House Speaker Paul Ryan — America’s worst nightmare

Dear Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI),

I understand that your wife Janna is a life long member of the Democrat party and worked very hard to elect Obama and tried to elect Hillary Clinton – into the Oval Office.

Your Democrat induced family network is deeply embedded in this nation as you wrap tightly around the necks of the American people and the small business owners that are trying to make America great again under the leadership of President Trump.

You are a fake and a fraud – you, sir, are a liberal posing as an American impeding the Trump economic recovery for this Republic.

You claim you want to cut spending while turning a blind eye to unconstitutional expenditures. For example: No attempt has been made to defund the unconstitutionally funded U.S. Department of Education (DOE)

The disclaimer on the DOE website clearly states the 10th Amendment protects the states from federal intrusion in funding and educating our children.

It states:

“Please note that in the U.S., the federal role in education is limited. Because of the Tenth Amendment, most education policy is decided at the state and local levels. So, if you have a question about a policy or issue, you may want to check with the relevant organization in your state or school district.”

So why are you Paul Ryan funding an increase of $1.3 billion tax payer dollars more for FY 17 for the Department of Education than was given in 2016? Do we borrow more money from China to cover this expense? Maybe we can send the bill to your wife’s idol Hillary Clinton?

The DOE budget request for FY 2017 includes $69.4 billion in discretionary funding, which is an increase of $1.3 billion over the 2016 appropriation. This is totally unacceptable tax payer waste and abuse.

Why is the federal government working through the Department of Education funding elementary and secondary programs annually handing out tax payer cash to 16,900 school districts and approximately 50 million students attending more than 98,000 public schools and 28,000 private schools?

Under whose authority? The Constitution does not permit this folly Mr. Speaker!

Department programs also provide grant, loan, and work-study assistance to more than 13 million post-secondary students.

Why is this?

Who decides this redistribution-of-wealth to the far left colleges ran by pro Marxist – LGBT embracing – Communists leading our kids down the Socialist path of destruction?

This unconstitutional intrusion into our schools gave President Obama and his wife unprecedented control over all schools in this nation that accepted this fleeced tax payer money.

Right down to what the kids can eat for lunch with the federal bureaucrats inspecting our kids brown bag lunches to make sure they were compliant with Michelle Obama’s menu.

Our national debt is $20 Trillion.

Mr. Ryan – when you decide to return back to constitutional governance and defund and abolish this Jimmy Carter approved DOE assault on our schools please let us know.

So while the Republican led Congress sits on its asinus refusing to address the debt on this nation created by the unprecedented out of control spending by the Congress of the United States – we Americans will keep you in the spotlight until you resign from your leadership post in the Congress.

President Trump has only one tool blocking the Congressional excesses to free this nation from the over bloated – tax payer abusing Communist – Socialist Congress – YOU!

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Craziest activist photos from the #MarchForScience

Their true colors shine brightly:

This Earth Day, April 22, Earth Day Network and the March for Science are co-organizing a rally and teach-in on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The day’s program will include speeches and trainings with scientists and civic organizers, musical performances, and a march through the streets of Washington, D.C. The crowd will gather at 8:00am, and the teach-in will begin at 09:00 am.

Here’s a photo of AP’s science writer Seth Borenstein doing an interview with, er, Barney. I think. Pretty well sums up Seth’s outlook.

Godwin’s law was proven early, and this sign, pretty well sums up the insanity:

I seem to recall leftists went berserk when the Heartland institute put up a billboard with a similar meme, using the unabomber. But, apparently its OK when they do it.

Ummm….WTF?

Marine Le Pen’s powerful ‘In The Name Of The People’ video

In a column titled Best campaign ad ever? Marine Le Pen’s powerful new ad “In The Name Of The People” will blow you away TheRebel.media reports:

Marine Le Pen’s newest ad may as well be a movie trailer. It’s that impressive.

It begins with the National Front Leader introducing herself and the passion she has for France. She goes on to say the country has lost its way with Islamic fundamentalism, victims not getting justice, and politicians betraying the people.

Essentially, she promises to make France Great Again and restore the country to its once united, proud and prosperous state.

The ad has spawned the hashtag #AuNomDuPeuple which translates to In The Name Of The People, which is what Le Pen says at the end of the ad.

RELATED ARTICLE: France’s Election Is Also a Crossroads for Europe

Marine Le Pen is the ‘France First’ candidate

Marion Anne Perrine “Marine” Le Pen is a French lawyer and politician. Ms. Le Pen stepped down as the president of the National Front to become the people’s candidate. “Tonight, I am no longer the president of the National Front. I am the presidential candidate,” she said on French public television news after winning in the first round of the election.

If elected Ms. Le Pen would become the first woman to lead the Gouvernement de la République française

Marion Anne Perrine “Marine” Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron (right)

 has described Le Pen’s opponent Emmanuel Macron as, “[T]he horrible crossbreeding of Obama and Soros and Justin Trudeau.”

Breibart’s Jack Montgomery reports:

Marine Le Pen, the presidential candidate for France’s populist National Front (FN), has pledged to put France first, hitting out at “financial globalisation”, “mass immigration”, and “Islamic fundamentalism” in a landmark speech.

The 48-year-old said that “financial globalisation and Islamist globalisation are helping each other out”, and “those two ideologies aim to bring France to its knees”.

According to Le Pen, globalisation can be summed up as “manufacturing with slaves to sell to the unemployed”. She pledged that an FN-led republic would be “will be all about the local, not the global”.

So what does Le Pen stand for? According to her campaign website here are some items from her platform:

  1. To regain our freedom and mastery of our destiny by restoring to the French people its sovereignty (monetary, legislative, territorial, economic).
  2. Guarantee freedom of expression and digital freedoms through their inclusion in fundamental freedoms protected by the Constitution, while strengthening the fight against cyber-jihadism and pedophilia.
  3. Defending women’s rights : fighting against Islamism, which undermines their fundamental freedoms; Put in place a national plan for equal pay for women and men and fight against job and social insecurity.
  4. Ensure the freedom of schooling of children according to their choices , while at the same time strictly controlling the compatibility with the values of the Republic of the education provided in private non-contractual institutions.
  5. Massive re-armament of the security forces  : personnel (recruitment plan of 15,000 police and gendarmes), equipment (modernization of equipment, police stations and barracks, adaptation of armaments to new threats), but also morally and (Including the presumption of self-defense). Guarantee the military status of gendarmes.
  6. Fight against juvenile delinquency by empowering parents by eliminating the payment of social assistance to parents of repeat offenders in the event of manifest educational deficiencies.
  7. Restore national borders and exit the Schengen area (a special arrangement for border workers will be put in place to facilitate border crossing). Replenish the number of staff removed from customs by the recruitment of 6,000 staff during the five-year period.
  8. Reducing legal immigration to an annual balance of 10 000. To put an end to automatic automatic family reunification and reconciliation and the automatic acquisition of French nationality by marriage. Remove the suction pumps from immigration.
  9. Putting in place a plan for re-industrialization in the framework of cooperation involving industry and the state-strategist to give priority to the real economy in the face of speculative finance.
  10. Supporting French companies in the face of unfair international competition through the establishment of intelligent protectionism and the restoration of a national currency adapted to our economy, which is the lever of our competitiveness.
  11. Establish a true economic patriotism by freeing itself from European constraints and by reserving public order to French companies if the price gap is reasonable. Reserve a part of the public order to SMEs.
  12. Reducing the administrative and fiscal complexity of small and medium-sized  enterprises (SMEs): dedicated one stop-shop (social, fiscal and administrative), generalization of the “emploi emploi service entreprise” New device based on a personalized evaluation thanks to an occupational medicine that will be reconstituted. The penalty will be offset by an increase in pension annuities.

Go here to read Ms. Le Pen’s entire platform.

The media is characterizing Ms. Le Pen as the “far right candidate” and her opponent Macron as a “moderate.”  reports that Macron is anything but a moderate. Lépante writes:

Macron is an ultra-leftist who viscerally hates France and the French people. He has said many times that “there is no French culture”, that “he has never seen French art” (meaning that French art doesn’t exist), therefore he denies the very existence of the French people (because all people has his own culture)! And he has accused France of crimes against humanity in Algeria, when in fact it’s the Algerians who are guilty of crimes against humanity, because they reduced into slavery more than 1 million of our ancestors and slaughtered more than 1 million French people from 8th to 19th century!

Macron has said time and again that he supports mass immigration into France from Africa ! That millions of immigrants will continue to invade our European countries and that it’s a good thing! And he has praised the traitor to the German people Angela Merkel for letting 1 million illegal Muslim immigrants invade Germany in 2015, resulting in thousands of German women raped and numerous terrorist attacks!

Macron has said that he wants to create an “French-Algerian Youth Office” to increase the entry of Algerians into France, these Algerians being predominantly racist scums who insult and rape our wives and daughters, who attack and kill our parents and children, who rob, maim, kill, commit terror attack after terror attack. As a reminder, Muslims represent more than 70% of the prisoners in our prisons.

France has a choice on Sunday, May 7th, 2017 between Marine Le Pen, the French patriot and Emmanuel Macron, the establishment’s choice.

Choose wisely!

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Ecosexuals Believe Having Sex with the Earth Could Save It

The title of this article is not a joke, neither is it fake news nor political satire. It is the title of an article by Neil McArthur from Vice.com.

McArthur reports:

From skinny dippers to people who have actual intercourse with nature, ecosexuality is a growing movement taking a new approach to combatting climate change.

If you happen to find yourself in Sydney this week, you have the unique opportunity to have sex with the earth. You just need to stop by the “ecosexual bathhouse,” which is currently part of the Syndey LiveWorks Festival of experimental art. The bathhouse is an interactive installation created by artists Loren Kronemyer and Ian Sinclair of Pony Express, who described the work to me as a “no-holds-barred extravaganza meant to dissolve the barriers between species as we descend into oblivion” as the result of our global environmental crisis. But they also see their piece as a part of a much larger ecosexual movement, which they say is gathering momentum around the world.

And they may be right. Jennifer Reed, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is writing a dissertation on ecosexuality, and says that the number of people who identify as ecosexuals has increased markedly in the past two years. And Google search data confirms that interest in the term has spiked dramatically over the past year. We may look back on 2016 as the year ecosexuality hit the mainstream.

Ecosexuality is a term with wide-ranging definitions, which vary depending on who you ask.

Read more…

According to Wikipedia, “Earth religion is a term used mostly in the context of neopaganism.”

I wish after reading McArthur’s column I could find a way to justify this renewal of barbarism, this neopaganism. But I can’t.

If this isn’t worshiping a false idol I don’t know what is.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of participants at the Ecosexual Bathhouse by the art group Pony Express. Photo by Matt Sav

‘March for Science’ invokes God, Hitler, Gay Marriage, Racism, Sexism

“Having spent the day in D.C. on April 22 interviewing the marchers, it struck me about how this is first and foremost a march for endless government funding, ideology and in support of a no dissent policy. (Another new study gives plenty of reason to dissent: New Climate Study Calls EPA’s Labeling Of CO2 A Pollutant ‘Totally False’) The Trump administration can help make science great again by resisting these pay up and shut up demands for taxpayer research money.” See: Bloomberg News: Obama ‘stashed’ $77 billion in ‘climate money’ across agencies to elude budget cuts

Watch: Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer criticizes ‘March for Science’: ‘It is sort of a religious belief for them’ – Dr. Will Happer on Fox News: Asked about more government funded science?  Happer: “We’ve had 8 years of very highly politicized so-called research on climate. It’s not what most of us would recognize as real scientific research. Something where the outcome was demanded before the funding was provided. We should tend to real environmental problems and fix them and stop chasing these phantom problems that are really just religious dogma.”

Watch CNN Debate: Bill Nye blows gasket when a real scientist Dr. Will Happer schools him on ‘climate change’

Pictures and reports about the ‘March for Science’

HITLER DFOUBTED

‘March for Science’: Politics Disguised as Science: When to Doubt a Scientific ‘Consensus’ – The early claims of 97% ‘consensus’: In 1992, former Vice President Al Gore reassured his listeners, “Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.”

Climatologist Dr. Roger A. Pielke Sr: “If there was any doubt the “March on Science” is political – The march is explicitly a political movement” See full article

Science March 2

Anti-Trump ‘March For Science’ Protest Has Problems W/ Bill Nye Because He’s A White Guy

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Gender strudies

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry rips ‘march for science’ as ‘a self-serving navel gazing exercise for scientists’ — A ‘we don’t like Trump’ tantrum

The March is over: 

Prof. Roger Pielke Jr.: ‘The smartest people on the planet want to oppose Trump and the best they can come up with is a march in support of themselves?’

Why This Scientist Did Not Attend The ‘Science March’ – ‘Hijacked’ by ‘political partisanship’

Bio Sex

Warmist Michael Mann at ‘March for Science’: ‘Science & scientists are now under attack in this country’

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Elected Science Deniers Are a Threat to Democracy

MARCH FOR SCIENCE UNDER ATTACK FOR LEFT-TILTING POLITICAL AGENDA – “It clearly has a partisan framing,” said Roger A. Pielke Sr., senior research scientist, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. Mr. Pielke, who has been criticized by the climate-change movement for challenging the “consensus,” said he fears the event may erode the public’s trust in science by reinforcing the impression that research is being spun to advance political causes. “I feel this will hurt the reputation of scientists as honest brokers,” said Mr. Pielke in an email. “This march will make them (appropriately) seen as advocates for the liberal side of the Democratic Party. This is not healthy for science, and more broadly, in terms of how scientists engage with policymakers.”

Science March

The Anti-Science ‘March for Science’: ‘Soviet-style central planning of economy in name of ‘saving’ Mother Earth – Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.: “If the climate science is “settled”, as claimed at the March, why argue for so much money for multidecadal climate prediction modeling?”

Bill Nye, The Cognitive Dissonance Guy – ‘He is a junk science guy’

Physicist: ‘March For Science’ is deeply misguided, unethical – Trying to get money for left-wing activists & pretend it’s money for science – Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl on March For Science: “It’s a political event organized by extreme leftists whom I can’t respect and it tries to promote various pet causes of these extremists such as the affirmative action as well as junk science such as the climate hysteria to the status of science, and to get money for basically left-wing activists, although they want to pretend it’s the money for science.”

A real ‘March for Science’ would celebrate scientific puzzles, disagreements, & competing ideas’

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano interviewing at the march

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Craziest activist photos from the #marchforscience #sciencemarchdc

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Earth Day Must Divorce Itself From The Climate Scare

CNN criticized on Earth Day for daring to air a climate skeptic

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Our Air Is Cleaner Than Ever, So Why Do People Think It’s Getting Worse?

John Stossel: ‘Gore creatively misremembers his own movie’ & Climate march is ‘really marching for a left-wing religion’ – John Stossel: ‘Now Gore claims “the most criticized” part of the film was his assertion that the 9/11 memorial site would flood. Then, during Hurricane Sandy, it did! But Gore creatively misremembers his own movie. He had claimed the World Trade Center would flood because of a permanent 20-foot sea-level rise. Actual scientists called that nonsense. It would take hundreds of years for such a thing to possibly happen. But since the area flooded, briefly, Gore spins that as confirmation of his exaggerations.’

On March for Science in DC: ‘The alarmists claim they’re marching for “science,” but they’re really marching for a left-wing religion.’

Analysis: ‘March for Science a Dud’

March for Science rallies take aim at climate change skepticism, proposed budget cuts

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Meteorologist Joe Bastardi: The March for … What?

Democrats Scramble All Over Each Other To Show Support For Science March

Stand up and ‘March for Science’ say people who don’t know what science is

It’s a march for “robust funding” (give us the money)

AFL-CIO: ‘Unionized Scientists March in Protest of Attacks on Science and Jobs’ – Oppose Budget Cuts

It’s not a ‘March for Science’ – it’s ‘Anti-Trump Day’

This Isn’t A ‘March For Science’ — This Is About Economic And Political Policy
CFACT’s David Rothbard at the March filming:

A Warning Letter from France about the Presidential Election!

FRENCH ELECTION RESULTSAs you know, the first round of the French presidential election took place this past Sunday, April 23rd.

Emmanuel Macron (who is the direct heir of the incompetent and traitor and anti-French socialist president François Hollande) and the nationalist Marine Le Pen are qualified for the second round. But Marine Le Pen has almost no possibility to win and become the next French president.

Macron will most probably be the next French president. This Macron is a sort of white Obama, but more extremist, more anti-Western, more anti-Christian, more anti-Jewish, than Obama was!

Emmanuel Macron was called by and talked with Barack Obama after the election.

Macron is the horrible crossbreeding of Obama and Soros and Justin Trudeau.

Macron is an ultra-leftist who viscerally hates France and the French people. He has said many times that “there is no French culture”, that “he has never seen French art” (meaning that French art doesn’t exist), therefore he denies the very existence of the French people (because all people has his own culture)! And he has accused France of crimes against humanity in Algeria, when in fact it’s the Algerians who are guilty of crimes against humanity, because they reduced into slavery more than 1 million of our ancestors and slaughtered more than 1 million French people from 8th to 19th century!

Macron has said time and again that he supports mass immigration into France from Africa ! That millions of immigrants will continue to invade our European countries and that it’s a good thing! And he has praised the traitor to the German people Angela Merkel for letting 1 million illegal Muslim immigrants invade Germany in 2015, resulting in thousands of German women raped and numerous terrorist attacks!

Macron has said that he wants to create an “French-Algerian Youth Office” to increase the entry of Algerians into France, these Algerians being predominantly racist scums who insult and rape our wives and daughters, who attack and kill our parents and children, who rob, maim, kill, commit terror attack after terror attack. As a reminder, Muslims represent more than 70% of the prisoners in our prisons.

MohamedSaou

Emmanuel Macron with Mohamed Saou (right)

Macron has many Muslim extremists around him, one of them (Mohamed Saou) who refused to condemn the assassination of Charlie Hebdo’s journalists in January 2015!

Macron is very close to Marwan Muhammad, a fanatical Muslim extremist who was fired by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) for spreading anti-Western Muslim propaganda, who wants to suppress any critic of Islam, and who supports islamization, burkas, burkinis and shariah (Islamic) law in France!

Macron has said he plans to introduce “positive” discrimination, which is, as it has been proven in America, anti-White racism. And he plans to use this “positive” discrimination to hire Muslims in place of French people.

Macron will dramatically increase the Islamization of France, and will do everything he can to force us to submit to Islam, this ideology worse than nazism ! That’s why all the Muslim organizations in France have called today Muslims to “vote massively” for Macron.

Paris and France will become even more dangerous places than they are already. Jews and Christians and non-Muslims will be attacked more and more often, and forced to flee France!

This is a catastrophe!

The first round victory of Macron was made possible by a horrendous “coup d’Etat”, orchestrated by François Hollande and the socialist government, who fabricated fake accusations against François Fillon, the leader of the French right, and ordered leftist judges to prosecute Fillon in violation of the French laws and the French Constitution, and by leftist journalists (more than 90% of French journalists are ultra-leftists) who have spread lies and disinformation against Fillon day after day during months.

America shall not follow Europe’s path!

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RELATED VIDEO: Marine Le Pen delivered a rousing speech to her enthusiastic supporters last night, declaring that it is time to “free the French people” from the destructive policies of open borders, open immigration and crushing EU regulations.

marine le pen quote

Citizenship Needs an Owner’s Manual by Lawrence W. Reed

When you buy a new car, you get an indispensable document called an Owner’s Manual. Nobody ever throws the manual away while he owns the car. It’s far more important than the slip of paper you get with a new flashlight that tells you where to put the batteries; you could figure that out on your own. A car has a maze of electronic circuitry; lots of buttons, dials and periodic maintenance requirements; and numerous moving parts both visible and hidden. Many things could go wrong if you don’t get things right.

Citizenship in a free republic is similar. Historically, it’s a scarce and valuable commodity. The freedom it conveys is much sought after but most people in history never achieved it and most of those currently living never will. Some who have it will lose it through assault or neglect. If and when you’re blessed to possess it, you will discover that it won’t run on its own.

You must take charge. Maintenance, after all, requires an active maintainer. So it is that citizenship in a free republic requires an Owner’s Manual, and now for Americans at least, activist and philanthropist Helen Krieble has given us one.

Helen Krieble, formerly of Colorado and now a resident again of her home state of Connecticut, is president of the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation. She’s a lifelong promoter and benefactor of freedom-related causes from regulation to immigration. Her late father, Robert Krieble, co-founder of the Loctite Corporation and former vice chairman of the Heritage Foundation, was known for his role in supporting freedom movements within the old Soviet Empire.

Helen has tangled with intrusive governments herself right in her own backyard, battling regulators in Colorado whose nonsense forced her to close and sell her beloved Colorado Horse Park, an international equestrian and events center.

She knows that freedom is never automatic or guaranteed from one generation to the next. She also knows that defending it begins at the most local level, the individual.

Helen is the prime mover behind many effective projects over the years, including the impressive Leadership Program of the Rockies. Her latest is the Lens of Liberty Citizenship Initiative , “a series of projects and programs to educate Americans on what it means to be a United States citizen, and on the responsibilities that come with citizenship.”

It’s nothing like the nondescript mush you hear from groups that purposefully steer clear of any principled message—you know, the ones that go no deeper than tell you to vote (for anybody, so long as you vote), write your congressman, tour the capitol building and attend school board meetings. Everything Helen’s organization produces is aimed at getting Americans to see all issues through the “lens of liberty” and then equipping them to act on behalf of their vanishing freedoms.

The 50-page Your American Citizenship Owner’s Manual is one of the Lens of Liberty’s publications. It includes a “Parts List” and sections on “The Privileges of Ownership,” “Teaching Other Drivers,” “Maintenance Responsibilities,” “Operating the Controls,” “Roadside Emergencies” and even one on “Recalling Defective Parts.” It’s included in the free “Freedom Kit” you can request here.

Citizenship in a free republic, in Helen Krieble’s view, requires that we understand and appreciate these principles: equality before the law, unalienable individual rights, personal responsibility, the rule of law, free enterprise and private property, among others. Moreover, we must put our time and talents to work for them. We must speak truth to power and challenge unconstitutional or unwarranted assaults on our freedoms whether they come from the distant federal government or from the local zoning board. “Every citizen,” says Helen, “must hold government accountable for preserving our freedom, not taking it, and our home towns are great places to start.”

At FEE, we educate people (young ones especially) in pretty much the same ideals that Helen’s new effort does, so we are especially pleased to partner with the Lens of Liberty Citizenship Initiative. When I am asked, as I frequently am, “What can I do now that I’m sold on liberty?” I urge principled people to start a Bastiat Society chapter, sponsor students to a FEE seminar, get involved in media or politics or any number of other activities where their talents are best deployed.

Now to that list I proudly add Helen Krieble’s Lens of Liberty! You can start by learning more about the organization and by ordering your Freedom Kit today.

America is more than just a place—it is an ideal and a set of principles. In America, government exists for and with the consent of the people—a radical concept in the beginning that the founders knew would require informed and responsible citizens. American citizens who enjoy the privileges of a free society must play a role in keeping the nation’s ideals of freedom on course.

~ Helen Krieble, founder of the Lens of Liberty Citizenship Initiative.

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is President of the Foundation for Economic Education and the author of the book Real Heroes: Inspiring True Stories of Courage, Character and Conviction. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

The Bad Manners of the Campus Left by Lawrence W. Reed

It snowed last Thursday (April 20) in Colorado.

It’s not unusual for folks in the Centennial State to witness snow in April if the snowflakes are outside. But on this occasion, they appeared inside a university classroom, which, it turns out, is not unusual either.

Having been invited by the local chapter of the student organization, Turning Point USA, I arrived on the campus of the University of Colorado-Denver to deliver a lecture on “Lessons from Ancient Rome.” The subject was 2,500-year-old history with a sprinkling of observations about what we today might learn from it all. Not exactly a hot-button topic such as abortion, immigration, Trump, or the most recent season of “The Walking Dead.”

What I saw from a minority of radicalized students in the audience, however, was an appalling microcosm of the smug, arrogant, self-righteous, politically-correct, campus insanity that you see on TV with increasing frequency these days.

About a dozen of the students at last Thursday’s event interrupted my lecture repeatedly with lengthy diatribes. One held up a sign that read, “Bullshit!” They heckled me. When that failed, they accused me of racism. I was able to deal with the interruptions and conclude my speech, but that was due to a failure in the protesters’ organizing capabilities rather than any generosity in their intent. They exhibited far more “selfishness” than the conservatives and libertarians they think of as “selfish” and seek to silence. It certainly helped that the rest of the audience wanted me to speak, and enthusiastically applauded each time I put a protester in his place.

For me, next year will mark 50 years in the “liberty movement.” It was in 1968, a month shy of my 15th birthday and prompted by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, that I participated in a public demonstration in Pittsburgh. So I know and appreciate the importance of protest. In the right places and at the proper times and for noble causes, it’s a healthy and necessary thing. In Mellon Square in downtown Pittsburgh that day forty-nine years ago, we protested the vicious deployment of tanks, guns and troops by a communist regime to crush the rights and freedoms of a neighboring country.

What the hooligans last Thursday at my lecture in Colorado were objecting to was a very different kind of invasion—a peaceful, voluntary offering of ideas they were unaware of, didn’t want to hear, and thought it was their right to prevent others from hearing. Their intent was to intimidate, to harass, to silence, to dominate. This is not conduct that a citadel of education should tolerate for an instant.

Interesting, isn’t it, that what some go to college for, others find “offensive.” As I watched the incident occur, I thought to myself, “I’m standing in a taxpayer-funded institution of supposedly ‘higher’ education, not a Khmer Rouge re-education camp, for crying out loud!”

The disruptions commenced a mere five minutes into my lecture on Roman history, before I had progressed much beyond about 300 B.C. So it was hardly anything I could have said that the disrupters truly found indecent. They had come voluntarily but were annoyed—deeply and personally aggrieved, it seemed—for no more reason than the speaker and the sponsoring organization possessed viewpoints they knew little about, didn’t understand, couldn’t articulate, and don’t like.

Far-left students derailing speakers with whom they disagree have been in the news a lot. Sometimes they’ve resorted to violence. Many times, the speech being protested was cancelled before it happened or protesters forcibly prevented the speaker from finishing his job. My encounter was small potatoes by comparison and fortunately, never descended into fisticuffs. And I did push back, and I did finish speaking.

When I taught college classes 40 years ago, I didn’t tolerate a sleeper or a ball cap, let alone a bad-mannered brat with no respect for the rights of his fellow students. So I wasn’t about to let these “progressive” brownshirts shut me up.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald explained where this tawdry deportment is coming from:

Campus intolerance is at root not a psychological phenomenon but an ideological one. At its center is a worldview that sees Western culture as endemically racist and sexist. The overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people within the ever-growing list of official victim classifications to view themselves as existentially oppressed. One outcome of that teaching is the forceful silencing of contrarian speech…The silencing of speech is a massive problem, but it is a symptom of an even more profound distortion of reality.

Like Mac Donald, I doubt that many of the anti-free speech bullies in today’s colleges and universities enter those institutions with the intent to shut people up. It’s not typically their parents who teach them intolerance, it’s a handful of their professors—the very professors their parents are bankrolling with their hard-earned tax and tuition dollars. They are besmirching the entire profession, which neither the serious students who want to learn or the good professors who want to teach deserve.

I’m guessing that UC-Denver’s course on “Problematizing Whiteness: Educating for Racial Justice” is not helping matters.

My FEE colleague Jeffrey Tucker recently shed light on the influence of Herbert Marcuse, a key Marxist intellectual from whom the troublemakers draw inspiration. In a similar vein, I wrote four years ago about how ugly ideas permeating British academia contributed to ugly behavior in the streets in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death in 2013.

Here are some highlights of the exchange at the University of Colorado-Denver last week:

A few minutes into my lecture, a student raised his hand and started speaking. I politely said, “Please let me get through my lecture and then we’ll have a Q & A period.” He muttered something that only those around him could hear, but I doubt it was “Thank you.”

A minute or two later, I mentioned that ancient Roman road-building was so massive that nothing would compare in magnitude until the 20th Century. One of the snowflakes found that offensive.

“Not true! The Mayans built roads too!” that same student rudely interjected from the back of the room.

“Yes, the Mayans built roads too, but nothing on the scale of the Romans,” I responded.

“Not true!” he insisted. “We have professors who have researched this!”

Well, here are the cold, hard facts: Roman road mileage totaled 250,000. By contrast, the most extensive road system in pre-Columbian South America was constructed by the Incas, not the Mayans, and it amounted to a mere 25,000 miles. Mayan civilization (everything, not just the roads) covered about 125,000 square miles at its height, compared to Rome’s 2.5 million square miles. You could fit all of the Mayan Empire into just half of the Roman province of Egypt. So the student who felt so put upon and so sure of himself that he had to interrupt the speaker didn’t actually have a clue of what he was babbling about.

There’s another point worth making here. Why do you suppose the student was so indignant that I didn’t give inflated road-building credit to the Mayans in a lecture on Rome? Answer: Because Romans were white Europeans and in the official Newspeak of far-Left academia, white Europeans are barely a notch above persona non grata. Mayans, on the other hand, were “indigenous, native peoples” who must be elevated and celebrated.

Never mind that the state religion of the Mayan Empire incorporated idol worship, human sacrifice, hallucinogenic rituals and decapitations. Let’s not talk about the pandemic internecine warfare of the Mayan Empire, or its severe environmental degradation and enslavement of subjugated peoples, either. That would not be politically correct.

Again, I asked that I be allowed to make my presentation and take questions afterwards. Mumblings and a few brief outbursts persisted but I mostly ignored them.

Fifteen or so minutes later, another student raised his voice from the back row, “You haven’t allowed any questions yet!”

I replied, “I already said I would take questions when the lecture is over, and I promise I’ll call on you first.” He insisted on speaking then and there, whereupon one of the Turning Point students asked him to leave the room. He did, but returned moments later.

In the video clip above, you can observe a part of this student’s Second Coming. As promised, I called on him during the Q & A. Do you suppose his question was about Roman history? Of course not. Here, slightly abbreviated, is how it unfolded:

Student: “You wouldn’t take my question when I wanted to ask it. Why should I listen to anything you say if you won’t listen to what I say? Why should I bother?”

Me: “What am I doing right now but listening to you?” A few incoherent mumblings in response, which prompted me to then assert, “This has happened before on some campuses and I’m guessing that you just can’t stand the fact that somebody might have a viewpoint different from yours.” Vigorous applause followed from the great majority of the audience, boos and catcalls from the minority.

The video clip, unfortunately, doesn’t quite capture a subsequent moment that I regard as the high point of the whole affair. I raised my voice to convey an important observation to the disrupter: “You have a character problem!” I doubt he understood that I was informing him that his rude intolerance was not only indefensible, it was a manifestation of something wrong inside, something flawed about his personal choices and conduct.

“Now you’re calling me an idiot!” he exclaimed, to which I instantly shot back, “I did NOT say you were an idiot. I said you have a character problem!”

That’s when some shouting and epithets began to pour forth from the know-it-all snowflakes: “You’re a racist! “Bullshit!” Nazi!” And a few F-bombs as well, the first of several aimed at me both during the event and while I was walking to my car. It was amazing how swiftly and seamlessly these wise guys toggled between “offended“ and “offensive”!

And oh, the sanctimony was so thick you could cut it with a knife! The slogans that rolled off those immature tongues were what Anthony Esolen refers to in his superb book, “Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture” as “cant”—the insincere or hypocritical use of pious language to cover up for one’s ignorance while making a pretense to moral superiority. In Esolen’s words,

You have to be educated into cant; it is a kind of stupidity that surpasses the capacity of unaided Nature to confer….

People are especially prone to cant when they describe their feelings in public. When someone says, “I am offended by that remark,” the first thing you must think, in our time, is that the remark has broken upon the person’s day like the bright sun through a week of rain and gloom. An owl is not offended by the little field mouse; it is just what the owl is on the lookout for. If the offended person loses any sleep that night, it will not be for sorrow, but for delightful dreams of vengeance and public displays of virtue. The cannibal rolls up his sleeves and whets the knife. For truly tolerant people are hard to offend. They do not seek occasion to bring others into ill repute. They do not put the worst construction on someone else’s words or deeds.

Disturbingly, this lowering of the most basic standards of interpersonal communication makes a mockery of “higher” education in this troubled age of ours.

Blake Scott from Littleton, Colorado was there last Thursday evening (and provided the video clip). In his words, “I was shocked at how the students attacked Mr. Reed with unwarranted claims. Rather than derailing from his speech that he was invited to give, he respectfully took the moral high ground. Hecklers accused him of racism during the question and answer session, claiming he selectively picked students for questions by racial profile, without any evidence whatever. The students constantly attempted to disrupt the speech but he calmly rebutted their outbursts.”

Bradley Beck of Erie, Colorado, another eyewitness, says, “The whole time, Mr. Reed smiled and stayed professional, calm and in charge.”

So the good news is that this time, the bad guys didn’t get away with it.

The increasing frenzy of the campus Left may be an indication that, in the words of Robert Tracinski in “The Federalist,” we are approaching “peak leftism.” We should certainly hope Tracinski is right.

Writing in The Washington Post on April 20 (the same day as my Colorado speech, coincidentally), Catherine Rampell advised, “Don’t blame college students for their hostility to free expression. The fault ultimately lies with cowardly school administrations, who so often cave to student demands for censorship.” (In that same article, she recounted a crazy episode at American University in Washington. It’s worth your attention. Also, check out the headlines to commentary at The College Fix and you’ll get the drift.)

Rampell makes a good point. Cowardly school administrators are indeed partly at fault, and not just because they coddle reprehensible student conduct. When they hire barbarians to teach in their classrooms and collaborate with them to blackball serious scholars of a different viewpoint, they are accomplices in the degradation of education and the decay of civilization.

But I don’t let the students off the hook. They are young adults. Even if they act like toddlers in a temper tantrum, nothing will nip this stuff in the bud quicker than treating them as adults. That means one fair warning before a second offense. Then you get expelled and perhaps fined and maybe even a night or two in the slammer, if I had my druthers. Unlike the barbarian Left, I take freedom of speech seriously, and assaults on it even more seriously. Let’s stand up to these bullies. Civilization depends on it.

The students from the UC-Denver Turning Point chapter suffer through intimidation tactics from the campus Left all the time, as do courageous students from TPUSA chapters elsewhere, along with students in similar organizations like Young Americans for Liberty, Students for Liberty, Young Americans for Freedom, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. At FEE, we are proud to work with them, provide literature and speakers and moral support, and we applaud their efforts to resist the barbarians in their midst. If anything, the incident last week only emboldens us to assist them all the more.

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. Reed is President of the Foundation for Economic Education and the author of the book Real Heroes: Inspiring True Stories of Courage, Character and Conviction. Follow on Twitter and Like on Facebook.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Shadowy Extremist Group Behind the Anti-Trump Riots | LifeZette

French Presidential Campaign: Partie 5

Part 1 can be found here – click.

Part 2 can be found here – click.

Part 3 can be found here – click.

Part 4 can be found here – click.

10:44 AM: I feel like my country, the country I’ve lived in for over 44 years, is a patient in intensive care. Tubes and catheters, control panels, IT graphs, pulsing images, flashing lights. We’re waiting with sinking hearts for the specialist to come in and interpret the lab results. Something ineluctable is about to be revealed. But what?

I’m going to the outdoor market. When I get back, maybe I’ll run the vacuum cleaner. To keep my mind fresh. Plans for my visit to Israel in May are shaping up. Then 2 weeks in June in the US. A week in the South of France after that. Life goes on. I’ll walk around and take a look at the polling places. All the candidate posters have been defaced by anarchists and other heavy metal destroy protestors.

3 PM: The hawk is out, a merciless cold wind is slamming our hopes for springtime. The sun is hot and bright. It’s not enough. Anarchists and other looking-for-a-fight protesters at yesterday’s Social 1st Round left their filthy messages all up and down boulevard Beaumarchais. Last night they threw bottles and other hard edged objects at the police. Their graffiti looks like blood, talk about broad brush, they obscure whatever they touch. WAR ON THE RICH here POLICE ASSASSINS there. Can’t someone get them out of our face, out of our hair, out of the national conversation? Their causes are rotten. They grab at anything as an excuse for slopping signs and breaking windows, attacking the police and whatever else they get their hands on.

I’m on edge. Up to now, everything was possible, you grasped it with your rational mind. Now it is happening. People are voting. The verdict will soon fall.

I’m sharply impatient and here they come again with Marine Le Pen. A friend tells me about an article in the Jerusalem Post, CNN is in her stomping grounds at Bénin-Haumont and President Trump thinks she’s the best on frontiers and all that sovereignty, and the only one that’s dealing with that pesky problem. C’mon guys, either find out what’s really happening here or comment on another poker game.  You want Marine le Pen for president? Help yourself. But leave us out of it

Oh they’re so sure she’ll get to the 2nd round. I just hope they’re wrong. I’m so tired of her misrepresentation.

I have to leave for the concert.

8:17 PM: The concert lasted longer than I expected. My friend Isaac Bensimhon brought to life Jean Ferhat and it brought tears to my eyes, the beauty of song, the commitment to social justice, the innocence (he was a Communist fellow traveler) and the reality of the Soviet Union. Tears for the idealism of our youth, with nothing but hollow bushel barrels to harvest their hopes.

Authorities fear an outbreak of violence after the election results are announced.

A helicopter turns in the cold skies.

I meant to write hour by hour but I kept bumping into friends and neighbors, heard fantastic theories of what was about to happen.

I sensed it, didn’t I? The smug pollsters. Oh my friend, our pollsters are not like your pollsters. Ours are French sharpshooters. Haven’t they been telling us for weeks and months that it would be Le Pen and Macron? Didn’t they make fun of us for seeking other sources that would comfort are vain hopes.

la pen macron

Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron

OK, it’s Macron and le Pen. A few minutes ago Fillon squeezed a few centimeter ahead of Mélenchon. Merci, c’est gentil.

Le Pen and Macron. Are you happy, foreign media and friends from everywhere that have been promising Marine would make it to the 2nd round? And win.  Forgive me, I had a higher evaluation of French citizens.

Excuse me, for the moment I’ve lost interest in this story.

Now I have to go and endure their victory speeches.

Merci, François Hollande, you realized the dream of the Left: run against the Front National instead of the parliamentary Right. And win.

What a loss!

RELATED ARTICLES: 

‘France First’ – Marine Le Pen Hits out at Islamism and Financial Globalisation

Front-runner for French presidency against arresting and deporting “radical Islamists”

The trouble with Emmanuel Macron

First Round of French Presidential Election a Blow to the Establishment

Le Pen vs. Macron in French Presidential Run-Off

Europe’s Rising Islam-Based Political Parties

Paris: Knife-wielding Muslim tackled by police at Eurostar terminal

French ex-Muslim lunges at Paris mayor: “There is no more French, there is nothing anymore!” “I was a Muslim, I’m not anymore. I’m ashamed.”

West Virginia middle school teacher wears ‘Tuck Frump’ shirt in class

Treason in the classroom.

These are the real-life villains teaching our children, brainwashing and inculcating them into the army of gossestepping leftist zombies. I have one word for Americans — Homeschool.

If that’s not an option, get active. Get on school boards, fight!

Call:

Sherman Junior High School
Principal: Matt Riggs
9846 Coal River Rd, Seth, WV 25181
Phone: (304) 837-3694

How sure are these totalitarian soldiers? The teacher Ms. Judy said she doesn’t try to push her liberalism on others, but asserted that the children who saw her patch on Thursday were “like-minded.”

Frightening.

WEST VIRGINIA MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHER PHOTOGRAPHED WEARING ‘TUCK FRUMP’ SHIRT IN CLASS

By Jessica Chasmar – The Washington Times – Wednesday, April 19, 2017

A West Virginia middle school teacher is under fire after she was photographed by a student in class wearing a jacket with the words, “Tuck Frump,” emblazoned on the back.

Cheryl Judy, an art teacher for Sherman Junior and Senior high schools in Boone County, told the Charleston Gazette-Mail that the profane anti-President Trump message was written on a patch that she later attached to her jacket while in class Thursday afternoon.

Ms. Judy said she was planning on wearing the patch to a school board meeting later that evening, so she briefly tried it on in class to make sure it was on straight. She said that “without thinking,” she then allowed a student to take a picture of the patch, which the student shared on Snapchat.

The picture quickly exploded on social media, and now some parents are calling for Ms. Judy’s resignation.

Superintendent Jeff Huffman said he can’t comment specifically on Ms. Judy’s case but vowed to investigate once spring break concludes this week.

“We expect professionalism with both conduct and appearance,” Mr. Huffman told WSAZ. “It seems to have caused a great amount of concern from around the area and around the nation, as we’ve received multiple phone calls today.”

Ms. Judy said she’s been teaching in Boone County for more than 13 years and is the secretary for the local chapter of the American Federation of Teachers labor union. She said she doesn’t try to push her liberalism on others but asserted that the children who saw her patch on Thursday were “like-minded.”

“We had discussed this kind of stuff before,” Ms. Judy told WSAZ. “They were not offended by it. It doesn’t really have anything inappropriate on it unless you read it the wrong way.”

“I don’t want to lose my job. I want to teach my students, but if I have to, I have to. It’s just a shame that students are going to be losing someone they care about and really cares about them, each and every one of them,” she told the Gazette-Mail.

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

Women have become political and social IED’s

I have been thinking a lot about Bill O’Reilly and his departure from Fox News. This is the first time that I have commented on it because I wanted to thoroughly think it through first, and this is the conclusion that I have arrived at.

I am not a big fan of Bill O’Reilly, and never have been, but that isn’t because of any allegations of womanizing. I just find him to be an obnoxious bore, but Mr. Bill has become the latest victim of liberalism, that’s all. Nothing to do with sex, or harassment, or anything of the sort…just liberalism and here’s why.

Woman have gone the way of every other minority in this country, namely blacks, in the respect that they have become abusers of the very system that has given them equality and justice. At one time, that pendulum of justice swung far to one side and treated women unfairly…same as it did for blacks, but then things changed and there was a correction, rightfully so, and that pendulum swung the other way, but instead of stopping it in the middle where truth and fairness for all is found, they, like blacks, kept on pushing it far to the opposite side to where now they are able to manipulate and abuse the very system that sought to correct the uneven balance.

Women have become political and social IED’s.

The slightest provocation, and even no provocation, could cause them to explode, and if you are in their path…..you are going to get hurt.

One word from a woman, and without one iota or scintilla of evidence or proof, and a man is immediately under the microscope by the social and legal communities and his entire life is at risk. Let’s take a couple of scenarios that are going on right now and that I am personally familiar with:

The first, a young couple living together. He bought the house, and she is the “live in” girlfriend with three kids. They get into a fight, she calls the cops and accuses him of hitting her. He is arrested and cannot return to his house. This has become an old story. It is now almost commonplace for a woman to file a “protection from abuse” when couples seek divorce, just to get him out of the house, and if she files it, she automatically gets it. No proof of abuse, she just gets the order.

Next, did you know that it is a sad fact that many young fathers will not bathe their daughters? It’s a fact. Why? Because of the ever increasing accusations of sexual abuse if the couple becomes estranged. One accusation from a woman immediately puts a man under the microscope of the legal authorities. Yes, I know of such a case right now……and it never happened. The playwright, William Congreve said it best, “…Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turn’d, Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

These are not isolated cases or situations. This has become the norm across the Nation. The American Woman has proudly taken her place alongside Black Lives Matter. Unless you have your head buried in the sand, you’ll have noticed that there is a war against whites, there is a war against boys and there is a war against men.

So if you’re a white boy who has grown to be a man? Well, you’re pretty much screwed.

RELATED ARTICLE: The Shadowy Extremist Group Behind the Anti-Trump Riots | LifeZette

VIDEO: In 1964, Malcolm X Warned Blacks that Democrats are anti-Black

In 1964, when Malcolm X noticed that the then Negro leadership was working and planning an August 28th, Civil Rights March on D.C., with the Democrat White House of Lyndon Johnson, Bobby Kennedy, and the whole Democrat Party, as blacks peoples’ former chattel slave masters for 245 years; and the time, 99 years of Black Codes and Jim Crowism; the very cause for the civil rights movement, Malcolm X, admonished to them the following:

That black people was having the “wool pulled over their eyes”, hoodwinked, run-a-muck, bamboozled.

Now, 53 years later, alarmingly, he has been proven right.

Didn’t Malcolm X try to fore warn today’s progressive black Democrats—that the Democrats are not what they appear to be?

Malcolm X on the Democrats in America:

French Presidential Campaign: Partie 4

Part 1 can be found here – click.

Part 2 can be found here – click.

Part 3 can be found here – click.

How are citizens supposed to detect fake news when the real news is so bizarre? How did Karim Cheurfi, born 31 December 1977 à Livry-Gargan (Seine-St. Denis outskirts of Paris) achieve his lifetime dream of killing a policeman despite the “vigilance” of the courts and law enforcement? How did he manage to do it on the Champs Elysées smack in the middle of the final all- candidate show of a problematical presidential campaign? How could this emblematic attack not influence the results of the first-round vote on April 23rd?

The final 11-candidate show

Because several of the leading candidates refused to participate in a last-minute debate, France 2 organized an 11-piece candidate show on the 21st of April. Expecting a routine replay of all that had gone before, bottom-heavy with the obligatory presence of all 11 candidates, I faced up to my self-imposed obligation to miss nothing, follow everything, dig everywhere, and think uninterruptedly.

In fact, it was more interesting than the “debates” that channel candidates into one-minute statements on contrived questions. In the close up 15-minute segments with each candidate in turn, hosts David Pujadas and Lea Salomé were less intrusive, the candidates were more expansive, and….one hour into the broadcast, Pujadas announced the “terrorist attack” on the Champs Elysées. Yes, from the first flash, authorities labeled the attack with the code word terrorist meaning jihad. From that point on, candidates integrated into their 15-minute slot a spontaneous reaction to the breaking news. I reported details as they emerged in updates to Part 3 of this series.

As the broadcast came to an end, all 11 candidates lined up in the studio and gave 2-minute closing statements. With the exception of Marine Le Pen and François Fillon, they were incapable of integrating the sudden intervention of harsh reality. After a brief expression of condolence for the family of the slain policeman and wishes for the prompt recovery of his wounded colleagues, they each delivered the vote-for-me speech they had prepared in advance. Le Pen, Fillon, and Macron announced cancellation of events scheduled for the following day, Friday, the last day of the campaign.

Special Edition (= Breaking News)

Midnight. Switch to the Champs Elysées, thick with police vans and flashing blue lights, reminding me of the scene on bd. Beaumarchais on the fateful night of November 13, 2015. As if the central nervous system of Paris were emitting an alert of immediate massive danger. Details emerged, some confirmed others corrected the following day. A policeman died instantly, shot in the head as he sat at the wheel of his van. Another critically wounded, a third less seriously hit. The assailant shot dead before he could kill anyone else. Already identified, his ID is in the Audi he drove up to his private little killing field. For the purposes of the investigation, his name would not yet be released. Daesh took claim for the attack but something doesn’t fit, they identify the soldier as Belgian. Is there another one on the way?

Morning after

The previous arrest of two jihad hopefuls ready to strike in Marseille did not get the attention it deserved. This studied avoidance is a familiar practice of French media. We know the reasoning: uh-oh terrorist attack, might be to the advantage of Le Pen and Fillon and disadvantage peace & love Macron, so let’s not talk about it. Kamil Cheurfi’s exploit could not be ignored. Especially as details of the determined cop killer’s CV rolled out. He spent 14 of the past 16 years in jail. It started in 2001 when the stolen car he was driving collided with a vehicle driven by a rookie policeman and his brother. Cheurfi broke and ran, the two men chased him down and when they got close, he fired, wounding both of them seriously in the chest. While in detention for this crime he tricked a gendarme into entering his cell, grabbed his gun, and shot at him. All three of these victims survived. In 2008 he was charged with assaulting a prison guard and attacking a cellmate in 2009. Authorities recently received an alert from an acquaintance of Cheurfi: he said he wants to kill policemen because they ruined his life. Because they didn’t let him get away with the stolen car? Drawing him into a vicious circle?

Friday morning, Marine Le Pen and François Fillon made statements from their respective headquarters. Le Pen was as usual emotional, bombastic, long-winded and all over the place. She solemnly enjoined the government to take immediate measures to seal the frontiers, stop all immigration, deport bi-national terror risks, close radical mosques, a whole program of things it never did and can’t do now, two weeks before vacating the premises. She accused the government of doing nothing and claimed she could have done everything. Last night’s shooting, the Mohamed Merah massacre, and everything in between would never have happened if she were president. After spending most of her campaign touting ridiculous retrograde isolationist protectionism, she splattered her fire at Islam.

Shortly after Le Pen’s speech, François Fillon spoke briefly, soberly, and to the point, rightfully reminding voters that he has been warning about Islamic totalitarianism for years, published a book on the subject as he entered the primary campaign, gave it a prominent role in his program and campaign, and will combat it with an iron fist as president. He emphasized that we must be armed politically, militarily, and ideologically; the aim of this totalitarian movement is to destroy our civilization. He outlined measures that will be taken: control our frontiers, maintain the state of emergency, reinforce the police and military, improve intelligence services, tighten the judicial response to security risks, increase prison capacity, and form a strong coalition to defeat Daesh abroad. Curiously, he includes Iran in this coalition. When he is president, I hope he will give another thought to that one.

The same polls that almost kicked François Fillon into 5th position credited him with 30% the first week after he won his party’s nomination. The same journalists and commentators that spent two months rubbing his nose in scandals that wouldn’t have caused a ripple 2 years ago, wondered how the terrorism issue had managed to slip out of the campaign only to enter with a bang on the Champs Elysées at the eleventh hour. In fact, every time Fillon had tried to talk about The Issue, they pulled him back to The Scandals. If François Fillon is really polling at 20% someone has to explain where the other 10% of voter intention went. To Marine Le Pen? Nothing can be excluded, but it would be so irrational. No one who is truly on the Right could swallow her Mélenchon-friendly economic program. No one who understands what it means to use political power could believe that Marine Le Pen would be capable of leading a modern nation through international mine fields.

Did the Center-Right inch over to Emmanuel Macron? He intervened at 12:45 with a stiff wooden declaration, so carefully calculated it sounded like it was concocted with social media tools-key words, emotion stickers, reassurance with a capital R. First, he promised to create a task force (in English in the text), and then went into a riff of I’ll be relentless in the DEFENSE of your SECURITY, I’ll PROTECT you, don’t let FEAR influence your choice, I will bring UNITY with my PROGRESSIVE project, I will transform our society by CULTURE and EDUCATION. He managed to pronounce the words “radical Islam” once without choking. And he got in a swipe at “the one who” (Sarkozy) weakened our intelligence gathering services.

This was followed by an astounding faux pas on the part of the outgoing prime minister. His intervention was so shocking that it produced uninhibited reactions from journalists and invited guests. Whatever their personal preferences, they were simply astonished that Hollande would stoop so low as to send his PM onto the battlefield to shore up the wavering wunderkind Macron. A righteously indignant Cazeneuve denounced the indecency of Marine Le Pen and François Fillon trying to make political hay of a tragic incident on the Champs Elysées.

It is these terrible low moments that should make us grateful for our albeit imperfect democracies: In a dictatorship the prime minister would have sent goons to arrest the two unwanted candidates. Or have them shot then and there.

The short unhappy life of Karim Cheurfi

As is his wont, Paris prosecutor François Molins began his statement to the press Friday afternoon on a philosophical note: this tragic event teaches us humility. Understood as- one attempt foiled, one that slipped through the armor. Then he recited like a Zen monk at a funeral the verified facts of the case. The weapons found in a sports bag in the trunk of the car, including a koran. The weapons found in the killer’s lodgings, plus the IT material, plus a prayer rug and koran. (Of course acquaintances said he was not religious, just a loner). His various crimes and convictions. He spent 14 of the past 16 years in prison. Four convictions. Shooting at the rookie policeman in 2001, shooting at the gendarme, attacking his cellmate and, recently, breaking and entering, theft, disorderly conduct… The math is a bit complicated. Apparently released several years before the end of the first 15-year sentence, sentenced to 2 years of prison and 2 years suspended sentence for the latest crime, he was under surveillance while preparing to finally kill policemen.

Maître Jean-Laurent Panier, the lawyer who defended him in the last case, doesn’t think his client was religious or radicalized; his problem is psychological. He was a loner. His family tried to help but didn’t succeed. Cheurfi’s mother, born in Algeria, is divorced from his father and from her second husband, a “Frenchman.” The lawyer complains that his client didn’t get proper psychiatric treatment while on parole. Maître Panier happened to be on the Champs Elysées Thursday night, not far from N° 102 where Xavier Jugelé the murdered policeman was stationed to protect the Turkish tourist association. Yes, the lawyer had given it a thought-he might have been collateral damage in the shooting. I don’t know if he gave it a thought that Xavier Jugelé might be still alive if he hadn’t got his client off with a suspended sentence.

Furious grieving law enforcement

Law enforcement is fed up. State of emergency, Nuit Debout, weekly demonstrations against the el Khomri labor reform, targeted by violent anarchists, jihadists, union radicals and misguided kids. Thousands of policemen injured, several almost burned alive, a police couple savagely slaughtered, and now this…

Kamil Cheurfi was briefly detained in February after authorities were alerted to his plans to kill policemen in revenge for what France was doing in Syria. He was reportedly contacting jihadists and trying to procure weapons. His lodgings were searched (he lived in a sort of add-on to his mother’s home), some IT material was confiscated, his phone was tapped, he was watched. In the absence of any sign of radicalization, he was released. Though he had spent a month in Algeria from mid-January to mid-February without informing the surveillance officer, he was not sent back to prison.

Dominique Riset of BFM TV read passages from the police report. I don’t think he invented it! Asked to explain why he had purchased-via Amazon of course-two hunting knives, a go-pro camera, and a fencing mask, Cheurfi said the knives were to cut fish and the mask was for a carnival disguise. Further, the report states that the ex-convict did say he wanted to kill policemen but did not target any specific policeman by name. There was no evidence whatsoever of any psychiatric problem. The trip to Algeria? He went there to get married. N.B. Mohamed Merah used the same excuse for his extended visits to jihad territory in the Middle East. Nevertheless a new investigation was initiated on March 3rd for “self-radicalization.” Nevertheless, he was able to procure weapons and turn the Champs Elysées into one more battleground.

The ineluctable reality of the pollsters

Pollsters, journalists, and commentators spent the day speculating on the eventual influence on voters of the last-minute terrorist attack. They more or less agreed that it might cause a very slight shift here and there, but nothing dramatic. No upset. Pollsters seem to be more sure of themselves than ever. Almost smug. Whatever you think, ladies and gentlemen, we know what will be on the menu Sunday night. You might be trembling with suspense, but we’re endowed with the scientific tools of political fortune telling. You had a bash at the outdoor snack & drink with Jean-Luc (Mélenchon) and his Podemos compadre on Friday when the bigshot candidates were cowering in their headquarters but we know your guy is not going to make it to the 2nd round. You think, monsieur ‘dame, that François Fillon, having overcome the handicap of Penelopegate and all the etcetera, will ride to victory on the white stallion of his decades of political experience, enjoy your pipe dreams. Sunday night it’s going to be Macron and Le Pen. You can throw your big data analysis in the trash file.

Social 1st round

The CGT (Communist labor union) and associates are helping themselves to a “social 1 round” this Saturday, the day before voters go to the polls. Apparently the government authorized the demonstration at Place de la République, despite the state of emergency, despite the fact that law enforcement is stretched thin, despite the risk of violence and vandalism by anarchist fringe elements. They’re in the streets with sound systems and slogans, determined “to impose their demands” on candidates and voters combined.

Last week, a modest demonstration by Kabyles yearning for independence went unnoticed. We’re fed up, they told me, with that repressive Algerian government. I asked if they get support from any political forces in France. Nothing, they replied. And we are good citizens. We integrate, we support the nation, we obey the law and even if we’re Muslim we aren’t extremists We live and let live. The Kabyle increasingly insist on the distinction between themselves and Algerians

MEMRI reports that French Salafists are telling Muslims it is haram [forbidden by Islamic law] to vote.

democracy is the religion of the west

The picture above was shared on Twitter by a French jihadi currently in Syria and reads: “Democracy is the religion of the West.” This opinion is shared by many jihadi supporters online.

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