candidates in The Download—A Democrat in the White House?

COLUMN BY

CHRISTINE NILES, M.ST. (OXON.), J.D.

Christine was born in Saigon, Vietnam one year before it fell to the Communists, and has lived in France and the United States. She has degrees from Notre Dame Law School and Oxford University. She is editor-in-chief of News at Church Militant.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant column is republished with permission.

PODCAST: Why Are Democrats Abandoning Religion?

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Gallup recently released an interesting report discussing the erosion of attendance and membership in organized religion. They claim membership in churches, synagogues, and mosques has reached a new low, 50%. From 1938 to 1999, membership averaged 70%, but since then it has steadily declined to its current level. This helps explain why so many institutions are suffering financially and being forced to make dramatic changes, such as selling their building, terminating leaders and staff, mergers and consolidations, etc. Interestingly, the same can be said for other nonprofits, such as fraternal, civic, trade groups, and amateur sports institutions. Most, if not all, are experiencing a decline.

The downsizing of membership in organized religion is interesting as there are political ramifications in play. According to the Gallup report, Republicans show a modest decline in terms of membership, dropping from 77% to 69%. However, Democrats showed a more dramatic decline, going from 71% to 48%.

Why the significant drop in membership? Some people theorize religion has become synonymous with the Republican party and, as such, do not want to be associated with such values. I believe it goes well beyond this though. As the Democrats have become more radically liberal, thereby embracing Socialism, there is a natural inclination to avoid religion and abandon God. This explains why moderate Democrats are leaving the party and are either voting independently or switching over to the Republican party as they do not want to see their religion ridiculed by the far Left. Let us not forget, there have been efforts in the last few Democrat conventions to eliminate “God” from the wording of the party platform.

In particular, Christianity has been in the cross-hairs of radical Democrats for a long time, and still is to this day. To illustrate, the San Antonio City Council, controlled by Democrats, recently banned the popular Chick-fil-A restaurant from opening a new store in the city’s airport. Although the company was originally included in the plans, they were forced out apparently for their charitable donations to Christian groups who allegedly are anti-LGBTQ. According to a USA Today report, San Antonio Councilman Manny Pelaez (D) even went so far as to “lambaste, denigrate, and openly mock the otherwise upstanding corporate citizen of Chick-fil-A.” Further, “He described Chick-fil-A as a ‘symbol of hate’ because it has donated to religious charities that he considered to oppose LGBTQ rights.” All of this has resulted in a request for an investigation into the City Council’s decision based on religious discrimination.

As another instance, former President Barack Obama and Sec. Hillary Clinton, recently commented on the bomb attacks in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, by referring to the victims as “Easter worshippers” and not “Christians.” The snub was subtle, but significant in that it reflects the attitude by the Democrats to disrespect Christianity.

In a related story, it was recently announced the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Flyers will no longer play Kate Smith’s rendition of the Irving Berlin classic, “God Bless America,” a time-honored patriotic song, claiming Smith was a racist. Please remember Kate Smith was the woman President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a Democrat) introduced to Winston Churchill years ago as “Mrs. America.” Smith was also the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her singing during World War II. In other words, something smells fishy here; is it the singer or the song on trial here? I suspect the latter.

It is perfectly obvious the Democrats are rebelling against the 4-C’s of Republicanism:

  1. Christianity – Not only are they abandoning church, they are working to subvert it because of the moral values involved. The truth is, they are jealous of Christians in terms of what they have accomplished through their work ethic and benevolence.
  2. Capitalism – They are trying to replace it with Socialism in order to expand government control and create dependencies (aka, “Master/Slave” relationship). Democrats have abandoned the concept of “earning a living,” preferring entitlements instead.
  3. Constitution – They have made numerous attempts to undermine our governing document as it is perceived as an antiquated encumbrance against the Democrat agenda. This is why they wish to eliminate the Electoral College, change the makeup of the Supreme Court, implement gun control, and other changes to our Bill of Rights.
  4. Conservative values – These are values developed over the country’s history and includes such things as love of country (patriotism), citizenship, reverence for family, belief in deity, being a good neighbor, lending a helping hand, etc. Instead, the Democrats have developed a set of moral values diametrically opposed to conservatives in an attempt to redefine history, government, freedoms and rights. According to Gallop polls in 2017 and 2018, liberal positions have led to a sharp decline in morality in the country as we know it today. This is greatly assisted by the entertainment and news media who no longer feel restrained from promoting liberal values and demeaning those of conservatives.

So, in terms of organized religion, the Democrats are rapidly becoming the anti-God party as it doesn’t fit in with their political agenda. Whereas the United States used to be considered one of the most religious countries in the world, it’s ranking has slipped due to the departure of the Democrats. Again, this will likely cause our sense of morality to continue to stumble and fall.

The refutation of the 4-C’s represents a rejection of the traditional values of the country. It ultimately represents a radical re-definition and implementation of America, one where liberty is steadfastly controlled by government. Yes, it is all about “control.”

Keep the Faith!

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Unions Keep Deducting Dues Without Consent, Teachers Say

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Just a few weeks before school let out last May, unexpected visitors showed up in Bethany Mendez’s classroom.

They didn’t come to discuss the nuts and bolts of education or the work the teacher was doing to assist young students with learning disabilities.

Instead, the visitors wanted to know why she was leaving the teachers union, and if she fully understood the ramifications of resigning her membership.

“This made me very angry and upset to actually have them come to my classroom during instructional time during the day,” Mendez told The Daily Signal in an interview. “I thought the meeting was regarding a student who might have to go into one of my classes. But these were union representatives who showed up in my classroom to question me as to why I was leaving the union.”

Mendez teaches elementary school students with learning disabilities in California’s Fremont Unified School District.

Since she had her own bouts with dyslexia when she was roughly the same age as her students, Mendez explains, she became motivated to become a teacher and devote herself to assisting children who require specialized instruction.

For union officials to interrupt her instructional time, Mendez thought, was inappropriate and overly intrusive.

“I struggled with dyslexia when I was little, and that was due to a vision problem,” Mendez, 35, said. “But I was able to have surgery to fix it. For a lot of these kids, it’s a brain-wiring issue and it involves how their brain interprets visual information. My goal is to help children learn and to avoid the embarrassment of not being able to read in the third and fourth grades. I’m passionate about helping kids to bridge that gap.”

“It would be fine to have a friendly conversation outside of class, but to actually have two people come to my class while I was teaching and ask these questions I thought was a little offensive,” she said. “They asked if I knew what I was doing and if I knew what I would be giving up. My answer is I think everyone should have a choice to either opt in or opt out of joining the union.”

Suit Claims Unions Circumvent High Court

Last June, in a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down mandatory union dues and fees for public sector workers.

In their decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the justices said “agency shop” laws requiring nonunion government workers to pay union fees violate the First Amendment rights of workers who object to the political agenda of public employee unions.

In March, Mendez, joined with four other teachers to file a class-action lawsuit in federal court against the California Teachers Association and several local affiliates, alleging that the teachers unions continued to deduct dues from their paychecks in violation of the Supreme Court’s Janus ruling.

The lawsuit also names the National Education Association, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, local school districts, and local unions as defendants.

Contrary to what union officials have argued, the teachers who signed union membership cards last year did not provide the California Teachers Association or local affiliates with “affirmative consent” to deduct dues, Mariah Gondeiro, a lawyer with the Freedom Foundation who represents the suing teachers, told The Daily Signal.

“These membership forms don’t include sufficient waiver language as required under Janus,” Gondeiro said, adding:

The unions are arguing they can lock people into these contracts because they signed these forms. But they don’t tell employees that they have an option to not fund the union. They don’t tell people that they are leaving out important facts. The teachers can’t consent to something they didn’t know about, and they did not know their rights.

The Daily Signal sought comment on the lawsuit from the California Teachers Association and the National Education Association.

Frank Wells, a communications official with the California Teachers Association, responded in an email.

“This is just another lawsuit from the Freedom Foundation to continue their attack on public education and public employees,” Wells said. “Their backers have a lot of money to spend so it’s likely these and other attacks will continue. I’d follow the money. That is the real story here.”

The National Education Association did not respond to requests for comment.

The Daily Signal also sought comment on the lawsuit and specific allegations from two local unions, the Fremont Unified District Teachers Association and the Hayward Education Association, by phone and email.

Hayward union officials referred a reporter to the state union, while the Fremont local acknowledged the request for comment and said it would be forwarded to the local’s president.

The Daily Signal also asked the California Teachers Association’s Wells whether he would like to respond on behalf of the local unions. He had not commented further at publication time.

Supreme Court and ‘Affirmative Consent’

Under the high court’s Janus ruling, teachers and other public employees must offer “affirmative consent” before a union may withhold fees from their paychecks, Gondeiro said.

In his opinion for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said automatic deduction of union fees from a nonmember’s wages without consent violates free speech rights.

Freedom Foundation, a free market think tank based in Washington state, filed an amicus brief in the Janus case asking the Supreme Court to outlaw “opt out” arrangements that put the burden on nonmembers to halt collection of union fees from their paychecks.

Public employees must make a deliberate choice to “opt in” to paying union fees, Alito said on behalf of the court majority, writing:

Neither an agency fee nor any other payment to the union may be deducted from a nonmember’s wages, nor may any other attempt be made to collect such a payment, unless the employee affirmatively consents to pay. By agreeing to pay, nonmembers are waiving their First Amendment rights, and such a waiver cannot be presumed.

The Janus ruling affects about 5 million government employees in 22 states who no longer are required either to join a union or pay related fees as a condition of employment.

Mark Janus, a child support specialist at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit and gave the case its name.

“The opt-in requirement is something the Freedom Foundation really advocated for before Janus was decided,” Gondeiro said, adding:

The reason why is because unions are in a powerful position, and history shows they take advantage of vulnerable workers. So we wanted to make sure that the court put the burden on these powerful entities to obtain workers’ affirmative consent. Because if we didn’t, then they would just have taken advantage of workers, which they have done in the past. What’s remarkable is that even with the burden being put on the unions, they are still trying to circumvent the law.

‘All About Janus’

“I didn’t know anything about the Janus case and didn’t know that it was a possibility,” Mendez said. “I also didn’t understand why we needed to reconfirm membership. The forms didn’t make sense to me, because the dues already came out of our paychecks. But now I see that this was all about Janus.”

Union officials eventually persuaded Mendez to sign the “membership recommitment form,” which she did on June 4, 2018, just a few days before the end of the school year and a few weeks before the high court’s Janus ruling.

She had received a text message from local union officials urging her to sign up until the last few days of school.

“I was told we needed to stand 100% together to defeat a law that would destroy unions,” Mendez said:

That’s the information I got. I’m not anti-union. I think they do some good, especially my local union. I’m pro-individual rights and pro-teacher. But what I was told was not the truth. Janus does not destroy all unions. They [union leaders] did not provide us with an opportunity for informed consent, and that’s what this case is about.

Mendez says she attempted to opt out last fall from the California Teachers Association and her local union.

But there was a catch. Because Mendez signed the membership recommitment form, union representatives informed the teacher that she was locked in until this coming June. The form contained “fine print” and “a clause” that said teachers could withdraw from membership only during a 30-day window beginning when they signed the form.

$10 Refund for Political Activity

Audrey Stewart, a fellow plaintiff who teaches in Hayward Unified School District, says she is familiar with the tactics unions use to keep dues and fees flowing in from teachers who prefer not to be members.

Stewart said she also has a hard time believing that her union spends only about $10 a year on politics.

Stewart, a teacher for 30 years, told The Daily Signal that she often has found herself in a hostile work environment because she differs with the political stance of teachers unions on a range of issues.

“I don’t want to pay for the unions’ politics,” she said. “I always said they could represent me as far as employment is concerned, but they shouldn’t have a place in my political life.”

Although unions were required to refund nonchargeable political expenditures that weren’t part of the collective bargaining process even before the Janus ruling, Stewart isn’t convinced the amount of her refunds measure up with what the unions actually spend on politics.

“They have been issuing this $5 bill to me twice a year, and I have to go down to the office of my local union and pick it up because that’s what they are claiming is the [refundable] amount spent for political purposes,” Stewart said. “So, they are saying it’s basically $10 a year they spend on politics. This is really a joke. This has been going on for 30 years, and I find it odd that it’s never increased either. It’s always a cash payment in an envelope.”

Stewart says she signed her membership recommitment form on May 9, 2018, at the behest of union officials. The form said it was necessary for her and other teachers to sign to support colleagues.

“There was no rhyme or reason to these recommitment cards,” she said. “I signed it because I was told it was to support my fellow teachers. But I later told my union representative that I found this recommitment form awfully suspicious because they front-loaded this knowing this [Janus] case was coming and it might not go in their favor, and they have locked these teachers in. I don’t even know if this recommitment form was a legal membership document.”

Gondeiro, the lawyer with Freedom Foundation, told The Daily Signal that the forms signed by teachers last year should not pass legal muster.

“What we are doing with the class-action suit is we are trying to illustrate what affirmative consent looks like,” she said, adding:

We are trying to take Janus to an extra step because apparently the unions can’t abide by the law. So, we want to put in plain text what type of notice they have to give workers, because they need all the direction they can get. We want in the contract that they have a right to not financially support the union, and [that] by signing the agreement they are waiving their First Amendment rights. If they don’t include that type of language in the contract, there is no affirmative consent.

Gondeiro also said the unions are making it difficult for teachers who have become aware of their rights to opt out, using restrictive window periods and other cumbersome requirements that involve writing letters to union representatives and payroll personnel saying they want to leave the union and stop automatic deduction of dues.

“I sent letters to the California Teachers Association and to my local telling them I was going to opt out,” Stewart said. “They wrote back to me to thank me for my inquiry. But I wasn’t inquiring, I was telling them I was leaving.”

Stewart, who teaches at both the elementary and high school levels, told The Daily Signal that “strange incidents” took place after she made it clear she wanted to leave the union.

Her elementary school classroom was “ransacked” several times after hours in February, Stewart said, and around this time she was “verbally attacked” by a union leader while walking up a path to the high school.

The lead plaintiff in the teachers’ lawsuit says she wants to make a clean break.

Mendez, who is entering her 13th year as a teacher, says she had wanted to withdraw from the California Teachers Association, but until recently was content with her local union.

“The CTA has always misrepresented me, but I was willing to stay in the local union,” she said. “But after they [the local union] withheld information, misled us, and accepted poor salary and benefits in my district, I wanted out of both the state and local union.”

The local unions and school districts named in the lawsuit include Fremont Unified District Teachers Association, Valley Center-Pauma Teachers Association, Hayward Education Association, Tustin Education Association, and the Fremont, Valley Center-Pauma, Hayward, and Tustin unified school districts.

COLUMN BY

Kevin Mooney

Kevin Mooney is an investigative reporter for The Daily Signal. Send an email to Kevin. Twitter: @KevinMooneyDC.

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Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

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

New York Is Illegally Targeting the NRA, Trump Says

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President Donald Trump on Monday called the New York state attorney general’s newly announced probe of the National Rifle Association illegal, and an expert on laws regarding nonprofits contends that the probe is at minimum improper.

Trump said it was a concerted effort to “take down and destroy” the NRA.

“When a state attorney general uses the power vested in the attorney general’s office to improperly use [it] against organizations for political purposes, it could be illegal,” Cleta Mitchell, a Washington lawyer who advises nonprofits and was co-counsel to the NRA in a 2002 Supreme Court case, told The Daily Signal.

“The NRA, in court, would have a good predicate to argue political bias against the organization to show that hostility toward the organization’s existence,” Mitchell said.

Over the weekend, the attorney general’s office announced it commenced an investigation into the NRA’s nonprofit status and would be subpoenaing financial records.

The announcement came in the midst of turmoil in the organization, after the NRA ousted Oliver North as president in what became a public dispute between North and NRA Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre. North reportedly said he was forced out because he alleged financial improprieties.

New York state has taken separate action against the finances of Carry Guard, the NRA’s branded insurance program.

Even the liberal American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief on behalf of the NRA last year that argued New York “indisputably targeted the NRA and similar groups based on their ‘gun promotion’ advocacy.”

The ACLU brief continued: “It is important to note that, however controversial it may be, ‘gun promotion’ is core political speech, entitled to the same constitutional protection as speech advocating for reproductive rights, marijuana legalization, or financial deregulation.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James pledged as a Democratic candidate for the office to “use the constitutional power as an attorney general to regulate charities, that includes the NRA, to investigate their legitimacy,” it noted.

The new probe could be entirely legitimate, but it faces questions because of New York’s past actions, said Amy Swearer, a senior legal policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation.

“State AGs certainly have a duty to investigate credible allegations of financial misconduct by nonprofits incorporated in their states,” Swearer told The Daily Signal. “At this point, it’s unclear what evidence exists that might threaten the NRA’s nonprofit status, but this type of investigation is not in and of itself unlawful.”

She continued:

Unfortunately, as the president alluded, New York has a long history of taking actions against the NRA to silence the organization’s pro-Second Amendment voice, and even the ACLU has come to the NRA’s defense over recent unconstitutional attempts by New York to stifle the organization financially.

Because of the state’s history of taking unconstitutional and bad-faith actions against the NRA, a dark cloud of suspicion will justifiably continue to hang over what might otherwise be a justified and good-faith investigation.

The NRA is clearly working through some internal problems, and the president is right to suggest that this distracts the organization from what it does best—working to strengthen the Second Amendment against those who would rather destroy its protections.

Trump tweeted on Monday that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the attorney general “are illegally using the state’s legal apparatus to take down and destroy this very important organization.”

The president said the NRA “must get its act together quickly, stop the internal fighting.”

An NRA spokesman did not respond to phone and email inquiries for this article.

The New York attorney general’s office responded to the president Monday.

“Attorney General Letitia James is focused on enforcing the rule of law. In any case we pursue, we will follow the facts wherever they may lead,” the office said in a public statement. “We wish the president would share our respect for the law.”

The New York attorney general’s office has subpoenaed banks for financial records related to the Trump Organization, the president’s business, and is suing the Trump Foundation charity.

“This is the same office that has gone after the Trump Foundation,” Mitchell said. “The attorney general obviously has a pattern and practice of going after an organization it does not like.”

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

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

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

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

Islamist Terrorism Remains the World’s Greatest Threat to Peace

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After the horrific mass murder of 50 Muslim worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, there was widespread coverage and a torrent of mainstream news networks contemplating the threat of white supremacy.

These conversations, completely reasonable and necessary in the face of violent attacks from a racist gunman, soon began deteriorating into politically motivated and specious claims contending that “white supremacy” had become the predominate terror threat in the world.

Well, the coordinated bomb blasts aimed at Christian worshippers on Easter Sunday, which killed at least 290 people and injured hundreds more, demonstrates the kind of meticulous planning, funding, resources, and support that is still exclusively the domain of radical Islamic terrorism.

It’s not merely that the act was planned to maximize the death toll, but that it is a continuation of long-standing efforts by Islamists to destroy the Christian communities left in Asia.

Those who kill in the name of Islam are part of a worldwide, historic, ideological, and political movement that includes, to various degrees and various reasons, radicalized men and women from both great factions of the faith.

Then again, terrorist groups—as well as their recruitment and propaganda outfits—are often functioning in Islamic regimes, which either actively sustain terror, tolerate these groups, or pay them off to engage in terrorism elsewhere.

The Christians who remain in the Islamic world are often oppressed in other ways. In a number of these nations, publicly praying in any faith but Islam is forbidden and, in many, converting to Christianity is still punishable by death.

“Islamic extremism remains the global, dominant driver of persecution, responsible for initiating oppression and conflict in 35 of the 50 countries on the list,” according to Open Doors, a worldwide Christian group.

The idea that a similar threat exists in the West is risible. There’s not a single Western country that doesn’t afford Muslim citizens the same rights it does as all other citizens. No government on Earth supports white supremacy.

There is no funding infrastructure for those who support white power. There is no Christian or Jewish denomination, or any notable political factions, in those nations that imbue white supremacy with any theological or ideological legitimacy. There is no white supremacist government trying to obtain nuclear weapons, and none sending its terrorists to other countries. In the world’s free nations, where any political party can participate in the process, the power of racist groups is minimal.

Yet the American left continues to downplay the danger, first by arguing that Islam has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, and then by lumping every white-skinned person who commits a terrorist act into one imaginary coherent political movement to contrast against it.

It’s true that Americans have been spared much Islamic terror since 2002—a year that, curiously, nearly every graph media uses to measure domestic terrorism starts—but only because we’ve spent billions of dollars each year and immense resources, both in lives and treasure, keeping it out of the country and fighting it abroad.

Another reason the majority of Americans might not comprehend Islamic radicalism’s reach is the skewed intensity of the media coverage. Political correctness and a chilling fear of being labeled “Islamophobic” makes it difficult to honestly report on terrorism around the world.

In addition to the massacre this Easter in Sri Lanka, at least 200 Christian civilians have been murdered in Africa by Islamic militants thus far in 2019—many of them killed by machete, some by bombings. Many more Christians have been murdered during the past calendar year.

In November 2018, for example, 42 people were slaughtered in an attack on a Catholic mission in the Central African Republic. In October, 55 Christians were murdered by a group of Islamists in Nigeria. Another 29 were killed when 10 churches were burned down in Ethiopia last summer. Another seven Coptic Christians were gunned down in Egypt—and others spared only because of the good work of police.

There are pockets of racists in the world, and individuals who engage in terrible acts of violence against innocent people. These are dangerous men, capable of doing tremendous damage. But no group threatens global peace the same way that political Islam does. None has its reach or material and theological support. None has created more mayhem and death in the world since the end of the Cold War. The Sri Lankan massacre is just another harrowing reminder.

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

COMMENTARY BY

David Harsanyi

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist and the author of “First Freedom: A Ride through America’s Enduring History With the Gun, From the Revolution to Today.” Twitter: .

RELATED ARTICLE: Should the Muslim Brotherhood Be Labeled Terrorists?

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

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

VIDEO: 4 Keys to the Immigration Reform We Need

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Immigration is one of the fundamental building blocks that help make America the unique nation that it is.

But the debate over border security and immigration has become toxic because politicians have put politics before principles. And reasonable Americans find themselves trapped between zealots on both sides.

For over two centuries, the United States has welcomed millions of people from every corner of the globe. And today, we lawfully admit over 1 million people every year. That is more than any other country in the world.

The debate is not about whether we should allow immigration—it’s about how we do so in a way that protects American sovereignty, respects the rule of law, and is beneficial to all Americans.

So what does a thoughtful agenda for American immigration reform look like?

Here are four guiding principles:

1. We must respect the consent of the governed—that is, the will of the people.

Individuals who are not citizens do not have a right to American citizenship without the consent of the American people. That consent is expressed through the laws of the United States.

Through those laws, we the people invite individuals from other countries, under certain conditions, to join us as residents and fellow citizens.

2. We cannot compromise national security and public safety.

Every nation has the right, recognized by both international and domestic law, to secure its borders and ports of entry and control what and who is coming into its country.

A disorganized and chaotic immigration system encourages people to go around the law and is a clear invitation to those who wish to take advantage of our openness to harm the nation.

Secure borders, especially in a time of terrorist threat, are crucial to American national security.

3. Becoming a citizen means becoming an American. We must preserve patriotic assimilation.

The founding principles of this nation imply that an individual of any ethnic heritage or racial background can become an American. That’s why we have always welcomed immigrants seeking the promises and opportunities of the American dream.

Patriotic assimilation is the bond that allows America to be a nation of immigrants. Without it, we cease to be a country with a distinct character, becoming instead a hodgepodge of different groups.

If we are to be a united nation, living up to our motto of e pluribus unum—out of many, one—we all must understand and embrace a common language, history, and civic culture.

And that not only benefits America, but also those immigrants and their families who aspire to prosper here.

4. Our lawmakers must respect the rule of law, and immigration is no exception.

Failure to enforce our immigration laws is unfair to those who obey the law and follow the rules to enter the country legally.

Those who enter and remain in the country illegally should not be rewarded with legal status or other benefits. When politicians condone such behavior they only encourage further illegal conduct.

Based on these principles, immigration reform should include transitioning to a merit-based system. We should end practices like chain migration, birthright citizenship, the visa lottery, arbitrary per-country immigration caps, and any form of amnesty for those here illegally.

We must close loopholes that prevent enforcement of our laws and have overwhelmed immigration courts, allowing illegitimate asylum claimants and other lawbreakers to remain in the U.S. indefinitely.

And we must take on these issues one by one. A comprehensive “deal” subjects the fate of policies with universal appeal to the fate of the most controversial topics. The key is to begin by working on the solutions on which most Americans agree.

We must and can address this issue in a manner that is fair, responsible, humane, and prudent. This is too important an issue to not get right and too important an issue to be driven by partisan agendas.

Let’s stay focused on what is best for the welfare of all Americans, both those of today and those of the future.

COMMENTARY BY

Genevieve Wood

Genevieve Wood advances policy priorities of The Heritage Foundation as senior contributor to The Daily Signal. Send an email to Genevieve. Twitter: .

RELATED ARTICLE: Former Border Patrol Chief Explains Why Border Crisis Is Worst It’s Been in US History

Dear Readers:

With the recent conservative victories related to tax cuts, the Supreme Court, and other major issues, it is easy to become complacent.

However, the liberal Left is not backing down. They are rallying supporters to advance their agenda, moving this nation further from the vision of our founding fathers.

If we are to continue to bring this nation back to our founding principles of limited government and fiscal conservatism, we need to come together as a group of likeminded conservatives.

This is the mission of The Heritage Foundation. We want to continue to develop and present conservative solutions to the nation’s toughest problems. And we cannot do this alone.

We are looking for a select few conservatives to become a Heritage Foundation member. With your membership, you’ll qualify for all associated benefits and you’ll help keep our nation great for future generations.

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

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