7th Grader ‘Likes’ Toy Gun Photo on Instragram, Gets Suspended from School

If you follow gun control politics even casually, you know three things.

One, gun control advocates are positively and unshakable fixated – not just on taking your guns – but on making the very idea of a gun a thoughtcrime.

Two, there is nothing “reasonable” about their methods or their goals.

Three, their activities have nothing to do with public safety (or reality, in most cases) and instead spring from a pathological impulse to assert their will and ideology over others.

Occasionally, though, their zealousness and absurdity are so extreme that you have to wonder how much steeper the slippery slope can get.

Ground Zero for all that epitomizes the antigun worldview is any place that purports to “educate” young minds. And young people just love to communicate with each other on social media about their shared pastimes.

When you put the two together, you get what happens to Zachary Bowlin, a hapless kid just trying to get through Edgewood Middle School in Trenton, Ohio on his way to growing into adulthood. Zachary is hapless because he is surrounded by unreasonable people acting as educators.

Last week, according to a report by the local Fox affiliate WBRC (Fox19 News), Zachary was innocently minding his own business, doing what millions of other American kids do at night after school. He was checking his social media account, in this case, the video and image-sharing app, Instagram.

Coming across a friend’s picture of a realistic-looking Airsoft gun, Airsoft enthusiast Zachary pushed “Like,” an absent-minded gesture many people engage in dozens of times a day on images depicting such things as pets, deserts, and objects involved in hobbies they share with their friends.

The next morning, Zachary told a WBRC reporter, school officials “called me down … patted me down and checked me for weapons, then they told me I was getting expelled or suspended or whatever.”

According to a note from the school the Bowlins provided to the reporter, Zachary was to be suspended effective May 4, with his return date to be determined later. The reason: “Liking a post on social media that indicated potential school violence.”

AOL.com posted a picture of the offending post, which merely depicted the plastic gun on the table, with the caption, “Ready.”

To say that the post, to a casual observer, would indicate potential school violence would be akin to claiming that a picture of the sun would indicate the potential of a cataclysmic gravitational collapse that would extinguish all life on earth.

Except that the sun really is dangerous and Airsoft guns really are not.

To be fair, you could imagine a scenario where a facially innocent picture of a toy gun on social media was merely one in a series of circumstances known to school officials that would justify them taking strong action.

But that wasn’t this case. Indeed, Superintendent Russ Fussnecker essentially admitted that the school’s reaction was based only on the picture, coupled with his own vivid imagination about its worst possible significance.

“When you’re dealing with school districts nowadays and there are pictures of guns, regardless of the kind of gun it is, it’s a gun,” Fussnecker told WLWT News in Cincinnati. “And there are certain images or words, I can’t determine if that’s playful or real. And until I can get to an investigation, I have to look into it, those students have to be removed.”

Fortunately, Zachary’s parents knew enough to go to the media, whose intervention apparently allowed cooler heads to prevail. The school eventually rescinded the suspension (at least of Zachary, the student who posted the photo remains barred from school), but Superintendent Fussnecker appeared ready to stick to his … well … delusions in a statement to Fox19 News.

“The Board has a ‘zero tolerance’ of violent, disruptive, harassing, intimidating, bullying, or any other inappropriate behavior by its students,” it read. Fussnecker continued: “As the Superintendent of the Edgewood City Schools, I assure you that any social media threat will be taken serious [sic] including those who ‘like’ the post when it potentially endangers the health and safety of students or adversely affects the educational process.”

Superintendent Fussnecker – obviously no English major – apparently doesn’t understand the meaning of the words “threat” or “endangers” or the irony of his own proposition. Taken at face value, the image was neither inherently threatening nor aimed in any overt way at the school or “educational process.” Zachery himself understood exactly what it meant. “I figured he’d cleaned his gun and was ready, wanting to play and stuff,” he explained to WLWT News. His father added, “The young man that posted it and my son, and probably four or five other kids, play airsoft in our field. … So I really wasn’t concerned.”

And if adverse effects on the “educational process” are the true concern, what is more likely to accomplish that than summarily suspending an innocent student for harmless behavior – not to mention exposing the entire school and its staff to national ridicule – before “investigating” the situation?

The real problem with this and other “zero tolerance” abuse isn’t just that it’s stupid or overbearing but that it means even decent, well-meaning kids have no path through school that isn’t mined with hysteria that could suddenly and unpredictably explode in their face and derail their future.

Fortunately, Zachary’s parents stood up for their son, and the school (to its credit) eventually did the right thing in his case.

But for every Zachary, who knows how many other students are harshly punished and stigmatized without recourse, simply because the educational establishment has officially adopted an antigun, anti-Second Amendment posture?

However many it is, it’s too many. And there’s certainly nothing to “Like” about that.

Dethrone the FBI, Not Just Comey by James Bovard

President Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey provides a welcome chance to dethrone the FBI from its pinnacle in American politics and life. Last September, Comey denounced Twitter “demagoguery” for the widespread belief that the FBI was not “honest” or “competent.”

But the FBI has a long record of both deceit and incompetence. Five years ago, Americans learned that the FBI was teaching its agents that the bureau “has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” This has practically been the FBI’s motif since its creation.

Dirty Deeds

J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, built a revered agency that utterly intimidated official Washington. In 1945, President Truman wrote: “We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. … This must stop.”

But the bureau’s power soared after Congress passed the Internal Security Act of 1950, authorizing massive crackdowns on suspected subversives. Hoover compiled a list of more than 20,000 “potentially or actually dangerous” Americans who could be seized and locked away at the president’s command. “Congress secretly financed the creation of six of these (detention) camps in the 1950s,” noted Tim Weiner in his excellent 2012 book, Enemies: A History of the FBI.

From 1956 through 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counterintelligence programs) conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist and anti-war organizations.

FBI agents also busied themselves forging “poison pen” letters to wreck activists’ marriages. COINTELPRO was exposed only after a handful of activists burglarized an FBI office in a Philadelphia suburb, seized FBI files, and leaked the damning documents to journalists.

FBI haughtiness was on display on April 19, 1993, when its agents used armored vehicles to smash into the Branch Davidians’ sprawling, ramshackle home near Waco, Texas. The tanks intentionally collapsed much of the building on top of the huddled residents. After the FBI pumped the building full of CS gas (banned for use on enemy soldiers by the Chemical Weapons Convention), a fire ignited that left 80 children, women and men dead.

The FBI swore it was blameless for the conflagration, but six years later, an investigation revealed that the FBI fired incendiary cartridges into the building before the blaze erupted. No FBI agents were penalized or prosecuted for their fatal assault against American civilians.

21st Century Scandals

Before the 9/11 attacks, the FBI dismally failed to connect the dots on suspicious foreigners engaged in domestic aviation training. Though Congress had deluged the FBI with $1.7 billion to upgrade its computers, many FBI agents had old machines incapable of searching the Web or emailing photos. One FBI agent observed that the bureau ethos is that “real men don’t type. …The computer revolution just passed us by.”

The FBI’s pre-9/11 blunders “contributed to the United States becoming, in effect, a sanctuary for radical terrorists,” according to a 2002 congressional investigation. (The FBI also lost track of a key informant at the heart of the cabal that detonated a truck bomb beneath the World Trade Center in 1993.)

In the late 1990s, the FBI Academy taught agents that subjects of investigations “have forfeited their right to the truth.” This doctrine helped fuel pervasive entrapment operations after 9/11.

Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1% of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats. Thirty times as many were induced by the FBI to behave in ways that prompted their arrest.

The bureau’s informant program extends far beyond Muslims. It bankrolled an extremist right-wing New Jersey blogger and radio host for five years before his 2009 arrest for threatening federal judges.

And then there are the other scandals — the perpetual false testimony from the FBI crime lab, its use of National Security Letters and other surveillance tools to illegally vacuum up Americans’ personal info, its whitewashing of every shooting by an FBI agent between 1993 and 2011, and its operation of dozens of child porn websites (another entrapment operation gone awry).

Unleashed Power

The FBI’s power has rarely been effectively curbed by either Congress or federal courts. In 1971, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs declared that the bureau’s power terrified Capitol Hill: “Our very fear of speaking out (against the FBI) has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny. … Our society … cannot survive a planned and programmed fear of its own government bureaus and agencies.”

Boggs vindicated a 1924 American Civil Liberties Union report warning that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a political character” — a charge that supporters of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would have alternatively cheered last year.

If Trump fired Comey to throttle an investigation into Trump administration criminality, that is an impeachable offense. Otherwise, Comey’s fall provides an excellent opportunity to take the FBI off its pedestal and place it where it belongs — under the law.

It is time to cease venerating a federal agency whose abuses have perennially menaced Americans’ constitutional rights.

Reprinted from USA Today.

James Bovard

James Bovard

James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. Find him on Twitter @JimBovard.

The Moral Case for High-impact Industries

Yesterday, I got the opportunity to speak at the annual conference of The Association of Union Constructors. I was particularly excited to speak at this conference because the attendees’ unions represented a combined 3 million employees from groups such as iron workers, boilermakers, electricians, etc.

RELATED VIDEO: The moral case for fossil fuels:

imageOne hour before the speech, everyone has a book waiting for them.

The moral case for fossil fuels is crucial to these industries for two reasons.

First, they rely on cheap, plentiful, reliable energy from fossil fuels–and when that energy is restricted their industries suffer terribly.

Second, because they mostly work in high-impact industries–industries that create value by visibly transforming our environment–they especially benefit from reframing the debates over their industries in pro-human terms.

I got to meet many bright, thoughtful, passionate people at the book signing after my speech.

I already have several plans to talk to attendees about educating their many members.

Thanks so much to TAUC for inviting me.

ALSO: Whenever you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help your organization turn non-supporters into supporters and turn supporters into champions.

1. Fill out the free Constructive Conversation Scorecard to assess where you are and where you want to be in your one-on-one communications.

Email it back to me and I’ll send you my step-by-step Constructive Conversation System that will enable you to talk to anyone about energy.

2. Hold a free Lunch-and-Learn (inside or outside the industry).

This program contains one of my favorite debates along with some “cheat sheets” to help you make the moral case for fossil fuels in your professional and personal life more easily than you thought possible. You can have access to the entire program right now. By the end of the session you and your team will:

  • gain a deeper sense of meaning from their work
  • be able to turn fossil fuel skeptics into fossil fuel supporters
  • learn the secrets to having constructive conversations about energy instead of frustrating fights

Click here to sign up for the free program.

3. Hire me to speak at your next event.

If you have an upcoming board meeting, employee town hall, or association meeting, I have some new and updated speeches about the moral case for fossil fuels, winning hearts and minds, and communications strategy in the new political climate. If you’d like to consider me for your event, just reply to this message and put “Event” in the subject line.

Click here for a PDF copy of the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.

How has Delaware dodged the refugee bullet for decades? Answer: Joe Biden

There is a short news item at Delaware Public Media about how a Jewish refugee agency in Delaware is waiting for seven families (likely Muslim families based on their country of origin) they hope they will soon be settling in Delaware—the First State.  So I thought I might revisit a topic I haven’t discussed for a long time and that is the origin of the Refugee Act of 1980.

Senators Biden and Kennedy are responsible for the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program. See list below of other Senators deeply involved in 1979.

But, first here is a portion of the short piece at Delaware Public Media:

The state of Hawaii’s stay on Trump’s second travel ban suspends the FY17 cap for refugees – currently set at 50,000.

That opens the door for refugee families from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Eastern African country of Eritrea in line to come to the First State, but none of them have travel plans in place yet.

Jewish Family Services of Delaware Refugee Resettlement Coordinator Sarah Green says that currently, the families are stuck in Jordan and Ethiopia.

“It’s hard to know what’s happening,” Green said. “We just have to wait and see. We get a very limited view of what’s happening over there.”

She says her agency is taking the approach that these families could arrive any day – and working to ensure they’ll be comfortable when they reach Delaware.

[….]

There’s reason to expect they could arrive soon. According to the U.S. State Department, 900 flights for refugees to the U.S. are being scheduled every week.

As of this morning, 831 new refugees arrived in the US in the past week (5/5-5/12) according to Wrapsnet. And, that puts us at 44,072 this fiscal year.

At this rate the Trump Administration will hit 50,000 in about 7 – 8 weeks. Will they stop at 50,000 which should happen around the first week of July? That is the question!

Delaware, in some ways, is more interesting to me than some of the other very low refugee admission states (LOL! including Hawaii).  See chart below.

And that is because then Senator Joe Biden was one of the chief sponsors of the Senate-generated Refugee Act of 1979 (S.643) which became the Refugee Act of 1980 when Jimmy Carter signed it in to law the following year.  You can learn more about it here.  Pay special attention to the part about how states were NOT to be burdened with welfare costs of refugees.

Here are the co-sponsors of S.643 another of Senator Ted Kennedy’s swamp-America-with-immigrants bills:

So how is it that Delaware is in the bottom ten locations for refugee seeding when then Senator and now former Vice President Joe Biden is that state’s most prominent political figure?  Did he welcome refugees to America in 1979, but keep them from swamping Delaware with diversity for decades?

Wrapsnet data only goes back to FY2003, but that gives us enough years to see a pattern. (For researchers more diligent than I am, you can go back through all the previous annual reports and put the data together from the very beginning, but I expect the pattern is similar in the early years.)

So from FY03 through today (in FY17) we admitted 886,324 refugees to America (not including asylum seekers) and Delaware got a whopping 139 of them!

In the years Joe Biden was Vice President, Delaware got only 50 refugees.

Here are the last ten locations for refugee placement from FY03 to the present. What the heck is “Unknown State?” Does that mean 68 refugees were placed secretly somewhere? Yikes!

If Delaware Public Media really wanted to do some important work, reporters there should try to find out exactly why and how Delaware dodged a bullet for so many years when their claim to fame, Veep Joe Biden, sponsored the original law and then apparently kept diversity-seeding from the state! (It is not because of the state’s small size since Rhode Island got thousands more than Delaware).

For new readers, this post is filed in mywhere to find information’ category and in ‘Refugee statistics.’

James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor

(Author’s note: In August 2016, I wrote an article entitled “James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor,” warning readers that the Comey fish was already rotting and that things were bound to get worse. Clearly, they just did. And it’s just as clear that the uncontrolled hysteria we are witnessing from Democrats has to do not with bogus accusations about Russia but about the criminal indictments coming down the pike for the people they’ve blindly defended for decades—that would be Bill & Hill Clinton—and possibly against even bigger fish! I’ve updated this article by abbreviating its length but also adding a few sentences. – JS)

I always thought that James Comey was a company man. As it happens, the company he headed is among the most influential, powerful and scary companies in the world—the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But still, a company guy. Whether working for a president on the moderate-to-conservative spectrum like G.W. Bush or for a far-left Alinsky acolyte like Barack Obama, makes absolutely no difference to this type of obedient—and also subservient—accommodator.

The red flag of skepticism should have gone up years ago to the American public when lavish praise was heaped on Comey by people who revile each other. While the spin insists that Comey is a lot of virtuous things—“straight-shooter,” “unbiased,” “fair-minded,” “non-partisan” “man of his word”—don’t be fooled. That’s Orwellian newspeak for someone who will do and say anything to keep his job, including, as Comey did in yet another Clinton fiasco case last summer, allow her to…

  1. Create out of whole cloth an “intent” criterion in federal law to let a clearly corrupt politician––that would be Hillary––off the hook, and,
  2. Appropriate the job of the Attorney General in announcing what the outcome of the FBI’s investigation should be.

While citing Hillary’s “extreme negligence” in handling classified information, a virtual litany of illegal acts committed by the then-Secretary of State, and the fact that hostile foreign operatives may have accessed her email account, Comey said he would not refer criminal charges to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department. Hillary, he said, was “extremely careless” and “unsophisticated,” among other spitballs he hurled in her direction before completely letting her off the hook!

Comey’s friend and colleague, Andrew C. McCarthy, said that the FBI director’s decision is tantamount to sleight-of-hand trickery. “There is no way of getting around this,” McCarthy wrote. “Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation…in essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.”

Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of AmericanThinker.com, wrapped the entire debacle up neatly, saying that “the director of the FBI offered 15 of the most puzzling minutes in the history of American law enforcement. James Comey spent the first 12 minutes or so laying out a devastating case dismantling Hillary Clinton’s email defense. Then, “in a whiplash-inducing change of narrative, he announced that `no reasonable prosecutor’ would bring the case he had just outlined, an assertion that was contradicted within hours by luminaries including former U.S. attorney (and NY City mayor) Rudy Giuliani and James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office.”

Which begs the question: Why would Comey act contrary to the wisdom of virtually every legal scholar who has written or spoken about this case?

It is certainly not because he wasn’t taught by his upstanding parents the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, moral and immoral. One could make the case—and many have—that he is as close to a moral man as it gets in public life. According to his bio in Wikipedia, Comey, a lawyer, majored in religion at the College of William and Mary, and wrote his thesis about the liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and the conservative televangelist Jerry Falwell, emphasizing their common belief in public action.

THE LOOKING-THE-OTHER-WAY FACTOR

That’s what company guys do.

Affirming this unflattering opinion, Jerome Corsi, journalist and NY Times bestselling author, said that Comey has a long history of cases ending favorable to the Clintons.

In 2004, Corsi says, Comey was a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department when he “apparently limited the scope of the criminal investigation of Sandy Berger…[and Berger’s] removal and destruction of classified records from the National Archives. The documents were relevant to accusations that the Clinton administration was negligent in the build-up to the 9/11 terrorist attack.”

“Curiously,” Corsi continues, “Berger, Lynch and Cheryl Mills (Hillary’s longtime advisor and Chief of Staff during her years as Secretary of State) all worked as partners in the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson, which prepared tax returns for the Clintons and did patent work for a software firm that played a role in the private email server Hillary Clinton used when she was secretary of state.”

Corsi said that “various statements Comey made about Berger’s mishandling of classified documents bear comparison to his comments regarding Hillary Clinton’s email server” and that Berger, “a convicted thief of classified documents, had been advising Clinton while she served as secretary of state and had access to emails containing classified information.”

Yep… a company guy. As an editorial in The Wall St. Journal stated: “Three days after James Comey’s soliloquy absolving Hillary Clinton of criminal misuse of classified information, the big winner is—James Comey. He often poses as the deliverer of `hard truths,’ and the hard truth is that he has helped himself politically but not the cause of equal treatment under the law.”

Indeed, recommending that Hillary be indicted would have been bad for—ta da—James Comey! “Doing that, however,” the editorial goes on, “would have courted fury among Democrats and their media friends. And if Mrs. Clinton later won the election, Mr. Comey might have had to resign before his 10-year term expires in 2023. Otherwise he’d risk becoming persona non grata as Louis Freeh was under Bill Clinton.”

The entire, protracted, and fraudulent investigation seems now like a dog-and-pony show for the American public. Here, journalist Bill Still says that during Hillary’s interview with the FBI, not only was Comey not present, but it wasn’t recorded and she was not under oath!

 THE PERSUASION FACTOR

Let’s take another upstanding guy, the once-esteemed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, conservative John Roberts. Did I say “conservative”? Silly me. At midnight on Christmas Eve in 2009, the Democrats voted unanimously—without one Republican vote—for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare, to inflict the proven-failure of socialized medicine on the American public.

When the constitutionality of the legislation was challenged up to the Supreme Court, a vote of 5-4 affirmed that the individual mandate was constitutional under Congress’s taxation powers. It was Roberts who tipped the balance, sending shockwaves of disbelief throughout the country—much like the reaction to Comey’s incomprehensible decision on Hillary.

At the time, there was talk of Roberts’ “caving” because “someone” had “reached” him and threatened to expose the fact that his two young children had been adopted illegally, a revelation that, if true, would have effectively forced him to resign in ignominy for lying under oath about the adoption. I have no idea if that allegation is true or not, but it made sense to me at the time, particularly because his decision made no sense.

I was also aware of the many allegations listed in websites like Clinton Body Count (and this one too), Bush Body Count, and Obama Body Count, which detail the many people who have gone missing, been killed, had “accidents,” or “committed suicide” under each president’s tenure, the implication being, of course, that each of these chief executives had a personal “hit” squad to, ahem, remove anyone who threatened their tenure in office, or, more seriously, could land them in prison. Oh, let’s not forget the Hillary list compiled by noted radio host Tami Jackson.

Around the time of Comey’s colossal whitewash of Hillary’s email scandal, the prominent former President of the United Nations General Assembly, John Ashe, died when a barbell dropped on his throat and crushed his larynx. Coincidentally, that very day he was scheduled to testify in a trial about “Chinagate” (of Bill Clinton fame) and, specifically, of the bribery charge against Chinese businessman Ng Lap Seng, and even more specifically of Hillary’s links to Seng.

I’ve followed the persuasion factor not only through “The Godfather” and other mafia-themed movies, but in real life watching Rudy Giuliani deal with and decimate the mob, first as Associate Attorney General under President Reagan and later as mayor of New York.

It’s really quite simple how the thug culture works, be it in the Mafia or in government: Find out what a person values and then home in on that vulnerability. Isn’t that how ObamaCare passed? Here Perry Peterson, a retired auditor and tax accountant, documents the many backroom deals that persuaded various politicians to sign on, such as Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson, who was promised the “Cornhusker kickback” that would pay the full price of expanded Medicaid coverage in Nebraska forever, or Senator Mary L. Landrieu’s agreement to sell her vote in the “Louisiana Purchase” for $300,000,000.00 that would flood into her state through added benefits in the ObamaCare bill, on and on and on.

There’s more hardball persuasion, to be sure, like reminding the target that you know that his daughter just moved to an off-campus apartment, or that his wife would feel terrible learning about his girlfriend.

Mmmmm…what “persuasion” could possibly be employed on a rich, successful guy like Comey?

THE CONFLICT-OF-INTEREST FACTOR

Well whaddaya know? According to Investment Watchdog, “It seems that our beloved FBI Director was once a director and board member of HSBC, which is tightly connected to the Clinton Foundation…this is the same HSBC [Swiss bank] that was accused of laundering drug cartel money, was heavily involved in the LIBOR scandal, and who knows what else, and all while our esteemed FBI Director was part of the senior leadership.”

Writer Kim McLendon elaborates upon a report issued by one of the few major whistleblowers about the foundation, Wall St. analyst Charles Ortel, who exposed AIG as well as the massive discrepancies in General Electric’s finances in 2008. Ortel found more massive discrepancies “between what some of the major donors say they gave to the Clinton Foundation…and what the Clinton Foundation said they got from the donors and what they did with it.” The letter he sent to donors, charity regulators, and investigative journalists labeled the charity “the largest charity fraud ever attempted‚Äö that being the network of illegal activities worldwide, whose heart is the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.”

Ortel goes on to say: “The Clinton Foundation…has been part of an international charity fraud whose entire cumulative scale (counting inflows and outflows) approaches and may even exceed $100 billion measured from 1997 forward. Yet state, federal and foreign government authorities, that should be keenly aware of this massive set of criminal frauds, so far, move at a snail’s pace, perhaps waiting for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to reveal the scope of its work and the nature of any findings.”

Aha! “Perhaps” the powers-that-be are “waiting for the FBI” to investigate this international con game. And wouldn’t that be one James Comey? Is there indeed a conflict of interest that prevents the esteemed director from looking into this ostensibly criminal enterprise?

Writer Tim Brown says that just because Comey was a Director with HSBC “does not assume corruption.” But it’s notable, he adds, that according to The Guardian, the “Clinton foundation received up to $81 million from clients of controversial HSBC bank.”

In March, Judicial Watch documented the piles of money taken in by The Clinton Foundation, and reported: “Our lawsuit had previously forced the disclosure of documents that provided a road map for over 200 conflict-of-interest rulings that led to at least $48 million in speaking fees for the Clintons during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

All of this and more led InfoWars reporter Kit Daniels to conclude, “Comey may be on the periphery of Clinton’s use of foreign policy to raise money for her foundation, but his position at HSBC may explain in part why she received kid glove treatment while others accused of similar crimes were prosecuted. His connection, however tenuous, should be reason enough to revisit the case and appoint a special prosecutor, as Rep. Matt Salmon of Arizona has demanded.”

According to a report by Investors Research Dynamics, “in 2003, Comey became the deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice (DOJ). In 2005 he signed on to serve as general counsel and senior vice president at defense contractor Lockheed Martin. In 2010 he joined Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based investment fund, as its general counsel. On September 4, 2013, James B. Comey was sworn in as the seventh Director of the FBI. Talk about the revolving door in and out of government! A shill for the private defense industry and later a Wall Street investment firm, two of the groups that support Hillary’s ascent to the Throne.”

Meanwhile, last month, the IRS preempted the FBI by launching an investigation into what appears to be a full-blown, multi-tentacled criminal enterprise that spans the globe. Was this timed to let Comey slither away untarnished?

Is that why Comey failed to ask Hillary even one question about her Foundation and its seemingly nefarious Kremlin connections? About the indictments (as reported by Michael Sainato) of several of her super-delegates for corruption and ethics violations involving huge sums of money? Of her closest aides for funny money vis-a-vis the Clinton Foundation? About the 181 Clinton Foundation donors who lobbied the State Department while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state? About State Department favors for weapons manufacturers and foreign governments? How about how Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta bagged $35 million but failed to fully disclose this windfall, or about how Hillary showed remarkable disinterest in going after the murderous butchers of Boko Haram (as reported by Mindy Belz and J.C. Derrick in WORLD Magazine) because, allegedly, millions of dollars in donations were given to the Clinton Foundation by Nigerian billionaires with oil interests in northern Nigeria? On and on and on.

And is it not relevant that Comey’s brother, Peter Comey, works at the law firm that does the Clinton Foundation’s taxes?

Do any of these (and other) “dots” connect to Comey? Did he ever wonder if any of the 33-thousand emails that Hillary destroyed involved these explosive subjects? Is he just an incurious guy, or does his high position with HSBC and its oh-so-close Clinton Foundation connection make the conflict-of-interest suggestion too uncomfortably plausible?

THE STINKING FISH FACTOR

Whether it’s in industry or the military or sports or show business, if failure occurs, it’s always the top dog who is accountable. Not the assembly line worker or the buck private or the third baseman who calls the shots, but the one who occupies the ultimate seat of power. Look at what happened at the Democratic National Committee…the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief of Communications, and Chairwoman all resigned because of the hacking that proved the DNC to be both crooked and racist.

That is why they say that the fish stinks from the head, or, in the DNC case, the hydra-headed monster. And the same is true in politics. Which may be the real reason why Comey punted, taking the coward’s way out in steadfastly refusing to do what both the law and morality demanded of him.

No matter how you look at Hillary’s email scandal, as well as the murders of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, information Officer Sean Smith, and CIA operatives Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods in Benghazi—and for all we know, a dozen paths to the Clinton Foundation—they all led directly to the Oval Office and its former occupant, one Barack Obama. Reminds me of the cards in a Monopoly game: Go to Jail, Go Directly to Jail, Do not Pass Go!

Legal scholar Henry Mark Holzer reminds us that,” Hillary was not under oath when she testified before Comey’s FBI investigators. Seems to get her off the hook, doesn’t it? But under 18 United States Code Section 1001, it is a five-year felony to lie to an FBI agent (and other government officials) about a material fact relevant to an investigation. The federal criminal dockets are loaded with convictions of people who beat the underlying charge only to be convicted of an 18 USC 1001 offense. If Hillary loses the election, keep an eye out for an Obama pardon, to choke off a retributive indictment by a Trump Department of Justice. There is a long road ahead for Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton before the statutes of limitations expire on her crimes.”

Whether or not it’s the stinking fish factor or something else that compelled James Comey to cave to the Obama Justice Department and the Clinton Machine will be for historians to determine. Personally, however, I can’t imagine a man of James Comey’s stature tolerating the fact that history will include obituaries of him that state in their opening paragraphs that he was the first Director of the FBI who took a fall—and now the second FBI Director in history to be fired!

Acting FBI Director McCabe needs to go because of his wife Jill

The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and CNN all reported that the acting FBI Director Andrew G. McCabe contradicted the White House’s assertion that James B. Comey had lost the support of rank-and-file FBI agents. So why are these news organizations highlighting McCabe? Perhaps it is because of his wife Dr. Jill McCabe, who ran for the Virginia state Senate as a Democrat?

What these news outlets fail to tell you about his wife Dr. Jill McCabe is her connection to long time Hillary Clinton supporter and governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe.

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe campaigning with his wife Jill.

Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe campaigning with his wife Jill.

In The Daily Signal article Here Are 12 Possible Comey Replacements at FBI Fred Lucas reports:

Andrew McCabe, the acting FBI director who was the deputy director under Comey, testified on Capitol Hill Thursday. He is also reportedly a contender for the job, but could be challenged due to potential conflicts.

McCabe served as an FBI special agent since 1996, and was elevated to the No. 2 spot in 2016. However, while he was moving up in the FBI during the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, his wife Dr. Jill McCabe ran for the Virginia state Senate in 2015, with a financial boost of almost $500,000 from Common Good VA. The political action committee is controlled by longtime Clinton ally Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

In a statement to The Wall Street Journal last year, the FBI said, “Months after the completion of [his wife’s] campaign, then-Associate Deputy Director McCabe was promoted to deputy, where, in that position, he assumed for the first time, an oversight role in the investigation into Secretary Clinton’s emails.”

“It needs to be somebody independent,” said Ron Hosko, the FBI’s former assistant director of the criminal investigative division and now president of the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund. “With McCabe, this day and age, even the appearance of impropriety is a problem … An appearance can be fatal—maybe not to a career—but to advancement.”

Hillary Clinton campaigning with long time ally Terry McAuliffe, governor of Virginia.

Hillary Clinton campaigning with long time ally Terry McAuliffe, governor of Virginia.

The Daily Beast reports:

The news [of Dr. Jill McCabe’s McAuliffe connection] drew calls for McCabe to publicly recuse himself from anything involving the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s email scandal. But he didn’t do that, and conservatives haven’t forgotten.

“He should be removed as acting director and then either fired or demoted,” Mark Corallo, spokesperson for John Ashcroft when he was Attorney General, told The Daily Beast. “When he did not recuse himself from the investigation despite knowing his wife received major campaign contributions from Terry McAuliffe, he broke the ethics rules and tainted the investigation. Time for him to go.”

It appears the reason McCabe is defending Comey and wants the Russian investigation to move forward may be because he is complicit in the failure by the FBI to indict Hillary Clinton and those implicated in creating, maintaining and scrubbing the email server, which contained classified information.

Mr. McCabe needs to go.

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Minnesota needs $5 million to fight infectious diseases in migrant population

Hey, since many of the refugees and other immigrants now causing expensive infectious diseases to spread in the state are a result of Obama’s migration policy, maybe he could contribute his $3 million speaking fee to Minnesota as a partial payment to handle the crisis!

Remember this story! Gov. Mark Dayton: If you don’t like our Somali refugees, get out of Minnesota because they are here to stay! 

Here is the latest news generated by the recent Measles epidemic in Minnesota. As of Tuesday there were 50 diagnosed cases, most (45) are in the ‘Somali community.’

And, we are told that refugees don’t cost state and local taxpayers a dime!

FILE In this June 30, 2011 photo, Gov. Mark Dayton speaks during a news conference hours before the midnight deadline to pass a budget at the Minnesota State Capitol  in St. Paul, Minn.   The Democratic governor and legislative Republicans are deadlocked over a $5 billion budget deficit. Republicans have refused any tax hike.   (AP Photo/Genevieve Ross)

Gov. Mark Dayton  (AP Photo/Genevieve Ross)

From Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart:

Minnesota Health Commissioner Dr. Ed Ehlinger sounded an alert on more frequent and costly threats to the public health, referencing measles, tuberculosis, and even the Zika virus and syphilis, according to a statement released by the MDH on Wednesday as reported by Hometownsource.com.

“In recent months, state and local public health officials have had to respond to a series of infectious disease outbreaks including multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, hundreds of new cases of syphilis, and now, the largest measles outbreak the state has faced in nearly 30 years. These outbreaks come on the heels of extensive public health efforts in 2016 for the Zika virus response and in 2014-15 for Ebola preparedness,” he added….

[ … ]

Minnesota is currently in the middle of the largest outbreak of measles in over twenty years. As of Tuesday, 50 cases of measles have been diagnosed in the state since the first case was reported on April 11, 45 of which have been diagnosed in Somali Minnesotans.

As Breitbart News reported previously, 90 percent of the 168 cases of active tuberculosis diagnosed in Minnesota in 2016 were foreign-born, much higher than the 67 percent of foreign-born cases that accounted for the 9,287 cases of active TB diagnosed in the United States in 2016.

Fourteen of those cases were from newly arrived refugees, eleven of whom were diagnosed with active TB in medical screenings overseas but were nonetheless allowed to resettle in Minnesota by the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security.

Continue reading here. The article is chock full of important information and links to follow.

See my ‘Health issues’ category, here, where I have archived 329 previous posts about health issues (including mental health issues) involving the refugee flow to America.

I wondered here if this Measles outbreak started with a newly arrived refugee from Somalia (or from elsewhere in East Africa since a large number of our Somalis come from UN camps in Kenya).

BTW, Slate had a hysterical story the other day claiming this Measles outbreak is Trump’s fault—not because he is admitting infected Somalis, but because he hangs with “Anti-vaxxer pals.”  Huh?

Mr. Cool goes to Milan, announces that ‘climate refugees’ will flood the first world

Changing the subject?

Unbuttoned to mid-chest: We are told that Mr. Cool forgot his tie. If you are a former President of the U.S. staying in what must be the most expensive hotel in the city, isn’t it possible to send out for a wonderful selection of beautiful ties?

Just in case Islam-generated conflicts run out of steam in the Middle East and Africa, Barack Obama crossed the Atlantic to collect a speaking fee reportedly in the $3 million range to pronounce that, as a result of global warming there would be a refugee crisis “unprecedented in human history.”

He wants to make sure that world Open Borders activists (and global corporations looking for cheap labor) wouldn’t run out of reasons to tear down borders to the first world (if Islamic conflicts fail to do a good enough job).

Obama talked extensively in the speech about the impact of warming, while several reports lately say the earth is entering a cooling period.  So which is it?

Below is some of what Obama said in what some, here are calling a “contradictory speech.”

From the UK Independent:

Climate change could produce a refugee crisis that is “unprecedented in human history”, Barack Obama has warned as he stressed global warming was the most pressing issue of the age.

Speaking at an international food conference in Milan, the former US President said rising temperatures were already making it more difficult to grow crops and rising food prices were “leading to political instability”.

“Floods on sunny days”—bad, very bad….

He said the United States was currently experiencing “floods on sunny days”, increased wildfires and, in Alaska, increased coastal erosion as the ice melts and no country was “immune” to the problem.

Climate refugees on the march….

If world leaders put aside “parochial interests” and took action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enough to restrict the rise to one or two degrees Celsius, then humanity would probably be able to cope. [So, might we shut up about this issue if sunspot activity and natural cycles restrict the rise to one or two degrees?—ed]

Failing to do this, Mr Obama warned, increased the risk of “catastrophic” effects in the future, “not only real threats to food security, but also increases in conflict as a consequence of scarcity and greater refugee and migration patterns”.

“If those rain patterns change, then you could see hundreds of millions of people who suddenly find themselves unable to feed themselves, because they’re already at subsistence levels.

“And the amount of migration, the number of refugees that could be resulting from something like that, would be unprecedented in human history.”

Dare I mention the scientific notion of carrying capacity and that a population die-off might be mother earth’s way of staying in balance (okay stone me!).

Continue reading here.

I have a ‘Climate Refugees’ category with 49 previous posts on the topic, here.  I don’t know if they have settled their differences, but early-on the climate refugee agitators were at odds with the ‘humanitarian’ refugee agitators over the use of the word “refugee.”  ‘Humanitarians’ were angered by environmentalists stealing the word that they had over decades built up as one that invokes warm and fuzzy feelings among people who know nothing.

RELATED ARTICLE: Largest US Solar Panel Maker Files for Bankruptcy After Receiving $206 Million in Subsidies

Hungary Takes EU To Court Over Migrant Demands

The Eastern European nations that refuse to destroy their countries will be the only places of refuge and sanctuary for infidel refuseniks in the coming bloody wars.

islam harvest shariahHUNGARY TAKES EU TO COURT OVER MIGRANT DEMANDS

By Jacob Bojesson, Daily Caller, May 10, 2017:

HUNGARY AND SLOVAKIA ADDRESSED THE EUROPEAN COURT OF JUSTICE WEDNESDAY IN A JOINT CASE AGAINST THE EUROPEAN UNION’S REFUGEE DISTRIBUTION SCHEME.

The EU Council has moved to distribute hundreds of thousands of refugees across Europe to lighten the burden on Italy and Greece. The Hungarian government has opposed the move from the start and proposes a new mechanism to mass deport migrants instead.

“We have complied a ten-point list of reasons we believe this decision to be illegal,” Hungary’s Justice Minister Laszlo Trocsanyi told German newspaper Die Welt. “The decision to assign quotas also sends the wrong signal to potential migrants.”

Trocsanyi said the current message from the EU is “Go ahead and come to Europe, we will handle the distribution.”

So far, less than 18 percent of the 100,000 migrants have been relocated under the quota system. A ruling in the case is expected this fall and Trocsanyi said Hungary will accept the outcome.

“Hungary abides by the law and fulfils its duties,” he told Die Welt.

Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesman for the Hungarian government, told The Daily Caller News Foundation that Hungary’s disputes with the EU is rooted in the country’s refusal to give up elements of sovereignty.

“We would like to retain the elements of sovereignty, which are there by law, and we are against a stealth way of taking away elements of your sovereignty,” Kovacs told TheDCNF in a recent interview.

Hungary argues the “four freedoms” of the EU project — the free movement of goods, capital, services and people — can only be ensured if the outer borders are protected.

“You can not defend the achievements of Schengen from within. It has be done at the borders,” Kovacs said.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Geller Report.

America is Not Racist, According to Millions of Eager African Immigrants

Like any other country that is truly multicultural — and few if any are as diverse as the United States — America has its race-based challenges. Some are real and some are politically ginned up, but they all become hurdles to a more unified country.

However, maybe the best measure of where America really stands in the world comes from the choices of black African immigrants. Native Sub-Saharan Africans, by their actions of free movement, seems to have judged that America is not racist — or is perhaps the least racist country in the world offering the greatest opportunities.

This conclusion stems from one breathtaking fact: America is the most popular immigration destination for Africans. More than European nations, than Asia nations, than South American nations. More than any other country in the world. It’s not even close. Further, America is becoming geometrically more popular with black Africans every decade.

The New York Times did a story on the phenomena, but either missed or ignored the import of what the actually data means. Their angle was how the immigration was affecting the makeup of New York City boroughs, and they ran it in the New York Region section, not nationally. In fact, you rarely see this data as national news. You decide why.

A shocking slavery comparison

However, the Times story did make this jarring and rather astounding number comparison:

“Between 2000 and 2010, the number of legal black African immigrants in the United States about doubled, to around one million. During that single decade, according to the most reliable estimates, more black Africans arrived in this country on their own than were imported directly to North America during the more than three centuries of the slave trade.”

What? Yes. More black Africans voluntarily chose to come to America in one decade than were forced to during 300 years of slavery. That hardly sounds like a nation with terrible race-relations — at least in contrast to the rest of the world.

And that is the important caveat.

America’s race relations definitely need to improve — and it is on all races to make that happen. But throughout history this has been a global problem. So today, according to the people who have choices of where to immigrate, the fact that they choose the United States in increasing droves suggests that compared to all the rest of the world, we may have the best race relations. Certainly the best race relations and economic opportunities combo.

Geometric rise in black immigration to America

According to a new study from the Pew Research Center, as of 2015, there were nearly 2.1 million people living in the U.S. who were born in Africa. That number is up from 880,000 in 2000 and only 80,000 in 1970. By 1970 Jim Crow was completely eliminated in the South and the Civil Rights Acts were passed.

Monica Anderson, a research associate and the author of the study, said the numbers are doubling every decade, and she expects that trend to continue.

“In 1980 only 1 percent of refugees admitted to the U.S. were from an African country and today that share is about 37 percent,” she told Voice of America in an interview. Consider that. The rate of Africans immigrating to the United States as a portion of our immigrant, legal immigrant, population is 37 times higher than it was less than 40 years ago.

Interestingly, guess which state is the top destination for black African immigrants? California? No. New York? No.

Texas.

Why a southern, conservative state like Texas, which is supposedly anti-immigration? Specific reasons were not given in the research. But it does not seem hard to surmise.

Still the land of opportunity

Opportunity matters.

Immigrants, legal immigrants, don’t come here looking for handouts and government benefits. They still see America as the land of opportunity, where they can make a better life for themselves and for their children. And Texas is one of the best states for immigrants who want to work hard to get ahead and seize opportunities.

This is all completely countervailing to the views of many in elite American institutions, such as the media, Hollywood and the federal government in D.C. In those circles — and among those they influence — America continues to to be an ultra racist country that elected Donald Trump based on racism.

You can see such stories on virtually a daily basis in national news, online mainstream media sites and in your local media outlets. But they are at odds with this immigration reality — which they all but ignore.

Seeing America as ultra racist considering the state of the world has long seemed fictitious, a political opportunity for many to pit the races against each other in search of money, power and votes. It worked well for some black “leaders” such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, Jr. and new black lives matter leaders such as Deroy Murdock and others. But it is not true. Other causes are driving poverty and violence in many American cities.

And now we can see in black people’s actual life choices from the African continent, it appears even more clearly not to be true.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The Revolutionary Act. Readers may subscribe to The Revolutionary Act’s YouTube channel by clicking here.

Harvard students holding ‘Blacks only’ graduation ceremony — Jim Crow Racism?

In an eHeadlines.com column BREAKING: Harvard University Organizes SHOCKINGLY Racist Event On Campus…Reminiscent Of Jim Crow [VIDEO] 

Harvard University will be holding a special separate graduation ceremony this year for black graduate students, with plans to expand the new tradition to include black undergraduate students.

The special ceremony and subsequent reception will feature some 125 black students, who raised upwards of $27,000 themselves to cover the ceremony and party, The College Fix reported. It is worth noting that these students will also be taking part in the regular Harvard graduation ceremony for all students.

From Conservative Tribune

The ceremony, first reported by The Root, was scheduled to take place May 23 and intended to “acknowledge the struggles and resilience that black students have had to possess in order to thrive in higher education,” especially in a predominately white environment like the campus of Harvard.

“This is an opportunity to celebrate Harvard’s black excellence and black brilliance,” said Michael Huggins, soon to graduate with a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. “It’s an event where we can see each other and our parents and family can see us as a collective, whole group. A community.”

“This is not about segregation,” Huggins added. “It’s about fellowship and building a community. This is a chance to reaffirm for each other that we enter the work world with a network of supporters standing with us. We are all partners.”

Except that graduation ceremonies already provided a venue where parents, family and friends could celebrate the achievement and take note of the “network of supporters” without regard to race, color or creed.

It also would seem that Huggins was unclear on the definition of “segregation,” as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it: “(T)he separation or isolation of a race, class, or ethnic group by enforced or voluntary residence in a restricted area, by barriers to social intercourse, by separate educational facilities, or by other discriminatory means,” as well as, “(T)he separation for special treatment or observation of individuals or items from a larger group.”

A blacks-only ceremony would seem to fit both definitions, but, moving right along …

Read more…

RELATED ARTICLE: The Ugly Racism of Karl Marx

The suppression of expression on campus needs to stop

As I have noted many times, and experienced firsthand in the last few weeks at the University at Buffalo, Truman State University, and Gettysburg College, colleges and universities today are not institutions of higher learning, but factories of hard-Left and pro-jihad indoctrination, propagandizing and brainwashing students into becoming ugly little fascist shock troops for twenty-first century totalitarians. Administrators, as I have also experienced firsthand, not just at the University at Buffalo but also in the past at Temple University, Saint Anselm College and DePaul University, actively aid and abet all this.

Public universities and colleges must cease to be indoctrination centers for the hard-Left, and ensure that dissent from the Leftist line is not censored and the dissenters brutalized, or they should receive no taxpayer funding of any kind, and required to include in all promotional literature a statement to the effect that they don’t receive any public funding because of their intolerance of all intellectual dissent. If they are private universities or colleges, they should be required to include a warning label on all their promotional literature: “Warning: this institution does not tolerate views that deviate from the mainstream Leftist line. Enroll at your own risk.”

“Editorial: The suppression of expression on campus needs to stop,” Daily Commercial (Leesburg, Florida), May 5, 2017:

President Donald Trump has rattled some in our political chattering class with overtures to some of the ruthless dictators stalking our globe. We’ve lived for months with unsupported speculation about Trump’s bromance with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump has exacerbated the hand-wringing recently by positive references directed at the likes of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Egypt’s Abdel ¬Fatah al-Sissi.

One chief complaint from the president’s critics is that Trump is inappropriately extending goodwill to strongmen with weak records of tolerating dissent, free expression and human rights.

Perhaps we would better served if those who questioned the president’s attitude toward the world’s worst authoritarians would stop tolerating homegrown forces who emulate their behavior.

Last week outspoken conservative pundit and author Ann Coulter was slated to shake up the hallowed halls at California’s premiere state university in Berkeley, which prides itself on uninhibited expression. Invited by a pair of conservative student groups, Coulter was expected to talk about her support for Trump and his immigrati0n views. It didn’t happen.

University administrators cancelled her April 27 appearance in mid-April, a few days after an unrelated brawl broke out in downtown Berkeley between pro- and anti-Trump forces. The college then offered to reschedule for Tuesday (when classes would be out). Coulter rejected the offer and vowed to come to Berkeley on the original date, and then watched as her sponsors bailed, leading her to ditch the idea for good.

The reason provided by the university and Coulter’s sponsors was the same: the atmosphere on campus had become so poisonous that neither side could guarantee the safety of Coulter or, presumably, her fans or the protesters.

Yet Coulter’s was the third appearance by a conservative at the supposed birthplace of the Free Speech Movement that was cancelled because of fear about the violent reaction of those who despise the president. In February UC-Berkeley dropped former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos after an anti-Trump protest devolved into a riot.

The College Republicans at Berkeley then invited David Horowitz, a UC-Berkeley grad and one-time apologist for the Black Panthers who converted to conservatism, to his alma mater in mid-April as a substitute for Yiannopoulos. The group pulled the plug on that after campus police declared that, in order to diminish the threat of violence, Horowitz could only speak in the afternoon, not in the evening, and only to students. The event was cancelled, the College Republicans’ president wrote, because the police rules left only one venue, located some seven blocks from campus, and would have cost the group several thousand dollars for security.

Such ill-tempered, anti-Trump fretting has been occurring again and again on campuses of all sizes.

Earlier this year conservative author Charles Murray’s attempt to speak at Middlebury College in Vermont sparked a brawl that left Murray’s campus sponsor in the hospital with a concussion, and him writing afterward that he feared for his safety.

Another conservative writer, Heather Mac Donald, was not allowed to speak publicly at Claremont McKenna College in California, but instead was ushered to a private room, where she gave her talk via livestream as demonstrators pounded on the windows of the room and hurled expletives at police.

At New York University, a protest of conservative journalist Gavin McInnes turned ugly, with demonstrators fighting police, pepper-spraying McInnes himself and nearly a dozen people arrested.

At the University of Buffalo this week, Robert Spencer, a conservative speaker who discusses Islamic terrorism, was shouted down and denounced as a Nazi by critics. No violence occurred, but audience members told reporters they feared the tension created by his appearance could have prompted it….

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Libertarian Jesus Memes Lampoon Leftists by Daniel J. Mitchell

It’s time to make a very serious point, albeit with a bit of humor and sarcasm.

A couple of years ago, I shared an image of Libertarian Jesus to make the point that it’s absurd to equate compassion and virtue with government-coerced redistribution.

We all can agree – at least I hope – that it is admirable to help the less fortunate with our own time and/or money. Indeed, I’m proud that Americans are much more likely to be genuinely generous than people from other countries (and it’s also worth noting that people from conservative states are more generous than people from leftist states).

But some of our statist friends go awry when they think it’s also noble and selfless to support higher tax rates and bigger government. How is it compassionate, I ask them, to forcibly give away someone else’s money? Especially when those policies actually undermine progress in the fight against poverty!

With this in mind, here’s another great example of Libertarian Jesus (h/t: Reddit).

Amen (pun intended), I’m going to add this to my collection of libertarian humor.

But don’t overlook the serious part of the message. As Cal Thomas succinctly explained, it’s hardly a display of religious devotion when you use coercion to spend other people’s money.

This is why I’ve been critical of Pope Francis. His heart may be in the right place, but he’s misguided about the policies that actually help the less fortunate.

For what it’s worth, it would be helpful if he was guided by the moral wisdom of Walter Williams rather than the destructive statism of Juan Peron.

P.S. I’m rather amused that socialists, when looking for Christmas-themed heroes, could only identify people who practice non-coercive generosity.

P.P.S. On a separate topic, Al Gore blames climate change for Brexit.

Brexit was caused in part by climate change, former US Vice-President Al Gore has said, warning that extreme weather is creating political instability “the world will find extremely difficult to deal with.”

I’m beginning to lose track and get confused. Our statist friends have told us that climate change causes AIDS and terrorism, which are bad things. But now they’re telling us climate change caused Brexit, which is a good thing.

Maybe the real lesson is that Al Gore and his friends are crackpots.

Republished from International Liberty.

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review.

On this Europe Day, Let’s Oppose the EU for the Right Reasons by Bill Wirtz

The 9th of May is supposed to mark a celebratory day for the European Union, congratulating itself for peace and unity in Europe. On May 9th 1950, Robert Schuman, then Foreign minister of France, set out his so-called Schuman Plan, which suggested that Germany and France should ease the sharing of strategic resources like coal in order to make a war between the two countries virtually impossible. This policy led to the European Community on Coal and Steel: a forerunner in the creation of what would become the European Union in the early 1990’s.

While the EU might celebrate the legacy of Robert Schuman’s free trade advocacy, its political structure has degenerated into something far more invasive than the mere easement of political dialogue. It actively combats the free market. For instance, the EU constantly considers tax harmonisation and over-regulates people’s personal habits (the EU recently introduced heavy regulation regarding e-cigarettes).

While trade barriers inside the EU have been abolished, the EU acts like a protectionist block when it comes to non-EU members: it subsidises European farmers, sets very high food standards (which keep African goods off the market) and imposes import taxes.

Anglo-Saxon Euroscepticism

“Only a fourth of all Brexit voters support UKIP”, said the conservative Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Daniel Hannan in a speech in Strasbourg last July. And indeed, while public perception of the European continent classifies many Brexit fans as anti-immigration and, all too often, as racists and bigots, there is a genuine Anglo-Saxon euroscepticism out there, which relies on the following principles:

  • Localism (the belief that the policymakers should be as close to citizens as possible, so that many important decisions should actually be taken on the local level),
  • Small government (a palpable scepticism towards big government and its tendency to constantly grow), and
  • Free markets (the opposition to government interfering in prices and interactions on the labour market).

These principles, while sometimes forgotten by certain governments, have been engrained in the Anglo-Saxon spirit for a long time and they have driven the Brexit spirit. Without the British small-government opposition to the EU, Brexit never would have happened. In fact, by illustrating that the union has lost its free trade roots (and become a poster child for social democracy), Brexiteers should be an inspiration to the political personnel in Brussels.

Don’t Be that Populist

Meanwhile, the eurosceptic movement, including that inside the liberty movement, has been infested with a different kind of opposition to the Brussels bureaucracy. These members of the new political right are not allies to the liberty movement, as they reject the EU for the one reason: they believe that the immigration that the EU allows for is to the detriment of the European culture.

We could point out that the European Union’s immigration policy guides movement inside of its own borders, while immigration from outside is left up to its member states, but, more important than setting the facts straight, we need to address one important point: The enemies of our enemies aren’t our friends.

When we shout ‘power to the people’ we defend individualism, the power of the people to govern themselves, not the power of the people to bully their neighbours, even if they have different reasons than those who are already in charge. We may agree with advocates of different political agendas, but let us not forget what their motivations are.

Europe Day is a day when we should remind officials in Brussels that the EU was a project of mutual cooperation, not that of crushing regulation, instead of burning the EU flag in an attempt to gain attention.

If the European Union does fail in the end, it will need advocates of small government and free markets to replace the void with liberty, not nationalists who wish to replace the EU with another brand of big government.

Lovers of liberty, in the United Kingdom or abroad, need to understand that we don’t oppose the European Union because we are contrarians, or because we enjoy the rush of being the negating viewpoint, but because our belief in small government is sincere. International organisations should not have the vast power to interfere in the life of individuals.

And neither should anyone else.

Bill Wirtz

Bill Wirtz

Bill Wirtz

Bill Wirtz studies French Law at the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France.

Any ‘Immigration Reform’ Must Put Americans First

Political compromise must not jeopardize national security, public safety, or the well-being of Americans.

“New and Improved” is a label often slapped on products to swindle consumers out of money.

Several years ago my local grocery store hung up banners declaring that they had permanently lowered the price of bags of sugar. I was impressed. I grabbed a couple of bags of sugar thinking I would save some money. Then I checked a bag and discovered that they no longer contained five pounds of sugar, but four pounds. Instead of saving money, the new bags cost more per pound.

Politicians employ similar tactics. They have elevated the use of Orwellian Newspeak to a true art form. Consider the con game known as “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”

The issue of immigration reform reemerged after President Trump’s first speech before a joint session of Congress:

I believe that real and positive immigration reform is possible, as long as we focus on the following goals: to improve jobs and wages for Americans, to strengthen our nation’s security, and to restore respect for our laws.

If we are guided by the well-being of American citizens, then I believe Republicans and Democrats can work together to achieve an outcome that has eluded our country for decades.

President Trump’s statement and his views on true immigration reform — putting Americans first — contrasts significantly from “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” — a program that would put the interests of illegal aliens before the national interest, which politicians have attempted to foist on Americans for decades.

Politicians know that American citizens are adamantly opposed to any “amnesty.” They make the bogus claim that if illegal aliens pay back taxes and learn English, then it is not an amnesty program. Legalizing illegal aliens forgives them for violating the law and provides them with the authority to work legally.

Scamming politicians (forgive the redundancy) from both political parties, accompanied by pollsters, pundits, leaders of industries, and special interest groups, continually claim that our “immigration system is broken,” citing the presence of millions of illegal aliens in the United States, and the need for “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”

Essentially their “fix” would legalize nearly all of the illegal aliens and, in the short term, the U.S. would no longer have millions of illegal aliens. This isn’t a new approach to “fixing” the “broken immigration system.”

A massive amnesty program to provide unknown millions of illegal aliens with lawful status was tried by the Reagan Administration in 1986 when the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was enacted, with disastrous results. It incentivized the subsequent illegal entry of millions of illegal aliens.

The Reagan Administration estimated that roughly one million illegal aliens would come out of the “shadows.” This supposedly one-time measure provided more than 3.5 million illegal aliens with lawful status, including terrorists and criminals.

Massive numbers of aspiring illegal aliens were obviously encouraged by the Reagan amnesty. It would likely be repeated in the future. Since IRCA was enacted three decades ago, the number of illegal aliens went from nearly zero to the current officially estimated 11 million.

However, in 2007, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the U.S. had 12 million illegal aliens.

It is entirely likely, as we saw with the Reagan amnesty, that at least three times as many illegal aliens would participate in Comprehensive Immigration Reform. This could mean that 30 to 40 millions illegal aliens might well participate in any legalization program that would be an integral component of Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

Notwithstanding the failures of IRCA, politicians, pundits, pollsters, and leaders of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, not to mention a wide array of special interest groups, have insisted that “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” would purportedly fix the “broken immigration system.” Deriding any claim that securing our borders and effectively enforcing our immigration laws would deter illegal immigration, these critics argue that, inasmuch as we cannot deport all illegal aliens, we should accept that they are here and provide them with pathways to legalization.

Officials who wield political power actually seek to encourage such law violations, flooding America with cheap foreign labor. This not only applies to illegal aliens, who take economic bottom-rung jobs, but also to holders of the ever-expanding numbers of non-immigrant work visas and investor visas that have flooded America’s middle class high-tech professions as well.

In fact, one provision of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” would greatly increase the number of H-1B visas for high-tech foreign workers. Alan Green-span, in testimony before the Senate Immigration Subcommittee in 2009, urged Congress to enact “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.” He supported a provision that would no longer shield American workers from foreign competition. Greenspan outrageously referred to high-skilled American workers as the “privileged elite” — those who were earning a “wage premium.”

In virtually any other area of law enforcement, when large numbers of individuals commit violations of significant laws, the usual (rational) reaction is to ramp up enforcement efforts to identify law violators, increase penalties for those caught breaking the law, and flood media with public service announcements warning that law violators will be identified and punished severely.

This approach not only punishes the violators, but deters others from violating the law. I refer to this as “deterrence through enforcement.”

This enforcement-based deterrence has targeted impaired drivers, who operate their motor vehicles under the influence of alcohol. The combined use of administrative sanctions, such as longer suspensions and costly fines, and harsh legal penalties has reduced alcohol-related crashes and fatalities over the past three decades. Does anyone seriously believe that such progress would have been possible if alcohol-impaired drivers received little if any punishment?

Where massive violations of immigration laws are concerned, a very different approach has been tried repeatedly, and, not surprisingly, the number of illegal alien law violators has increased exponentially. Most people would consequently say that this strategy is a failure.

For the globalist immigration anarchists in both political parties, and for globalists in a wide array of industries and special interest groups, however, this failure is actually a huge success; they are getting precisely what they want — a virtually limitless supply of cheap labor, foreign tourists, and foreign students.

Universities have been able to enroll ever-increasing numbers of foreign students, who are also likely to be granted temporary employment opportunities, which displaces highly skilled American workers and creates wages suppression for those who keep their jobs.

A massive amnesty program would greatly increase the labor force by providing unknown millions of foreign workers with an equal standing in America’s overflowing labor pool.

The immigration system’s lack of integrity mirrors our political system’s lack of integrity.

As the saying goes, “Follow the money.”

Even the fact that the 9/11 Commission identified multiple endemic failures of the immigration system as being the underlying root cause that repeatedly enabled terrorists (and not only those who participated in the attacks of 9/11) to enter the U.S. and embed themselves as they went about their deadly preparations has not persuaded immigration anarchists to abandon their duplicitous position on immigration.

Democrats generally seek pathways to citizenship for illegal aliens, while Republicans, who claim to be “tough” on immigration, say we should “only” provide lawful status and permission to work.

This “all or nothing” approach to law enforcement is unique to immigration. Most laws are only enforced a fraction of a percent. Yet no one ever suggests that laws which cannot be enforced 100 percent of the time not be enforced. Immigration is the odd exception.

For the most part, the only thing that Comprehensive Immigration Reform would accomplish is to make it easier for huge numbers of aliens to enter the U.S. and acquire lawful authority to work.

All that this has done is to encourage millions of aspiring illegal aliens from around the world to head for the U.S., enter unlawfully, and take advantage of our economic and political system. They have become convinced that, once here, nothing will be done to identify them, whether they run our borders or violate the terms of their lawful admissions.

Furthermore, all of the calls for a massive legalization from leaders of both political parties add another powerful incentive to these foreign nationals, convincing them that sooner or later all illegal aliens will be granted lawful status.

However, Donald Trump has thrown a huge monkey wrench into the plans of the globalists by declaring that he would not only build a wall to secure our southern border, but triple the number of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents to effectively enforce the immigration laws from within the interior of the U.S.

President Trump has, through his executive orders, addressed virtually all of the vulnerabilities I identified when I testified before numerous Congressional hearings in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

President Obama declared wide categories of illegal aliens were “off limits” to ICE agents. This served to intimidate those beleaguered agents into not making arrests. Back when I was an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) special agent, we had an expression worth considering, “Big cases, big problems; little cases, little problems; no cases, no problems!”

One of the issues addressed by President Trump’s executive orders is the fact that while the emphasis of ICE will be to locate and arrest aliens who have criminal histories, no illegal alien is off limits. This is extremely important because it helps restore integrity to the immigration system and also inserts “randomness” into the immigration law enforcement program. Terrorists in hiding can no longer be confident that they won’t be arrested.

This also deters many illegal aliens from coming to the U.S. because they can no longer expect that their immigration law violations will likely be ignored. This is likely why, in March 2017, the Border Patrol reported that illegal entries were down by 40 percent.

President Trump has called for truly reforming the immigration system by focusing not on family reunification, but on a merit-based system. He has also made it clear that he wants American workers to do the jobs in America.

While it goes without saying that truly exceptional immigrants should be encouraged to enter the country legally, hundreds of thousands of ordinary foreign workers are hardly exceptional.

No massive legalization system should ever be implemented for unknown millions of illegal aliens.

There would be no way to interview the likely tens of millions of illegal aliens and certainly not to conduct field investigations into their applications. Therefore there would be no way to determine who they are, their true backgrounds, and any affiliations with criminal or terrorist organizations.

The entry of aliens who run our borders is known as Entry Without Inspection (EWI). Since there is no record of the entry, it is impossible to verify if they entered the U.S. seven years ago or seven days ago.

Think of how often politicians, pollsters, and pundits support granting lawful status to illegal aliens, who are not violent felons. No one ever raises the question about how their true entry data could be verified.

This would create an open invitation for fraud.

Flooding the labor pool with millions of authorized foreign workers would displace American and lawful immigrant workers and drive down wages.

Finally, an issue that has never been reported by the media is that, if an amnesty was enacted, all heretofore illegal aliens would have the absolute right to petition the government to allow their spouses and minor children to enter under “family reunification.” Given the propensity of Third World families to have many children, it is possible that more children would be subsequently admitted into the United States than the number of illegal aliens who would be legalized.

This would impose a huge challenge on America’s already struggling education system. Indeed, in a report issued in 2007, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that it costs 20 to 40 percent more to educate children who are not literate in the English language.

How on earth would the already beleaguered American education system cope with the influx of unknown millions of foreign students of whom many would likely lack English language proficiency?

How carefully could all of those alien minors be vetted to make certain that they are truly the children of the newly legalized aliens? How carefully could they be vetted to determine if they have affiliations with gangs or terrorist groups in their home countries?

There is nothing “compassionate” about exploiting foreign workers, displacing American workers, and driving down wages.

There is nothing “compassionate” about depriving American children of their American Dreams.

There is nothing “compassionate” about leaving America and Americans vulnerable to international terrorists and transnational criminals.

Our immigration laws were originally enacted to save American lives and the jobs of American workers — it is time to go back to the future.

For once and for all, the well-being of Americans must be the government’s top priority.