Here Are The Most Egregious Fake News Stories Of 2018

As 2018 comes to a close, it’s time to review the year’s worst cases of media misquotes, misleading narratives, major corrections and straight-up fake news.

While last year’s fake reporting largely occurred during the media’s relentless pursuit to prove Russian collusion, this year’s list is much more varied. However, some themes emerged: stories about then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the U.S. border were routinely flagged for misinformation.

Without further ado, here is the list of 2018’s worst examples of fake news:

1. WAPO BLAMES BORDER PATROL FOR DEATH OF 7-YEAR-OLD MIGRANT

The Washington Post published a story in December focusing on a 7-year-old migrant child from Guatemala who died in border patrol custody.

Despite WaPo’s misleading headline suggesting border patrol was to blame for the girl’s death, the full timeline of events and statements from the girl’s father praising border agents revealed a different story.

2. CNN AND THE HILL SPREAD RETRACTED SEXUAL ASSAULT CLAIM AGAINST KAVANAUGH

CNN and The Hill both reported on a sexual assault claim against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in late September without ever mentioning that the claim had been quickly retracted.

WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 27: Judge Brett Kavanaugh testifies to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill September 27, 2018 in Washington, DC. Kavanaugh was called back to testify about claims by Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused him of sexually assaulting her during a party in 1982 when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 27: Judge Brett Kavanaugh testifies to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill September 27, 2018 in Washington, DC. Kavanaugh was called back to testify about claims by Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused him of sexually assaulting her during a party in 1982 when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Jeffrey Catalan apologized for making a “mistake” in leveling the false claim against Kavanaugh, but CNN and The Hill’s initial reports on the claim failed to note the retraction. The Hill later retracted a tweet bolstering the claim and CNN updated its misleading report.

3. BOSTON GLOBE CORRECTS LIZ WARREN STORY — MAKES HER LESS NATIVE AMERICAN

Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren released a DNA test in October seeking to prove her repeated claims that she has Native American ancestry.

The Boston Globe initially reported on the DNA test by explaining that Warren was somewhere between 1/32 and 1/512 Native American. However, the paper eventually issued two corrections that damaged Warren’s ancestral claims even further.

“The generational range based on the ancestor that the report identified suggests she’s between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American,” The Globe admitted.

4. NYT ACCUSES NIKKI HALEY OF PURCHASING EXPENSIVE CURTAINS

The New York Times initially tied U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley to expensive curtains hanging in the ambassador’s apartment in New York, writing, “Nikki Haley’s View of New York Is Priceless. Her Curtains? $52,701.”

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley addresses the UNSC during a United Nations Security Council meeting on Ukraine November 26, 2018 at the United Nations in New York. - The United States on Monday warned Russia that "outlaw actions" like the seizure of Ukrainian ships in the Sea of Azov are preventing normal relations from developing between Washington and Moscow. US Ambassador Nikki Haley told the UN Security Council that "the United States would welcome a normal relationship with Russia. But outlaw actions like this one continue to make that impossible." (Photo by DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images)

US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley addresses the UNSC during a United Nations Security Council meeting on Ukraine November 26, 2018 at the United Nations in New York. (Photo by DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images)

However, NYT’s own article later admitted that the curtains were approved in 2016 and that Haley had no say in the matter.

5. MEDIA STILL BLAMING REPUBLICANS FOR STEELE DOSSIER

CNN’s Jim Sciutto, MSNBC’s Katy Tur, and MSNBC’s Ari Melber were all responsible for falsely claiming that Never-Trump Republicans were responsible for initial funding of the salacious Steele dossier.

Washington Free Beacon founder Paul Singer did pay Fusion GPS for standard opposition research, however, he stopped paying Fusion GPS well before they contracted Christopher Steele to create the dossier. That research was paid for solely by the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

This falsehood has been shared so many times that even former FBI director James Comeyhas repeated it.

6. CNN ANALYST PUBLISHES DUBIOUS REPORT ON ADDITIONAL KAVANAUGH ALLEGATIONS

CNN political analyst and Sentinel editor Brian Karem published a report in September claiming that “Montgomery County investigators” were looking into an additional allegation of sexual misconduct against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Local police disputed that they were investigating any claims, and Karem later updated his reporting to indicate that his sources were not police, but rather random “investigators in Montgomery County.”

7. CNN ACCUSES TED CRUZ OF BEING AFRAID TO APPEAR ON THEIR NETWORK

CNN accused Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz of being “scared” to come on their programs in the wake of the February school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

ATASCOCITA, TX - NOVEMBER 05: U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks during a Get Out The Vote Bus Tour rally on November 5, 2018 in Atascocita, Texas. With one day to go until election day, Sen. Cruz is campaigning throughout Texas as he battles democratic challenger Beto O'Rourke in a tight race to save his Senate seat. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

ATASCOCITA, TX – NOVEMBER 05: U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks during a Get Out The Vote Bus Tour rally on November 5, 2018 in Atascocita, Texas. With one day to go until election day, Sen. Cruz is campaigning throughout Texas as he battles democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke in a tight race to save his Senate seat. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Sen. Ted Cruz blasted CNN for the falsehood, explaining on Twitter that he had done a 15-minute interview on the network the day prior.

“CNN has aired NONE of it,” Cruz complained. “Why not air the (entire) interview?

8. CNN SPREADS FALSE STATISTIC ON SCHOOL SHOOTING

After a May school shooting in Texas, CNN anchor Jim Sciutto and political correspondent Sara Murray both claimed that there had already been 22 school shootings in 2018.

CNN’s list of “school shootings” includes accidental firearm discharges, events that don’t involve any students, and domestic disputes — hardly the incidents that most people consider to be a school shooting.

9. NBC SAT ON INFORMATION THAT CONTRADICTED KAVANAUGH ALLEGATIONS

While NBC’s story is not incorrect, its choice to sit on evidence that contradicted a serious sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh earned them a spot on this list.

Celebrity porn lawyer Michael Avenatti claimed he knew a second woman who could back up gang rape allegations made against Kavanaugh by his client, Julie Swetnick.

That second woman actually contradicted the allegations in a phone interview with NBC News on September 30. Mysteriously, NBC chose not to publish this information until weeks later and after Kavanaugh had already been confirmed to the Supreme Court.

10. MCCLATCHY CLAIMS MUELLER HAS EVIDENCE THAT CORROBORATES PIECE OF DOSSIER

McClatchy reported in April that special counsel Robert Mueller had evidence that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen had been in Prague in the summer of 2016. The report appeared to corroborate a key part of the largely unverified Steele dossier.

US President Donald Trumps former attorney Michael Cohen leaves US Federal Court in New York on December 12, 2018 after his sentencing after pleading guilty to tax evasion, making false statements to a financial institution, illegal campaign contributions, and making false statements to Congress. - US President Donald Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen delivered a blistering attack on his former boss as he was sentenced to three years in prison on December 12, 2018 for multiple crimes. "It was my duty to cover up his dirty deeds," Cohen said as he pleaded for leniency before US District Judge William H. Pauley III.Cohen, 52, said he was taking responsiblity for his crimes "including those implicating the President of the United States of America." (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)

US President Donald Trumps former attorney Michael Cohen leaves US Federal Court in New York on December 12, 2018 after his sentencing after pleading guilty to tax evasion, making false statements to a financial institution, illegal campaign contributions, and making false statements to Congress. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)

But no other news outlets came forward to confirm McClatchy’s reporting and a spokesperson for Mueller’s team hinted to The Daily Caller News Foundation that the report may be false.

Cohen’s attorney, Lanny Davis, emphatically denied in December that Cohen had ever been in Prague as the dossier alleges.

11. JIM ACOSTA SAID ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS WOULDN’T CLIMB BORDER

CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta got into an ugly, public battle with President Donald Trump over immigration in November. During the testy exchange, Acosta claimed that illegal immigrants would “not be” trying to climb over the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

TOPSHOT - US President Donald Trump points to journalist Jim Acosta from CNN during a post-election press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on November 7, 2018. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

TOPSHOT – US President Donald Trump points to journalist Jim Acosta from CNN during a post-election press conference in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC on November 7, 2018. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

Unfortunately for Acosta, images a week later revealed that immigrants were doing exactlywhat he claimed they wouldn’t.

12. WAPO RAN KAVANAUGH STORY WITH KNOWINGLY FALSE INFORMATION

The Washington Post ran a story in October suggesting that Georgetown Preparatory School was hiring a new employee to deal with fallout from the Kavanaugh hearings.

The author of the report was informed by a spokesperson for Georgetown Prep that the new position was actually listed well before the Kavanaugh hearings. Somehow, that information didn’t make it into the report and WaPo had to issue a correction.

“This was a completely unintentional error-I read right over the date in haste. Story was corrected and correction is noted. Have a great weekend, all!” reporter Emily Heil wrote in response to backlash.

13. ANDREA MITCHELL SAYS DISGRACED FL ELECTION OFFICIAL IS A REPUBLICAN

Allegations of voter fraud and electoral misconduct in Florida during the 2018 midterms brought Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes into the spotlight.

Snipes, a Democrat, had been accused of misconduct in the past and was slammed again for violating Florida election law.

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell bafflingly said on air that Snipes is a Republican and “hardly a Democratic official, or someone doing the bidding of the Democratic candidates there.”

14. WAPO FORCED TO CORRECT NIKKI HALEY MISQUOTE

The Washington Post had to issue a correction after falsely attributing a quote about poverty to U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley.

After multiple requests by Haley for WaPo to issue a correction, the paper admitted that the quote in question was actually said by The U.S. Permanent Mission to the United Nations and International Organizations in Geneva.

15. CHRIS CUOMO SHARES FALSE STORY ABOUT AR-15 PURCHASE

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo spread a false story claiming that a 20-year-old student was able to purchase an AR-15 rifle without going through a background check.

NEW YORK, NY - DECEMBER 09: Chris Cuomo attends the 12th Annual CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute at American Museum of Natural History on December 9, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for CNN )

NEW YORK, NY – DECEMBER 09: Chris Cuomo attends the 12th Annual CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute at American Museum of Natural History on December 9, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images for CNN )

The story itself admitted that the student never actually finished filling out paperwork — which would trigger the background check — nor did he purchase the gun.

Cuomo doubled down on sharing the story, insisting that the “point” he was trying to make still stood.

16. MEDIA CLAIMS TRUMP CALLED THE FBI A ‘CANCER’

President Donald Trump referred to corruption and bias within the FBI, particularly related to the Russia probe, as a “cancer” during a September interview with The Hill.

The media repeatedly misquoted the president and claimed he called the FBI itself “cancer,” despite clarification from the two people who interviewed him.

17. RACHEL MADDOW ACCUSES WH OF EDITING PUTIN TAPE

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow opened a show in July by insisting that the Trump administration edited a tape of the president’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on July 16 in Helsinki.

The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump pointed out that the error was made by reporters too and was due to a change “between the feed from the reporters and the feed from the translator.”

18. CNN’S TRUMP TOWER STORY OBLITERATED BY LANNY DAVIS

CNN reported in July that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was prepared to tell special counsel Robert Mueller that the president had knowledge in advance of a Trump Tower meeting between his son and Russians.

WASHINGTON, DC - NOVEMBER 14: Lanny Davis attends the Newsweek & The Daily Beast 2012 Hero Summit at the United States Institute of Peace on November 14, 2012 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Leigh Vogel/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 14: Lanny Davis attends the Newsweek & The Daily Beast 2012 Hero Summit at the United States Institute of Peace on November 14, 2012 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Leigh Vogel/Getty Images)

But Cohen’s lawyer, Lanny Davis, said in August that CNN’s reporting got “mixed up” and that Cohen had no information related to the Trump Tower meeting. Cohen said the same to Congress on two separate occasions.

CNN doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down on its reporting, despite a series of issues with the report.

19. NBC’S BRIAN WILLIAMS BUNGLES HIT PIECE ABOUT TRUMP AND DOGS

MSNBC anchor Brian Williams — also a noted survivor of a helicopter attack during the Iraq war — thought he exposed the president for being a dog-hater in an August segment.

Williams claimed his team “launched an extensive web search” and only found one photo of President Donald Trump with a dog.

The Daily Caller revealed, with the help of a quick Google search, multiple photos of the president holding dogs.

20. WAPO CLAIMS MCSALLY ACCUSES OPPONENT OF TREASON

The Washington Post reported during the 2018 midterm elections that Republican Arizona Senate candidate Martha McSally accused her Democratic opponent, Kyrsten Sinema, of treason.

transcript of McSally’s comments reveals that she was actually knocking Sinema for excusing the treasonous actions of others.

TEMPE, AZ - AUGUST 28: U.S. Senate candidate U.S. Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ) speaks during her primary election night gathering at Culinary Drop Out at The Yard on August 28, 2018 in Tempe, Arizona. U.S. Rep. Martha McSally won the Arizona GOP senate primary. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

TEMPE, AZ – AUGUST 28: U.S. Senate candidate U.S. Rep. Martha McSally (R-AZ) speaks during her primary election night gathering at Culinary Drop Out at The Yard on August 28, 2018 in Tempe, Arizona. U.S. Rep. Martha McSally won the Arizona GOP senate primary. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

“You said you had no problem with [Americans joining the Taliban],” McSally said. “Kyrsten, I want to ask right now whether you’re going to apologize to the veterans and me for saying it’s okay to commit treason?”

21. NPR: DONALD TRUMP JR. COMMITTED PERJURY

NPR published a report in November insisting that Donald Trump Jr. lied to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow because his statements conflicted with those of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen.

However, NPR failed to realize that the piece of Trump Jr.’s testimony they quoted was about a different project.

“Trump Jr.’s statements about work on a Trump Tower Moscow that ended in 2014 referred to negotiations with Aras Agalarov,” The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Chuck Ross explained. “Felix Sater, a businessman with links to Cohen and Russian officials, tried to make a Trump Tower Moscow happen in 2015.”

22. NBC NEWS MISQUOTES SEN. CASSIDY, CREATES FALSE ANTI-TRUMP NARRATIVE

NBC News published and aired a misquote of Republican Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy in December that suggested he was turning on President Donald Trump. The opposite was true.

NBC’s misquote made it seem that Cassidy was worried the president was involved in illegality related to hush payments to women he had affairs with. However, the full quote shows that Cassidy did not think the hush payments were crimes at all.

“The only question is then whether or not this so-called hush money is a crime. John Edwards obviously was prosecuted  for the same thing and Justice Department failed,” Cassidy explained.

23. TIME MAGAZINE’S FAMILY SEPARATION COVER FEATURING CRYING HONDURAN CHILD

Time Magazine published an infamous cover in June that showed a Honduran child crying at the U.S. border, apparently after she had been separated from her mother. The image quickly became the face of the “issue of family separations at the border,” despite the fact that the child in question was never separated.

An AFP journalists reads a copy of Time Magazine with a front cover using a combination of pictures showing a crying child taken at the US Border Mexico and a picture of US President Donald Trump looking down, on June 22, 2018 in Washington DC. (Photo by ERIC BARADAT/AFP/Getty Images)

An AFP journalists reads a copy of Time Magazine with a front cover using a combination of pictures showing a crying child taken at the US Border Mexico and a picture of US President Donald Trump looking down, on June 22, 2018 in Washington DC. (Photo by ERIC BARADAT/AFP/Getty Images)

Later reports also revealed that, in contrast to common left-wing talking points, the mother and her child were not fleeing violence, and the mother had been previously deported from the U.S. In addition, the mother left three other children in Honduras and allegedly paid a smuggler to help her and her daughter cross the border illegally.

24. MIC WRITER CLAIMS RUSSIAN SPY WAS IN THE OVAL OFFICE

Shortly after it was revealed that a Russian spy was attempting to infiltrate right-wing networks, Mic writer Emily Singer claimed that same Russian spy was present during an Oval Office meeting with Russian diplomat Sergey Lavrov.

Singer claimed Russian spy Maria Butina was spotted in a photo of the meeting, citing the fact that she has red hair like the woman in the photo.

The woman in the photo is actually NSC staffer Cari Lutkins.

25. LAWRENCE O’DONNELL SPREADS FAKE LINDSEY GRAHAM QUOTE

MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell misquoted Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham in September to suggest that he was bashing Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 27: Christine Blasey Ford testifies before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill September 27, 2018 in Washington, DC. Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaughof sexually assaulting her during a party in 1982 when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. (Photo by Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 27: Christine Blasey Ford testifies before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill September 27, 2018 in Washington, DC. Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaughof sexually assaulting her during a party in 1982 when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. (Photo by Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images)

O’Donnell claimed that Graham called Ford’s allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh “garbage,” but Graham’s actual quote reveals he was talking specifically about gang rape allegations.

“If you’re a gang rapist when you’re in high school, you don’t just let it go,” Graham said. “[Kavanaugh’s] been at the highest level of public service, under tremendous scrutiny, 6 FBI investigations, and we missed the sophomore and junior gang rapist.”

“We didn’t miss it. It’s a bunch of garbage,” Graham asserted.

26. JENNIFER RUBIN MAKES FALSE ACCUSATION ABOUT GOP’S KAVANAUGH PROSECUTOR

Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post’s “conservative” columnist, claimed that the prosecutor chosen by the GOP to question Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had previously worked with controversial Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was not “someone from Sheriff Joe’s operation” as Rubin claimed— the two worked in separate agencies. Mitchell was employed at the Maricopa County Attorney’s office, while Arpaio worked in the Sheriff’s Department.

27. MEDIA SPREADS CONSPIRACY THEORIES ABOUT MELANIA POST-SURGERY

First lady Melania Trump took some time away from public life in June after undergoing kidney surgery, and the media quickly started speculating about her whereabouts.

The media elevated several bizarre claims about Melania, including an allegation that she had moved out of the White House and another that she was secretly recovering from plastic surgery.

Other reporters didn’t cite the conspiracies, but did suggest that something was amiss about Melania’s brief respite from the spotlight.

US First Lady Melania Trump reads the book "Oliver the Ornament" as she visits children at Children's National Hospital in Washington, DC, on December 13, 2018. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

US First Lady Melania Trump reads the book “Oliver the Ornament” as she visits children at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, DC, on December 13, 2018. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

“The last time we caught a glimpse of her was on May 10,” CNN reporter Brian Stelter said. “There’s been a lot of questions about her surgery at Walter Reed and now her invisibility…how long does she have to be out of sight to make this a legitimate media story?”

28. NEW YORKER PUBLISHES KAVANAUGH ACCUSATION WITH ZERO CORROBORATION

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow — generally known for their sharp reporting on sexual harassment — made a major blunder with their report on Deborah Ramirez’s allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Ramirez claimed Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face at a college party, but The New Yorker was unable to produce any firsthand witnesses or even confirm that Kavanaugh was at the party in question.

The New York Times even opted not to run the same allegation because they were unable to corroborate it. Ramirez herself admitted she had significant memory gaps about the incident and she told former classmates that she wasn’t even sure if Kavanaugh was the offender.

29. DAILY BEAST CLAIMS MIGRANTS IN CARAVAN DON’T HAVE DISEASES

The Daily Beast claimed that there is “zero evidence” that members of the migrant caravan were bringing HIV and TB into the United States.

The Tijuana Health Department reported a handful of cases of tuberculosis, HIV and chickenpox among the caravan. Officials with the Mexican state of Baja California disputed that there have been cases of tuberculosis, but confirmed that some migrants are carrying HIV and chickenpox.

30. AP PINS IMMIGRANT ABUSE ON TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

The Associated Press published a report in June about abuse of child immigrants in the U.S., but did its best to bury the fact that the abuse primarily occurred under the Obama administration.

As this reporter noted at the time, “The article mentions President Donald Trump and his administration’s zero-tolerance policy at least four times in the first ten paragraphs, leaving the implicit suggestion that the Trump administration is responsible for the alleged abuse.”

The AP sneakily admitted in the 20th paragraph that the alleged abuse began in 2016 — during the Obama administration — but never bothered to mention Obama’s name in connection with the report.

31. KAVANAUGH CLERK FLASHED ‘WHITE POWER’ SYMBOL

Former Brett Kavanaugh clerk Zina Bash, who was sitting behind the Supreme Court nominee during his hearings, was accused of flashing a white supremacist symbol on camera.

The accusation stemmed from a video clip that showed Bash’s hand resting on her arm with the “OK sign,” a symbol that leftists have claimed actually signals “white power.”

Far from being a white supremacist, Bash is Mexican and Jewish and her grandparents were Holocaust survivors.

“The attacks today on my wife are repulsive,” Bash’s husband said. “Everyone tweeting this vicious conspiracy theory should be ashamed of themselves. We weren’t even familiar with the hateful symbol being attributed to her for the random way she rested her hand during a long hearing.”

32. MEDIA CLAIMS OBAMA DIDN’T SEPARATE FAMILIES AT THE BORDER

Several reporters claimed during the uproar over President Donald Trump’s family separations at the border that President Barack Obama never separated families.

However, reports from McClatchy and statements from former Obama administration officials revealed that, yes, Obama did separate some families who crossed the borderillegally.

MCALLEN, TX - SEPTEMBER 08: A girl from Central America rests on thermal blankets at a detention facility run by the U.S. Border Patrol on September 8, 2014 in McAllen, Texas. The Border Patrol opened the holding center to temporarily house the children after tens of thousands of families and unaccompanied minors from Central America crossed the border illegally into the United States during the spring and summer. Although the flow of underage immigrants has since slowed greatly, thousands of them are now housed in centers around the United States as immigration courts process their cases. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

MCALLEN, TX – SEPTEMBER 08: A girl from Central America rests on thermal blankets at a detention facility run by the U.S. Border Patrol on September 8, 2014 in McAllen, Texas. The Border Patrol opened the holding center to temporarily house the children after tens of thousands of families and unaccompanied minors from Central America crossed the border illegally into the United States during the spring and summer. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

“ICE could not devise a safe way where men and children could be in detention together in one facility,” Leon Fresco, a deputy assistant attorney general under Obama, said. “It was deemed too much of a security risk.”

COLUMN BY

Amber Athey

Media and Breaking News Editor. Follow Amber on Twitter.

RELATED ARTICLES:

The Media Was Still Unglued in 2018

Fake News Media’s Massive Failure

EDITORS NOTE: This column with images by The Daily Caller is republished with permission.

Trump, Money and the Fed

So who are these guys in this picture?Legendary author of The Creature from Jekyll Island”, researcher and film producer G. Edward Griffin, my good friend and founder of PollMole Dr.Richard Davis, (R.I.P.), Mad Max Mullen and oh a yeah, a much younger me, John Michael Chambers. This post, Trump, Money and the Fed lay the important groundwork and understanding for what President Trump has begun to take on.

Back in 2009 as the founder of the Save  America Foundation a 501(c)(4), we held a large convention in Tampa, Florida sounding the alarm bells in our desperate individual and collective attempts to save America. fast forward. Donald Trump has blasted onto  the scene. Some say he cannot handle the storm when in fact he is the storm. This really is a very important article. Please read on and share this post. People need to know to secure and expand our supportive base for President Trump for what lies ahead by end of Q1 2019, will be challenging.

The following has been excerpted and somewhat revised and edited from a book I wrote in 2014-2015 while in Belize and mostly in Thailand titled, “Misconceptions and Course Corrections”. Since Trump has begun taking on the Fed (Federal Reserve), I thought it would be good to gain a better understanding of what money actually is, who the Fed is, how they came to be and what it is that they have done. This is about to come to be challenged and changed forever beginning after in 2019. I will be writing about this historical event as it unfolds. It has already begun. But for those that need a better understanding of the Fed, I have resurrected this chapter. Here goes…

What is Money?

What is money? Money is an idea backed by confidence,which is used as a means of exchange, rather than say barter. Today we live in a debt based monetary system. Some say that money is the root of all evil; I disagree with this. There was a period of time many a moon ago where money did not exist, yet there was plenty of evil around. My best guess (I could be wrong), is that people who misuse life’s energy are the root of all evil, not money. Money is not evil and abundance is wonderful; there are evil people.

In this world it seems we have assigned power to money. It’s a pretty big agreement since everyone seems to be trying to acquire the stuff. So to that end, money is power in the sense that it is the means by which one can acquire tangible items, own things, have things,influence people and agendas, as well as affording perhaps better healthcare,better food, some things luxury, and all things essential to survival. Money allows one to participate in many things as well as to travel. The person with money can also take advantage of various opportunities to explore many new aspects and experiences in life than a person without money. Having said all that, money is still not the measure of the man (woman).

Money can’t buy contentment or happiness or love, but it can ease the experience of life and living if handled properly.There is nothing wrong with acquiring great wealth. It’s what you do with this great wealth that helps determine the character of the person. Some people, as we know, become very greedy and misuse the power that comes with having lots ofmoney, and this can be seen in many ways. Others put that money to good use,such as a quality home, education for children and young adults, trust accountsfor posterity, and many are philanthropic or charitable.

History, Digging in a Little Deeper

Presently and since 1944, the U.S. dollar is the world’s reserve currency, and this, coupled with a great change that is currently taking place which will affect every person on the planet (which we will discuss a bit further on), is why we must understand more about the U.S.dollar and the debt based monetary system.

Many Americans and people throughout the world believe that the Federal Reserve in the United States is part of the Federal government. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Federal Reserve is no more a government agency than Federal Express! Check this video at marker1:09. Even former Fed chairman AlanGreenspan agrees.Freedom to Fascism, in case you missed all those years ago, can be viewed here. An absolute must see.

It is imperative if you want to understand how the money system works that you procure a copy of “The Creature from Jekyll Island,” a second look at the Federal Reserve by the legendary author, researcher, and film producer, Mr. G.Edward Griffin. This book will outline in great detail the formation of the Federal Reserve System.Below is a summary.

1910

In November of 1910, on Jekyll Island,Georgia, seven men who represented directly or indirectly one fourth of the world’s wealth, met in secrecy for nine days. It is there, at this location,where the Charter of the Federal Reserve was drafted. The Federal Reserve is a privately held for profit corporation,a banking cartel. The main objective for a corporation is to make a profit, and they do indeed make a profit. Let’s take a brief stroll through history as we look into the formation of the Federal Reserve and the results of the Federal Reserve Charter that was enacted into law by the U.S. Congress in1913.

J.P. Morgan, Senator Nelson Aldrich, Piatt Andrews, Frank Vanderlip, Henry P. Davison, Paul Warburg, and Charles D.Norton arranged for hundreds of millions of dollars to be poured into the campaigns of the most powerful members of Congress. In 1912, they backed an obscure Princeton professor for President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.He later became President.

The Coup’ of 1913

Late on Tuesday December 23, 1913, just days after the Christmas recess had commenced, a secret Senate vote was“arranged” with only a few Senators remaining in Washington D.C.The act passed with 43 voting “yea” and 25 voting “nay.” 27 did not vote since they had not been notified and had already left town to go home for the Holidays. All had previously expressed their opposition to the act. So on Dec 23, 1913, their plan worked by one of the most cunning manipulations in parliamentary history;Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.In its charter, the act clearly states as its main objective: “To provide the action with a safer,more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system.”

This means of a fractional reserve debt system controlled by a private for Profit Corporation has not worked out too well for the American people and thus the world to a greater or lesser extent.I mean we do not have a more stable monetary financial system at all.What we have is a debt based monetary system no longer backed by gold or silver. We have a currency that will soon be replaced as the world’s reserve currency. The Federal debt alone is $19 trillion dollars. It is mathematically impossible topay off this debt which will in a couple of short years will soon reach $22trillion and will make the U.S. situation look like Greece on steroids! Therefore “a safer, more flexible and more stable monetary and financial system” as set forth in this charter clearly has not worked out so well. And so by this means of fractional reserve banking,governments may secretly and unobserved, confiscate the wealth of the people and not one man in a million will detect the theft. This system of fractional reserve banking and the printing of all this fiat (now digital fiat) currency,is purely inflationary and the U.S. dollar has lost over 95% of its purchasing power since its inception.

1944 The Bretton Wooods Agreement

Another critical factor, which contributed to the rise of power in America, was the Bretton Woods agreement of1944. The Bretton Woods system of monetary management established the rules for commercial and financial relations among the world’s major industrial states in the mid-20th century. The BrettonWoods system was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent nation-states. It is through the Breton Woods agreement that the U.S. dollar became the world’s “reserve currency. 

Preparing to rebuild the international economic system as World War II was still raging, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods,New Hampshire, United States, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. 

The delegates deliberated upon and signed the Bretton Woods Agreements during the first three weeks of July 1944. Setting up a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, the planners at the Bretton Woods Agreements during the first three weeks of July 1944. Setting up a system of rules, institutions, and procedures to regulate the international monetary system, the planners at Bretton Woods established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD),which today is part of the World BankGroup. These organizations became operational in 1945 after a sufficient number of countries had ratified the agreement.

The chief features of the Bretton Woods system were an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate by tying its currency to the U.S. dollar and the ability of the IMF to bridge temporary payments. Simply stated, the power centers of the world met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire and it was decided that international trade and settlements such as the purchase of oil for example, must be exchanged with the U.S. dollars. This meant that the central banks of these nations were required to have sufficient U.S. dollars.

As a result, the increasing global demand for the U.S. dollar continued and based on supply and demand this kept the dollar strong. Another reason for this decision in 1944 is due to the fact that up until that point in history, America’s currency was kept under control without runaway inflation as the U.S. dollar was backed by gold and silver and  the trust and confidence in the US.Dollar was strong. Confidence is the critical underlying factor that keeps the financial structures and systems in place.Including confidence in the currency itself. In fact it can be stated that money is nothing more than an idea backed by confidence and a means to easily facilitate trade and keep order. What happens when this confidence is shattered?

1971 – The Nixon Shock

On August 15, 1971, the United States unilaterally terminated convertibility of the dollar to gold. As a result, the Bretton Woods system officially ended and the dollar became fully ‘fiat currency,’backed by nothing but the promise of the federal government. This action, referred to as the Nixon shock, created the situation in which the United States dollar became a reserve currency used by many states. From the1970’s and forward, Americans enjoyed what is considered to be a lavish lifestyle in comparison to most countries around the world.

Lesson from the Dustbin of History

 “Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.”– Amschel Rothschild, Mayer and German banker. He was the founder of the Rothschild family international banking dynasty.

The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch its currency.” “The best way to crush the bourgeoisie (middle class), Is to grind between the millstones of taxation and inflation.” – Vladimir Lenin, Chairman of Russia’s Council of peoples Commissars 1917-1924

“By a continuing process of inflation,government can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.” –John MaynardKeynes, Fabian Socialist and father of Keynesian Economics

“The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. Both   congress is now being run by Alan Greenspan (Ben Bernanke today) and the Federal Reserve and America’s foreign policy is now being run by the IMF. When the President decides to go to war he no longer needs a declaration of war  Money in our current system is nothing more than debt, and we have lots of it!.“ – Robert Reich 22nd U.S.labor Secretary

“The government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of the consumers. The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only   prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest  .” –President Abraham Lincoln

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” President Thomas Jefferson

“Inflation has now been institutionalized at a fairly constant 5% per year. This has been determined to be the optimum level for generating the most   causing public alarm. A 5% devaluation applies, not only to the money earned this year, but to all that is left over from previous years. At the end of the first year, a dollar is worth 95 cents.At the end of the second year, the 95cents is reduced again by 5%, leaving its worth at 90 cents, and so on. By the time a person has worked 20 years, the government will have confiscated 64%of every dollar he saved over those years. By the time he has worked 45 years,the hidden tax will be 90%. The government will take virtually everything a person saves over a lifetime.” – American Author, Researcher and Filmmaker, G. Edward Griffin

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are   hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” – President Woodrow Wilson, aftersigning the Federal Reserve into existence

Money in our current system is nothing more than debt, and we have lots of it! Weeks away from http://usadebtclock.com/$22Trillion and that’s just the Federal debt alone!

Concluding Remarks

So the Federal Reserve, a private for profit baking cartel,comes to the table with no “skin in the game.” They unleash what is now digital fiat currency with no tangible backing or accountability into the banking system and this is then leveraged by Fractional Reserve Banking. The banks then can loan out these dollars (with a multiplier of 10 or 100 or more times the amount than they received from the Fed.), to other banks, to governments, corporations, and individuals and charge an interest rate. They typically own title for example, as in a mortgage or car loan. And when they decide to“reap the harvest,” they seize the assets when the consumer is unable to survive in a jobless inflationary climate (which they helped to create). They also fund both sides of all wars for huge profits as the innocent little children are laid in shallow graves and billed as nothing more than collateraldamage”.

This subject of Fractional Reserve Banking is also defined in great detail in a simple to understand format in the DVD titled“ Money as Debt”

This Federal Reserve Act of 1913,although passed by congress, was in contradiction to the United States Constitution which in Article 1, Section 8, Phrase5. It clearly states the following regarding money that “  have power to coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures.“ This power was given to a private bank called the Federal Reserve in 1913. Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. back then said – “This Federal Reserve Act establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When President Wilson signs this bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized. This is the worst legislative crime of the ages that has been perpetuated by this banking and currency bill. From now on, all depressions will be scientifically created.”

And since the inception of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Dollar has lost over 97% of its purchasing power. I believe the U.S. Dollar may experience a false sense of stability for the short to near term as the Euro and other currencies falter and fail, but once the U.S. dollar loses its world reserve currency status (at least as we know it) as the global financial reset is now upon us just a few short months from now (It is December23, 2018 as I write today), Trump will make his move against the Fed. Watch for my article on this in the coming days.

2019 and Beyond

It is because of this power and control which money affords that you will come to realize why governments and banks around the world are moving towards a cashless society. That’s right, a cashless society. If governments can control your money they can control your life. There are more and more laws, rules, and regulations in the U.S., Europe,and many places around the world restricting the amount of cash you can withdraw from your own accounts. Banks are now beginning to charge negative interest to hold your money.

Pulling cash from your bank or excessive international bank wires in any amount over a few thousand dollars, the banks can report you to the government as a “suspicious person,” potential money launderer, or terrorist, and a series of such withdrawals can put you in violation of criminal structuring/money laundering regulations, with huge fines and jail sentences. The ultimate goal of the global socialists is to eliminate all cash on a global basis and force everyone on the planet into the computerized electronic banking/credit card system. Cryptocurrencies have gained much momentum (albeit very volatile).

This will eventually lead to the National ID card, then the Global ID card, and then the chip through injection. This is the ultimate control and this is the direction the world is presently heading.I recommend getting a copy of the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor report May 2015 titled “War on Cash”, orread more about this in my archived articles section under “financial”.

So What to Do About All This?

There will be quite the bloodbath in the stock, bond and real estate markets. In fact, this has just begun. Support President Trump. Stay the course. Awaken others. Turn off the fake news. It is poisoning your mind, thoughts and feeling world and making you miserable. Follow Q-There is a plan.Stay informed. Sign up to receive my weekly articles to your in box via this FREE RSS Feed.

Surveys indicate that people no longer trust the media for news, politicians for the truth, or that Wall Street has Main Street’s best interest in mind. The John Michael Chambers Report informs and empowers individuals in a changing world. Sign up. Be informed and empowered. Stay connected.

As to your personal finances? The time for action is now. While so many others will continue to operate in the deceitful and flawed modalities being advised by an industry they no longer trust, critical thinkers see the dangers and opportunities. But you must act. A great change is on the near term horizon. The time for action is now. You can survive and thrive through the battle that has just begun for global currency supremacy. Got questions? I can help. Contact me.

Video Commentary

Beginning 2019, I will be providing a short weekly commentary video reflecting on the state of affairs as they unfold weekly. There will be unprecedented events occurring in 2019 and 2020. We will make sense of the madness as Trump takes on the Fed and the Deep State. The first video will be launched here on January 6, 2019 and each Sunday thereafter. Until then, have a Merry Christmas!
See you soon!

Saying You’re Against Fascists Doesn’t Excuse Acting Like One

Despite claims that Antifa fights fascism, the group’s tactics actually mirror those of Benito Mussolini’s regime.


On March 23, 1919, Benito Mussolini, an Italian veteran of the Great War and a publisher of socialist newspapers, created the Fasci di Combattimento (commonly known as the Fascist Party) with the help of a few syndicalist friends.

Nearly one hundred years later, the word fascism remains at the forefront of our political discourse even though fascism is all but dead as a political force, and the word has lost much of its meaning (if not its power).

So why are we still talking about fascists?

On November 8, the late-night TV host Stephen Colbert took to Twitter to condemn a mob that had attacked the home of Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

“Fighting Tucker Carlson’s ideas is an American right,” Colbert wrote. “Targeting his home and terrorizing his family is an act of monstrous cowardice. Obviously, don’t do this, but also, take no pleasure in it happening. Feeding monsters just makes more monsters.”

The attackers consisted of a group who called themselves Antifa. Few Americans had heard the word “Antifa” prior to 2016. But that’s no longer the case.

In addition to the attack on Carlson’s home, numerous high-profile incidents involving Antifa—the “Battle of Berkeley,” the tragedy in Charlottesville, and a series of street battles in Portland—have thrust the loosely organized political group into the national spotlight. (It’s difficult to miss gangs of black-clad individuals who wear masks, tote weapons, and pick fights with political opponents.)

Antifa, if you have not already guessed, is short for anti-fascism. Conduct a Google search, and you’ll see Antifa oppose fascist ideologies, people, and groups.

This is part of the brilliance of Antifa. Unlike most fringe political groups, Antifa is not named for something. Their name expresses opposition to an ideology, one that is at once vile and nebulous.

More than seven decades ago, the British writer George Orwell observed that the term fascism had lost any coherent meaning.

“The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable,’” Orwell wrote in his essay “Politics and the English Language.”

Because of the ambiguous nature of the word, Antifa and other alt-left groups have been able to brand thinkers as diverse as Charles MurrayChristina Hoff SommersJordan B. Peterson, and Ben Shapiro as “fascist.”

Moreover, by branding themselves as “antifascist,” Antifa inoculate themselves from the criticism that usually is directed toward extremist groups.

Colbert’s condemnation of Antifa’s attack on Tucker Carlson’s home notwithstanding, there has been a cultural reluctance to condemn Antifa’s political violence and tactics.

In 2017, following the tragic events in Charlottesville, which involved a showdown between white supremacists and Antifa members, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said it was wrong to equate fascists and anti-fascists.

“No, not the same,” Romney tweeted. “One side is racist, bigoted, Nazi. The other opposes racism and bigotry. Morally different universes.”

Romney expressed a common belief, but Antifa is hardly the polar opposite of fascism. An examination of Antifa and the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s reveals striking similarities.

Many historians and political writers describe fascism as a right-wing movement, and the claim has an element of truth to it. When Mussolini and his syndicalist friends created the Fasci di Combattimento, it’s true they embraced Italian nationalism. Yet the party also called for the seizure of church lands, the confiscation of finance capital, and the abolition of the Italian monarchy and Senate.

In fact, Mussolini was an ardent Marxist for years. The son of a socialist-anarchist craftsman, he was well-versed in the works of Karl Marx, whom he praised as “a magnificent philosopher of working-class violence.” The extent to which Mussolini’s fascists simply copied their socialist predecessors has often been overlooked.

In his magnum opus Modern Times, the historian Paul Johnson explains that Mussolini was highly influenced by Kurt Eisner, who was cited several times in Mussolini’s fascist programme. Eisner’s “Bavarian fighting squads,” which inspired Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento, were themselves inspired by Lenin’s “men in black leather jerkins,” Johnson points out. Mussolini’s use of the term “vanguard minorities” to describe the shock troops of his revolution was almost certainly inspired by Lenin’s “vanguard fighters” (a term Lenin first used in 1903).

Communists and fascists of the 1920s and 1930s were unified by one thing above all else: their willingness to use political violence to achieve political goals. Mussolini, like Lenin, had no qualms about using violence in his effort to “make history, not endure it” (a Marx quote Mussolini was fond of employing).

The use of violence to attain political goals is a stance Antifa similarly embraces.

Antifa openly advocates and employs violence and intimidation. Like Mussolini’s “vanguard minorities,” they dress in black garb (though Antifa members often also cover their faces) and use intimidation and violence to prevent political opponents from assembling. These tactics include launching feces at law enforcement and using bricks, bats, chains, and knives in their street wars.

The methods are ostensibly reserved for fascists, yet so many have shown a willingness to overlook the fact that Antifa is employing fascist tactics. Antifa is given a pass because labeling the other side as “fascist” automatically makes them “good,” for they are the ones fighting against fascism. It’s a brilliant rhetorical trick. As Chris Cuomo said in defense of Antifa on a carefully-worded CNN segment in August, “fighting against hate matters.”

In a moral universe where the ends justify the means, using fascist tactics to fight fascists (or people deemed fascists) is entirely proper. The dangers of embracing the philosophy of violence, however, are severe. For as Solzhenitsyn observed, the first casualty of violence is the truth.

“Violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood,” the Russian writer observed prior to his exile from the Soviet Union. “Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.”

Solzhenitsyn’s point is one Antifa should seriously consider. If they do not, and they persist in their defense and employment of violence as a means to their political ends, Antifa will continue to be “interwoven with falsehood.” Their grandiose aims will prove as empty and sterile as those of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks who preceded them.

In our next piece on the rise of Antifa, we will explore the root of their philosophy and examine precisely why they think it’s justifiable to use fascist techniques in the name of fighting fascism.

COLUMN BY

Jon Miltimore

Jon Miltimore

Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. Serving previously as Director of Digital Media at Intellectual Takeout, Jon was responsible for daily editorial content, web strategy, and social media operations. Before that, he was the Senior Editor of The History Channel Magazine, Managing Editor at Scout.com, and general assignment reporter for the Panama City News Herald. Jon also served as an intern in the speechwriting department under George W. Bush.

Tyler Brandt

Tyler Brandt

Tyler Brandt is a Content Associate at FEE. He is a graduate of UW-Madison with a B.A. in Political Science. In college, Tyler was a FEE Campus Ambassador, President of his campus YAL chapter, and Research Intern at the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy.

EDITORS NOTE: This column from FEE with images is republished with permission.

Restoring Civilization: We Can’t MAGA Unless We MAMA

They can sense it. They can feel it. Something is seriously wrong in our civilization, and many people know it. This is why despite the relatively good economic times, most Americans polled say our country is on the “wrong track.” Yet many are like a gravely ill man who knows he’s not well but can’t precisely identify his ailment. Most often, Americans have only a vague sense of cultural malaise, or they “self-diagnose” wrongly.

Years ago I had a brief “state of the nation” discussion with a very fine, older country gentleman. While no philosopher, he did offer the following diagnosis. Struggling for words and gesticulating a bit, he said, “There’s…there’s no morality.”

Most believe morality is important both personally and nationally. We generally agree that an immoral man treads a dangerous path; of course, it’s likewise for two immoral men, five, 53 or 1,053 — or a whole nation-full.

Echoing many Founders, George Washington noted that “morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” The famous apocryphal saying goes, “America is great because America is good, and if she ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” For sure, we can’t MAGA unless we MAMA — Make America Moral Again.

Yet if immorality is the diagnosis and restoring morality the cure, we must know what this thing called “morality” is. Ah, that’s where agreement can end.

Talk to most people today — especially the people who study people, sociologists and anthropologists — and they’ll “identify morality with social code,” as Sociology Guide puts it. They’ll essentially say what sociologists Durkheim and Sumner do, “that things are good or bad if they are so considered by society or public opinion,” the site continues. “Durkheim stated that we do not disapprove of an action because it is a crime but it is a crime because we disapprove of it.” Yet true or not, would the majority really view an action as a crime, in the all-important moral sense, if they came to believe it was true?

Consider a man I knew who once proclaimed, “Murder isn’t wrong; it’s just that society says it is.” Clearly, “public opinion” isn’t swaying him much.

Yet how do you argue with him? Barring reference to something outside of man (i.e., God) dictating murder’s “immorality,” you’re left with a striking reality:

Society is all there is to say anything.

Then “Man is the measure of all things,” as Greek philosopher Protagoras put it.

Yet acceptance of the “society says” thesis presents a problem: Now you must convince others to equate “public opinion” with credible, binding “morality.” This is mostly fruitless because, frankly, it’s stupid.

Man’s opinion is just that — opinion. If the term “morality” is essentially synonymous, it’s a risible redundancy. If we’re acting as slick marketers, trying to elevate “opinion” via assignment of an impressive-sounding title, it’s false advertising. So if that is all we’re really talking about — “opinion” or “societal considerations” — let’s drop the pretense and just say what we mean:

We sentient organic robots (soulless entities comprising chemicals and water) have preferences for how others should behave (subject to change with or without notice). No, we can’t call these tastes “morality” — but, hey, we can punish the heck out of you for defying our collective will (see North Korea et al.).

To cement the point, consider my patent explanation. Who or what determines what this thing we call morality is?

Only two possibilities exist: Either man or something outside of him does. If the latter, something vastly superior and inerrant (i.e., God), then we really can say morality exists, apart from man. It’s real. Yet what are the man-as-measure implications?

Well, imagine the vast majority of the world loved chocolate but hated vanilla. Would this make vanilla “wrong” or “evil”? It’s just a matter of preference, of whatever flavor works for you.

Okay, but is it any more logical saying murder is “bad” or “wrong” if we only do so because the vast majority of the world prefers we not kill others in a manner the vast majority considers “unjust”? If it’s all just consensus “opinion,” it then occupies the same category as flavors: preference.

This is the matter’s stark reality, boiled down. It’s why serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s darkness-enabling attitude was, as his father related in a 1996 interview (video below; relevant portion at 40:26), “If it [life] all happens naturalistically, what’s the need for a God? Can’t I set my own rules?” It’s why occultist Aleister Crowley, branded “the wickedest man in the world,” succinctly stated, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” (Preference Über Alles 101).

[Please insert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgw0x0TxRO8]

This perspective engenders what’s often called “moral relativism,” the notion that “Truth” (absolute by definition) is illusion and what’s called “morality” changes with the time and people. But saying all is preference is actually moral nihilism, the belief that “morality” (properly understood) doesn’t actually exist — because, again, “opinion” isn’t morality.

Of course, few think matters through as thoroughly as a Dahmer or Crowley. (In fact, a possible reason sociopaths may possess above-average intelligence is that they’re smart enough to grasp the “morality” question’s two possibilities — either morality exists as something divinely-authored, something transcendent, or there is no morality — but draw the wrong conclusion.) Yet moral relativism/nihilism has swept Western civilization. And hell has followed with it.

How relativistic/nihilistic are we? A Barna Group study found that in 2002 already, most Americans did not believe in (absolute) Truth, in morality; in fact, only six percent of teens did. Thus are they most likely to base what once were called “moral decisions” on…wait for it…feelings. Surprise, surprise.

Such prevailing philosophical/moral rot collapses civilization. For anything can be justified. Rape, kill, steal, violate the Constitution as a judge, commit vote fraud? Why not? Who’s to say it’s wrong? Don’t impose values on me, dude.

To analogize it, imagine we fell victim to “dietary relativism/nihilism” and fancied the rules of nutrition nonexistent. With only taste left to govern dietary choices, most would indulge junk food; nutritional disorder would reign and health deteriorate. Moreover, considering one man’s poison another’s pleasure, we might sample those pretty red berries the birds gobble down. Hey, if it tastes good, eat it.

This reflects what’s befalling our “If it feels good, do it” Western civilization. Considering the rules of any system non-existent or irrelevant brings movement toward disorder — and a point where those who can impose their preferences restore order, a tyrannical one.

Having said this, discussing “Truth” and God evokes complaints, as the morally relativistic/nihilistic world view influences even many conservatives, and secularists find faith-oriented talk unsettling.

So let’s focus here on not faith but fact. As to this and the world’s Dahmers, Crowleys and the murder-skeptic man I knew, call them names, but don’t call them illogical. Within their universe of “data”— that “God doesn’t exist” and thus only organic robots can be the measure — they’re right: Murder’s status isn’t “wrong,” just “unpreferred.”

Note that moral principles cannot be proven scientifically any more than God’s existence; you can’t see a moral under a microscope or a principle in a Petri dish. Science only tells us what we can do, not what we should. Finding guidance on “should” necessitates transcending the physical and venturing into the metaphysical. It requires, pure logic informs, taking a leap of faith.

Something else not a matter of faith but fact is man’s psychology: People operate by certain principles. Like it or not, believing as Dahmer did (when young) about God leads to believing as he did about morality. “If man is all there is to make up rules, why can’t I just make up my own?”

As I put it in 2013, “Just as people wouldn’t abide by the ‘laws’ of physics if they didn’t believe they existed (the idea of jumping off a building and flying sounds like fun), and there weren’t obvious and immediate consequences for their violation (splat!), they won’t be likely to abide by morality if they believe its laws don’t exist.”

Of course, this rarely leads to serial killing. But it always — at population level — leads to serial immorality. This is an immutable rule of man.

So how should we combat our time’s moral relativism/nihilism? First, realize that from the Greek philosophers to the early/medieval Christians to the Founding Fathers, Western civilization was not forged by relativists/nihilists. It won’t be maintained by them, either. “If it feels good, do it” yields a healthy society even less than “If it tastes good, eat it” does a healthy body.

Thus, one needn’t have faith to understand that belief in Truth is utilitarian. As George Washington warned, “[R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

Second, know that moral relativism/nihilism’s appeal is that it’s the ultimate get-out-of-sin free card. After all, my sins can’t be sins if there are no such things as sins, only “lifestyle choices.” Yet also know that we can have this seemingly eternal but illusory absolution — or we can have civilization. We can’t have both.

So act as if Truth exists; seek it, speak it, love it, for it will set you free. Realize also that relativism is juvenile pseudo-philosophy. For if everything were relative, what you believed would be relative, too, and thus meaningless. So let’s talk about what’s meaningful.

The alternative? Well, it was expressed nicely by an old New Yorker cartoon. It featured the Devil addressing a large group of arrivals in Hell and saying, reassuringly, “You’ll find there’s no right or wrong here. Just what works for you.”

It’s an alluring idea — and a powerful one. It creates Hell on Earth, too.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab (preferably) or Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

RELATED VIDEOS:

America’s Anti God Rebellion

The Make America Great Formula.

EDITORS NOTE: This article is the second in a series on exposing modern (liberal) lies, explaining the disordered leftist mind and restoring civilization. The first is here. The “American’t” essay, which illustrates our problems, is here. The edited featured photo by Jonny Swales on Unsplash.

Getting Priorities Straight: House Democrats and the Public

Anti-gun organizations and their sycophants would have you believe that the 2018 midterm elections were a referendum on gun rights. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi “vows to fight” for “bipartisan, common sense” gun control and announced gun control “will be a priority” even before she had secured the Speaker’s gavel. The eagerness to curtail Constitutional rights isn’t limited to Nancy Pelosi; Representative Mike Thompson, head of the Democrats’ “gun violence prevention task force” and incoming Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Representative Jerry Nadler are both on record confirming they’ll push gun control early next year.

As soon as they’re in power.

They claim that it’s what the American people want. So, is it?

According to a Gallup poll conducted earlier this month, gun control and guns rank at the very bottom of the list of what adults say is the country’s top problem – coming in at three percent.

That’s tied with the economy in general, unemployment, and ethical/moral/religious decline. Only slightly behind crime and violence (4%), and about half as highly ranked as several categories of social issues including race relations, poverty and homelessness, and healthcare.

The top two problems facing the country, according to adults nationwide, are government (19%) and immigration (16%). Both issues fall under the purview of Congress and yet the next Speaker of the House couldn’t announce the new majority’s intentions quickly enough despite a complete lack of evidence that so-called “universal” background checks will have an effect on crime. In fact, readers may recall one study, lauded by anti-gun organizations and talking heads, actually found that background checks are associated with an increase in homicides.

Of course, the model in that study was misspecified but that hasn’t stopped anti-gunners from using it to push their agenda.

In looking at Gallup data for this year, guns and gun control was cited by only 1% of adults as the most important problem facing the country in October of this year. That number doubled all the way to 2% in November, and the midterm election was right in the middle of the November survey period. Gallup has asked the most important problem question monthly and shared the results from June 2018 onward, and gun control has never been higher than 4% (June 2018).

The top two specific problems every month since early summer have been the government and immigration.  Lest you believe that this is somehow unique to Gallup, let’s take a look at some other polling data.

A Marist Poll conducted from November 28th through December 4th of this year found that 8% of registered voters said guns should be the top priority for the next Congress.  Immigration was the top issue (18%), followed by the economy and jobs (17%) and health care (17%). Guns weren’t even the top issue for Democrats, coming in tied for third with climate change. Health care (24%) and the economy and jobs (16%) were ahead. Six percent of Independents think guns should be the top priority, well behind the economy and jobs (18%), health care (17%), immigration (15%), federal taxes and spending (14%), opioid addiction (12%), and climate change (9%).

Suburban adults put four issues before guns. This is getting repetitive, but maybe eventually Representative Pelosi will align her priorities with the American people.

Probably not, but maybe.

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EDITORS NOTE:  This column by the NRA with images is republished with permission.

Net Neutrality Repeal: The Internet Apocalypse That Never Came

Whether the naysayers are willing to admit it or not, less government regulation results in better outcomes for both companies and consumers.


This month marks one year since the FCC repealed the controversial net neutrality rules, officially killing the internet as we knew it forever—or so net neutrality proponents would have liked you to believe. But as we take a closer look at what has actually happened in the year since the rules have been abolished, we find that the (often hysterical) rhetoric doesn’t reflect reality at all. On the contrary, the internet has actually improved since regulations were relaxed.

The internet has been a household commodity available for public use since August 6, 1991. However, according to net neutrality’s most fervent supporters, the internet didn’t truly take off until February 2015, when the FCC passed and adopted the new rules.

In both the lead up to the vote on net neutrality and its subsequent repeal, mass hysteria ensued in which many people were honestly convinced that without government intervention, all the online services we enjoyed would cease to exist. In an article called “How the FCC’s Killing of Net Neutrality Will Ruin the Internet Forever,” the magazine GQ even went so far as to say:

Think of everything that you’ve ever loved about the Internet. That website that gave you all of the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City cheat codes. YouTube videos of animals being friends. The illegal music you downloaded on Napster or Kazaa. The legal music you’ve streamed on Spotify. …The movies and TV shows you’ve binged on Netflix and Amazon and Hulu. The dating site that helped you find the person you’re now married to. All of these things are thanks to net neutrality.

It’s rather shocking that this sentiment was so widely accepted as truth considering that every single one of the listed examples existed prior to net neutrality. In fact, the only reason the internet was able to become such an integral part of our lives was that it was left virtually untouched by regulatory forces. And since spontaneous order was allowed to occur, internet users were blessed with unbridled innovation that brought forth a robust variety of services, which GQ prefers to attribute to government action that wasn’t taken until nearly 24 years after internet use became the norm.

These small details were, of course, ignored by much of the public, and the panic continued. The ACLU joined the frenzy, telling readers that without net neutrality we “are at risk of falling victim to the profit-seeking whims of powerful telecommunications giants.”

We now realize that these dire warnings actually came to fruition, reminding us just how absurd the push for net neutrality rules was in the first place.

Net neutrality sought to define the internet as a public utility, putting it in the same category as water, electric, and telephone services. Doing so left it open to regulatory oversight, specifically when it came to connection speeds and the price providers were allowed to charge consumers for its use.

The new rules mandated that each internet service provider was henceforth forced to provide equal connection speeds to all websites, regardless of content. Prior to its passage, providers had the freedom to offer different connection speeds to users, including the option to pay more for faster speeds on certain websites.

If, for example, Comcast noticed that a majority of its users were streaming content on Netflix, it might offer packages that charge extra for the promise of being able to connect to the site at quicker speeds. In reality, this is just the market responding to consumer demand, but not everyone saw it this way. Others saw it as an abuse of power by “greedy” internet service providers.

Then-President Obama praised net neutrality, saying:

For almost a century, our law has recognized that companies who connect you to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access in and out of your home or business. It is common sense that the same philosophy should guide any service that is based on the transmission of information—whether a phone call, or a packet of data.

Unfortunately for those who think net neutrality rules are a good idea, the railroad industry serves as a perfect example of just how hazardous declaring consumer goods “public utilities” can truly be.

Like the internet, railroads changed the world by connecting us with people, ideas, and goods to which we did not previously have access. In 1887, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) was created specifically to regulate railroads in order to “protect” consumers from falling prey to the “profit-seeking whims” of the railroad industry. Much like today, the concern was that powerful railroad companies would arbitrarily increase rates or partner with other companies in a way that harmed consumers, just like the aforementioned Comcast/Netflix example. And as a result, the ICC made the railroads public utilities. But the ICC ended up doing more harm than good.

As Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post writes:

The railroads needed ICC approval for almost everything: rates, mergers, abandonments of little-used branch lines. Shippers opposed changes that might increase costs. Railroads struggled to meet new competition from trucks and barges. In 1970, the massive Penn Central railroad — serving the Northeast — went bankrupt and was ultimately taken over by the government. Others could have followed.

Without the freedom to innovate and provide the best possible service to consumers without having to first jump through a series of regulatory hoops, the railroad industry’s hands were tied, and progress was stagnant.

In 1980, the negative impacts became too much for even the government to ignore, and the ICC was abolished. Shortly thereafter, the industry recovered. Not only did freight rates and overall costs decrease, but railroads were also finally able to make a profit again—something that became a struggle in the wake of the ICC’s creation. In other words, the repeal of regulatory oversight resulted in a win-win situation for all parties involved. And it appears the same is true of the repeal of net neutrality.

If we were to believe the hype being spread last year, by now the sky should have fallen and the internet made obsolete or exorbitantly expensive, as Banksy implied, from the lack of oversight. But that has not been the case. Instead of costs skyrocketing or connection speeds slowing down, things have actually gotten much better.

According to Recodeinternet speeds actually have increased nearly 40 percent since net neutrality was abolished. Uninhibited by government regulations, service providers have been free to expand their fiber optic networks, allowing for greater speed:

Finally some good news: The internet is getting faster, especially fixed broadband internet. Broadband download speeds in the U.S. rose 35.8 percent and upload speeds are up 22 percent from last year, according to internet speed-test company Ookla in its latest U.S. broadband report.

You’d think this news would have inspired a slew of “oops, we were wrong” articles to be written by those who worked so diligently to spread fear in the lead-up to the repeal. But this has not been the case.

Wired, which published many articles in favor of net neutrality, did publish an article called “A Year without Net Neutrality: No Big Changes (Yet),” where it admits that none of the scary predictions actually came true. But it still clung to its paradoxical belief that an internet free from regulation is not truly free.

Whether the naysayers are willing to admit it or not, less government regulation results in better outcomes for both companies and consumers. So the next time we are told that a lack of regulation is going to be the end of life as we know it, we would do well to remember what really happened when the government finally freed the internet from its grasp.

COLUMN BY

Brittany Hunter

Brittany Hunter

Brittany is a senior writer for the Foundation for Economic Education. Additionally, she is a co-host of Beltway Banthas, a podcast that combines Star Wars and politics. Brittany believes that the most effective way to promote individual liberty and free-market economics is by telling timely stories that highlight timeless principles.

EDITORS NOTE: This column by FEE with images is published with permission.

Remembering Our WWII Parents at Christmas Time

The parents of us baby-boomers truly are a great generation. They grew up early, taking on adult responsibilities. Our parents did whatever needed to be done rather than whatever they wanted to do. They won World War II.

One of the great things my black American parents gave me was options which permitted me to select what I wanted to be when I grew up. My parents supported my desire to become a professional artist. Receiving numerous scholarships, I attended the Maryland Institute College of Art and landed a job as a graphic designer at WJZ-TV ABC affiliate television station in Baltimore.

In sharp contrast with mine, Mom’s childhood was horrific. When she was a little girl, her father was accidentally killed and her mother became an alcoholic. Many times Mom and her sister were left alone to raise and fend for themselves. Mom was bright and talented. She told me about the time she was beautifully dressed to apply for a job as a sales clerk at downtown Baltimore’s Hochschild Kohn’s and Hecht’s department stores. Mom said she was offered a job in the kitchen. Mom said it was because of her dark complexion. Though she did not say it. I could tell it hurt Mom deeply.

Never experiencing the racism Mom endured, I thought she had an irrational fear of white people. My sister excitedly wanted to show Mom the new home she purchased in an integrated development. When Mom realized the house was in a cul de sac, she panicked and demanded to be taken home. Mom feared if my sister’s white neighbors attacked, there was only one way out. Mom felt extremely uncomfortable going to integrated restaurants and theaters.

Dad was quite the opposite. Whenever a door opened for blacks, Dad ran through it. I was a little kid when the “Town” movie theater in Baltimore opened to blacks. Dad took me there to see the “Ten Commandments” with Charlton Heston.

Dad worked as a laborer until the door opened for blacks to take the civil service test to become Baltimore City firefighters. Despite outrageously racist working conditions, Dad thrived in the fire department winning “Firefighter of the Year” two times. At 29 years old, Dad was fathering his four kids and served as a surrogate father to my envious five boy cousins born out-of-wedlock. That’s a lot of responsibility for such a young man. I don’t think Dad was particularly unique. Americans seemed to mature earlier back then.

My wife Mary’s white parents were also hardworking, responsible and resourceful at young ages. Their family was two parents and four children. And yet, Mary remembers washing dishes for 11 people. Her parents took in family and friends who were in a financial jam. Mary’s amazing mom always made it work; extending the food and making everyone comfortable. Mary’s mom said everyone lived with them as many as 17 people. This was the character of the World War II generation.

Mary and I marvel over the fact that though our parents were not rich, neither of us ever felt deprived at Christmas. How on earth did they pull that off? We both have cherished Christmas memories.

Compared to our parents, we baby-boomers have had it pretty easy. We are the me, me, me – all about me generation. Not having to be concerned with survival issues like our parents, baby-boomers were free to be self-focused, rebelling against traditional morals, principles and values. This birthed the counterculture hippie movement.

Gifted with scholarships, in the late 1960s, I was among a handful of black students at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Most of my fellow students were white from well-to-do families. The rich white students ranted about the awfulness of America while expressing disdain for their traditional minded wealthy parents. These spoiled brats eventually took over public education and continue poisoning our youths against our country today.

Black Panther activists came to the Maryland Institute to rally us black students. Wearing black leather jackets and berets, the Panthers angrily demanded to meet with the college administrators to discuss our demands. The administrators complied.

I was clueless as to what I was suppose to be angry about. I was there on scholarships awarded to me by white men; a senator, a governor and Baltimore Mayor William Donald Schaefer. All my professors/instructors were excellent and supportive. Because Maryland Institute attracted talented art students from around the world, I was competing on a high level. Life was good. And yet, I joined my fellow black students in viewing the college’s administrators as enemies because I thought it was the black thing to do.

I see the same irrational and erroneous thinking in young blacks today; embracing the false rhetoric of the openly hate-group Black Lives Matter. Mega-millionaire American black actors and athletes who are living extraordinary lives are running around spewing hatred for America, claiming it is a hellhole of racism and social injustice against blacks. I scratch my head hearing millennial blacks in my family rant about America’s rabid racism. Folks, these young blacks have not experienced an ounce of real racism in their lives. Anti-America leftists have taught them that hating America is the black thing to do.

Old counterculture baby-boomers, black and white, have dominated public education for decades. Consequently, our kids see racism, social injustice and the awfulness of America everywhere.

The dirty little secret is even when liberals (old hippies) rant about America’s cruelty to the poor, illegals, women, blacks, gays and so on, it is still really all about them – making themselves feel good and superior. Whenever conservatives offer real commonsense solutions to the so-called wrongs liberals claim to want to fix, liberals always reject their ideas.

World War II generation blacks and whites marched, suffered and died for blacks to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Sadly, younger Americans believe hiring to achieve racial and gender balance is more important than character and qualifications.

My white baby-boomer friend Peggy told me a great Christmas story from her childhood. Every Christmas her father took their family to dinner at their favorite restaurant. On one occasion, a black couple was seated in the corner. After seating Peggy’s family and returning with drinks, the waitress began taking their food order. Peggy’s dad noticed that the black couple was there before them and had not been served. The waitress said she seated them but had no intention to serve them. She and management hoped the couple would leave. Peggy’s dad expressed his disapproval, removed his family and they never went back. Peggy said that incident impacted her greatly. It taught her to respect all people.

Peggy’s dad is gone. My wife Mary’s dad is gone. My mom and dad are gone. Our parents were members of the great World War II generation – a time when manliness was considered a good thing and women realized the power of their femininity.

My grown up Christmas wish is for more young Americans to realize the greatness of their World War II grandparents and great grandparents – embracing traditional principles and values which bring stability. I am seeing signs of my wish coming true. Traditional marriage is making a comeback among millennials

Have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Blessed New Year!

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Vitor Pinto on Unsplash.

Planned Parenthood Has an Ally at National Institutes of Health

Pro-life leaders are urging Trump administration officials at Health & Human Services (HHS) to correct National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins over the issue of using aborted babies for fetal research.

“Director Collin’s remarks are a stark reminder that the stain of Planned Parenthood’s commoditization of unborn children isn’t yet eradicated from the federal government,” said 2ndVote Executive Director Robert Kuykendall. “Director Collins’ pro-life superiors clearly need to remind him that he’s no longer with the Obama administration, which promoted, funded, and tried to force private actors’ participation in, abortion.”

As reported by Science, Collins said last week that using aborted babies for scientific research “will continue to be the mainstay” at NIH even as alternatives are prioritized. “There is strong evidence that scientific benefits can come from fetal tissue research, which can be done with an ethical framework,” Collins continued.

Collins’ comments come after the Trump administration cancelled a Food & Drug Administration contract which aimed to use tissues from aborted babies for drug testing. Other testing has been cancelled, according to Science. HHS has also launched a review of all federal research which uses so-called unborn baby body parts and tissue from so-called “elective” abortions.

“There is never a reason to abort an innocent child,” said Kuykendall. “Director Collins’ acknowledgement that ethical, pro-life research options are ‘scientifically, highly justified’ doesn’t outweigh his support for continuing to provide a taxpayer-provided source of revenue to the abortion industry.”

RELATED ARTICLE: Planned Parenthood Discriminates Against Employees That Don’t Get Abortions


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EDITORS NOTE: This column with images by 2ndVote is republished with permission. The featured photo is by Shutterstock.

Advertisers Cower as Libs Gin up Attacks on Tucker Carlson

“Approximately 20” companies have caved to pressure from liberal groups and pulled or suspended advertising from Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show after the host’s recent statements about immigration:

“We have a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor they tell us, even if it makes our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided,” he said at the start of his program last week. “Immigration is an act of atonement. Previous leaders of our country committed sins. We must pay for those sins by welcoming an endless chain of migrant caravans.”

While many immigrants seek the American Dream, policies that encourage illegal immigration such as open borders and sanctuary cities undermine the rule of law. Furthermore, unchecked immigration is an invitation for chaos and a significant detriment to the social fabric of our nation — for example, the higher serious crime rates by illegal immigrants as compared to native-born Americans and legal immigrants.

Not surprisingly, the campaign to push companies away from Carlson’s show is led by leftist hack website Media Matters — an organization funded by liberal billionaire George Soros. According to Media Matters, advertisements on a network covering a different viewpoint on immigration policy amounts to “sponsoring fascism.” Of course, Pacific Life, who is “pausing” ads, continues to support pro-abortion organizations, while Media Matters convenient ignores the historical role of abortion in the eugenics philosophies promulgated by real, actual fascists. The abortion industry is also complicit in enabling human traffickers who prey on vulnerable immigrants.

Do companies like Pacific Life support the abortion industry’s attack on immigrants? The virtue signaling over Carlson’s comments is outrageously hypocritical when corporate bank accounts directly fund the destruction of life, particularly in immigrant communities. This means 2ndVoters must work harder to engage these companies through direct contact and by holding them accountable with your dollars.

Will you educate Pacific Life today on their hypocrisy? Reach out using the button below:

Send Pacific Life an Email!


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EDITORS NOTE: The column with images by 2ndVote is republished with permission. The featured photo is from Shutterstock.

C.S. Lewis Saw Government as a Poor Substitute for God

That means it contains all the flaws and foibles of mortals so a free people must confine it, restrain it, and keep a wary eye on it.


“Friendship,” wrote C. S. Lewis in a December 1935 letter, “is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was just the sort of person I would give an arm to have as a friend across the street. I can only imagine the thrill of listening to him for hours on end. This distinguished scholar and thinker was, of course, a prolific author of works in Christian apologetics and of the seven-part children’s fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia (which have sold more than 100 million copies and have been adapted into three major motion pictures).

While teaching literature first at Oxford and then at Cambridge, he cranked out more than a score of books, from the dense but highly regarded Mere Christianity to the entertaining The Screwtape Letters, plus hundreds of speeches, essays, letters, and radio addresses. Some regard him as the greatest lay theologian of the 20th Century. His influence, substantial while he was alive, may be even greater in the world today. Visit the C. S. Lewis website and you’ll see just how copious and wide-ranging this amazing Irishman’s interests were.

Stacked against his literary and theological offerings, Lewis’s commentary on political and economic matters is comparatively slim—mostly a few paragraphs scattered here and there, not in a single volume. Lewis scholars have examined those snippets to discern where he might be appropriately placed on the spectrum. Was he a socialist, a classical liberal, an anarchist, a minarchist, a theocrat, or something else?

Personally, I believe Lewis might be perfectly happy to be labeled a Christian libertarian. He embraced minimal government because he had no illusions about the essentially corrupt nature of man and the inevitable magnification of corruption when it’s mixed with political power. He knew that virtuous character was indispensable to a happy life, personal fulfillment, and progress for society at large—and that it must come not by the commands of political elites but from the growth and consciences of each individual, one at a time. He celebrated civil society and peaceful cooperation and detested the presumptuous arrogance of officialdom.

In these very pages, other writers have made the case that Lewis was a lover of liberty. In a 2012 article titled “C. S. Lewis: Free Market Advocate,” Harold B. Jones Jr. argued that it was Lewis’s belief in “the rules of logic” and “premises that are fixed realities” that produced his embrace of markets and free exchange. I think Lewis’s literal interpretation of Jesus’s words led him to the same perspective I explained in my essay, “Rendering Unto Caesar: Was Jesus a Socialist?

Calvin College’s David V. Urban answered the question “Was C. S. Lewis a Libertarian?” with a resounding Yes! And thirty-five years earlier, in “C. S. Lewis on Compelling People to Do Good,” Clarence Carson dissected Lewis’s statements and arrived at a similar conclusion. More recently, Marco den Ouden brilliantly drew out Lewis’s sobering insights into the tyrannical potential of pure democracy in “Why the Devil Loves Democracy.” All these essays are well worth your time even if your interest in Lewis is minimal.

It’s the primary source of Lewis’s own words, of course, that should clarify where his political and economic sympathies were. Allow me to present the following selections for you to consider.

Lewis’s 1958 essay, “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State” (published that year in The Observer and then later revised and included in his excellent 1970 anthology, God in the Dock) is a goldmine of insights about government and its proper relationship to the individual. You can read the whole essay here. One of my favorite passages is this:

To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labor, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death—these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilized man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.

While advocates for the interventionist welfare state argue that government programs produce happiness and security, Lewis suggests they are seriously mistaken. There is a far better way to achieve those ends, namely, freedom:

I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has “the freeborn mind.” But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?

Elsewhere in the essay, Lewis is unequivocal in his disdain for the pretensions of government, as much for its overblown claims of “rule by experts” in the modern day as for its medieval insistence on rule by “divine right.” In every age, he says, “the men who want us under their thumb” will advance the particular myths and prejudices of the day so they can “cash in” on hopes and fears.

That, he says, opens the door wide to tyranny in one form or another. Such men are no more than self-exalting, self-aggrandizing mortals. While they may proclaim to be “of the people and for the people,” they inevitably establish self-serving oligarchies at the people’s expense. The following three paragraphs from “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State” (appearing at different points in the essay) express profound skepticism toward the “planners of society” among us:

“I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands ‘Thus saith the Lord’, it lies, and lies dangerously.”

“The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting?”

“The modern state exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good—anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers.’ We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.”

The notion that the welfare state will take good care of us is, to Lewis, delusional. Doing so is to sell short one’s own capabilities and those of voluntary, social networks and organizations. It also ensnares one in a fool’s errand that cannot end well:

What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about “Man taking charge of his own destiny.” All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?

Lewis believed that men and women should be equal before the rule of law. He disdained arbitrariness, caprice, racism, or classism in the law’s application. Consistent with those principles, he believed just as firmly that the law should not aim to make people equal in other ways, such as in material wealth. That could only be done through ugly force.

In a 1943 essay entitled “Equality,” he warned against applying economic equalness as a “medicine” for society’s ills. When we do that, he said, “we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked.”

Though he found the egalitarian impulses of democracy offensive, he wasn’t averse to using the term “democrat” to describe his own feelings about government. It’s important to note that he used the term in its broadest sense, namely, to mean popular participation in decisions about who served in government and what they could justifiably do. At the end of the day, he readily acknowledged the danger of a pure democracy combining with rotten character to ultimately produce its precise opposite, dictatorship. In Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966), he wrote:

Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organization will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi. The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety.

The Screwtape Letters (1942) remains one of Lewis’s most popular satirical pieces. It was written as a series of missives from a senior demon, named Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, who carries the official title of Junior Tempter. Screwtape is training Wormwood in how to corrupt mankind, to turn society into a Hell on Earth. It’s very revealing of Lewis’s political thinking that the senior demon instructs his pupil to “equalize” and “democratize” to achieve their nefarious objectives:

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement toward the discrediting, and finally elimination, of every kind of human excellence—moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how Democracy is now doing for us the work that once was done by the ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? … Allow no pre-eminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own.

If Lewis were a statist of any persuasion, I don’t see how he could write any of the above. And if he were a statist, he would likely glorify the ambitions of central planners, which he never did. He was just not impressed by the pomposity of politicians. In his 1960 essay titled “The World’s Last Night,” he wrote,

The higher the pretensions of our rulers are, the more meddlesome and impertinent their rule is likely to be and the more the thing in whose name they rule will be defiled. . . . Let our masters . . . leave us some region where the spontaneous, the unmarketable, the utterly private, can still exist.

If I had to choose a favorite among Lewis’s pithy put-downs of big government, it would be this clip from his 1949 essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” which also appeared later in his anthology, God in the Dock:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

Lewis’s worldview was internally consistent. He couldn’t bring himself to look upon government as God, a substitute for God, or a reasonable facsimile of God. Government was composed of imperfect mortals, period. That means it contains all the flaws and foibles of mortals so a free people must confine it, restrain it, and keep a wary eye on it.

He was humble enough to admit what so many other mortals won’t, namely, that not even his own good intentions could justify lording it over others. To him, good intentions plus political power equals tyranny all too often. He believed that bad consequences flow directly from bad ideas and bad behavior. In The Abolition of Man, he says:

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Finally, I love his scathing criticisms of the education establishment of his day—dominated as it was (and is even more so today) by the centralizers, the faddists, and the practitioners of pedagogical malpractice who are empowered by virtue of government’s involvement. If education is to be saved, I think he would see that salvation coming from private initiative, not from the costly, mind-numbing conformity of bureaucrats in the Department of Education:

Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.

If the world is no smarter today than it was when C. S. Lewis died in 1963, we certainly can’t blame him. He gifted us wisdom by the bushels—wisdom we ignore or dismiss at our peril.

COLUMN BY

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Foundation for Economic Education and author of Real Heroes: Incredible True Stories of Courage, Character, and Conviction and Excuse Me, Professor: Challenging the Myths of ProgressivismFollow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

EDITORS NOTE: This column with images by FEE is republished with permission. The featured photo is by Caleb Woods on Unsplash.

New Census Data Show Americans Are Migrating from Tax-Punishing States

The Census Bureau released new data that show Americans are continuing to move from high-tax to low-tax states.


The Census Bureau has released new data on state population growth between July 2017 and July 2018. Domestic migration between the states is one portion of annual population change. The Census data show that Americans are continuing to move from high-tax to low-tax states.

This Cato study examined interstate migration using IRS data for 2016. The new Census data confirms that people are moving from tax-punishing places such as California, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey to tax-friendly places such as Florida, Idaho, Nevada, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

In the chart, each blue dot is a state. The vertical axis shows the one-year Census net interstate migration figure as a percentage of 2017 state population. The horizontal axis shows state and local household taxes as a percentage of personal income in 2015. Household taxes include individual income, sales, and property taxes.

On the right, most of the high-tax states have net out-migration. The blue dot on the far right is New York with a tax burden of 13 percent and a net migration loss of nearly 1 percent (0.92) over the past year.

On the left, nearly all the net in-migration states have tax loads of less than 8.5 percent. The outlier on the bottom left is Alaska. If policymakers want their states to be people magnets, they should get their household tax burdens down to 8.5 percent of personal income or lower.

The red line is fitted from a simple regression that was highly statistically significant.

This Cato Institute article was republished with permission.

COLUMN BY

Chris Edwards

Chris Edwards

Chris Edwards is the director of tax policy studies at Cato and editor of DownsizingGovernment.org.

EDITORS NOTE: This column with images by FEE is republished with permission. The featured photo is by rawpixel on Unsplash.

Judge Sullivan Must Recuse Himself From Flynn Case

When I was in sixth grade, I was chosen to be the defense attorney for a classmate. Evelyn was accused of passing an answer to a test question to a fellow student during an exam. She was accused of cheating.

Evelyn was a great student, and she had never been accused of cheating before, but her accuser was none other than the principal of the school, Dr. Gil Beltrán.

As it were, Dr. Beltrán had seen Evelyn pass the note to her friend when, while performing his routine rounds, he glanced through one of the door windows behind the class and saw the allegedly illegal act take place. Upon seeing the exchange of information, Dr. Beltrán opened the back door of the class, signaled to the receiving student to hand over whatever paper Evelyn had just handed him, and opened it.

You could hear a pin drop as Dr. Beltrán stared down at Evelyn and signaled for her to go to his office. Evelyn cried for hours after that prompting the rest of us to protest about the unfairness of the treatment to which Evelyn was being subjected.

At some point, and I am foggy on the details, Dr. Beltrán offered us our class a compromise. We would have a trial, one with witnesses, lawyers, and a judge; the whole deal. I think Dr. Beltrán (may he rest in peace) concluded this would be a great opportunity for us kids to engage in experiential learning. Of course, Evelyn was the defendant, and I was chosen by the principal himself to be her attorney. And to serve as my co-counsel, the principal chose Dagoberto, my best friend in the world.

But the principal also picked himself to serve as the judge, and the trial would take place in his office; in a week.

Dago and I zealously worked to get Evelyn off. First, we learned that what Evelyn had handed to her friend, was not an answer to the test, but a question about what they were going to do after school. Unfortunately, the principal, Dr. Beltrán, had since thrown away the piece of paper.

And in a great development for the defense, we were also able to procure the teacher as a witness who was willing to testify that not only did she not see Evelyn pass any piece of paper that day, but that Evelyn was a young lady of impeccable character and would be the last student the teacher would have expected to engage in cheating.

Overall, Dago and I were feeling pretty good about our case. At best, we might be able to get Evelyn off altogether. At worst, she would be found guilty of a lesser offense such as disruptive class behavior.

Despite our success at building the case: the accuser was also the judge. I remember Dago and I worried that we would not be able to bring Dr. Beltrán to the stand because a) he was the principal; and b) he was the judge. How do you get the judge to serve as a witness? Dago and I asked ourselves. For the answer to this question, Dago and I would need a classmate friend’s parent who was also an attorney! But try as we did, we couldn’t find one.

Our school, La Lúz School, was a small private, Cuban immigrant school where the Cuban National Anthem was played immediately following the American National Anthem every morning while we stood in ranks with our hands on our hearts and where the Cuban flag proudly waived next to the Stars and Stripes.

At that time, most Cubans had not had the time in country to become members of the learned professions.

So, into trial at the principal’s office we went with the whole class as our audience.

I’ll never forget it! I thought our team performed marvelously. We laid out the facts of the case by calling our witnesses to the stand and having each tell his or her story. We were able to ascertain that the note was not an answer to a test question, that Evelyn had impeccable character, and that no one, except the accuser, ever saw her even pass the paper; a paper no one could produce!

Still, we lost.

Why? Because the judge, who was also the accuser and who was not called to the stand said he knew what he saw, and that Evelyn was guilty.

It wouldn’t be until years later, during a high school civics class, that I learned that the judge could not be a witness or a party to the case!! I needed to move that the judge recuse himself because he was the witness AND the accuser! 

The reason I’m sharing this story with you is because it was the first thing that came to mind when I heard of the shenanigans that took place yesterday at General Michael Flynn’s sentencing hearing.

Let me be clear. I believe that General Flynn lied to the FBI and in so doing broke the law. I also believe he was set up to lie by a manipulative, vindictive, and agenda-driven FBI bent on entrapping the General. What’s more, I believe the investigators in this case were the primary reason General Flynn was without an attorney at their meeting of Jan. 24, 2017, and to allow the FBI to get away with that level of disrespect to a defendant’s rights is repulsive.

But yesterday, a new offense arose. Yesterday, we learned for the first time, that Judge Emmet Sullivan, the judge assigned to the Flynn case, is horribly and irreparably biased against Flynn, and we know this from the judge’s very words.

During the hearing, Judge Sullivan is quoted as saying to Flynn, “I am not hiding my disgust, my disdain for your criminal offense.” At one point, the judge went on to state that Flynn, a 33-year Army veteran of war and peace, had betrayed his country and asked whether General Flynn could be accused of treason. Treason!

That is the only crime so egregious, so vile, and so disgusting to the Framers that it stands as the only one mentioned by name in the Constitution of the United States and punishable by hanging. The same crime for which Jane Fonda was not accused when she pranced around in her short shorts in front of the Viet Cong and sat on an anti-aircraft battery for a photo op.

This is what Judge Sullivan thinks of General Flynn! I notice that Judge Sullivan never served in our nation’s military. Never saw bullets flying nearby while wearing a helmet and shrapnel vest, and never spent months overseas away from his family not knowing if he would ever get back home because he might say hello to an enemy bullet first.

With all due respect to the judge, I will put one year of General Flynn’s service to this great country against the judge’s whole career any day and easily come out winning.

Admittedly, the judge corrected himself and apologized for his remarks, to which I will respond in kind. I apologize for those last two paragraphs and strike them from the record.

But regardless of how I feel about this case, we still have a very significant problem. We still have a judge who is disgusted by the defendant and holds disdain for him to the point where he would consider employing the word treason around this American hero.

It’s like having Dr. Belrtrán try a case all over again, except this time, although I am not Flynn’s attorney, I know better.

Judge Sullivan, recuse yourself from this case!

RELATED ARTICLE: The Evidence Coming Out Of The Flynn Case Makes Mueller Look Worse And Worse

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act. The featured photo is by rawpixel on Unsplash.

2 Students Explain Why They Defended Teacher Fired Over Transgender Pronouns

Two high school students say they organized a walkout in support of a teacher fired for not using pronouns preferred by a transgender student because they thought they should speak out on a cause they believe in.

“When I wanted to speak out about this, I just found this a great opportunity,” Forrest Rohde, a junior at West Point High School, told The Daily Signal in an interview. “I knew that a lot of people in my school would follow with me.”

School officials, Rohde said, are pushing “a false ideology” on teachers and students.

Rohde’s friend Wyatt Pedersen, a senior at the school in West Point, Virginia, said he thought school administrators were “suppressing” French teacher Peter Vlaming’s First Amendment rights.

The West Point school board voted 5-0 on Dec. 6 to fire Vlaming, saying his refusal to follow orders to use male pronouns in referring to the transgender student “harassed and discriminated against the student” and meant the teacher was “insubordinate.”

Vlaming, 47, told the school board that he did not use male pronouns in referring to the student, who was born female, because of his own religious convictions. He said he also didn’t use female pronouns to refer to the student.

The teacher “read a 10-minute statement to the board and hearing attendees about his intentions, respect, and love for all of his students and their rights,” The Virginia Gazette reported.

Rohde, 17, told The Daily Signal that he “was already kind of into politics in general.” He said he helped organize the walkout of about 100 students Dec. 7 after his father encouraged him to do what he could to show he backed the teacher.

“He’s like, ‘Hey, you want to stay home? Or do you want to not go to school but protest in front of it?’” Rohde said of his father. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure. That sounds like a plan.’”

“So, I head out to the school like around 7:30 that morning, and I stayed out there for an hour and a half … holding these signs,” Rohde said.

Rohde said he had started texting friends and posting on social media about supporting Vlaming, and Pedersen came up with the idea of a walkout.

Pedersen, also 17, is what Rohde calls a “co-leader of the #JusticeforVlaming movement.”

Wyatt Pedersen, a senior at the school in West Point, Virginia, says school administrators were “suppressing” teacher Peter Vlaming’s First Amendment rights. (Photo courtesy of Wyatt Pedersen)

Pedersen told The Daily Signal that he supports Vlaming because the teacher “just is an amazing man” and a “devout Christian.” For Vlaming, using male pronouns in this situation would be a “violation of his conscience,” the student said.

“I also feel like the school is suppressing [his] First Amendment rights,” Pedersen said.

Rohde said school officials have the right to disagree with Vlaming, but went too far in firing him.

“The school board can disagree with Vlaming all they want,” Rohde said. “I just think they shouldn’t have fired him over it, or given him any consequences, because it’s a false ideology they’re trying to push onto him, and basically everybody else.”

Rohde said he circulated a petition for fellow students to sign in the school cafeteria, which was met with opposition from teachers. The petition eventually was confiscated, but later returned to him.

Rohde said he would tell peers facing similar situations in schools across the country to speak up politely, respectfully, and “in a peaceful manner” for what they believe in. “Nothing that incites hatred,” he said.

“If you want to spread a message about something, you shouldn’t be afraid of the consequences,” Rohde said. “You should be proud of getting in trouble because from getting in trouble yourself, you’re kind of changing the world, basically, and changing everything for the better.”

In a statement emailed to The Daily Signal, West Point Public Schools Superintendent Laura K. Abel said the high school is supportive of students who openly back Vlaming.

The walkout “gave students an opportunity to publicly show their support for their teacher,” Abel said. “We encourage student involvement in issues that affect the school division.”

Pedersen said he thinks the high school has been unjust in its treatment of Vlaming.

“The government has a purpose in protecting students, but not to the degree of harming other people,” Pedersen told The Daily SIgnal. “I think that it’s disgusting that one student’s beliefs and ideology is being put over the teacher’s beliefs and ideology.”


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COLUMN BY

Portrait of Rachel del Guidice

Rachel del Guidice

Rachel del Guidice is a reporter for The Daily Signal. She is a graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, Forge Leadership Network, and The Heritage Foundation’s Young Leaders Program. Send an email to Rachel. Twitter: @LRacheldG.

EDITORS NOTE: This column with images by The Daily Signal is republished with permission. Photo courtesy of Forrest Rohde.

TRUMP’S BATTLE FOR A BORDER WALL: National security, public safety, and Americans’ jobs are “on the line.”

The immigration debate has been raging for years.  Advocates for open borders can be found on both sides of the political aisle and in a wide variety of special interest groups who have come to see the immigration system that delivers an unlimited supply of cheap and exploitable labor, an unlimited supply of foreign tourists, and unlimited supply of foreign students and, for the lawyers, an unlimited supply of clients.

That was the premise for my article, “Sanctuary Country – Immigration failures by design.”

Now the debate about the construction of a border wall is coming to a head.

A line has been drawn, and not in the sand, but along the highly porous and dangerous U.S./Mexican border that permits huge numbers of illegal aliens to enter the United States without inspection and permits huge quantities of narcotics and other contraband to be smuggled into the United States as well.

President Trump is arguably the first U.S. President in many decades who truly understands that border security equals national security.   He also understands that flooding America with exploitable foreign workers from Third World countries is not compassionate for those foreign workers and certainly not for the American workers that they displace.

President Trump is determined to build that wall but incredibly, the Democrats are adamantly opposed to the construction of a border wall.

As I noted in my recent article “Nancy Pelosi, Speaker Of The House – The Sequel (Worse Than The Original),” Pelosi and her Democratic Party colleagues have incredibly declared that a border wall would be as Fox News reported Pelosi’s assertions, “immoral, ineffective and expensive.”

Pelosi and company have created the false illusion that the border wall would seal off the United States from Mexico when, in point of fact, nothing could be further from the truth.  The  border wall would not block access to U.S. ports of entry along that border but simply funnel all traffic to those ports of entry so that the aliens can be inspected and vetted and records of their entry into the United States can be created.  Similarly all cargo would be subject to inspection to keep drugs and other contraband out of the United States.

How could any rational person not want to act to combat the flow of those drugs into the United States?

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) employs approximately 60,000 employees that include the U.S. Border Patrol, the CBP Inspectors at ports of entry and support staff.  The annual budget for CBP is nearly $14 billion.  It makes absolutely not sense for the United States to not secure the U.S./Mexican border against the un-inspected entry of aliens into the United States and against the smuggling of tons of heroin, cocaine, meth, fentanyl and other dangerous drugs into the United States that cost tens of thousands of innocent people their lives in the United States from drug overdoses.  The drugs also provide a huge revenue stream for the drug cartels and, as I noted in previous articles for Hezbollah, the client terrorist organization of Iran.

Drug are also a major factor where transnational gangs operating in the United States are concerned, leading to more violence and more senseless deaths, most often of children living in ethnic immigrant communities across the United States.

Of course the wall that President Trump is determined to construct would not, by itself, end illegal immigration or stop all illegal drugs from flowing into the United States, but would represent a major element of what needs to be a coordinated system that plugs all of the holes in the “Immigration Colander.”

Finally, as I have written in previous articles, the wall would pay for itself.  Illegal aliens provide cheap and exploitable labor for greedy and immoral employers but, as the saying goes, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.”

The cost of educating illegal alien children who are cannot speak, read or write English has been estimated to be 20% to 40% more than for educating children who are English language proficient.

Illegal aliens often use emergency rooms as their primary healthcare provider, creating long lines of those patients who, although they cannot pay for their treatment cannot be turned away.

Illegal aliens send as much of their illegal earnings back to their families in their home countries.  For Mexico the remittances sent by their citizens working illegally in the United States amounts to more than $25 billion annually.  Furthermore, not all money is sent via quantifiable wire transfers.  Money is also smuggled out of the United States to the countries of origin of the millions of illegal aliens who have taken jobs that should be taken by U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants

That money is lost to the U.S. economy and “multiplier effect” exacerbates this loss of money that would otherwise circulate through the U.S. economy if that money was earned by Americans who would spend and invest that money in the United States.

Flooding the United States with Third World workers suppresses wages and working conditions of America’s working poor and, as a consequence, has contributed to increasing homelessness among America’s poor.

If only a fraction of all of these negative results of illegal immigration was prevented, the wall would pay for itself in short order and, as a consequence, enhance national security, public safety and, public health by preventing the entry of un-inspected aliens.

However, many well-intentioned Americans have fallen for the bogus mythology created by the immigration anarchists who advocate for open borders and ineffectual enforcement of the immigration laws from the interior of the United States by promoting the absurd notion that advocates for border security to prevent the illegal and un-inspected entry of aliens into the United States is a bigot and a xenophobe.

In reality the immigration laws of the United States make absolutely no distinction about the race, religion or ethnicity of aliens but rather objectively and dispassionately seek to prevent the entry and continued presence of aliens in the United States when those aliens pose a threat to public health, public safety, national security and the jobs of Americans.

Given the perilous era in which we live, it is unthinkable that anyone would be willing to board an airliner if some of the passengers on that airliner were observed sneaking past the TSA screeners, yet today we live in cities where we live with huge numbers of illegal aliens who have entered the United States surreptitiously by evading the inspections process conducted at ports of entry.

Worse yet, consider how many “sanctuary cities” and even “sanctuary states” have been created across the United States, while “leaders” of the Democratic Party openly call for dismantling ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) altogether.

The immigration anarchists have become proficient at conning huge numbers of Americans into accepting near-anarchy where immigration law enforcement is concerned.

Prior to the Second World War, the enforcement and administration of our nation’s immigration laws was primarily the responsibility of the Department of Labor.  The goal was to make certain that American workers would be shielded from unfair foreign competition for jobs.  Remember at that time the United States was struggling to emerge from the “Great Depression.”

Authority for the enforcement and administration of the immigration laws was shifted to the Department of Justice at the beginning of the Second World War when it became readily apparent that enemy spies and saboteurs were attempting to enter the United States, posing a serious threat to national security.

Ironically, after the terror attacks of 9/11 the responsibility for the enforcement and administration of those very same laws was shifted to the newly created Department of Homeland Security but in a way that undermined that very mission.  This was an issue I wrote about in my article,  Caravan Of ‘Migrants’ – A Crisis Decades In The Making.  When the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) was created, in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, the administration of President George W. Bush apparently failed to follow the Homeland Security Act (HSA), the enabling legislation that created DHS resulting in what Congressman John Hostettler, the Republican Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims referred to as “Immigration incoherence” during a hearing on the topic, New ”Dual Missions” Of The Immigration Enforcement Agencies.

Here are two excerpts from his statement at that hearing:

Failure to adhere to the statutory framework established by HSA has produced immigration enforcement incoherence that undermines the immigration enforcement mission central to DHS, and undermines the security of our Nation’s borders and citizens.

[ … ]

The 9/11 terrorists all came to the U.S. with-out weapons or contraband—Added customs enforcement would not have stopped 9/11 from happening. What might have foiled al Qaeda’s plan was additional immigration focus, vetting, and enforcement. And so what is needed is recognition that, one, immigration is a very important national security issue that cannot take a back seat to customs or agriculture. Two, immigration is a very complex issue, and immigration enforcement agencies need experts in immigration enforcement. And three, the leadership of our immigration agencies should be shielded from political pressures to act in a way which could compromise the Nation’s security.

It is time for our “leaders” to put America and Americans ahead of their greed-driven political agendas and take Chairman Hostettler’s lament and observations to heart.

RELATED ARTICLE: WATCH: Stephen Miller Absolutely Savages Wolf Blitzer Over Immigration

RELATED VIDEO: Brian Kolfage of We The People Will Fund The Wall Interview With Laura Ingraham

EDITORS NOTE: This column with images originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine. It is republished with permission. Border wall photo © Tomas Castelazo, www.tomascastelazo.com / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Trump Is Right to Withdraw From Syria

The U.S. military presence in Syria has not been authorized by Congress, is illegal under international law, lacks a coherent strategy, and carries significant risks.


President Trump has ordered a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. This is the right decision. The U.S. military presence in Syria has not been authorized by Congress, is illegal under international law, lacks a coherent strategy, and carries significant risks of entangling America in a broader quagmire in yet another Middle Eastern country.

As I wrote in Axios:

The Obama administration first deployed U.S. troops to Syria to complement its aerial bombing campaign against ISIS with special operations forces and coordinate with local anti-ISIS militias on the ground, gradually expanding from hundreds of troops to roughly 4,000.

The mission expanded, too, from merely defeating ISIS (substantially accomplished some time ago) to ushering Syrian President Bashar al-Assad out of power, expelling Iranian forces, and edging out Russia.

The bottom line: Absent achievable goals and a strong national security imperative backed up by congressional authorization, the U.S. presence in Syria is illegitimate and better off wound down.

One prominent criticism of Trump’s decision is that it lacks a clear public explanation and evades the carefully planned and coordinated inter-agency process that enables such a withdrawal to be executed safely and responsibly. This is a fair criticism. Indeed, Trump seems not to have consulted the Defense Department, State Department, or really any of the national security principals in his administration before making this announcement.

But the fault for evading process may lie more with the president’s hawkish advisors than with Trump himself. Trump has long expressed disapproval for the U.S. military presence in Syria, but his own officials—including National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and the current Special Representative for Syria Engagement James Jeffrey—either resisted or ignored the Commander-in-Chief’s clearly stated preferences on an ongoing military mission. That may have made the president feel he had no choice but to circumvent process and issue the order to withdraw on his own, via Twitter.

That said, I do worry about an administration that is too deferential to Trump’s every whim. I was heartened, for example, that cabinet officials spent months pushing back on Trump’s call to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. Likewise with the president’s request for military options against North Korea, which the Pentagon reportedly slow-walked in the months before Trump shifted from maximum pressure to diplomatic negotiations with Kim Jong-un. And when Trump reportedly asked Mattis to assassinate Assad, it was probably a good thing that the Secretary of Defense chose not to take the suggestion seriously.

That withdrawal is the right decision does not mean Syria will flourish in peace and security. Several undesirable contingencies may occur in the aftermath of our exit. The Turks may engage in operations against the Kurds in Syria’s northeast. ISIS may make some gains here and there. But if these things materialize, they should not be cited as proof that withdrawal was unwise. That’s exactly the flawed argument hawks employed to criticize the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq. Sure, it left a vacuum in which ISIS emerged. But ISIS itself is a product of the US invasion of Iraq. And our presence in Syria could very well be creating comparable unintended consequences, instead of preventing them.

It can’t be America’s purpose to indefinitely forestall every plausible misfortune that may or may not bedevil this troubled region. In the near term, we can engage in diplomacy to try to curb Turkish plans to target the Kurds. And with regard to ISIS, it’s not at all clear that their permanent defeat depends on maintaining a U.S. ground presence in Syria. The extremist group is already decimated, and even without an indefinite U.S. presence, it is surrounded by enemies to whom we can pass the buck (should resurgence even occur, which is not a given).

Anyone who favors a U.S. military presence in Syria should be calling for Congress to formally authorize it. That process will require making a strong public case that deployment is required to preempt an immediate threat to U.S. security and that the mission has coherent, achievable goals that clearly define what victory looks like. Otherwise, our presence in Syria is illegitimate.

This article is reprinted from Cato At Liberty.

COLUMN BY

John Glaser

John Glaser is associate director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. His research interests include grand strategy, basing posture, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the rise of China, and the role of status and prestige motivations in international politics.

RELATED ARTICLES: 

Official: White House ‘Very Supportive’ of Israeli Strikes on Iran in Syria

US Troop Withdrawal from Syria Could Fuel Gulf Assertiveness

The US Withdrawal from Syria: A Blessing in Disguise?

Pros and Cons of the US pullout from Syria

Saudi Arabia says it’s open to sending troops to Syria as U.S. draws down

The United States Decision to Withdraw Forces from Syria: Significance for Israel

Netanyahu Attempts to Calm Fears Over US Pullout from Syria

EDITORS NOTE: This column by FEE with images is republished with permission.