Podcast: Supreme Court Will Hear Case on Veterans’ Cross Memorial Atheists Oppose

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The Supreme Court recently announced that it will hear an appeal for a case involving a memorial cross. This large cross stands in an open field in Bladensburg, Maryland, and commemorates the sacrifice of 49 local servicemen who gave their lives in World War I. We talk with Jeremy Dys of First Liberty, the organization that is defending the memorial against the American Humanist Association. Listen below, or read the transcript, slightly further down.

We also cover these stories:

  • The midterm elections are today—and the Justice Department is not going to tolerate fraud. Officials will be monitoring voting in 19 states.
  • The U.S. government restored economic sanctions that the Obama administration lifted in 2015 as part of the Iran nuclear deal. The sanctions target Iran’s energy, shipping, and banking sectors, among others.
  • Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the United States will hold accountable the men who murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, while still maintaining the strategic U.S.-Saudi relationship.

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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Jeremy Dys is the deputy general counsel for First Liberty, a law firm that defends religious freedom for all Americans, and is representing the American Legion in this veterans’ cross case. 

Daniel Davis: Last year my colleague Jarrett and I went out to Bladensburg, Maryland, to see the memorial cross that your organization is now defending in court. And when we got there we saw a list of names on the monument, men who had given their lives in World War I, and it was sobering because we knew that if the court rules a certain way, it could soon be gone.

Can you give us some background here? Why is this memorial cross under threat?

Jeremy Dys: Well, a couple years ago the American Humanist Association decided that, for the first time in the 90-plus-year history of this memorial, it is violating the Constitution because it appears on public property. And the reason they say that it is violating the Constitution is that it is in the shape of a Celtic cross.

In fact, the Gold Star mothers who designed this memorial back in 1919, a hundred years ago now, they chose the shape that mimicked the markers that sat over the top of the graves of many of their sons over in Europe. Most of the men who died in World War I were buried under a Celtic cross. Teddy Roosevelt’s son, for instance, famously was buried under a Celtic cross in the European battlefields.

And so they knew that Americans would forget the sacrifice of their sons if they didn’t have something to visually remind them of that. So they decided to design this monument in the design of a Celtic cross. And then they built it.

The American Legion jumped in to help out, and by 1925 that monument was erected right there, right at the terminus of the National Defense Highway, which is itself a World War I memorial. It runs between D.C. and Annapolis, Maryland.

And it’s been standing there, perfectly innocently keeping watch over the memory of these 49 men from Prince George’s County, Maryland, just as their mothers had wanted nearly a hundred years now until the Humanist Association decided that they’d had enough, and that that could no longer be tolerated. And so they managed to get the 4th Circuit to agree and now we’re at the Supreme Court of the United States.

Katrina Trinko: Yeah, I have to say, I have a family member who lives near that cross, and every time I pass it … you don’t really think a lot about World War I, and it is a very poignant reminder.

Jeremy, what are some of the possible implications of this case? Obviously we have religious-themed art throughout the United States and government buildings. We’ve talked some about Arlington National Cemetery. Could this case have wide-ranging implications?

Dys: Very much so. And to answer that, I have to remember Martha Redmond, whose son William is on the side of that memorial. When she was organizing support for the memorial back in 1919, she wrote to her senator and said, “The reason I’m so excited about this memorial is that I very much view this as my son’s gravestone.”

She couldn’t go to her son’s grave. It was over in France. You couldn’t just jump on a plane and go visit it at the time, so this was, in her mind, her son’s gravestone. And I think it’s appropriate that we think of it as that, as a gravestone for 49 men from Prince George’s County, Maryland.

So if that goes down, then it unleashes a bulldozer across the country. It’ll start there in Bladensburg, Maryland, and then it’ll go across the river to Arlington National Cemetery, where you’re going to knock the Argonne cross, the Canadian cross of sacrifice.

You may have to sandblast the side of the Tomb of Unknown Soldier that has religious language on it. Teddy and Bobby Kennedy’s gravestones are going to have to come down. They’re both buried under a cross in the grounds of Arlington. And you can keep on going across the country.

But this is why this case is so vitally important.

Not only do we want to avoid this—the erasure of the memory of the service and sacrifice of these 49 fallen servicemen from Prince George’s County, Maryland—we want to ensure that there’s a restoration of common sense here. Just because something is in the shape of what some people view as religious, doesn’t mean that it is somehow in violation of the Constitution if it shows up on public property.

That’s what I think Justice Clarence Thomas has in mind when he talks about how the Establishment Clause jurisprudence of our country is in “disarray.” And so I think this presents a great opportunity for the Supreme Court to provide clarification to that. Protecting this memorial in the first place, but providing guidance to the country as to what the Establishment Clause is meant to actually mean.

Davis: Yeah. I was actually just about to ask about that, because that’s such a key point. The other side is arguing with the Establishment Clause, basically having any religious symbolism or language on public property is basically equivalent to establishing a religion. And so you have to get rid of all of that. How do you respond to that assessment?

Dys: I think I’m as confused everybody is, right? Even those who did go to law school like me are confused. Which test are we supposed to apply now? You’ve got three, four different tests that might apply on Establishment Clause cases. The reasonable observer that is talked about is almost always offended at anything that is smacking of the religious.

And so it’s almost impossible for the Establishment Clause not to be violated by anything that bears on the religious and comes on public property. …

The bottom line is this. The Supreme Court has the opportunity to provide guidance on these issues. And more particularly, the Supreme Court is really the last hope for preserving the 90-year-old Bladensburg World War I veterans monument, and the memory of the 49 men from Prince George’s County that it represents.

Trinko: So of course the American Legion is involved in this. Have you, throughout First Liberty’s work on this case, encountered veterans or their families, and is this a case that you expect they’ll be following closely?

Dys: We are very privileged to represent the American Legion in this lawsuit. I should point out that, if you haven’t seen the memorial, what you need to know is that this concrete memorial right in the dead center of the cross has the emblem of the American Legion right there.

Don’t forget the American Legion was formed out of World War I, and so these guys coming back to the United States wanting to remember the men who had died, men like Howard Morrow who received the Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery overseas as a grenadier.

These were remarkable men, some of whom were not able to be … Well, I mean, you weren’t able to find enough of them to bury. These were heroes beyond what words are able to describe. And families felt the real loss of these things. But they would have been members of the Legion had they survived.

So I think the Legion feels a particular duty to remember the men that they served with or that served with their forebears, and preserve the freedom that you and I possess today. And so their duty is turn to them and say, “We’re going to watch over this memorial,” this gravestone, as Martha Redmond called it. And make sure that their memory is never forgotten come hell or high water, or the Supreme Court of the United States.

Davis: So Jeremy, what’s next in this case? And when are you all going to be in Washington, D.C., arguing the case?

Dys: I would guess probably in the early spring the Supreme Court will have arguments. They set aside an hour for the argument on this case. So maybe March or so we might be seeing arguments before the Supreme Court, and that would be followed, of course, by June when we would have an order coming from the court finally articulating whether or not this monument is going to have to be turned into an obelisk, or razed to the ground, or somehow removed. Now we’re not going to remove it. We’re not going to take that monument down.

It’s a very key decision that the Supreme Court has to make here. I think they should just simply honor the way that Gold Star mothers chose to remember the service and sacrifice of their sons who died defending our freedom. That’s the easiest solution here.

Trinko: You mentioned that there’s been several times that the courts have weighed in on this issue. Justice Kavanaugh, of course, will not have a history on the Supreme Court on this, but have any of the other justices been involved in rulings that maybe hint at how they would approach this?

Dys: Well, it’s a great question and one I’d have to go back and do my own research on … Justices Thomas and Ginsburg have had the opportunity to see a few of these cases.

But this is a pretty unique one. I mean, you’re looking at a 100-year-old monument. Don’t forget that most of these men died a hundred years ago last month, in October of 1918. So most of the men, in fact, the grand majority of the people who died in World War I from America, died in that offensive at the end of World War I in 1918.

And so this certainly is historic, and it presents a great opportunity for the court to remind everybody that we forget what we don’t see. And so we ought to honor the sacrifice that these men made.

PODCAST BY

Portrait of Katrina Trinko

Katrina Trinko

Katrina Trinko is managing editor of The Daily Signal and co-host of The Daily Signal podcast. She is also a member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors. Send an email to Katrina. Twitter: @KatrinaTrinko.

Portrait of Daniel Davis

Daniel Davis

Daniel Davis is the commentary editor of The Daily Signal and co-host of The Daily Signal podcast. Send an email to Daniel. Twitter: @JDaniel_Davis.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column with images is republished with permission. The featured photo is of the World War I veterans’ memorial is in Bladensburg, Maryland. (Photo: The Daily Signal)

PODCAST: Sebastian Gorka on the Biggest Threat Facing America and What Trump Is Doing About It

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Sebastian Gorka, former deputy assistant to President Donald Trump, is author of the new book, “Why We Fight: Defeating America’s Enemies—With No Apologies.” He recently spoke to The Daily Signal. Listen to his full interview on our podcast. A slightly edited version is below.

Rob Bluey: What are the most serious threats that America faces today?

Sebastian Gorka: In “Why We Fight,” I go through the whole catalog of the threats that face us today—whether it’s North Korea, Russia, Iran, or China, or global jihadism, which was a subject of my first book “Defeating Jihad.”

After my time in the White House, it’s very clear to me that we’re going to deal with all of these threats. The ISIS caliphate is already gone. The Iran deal is dead. Russia is being put back in its box. But there is only one remaining strategic threat to America and that’s China.

China has a plan. It’s not secret. Anybody can read it. It’s called One Belt, One Road. It is predicated on China, communist China, replacing America as the most powerful nation in the world by the 100th anniversary of their communist revolution.

They are going at it on all cylinders, whether it’s buying up interests in Africa, whether it’s corrupting politicians in Australia, whether it’s building fake islands in the South China Sea to intimidate our friends and our partners.

The good news is Donald Trump understands the threat and, as you’ve seen by recent decisions, he’s taking it very, very seriously.

Bluey: The threats that we’re facing today are quite different from those of the past. What does that mean for how we go about addressing them?

Gorka: The book doesn’t just address threats. It’s about the evolution of warfare—what every taxpayer, what every patriot needs to know about how war has changed over the ages. I’ll just illustrate it with one simple example.

If you say to the average American “war,” what kind of images come to mind? For most people, if you haven’t served in special forces in the Middle East, you think of what? “Saving Private Ryan.” You think of mass tanks fighting each other. You think of dog fights. We think about the conventional wars of the 20th century.

As I demonstrate in “Why We Fight,” that’s the exception to the rule. More than 80 percent of all wars since Napoleon—for the last 200 years—are what is technically called irregular warfare or unconventional, meaning a military in a uniform is fighting a non-state actor. Not another country’s military, but a group, a guerrilla force.

Or, if you look at one of our first ever engagements as a republic, the Barbary pirates. We didn’t just start fighting jihadis after 9/11. We started almost as soon as the republic was born, fighting the Barbary pirates off the shores of Tripoli, a phrase that might be familiar from the Marine Corps anthem. Those were jihadis, and that was almost 200 years ago.

Ginny Montalbano: You mentioned China and North Korea. There are certainly a lot of challenges we’re facing. How can President Trump most effectively communicate all of these challenges to the American people?

Gorka: I can’t keep track of it because it grows so fast, but I think having 55 million Twitter followers certainly helps. He is the arch communicator, whether it’s how he labeled his opponents during the election campaign, whether it’s the MAGA hat. I mean, look at Kanye West, what happens when a billionaire puts on a red hat. That’s a political statement.

So how does he communicate? He has to take his branding tools from politics into the national security arena, and I think he’s doing it.

I was in the White House when he prepared his first address to Congress. It wasn’t the State of the Union, if you recall. He gave a special address to the joint session of Congress, and in it, what did he do?

Everybody, all the Never Trumpers, “He’s going to go soft on us. He’s going to go soft. He’s not going to talk about radical Islamic terrorism.”

What did he do? It’s the most powerful moment in his speech if you watch the video. He stops. He pauses. He looks right into the camera and he says, “And we will defeat radical Islamic terrorism.” This is a man who, I don’t think he went to PR school, but he understands communication and PR branding like no other man I’ve met.

Bluey: Let’s go back to China just for a moment. The president is now talking about some sort of a trade deal with China. Obviously, he’s had engagement with high-level officials there. What do you make of some of the next steps that you expect to see from this administration when it comes to China?

Gorka: There’s two things. There’s two broad baskets. No. 1 is what they’re doing illicitly. This is declassified now. Your listeners can look it up thanks to the Department of Justice, which brought the case and then declassified it a few years ago.

A Chinese agent was intercepted in the Midwest in a cornfield. Not in the bowels of the Pentagon or the National Security Agency. He was apprehended in a cornfield. Why? Because he was stealing samples of American genetically-modified, blight-resistant corn to take home to China so the communist government could reverse engineer that intellectual property that had been developed at the costs of who knows how many millions of dollars here in America.

No. 1, we have to counter the subversion, the theft of our intellectual property, the work of the Confucius Institutes in America, which are funneling anti-Western messages.

Then on top of that, the second basket is what the president does in the overt domain, in the public diplomacy domain. We have to send a very clear message to American companies.

Let’s just internalize one thing. The most powerful information processing company in the world, Google, is happy, in the name of profit, to assist the Chinese communist government in censoring information from its own populous. There’s a very, very serious word for that that begins with a T, that in a prior age we would have used against any company that supports dictatorships that wish to undermine us.

We have to build, with The Heritage Foundation and everybody else, an information campaign that educates Americans that communism. On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall may have come down, but communism is not dead.

Montalbano: It certainly isn’t. President Trump has had so many foreign policy successes. Which of those do you think have made America safer?

Gorka: Trump has embraced 64 percent of the 360-some conservative policy recommendations in Heritage’s “Mandate for Leadership.”

Let me tell you what’s most important for me. Because actually there’s some photographs in the book from my time in the White House and one of them really, for me, is very personal. It’s the one I’m proudest of, beyond being the president’s strategist.

I snuck into the back of the Rose Garden to watch the president make his announcement on our exiting the Paris climate accords. For me, that was a seminal moment. It’s not about nuclear weapons. It’s not about building a wall, but the spiritual and the philosophical weight of that moment cannot be overestimated.

When the president said in that speech, “I was elected by the citizens of Pittsburgh to be their president, not the citizens of Paris,” that is why Donald Trump won the election.

So people miss it. Even conservative commentators miss it. There is an underpinning to everything the president did in his campaign and everything he does as the commander in chief.

The philosophical bedrock is national sovereignty. It’s the concept that national sovereignty is good—whether it’s building the border, crushing ISIS, revitalizing our trade relations, rebuilding NATO.

National sovereignty is not only good, it is healthy for a nation, and Donald Trump is doing it. Wherever you look, he’s rebuilding national sovereignty.

Bluey: Heritage’s founder, Ed Feulner, was there and so many others have recounted other stories similar to yours.

Gorka: And let me just say, I joined the transition team before we won the election. It’s a peculiar system. I don’t know if the listeners are familiar, but the last two candidates before an election get given federal offices a few blocks from the White House to build their transition team.

So Hillary Clinton was on one floor and we were on the other floor, and it was very nice, very reassuring the first day we walked into the transition offices—I think it was in October—to see a certain Dr. Feulner sitting in one of the cubicles. That made us feel much, much better.

Bluey: It goes to the heart of my question. I wanted you to take our listeners back to your first encounter with Donald Trump and where that journey kind of took you.

Gorka: I actually wrote the bulk of this book before I joined the administration, but I wanted to tag on at the end a chapter on “How a kid from West London ended up in the West Wing.” It’s an American story.

I found myself, the day after the—I don’t drink so I didn’t have a hangover. So Saturday, Jan. 21, at 8 a.m., I was walking around the White House. A guy with a funny accent walking around the White House by himself, only in America. But how did I get there?

Summer of 2015, I’m a professor. I have the chair of military theory at the Marine Corps University in Quantico. Love my Marines. I get a phone call from a guy called Corey Lewandowski. Never heard of him. Didn’t know who he was.

And he said “I work for Donald Trump, candidate”—then candidate Trump—”and he’s preparing for the GOP debate this fall on national security, and he’s looking for somebody to advise him on national security issues. Would you come to New York?”

I’d never done anything like that before in my life. Spent most of my career working with the military and the FBI in counterterrorism issues, and I said, “Sure.”

So I flew to New York a few days later, went to Trump Tower, went to the future president’s private office, sitting as close to him as I am to you, just me and Donald Trump, and in the corner, Corey. We’d never met before, and we had this incredible, wide-ranging, blue-sky discussion for about 40 minutes on you name it.

It was national security, but we went from the Civil War to nuclear weapons to ISIS, what have you. Then halfway through, classic Trump, he stops the conversation dead, turns to Corey, and says, “I like this guy. Let’s hire him.” Just quintessential Donald Trump. He sees something, he makes a decision.

I signed my non-disclosure agreement, which I actually obey—unlike certain people—and then I started writing him some policy papers for the debates, got to know Gen. Michael Flynn a little bit as the campaign progressed, and then was invited onto the transition team for the National Security Council.

In the last week, literally, I think it was four days before the inauguration, a guy who knew me named Steve Bannon reached out and pulled me out of the NSC transition team and said, “You’re coming to work for me. I’m the chief strategist to the president, and you’ll be the strategist to the president.” So it’s an American tale.

Montalbano: And what a journey it’s been. I love all the photos in the book.

Gorka: Thank you.

Montalbano: Support for socialism seems to be growing in America. What is your message to those who embrace it, especially young people?

Gorka: As the child of people who suffered under fascism and then communism, it’s really galling to me. It’s hard to internalize when the Victims of Communism Foundation does a poll and the result is they find 42 percent of millennials would like to live in a socialist or communist America. It’s hard. I mean, my father was tortured by communists.

So what’s my message? My message is Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There’s a moment in his testimony before the House after he was accused of heinous crimes, which clearly he was innocent of, where he says, clearly a righteous man, a godly man, and he looks at those senators who are trying to destroy him—like Whittaker Chambers many, many years before him, who I write about in the book—and he says, “I don’t care which way you vote. I don’t care what happens, but I’m not going to allow you to get away with this.”

That’s my message, whether it’s the local chapter of Turning Point USA, whether it’s a Heritage subscriber, whether it’s somebody at Hillsdale who’s going on to a grad school in some kind of hive of liberal insanity. Never give up and never let their lies undermine your confidence in the nation.

I’ll talk about my personal experience. So I’m in the White House, I’m a deputy of the president, and I understand I’m going to get attacked. It’s politics. I’m a proxy for Donald Trump and a proxy for Bannon, so I’ll get attacked.

But when it’s 42 attack pieces by one journalist in three months, when they start attacking my children, when they start attacking my wife, the reputation of my dead mother, you realize that things get heavy. Let’s say things get heavy. You have a little crisis of “Is it worth it for that massive paycheck?” Right? That massive government paycheck.

I came to a very simple realization. I’m not hanging by my wrists from the ceiling of a torture chamber in a basement in Budapest like my father was. It’s just words. So bring it, Huff Po. Bring it, Daily Beast. You’re not going to win. Never give up.

I have four stories in the book of American heroes, and the lesson from each of them is you never give up because the stakes are too important. This nation was the only nation, still is the only nation, founded on the principles of individual liberty and freedom, and we have to fight for them every day.

Bluey: Thank you for sharing that. The other thing that I want our listeners to know is you have been speaking about this topic and others to Heritage Foundation audiences all across the country, and we appreciate you sharing those personal stories with them. The feedback we’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive.

Gorka: That’s very kind of you. I’ve loved working with Ed Feulner before he stepped down. I am incredibly, incredibly excited by Kay James’ understanding that socialism isn’t a chapter in history. Socialism is a threat to America today. So wherever I can talk about it, the president’s club day or anywhere else, and get the word out, it’s an honor for me. Thank you, Kay. Thank you, Ed. Thank you, you guys.

Bluey: You mentioned Justice Kavanaugh in your answer to that last one. You’ve said this has created a version 2.0 of the Republican Party. What do you mean by that?

Gorka: I never thought—did any of us think that Sen. Lindsey Graham would teach the GOP how to be men? I never thought I’d say those words. I’ll tell you the proof of what I mean by GOP 2.0.

The Kavanaugh hearing was incredible. Even more important was, I think, the Saturday after when he was confirmed, when the president, in front of the world’s cameras, in front of billions of people, next to Kavanaugh, next to his family, from the White House declared that this man is innocent. That was the right thing to do. That was the just thing to do.

But the pivot from the political perspective, the pivotal moment is the GOP press conference on the Friday before that when the senior members of the judicial committee kind of wrapped up the events.

Watch that video again. Watch Sen. Chuck Grassley. Watch everybody else. I have never ever seen that level of anger amongst the most senior Republican politicians in America. I think something changed. I think politics is usual in thinking, “Hey, it doesn’t matter if they’ve got a D behind their name or an R behind their name. It’s all a nice elite club.” I think that was broken.

The behavior of the Democrats in those hearings, when you have people like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who had a Chinese intelligence agent on her payroll for 20 years. You have individuals like Sen. Cory Booker, who actually admitted [to groping] somebody in high school. You’ve got Sen. Kamala Harris who built her political career on questionable relationships—let’s just leave it at that.

Those people are sitting in judgment over a man who—this isn’t an insult—is literally a grown-up Boy Scout, is a church volunteer, volunteer coach, is the most quoted federal judge in Supreme Court history in the modern age, and they’re going to judge him?

I think the GOP, I think the scales fell from their eyes. I think we’re going to see a new GOP evolve from that Rip Van Winkle coming out of the cave.

Montalbano: Ive had the opportunity to travel to several Trump rallies the past couple of weeks. I can tell you firsthand that people are fired up. They are upset about what happened to now Justice Kavanaugh.

You immigrated here legally. What do you make over the current battle about the caravan, birthright citizenship, and immigration in general?

Gorka: I think there’s two massive topics that we don’t touch, the third rails in D.C. One of them is the deficit and the budget. Nobody wants to seem to solve that.

The other one is 30, 40 years of a flawed immigration system, an utterly flawed immigration system. The whole concept of chain migration.

Right now, don’t take my word for it. Go online. Look it up. There are baby factories in Florida. There are companies that simply give opportunities for people from the Middle East, from Russia, or elsewhere to come here pregnant, have their baby, and then use that baby’s anchor citizenship to legalize the rest of their family’s immigration to America.

I don’t care who you vote for, does anybody really think that’s what the Founding Fathers meant by any amendment to the Constitution? What we’re talking about today is an amendment that was designed to do what? To stop, let’s get accurate, to stop Democrats denying free slaves and their children citizenship. That’s the real history.

Let’s not try and give into the propaganda. It has nothing to do with people who are looking for asylum from other countries, and as an immigrant, a legal immigrant to America of people, parents who were refugees, this is personal to me.

Forget that for a second. Look at the law. In international law, if you really are persecuted and you want asylum, if you get out of the country you’re persecuted in, what are you supposed to do? You’re supposed to apply for asylum in the first country you land in.

So what are they doing? They’re walking what? Two thousand miles, 3,000 miles to get to America. Well, what about Mexico? What about all the other countries they cross? You get out of Honduras, you get out of El Salvador, if you really are, if you’re not an economic migrant, if you’re a politically persecuted one, you’re supposed to stop where you are and apply for asylum status. None of them are. What does that tell you?

Bluey: Sebastian, this was a great interview. We appreciate you being on The Daily Signal podcast.

Gorka: It’s my pleasure. Thank you, guys. Follow me @SebGorka. God bless.

Bluey: Again, the book is called “Why We Fight.” Thank you.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column with podcast and images is republished with permission. The featured image is by Christoph on Pixabay.

Keeping Our Eye on the Prize

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Keep your eye on the prize and run to win! That was Paul’s charge to the Corinthians in pursuing the call of God upon their lives. Knowing their love of sports, he told them they should run with the same determination, discipline, and focus that they would use to win the prize in the Isthmian games held in Corinth. Paul’s appeal to these qualities in the pursuit of what should be our ultimate goal, living life by God’s design, only serves to underscore the importance of these characteristics to success in any undertaking that is worth pursuing.

In America today, determination, discipline, and focus are also what is required to continue on our current path of restoring the core values that built a great and prosperous country. In particular, we have seen the end to eight years of a withering assault on religious freedom, an issue that motivated voters in the 2016 election.

A clarion call to respect people of faith and our First Freedom — religious liberty — could not come at a better time as we mourn as a nation the loss of life in Pittsburgh where a man allegedly motivated by hatred against Jewish people committed an act of violence.

That barbarism illustrates why respect for people of faith and protection of religious liberty is so important, especially after years of marginalization by the last administration.

The anti-faith attacks could be seen most clearly in our own government prosecuting nuns, who were aiding the least of these, for refusing to violate their religious beliefs and fund contraceptives, including abortifacients, in their health care plans.

There were also the cases of Soldiers, Airmen, Coastguardsmen and Marines punished for seeking to live out their religious faith in the most basic ways, like having a Bible on their desk or chaplains like Wes Modder being removed from his command for counseling according to the principles of his biblical faith.

We witnessed small business owners like Don Vander Boon, whose family owns a meat packing facility in Michigan, told by agents of the federal government that he had to remove Bible-based articles from his breakroom where employees gathered, or the government would shut their business down.

But stopping this prejudice is only the first step to righting our course. It will take a concerted and consistent effort to rebuild respect for America’s First Freedom throughout the ranks of a government, which the previous administration had mobilized to attack.

Less than two years in office, the Trump administration is restoring religious liberty. In May of 2017, President Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Justice to ensure all federal agencies were protecting and promoting religious freedom. Despite tremendous opposition from leftist groups that are suing the DOJ and other agencies to hinder or stop the effort, the restoration of our First Freedom continues.

For the first time in a long time, religious freedom has also become a priority in U.S. foreign policy, most notably demonstrated in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Just three months into his post, he hosted the first-ever Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom, attended by leaders from over 80 different nations.

It is essential to each individual American, especially to Christians who are called to follow the teaching of Scripture no matter what they do: “whether eating or drinking, do all to the glory of God.” This understanding that religious freedom is the ability to live every aspect of our lives according to our faith is deeply rooted in what historians describe as America’s Protestant work ethic, which has led to unparalleled productivity and prosperity, as work is an act of worship done in service to God.

French historian Alexis De Tocqueville, in his historical analysis of America’s growing prosperity in the 1800’s, made clear that the foundation and anchor for democracy and prosperity in America was the Christian faith pioneered by the Puritans. In other words, America didn’t create religious freedom; religious freedom created America.

Many will be quick to try and dismiss the connection between religious freedom, economic prosperity and social stability, but a growing body of academic research shows the correlation. Indeed, a study by the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation reports that “religion contributes $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy annually, more than the combined revenues of the top 10 technology U.S. companies including Apple, Amazon and Google.”

Is it a coincidence that as religious freedom is being promoted and protected again in America, our economy is growing and unemployment is shrinking to historic lows? Maybe, but economic growth and prosperity cannot be long sustained without religious freedom. And for religious freedom to impact the economy, it has to be an individual freedom that permeates all aspects of society. The mere freedom of worship, which seeks to quarantine the practice of one’s faith within the walls of a church, is not authentic religious freedom.

The Trump administration has done more to restore religious freedom than any other administration since the steady assault began over a half century ago. This election is about whether or not we continue on a path that restores America’s First Freedom, which is foundational to genuinely making America great again. We must be disciplined in systematically pursuing those policies that will restore religious freedom and stay focused on the prize — one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.

For more motivation heading into Tuesday, check out this op-ed by FRC’s Patrina Mosley and David Closson, “For Christians, Voting Is Not an Option. It’s a Divine Calling.”

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

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

The Question Before Us Today.

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Once again, we find ourselves at a midterm election, and once again, the nation is at an impasse.  Essentially we are confronted with a referendum on two alternative and incompatible visions for the future of our nation.

On the one hand, we have the followers of Donald Trump.  Take away what you feel about Donald Trump himself, his tweets, his comments. . . his quips.  The fact is that certain people placed him in power, and those people believe in certain things.  If you support Donald Trump or the candidates in his camp, you are supporting the aspirations and dreams of this group of Americans.

These are people who believe that the United States is the greatest country in the world.  They believe this status carries with it certain responsibilities.  Those include an affirmative leadership role globally.

They also believe the United States is truly exceptional, not because of a shared ethnicity since the country certainly does not have that, but because of a certain set of circumstances that made this country an exception to all others.  They believe it is the human spirit that drives greatness, freedom, and success.  They believe that the more government gets the hell out of the people’s lives, the better off the people are, and the better off the government and the nation is.

The great flag bearers of this philosophy are people like, Mark Levin, John Bolton, Rush Limbaugh, and Ben Shapiro.

On the other, we have the followers of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.  Once again, remove from the analysis whatever feelings you may have towards Sanders or Clinton.  Instead, think of the things the people who put them in positions of authority believe. These folks are not the Democrats of old.  They are not the people who, like John F. Kennedy, asked not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country.  These people are totally different.

They don’t believe that there are problems plaguing the nation.  Rather, they believe the country is the problem.  They believe the United States is the great promoter of injustice.  This is because they America is a flawed state; from its inception!

They believe that the United States is the greatest fomenter of evil in the world today.  They believe that so many of the world’s injustices; poverty, famine, disease, and even the future decline in the health of the planet itself is to a great extent the result of the presence and actions of the United States.  They believe that because the United States has achieved a certain amount of stability and wealth, it must now give most of it up to the rest of the world.

The people in this camp believe it is appropriate to suspend due process because of the many injustices the United States has itself perpetrated in the past.
They believe in socialism, wealth distribution, and in the inherent evil of their opponents.  They believe that each and every one of you is responsible for the health of all those around you, and you should pay for it.

They believe that every majority group is inherently hateful, or at least unjust, towards every minority.  For this reason, they claim others as being racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobes at will.

This group’s flag bearers are Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joaquin Castro, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Mazie Hirono, and George Soros.

And there you have it; the two directions being offered to the American public.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a stark dichotomy between the two groups hoping to lead our country, and today, each group is asking you to help it take the nation in the direction it believes is better for the nation and the world.  Each is trying to convince you that theirs is the better way.

The question you need to answer is which vision do you believe is better?  Your response is fundamentally important to our nation’s future.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Emily Morter on Unsplash.

THE PURGE: Banned on Facebook! No HONEST Discussion Allowed!

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Tom Trento, Laura Loomer, Damon Rosen, and J Mark Campbell were “LIVE” today, Monday, Nov 5th, to discuss the 2018 election, the Socialist Democrat candidates, and the BANNING that is happening to ANYONE Conservative!

Within about 20 minutes… picture was scrambled and the LIVE video feed was shutdown by Facebook! Censorship SUPREME!

Where is the Conservative Voice able to SPEAK THE TRUTH? America needs a new Conservative platform for honest discussion!

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Glen Carrie on Unsplash.

Student arrested, charged with battery after confrontation with College Republicans

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  • Florida State University police arrested and charged a student who allegedly assaulted at least one College Republican at a tabling event.
  • The student, Shelby Anne Shoup, threw her drink on at least one College Republican member and kicked over a sign.

Police at a Florida university have arrested a student who allegedly assaulted at least one College Republican, according to a Friday announcement.

Florida State University police arrested FSU student Shelby Anne Shoup after the release of a viral video in which Shoup threw her drink at a College Republican and kicked over a Ron DeSantis campaign sign.

“I hope you all realize that you are normalizing and enabling Nazis,” she said. “And you can film me, I don’t give a shit.”    

[VIDEO: Instructor arrested for attacking conservative students]

The College Republicans tabled Tuesday to educate students about the importance of voting in the midterm elections when Shoup confronted them.

“You are supporting Nazis,” the student said. “Do you know that?”

“You’re supporting communism?” a bystander asked Shoup, pointing to a pin worn by the student, which appears to depict a sickle and hammer.

“Yeah, I fucking am,” Shoup responded. “Fuck you, man.”

“Don’t pour your coffee on me,” the bystander said.

“Fuck you, I will,” Shoup said, tossing the contents of her drink, which she subsequently claimed was chocolate milk, onto the bystander. “Fuck all of you.”

“I hope you all realize that you are normalizing and enabling Nazis. And you can film me, I don’t give a shit. Listen here: eleven of my people are fucking dead this weekend,” she continued, referencing the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre.

“Two black people are dead in Kentucky because of fucking nationalist murderers that this normalizes,” she added, referencing the Louisville Kroger store shooting.

Shoup kicked a sign promoting Fla. Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis while leaving the scene.

FSU College Republicans Vice Membership Chair Daisy Judge commented on the incident to Campus Reform.

“While handing out Trump stickers to two students, I was brashly approached by two students insinuating that we were racists for supporting  President Trump,” Judge told Campus Reform. “This escalated into the students implying that we were responsible for the shooting that occurred in Pittsburgh. The female student threw her chocolate milk on me after stating that the Republican Party and myself were Nazis for who[m] we aligned ourselves with.”

[RELATED: Female student attacked for wearing Trump hat on campus]

“As she continued to voice her opinion, she once again threw her drink on me while I continued to remain civil and explain our stance,” the vice membership chair said. “As others approached to de-escalate the situation, she threw the remainder of her drink on someone else [at the beginning of the video] due to them pointing out that she supported the Communist party. The girl then went on to hit a passing by student and to kick down our DeSantis sign.”

“FSU is a diverse community that values and respects each person,” the school posted on Twitter Friday. “FSU expects each member of the community to embrace the values of civility and ethical conduct and obey the law. Regarding Tuesday’s incident, the individual was identified, arrested and charged with battery.”

COLUMN BY

Genesis Sanchez

GENESIS SANCHEZ

Florida Campus Correspondent

Genesis Sanchez is a Florida Campus Correspondent, and reports liberal bias and abuse on campus for Campus Reform. She studies at Tallahassee Community College and serves as a Contributing Editor at The Lone Conservative. Twitter: @GenSanchezz.

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One Last Election Surprise: Pre-Planned Media Hit Piece On Rick Scott

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With the U.S. Senate in the balance, Florida’s largest newspaper chain published a last-minute hit piece on Gov. Rick Scott, an apparent attempt to undermine his campaign to unseat 46-year Washington politician Sen. Bill Nelson — the man Forbes magazine once famously depicted on their cover with, literally, an empty suit.

The pre-planned package of stories was published by GateHouse Media, which owns 21 newspapers in the state, including dailies in Jacksonville, Palm Beach, Sarasota, Daytona Beach, Panama City, Gainesville, St. Augustine and many more.

The newspapers ran an astonishingly bad piece of journalism out of the Palm Beach newsroom entitled “Florida felon voting rights: Who got theirs back under Scott” with the subhead reading “The governor restored rights to the lowest percentage of blacks, highest percentage of Republicans in 50 years.”

This came just days before Tuesday’s huge election, early enough to influence voting underway and election day, but not enough time to mount much of a pushback by the Scott campaign. It also tied in with Amendment 4, which would amend the Florida Constitution to automatically restore the voting rights of felons once they completed all of the conditions of their convictions.

It’s pretty clear from the “reporting” where the media stands on Gov. Scott and Amendment 4. The days of even pretending to hide partisanship are fading into a distant memory.

The long piece, essentially an agenda-driven package, is truly painful to read through if you are not an ardent Democrat. The reporting team draws conclusions of motivational fact on the part of Scott from nothing more than a correlation or one set of numbers significantly lacking context and the rest of the data.

For instance, one conclusion the piece draws is: “Scott’s system of restoring voting rights has for years discriminated against black felons, boosting his own political prospects and those of other Republicans throughout the state, a Palm Beach Post analysis has found.” [emphasis added]

Don’t be fooled by the word “analysis,” as though it means some green eye-shade look at the numbers. It’s not an analysis in any honest sense.

Reporters playing with statistics frequently mistake correlation with causation, sometimes out of ignorance, but often because even minor correlation can be enough for them to build their predetermined storyline.

In this case, the logic is as follows: A higher percentage of blacks than whites are arrested, so cops are racist. A higher percentage of blacks than whites are incarcerated, so the courts are racist. A higher percentage of blacks than whites are denied the restoration of voting rights, so specifically Gov. Scott is racist.

But the numbers do not show “discrimination,” which would be causal, they just show resulting numbers. Never truly asked or delved into in any of those numbers-conclusions scenarios is the bottom line question: Are a higher percentage of blacks committing crimes? That is the golden data point to be mined that the media has very little stomach for even looking at. Further in the data underlying this sentence, how many blacks requested restoration of voting rights?

The story is just riddled with truisms from Will Rogers’ observation, “There are three types of lies; lies, damned lies and statistics.” This story is chockaful of just such “statistics.”

Let’s bullet point some of their bullet points:

➞ Story: “During his nearly eight years as governor, Scott restored the voting rights of twice as many whites as blacks and three times as many white men as black men.”

Leaving aside what the felond did in the years after release — jobs, marriage, family, church, community involvement, that would suggest lifestyle stability — this bullet point sounds terrible until you read way down into the story and comb through one of the charts. Because the context for this is just during his term, and just between blacks and whites. But it turns out Scott had a higher ratio of blacks to whites than the last Democratic governor of Florida, Lawton Chiles, in the 1990s.

But that does not fit the agenda, so there was no real truthfulness of conclusions.

➞ Story: “Scott restored rights to a higher percentage of Republicans and a lower percentage of Democrats than any of his predecessors since 1971.”

By a little. And, by the way, he still restored a much higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans. Again, you have to find the data box to discover this. It’s not in the narrative “analysis.”

➞ Story: “Blacks accounted for 27 percent of those who had their voting rights restored despite the fact that 43 percent of those released from state prisons over the past two decades were black.”

This tells us nothing of causation. Again, as in the first bullet point above, what is causal is not the percentages but what each felon did in the years after their prison release — jobs, marriage, family, church, community, etc., that would suggest the sort of stability that a clemency board would be looking for in order to return full rights.

There is simply a lot of bad journalism in this story.

Of course, it was probably never intended to be groundbreaking investigative journalism digging into the truth. The consistently slanted “statistics” suggest the real intent was to sway votes in the midterm elections toward Sen. Bill Nelson. Between Gillum’s nomination and this story blasted across the state, it seems like that succeeded.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Revolutionary Act.

The Problem With Capitalism

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I am a capitalist. I believe in capitalism because it is foundational to upward mobility, the middle class, ordered liberty, and the individual freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. So, what is the problem with capitalism?

Capitalism is driven factually by supply and demand but artificially by the marketing and advertising industries that hawk its products. So, if a particular business or industry is suffering from lack of sales – it can hire a marketing firm to create an artificial demand for its products. Those products may or may not be beneficial to the public. For decades tobacco was marketed and advertised as elegant, sophisticated, and desirable even though it was a known cancer-causing killer. Buyer beware is the operating principle in a market economy.

Billions of dollars are spent annually marketing, lobbying, and advertising products because marketing, lobbying, and advertising are extremely effective.

Products are ordinarily considered to be goods and services, but what if the product is ideology?

The publishing of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973) destroyed any Western fantasies about collectivist ideology and life under communism/socialism when individual liberties are surrendered to the state. Socialism needed a new image if it was going to sell. How was the Left going to market collectivism?

In Matthew Continetti’s brilliant lecture titled “The Problem of Identity Politics and Its Solution” given on October 24, 2017 at Hillsdale College he explores the challenge for the Left.

“How to carry on the fight against capitalism when its major ideological alternative was no longer viable? The Left found its answer in an identity politics that grew out of anti-colonialism. Marx’s class struggle was reformulated into an ethno-racial struggle – a ceaseless competition between colonizer and colonized, victimizer and victim, oppressor and oppressed. Instead of presenting collectivism and central planning as the gateway to the realization of genuine freedom, the new multiculturalist Left turned to unmasking the supposed power relations that subordinated minorities and exploited third world nations.”

The Left had a new marketing, lobbying, and advertising strategy that targeted American universities and then K-12. American education was chosen as the vulnerable soft target for revolution – no bullets required. The long-term strategy was that two generations of leftist educational indoctrination would transform America from a capitalist constitutional republic into the socialist state required for internationalized one world government. It was a two-fisted approach that softened the targets (future voters) in school to accept the seismic political shifts that would come. This is how it works.

The radical leftists on campus in the 60s did not go quietly into the night after Woodstock – they graduated and became the teachers, professors, text book writers, psychologists, sociologists, politicians, and decision makers in charge of public education including curriculum content that reflected their anti-American bias and globalist views. Gradually the individualism and critical think skills that had created the vibrant, independent, upwardly mobile middle class and supported the American dream were deliberately dumbed down to encourage dependence, collectivism, group think, and a victim mentality.

In a sweeping effort that eventually transformed public education, collectivism was repackaged, marketed, lobbied, advertised, and sold to an unsuspecting American public. The former pro-American curricula that proudly promoted individualism, the meritocracy, capitalism, and the middle class was replaced. The revised curricula teaches American students to be anti-American, self-loathing, dependent, fragile collectivists, and unapologetically preaches global citizenship in a new world order.

Many people take public education for granted and do not realize that public education made the American dream possible. Public education supports American freedom and distinguished America from societies across the globe where centralized governments including monarchies, caste systems, despotic regimes of communism, socialism, defined their citizens’ futures.

The American dream reflected the possibilities and potentials for upward mobility in America. Legal immigrants who came to America seeking a better life understood that public education was the gateway to success in America. Those immigrants worked, assimilated, and sent their children to school to learn English and have a chance to realize the American dream.

It is essential to remember that the transformation of public education was in service to the political ideology of the Left that embraced collectivism and rejected capitalism. In order to destroy capitalism the Left took aim at the economy of the existing middle class. This effort reached a crescendo during Obama’s eight year promise to fundamentally transform America. His crushing economic policies:

  • sent jobs and manufacturing overseas
  • created massive unemployment
  • bloated the welfare rolls
  • created more and more dependence upon the government
  • moved the country further toward collectivism

The current midterm illegal migrant invasion threatening our southern border is the apotheosis of Leftist political maneuvering designed to completely overwhelm the American welfare system and destroy its capitalist infrastructure. Socialists Cloward and Piven provided the paradigm for economic collapse by deliberately overloading the American welfare system. The menacing midterm illegal migrant invasion marching toward our southern border is a catastrophic economic overload to our welfare system if allowed to breach our borders. It is Cloward and Piven’s destructive economic paradigm on steroids deliberately staged to produce the most damaging optics in hopes of swinging the midterm elections toward the leftist Democrats.

The caravan goal is not relief for refugees – the goal is to overwhelm the welfare system and finally collapse the US economy. If the  midterm caravan successfully breaches the US borders another caravan will immediately follow – and then another – and then another.

The Leftist movement has been repackaged, marketed, and advertised as a multicultural religion. There is zero chance of separating a religious zealot from his religious beliefs which is why the identity politics of the left are so effective. The inconvenient facts of Leftist hypocrisy do not get in their way. Jews march with anti-Semites. Women march with misogynists. Homosexuals march with homophobes. The Left unapologetically marches with Linda Sarsour despite her anti-American sharia law tenets including wife beating, child marriage, rape, murder of infidels, and “honor” killing. The stunning hypocrisy of the Left is completely ignored because the overarching and unifying principle is their shared hatred for President Trump.

The educational system has successfully dumbed down and indoctrinated half the American population into believing that socialism will bring social justice and income equality. The Leftist mainstream media, Internet behemoths, and Hollywood glitterati are facilitating the messaging and participating in the unifying attack against America-first President Donald Trump because he is the existential enemy of socialism.

America has reached the political tipping point and tomorrow’s midterm election will determine our future.

I believe in facts, critical thinking, and informed consent. I believe Solzhenitsyn. I believe the words of those who have suffered under communist/socialist regimes not the marketing promises of Leftist Democrat political leaders falsely advertising the benefits of collectivism. The Gulag Archipelago described the collectivist nightmare and serves as a stark warning to America.

We must reject Leftist Democrat collectivism and remember it is just Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag renamed and marketed as identity politics.

We must support President Trump’s vision of a sovereign, safe, secure, free America.

BUYER BEWARE! Choose freedom! Vote Republican and Make America Great Again!!

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Goudsmit Pundicity. The featured photo is by Chris Li on Unsplash.

Meeting the Caravan With Common Sense

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It’s sad to see the debate over the migrant caravan break down into the usual polarized camps. You’re either pro-immigrant and therefore willing to let anyone in, or you’re anti-immigrant and you want to slam the door in the face of anyone, right?

Wrong. The phrase “My fellow immigrants” certainly rings true for me, as it does for countless other Americans. In the 1870s, my forebears came to the land of opportunity, worked their way westward to Chicago, and lived their dream.

Today, there are more listings for “Feulner” in the Chicago phone book than in southern Germany, where my ancestors came from. (Although a quick computer search tells me that Markus Feulner is a star footballer for the Augsburg team. Clearly, “Cousin Markus” didn’t get his football genes from me.)

This isn’t a question about being unwilling to welcome newcomers. It’s about how we do it. For my ancestors—on both sides of our family—and millions of others, there was only one way to enter America: legally.

A sovereign nation is defined by specific territorial limits. Limits are borders, and borders must be real—that is, secure. A country without borders, sooner or later, will cease to be a country altogether.

That’s why there are processes and procedures for those who wish to enter our great land, either to visit or to become a citizen. We don’t just leave the door propped up.

In the words of a former U.S. president, “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants into this country.”

Hmm, you may be wondering, what hard-core conservative said that? Barack Obama. Surprised? The difference is that he said it when he was a senator, back when he and his fellow liberals were a bit more willing to speak truthfully about this subject.

Fast forward to 2018, and many of the same people who echoed Obama’s sentiment happily denounce anyone unwilling to throw the border open to the 7,000-plus migrant caravan wending its way north through Mexico.

Consider what Marc McGovern, mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, says: “Every one of these people are coming from a real fear. These are refugees. These are people who really are facing real problems, and we have to let them through.”

Some people may find themselves swayed by this emotional appeal, but it’s dangerous. Our nation has specific laws in place when it comes to asylum—laws that are typically reserved for instances of state-based repression.

Is that the case here? Maybe, but the point is that we have procedures in place to carefully determine such things. We don’t simply say, “Aww, those poor people. Just let them in.”

McGovern and others can say what they want, content to score political points because they’re publicly opposing President Donald Trump. But immigration officials can’t worry about being fashionable, or politically correct. They’re required by law to put the safety of Americans first.

The irony is, Trump’s critics don’t even seem to consider that South American left-wing parties may be manipulating the poor people in this migrant caravan.

“The timing before the U.S.’ midterm elections and the change of presidency in Mexico is not coincidental,” Latin America expert Ana Quintana says. “It is also clear the caravan organizers are more interested in creating turmoil than the well-being of the migrants.”

Those of us who care about both Americans and would-be Americans are called to a higher standard.

We should never fail to welcome those who wish to enter legally and become true Americans. But we must never allow our compassion to override our common sense, or let us forget that we’re a nation of laws—for the liberty and protection of all.

Originally published by The Washington Times.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Ed Feulner

Ed Feulner

Edwin J. Feulner’s 36 years of leadership as president of The Heritage Foundation transformed the think tank from a small policy shop into America’s powerhouse of conservative ideas. Read his research. Twitter: .

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

 

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column with images is republished with permission. The featured image by CristianFerronato on Pixabay.

2018: As Florida Goes, So Goes The Country

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It’s showtime for the 2018 midterm elections, where polls and media contend a “Blue Tide” is going to sweep across the country and the Democrats will reclaim the House of Representatives. After all, the press insists, “the party in power historically loses the midterms.” The only problem is the media has never met a president like Donald Trump, nor do they understand the country’s sense of priorities, where the citizenry prefers peace and prosperity over turmoil.

Certainly, we haven’t already forgotten how horribly wrong the media and polls got it in 2016 by picking Hillary Clinton over Mr. Trump in a runaway election? These are the same people who are now predicting the “Blue Tide.” Frankly, they are as wrong as they were in 2016.

In 2016, I accurately predicted the outcome of the election, not because I am a polling genius or possess some sixth-sense intuition, but because I simply studied the early voting data in Florida and saw the Republicans rallying to victory. I also knew Florida was an important swing state and realized, as Florida goes, so goes the country. I believe this remains true in 2018. In other words, I have found the early voting data produced by the Florida Division of Elections to be much more reliable than any poll I have come across.

Before we examine the 2018 Florida data, here are some assumptions I have learned over the years:

  1. Republicans tend to cast more Mail-In votes (Absentee) than Democrats.
  2. Democrats typically cast more Early-Voting votes than Republicans.
  3. Democrats do less voting in Midterm elections than in presidential years.
  4. Republicans tend to cast more votes on election day than Democrats.
  5. There are more registered Democrat voters in Florida as opposed to Republican voters, yet Republicans are more inclined to vote.
  6. Independent voters are a key factor. Whoever sways independents, wins the election.
  7. The majority of votes cast are during pre-voting, not on election day. (Typically 70% vote early, and 30% vote on election day).

Here are the pre-voting numbers in Florida prior to election day:

NOTES:

  1. Pre-voting was approximately 60% of the votes cast in 2016.
  2. The GOP is winning in Tampa Bay area and Florida overall.
  3. GOP is running away with the Mail-In votes, Dems ahead in Early Voting (same as 2016).
  4. Although “Other” party affiliations are lacking far behind, “No Affiliations” (Independents) show a strong turnout.
  5. 42.1% of registered Republicans have already voted.
  6. 39.3% of registered Democrats have already voted.

Translation: Republicans are more aggressively voting than the Democrats.

The biggest difference is the total number of votes cast in Florida between Republicans and Democrats. The GOP took a commanding lead in pre-voting and never let go.

It is impossible to determine how independent voters are voting. Even if it is 50/50 Republican/Democrat split, the Republicans will win. However, we have to remember it was the independent voters who voted Republican in 2016. Floridians appear to be happy with our economic success, whereby the state is #1 in the country for Fiscal Responsibility, and #4 in the Tax Foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index. Translation: they prefer peace and prosperity over turmoil and confrontation.

What does this all ultimately mean? There will be a “Red Tide” in 2018, not blue. Ron DeSantis will win the governorship, and Rick Scott will be our next U.S. Senator.

And as mentioned, “as Florida goes, so goes the country.” If this is so, it appears the Republicans will maintain control over the House, and will pick-up some Senate seats (I’m estimating five). When this election is over, the media, the polls, and the Democrats will once again wonder “What happened?” And as usual, they will have misunderstood the will of the people.

Keep the Faith!

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo of Jacksonville, FL is by David Masemore on Unsplash. All trademarks both marked and unmarked belong to their respective companies.

New York Times writer “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White”

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Photo of James Baldwin from Biography.com.

The title of this column is from a 1967 New York Times article written by James Baldwin. Mr. Baldwin, according to Biography.com, was an essayist, playwright and novelist regarded as a highly insightful, iconic writer with works like The Fire Next Time and Another Country. I found a link to Baldwin’s article while reading another New York Times article written by Ginia Bellafante on October 31, 2018 titled “Is It Safe to Be Jewish in New York?.” Ms. Bellafante wrote:

A related issue is that bias stemming from longstanding ethnic tensions in the city [of New York] presents complexities that many liberals have chosen simply to ignore. “When we were growing up in Harlem our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish, and we hated them.” So begins an essay by James Baldwin that appeared in The New York Times in 1967 titled “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White.”

It is worthwhile reading Mr. Baldwin’s column to understand the phenomenons of “white privilege” and anti-Semitism.

Wikipedia defines these two terms as:

White privilege is the societal privilege that benefits people whom society identifies as white in some countries, beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political, or economic circumstances.

Antisemitism is hostility to, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is generally considered to be a form of racism.

The idea of white privilege has led some individuals, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, to portray themselves as non-white. According to Ms. Bellafante “anti-Semitic incidents have constituted half of all hate crimes in New York this year, according to the Police Department. To put that figure in context, there have been four times as many crimes motivated by bias against Jews — 142 in all — as there have against blacks. Hate crimes against Jews have outnumbered hate crimes targeted at transgender people by a factor of 20.”

This divisiveness has lead to attacks against synagogues, like the killing of 11 Jews in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the foiled bombing attack in Florida in 2016.

White privilege and anti-Semitism are both racist ideologies. One discriminates against others based on the color of their skin, the second on a person’s religious affiliation.

How are White Privilege and Anti-Semitism connected?

Perhaps Mr. Baldwin put it best in his article stating:

The root of anti-Semitism among Negroes is, ironically, the relationship of colored peoples–all over the globe–to the Christian world. This is a fact which may be difficult to grasp, not only for the ghetto’s most blasted and embittered inhabitants, but also for many Jews, to say nothing of many Christians. But it is a fact, and it will not ameliorated–in fact, it can only be aggravated–by the adoption, on the part of colored people now, of the most devastating of the Christian vices.

Mr. Baldwin is connecting the hate for blacks to Christians and Jews. Perhaps Mr. Baldwin would be appalled by the statements made by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and members of the Black Lives Matter movement?

Capitalism, Jews and White Privilege

Mr. Baldwin also blames capitalism for the plight of the blacks stating:

Of course, it is true, and I am not so naÔve as not to know it, that many Jews despise Negroes, even as their Aryan brothers do. (There are also Jews who despise Jews, even as their Aryan brothers do.) It is true that many Jews use, shamelessly, the slaughter of the 6,000,000 by the Third Reich as proof that they cannot be bigots–or in the hope of not being held responsible for their bigotry. It is galling to be told by a Jew whom you know to be exploiting you that he cannot possibly be doing what you know he is doing because he is a Jew. It is bitter to watch the Jewish storekeeper locking up his store for the night, and going home. Going, with your money in his pocket, to a clean neighborhood, miles from you, which you will not be allowed to enter. Nor can it help the relationship between most Negroes and most Jews when part of this money is donated to civil rights. In the light of what is now known as the white backlash, this money can be looked on as conscience money merely, as money given to keep the Negro happy in his place, and out of white neighborhoods.

We see what Mr. Baldwin describes from his personal experiences today.

So what is the answer?

Mr. Baldwin concludes his article noting:

All racist positions baffle and appall me. None of us are that different from one another, neither that much better nor that much worse. Furthermore, when one takes a position one must attempt to see where that position inexorably leads. One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads. And if one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy.

Baldwin concludes, “The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.”

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Shalom Mwenesi on Unsplash.

Anti-Semitic Speaker Invited to Orlando’s Valencia College

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In the wake of the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre by a Neo Nazi who screamed, “All Jews Must Die”, the same vile hate motivating that mass murderer is being welcomed here in Orlando.

The nationally known anti-Semitic hate speaker is Dr. Yasir Qadi, whose  lecture is being sponsored by the UCF and Rollins College Muslim Students’ Association, Valencia Peace and Justice Institute, and the Valencia College Muslim Ambassadors For Peace.

Dr. Yasir Qadi has a dark resume that has been sourced and verified by CanaryMission.org.  I challenge every interested person and critic to go to the Canary Mission website, enter Dr. Yasir Qadi, and verify all facts and evidence presented to you today.

Dr. Yasir Qadhi said this:  On November 17, 2014, Qadhi suggested on Facebook that the United States and other Western governments were behind the rise of ISIS.

February 4, 2015, Qadhi posted on Facebook additional opposition to Muslim Leadership Institute (MLI)  — which brings North American Muslims to Israel to “explore how Jews understand Judaism, Israel, and Jewish peoplehood.” Qadhi called MLI a “blatantly Zionist Islamophobic propaganda group” — and claimed the ideology of Zionism is “racist.”

Dr. Yasir Qadhi alleged that Jews were sowing “division” and “discord” among Muslims, saying:

“How many Muslims know about this? You go to America, you find 95% of the Islamic Studies professors are Jews…Why are Jews studying Islam? There is a reason. Not that they want to help us, they want to destroy us. And they want to bring about shubuhat, they want to bring about doubts. Look at the doubts that are existing, look at the division, look at the discord, look at the disunity, look at all these ideologies that are being spread and know that Yahood [Jews] and the Kuffar [non-believer] do like this type of thing.”

Dr. Yasir Qadhi also said:

“Hitler never intended to mass-destroy the Jews. There are a number of books out written by Christians on this, you should read them. The Hoax of the Holocaust, I advise you to read this book, you may want to write this down, the Hoax of the Holocaust, a very good book. All of this is false propaganda and I know it sounds so far-fetched, and these theories, but read it. The evidences are very strong. And they’re talking about newspaper articles, clippings, everything and look up yourself what Hitler really wanted to do. We’re not defending Hitler, by the way, but what the Jews, the way that they portray him, also is not correct.”

In another lecture, Qadhi related tales alleging that a Jewish prankster embarrassed a Muslim woman and that treacherous Jews — “ethnically and culturally different from the local population” — schemed to assassinate Muhammad.

On August 19, 2014, Qadhi said on Facebook:

“Israel is following some of the very same tactics that Nazi Germany did, in dehumanizing Palestinians.”

In an August 2, 2014, Facebook post, Qadhi specifically likened Israel supporters — and Israelis — to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

The April 11, 2017 Dominic Kennedy of  The Sunday Times reports,

“Yasir Qadhi, a Saudi-educated American academic, has been recorded apparently telling students that killing homosexuals and stoning adulterers was part of their religion. Dr Qadhi, who features in an eight-city tour starting this month, described Islamic punishments such as cutting off the hands of thieves as “very beneficial to society”.

Dr. Yasir Qadhi’s world view could incite others to violence.  We saw what the teachings of the Neo-Nazi movement did to the shooter of the Tree Of Life Synagogue several days ago.

All people of conscience living in Central Florida have a duty and an obligation standing up to these pathological speakers like Dr. Qadi.

The subject of the lecture Dr. Yasir Qadhi will be speaking on is, “Role Of Muslims in Promoting a Culture of Peace”.   Dr. Qadhi’s past comments of anti semitism, homophobia, and holocaust denial should disqualify him immediately from lecturing at Valencia College unless, the duplicitous nature between the speaker and title of the lecture is intentional?

What are the sponsors of this lecture trying to hide by naming their talk something so nice and uplifting while Dr. Qadhi’s comments are so vile and contradictory. How can two opposites both be true?  They can’t if you look beneath the surface.

Dr. Yasir Qadi is a wolf in sheep’s clothing along with those groups who would expend resources bringing him to Valencia College in Orlando, FL.  on November 12, 2018 11:30-1:00 PM.

Call Valencia College and let them know how Dr. Yasir Qadhi’s comments divide us as a community rather than unite us. Main Phone Number 407-299-5000

Source for Qadhi dossier:  https://canarymission.org/professor/Yasir_Qadhi

RELATED ARTICLES: Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White – New York Times

EDITORS NOTE: In the column Is It Safe to Be Jewish in New York? – New York Times Ginia Bellafante reports:

During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an anti-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group, Mark Molinari, commanding officer of the police department’s Hate Crimes Task Force, told me.

Capitalism Brings Us Together, Authoritarianism Tears Us Apart

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Empathy is fostered in a culture where commercial transactions occur between all walks of life.

You’ve probably heard this story before: a terrible crime occurs, the press interviews the neighbors of the perpetrator, and the neighbors say they never saw it coming.

Consider Robert Bowers, the mass murderer who killed eleven people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. One neighbor said this:

It’s just so disturbing that someone so normal could have so much hate. You think you know your neighbor, but this just shows how wrong you can be.

Some may dismiss such comments as coming from clueless, unobservant individuals. Surely there are signs that individuals, such as Bowers, are capable of committing heinous acts. We are comfortable believing in good guys and bad guys, separated by a relatively impermeable barrier between the polarities. Think of villains in popular movies and television—they are often one-dimensional characters who easily commit terrible acts, often without a rationale.

Renowned psychology professor Roy Baumeister is best known for his work on willpower. His work on the nature of evil deserves close examination, too. He begins his book, Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, with a bold proposition: “Evil usually enters the world unrecognized by the people who open the door and let it in. Most people who perpetrate evil do not see what they are doing as evil.”

Baumeister defines evil as “actions that intentionally harm other people.” When we have a black and white view of evil, it is easy to believe that those like Bowers must be insane. Not true, Baumeister informs us: “insanity is in fact a relatively rare and minor cause of violence.”

Calling someone “insane” is an attempt to absolve them of responsibility. As Baumeister observes, “People do become extremely upset and abandon self-control, with violent results, but this is not insanity.” He adds, “violence is often an impulsive action representing a failure of self-control—but a failure in which the person often acquiesces.”

Would you, Baumeister asks, “obey orders to kill innocent civilians? Would you help torture someone? Would you stand by passively while the secret police hauled your neighbors off to concentration camps?” Baumeister writes, “Most people say no. But when such events actually happen, the reality is quite different.”

In his acclaimed work The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Solzhenitsyn continued by observing that the line between good and evil is permeable:

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Professor Steven Pinker echoes Solzhenitsyn and Baumeister: “Humans are not innately good (just as they are not innately evil), but they come equipped with motives that can orient them away from violence and toward cooperation and altruism.”

Pinker reveals the factors that help us choose good over evil:

Empathy (particularly in the sense of sympathetic concern) prompts us to feel the pain of others and to align their interests with our own. Self-control allows us to anticipate the consequences of acting on our impulses and to inhibit them accordingly. The moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways that increase it. And the faculty of reason allows us to extricate ourselves from our parochial vantage points, to reflect on the ways in which we live our lives, to deduce ways in which we could be better off, and to guide the application of the other better angels of our nature.

Baumeister, Pinker, and Solzhenitsyn are correct: The conditions under which people are prone to tip to their evil side deserve a great deal of study and reflection.

Many of us hold popular beliefs “that frustration, violent movies, poverty, hot weather, alcohol, and unfair treatment all cause aggression.” Baumeister rejects these theories and asks:

Why isn’t there more evil than there is? … Then why wouldn’t almost every adult in America have committed several murders and dozens of assaults by now? After all, how many adult Americans have not been frustrated? Have not seen violent films? Have not felt poor or suffered from hot weather or so forth?

For Baumeister, the answer is clear:

Most violent impulses are held back by forces inside the person. In a word, self-control prevents a great deal of potential violence. Therefore, regardless of the root causes of violence, the immediate cause is often a breakdown of self-control.

Evil and violence increase when we choose to not restrain ourselves. Baumeister explains:

When evil increases, it does not necessarily mean that the causes of evil have become more powerful or important. Rather, it may mean that the inner controls have become weakened. Or, to put it another way: You do not have to give people reasons to be violent, because they already have plenty of reasons. All you have to do is take away their reasons to restrain themselves. Even a small weakening of self-control might be enough to produce a rise in violence. Evil is always ready and waiting to burst into the world.

Many people believe low self-esteem leads to violent acts. “The evidence shows plainly that this idea is false,” Baumeister explains:

Violent acts follow from high self-esteem, not from low self-esteem. This is true across a broad spectrum of violence, from playground bullying to national tyranny, from domestic abuse to genocide, from warfare to murder and rape. Perpetrators of violence are typically people who think very highly of themselves.

He observes that “people whose self-esteem is high but lack a firm basis in genuine accomplishment are especially prone to be violent, because they are most likely to have their narcissistic bubble burst.”

Many educators praise students regardless of their accomplishments, fueling narcissism. One can wonder where this will lead. As these young narcissists meet the world will they “feel like lashing out at anyone who says [they] are not as great as [they] thought.”

Both Baumeister and Pinker point to empathy as a factor that brings out our “better angels.” As Baumeister points out, though, human beings tend to feel the most empathy for those who are “most similar to themselves.” In other words, many default to tribalism.

Before his deadly act in Pittsburgh, Bowers blamed Jews for helping to promote immigration. He posted on the social media platform, Gab, “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.” “All Jews [must] die” played like a mantra in his mind. If Bowers taps into his capacity for empathy, he extends empathy to a narrowly defined tribe.

Authoritarian societies—whether called socialist, communist, or fascist—are always looking to find scapegoats. In those societies, there is always the “evil other,” a group or groups who have “sabotaged” the greatness of the authoritarian regime. When monstrous evil deeds are committed, some perpetrators assuage their guilt by believing their acts defend their “noble” vision. Others believe they are merely following orders and doing their job.

Reading accounts of Nazi, Soviet, or North Korean concentration camps, remarkable similarities are revealed. Unspeakable brutality is practiced and rationalized. The rationalization always begins with some form of the belief that their victims are not truly human. As Baumeister puts it, “The lack of empathy makes violence toward outsiders easier because it undermines the restraining power of guilt.”

Baumeister relates the story of a man concerned about the lack of food and adequate clothing at a Soviet labor camp in his village. At significant risk to himself, he protested to the camp administrator, “These people might die!” “The camp administrator replied, ‘What people? These are enemies of the people.’”

Since I don’t spend hours at a time driving, I recently called SiriusXM to cancel their service; I could not justify the cost. Before making the call, I knew many complain about how hard it is to cancel their subscription. I was also aware that I’d be speaking with an agent at a call center in India. Yet, as the agent took my call, I was feeling empathy. I imagined the agent was being measured on some retention metric and that he frequently interacted with customers who just wanted to get off the phone without hearing his retention pitch.

The person I spoke with was solicitous and concerned. Why wouldn’t he be? His well-being (succeeding at his job) depends on satisfying customers. The need to satisfy customers brings out an empathetic response towards seeing the world from the point of view of the customer. Perhaps he was looking at a computer screen showing him my limited usage stats. Ten minutes and a pleasant chat later, the price of my service was reduced to a win-win, 65 percent off my previous price.

If either of us had no empathy for the other, a lose-lose outcome might have resulted. Empathy greases the wheels of commercial transactions. SiriusXM is rewarded when they hire empathic service agents who can discern consumers’ needs.

Perhaps some readers are cynical of my account. Oh, come on; he probably hates his job and was merely following a script. I doubt it, but even so, the demands of commerce were forcing the agent to join hands with me in creating a win-win trade. In the process, his practice of empathy was being rewarded.

In a Forbes essay, “A Virtuous Cycle,” James Surowiecki observed how capitalism “encouraged universalism over provincialism,…a willingness to make and keep promises—often to strangers and foreigners… [as well as] a sense of individual, rather than group, responsibility.” He explains why under capitalism, trust is not built merely on tribal personal relationships:

Trust had been the product only of a personal relationship—I trust this guy because I know him—rather than a more general assumption upon which you could do business. The real triumph of capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries was that trust was woven into the basic fabric of everyday business. Buying and selling were no longer about a personal connection. It was now about the virtue of mutual exchange.

Einstein urged that we widen our circle of compassion. In a letter to a father grieving the untimely death of his son, Einstein wrote:

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Einstein’s call to action is precisely what commerce does: Our circle of compassion widens through empathetic connections forged through trade. If Bowers had been a patient of the Jewish dentist he murdered, might his opinion of Jews been different?

Had he spent time walking the streets of the Squirrel Hill neighborhood where the synagogue was located, might he have stepped into some Jewish businesses? Had he stopped to shop, perhaps he would have realized that Jews were part of the extended order of which we are all a part. Perhaps his hatred would have been mitigated.To be sure, capitalism will not eliminate hatred; the line between good and evil cuts through “the heart of every human being.” Yet capitalism is pointing us in the right direction. As the extended order gets wider, it creates more opportunities for more people to widen their circle of compassion. As commerce weaves together the lives of people everywhere, the question Solzhenitsyn asked—“who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”—becomes easier to answer.

COLUMN BY

Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein

Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore. He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership. To receive Barry’s essays subscribe at Mindset Shifts.

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

Why the Hammer and Sickle Should Be Treated Like the Swastika

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If someone were to ask you to think of either extreme of the political spectrum, odds are you would immediately picture a swastika at one end and a hammer and sickle at the other. Regardless of your views on the left-right paradigm or whether or not you subscribe to horseshoe theory, we (rightfully) tend to perceive fascism and communism as the standard ideologies of the extreme.

As such, many of us would also feel rather uneasy seeing those two symbols. Upon seeing a swastika, we are immediately reminded of the evils of the Nazi regime and are accordingly repulsed. To publicly display the logo is even a crime in many European countries. We understand how abhorrent the ideology is and treat it accordingly with disrespect and disgust.

But how do we react to the hammer and sickle? I don’t have to write an article explaining the millions of deaths that occurred at the hands of communist regimes; like the Holocaust, the gulags of the Soviet Union and killing fields of Cambodia are widely known.

Yet journalists in the UK openly and proudly advocate communism. Statues of Karl Marx are erected. Even in the US, historically one of the most passionately anti-communist states in history, there is a statue of Vladimir Lenin in the northwestern city of Seattle.

So why exactly do we treat two equally bloody ideologies in such starkly different ways?

The answer may lie the in misperceptions of virtue. Nazis, rightfully, are seen as hateful and vicious because their ideology is built around the idea that one group is superior to the other. It is an inherently anti-egalitarian ideology, a violent belief that was put into practice only once by those who devised it.

As such, there is no justifiable way a fascist could argue ‘That wasn’t real Nazism.’ The same is not true for communism.

On the contrary; we see this argument all the time. Those on the far-left have a whole umbrella of communist styles, from Stalinism to Anarchism, Maoism to Trotskyism, or even just classic Marxism. Since Karl Marx never implemented communism himself, the leaders of communist states always have that get-out-of-jail-free card. Any shortcomings, tragedies, or crises a communist regime faces can always be blamed on a misapplication of Marx’s infallible roadmap to utopia.

Conveniently, communists can always detach themselves from the horrors of the past. They can paint themselves as pioneers of an ideology that simply hasn’t had the opportunity to flourish (‘Real communism has never been tried!’).

In this way, advocates of communism can continue to paint themselves as protagonists. They are only ever fighting for the liberation of the working class and the creation of a workers’ paradise that has nothing to do with the false prophets of before. At worst, advocates of communism are seen as misguided but ultimately well-intentioned.

This is the nub of the issue. While Naziism is intrinsically linked to the crimes of its followers, communism can always be separated. No one would tolerate a t-shirt emblazoned with Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini, yet the wildly oppressive Che Guevara is easily detached and morphed into a symbol of revolution.

But where do we draw the line? The communist ideology in its purest form might be separated from its implementations, but at what point does its awful track record discredit any attempts to advocate it?

As economist Murray Rothbard once said: “It is no crime to be ignorant of economics […] But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”

We need to say the same about communism. To continue advocating communism despite its dismal track record is neither well-intentioned nor misguided; it is a deliberate attempt to push a provably dangerous ideology. The history of communism is as bloodstained as that of Naziism; much more so, actually. It’s time we treated it as such.

This article was reprinted from Intellectual Takeout.

COLUMN BY

Richard Mason

Richard Mason

Richard Mason is a freelance blogger and assistant editor at SpeakFreely.today.

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

Democrats Care About Illegal Aliens, Not You

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A buddy shared a heart-wrenching story with me during dinner. His mom was killed Christmas Eve by a drunk driver illegal alien. The illegal had been caught 4 times driving drunk by police, never deported. My buddy is number 9 of his amazing mom’s 13 kids. She was old school Italian, waking up 3:00 AM five days a week to bake fresh bread and prepare meals for their family. Dad cooked on weekends.

Christmas Eve 2002, she decided to make a quick run to the store for a few ingredients she needed to bake pies. You can imagine the devastating horror their family felt upon being notified by police that their mother had been killed.

The illegal alien drunk driver received 7 years and only served 3 and half years. Two of my buddy’s brothers attended the illegal alien’s parole hearing to keep him behind bars to no available. The multiple offender illegal alien drunk driver was set free to roam the streets of America, not deported.

Watching my buddy struggle to maintain his composure, my heart went out to him. I thought, “Why is all of mainstream media’s and Democrats’ compassion and sympathy always given to illegals and nothing for Americans?”

While strolling with her dad on a San Francisco pier, 32 year old Kate Steinle was shot and killed by an illegal alien. Kate’s killer had a long criminal record. Deported 5 times and a 7 times convicted felon, the sanctuary city repeatedly welcomed back the illegal with open arms who eventually murdered Kate Steinle. A liberal San Francisco jury found Kate’s killer not guilty. President Trump said their verdict was disgraceful. Kate’s dad recalls her last words as he held her in his arms. “Help me, Dad.”

San Francisco politicians, mainstream media and Democrats celebrated the leftist jury’s outrageous not guilty verdict. These leftists did not express an once of sympathy for American citizen Kate Steinle and her family.

Sixteen year old Kayla Cuevas was brutally murdered by MS-13 gang members who illegally invade our country. Did Democrat Nancy Pelosi express an ounce of sympathy for Kayla’s mom, Evelyn Rodriguez? No. Pelosi angrily attacked Trump for calling MS-13 gang members animals. No compassion or sympathy for Americans.

Folks, I could fill this article with incidences in which American lives have been devastated by illegal repeat criminals and illegal gangs coddled by Democrats who run sanctuary cites.

Democrat California governor Jerry Brown actually signed a bill making California a “sanctuary state.” Brown’s bill says his state will not cooperate with federal immigration law enforcement, putting American lives at risk. Why is Brown gifting illegals rights while denying the rights of his American constituents? While Californians struggle to find housing, Brown is assisting illegals with housing. Illegals in California receive college tuition and numerous other benefits unavailable to legal citizens.

Democrat governor Bruce Rauner has officially made Illinois a “sanctuary state” for illegals. Why are Democrat governor’s digging in their heels, ignoring federal law to roll out the red carpet for people who arrogantly and boldly break our immigration laws? These illegals have no desire to embrace our American culture. They drain our welfare system and receive benefits unavailable to U.S. citizens.

So why are mainstream media and Democrats obsessed with opening our borders for the free flow of illegals and getting them addicted to government freebies? One reason is we have allowed old hippies to indoctrinate our kids in public schools for decades. This has created a generation which believes America is the greatest source of evil in the world; founded by white straight Christian men who stole everything from the rest of the world. Our youths believe it is morally unjust for America to have borders. We must share what we stole with the rest of the world.

Insidiously, the second reason why Democrats desire to flood the country with illegals is to gain political power. Legal immigrants have contributed greatly to our culture. The vast majority of illegals are unskilled workers easily seduced by Democrat politicians who promise to take care of them. Democrats will do to illegals what they have done to blacks for decades – give them just enough to keep them poor, on welfare and faithfully voting for Democrats.

This is why mainstream media and Democrats pretend to have all the compassion and sympathy in the world for illegals while ignoring the dire consequence coddling illegals has on the lives of Americans.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured photo is by Tayla Kohler on Unsplash.