Failure of the ‘Biofuels’ mandate

Can government ever admit a mistake and reform?

Government “biofuel” mandates are a mistake we should eliminate.

CFACT senior policy advisor Paul Driessen reminds us at CFACT.org of Ronald Reagan’s quip that, “the closest thing to earthly eternal life is a government program.”

“The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS),” Driessen writes, “created under the 2005 Energy Policy Act and expanded by the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act, is a perfect example. It has more lives than Freddy Krueger.”

“The laws require that refiners blend steadily increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline, and expect the private sector to produce growing amounts of ‘cellulosic’ biofuel, ‘biomass-based diesel,’ and ‘advanced’ biofuels. Except for corn ethanol, the production expectations have mostly turned out to be fantasies. The justifications for renewable fuels were scary exaggerations then, and are now illusions.”

“Bio-fuel” mandates reduce mileage, distort markets, raise prices, clog engines, reduce natural habitats and increase CO2 emissions (if that’s your thing).

They have no energy or environmental benefits and certainly are of no help to the climate.  They are an agricultural welfare program.

We love our farmers.  While some may defend these mandates to keep the cash flowing, virtually all admit that they are a big government mistake.

“Biofuel” mandates are ripe for cutting.

Congress should dust off and sharpen its ax and cut these foolish mandates off.

Round up of ‘death wish’ calls by Enviromental-Nazis

Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo has issued a death wish for conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. Ruffalo urged a “gofund me campaign”to “fly Rush Limbaugh to Hurricane Irma!”

Ruffalo’s death wish for Limbaugh follows a long line of climate activists who have issued similar calls for harm to come to climate skeptics. See:

2017: Left-Wing Website Hoped Hurricane Irma Would ‘F*ck Up’ Trump’s Mansion

2016: Arnold Schwarzenegger again threatens climate skeptics: ‘I would like to strap their mouth to the exhaust pipe of a truck — turn on the engine’ -Terminator wants to Terminate skeptics

2014: Death Wish: Warmist Greg Blanchette: ‘I kind of hope N. America gets its ass kicked this hurricane season. It would motivate us on climate action’

DEATH WISH: Flashback 2009: Nobel-Winning Warmist Economist Thomas Schelling ‘Wished’ for ‘tornadoes’ and ‘a lot of horrid things’ to convince Americans of climate threat!

2010: DEATH WISH: Warmist Michael Tomasky admits he’s cheering for more natural disasters to convince people of man-made global warming!

Warmist’s Death Wish: ‘I will probably enjoy a drink of expensive scotch when Marc Morano, James Inhofe, and Steve Milloy kick the bucket’

2016 Death Wish: NYT Writer Calls for A ‘Natural Disaster’ in GOP States to ‘Unify’ After Clinton Win 

And if the weather does not kill, just use a weapon! See: ‘We could shoot him’ – Sir David Attenborough proposes shooting Trump to save climate in 2016 – ‘It’s not a bad idea’

Image result for death wish

But these hurricanes cannot be linked scientifically to “global warming” See: Climate Depot’s point-by-point rebuttal to warmist claims on extreme weather events

Despite that, Actor Ruffalo also urged Americans to “direct some of your rage and loss” at “climate change deniers like [EPA Chief] Scott Pruitt.”

Julie Kelly writing in American Greatness commented:

One could write this off as just another emotional rant from an uneducated Hollywood celebrity. But Ruffalo has quite a following, including 3.4 million Twitter followers and the media’s admiration. So it is not without consequence when the actor invites his minions to attack a Trump Administration cabinet official and anyone deemed a climate change denier. Considering one of Ruffalo’s fellow Bernie Bros tried to assassinate several Republican congressmen earlier this summer, nearly killing one of them, it’s outrageous for a top celebrity activist to fan the flames in this kind of political environment. It’s also a bit ironic, since he routinely tweets about love, compassion, and tolerance.

But Ruffalo also claimed that GOP “deniers” will be “in part responsible for these disasters going forward.”

The climate change activist community appears unified that Hurricane Harvey and Irma were somehow made worse by “climate deniers” and these “deniers” should be punished because they are guilty of “murder.”

The Nation: ‘To refuse to act against global warming…is murder’ – ‘Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us’

“The victims of Hurricane Harvey have a murderer—and it’s not the storm.​..What makes this so infuriating is that it shouldn’t be happening. Experts have warned for decades that global warming would increase these sorts of weather extremes and that people would suffer and die if protective measures were not implemented,” Warmist Mark Hertsgaard wrote in The Nation for the September 25 issue.

“The first step toward justice is to call things by their true names. Murder is murder, whether the murderers admit it or not. Punish it as such, or we encourage more of the same,” Hertsgaard wrote. “It is past time to call out Trump and all climate deniers for this crime against humanity. No more treating climate denial like an honest difference of opinion.”

“When the president announced in June that he was withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate accord, I wrote in The Nation: ‘To refuse to act against global warming is to condemn thousands of people to death and suffering today and millions more tomorrow. This is murder, even if Trump’s willful ignorance of climate science prevents him from seeing it,” he added.

Climate activist Brad Johnson followed suit and demanded: “Put official who reject science in jail” as he blamed Irma on climate change.

Meanwhile, other environmental activists prayed for Hurricane Harvey to hit Texas so that it could damage it’s oil pipelines.

“Yes I am praying the Hurricanes hit full force to stop the illegal no federal permit permit Valley Crossing Pipeline,” Texas’ Carrizo-Comecrudo Tribe chairman Juan Mancias posted a day before Harvey made landfall in Texas. “It will cost Enbridge and Spectra more $$$$.”

The two hurricanes also prompted other climate activists to demand “big oil must pay for climate change” because “their products contributed substantially to climate change.”

Other climate activists have called for a national registry to record U.S. citizens views on man-made climate change. See: Climate Gestapo: Treat ‘deniers’ like murderers, demand federal registry to record views on climate change

Climate Activists Peter C Frumhoff & Myles R Allen wrote in the UK Guardian that they blame industry for worsening storms.

“We know that the costs of both hurricanes will be enormous and that climate change will have made them far larger than they would have been otherwise,” Frumhoff and Allen wrote.

But others noted that fossil fuels are indispensable when facing natural disasters.  See: Alex Epstein on Stossel: ‘I Love Fossil Fuels’ – ‘The fossil fuel industry is not taking a safe climate and making it dangerous. They are taking a dangerous climate and making it safe’Alex Epstein praises oil & gas industry: ‘Thousands upon thousands of lives saved in Texas thanks to fossil fuels and the development they make possible’

Flashback 2016: Marc Morano: “This is all part of a financial scheme…Warmist attorneys general will use any storm now to get money from energy companies claiming that their company made tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and droughts worse. They will use any bad weather event to shake down energy companies. That is why the extreme storm meme is so important.”

Climate Depot’s point-by-point rebuttal to warmist claims on extreme weather events

Warmist claims from UK Independent Article – Via UK Independent: 

Claim: “Hurricane Irma likely to be followed by more extreme weather events.”

Climate Depot Response: “A meaningless statement. Extreme weather events have always happened and will always happen.” See: UK Prof. Philip Stott: ‘From the Babylon of Gilgamesh to the post-Eden of Noah, every age has viewed climate change cataclysmically, as retribution for human greed and sinfulness.” “Extreme weather events are ever present, and there is no evidence of systematic increases.”

Claim: “The world is going to be hit by more horrifying weather events like the hurricanes Irma and Harvey.”

Climate Depot Response: “Yes. That is true. The world has always been hit by horrific storms and extreme natural events. Climate activists are basically saying ‘many bad things will happen because of global warming’ and then when a bad thing happens, they tout ‘we predicted it!.’ But if you look at the history of major landfalling hurricanes, you can see a declining trend as CO2 has risen. See: Chart: As CO2 has risen, major landfalling US hurricanes declining over past 140 years – ‘Maybe we need MORE CO2’

Claim: “Global warming is likely to trigger a run of extreme weather events, they say, and like the recent hurricanes they may unfairly hit the poor.”

Climate Depot Response: “Concern about ‘global warming’ has coincided with unusually low extreme weather so far, despite these two recent hurricanes. See: Extreme Weather Expert: ‘World is presently in an era of unusually low weather disasters’

All extreme weather and other disasters “unfairly hit the poor” including war, famines, etc. The “poor” will always have it worse than the wealthier when it comes to resources to battle disruptions.

Claim: “The rapid pace of climate change is set by government policies in the U.S. and many other countries.”

Climate Depot Response: “Wow. Governments set the “pace of climate change.” About as likely as witches controlling the weather.

Claim: “Planet Earth’s climate is in upheaval and we know exactly what is causing it: right now.”

Climate Depot Response: “Earth’s climate is not in any more ‘upheaval’ than past geologic history. It’s medieval witchcraft to claim that  ‘we know exactly what is causing’ bad weather.” See: Climate Depot’s New ‘Talking Points’ Report – A-Z Debunking of Climate Claims

RELATED LINKS: 

‘Three Category 5 hurricanes have made landfall in the U.S. since 1924’

Is Irma really strongest hurricane ever? ‘Not really’ – Ranked 10th for ‘intensity’ – Tied for 2nd in Wind Speed

Bjorn Lomborg: ‘Harvey & Irma are terrible, but…Major landfalling US hurricanes trending downwards over past 140 years’

Statistician Bjorn Lomborg: “Harvey and Irma are terrible, but we need perspective: Major landfalling US hurricanes trending downwards over past 140 years.”

Chart: As CO2 has risen, major landfalling US hurricanes declining over past 140 years – ‘Maybe we need MORE CO2’

Claim: ‘Hurricane Irma Should Shut Up All the Global Warming Deniers for Good’

The Nation: ‘To refuse to act against global warming…is murder’ – ‘Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us’

Claim: ‘Hurricane Irma’s epic size is being fuelled by global warming’

‘Bloomberg News: Hurricane Irma Made Worse by Climate Change, Scientists Say’

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘Anyone blaming Harvey on global warming doesn’t have a leg to stand on’ – Curry: ‘Anyone blaming  Harvey on global warming doesn’t have a leg to stand on.’ ‘The huge amounts of rain are associated with Harvey’s stalled movement.’ Phil Klotzbach has prepared this list off Cat 4-5 U.S. landfalling hurricanes:

Flashback: 1963 Global Cooling Hurricane Produced 100 Inches Of Rain

The so-called “consensus” is very unclear about hurricanes.

See:What Hurricane ‘consensus’?! ‘Global warming’ causes MORE hurricanes — Except when it causes FEWER hurricanes – Stop the confusion! Global warming will cause less hurricanes or more hurricanes or more powerful but less frequent hurricanes or have no known impact on hurricanes and will cause less rain or more rain. In other words, predict every possible outcome and you too can claim you predicted it! No matter what happens with hurricanes, the climate establishment can confidently claim, they were right. 

Michael Mann joins a long list of doomsayers who have predicted similar end times predictions about “global warming.” In 2004, the UK’s Sir David King suggested Antarctica would be the only place left on Earth cool enough for humans to live.

UK Independent article excerpt from 2004: “Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the Government’s chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week.”

Flashback 2007:UK Green Guru James Lovelock Predicts Global Warming Doom: ‘Billions of us will die; few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in Arctic’  (But Lovelock would later recant and become more skeptical of climate change. See: Alert: ‘Gaia’ scientist James Lovelock reverses himself: I was ‘alarmist’ about climate change & so was Gore!

Former NASA scientist James Hansen on NBC’s Nightly News: “Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Miami. They would all be under water.UN IPCC’s Michael Oppenheimer on ABC News, 20/20: “If the sea level rise occurred fast enough, some major cities might have to be abandoned, like, for instance, London.”  (Both of above clips  of Hansen & Oppenheimer appeared in Climate Hustle film. )

Global warming campaigners have seized the opportunity to link Hurricane Harvey to their cause, just as they have done with previous hurricanes.

Here we go again: Every hurricane is ‘what climate change looks like’ according to climate activists

Climate activists waste no time blaming, exploiting and claiming every hurricane that makes landfall in the U.S. is “what climate change looks like.” Hurricane Harvey is the latest hurricane to get this treatment. Below are a few examples. (Also see: What Hurricane ‘consensus’?! ‘Global warming’ causes MORE hurricanes — Except when it causes LESS hurricanes)

2017: “Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like” – Politico Magazine – By ERIC HOLTHAUS – August 28, 2017: Harvey is what climate change looks like. More specifically, Harvey is what climate change looks like in a world that has decided, over and over, that it doesn’t want to take climate change seriously.

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Flashback 2005: Boston Globe: Katrina’s real name: ‘Its real name is global warming.’ – By Ross Gelbspan – August 30, 2005: “THE HURRICANE that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name is global warming.”

Flashback 2012: Superstorm Sandy Is ‘What Global Warming Looks Like’ – Environmental News Service – October 30, 2012: Dan Lashof, who heads the Natural Resources Defense Fund, blogged, “This mega-storm is just one more sign of the new normal that will continue as long as we keep avoiding addressing climate change. Just like the unprecedented droughts, flooding and heat we all experienced this year, storms like Hurricane Sandy is what global warming looks like. This is the new normal.”

Flashback 2015: “Hurricane Matthew looks a lot like the future of climate change” – CNN – By John D. Sutter – October 7, 2016: But as the impact of the storm becomes clear, there’s an uncomfortable truth the rest of us should wrestle with: Hurricane Matthew looks a lot like future climate change. And if we want to stop storms like this from getting even more intense, we need to do everything we can to rid the economy of fossil fuels.

Reality Check: Hurricane Irma Is NOT the Most Powerful Atlantic Hurricane Ever Recorded

Watch: CNN, MSNBC Blame Climate Change For Irma

Not just in America: Statue of Polish King who saved Europe from the Muslim horde desecrated

See the story here at Gates of Vienna blog.

The other September 11th….

polish-hussars

GoV:

Austria is about to celebrate the 334th anniversary of the breaking of the Siege of Vienna, which took place on September 11-12, 1683. The force that rode to the relief of Vienna was led by King Jan (John) III Sobieski of Poland, who later became known as the “Hero of Vienna”. [Also called “the hammer of the Turks”—ed]

On the night of September 11 the king arrived with his troops at the summit of the Kahlenberg, the wooded hill that overlooks Vienna. Early the following morning he led his men in a charge down the hill and routed the Turks before the Gates of Vienna, saving the city.

Last night the statue of King Jan III Sobieski on the Kahlenberg was vandalized and damaged.

Continue here.

Over three hundred years ago a horrific battle saved Europe from becoming a Muslim continent, but alas today, except for the Poles (and a few other countries of Eastern Europe) who do remember history, Europe will surely fall without a whimper through the Hijra—the migration.

Just a reminder that Donald Trump at least knew something about history when he traveled to Poland in July, here.

See my complete ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive by clicking here.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Towards A Definition Of Islam And Islamism

When a Leftist Pope gets between a rock and a hard place (laugh of the day)

VIDEO: Husaria – the Polish-Lithuanian Winged Hussars.

VIDEO: How Iraq Was Won and Lost

If you ask most people about the Iraq War, they’ll tell you it was a total disaster. They’ll tell you that George W. Bush lost the war, and Barack Obama cut our losses. But that’s totally backwards.

In this week’s new video, Pete Hegseth, who served in the Iraq war as an Army lieutenant, explains what really happened: President Bush won the war with the surge, leaving office with a stable and quiet Iraq, and then President Obama withdrew, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

EDITORS NOTE: I was a U.S. Army Lieutenant with the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam during the Tet Offensive of 1968. We lost the Vietnam war in the same way we lost the Iraq war. The newly elected President Nixon went to the bargaining table, keeping his promise to withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam.

President Nixon cut a fragile peace deal with the North Vietnamese. When the North Vietnamese Army invaded South Vietnam, after all of our troops had been withdrawn, Congress failed to provide the needed support promised in the peace agreement. The American people and our elected officials lost their collective “resolve” during the protests against the Vietnam War just as they did in Iraq.

Sadly we once again see that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

In honor of Dennis Prager’s birthday, August is PragerU’s annual fundraising month. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation so that we can continue to bring Dennis’s ideas to the next generation.

From Civil Religion to “Hate”

David Carlin writes that the new wave of intolerance, whether from the KKK or antifa, calls for a revival of our Judeo-Christian national religion. If not, get ready for the worst.

Although the United States has never had an official religion, it has traditionally been, in an informal and unofficial way, a Christian nation; more specifically, a Protestant nation. A virtually universal Protestantism was one of the chief factors, in addition to language and common law, which unified British America prior to the Revolution.  After the Revolution this near-universal Protestantism helped make it relatively easy to unite the thirteen states into a single federal state.

It is true that many of these early American “Protestants” were un-churched, especially in the less thickly settled regions of the country.  All the same, they thought of themselves as Protestant Christians.  No matter how uninstructed in the contents of the Bible many of them may have been, they regarded the Bible as the great authority in religion.  And they deplored the Catholic Church, as did all good Protestants (except for a small number of High Church Anglicans).

When in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries great numbers of Catholics flowed into America from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Quebec, and the Slavic countries, the purely Protestant nature of the USA was compromised; and it was further compromised when many Jews came in from the Russian Empire, joining the smaller number of Jews who had come in from Germany in the mid-19th century.

As the newcomers were gradually integrated into the American way of life, the nation continued to have an informal and unofficial religion. This time it was no longer pure Protestantism. Instead it was a “Judeo-Christian” religion, a common denominator religion based on those faith-and-morality elements that Protestants, Catholics, and Jews agreed on. But this Judeo-Christian faith was much more Protestant in tone than it was Catholic or Jewish. This Protestant tone was especially notable in its belief in the right of private judgment.

Both Catholicism and Judaism were religions of authority, not of private judgment. In Catholicism, the authority was that of popes and bishops and general councils. In Judaism it was that of the rabbinical tradition. Protestantism too had an authority: the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible.

But there was no authoritative interpreter of the Bible. That was up to the private judgment of every man and woman. In America, Catholics and Jews adopted this great Protestant principle of private judgment. Among Jews, rabbis lost much of their teaching authority.  Among Catholics, bishops lost much of their teaching authority.

Click here to read the rest of Professor Carlin’s column . . .

David Carlin

David Carlin is professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of the nine-meter tall statue of Jesus Christ carved from white marble, thought to be the biggest of its kind in Africa, which was unveiled in Abajah, southeastern Nigeria on January 1, 2016. PHOTO: AFP. The image in the column is titled Nero’s Torches by Henryk Siemiradzki, 1876 [National Museum, Kraków].

Expect a New Wave of Millions of Iraqi Refugees

In an article last week, I wrote that Syrian President Basher Assad is regaining power with the help of an Iranian Shiite coalition made up of Iranian fighters joined by Hezbollah, Iraqi and Afghan militias. In the near future, I predicted, it is possible that this coalition will try to rid the country of the millions of Sunnis who make up the majority of Syrian citizens, in order to prevent additional rebellions of the type Syria experienced from 1976 to 1982 and has been suffering from for the last six and a half years.

As a result of last week’s article, I was contacted by Sheikh Walid el Azawi, an Iraqi Sunni living in exile in Europe, who heads a party called “The Patriotic 20 Rebellion.” He wanted to tell me the shocking story of the situation in Iraq, where he claims that for years now, Iran is the real ruler and its Ayatollahs dictate Iraqi government policy and actions.

Iranian hegemony blends in well in Iraq, most of whose citizens are Shiite, and now that the Islamic State established by ISIS in Iraq has disintegrated, the Sunnis there have no armed organization to protect them from both Iranian and Iraqi Shiite rage

The Shiite’s desire to rid the country of its Sunni minority is motivated by a desire for revenge, because up to the year 2003, Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, and treated the Shiites with terrible cruelty all the years he was in power. After his defeat in the First Gulf War in February 1991, he used artillery to butcher tens of thousands of Shiites who attempted to find safety at the gravesite of Hussein ibn Ali in the city of Najef.

There is an even older feud between the Iranians and the Iraqii Sunnis, dating from the 1980-1981 war forced upon them by Saddam Hussein . This war took the lives of over a million people, both citizens and soldiers, on both sides. It is important to recall that both sides used chemical weapons against each other during that accursed war which ended in Iran’s defeat when the chemical warfare waged against Tehran killed thousands of civilians.
The Iraqi and Iranian Shiite desire for revenge on Saddam Hussein is now directed against his entire religious sector, the Sunnis, who stand unprotected and unarmed against a rising, strengthening Shiite world. The collective power of Sunni forces – made up of organizations such as ISIS, al Qaeda, the Syrian rebels and countries such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Emirates and Egypt – is weakening rapidly over the last few months in the face of the growing strength of the Shiite coalition made up of Iran, Hezbollah, and the Iraqi and Afghan militias.

Sheikh Walid el Azawi claims that as a result of this enormous shift in the balance of power, the Shiites will do everything they can to expel the Sunnis from Iraq to any country willing – or unwilling – to accept them. If this scenario does come to pass, about ten million Iraqi refugees will soon be joining the waves of the 15 to 20 million already existing refugees This wave of refugees can turn Europe, North and South America, Asia and Africa into economic disaster areas, leading to social unrest and political maelstroms. Do not forget to thank Iran and all those who strengthened that country during the past few years.

What is the solution?

Iraqi refugees

During my conversation with the Sheikh, I asked him what solution he and his party have to offer to save the Iraqi Sunnis and convince them to remain in their homeland. His answer came as a total surprise: “The Emirate Solution.” He is convinced that this is the only real solution that can save the Sunnis in Iraq from ethnic cleansing.

The country must be divided into regional states, on the lines of the USA, or cantons as in the Swiss model, each with internal autonomy. Iraq would become a federation with a limited central government while the Emirates would run the lives of whatever group resides in their territory. Each Emirate would lead its own life and refrain from interference in the policies of the other Emirates. Each Emirate would be ruled by a local Sheikh who originally stood at the head of the families within the Emirate’s borders, following the population’s social traditions. This, claims the Sheikh, will create harmony, stability and peaceful relations with neighboring Emirates for the good of all the citizenry.

The “Emirate Solution” will also grant self-rule to the Kurds of Northern Iraq, making the establishment of an independent Kurdish state unnecessary and preventing the certain violent antagonism of the Iranians, Turks and Arabs to its existence and ensuing hostilities

For illustration’s sake, let us recall that the northern Iraq Kurdish region is surrounded by countries that do not share the Kurdish dreams of independence, and has no corridor to the sea. If the neighboring countries allied against the Kurdish state, should one be established, preventing goods and people from reaching it, the Kurds would have no way of leading normal lives. How would they export oil and other products in that case? How would they manage to import necessities?

If the Kurds finally achieve independence in the framework of the Emirate Solution for Iraq, ending the struggle that has been going on for years, where is the problem? Clearly it lies with Iran, which will not agree to the plan now that it has taken over Iraq – unless it is forced to do so. And the only power in the entire world capable of forcing iran to agree to anything is the USA.

Sheikh el Azawi is prepared to go to the US at a moment’s notice in order to meet with decision-makers there and explain the logic behind his peace plan for Iraq and the benefits it s implementation would bring the world and the Iraqis themselves. The Americans, however, are busy dealing with four other issues: North Korea, the relations between the right and left inside America, who is going to resign or be fired on Trump’s staff and natural disasters like Harvey and the flooding in Houston this week. Who could possibly have the time and patience there to do anything about Iraq, the country the US Army left seven years ago with no desire to ever return?

The Emirates Solution in other Middle Eastern states

Afghanistan is another country that gives the US a blinding headache, mainly in the media, and to its security forces, intelligence and army, because the 17 years of American involvement there, the spilled American blood and enormous amounts of money put into the country, have not yielded appreciable results – for one main reason:

The Americans have been using all their power to preserve the artificial Afghan entity established by the British and Russians in the 19th century, despite the fact that it is filled with ethnic strife which prevents the creation of a homogeneous, united nation.. The only result so far is blood, fire and tears.

If the Americans and their allies would only take apart the illegitimate entity called Afghanistan and turn it into autonomous or independent states based on whatever local families rule in each one, so that it is governed by rulers with legitimacy, the heads of families and tribes, possibly Afhanistan could be a land of peace and tranquility reigning among its religious, family and ethnic groups,each living its own life and leaving all the others to do so in peace.

Interestingly, that same Emirate Solution could most definitely be applied to the seven cities of Judea and Samaria in addition to the Gazan Emirate established a decade ago. I am not a fan of Hamas, but Gaza is a state from every practical point of view, and Israel must find a way to deter effectively and clearly the Jihadist gang that has taken it over. Establishing Emirates in Judea and Samaria will grant the people there stability, prosperity and quiet. It will give Israel peace.

That same solution will solve Jordan’s problem as well. It can be divided into a Palestinian Emirate, perhaps more than one, and a Bedouin Emirate. The king will be a symbolic figure as is the Queen of England. Sudan has already split into two states, but both parts should be divided into smaller, more homogenous Emirates in order to bring more stability to this war torn and blood soaked country.

Yemen, a totally tribal society, would benefit from the Emirate Solution, becoming more governable and stable, certainly in comparison to the failed central government it has at present, which has brought many thousands to the point of hunger, disease, suffering and death.

Sheikh el Awazi’s dream, which I share with him, could become the basic principle employed by the world to solve the Middle East problem. Had it been employed in Syrai five years ago, many of its half million dead citizens would be alive today.

Watch: The gloomy future of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq under Iranian hegemony.

EDITORS NOTE: Translated from Hebrew by Rochel Sylvetsky, originally published on Israelnationalnews.com

Some Recent Energy & Environmental News

The newest edition of the Energy and Environmental Newsletter is now online.

Once again, there were so many worthwhile articles that it was quite challenging to pick out a few to be highlighted.

Some of the more interesting energy articles in this issue are:

Property and Wind Turbines: a Missing Point in the Discussion

Military Officials Explain Concerns with Wind Turbines (with good pictures)

NC & NYS Dealing with Military-Wind Energy conflicts

The Failure of RGGI

Scientific Critique of Wind Project Bird & Bat Study

Scientists who publicly question solar are silenced

Green Delusions and the Wind Bully

The Climate Alarmists’ Gross Perversion of the Word “Clean”

Peer Reviewed Study: Altered brain connectivity due to wind turbines

Some of the more informative Global Warming articles in this issue are:

Climate Models Over-Estimated Warming

Moving the Goalposts in the Climate Change Debate

Climate Science Comes Up Short

The totalitarianism of the environmentalists

“Science” journals stung again

Al Gore’s Climate Sequel Misses a Few Inconvenient Facts

Simplified Explanations of the Falsified Claims of Human Caused Global Warming

NYT guilty of large screw-up on climate-change story

Expose on Bill McKibben (a key energy and environmental player)

Lindzen: On the ‘Death of Skepticism’ Concerning Climate Hysteria

Not Sea Levels, Again!

PS: Our intention is to put some balance into what most people see from the mainstream media about energy and environmental issues… As always, please pass this on to open-minded citizens, and on your social media sites.

PPS: I am not an attorney, so no material appearing in any of the Newsletters (or our WiseEnergy.org website) should be construed as giving legal advice. My recommendation has always been: consult a competent attorney when you are involved with legal issues.

Governor of Virgin Islands Orders National Guard to Seize Americans’ Firearms

With hurricane season now upon us, U.S. states and territories are preparing for a barrage of potentially damaging weather. In the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), however, those preparations include an order by Gov. Kenneth E. Mapp for the National Guard to seize residents’ lawfully-owned firearms and ammunition, ostensibly as a means of promoting public order and protecting life and property during Hurricane Irma.

The order states in no uncertain terms that the Adjutant General of the U.S. Virgin Islands National Guard is “authorized and directed to seize arms, ammunition, explosives, incendiary material and any other property” deemed necessary to the mission of maintaining or restoring order during the storm.

Certainly, the rest of America’s thoughts and prayers are with the USVI as they recover from the damage Irma caused. Nevertheless, Gov. Mapp’s Sept. 4 order was an inexcusable incursion on the right of the U.S. citizens who reside on the USVI to protect themselves from the all-too-predictable outbreaks of looting and crime that can occur when normal emergency services are over-taxed by an extraordinary event. Simply put, it violated the U.S. Constitution and threatened to put innocent people at further risk.

America has seen similar overreaches in the past, most notoriously during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when local officials ordered the confiscation of lawfully-owned firearms from New Orleans residents. First responders had been overwhelmed by the demands of the storm, and those who had not managed to evacuate were dealing with virtual anarchy.  For many gun owners, the shocking site of a frail woman being slammed to the ground in her own home by police enforcing the post-Katrina order remains an indelible image of the very sort of violent firearm seizures that some claim could never happen in the U.S.

The NRA intervened in federal court and was able to halt the New Orleans confiscations and obtain an order requiring the return of the seized firearms. Nevertheless, the city delayed compliance with the order for as long as it could, including requiring unrealistic documentation from gun owners whose lives had been turned upside by the storm. Only in 2008 did the NRA and the city agree on mutually acceptable terms for the return of the unlawfully confiscated property.

The NRA also promoted legislation to prevent government officials from using their emergency powers as a pretext for disarming the citizenry. In 2006, Congressman Bobby Jindal (LA) led the fight to protect America’s gun owners against these abuses by introducing H.R. 5013 in the House, a final version of which was signed by President George W. Bush in October of that year.  Now codified at 42 U.S.C. § 5207, the law prohibits persons acting under color of federal law, receiving federal funds, or acting at the direction of a federal employee from seizing or authorizing the seizure of lawfully-possessed firearms during a state of emergency. The majority of U.S. states now have similar laws.

The NRA quickly condemned Gov. Mapp’s order and pledged to take any necessary legal action to ensure that the people of the USVI were not deprived of their constitutionally protected arms when they might need them the most.

Barely 24 hours later, Gov. Mapp appeared before a national audience on the Tucker Carlson Show and furiously backpedaled, bizarrely claiming that the order simply meant that Guard units could purchase necessary emergency supplies at retail without the formalities of normal procurement procedures. “This is not about seizing anybody’s personal property,” he insisted.

That on-the-fly revision was too much even for the “fact-checking” (and typically antigun) website Snopes, which acknowledged there was no support for this interpretation in the actual words of the order itself.

Just what Gov. Mapp meant to do or thought he was doing with his “seizure” order remains unclear. To date, the NRA has received no information that any actual seizures have occurred.

Nevertheless, the incident should serve as a wake-up call for those who insist that the threat of civilian firearm confiscation is a scare tactic invented by the NRA. Americans saw it themselves this week, stamped with the gold seal of officialdom.

As ever, your NRA will remain vigilant and prepared to act so that no law-abiding American is forced to face danger without the protection guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

9th Circuit, once again, throws monkey wrench into U.S. Refugee Admissions Program

Groups like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and International Refugee Assistance Project, with their lawsuits through friendly courts, have so perverted the legal process that has been in place since 1980 for admitting refugees that there is even more reason for President Donald Trump to simply suspend the USRAP for FY18 which begins in 22 days.

Here is the latest crowing at the New York Times about how the recent 9th Circuit decision will allow more refugees to be admitted to the US.

But, but, but….

No where does the NYT article mention that the Supreme Court did affirm the President’s legal right to set a CEILING for the fiscal year and that Trump did set it once he was sworn in at 50,000.  We are now at 51,726 (as of this writing).  This is the first time in the history of the program that the ceiling has been exceeded. 

Any day now Donald Trump could set the CEILING for Fiscal year 2018 that begins on October 1 making moot so much of this legal wrangling.

All of this language created out of thin air by the Supreme Court—this “bona fide relationship” BS—is not in refugee law.

My argument again is that since the courts (including the Supremes) have so mangled refugee law (with the help of these political agitators) that the program should be suspended beginning October 1 to give CONGRESS and the President time assess the program and to regain their Constitutional authority to write and administer law!

The Refugee Act of 1980 does not mandate any number that a President must admit.  He can set the level at zero! He can do that without any executive order via his September ‘determination’ required under the Act!

If he sets the level at zero at the outset, he also takes away any claim the contractors have to having been promised (via contract/agreement) by the Dept. of State that they will be getting a certain number of paying clients (aka refugees) in the coming year.

Here is the New York Times helping to further muddy the public’s understanding of how refugee admissions to the US are processed.

Rebecca Heller, director of the International Refugee Assistance Project.

LOS ANGELES — A federal appeals court on Thursday reopened the country’s door to thousands of refugees who had been temporarily blocked by President Trump’s travel ban, and also upheld a lower court decision that had exempted grandparents and other relatives from the ban. [Thousands in 22 days?—ed]

The ruling, from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Seattle, was cheered by refugee resettlement organizations,*** and clarified, for now, who was covered by the ban.

In June, the Supreme Court allowed parts of President Trump’s executive order temporarily barring all travelers from six predominantly Muslim countries, and all refugees, to take effect while the court considered arguments over whether such a ban was constitutional. But the court said the government should let in travelers and refugees with a “bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States,” without fully defining what that meant.  [There is no “bona fide” relationship standard in refugee law! Bona fide dies when the executive order dies unless Congress rewrites the law and the President signs it!—ed]

[….]

They also said that working with a resettlement agency*** meets the standard for a “bona fide” relationship with an entity in the United States.

[….]

The United States refugee resettlement program virtually ground to a halt at the end of June as a result of the travel ban. Since then, the government has frozen the applications of individuals already assigned to a resettlement agency, unless they could show ties to a close family member in the United States. Some 24,000 refugees were affected, the court noted in its opinion.

The court mandated that the government resume resettling refugees in the United States beginning in five days.

Becca Heller, director of International Refugee Assistance Project, an organization that provides free legal assistance to refugees abroad and has sued the government over the ban, said Thursday, “I am thrilled that two courts have now recognized the importance of the decades-old relationship between refugees and the American families, communities and organizations that help them resettle.”

More here.

The Dept. of Justice said they will appeal (to the Supreme Court) this latest legal overreach by the 9th Circuit.

If the Leftist resettlement agencies*** had never gotten involved, accepted the 120-day moratorium, it would be long over now and they would be back to their normal process.

And, so since this whole exercise will be moot shortly, what have the refugee advocacy and contracting agencies*** gained from these legal machinations?

They have gained an enormous anti-Trump media campaign, that’s what!

Tell the President and Congress that the US Refugee Admissions Program should be suspended for fiscal year 2018!

*** For new readers, these are the Federal contractors/middlemen/employment agencies/propagandists/lobbyists/community organizers? paid by you to place refugees in your towns and cities listed below.  Under the nine major contractors are hundreds of subcontractors.

The contractors income is largely dependent on taxpayer dollars based on the number of refugees admitted to the US, but they also receive myriad grants to service their “New Americans.”

If you are a good-hearted soul and think refugee resettlement is all about humanitarianism, think again! Big businesses/global corporations depend on the free flow of cheap (some call it slave) labor.  It is for this reason that Republican leaders of Congress are supportive of an uninterrupted flow of refugees into America.

The only way for real reform of how the US admits refugees is to remove these contractors/Leftwing activists/big business head hunters from the process.

As far as I know, all of the contractors below supported the lawsuits that Ms. Heller and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society filed.

RELATED ARTICLES: 

HIAS conference call informative; but appears to be in the dark about FY18 Presidential determination on refugees

Letter to media: “discredited” SPLC should be ignored

San Diego IRC office gets slap on wrist from U.S. State Department

The Top Three Arguments against a Universal Basic Income

Unfortunately, a welfare state by any other name is still a welfare state. Brittany Hunter — by  Brittany Hunter

Every so often a new study is released, concluding that a universal basic income (UBI) is needed to fix this country’s welfare system. Most recently, the Roosevelt Institute claimed that switching to a UBI system could actually grow the economy by $2.5 trillion by the year 2025.

The study is full of hypothetical situations in which Americans receive a UBI of varying amounts. The research concludes that the higher the UBI, the more prosperous the economy. But like many UBI apologists, the study misses the major problems with such a system. Here are the three main ones:

1. It’s Expensive

Proponents claim that the UBI would be an efficient replacement for the country’s bloated welfare apparatus, and so would actually reduce overall costs.

Unfortunately, a welfare state by any other name is still a welfare state. And the UBI is just replacing one pricey system for another. And unlike the current welfare state, which has standards for determining who qualifies for certain aid, a UBI would be given to everyone. This would dramatically increase the pool of citizens receiving benefits from the state and inflict massive expenses across the board.

The Roosevelt Institute study posits two different ways to fund the UBI. But neither would benefit the national economy or the taxpayer. The study’s “positive” findings about economic stimulation are only applicable if the program is funded by increasing the federal deficit. So basically, in order to “grow” our economy, we must first plunge the American people even further into debt.

The second scenario presented in the report was a UBI funded through increased taxation. In this instance, the study found no net benefit to the overall national economy. In fact the report even went so far as to state:

When paying for the policy by increasing taxes on households rather than paying for the policy with debt, the policy is not expansionary. In effect, it is giving to households with one hand what it is taking away with the other. There is no net effect.”

There would be an effect, however, on the American taxpayer. When the Resolution Foundation, a think tank in the UK crunched the numbers to see what the cost would be to the taxpayer, they found that the amount paid would actually be much more than the amount received.

Commenting on the problems with the UBI as they related specifically for the UK, Robert Colvile writes:

…From the first pound you earned to the £43,001st, you’d pay a combined rate of income tax and National Insurance of around 35-40 per cent, after which the higher rate of tax would kick in as normal. In other words, to get that £3,692 from the Government, you’d pay thousands of pounds more.”

What this type of proposal really means is that a vast sum of people will be paying more in taxes than they already do. Colvile also notes that “In fact, it would represent a transfer of £120 billion of extra taxation into the welfare state – the equivalent of the entire budget of the NHS in England.”

If this is the case for the UK, it would most certainly be the case for the US.

This money has to come from somewhere. It will not appear out of thin air. And unfortunately, it is the American people who would be stuck with the bill for a grandiose UBI system.

2. Incentives Work, Handouts Don’t

Incentives are a powerful force. And there is no greater incentive than financial security and holding a job is essential to that end. When something comes easy, it is easily taken for granted. And while it would be nice to believe otherwise, giving cash handouts to every American incentivizes them to try that much less.

By removing the financial incentive to work, the state is encouraging idleness, something contrary to the entrepreneurial spirit so deeply woven throughout our country’s history.

During the Clinton era, the welfare state saw tremendous decreases. But that didn’t mean there were millions of Americans struggling to get by. Employment actually increased because individuals were incentivized to get jobs when there was no longer a guaranteed safety net.

3. The Welfare State Isn’t Going Anywhere

As previously mentioned, there are always claims that a UBI could decrease, reform, or even abolish our welfare system. But no one seems to have any idea as to how this transition would actually look.

This is because there is no transitory plan in place. And any such plan that came to fruition would surely be political suicide since you run the risk of angering someone. And for politicians who rely on the support and approval of their constituents, this is sure to bring some unwanted criticisms.

Anyone in the policy realm knows that there is no better way to alienate older constituents than threatening to take away their Social Security benefits. In fact, even the mere mention of decreases usually causes rooms of senior citizens to fear for their well being. Even if there is an alternative plan presented to them, it does not calm the fears of what might happen during the transitionary period. It is for this reason that Social Security is often called the “third rail” of politics.

Additionally, trying to get individuals transitioned off of one welfare plan, and into the next requires, at least temporarily, the funding of both programs. A decision to enact a UBI would not magically abolish the American welfare system. America’s welfare programs have been around for so long, it would take time to unroot it. Too many people have become reliant on our welfare state to have it simply wiped out overnight.

And who is going to pay for the process in the meantime? Well, the American taxpayer of course.

If anything, incorporating a UBI in America would most likely result in an additional layer of the welfare being added on top of our existing programs. This would, in effect, increase the state’s power rather than decrease it. Governments are rarely keen on relinquishing their power, and there is great power in controlling the welfare of the citizenry. It is therefore highly unlikely that the welfare state as we know it today would simply cease to exist.

There Is No Welfare Utopia

Bastiat famously said, “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” This is exactly why any form of welfare state is bound to fail. You cannot take from one, give to another and expect everyone’s hardships to be solved.

The UBI creates the illusion of decreasing the welfare state when the facts of the matter all point to the contrary. Everyone would like to live in a society where no one wanted for anything and everyone was provided for. But we live in a society of individuals with individual aspirations and goals. Pretending that we can centrally plan a welfare system with so many distinct wants and needs is unrealistic and unobtainable.

Our current system cannot be maintained because it’s too expensive. Period. Already programs like Social Security are projected to run out of money within the next decade and there is no plan for how to approach this coming storm. Why would anyone think broader welfare state situation would be any different?

If we cannot financially maintain our current system, it would be an unwise to believe we could somehow afford a UBI. As Colvile says when comparing one welfare system with the other, “It’s old wine in new bottles – redistributive, seventies-style taxation under a trendy new branding.”

Brittany Hunter

Brittany Hunter

Brittany Hunter is an associate editor at FEE. Brittany studied political science at Utah Valley University with a minor in Constitutional studies.

Even by Its Own Standards, Communism Has Failed Miserably

For all its dreams of abolishing class, communism ended in highly stratified societies. Marian L. Tupy — by  Marian L. Tupy

Recently, I came across a letter that Estonian Justice Minister Urmas Reinsalu sent to his Greek counterpart, Stavros Kontonis. The letter was prompted by the Greek politician’s refusal to attend a conference on the crimes of communism that Reinsalu had organized and by his observation that communist rule had some “positive aspects.”

After thanking Kontonis, a communist deputy for the island of Zakynthos, for responding to the invite, Reinsalu’s letter recounts the crimes of communism, especially those committed by the Soviets in Estonia.

He notes that, as Justice Ministers, the two share a duty to defend human rights and asserts that it “makes no difference to a victim if he is murdered in the name of a better future for the Aryan race or because he belongs to a social class that has no place in a communist society.” While I agree with much in Reinsalu’s letter and assume that it will convince most people, I wonder if those kinds of arguments are convincing to self-declared communists, like Stavros Kontonis.

Why, for example, should Reinsalu expect a communist to agree that capitalists ought to enjoy the same rights as everyone else? It is a central part of Marxist thought that capitalists are parasitic oppressors of the working class and, as such, the main cause of social problems. Their very existence, therefore, is incompatible with the ideals of a communist society.

How Can We Evaluate Different Systems?

Lenin, who was the first man to succeed in implementing Marx’s ideas in practice, saw the need for extermination of the enemies of communism clearly. The French revolutionaries, he wrote of the Communards in 1908, were guilty of excessive generosity. They should have “exterminated” their enemies. In “Lessons of the Commune”, he committed himself to “cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrel fleas, of bedbugs.” Hitler would echo those sentiments in Mein Kampf two decades later.

We can evaluate political and economic systems on the basis of their declared objectives and on the basis of opportunity costs.

Being a libertarian, I abhor violence and put a high value on liberty. Furthermore, having spent my childhood in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, I am instinctively drawn to Reinsalu’s side. Unfortunately, evaluating communism from liberal precepts, like Reinsalu does, is insufficient, because people’s ethics differ. The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm was attracted to equality. He felt that the killing of 20 million people in the pursuit of a classless society was a price worth paying. Put differently, arguing about communism from first principles does not get us very far.

To make matters even more complicated, it is difficult to think of any political and economic system that did not, in the words of the Greek Justice Minister, also have some “positive aspects”. European imperialism, for example, introduced modern technologies and medicines to sub-Saharan Africa. Italian fascism is often credited with making the trains run on time. German National Socialists tackled high unemployment and built fabulous motorways. Soviet communism industrialised a peasant society.

To be crystal clear, I am not suggesting that the “positive aspects” of imperialism, fascism, National Socialism and communism justify human suffering. I am merely recognizing that such “positive aspects” exist.

So, again, how do we evaluate political and economic systems in the absence of agreement on the principles that should underpin an ideal human society? I am not sure that it can be done, but two intellectual exercises can, perhaps, help us to think these issues through. We can evaluate political and economic systems on the basis of their declared objectives and on the basis of opportunity costs.

Failing Their Objectives

One of the chief goals of communism, for example, was the creation of a classless society. It was to that end that Soviets killed millions of industrialists, financiers, shop owners, successful peasants and other “parasites.” But, as the New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith observed in his, in my view unsurpassed, examination of the Soviet Union, Russia under communism was a highly stratified society.

In his 1974 bestseller The Russians, Smith noted that members of the Soviet politburo and their families occupied the highest perch in the Soviet society, enjoying access to special shops, schools and hospitals, as well as virtual immunity from persecution, unsupervised trips abroad and free access to Western publications. Other high-value citizens, including, by his own admission, the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, enjoyed perks that ordinary Russians could only dream about.

The old class divisions may have been eliminated, but a new class structure – one based on the perceived usefulness of the individual to the survival of the communist regime – replaced it. Thus, communism was a failure not only according to the moral precept of non-violence and respect for human rights that Reinsalu and I share, but also according to the objectives that communists had set for themselves.

(Incidentally, the social stratification that Smith observed in the USSR emerged in all communist societies. Milovan Djilas found it in Tito’s Yugoslavia and Vaclav Havel described it in Husak’s Czechoslovakia. Today, social stratification can be observed first hand in Castro’s Cuba and, in its most extreme form, in Kim’s North Korea.)

Communism can also be evaluated on the basis of opportunity costs or actual outcomes of competing political and economic arrangements in divided societies, such as East and West Germany, North and South Korea, and, to a large extent, Hong Kong and China.

Income Equality

In all those cases, people of the same ethnicity, culture and history found themselves living under two diametrically opposed systems – capitalism and communism. To my knowledge, there is not a single indicator of human well-being where communism achieved superior outcomes to capitalism.

Put differently, had communist societies not been communist, but capitalist, they would have been further ahead on such measures of human well-being as life expectancy, advanced medical care, personal income, nutrition, tertiary education, etc. Ah, but I can hear Stavros Kontonis and his fellow travelers object, what about income inequality?

Let us, for the sake of argument, grant that income equality is a desirable social goal – even if it leads to stunted growth and, consequently, lower incomes in the long run. That still does not mean that communism succeeded, where capitalism had failed.

Related to my point about stratification of communist societies, top members of the communist party in all communist countries enjoyed salaries, perks and privileges that ordinary people did not. Again, one only needs to look at the vastly differing lifestyles of Kim Jong-Un and his acolytes, as opposed to the vast multitude of ordinary North Koreans, to see that.

In conclusion, in the absence of a shared moral framework, evaluation of differing political and economic systems is more complex than it may first appear. That said, communism was a failure even by the standards that communists set for themselves.

Reprinted from CapX.

Marian L. Tupy

Marian L. Tupy

Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org and a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

Yes, the Alt-Left Exists and It’s Terrifying by Keri Smith

For those self-identified liberals who may have been seduced by this belief system, by its propaganda, and are fuming at this piece, thank you for reading. — Keri Smith Keri Smith

When writing this piece, a quote kept rattling around in the back of my head. It was the title of the opening chapter of “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan’s seminal 1963 feminist manifesto: The Problem That Has No Name. Apologies in advance, for appropriating and altering three of the quotes I find most meaningful from that chapter, for my own purposes here:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American liberals…

Even so, most liberals still did not know that this problem was real. But those who had faced it honestly knew that all the media dismissals, the academic justifications, the intellectualized double speak and the manufactured outrage were somehow drowning the problem in unreality…

How can any person see the whole truth within the bounds of one’s own life? How can she believe that voice inside herself, when it denies the conventional, accepted truths by which she has been living? And yet the liberals I have talked to, who are finally listening to that inner voice, seem in some incredible way to be groping through to a truth that has defied the media.”

How can we discuss something we cannot refer to by name?

The Alt-Left Is Real

There is an effort underfoot, in the media and in academia, to declare the Alt-Left a myth, to sweep it back under the rug, to reduce it, in effect, back to being a sickness not spoken of, a problem that has no name. I have had well-meaning friends tell me I should not use the term Alt-Left (or any of its synonyms: Regressive Left, CTRL-Left, SJWism) because they are ‘pejoratives’ used only by the right to attack the left.

In my experience, this is not true. Like canaries in the coal mine, liberals who do not (or no longer) subscribe to the Alt-Left ideology have been sounding the alarm about this creeping plague of repressive groupthink for quite a while now. I believe this attempt to dissuade our use of the term Alt-Left is purposeful (even if not consciously recognized by individuals who are doing it) — for how can we discuss something we cannot refer to by name?

When asked to define Alt-Left, I would describe it as a leftist but illiberal authoritarian ideology rooted in postmodernism and neo-Marxism that supports censorship, condones violence in response to speech, is obsessed with identity politics (much like the Alt-Right), and functions like a secular religion that gives its believers a sense of moral self-worth.

It masquerades as a form of liberalism, but it has more in common with authoritarianism than its true believers can (or want to?) admit. It claims to speak for the marginalized, but it either ignores or attempts to hatefully shame members of marginalized groups who do not subscribe to the ideology.

It is not simply Antifa; it is the ideology that undergirds Antifa, and it has swallowed much of BLM and intersectional third wave feminism. It wishes to swallow the whole of the left, the country, the world. It is rooted in nihilism, resentfulness, and arrogance, though it presents itself as being rooted in equality, justice, and morality. It favors collectivism over individualism, statism over liberty, forced equality of outcome over freedom.

Now…imagine if I had to say that mouthful every time I wished to talk about the Alt-Left because I bought into the notion that to give it a name it would be insulting to fellow liberals. No, to speak of it by name is to out it for what it is and to reduce some of its power.

What’s in a Name?

I can’t tell you how good it felt when I first discovered the work of Dave Rubin, a reasonable liberal, and realized I wasn’t alone in seeing this pernicious belief system for what it really is.In his video, Rubin offers that it doesn’t matter which term we use, what’s important is that we are allowed to identify the problem. “Whatever name you use for this well-meaning yet painfully misguided set of ideas is largely irrelevant. We needed this phrase to identify this backward ideology which puts groups before people. And sometimes you need a label to get people to understand an idea.”

Reasonable liberal Maajid Nawaz, widely credited with coining the term Regressive Left, also made the following observation last year:

Today’s active, organized left is no longer liberal. A liberal will always prioritize free speech over offense. This behavior, censorship on the organized left, post factual behavior, violence being seen as an option and prioritizing group identity over individual rights. That isn’t liberal.”

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole video:

Yet another reasonable liberal, Tim Pool, points out that one of the few things Politico gets right about the Alt-Left is that it is a term used by centrist liberals. Pool says, “Yes, I use the term Alt-Left because I want to make sure everybody knows when I say I’m left-leaning, I’m not the kind of person that’s gonna go out and punch somebody in the face or take away their rights because I think mine are more important.”

I’m also a liberal who’s been using the term Alt-Left since I first learned to trust that voice within myself, that voice that denies the conventional, accepted Alt-Left “truths” by which I had been living.

The first time I used it in a public piece of writing was back in May while attempting to articulate my transformation in belief systems in an essay called On Leaving the SJW Cult and Finding Myself. The essay itself was a long time coming. I started to wake up to the creeping authoritarianism and endless internal hypocrisies of the accepted Alt-Left ideology over a year ago. But leaving behind a belief system to which you’ve subscribed for twenty years is a bit like razing your house to the ground and rebuilding from the ground up.

Suddenly you are starting with nothing; everything you thought you knew is suspect. It takes a long time to evaluate each previously held belief and try to discern which ones hold substance. Where before my house had foolishly been built on the shifting sands of postmodernism, this time I want to ensure that, as Dr. Jordan Peterson might say, my house is built on rock.

It makes me think of George Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant,” my first introduction to the concept of framing. Lackoff said “Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world….Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have — the long-term concepts that structure how we think — is instantiated in the synapses of our brains…If a strongly held frame doesn’t fit the facts, the facts will be ignored and the frame will be kept.”

I devoured this book when a young SJW. It helped me understand how people could vote Republican and why my right-wing Aunt didn’t seem to be swayed to my point of view no matter how many facts I threw at her. What I didn’t think too much about was how this human tendency is just as prevalent on the left as it is on the right.

The Frog and the Pot

I am of the opinion that a lot of well-meaning people have become converts to the Alt-Left ideology without even realizing it. Like the parable of the slow boiling frog, if you had told me at the beginning that one day I’d be expected to perform mental gymnastics in order to defend censorship and violence in response to speech, I would have leaped from the pot.

Instead, I was conditioned to accept as gospel each new tenet of SJWism over a period of twenty years. I believed in the essential goodness of the ideology, and in my own essential goodness in preaching it. When facts about the direction it was taking me made themselves known to me, I rejected them because they did not fit the frame. As the ideology became more noticeably toxic, hypocritical, and authoritarian, so too did the tactics of the true believers. Whether in academia, in the media, at Google, or online — the message is clear: dare to step out of line or express an independent thought, and a mob of zealous SJW zombies will come for you. The fear of losing one’s job, status, friends or personal safety is a strong motivator in forcing reasonable people to remain silent.

I have received a lot of positive feedback about the sentiments expressed in my writing about SJWism from people all over the political spectrum. Most meaningful to me of these might be the messages I get from fellow liberals who are going through the same realization, confusion, and fear.

In addition to the public responses you can read yourself, I have received private messages from people in academia, journalism, and entertainment — many of them liberals — expressing that the piece resonated with them and that they were afraid to share it (or presumably in some cases, to express themselves about anything at all). Excerpts from a handful of these are below:

I honestly was scared to tweet that…that’s how bad things have gotten. I’ve nearly lost work…The world has gone mad.”

“I have definitely taken notice of so many of my friends on the left going to a dark place.”

“It is totally wild. These people are my friends — my community….They’re so angry.”

“…your piece on the social justice cult affected me more than words can say. After being called ‘violent’…because I used a word that someone decided was offensive…I had a bit of an existential crisis about my life and self-worth. Thus, I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit… I remain committed to the idea that privilege exists and it should be combated through both self-reflection and system action. I also am a proud liberal, and that hasn’t lessened. That said, I can’t get behind the individual scapegoating, shouting and intimidation in the name of fighting hate, or defining sharing a point of view as “educating” and “labor.” Ultimately, the world needs more compassion….I’m trying to get there on talking and writing about some of this a little more publicly, but I don’t think I’m quite there yet (also, the fact that I’m on the academic job market makes me a bit hesitant).” 

“I saw your posts and they were refreshing. I hate politics but free speech is so important to me….but then I remember I work in TV and Music and I can’t say anything that’s going to make me lose my job. It’s crazy what’s going on right now.”

“Just wanted to let you know I’m one of those people who greatly appreciates your voice on social media, but am too afraid of the thought police to voice my support.”

If the Alt-Left doesn’t exist, why are so many liberals and centrists afraid of expressing themselves?

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

If the Alt-Left doesn’t exist, why are so many liberals and centrists afraid of expressing themselves? Why are so many people self-censoring for their own sense of safety? I was fascinated by the James Damore story, not because I have an opinion on the legality of his dismissal, but because his online stoning and subsequent firing confirmed for me what I already suspected: Google, like most of the tech space, the entertainment space, the academic space and the media space has become a panopticon of Alt-Left groupthink, self-censorship, and fear.

I know this fear intimately. As I started waking up to the illiberal nature of the growing Alt-Left ideology, I held my tongue for a long time out of fear of losing job opportunities, the safety of anonymity, and friends. After all, I built my career, and by proxy a lot of my friendships, from this SJW frame. I don’t judge anyone for subscribing to this ideology out of misplaced idealism and a desire to do good; I did for twenty years. Likewise, I don’t judge anyone who is currently waking up from it but is constrained by fear. As I tell folks who write me about it: I don’t know the exact way to get over it. I suspect it’s different for every person. But trust me when I tell you, it is so liberating on the other side.

For those self-identified liberals who may have been seduced by this belief system, by its propaganda, and are fuming at this piece, thank you for reading this far. I believe a part of you is struggling to wake up if you stuck it out this long. I encourage you to start listening to that small voice inside yourself, the one that tells you when something doesn’t seem quite right or reasonable, no matter if it’s accepted by all of your peers.

Take a look at who was really at the Free Speech Rally in Boston for starters. This, for example, is Shiva Ayyadurai. You may decide you don’t like him because he’s conservative, but to call him a “white supremacist” is a dangerous Alt-Left falsehood.

Take the time to listen to Will Johnson and Joey Gibson, two of the organizers of the Patriot Prayer Rally in SF this past weekend. Their rally was canceled after successful media (and political) attempts to smear them as “white supremacists” caused subsequent threats of violence from the Alt-Left. Ask yourself if it’s not odd that so many so-called liberals are now smearing people of color with whom they don’t agree as “white supremacists” (Charles Barkley is apparently one now too, so Johnson, Gibson, and Ayyadurai are not alone).

Then ask yourself if these people, or these people, or these people, or these people, or these people, or these people, or these people, or these people or these people, or these people, or these people, or these people, or these students, or these students, or these students, or these students are really fighting fascism, or if they are acting as footsoldiers (some witting, some unwitting) for a pro-censorship and pro-violence ideology. These facts may not fit your frame, but — do the actions depicted here reflect your liberal values?

I read a C.S. Lewis quote some time ago, that has stuck with me during my transformation in thought. Perhaps it will stick with you:

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

Keri Smith

Keri Smith

Keri is Co-Founder of Whitesmith Entertainment.

Black American Says Antifa Must Not Be Tolerated

Moving to a tiny town in the hills of West Virginia took me out of the loop for about a month; no TV or internet with horrible cell phone service and too much static on the radio to listen to Rush. Upon finally getting back on line, I learned that the airways have been dominated by a bunch of scumbag haters calling themselves Antifa.

I’m a black original member of the Tea Party movement, singer/songwriter of the “American Tea Party Anthem.” Outrageously, fake news media grants respect to Antifa which is boldly and arrogantly inciting hate and engaging in violence which fake news media falsely accused the Tea Party of doing. Fake news media’s insidious deception is the epitome of evil.

Antifa terrorists throw Molotov cocktails, urinate on police cars, burn our flag, destroy public property and physically assault anyone who disagrees with them. In my history of speaking and performing at over 500 Tea Party rallies, rally sites were left cleaner than we found them. Grandmothers typically brought cookies to share with our team. And yet, fake news media insultingly gives Antifa moral high ground over the Tea Party.

I probably sound like a broken record repeating myself. Time after time, fake news media has shown us that they have no intention of being honest, fair or balanced. Their sole purpose is to further their Leftists’ homey’s anti-American and anti-Christian socialist/progressive agenda. Being blatantly hypocritical does not deter fake news media in the least. They will do or say whatever necessary to defeat us everyday Americans; remove Trump from office to block the implementation of his make America great again agenda. Given this truth, why on earth would anyone on our side attempt to work with or please fake news media? It is insane.

Antifa poster advocating violence against Trump supporters.

It is not surprising that despicable fake news media is secretly cheering on Antifa’s violence. Meanwhile, media slime-balls are aggressively selling their lie that white supremacists represent mainstream conservatives (cookie-baking Tea Party grandmothers at rallies with their grandkids who wave American flags while singing “God Bless America”).

As I stated, I have been actively involved in the Tea Party from its beginning. Never have I witnessed any of the violence, rapes, hate-mongering racism and disrespect for private and public property we have witnessed from left-wing hate groups like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

It blows my mind that these spoiled brat hate groups are given respect and a pass to break the law; politicians ordering cops to stand down. Folks, why is our country tolerating such evil?

Morally bankrupt fake news media demands selective law enforcement. They believe minorities, women and illegal aliens should be allowed to break the law at will. And yet, fake news media acts as though simply disagreeing with their agenda is illegal and seek to prosecute all white, Republican and conservative offenders. As the kids say, the whole situation is “wacked” (crazy and nonsensical).

But for some reason, far too many public voices and wimpy politicians are putting up with fake news media’s dictates and their minions breaking our laws. When will someone in government have the courage to say, enough is enough? If you break the law (physically attack people, destroy property and so on) your derriere will be thrown into jail regardless of your political affiliation. I get a bit weary hearing my wife Mary angrily rant that these Leftist bullies pull their lawless stunts because they know they can; confident they will get away with it.

Remarkably, high profile Leftists who support violence against Trump supporters are treated like paragons of virtue by fake news media. This is the same media that branded the Tea Party a violent mob in the minds of millions for peacefully protesting Obama using our Constitution as toilet paper.

Due to him being a faithful viewer and fan of CNN’s Don Lemon, I had a heck of a time convincing my 80 something year old black dad that the Tea Party was not a bunch of redneck racists. “Dad, I travel the country on the Tea Party Express tour bus. I sit in the back of the bus only because there is a huge flat screen TV for me to enjoy watching football.”

During Obama’s reign of terror, fake news media promoted the lie that everything in America was sweetness and light. Time prevents me from listing all the pain, suffering and tyranny Americans experienced under king Obama

We have seen this tactic before of the American left organizing to wreck national havoc whenever a Republican is in the White House. Leftists’ goal is to deceive a majority of Americans into believing Republicans implementing their America-first agenda is racist, evil and causing great suffering. This is why suddenly, all of these supposed victimized hate groups are emerging from their caverns of darkness. It is all a scam to lay a bogus guilt-trip on decent Americans. Please do not fall for it.

Pressure your representatives to lock up Leftist bullies whenever they break the law. Stand firm in support of the change we voted for last November.

God bless.

Geert Wilders: ‘We want a Europe without the EU’

Dutch Member of Parliament Geert Wilders was invited to speak at the Ambrosetti Conference in Italy. The purpose of the conference titled “Intelligence on the World, Europe, and Italy” was to “to discuss current issues of major impact for the world economy and society as a whole.”

If anything MP Wilders is an outlier and his remarks show him to be a truth teller among those who wish to ignore the truth about what is truly happening across Europe. As MP Wilders put it:

I appreciate inviting someone who does not share your enthusiasm for the European Union. Whether your European dream, like Euro Commissioner Frans Timmermans, just mentioned it. To be honest: His dream is my nightmare.

MP Wilders made it clear that the biggest issues facing the European Union are:

  • The European elite in our midst.
  • The mistake of European nations transferring more and more power to the EU.
  • [L]egislation has been outsourced to Brussels.
  • The lack of a “clear European identity.”
  • A EU that “is characterized by cultural relativism and hostility to patriotism.”
  • The “bitter fruits” of the EU immigration policy.
  • The EU resembling “a cartel of governments dominated by Germany and France.”
  • [T]he EU does not care for the preservation of Jewish Christian culture.

MP Wilders warned, “The problems facing Europe are existential. Non-economics, but Islamization, terrorism and mass immigration are our main problems. Existential, indeed, because it determines who we are, what we are and whether we will still exist as a free people in the future.”

Please read MP Wilder’s entire speech. His words are prophetic and sound familiar. His words are much like those of President Trump in that MP Wilders wants to make Holland Great Again.

National sovereignty, secured borders, controlled immigration, draining the swamp in Brussels and dealing with the growing threats to his culture and Judeo/Christian world view.

MP Wilders is one of a handful of leaders willing to speak out in order to save his country. The forces arrayed against him are like the forces arrayed against President Trump. But MP Wilders knows that we shall overcome those obstacles and restore our virtue and dignity as unique Western cultures and societies.

RELATED ARTICLE: Towards A Definition Of Islam And Islamism

Transcript of Speech by Geert Wilders
Ambrosetti Conference, Italy, Villa d’Este, September 2, 2017

Ladies and gentlemen,

Thank you for being here today. I appreciate inviting someone who does not share your enthusiasm for the European Union. Whether your European dream, like Euro Commissioner Frans Timmermans, just mentioned it. To be honest: His dream is my nightmare.

I realize that my opinion differs from that of many members of the European elite in our midst, but I am an optimist.

I believe in a positive future for Europe as a community of independent, sovereign and democratic countries – collaborating without a supranational political union – a Europe without the European Union.

I believe that true democracy can only exist and flourish within a nation state. The national sovereignty combined with the domestic culture gives us our identity. As well as control over our own limits and budget and the right to decide how we use it ourselves as a nation.

Unfortunately, most of our governments have transferred more powers to the EU, which undermines many important things we have achieved over the past centuries.

Our ancestors fought for a democratic Netherlands. That is a Netherlands where Dutch voters and nobody else decide on Dutch matters. Democracy means that a people can decide on his own legislation.

Democracy is equal to self-government. But by the transfer of our powers to Brussels, the EU institutions and other countries decide on matters that are essential to our nation: our immigration policy, our monetary policy, our trade policy and many other issues.

A large part of our legislation has been outsourced to Brussels. Our national parliaments have become EU executive agencies. Many people object to this.

In the 2005 referendum, the Dutch voted against the European constitution, but a few years later, a slightly modified version was pushed under a new name.

Last year, a large majority of the Dutch voted in a referendum against the EU Association Treaty with Ukraine, but the treaty was still pushed. Very few people can still take the EU as a democratic institution after they have seen this happen.

Another very important thing that the Dutch have acquired over the past centuries were clear and demarcated boundaries. Boundaries are important. Because they protect us and determine who and what we are. Due to our governments that have transferred sovereignty, we are now no longer responsible for our immigration policy and even our own borders.
And the result is terrible.

If you give away the keys of your own home to someone who does not lock the doors, do not be surprised when unwelcome guests find their way in. I believe every nation is in charge of its own boundaries and must be able to decide who is welcome and who not. The Netherlands is the home of the Dutch. It’s the only house we have. And we should have control over our borders and our own immigration policy.

One of these things we also attach Dutch is our national identity. The Dutch have their own identity. And so also the other nations of Europe.

But there is no clear European identity.

The EU is characterized by cultural relativism and hostility to patriotism. But patriotism is not a dangerous threat, it’s something to be proud of.

It means defending the sovereignty and independence of the nation states, and not selling these values ​​in slight compromises to the EU and its bureaucrats.

As the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said – I quote – “Europe is a community of Christian, free and independent nations. The greatest danger to Europe’s future is the fanatics of internationalism in Brussels. We will not allow them to bitter the fruits of to invoke our cosmopolitan immigration policy. ” End quote.

I totally agree with that.

The European Commission has recently initiated proceedings against Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic because they refuse to include immigrants. Two years ago, Mrs Merkel invited millions of immigrants to come to Germany.

An historical error. She not only released millions, her policy encouraged them.

Her “Wir buck tie – we can call it” call was one of the biggest suction factors in the European migrant crisis. It is impossible to maintain your identity if you are flooded by millions of newcomers with a completely different culture. A culture that – as is the case with Islamic culture – aims to dominate and refuse[s] to assimilate.

The EU resembles a cartel of governments dominated by Germany and France. These two mighty nations decide almost everything.

But the Poland, the Hungarians, the Dutch, the Italians did not choose Mr Merkel or Mr Macron.

They did not choose Mr Juncker, and we, Dutch, have decimated in the last parliamentary elections of last March, the most pro-EU and pro-ice party in the Netherlands: the social democratic party of my countryman, Mr Timmermans, next to this tomorrow I sit, lost 75% of her seats. My party, the EU’s most anti-EU and anti-icing party, won 33% more seats.

In the 13-party parliament in the Netherlands we are for the first time ever the second party, and next time we will be the biggest.

Another important issue that the Dutch is at heart is our safety. In our streets today, as in many other European cities, we can see daily that the EU and the pro-EU leaders of the national states have saddled us. In our inner cities we are faced with whole neighborhoods that no longer seem to be Dutch, and where Dutch are no longer safe. We have people in our country who are born in our country but who do not share our basic values ​​and it’s even worse.

Parts of Europe even seem to be in war zones. The EU has no war. There have been terrible murderous attacks in Barcelona, ​​London, Manchester, Berlin, Brussels, Nice, Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Madrid, Amsterdam.

Terrorists have entered Europe between immigrant flows that have allowed the EU and national governments. While home grown terrorists are already one of the biggest problems facing our countries today. Thousands of them, throughout Europe, are able to travel freely and wherever they want.

This morning, European anti-terrorism coordinator Gilles de Kerckhove said in a Belgian newspaper that there are now 50,000 radical Muslims in Europe. They can commit a terrorist attack any time, as has happened so often lately.

Brussels, together with the pro-EU leaders in the national capitals, created the conditions that allowed these horrendous events and attacks by allowing millions of immigrants to enter Europe – often uncontrolled, by not requiring assimilation by refusing a ” search culture ‘, a dominant culture, through political correctness and total lack of leadership.

At my office in The Hague is a huge portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. In 1946 he held a speech in which he pleaded for what he called – I quote – “a kind of United States of Europe.” But he did not mean what the Eurofiles mean. He called the British Commonwealth as an example: a loose federation of nations, economically cooperative and bound to a number of principles.

But when he became prime minister in the 50’s, Churchill did not ask for membership of the EU’s forerunner. He found the idea of ​​giving up national sovereignty horrendously. Because he knew that this would lead to the end of democracy, identity and security for his people.

And the EU does not care for the preservation of Jewish Christian culture.

On the contrary, it facilitates Islamization.

Our European civilization, based on the cultural legacy of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome, is the best civilization on earth. It gave us democracy, freedom, equality before the law, the separation of church and state, and the view that sovereign states are there to protect all this. The remedy against all misery and terror is clear: we need to re-emphasize what we are. Only then can we ensure our children a future in a safe, strong and free Europe.

The problems facing Europe are existential. Non-economics, but Islamization, terrorism and mass immigration are our main problems. Existential, indeed, because it determines who we are, what we are and whether we will still exist as a free people in the future.

Ladies and gentlemen,

I believe in freedom of expression. I pay a heavy price for that. I’m on killing lists of Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamic groups. I live in a safehouse of the Dutch state and I have been under the 24/7 police protection for 13 years. Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. I have that too.

And I think Islamization is the biggest threat to our European future. I’m not talking about all Muslims, many of whom are moderate, but I am talking about Islamic ideology that is incompatible with freedom and democracy and we import massively.

The European Commission expresses its concern about the so-called threat to democracy in countries like Poland and Hungary, but it ignores the destructive effect that Islam has on security and freedom of Europe.

For all these reasons – protecting our democracy, our borders, our identity, our security and our freedom – we want a Europe without the EU. Sovereign democratic countries are perfectly able to work together where there are common interests – without the need for a supranational political institution like the EU.

But despite all the bad news, I’m, as I said at the beginning, an optimist. Everywhere in Europe, more and more people become proud patriots.

And know that the patriots will win. And also the nation state.

Nations who are naturally willing to work together where they see a common interest. There is nothing wrong with economic cooperation, on the contrary. We can also work together to fight terrorism. But everything on a voluntary basis, as sovereign nations.

And without a political union. Without the EU.

The future belongs to the Europe of sovereign nations.

Thank you.