PODCAST: Booker T. Washington — A Legacy of Enterprise and Education

/in , , , /by

Author and educator Booker T. Washington played a critical role in the promotion of education and free market enterprise among black Americans at the turn of the century.

Alabama businessman and political consultant Richard Finley joins The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss what the legacy of Washington, who died in 1915, means to him and others in the African American community.

Listen to today’s podcast episode or read the lightly edited transcript below.

Rob Bluey: We are joined on The Daily Signal Podcast today by Richard Finley, who’s head of the Finley Group, a business and political consulting firm in Birmingham, Alabama. Richard, thanks so much for joining us.

Richard Finley: Thank you for having me.

Bluey: You are somebody who’s served on the Republican Party State Executive Committee there in Alabama, and very much have lived through the civil rights movement and history, and you’ve seen it before your own eyes.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

And throughout the month of February, Black History Month, we’re featuring some of the stories of American heroes. Maybe some of those who are listeners can learn a little bit more about, so we appreciate you taking the time to share with us about Booker T. Washington specifically and some of your own experiences.

Finley: I appreciate the opportunity.

I just feel that Washington was probably the most significant black figure in American history. And I know that’s arguable, but the things that he was able to do at Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, and the economic strategy he had for lifting up a people out of slavery was extremely significant and extremely valuable. And I dislike the fact that it is being downplayed in modern public schools’ telling of black history.

When I initially decided to become politically active in Birmingham, I went to the established black leadership and I told them, I said, “Well, I am going to become politically active, and I’m going to become politically active as a Republican.”

I explained to them that when I was in high school and college here as a young man, being an activist, our fight was with the yellow dog Democrats of Alabama in the South. And I didn’t quite understand returning to Birmingham and finding all of the black leadership now in bed with the yellow dog Democrats who were the oppressors.

Democrats controlled Alabama from Reconstruction up through the 1970s. So they had a long run and all of the segregation efforts, the laws that were put in place to segregate and oppress the black citizens were put in place by the yellow dog Democrats of Alabama.

I didn’t quite understand why our leadership had chosen to get in bed with these people. But I said that if you’re going to be politically active, then you have to have options. If you don’t have an option, then you really don’t matter in the overall equation. They can write you in, and then go pursue those folk who might be exercising their options.

And I felt that black people needed to hear both sides of the story. They needed to be able to get the information, and then make a conscious decision as to which way they wanted to go. Rather than being locked into the party of the same people who had been oppressing us for the [300] or 400 years leading up to the Civil War.

Bluey: Thank you for sharing that. We appreciate your leadership and speaking out.

I think it’s so critically important that people do have an open mind and understand history. Because I think, too often, as you’ve indicated to me, sometimes we only look at the recent history and not necessarily look back at the figures who had a transformative impact on our country. And Booker T. Washington is, certainly, one of them.

He was born in 1856, died in 1915. He was, obviously, an educator. You mentioned his role at Tuskegee University. He was a leading Republican, at the time. He was somebody who was among that last generation of black Americans who were born into slavery, and then became a leading voice.

So tell us more about him and why you consider him to be such a profound figure in American history, and an influence on your own life.

Finley: I was conscious of him all through elementary school when we were taught black history as part of the Jefferson County, Alabama, colored school system.

In the colored school we had all black teachers who had a sensitivity, or a consciousness to making sure that young black kids understood the contributions that we, as a people, have made to America.

My two heroes were Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. And I tell folk that I believed, as Frederick Douglass did, in free people and, as Booker T. Washington did, in free enterprise. So, free people and free enterprise was sort of my driving motto.

But Washington had a unique plan and strategy for lifting newly freed Africans who had been purposely blocked from learning to read, or being taught the way the system worked in this country.

Ignorance was being brutally enforced upon Africans who were in slavery. And once they were free, Washington had sort of a manifesto of here are the things that you need to first do in order to lift yourself up out of the poverty that you were left in.

In 1866, they set you free, but there was no budget with that. And so, newly freed Africans had a major challenge.

But having lived in such close quarters, just through observation, they understood how the system worked. And Booker T. Washington and his team at Tuskegee Institute, working with some Northern philanthropists, started to establish schools so that the newly freed Africans could immediately began to learn to read.

I think if you check the history in that period between 1866 and, say, 1930, illiteracy was reduced within the black community pretty close to 60%, 65%. So it was a major achievement in establishing a school network.

And there was an eagerness, or a hunger, from the newly freed Africans to learn to read and write the language—from being in proximity with the plantation owners—and how they operated the business they had picked up, pretty much, how the system was working.

If you look during that period, there was substantial economic gain made within the African or black community. They rapidly acquired what, ultimately, wound up being at the height about 15 million acres of land, went into various business pursuits. And Tuskegee was sort of the training ground, or the breeding ground, for this entrepreneurial effort.

Tuskegee Institute, if you read the stories, they talk about how they took straw and made bricks, and built the buildings on the campus at Tuskegee Institute. Well, not only were they making bricks and masonry products, they were doing lumber. And they became one of the largest, if not the largest, supplier of building materials in the South.

And with that business acumen, Dr. Washington then set about on a plan that was to be called the Tuskegee Industrial Complex. He established organizations all over the country under the title of the National Negro Business League. He had in his employ, at Tuskegee Institute, Dr. George Washington Carver, and several other botanists, and chemists, and scientists who were putting together a lot of the products that we use today.

It was his plan to turn Tuskegee into an industrial complex to create these various common need products, the deodorants, the soaps, the hair creams, all of these things were things that were being made from plants in Dr. Carver’s laboratory.

So Washington’s plan was to begin to manufacture all of these products there at Tuskegee, and distribute them across the country through the National Negro Business League.

He also, as I said earlier, had the capability for the building materials and so forth. He was building out of this industrial complex concept what would today be a multibillion-dollar American corporation.

A lot of this stuff that Proctor & Gamble was doing, a lot of that stuff that Kellogg was doing, and Rockefeller, and Firestone. All of these industrial giants were constant visitors at Tuskegee and with Dr. Carver.

To this day, some of their institutions still contribute to Tuskegee’s well-being, but they also became very wealthy corporations off of the formulas that Dr. Carver had put together.

Dr. Carver was the first to create synthetic nylon that was crucial to the American war effort. When they started developing automobile tires, Firestone was the beneficiary of what they were doing at Tuskegee in terms of creating rubber and synthetic nylon from the products that Carver was growing there on the Tuskegee properties.

Bluey: It’s really fascinating to hear you share those examples. Clearly, Booker T. Washington had a passion not only to educate, but also an entrepreneurial spirit as well, as you indicated there. …

We were at an event together in Washington, D.C., in February, it was put on by Black Americans for a Better Future, and you shared with me Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech. And it’s really fascinating in the impact that it had.

I wanted you to share a bit about that particular address and how it really set the course in motion, some of the things that he was able to accomplish.

Finley: It was a plan, a roadmap, if you will, that was put before the American white community, the business community.

The left wing, or the socialist elements of the time, headed up by W.E.B. Du Bois, labeled it a compromise speech. And I just assumed that they didn’t understand what Washington was putting forward. He was putting forward a plan for economic growth and development here in the South.

And his position with the Southern white businessmen were OK, if we are allowed uninterrupted to acquire land, to farm that land to build our churches, our schools, and our homes. And, in fact, own that property uninterrupted by whatever government the South was putting in place at the time then we, as newly freed Africans, we as newly freed participants in the American economy would want to establish, basically, a parallel relationship, or a parallel economy where we would bring our excess produce to the market, and we would live as neighbors. All being Americans.

Washington was a nationalist. He believed in America, he believed in the American concept, and he wanted the newly freed Africans to be able to establish a parallel system, as well as a parallel economy.

He said to the assembled people, anything social, that’s your preference. We can be as separate as the fingers on the hand, but should we be attacked by an outset aggressor, then be assured that we as citizens of the country will come together with you to defend America against any enemy, foreign or domestic.

He made that statement to the established audience there. But he then went on to talk about our sojourn up to that point here in America and the challenges that we were facing now as free American citizens.

If you remember, during that time frame, the great American railroad experiment was beginning, and the Chinese were the immigrants of the day, and they were taking jobs that the newly freed Africans were applying for, or wanting to do. And Washington addressed that position in his speech as well, the immigration problem.

Again, he went on to assure them that, hey, we’ve been here living in close proximity for [300] or 400 years, we’ve never, to any real extent, had a major uprising. We’ve been in situations where you’ve got [200] or 300 slaves on a plantation with maybe 10, 12 white people on the plantation. So, if there was any ill intent, it would’ve shown itself a long time ago.

So, he was saying that you could be comfortable with the black citizens. All we wanted was an opportunity to be productive and to generate and own property of our own, to be able to educate our children, to be able to establish and conduct our church and religious life as free citizens here in America. And, again, as a parallel to what was existing within the white communities at that time.

Bluey: Certainly.

Finley: So it was the first presentation of separate and equal. And it was, I think, well, you can read the other stuff that was in there, but it was the first actual deal or arrangement put on the table for blacks and whites to coexist in America.

Bluey: And we will make sure that we link to it for our listeners or our readers on The Daily Signal so they can see.

Richard, one final question for you. You spoke about the importance of educating today’s Americans and young people about our history. What are some steps that you’re taking, or what advice do you have for our audience who want to do a better job of making sure that young people understand those American heroes who came before us?

Finley: The thing that’s most personal to me now is, at my age, to have time to sit down and talk with young people. I think we need to encourage the storytelling. And, especially, within the black community, we are losing generations to poor public education. And now, with the advent of social media and the electronic communications, they’re getting stories that are coming at them so fast that they don’t have time to put them in perspective, and to understand what it is that they’re getting in all this information that’s flowing.

… I’m 70 years old, so I’m at the point where, as I told my children, I said, “I was there when the colored sign came down and I’m not sure it was the best thing to do for us.”

I said, we had, at that time, operating in Alabama, five nationally-established black insurance companies that were employing thousands of black people across the country. We had three banks here in Birmingham. We had a community that consisted of doctors and dentists and all of the various medical capabilities. We had a black-established and -run hospital within our community and we had the pharmacist in our community. All these businesses were going.

When Martin Luther King [Jr.] arrived in Birmingham, he had to have a serious conversation with A.G. Gaston who, at that time, was one of the leading black businessmen in the country. But he was stationed here in Birmingham and owned major buildings and property in, what is now, downtown Birmingham proper.

He cautioned King and his followers that they need to give serious thought to what would happen after the colored sign came down, and how would we be positioned financially or economically to compete in the broader market with the much more financially established white entities in a downtown area.

So we had a lot of questions that were going on that don’t get told in the stories of history today. It was a significant debate about the economic cost of integration to the black community. And people need to understand that there was not a whole lot of problem with the concept of separate and equal. The problem was we never could get the equal worked out.

Bluey: That’s right.

Finley: And the public tax revenue didn’t come into our community, but we had successful black businesses going on. We had successful black churches, black contractors were building houses. We had what by most standards would be a pretty comfortable working-class or middle-class existence in Birmingham. And that was lost once the colored sign came down. And we have not been able to reestablish.

I hear black businesses crying, “Well, we don’t have capital to do this, that, and the other.” I’m saying, I’m old enough to remember when we had all of these things, and whatever capital was needed we were able to put it together to do what needed to be done.

So understanding that history, and what we built, and how we built it, the drop in the link of communications has interrupted our ability to build on those successes.

The Johnson Publishing companies, the 300 black-owned radio stations, the 15 million acres of land, all of that is lost. And I feel that … the misdirection of the public education system and the breakdown in the family communications within our community have cost us tremendously. And that history, that story needs to be told.

When I talked to you about T.M. Alexander, the Rosa Parks story is a great human interest story, but this was the Montgomery bus boycott, [which] was an organized quasi business entity that was going on here. And the people didn’t stop going to work, they just stopped riding the bus.

In creating a car pool to be able to deliver these people to their jobs, they needed to have a blanket insurance. So we had a millionaire black insurance executive insurance company owner out of Atlanta who stepped up and provided a $2 million blanket policy to cover the bus boycott.

Now, Rosa’s courage is not to be diminished, but there was a business end to this, and the black conservative businessmen who, for the most part, were all Republicans, provided the financial strength necessary.

They did this up until the point that the movement itself became integrated, and groups with other objectives got involved. And then, I think, the black community sort of got lost in the shuffle.

Bluey: Richard, I want to thank you for the work that you’re doing and coming on The Daily Signal to share these stories with us. It’s incredibly important to all of us that here at The Heritage Foundation and The Daily Signal we keep this history alive and continue to tell these stories.

It’s so powerful to hear about them, and to have somebody like yourself who cares so passionately do it is a real treat for us. So I want to thank you, again, for joining us on The Daily Signal Podcast and [I] hope to have a future conversation with you and continue talking about this.

Finley: Well, I want to thank you. I appreciate what you’re doing and I hope you do continue to do this service for our community.

Bluey: Thank you.

Finley: Thank you.

PODCAST BY

Rob Bluey

Rob Bluey is executive editor of The Daily Signal, the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation. Send an email to Rob. Twitter: @RobertBluey.

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Cuban Americans Tell What Life Under Castro Was Really Like

/in , , , , , , /by

When Sebastian Arcos and family members tried to travel from Cuba to the United States, authorities stopped them in what turned out to be a sting operation to arrest one of his uncles, who had advocated and fought for Fidel Castro’s revolution more than 20 years earlier.

That was Dec. 31, 1981, and for trying to leave the island nation, Arcos was jailed for a year.

His uncle spent seven years in jail. His father, also a political supporter of the communist revolution and like many other citizens soured on the broken promises of democracy, was imprisoned for six years.

“For the sake of argument, let’s say both the [Cuban] health care system and education system are perfect, which they are not. There have been thousands of political executions, tens of thousands of political prisoners, and 3 million Cuban exiles,” said Arcos, 58, today associate director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

“So, the question to ask when we are told to consider the good things is: What is the price for the good?” Arcos told The Daily Signal.

Arcos said that he is “surprised when talking heads in the United States will give Fidel Castro the benefit of the doubt.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a professed democratic socialist, has defended comments he made in the 1980s, when he said of Castro: “He educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.”

In defending those remarks during an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Sanders said:

We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba, but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office [in 1959], you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”

Castro handed control of the government to his brother, Raúl Castro, before his death at age 90 in November 2016.

Miguel Díaz-Canel was named president when the younger Castro stepped down at age 87 in February 2018, but is largely considered a figurehead. Raúl Castro, head of Cuba’s Communist Party, is said to make major government decisions.

Sanders noted that President Donald Trump has had kind things to say about authoritarian rulers such as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Arcos joined the Cuban Committee for Human Rights in 1987, providing reports to the United Nations Human Rights Commission before coming to the United States in 1992.

He said people should know better than to concede gross human rights abuses in Cuba, and then point to health care and literacy.

“That’s been the regime’s argument for decades,” Arcos said. “Whoever makes that argument is just repeating their lines.”

Cuba’s military dictatorship controls 80% of the economy. Political prisoners are common, and courts face political interference.

The Heritage Foundation’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom ranks Cuba at 178th among the world’s nations based on how free its economy is.

Cuba did adopt some free market policies about a decade ago, but the government hasn’t been a strong effort to implement the reforms. Private property is allowed, but is strictly regulated by the government.

According to Heritage’s index, low state-dictated wages increase poverty in Cuba. The state runs the means of production, property seizures without due process are common, and the top income tax rate is 50%.

Repression in Cuba is on the rise, said Janisset Rivero, 50, a human rights activist who lived in Cuba until age 14. Her family was wrongly accused of engaging in seditious speech against the Cuban government because they received a letter from family abroad.

“Health care and education are not as good as the propaganda claims,” Rivero said. “It’s indoctrination more than education. The Cuban system doesn’t tolerate critical thinking.”

The two former Cuban citizens interviewed for this story gave similar accounts of health care in Cuba

They said the health care system has two tiers: One is for tourists, elites, and the military, which is top rate and what people see. The other is for the general population. When Cubans go to those hospitals, they have to bring their own food, water, bed sheets, and pillows.

Of support inside the United States for Cuba’s communist system, Rivero said, “It’s ignorance. Some people are ignorant.”

However, she suspects that in some cases, it’s worse.

“Some people simply support socialism and communism with a big state that can take control of people’s lives,” Rivero said. “Some supporters know exactly what is going on in Cuba and believe it would be OK here because they believe they know best.”

Frank Calzon, who retired last year as executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba, was born in 1944. His parents sent him to the United States after the Castro-led revolution. He became active in human rights causes and led the center for 22 years.

“A lot of claims the Cuban government makes should be suspect,” Calzon said. “Cuban students are not really more educated now. In 1951, the country had 75-80% of students [who] knew how to read and write.”

A strong spirit exists in Cuba for freedom, he said, pointing to the group Ladies in White as one example.

“The Ladies in White is a group of mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters of political prisoners,” Calzon said. “They try to march to Mass on Sundays, but Cuban police intercept them and take them to prisons. They release them that evening, but they take them several miles out of their city.”

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

RELATED ARTICLES:

My Visit to Cuba — An American in Havana

No, Fidel Castro Didn’t Improve Health Care or Education in Cuba

The Left’s Appalling Whitewashing of Castro’s Legacy

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Why I Believe That My Friend Phillip B. Haney Was Assassinated

/in , , , , , /by

My thoughts and prayers are with the family of my great and good friend Phillip B. Haney. 

In Remembrance of My Friend

I write this column knowing that my friend Phillip is with God in Heaven. This column is a tribute to a man who stood against evil. This column is in remembrance of a man who never ever gave up. This column is dedicated to a true American patriot. This column pays homage to a fellow warrior in the fight against those who would destroy America from within.

Let me begin by explaining how Phillip and I first met. My contacts with Phillip were all via phone. We spoke frequently, sometimes 2-3 times a week, over a period of 8 years during the most difficult times in his life. While I never had the honor of meeting him in person, we spoke frequently about life, his career, his family, his work and his passion for telling the truth no matter what the consequences.

Phillip became a contributor of ours writing fourteen columns. Phillip’s last column was dated December 3rd, 2019 titled Four Years Ago Today: A Tribute to the Victims of the San Bernardino Jihad Attack. Phillip concluded his last column writing:

As a sworn Federal Law Enforcement Officer who has also been deeply affected by this case, it is my intention, in the weeks, months and years ahead, to help make sure that their stories are not forgotten, and that on one fine day, we will all know more about what really happened on that December day in San Bernardino.

Phillip felt personally responsible for the deaths in San Bernadino because he knew that the Obama administration had shut down his investigation into several Islamist groups, two of which we now know were tied to the San Bernardino attack. Watch:

Upon his retirement after 13 years as a Customs & Border Protection Officer in the Department of Homeland Security, he relished his new role as a whistleblower explaining how political correctness was making us all less safe.

Phillip B. Haney was Assassinated

I believe my friend did not commit suicide. I believe Phillip was not murdered. I believe Phillip was assassinated.

I waited to write this column as the first shock of his death hit me. I kept asking myself why?

I was so distraught that I just couldn’t write about Phillip until I knew more about the circumstances of his death. I read column after column seeking answers to the who, what, where, when and how. As of the writing of this column the investigation into his death is on going. What we do know is that, according to the Washington Examiner:

[Phillip] was found dead with a bullet wound on Friday morning [February 21st]  about 40 miles east of Sacramento, California, in a park-and-ride open area immediately adjacent to state Highway 16 and near state Highway 124, according to law enforcement authorities.

“Highway 16 is a busy state highway and used as a main travel route to and from Sacramento. The location is less than three miles from where [Haney] was living,” the sheriff’s office statement explained.

Here are the reasons why I firmly believe that Phillip was assassinated:

  1. He was a man on a mission to tell his story to anyone who would listen.
  2. He was a man of character.
  3. He was a seasoned federal officer who dedicated his life to serving the nation.
  4. He was a target of various Islamic terrorist groups and individuals because of the work he did at the Department of Homeland Security.
  5. He never gave up even when he was under investigation by his own department’s IG, the U.S. Department of State and then Attorney General Eric Holder.
  6. He was never depressed during hundreds of the conversations we had while he was in DHS, after he retired from DHS and while he was a contributor to our publication.
  7. He was a strong Christian who knew that it was God who put him on this path to tell the truth.

Nick Givas from Fox News reported:

Haney was recently in contact with DHS officials about a possible return to the agency, the Washington Examiner reported, adding that he was also engaged to be married.

Phillip and I often spoke about his desire to return the the Department of Homeland Security. Phillip wanted to first write his book and then return as an agent to continue his work to root out terrorists and their enablers domestically and globally.

Phillip never gave up on this dream.

Conclusion

QUESTION: Why was Phillip B. Haney assassinated?

ANSWER: He was causing Fitna in the Muslim world.

In a February 18, 2015 article titled Fitna Is Worse Than Slaughter Phillip wrote:

I have come to believe that Fitnah is the most essential motivational component of Islamic theology, i.e., it is the cornerstone of an adversarial, confrontational worldview that inevitably leads to a state of perpetual conflict with the non-Islamic world.

Philip concluded:

The word ‘Phobia’ has two meanings – either to hate something intensely, or to fear something intensely. Using these two meanings, it could be said that Muslims and non-Muslims both have ‘Fitnaphobia’ – Muslims because they hate Fitnah, and non-Muslims because they fear it.

However, in the case of the non-Muslim world, it appears that we are much more concerned about causing Fitnah (by Opposing the Strategy & Tactics of the Global Islamic Movement), than we are about protecting our western civilization from the increasingly aggressive promoters of Shariah Law.

Phillip was assassinated because he was causing Fitna. You see the slaughter of Phillip was justified in order to stop the Fitna, his pushing back against Islamic terrorism.

Phillip did not hate Muslims nor did he fear the terrorists. He was fearless!

© All rights reserved.

RELATED VIDEOS:

Louie Gohmert on the life and death of Phillip Haney

Philip Haney on his book See Something Say Nothing.

‘Here We Go Again’: 4 Things to Know About New Russia-Trump Election Meddling Narrative

/in , , , , , /by

Democrats are raising a ruckus about a news report that Russia plans to meddle in the 2020 presidential campaign to help reelect President Donald Trump.

But further Russian election interference was expected, as special counsel Robert Mueller told Congress last year after his report about Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 campaign.

Here’s what to know about the newest reports about what Russia is up to.

1. What’s Different About Russia’s Plans to Interfere?

Several intelligence agencies reported in 2017 that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an effort to meddle with the U.S. presidential campaign, with a clear preference for Trump over the 2016 Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

The Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee and paid more than $100,000 for Facebook ads.

After an investigation lasting nearly two years, Mueller concluded in a 448-page report that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

The Times report said the Russians are “undeterred by American efforts to thwart them,” and have made “more creative use of Facebook and other social media.”

The Times story, online Thursday and in the newspaper Friday, does not allege any collusion or conspiracy between Trump or his 2020 campaign and the Russians.

“Russian operatives are working to get Americans to repeat disinformation, the officials said,” the Times story says, referring to unnamed sources. “That strategy gets around social media companies’ rules that prohibit ‘inauthentic speech.’”

The Times also reported that Russian hackers “infiltrated Iran’s cyberwarfare unit” to target the U.S. and make it appear the action came from Iran.

2. What Did Trump Have to Say About It?

Trump tackled the issue head-on at a rally Friday afternoon in Las Vegas. The president said that he has dealt with “three years of witch hunts and partisan Democrat crusades.”

“By the way, I think they are starting another one,” he said. “Did you see that? I see these phonies, the do-nothing Democrats. They said today that Putin wants to be sure that Trump gets reelected. Here we go again. Here we go again. Did you see it?”

The crowd booed over the reference to the news report.

Trump noted that Clinton, his vanquished 2016 rival, recently described both Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, and the Green Party’s 2016 presidential candidate, Jill Stein, as Russian agents.

Of the new Russia allegation, Trump said, “That’s Pencil Neck again,” his nickname for House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who led Democrats’ effort to impeach Trump in the House.

The Senate voted against removing Trump from office after a trial.

“I was told a week ago, you know, they’re trying to start a rumor,” Trump said at the rally. “It’s disinformation. That’s the only thing they’re good at. They get nothing done. … These people are crazy. They don’t think about the country. They don’t think about jobs. They don’t think about lowering your drug costs. Infrastructure. These people are crazy.”

3. What Does New Information Say About Intelligence Community’s Politics?

The New York Times’ story is based on a Feb. 13 briefing conducted by intelligence officials for the House Intelligence Committee, which Schiff chairs.

The Times reported that Trump was angry at his outgoing acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, for allowing the briefing to take place.

Trump has replaced Maguire with Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

Schiff tweeted that this move backs up his point about Trump being untrustworthy because he welcomes foreign interference in U.S. elections.

“We count on the intelligence community to inform Congress of any threat of foreign interference in our elections,” Schiff tweeted. “If reports are true and the President is interfering with that, he is again jeopardizing our efforts to stop foreign meddling. Exactly as we warned he would do.”

Trump long has publicly suspected that powerful members of the intelligence community have a political bias.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper, not known for fairly covering Trump,  reported Friday that his sources challenged much of the narrative pushed by the Times story about Russia trying to reelect Trump.

“A national security official I know and trust pushes back on the way the briefing/ODNI story is being told, and others with firsthand knowledge agree with his assessment,” Tapper says in a series of eight tweets, referring to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “What’s been articulated in the news is that the intelligence community has concluded that the Russians are trying to help Trump again. But the intelligence doesn’t say that, the official says … ”

The factual questions indicate a real problem, said Peter Flaherty, president of the National Legal and Policy Center, a government watchdog group.

“This shows that the president is still faced with people in the bureaucracy that want to impede and destroy his presidency. It also shows how intelligence is being politicized,” Flaherty said. “Intelligence should bear some resemblance to reality. It would seem the Kremlin would want Democrats to win.”

“Someone in the bureaucracy seems to be coordinating with Schiff,” Flaherty said. “But they are not offering specifics. If they have specifics, make them public.”

4. How Long Has Russia Meddled in U.S. Campaigns?

The fact that Russia plans to interfere in the 2020 presidential election shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, said J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department lawyer who is now president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an organization that advocates election integrity.

“This is what Russia always does. It’s not surprising, and it’s not going to stop,” Adams told The Daily Signal. “The Times and the left ignored interference in campaigns from Moscow from 1932 to 2017. The Democratic Party completely ignored it in the 1980s, and suddenly they are interested.”

What Russia did in 2016—particularly with social media—is largely a more high-tech means of doing what it previously has done, Adams said.

“Social media trolling is just propaganda that Russia has used since 1932,” Adams said. “Hacking is a cybercrime. When Russians hacked the DNC [Democratic National Committee] and John Podesta’s emails, it was a way to [mine] political intelligence, but it didn’t affect the election process.”

Podesta, former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton and counselor to President Barack Obama, was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Past instances of Russian interference in American elections include 1948, when the Soviet Union backed the Progressive Party, whose candidate for president was Henry Wallace. Wallace, who served as vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt, split with the Democratic Party over President Harry Truman’s hawkish stance during the Cold War. Truman fired Wallace as secretary of commerce.

The Wallace campaign included several Soviet operatives.

“If it had not been for the Communists,” journalist I.F. Stone wrote at the time, “there would be no Progressive party.”

But Wallace got just 2% of the popular vote and no electoral votes, coming in fourth place behind incumbent Truman, Republican Thomas Dewey, and States Rights “Dixiecrat” Party candidate Strom Thurmond.

In another instance, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., covertly reached out to Soviet leaders during two election cycles, while he was a presidential candidate in 1980 and ahead of the 1984 election, when President Ronald Reagan won his second term.

In 1980, Kennedy challenged President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination. According to Soviet archives, Kennedy sent former Sen. John Tunney, the California Democrat defeated for reelection in 1976, as a liaison to Soviet officials in March 1980.

As documented in Paul Kengor’s book, “Dupes,” Tunney informed the Soviets that Kennedy supported the policies of then-Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and was concerned about an “atmosphere of tensions” in the Cold War “fueled by Carter.”

The KGB archives describe Kennedy’s words as “acceptable to us.”

Carter beat Kennedy for the nomination, but lost in a landslide to Reagan in November. Kennedy again made overtures to the Soviets in 1983, seeking to prevent Reagan’s reelection.

Related correspondence first was reported Feb. 2, 1992, in the Times of London under the headline “Teddy, the KGB and the Top Secret File.” Kengor revealed the entire file in his 2006 book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.”

In a letter addressed to then-Soviet leader Yuri Andropov dated May 14, 1983, KGB head Viktor Chebrikov explained that Kennedy was eager to “counter the militaristic policies” of Reagan and undermine the president’s reelection chances.

Kennedy reportedly suggested doing so by helping the Soviet leader set up interviews with American TV news anchors Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters, among others. Andropov died later that year, and didn’t get a chance to act on Kennedy’s advice with regard to the 1984 election.

Kennedy’s outreach and Tunney’s trips are documented in the Mitrokhin papers filed with the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. The papers are named for Vasili Mitrokhin, a former KGB agent who defected to Britain from the Soviet Union in 1992.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

RELATED ARTICLE: Russia Wants Trump Over Sanders? No. Putin Wants Something Else!

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

‘Sex Change’ Isn’t Surgically Possible, My Surgeon Testified in Court

/in , , , , , , , , /by

Many people wonder why I’m so outspoken about the madness of prescribing cross-sex hormones and genital mutilation surgery for patients who suffer from the desire to be the opposite sex, known clinically as gender dysphoria.

I speak out because I consulted the “gender experts” when I had gender confusion, and they told me sex change was the only way to get relief.

But they were wrong. I didn’t need sex change—I needed effective psychotherapy to resolve childhood issues.

“Sex change” is pure balderdash. No one can change his or her sex. I have the document saying so.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Here’s how it came about.

After eight years of living as a woman, I finally admitted that truth to myself and sought to reclaim my male identity. In an effort to restore my birth certificate to “male,” I formally asked two acclaimed experts in 1990 to testify to my being male in California Superior Court.

They were Dr. Stanley Biber, the world-renowned sex-change surgeon who performed my operation and over 4,000 others in his career, and psychologist/sexologist Paul Walker, my gender therapist and the esteemed author of the original Standards of Care for transgender health.

These two men, both dead now, were the leading experts in the nascent field of “gender” medicine. In the document they co-authored, signed, and submitted to California Superior Court, they admitted that sex changes do not occur medically.

No Change of Sex Occurs

The court document from July 25, 1990, states that I meet the medical criteria for the male sex, even after a full-blown sex change. Men do not become women through surgery or hormones.

Paragraph 5 of the document reads:

This Patient, by the criteria established by John Money, Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is indeed now considered a male. We plead that the court will reestablish this man’s legal identity as male. The patient’s medical sex is evaluated as follows:

Genetic Sex ………………………………………………………..Male

Hormonal Sex……………………………………………………..Neuter

Internal Morphology…………………………………………..Male

External Morphology………………………………………….Mixed

Gonadal Sex……………………………………………………….Neuter

Social Sex (gender role)……………………………………..Male

“Genetic Sex [is] Male.” According to the testimony of both doctors, sex-change surgery fails to change a person’s genetic sex.

“Internal Morphology [is] Male.” That is, the internal form and structure of the body remains male even after years of hormone use and sex-changing surgical procedures.

In retrospect, it’s a game-changing bombshell. The renowned gender experts testified that even when a person undergoes sex-change surgery and takes cross-gender hormones for many years, genetic sex and internal morphology do not change.

Transgender identity doesn’t exist except in one’s imagination.

So What Does Change?

What does change, then, according to the sex-change surgeon and the gender expert?

  • “Gonadal Sex [is] Neuter.” The male reproductive organs are refashioned surgically into a pseudo-vagina and the ability to provide sperm is destroyed.
  • “Hormonal Sex [is] Neuter.” The ability to produce testosterone is destroyed.
  • “External Morphology [is] Mixed.” Outward appearance of the male body is a mix of male and female. Cosmetic procedures and hormones have a feminizing effect on appearance, but many male traits remain, such as hand size, foot size, and physical strength.

The court document attests that only social sex (gender role) and external morphology (outward appearance) can change.

Therefore, people can skip the hormones and ditch the radical genital surgery because they are not medically necessary. By providing them, the medical professionals commit medical malpractice.

Sex change at its heart is only a social sex change, staged by gender-confused people themselves through a change of clothes and name.

Transgender Women in Sports

Men who claim to be women and then intrude in women’s sports competitions because men’s sports are too difficult for them are only socially pretending to be women.

Their muscle mass, physical strength, and internal bone structure remain even if their testosterone levels later drop—all determined at puberty by the flood of testosterone.

It’s folly to place men on the cover of magazines and celebrate their courage to “come out” as a transgender female when, according to this court document, they are still genetic men.

I think that transgender women (men who are impersonating women) have pulled off one of the biggest misogynistic scams against women in history. Transgender women are saying, in effect, that the beautiful, distinct female sex—womanhood itself—is nothing more than wardrobe choices and some cosmetic surgery.

Pure balderdash.

This Explains the Unhappiness

This court document also helps explain the explosion of reported unhappiness, regret, and detransition stories emerging from the U.K., Canada, and the U.S.

Some of the regretters after changing gender tell me they feel like they are in “gender hell” or that “it was the biggest mistake of my life.”

“I realized I could never become a real woman,” one said. “Now I want my life back; can you help me?”

I detransitioned 30 years ago, in 1990, and have written many articles and books to shine a light on the harm this grand experiment has caused for so many people: suicides and attempted suicides, fractured marriages, deserted children.

Two renowned gender experts, sexologist Paul Walker and surgeon Stanley Biber, exposed the reckless and false ideology in the 1990 court document. Inadvertently, I’m sure, considering they continued to guide hurting people along the same destructive path.

This document filed by experts with the Superior Court of California plainly says that sex-changing surgery does not change men into women, or vice versa. So let’s stop pretending it does.

COMMENTARY BY

Walt Heyer

Walt Heyer is a public speaker and author of the book, “Trans Life Survivors.” Through his website, SexChangeRegret.com, and his blog, WaltHeyer.com, Heyer raises public awareness about those who regret gender change and the tragic consequences suffered as a result.

RELATED ARTICLE: End California’s Illegal Discrimination Against Pro-Lifers

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Ivanka Trump’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative Empowers Women

/in , , , , , , /by

Implementing free-market policies that advance economic freedom is the key to empowering women.

Elaborating on that critical linkage, the president’s Council of Economic Advisers recently published a report, “The W-GDP Index: Empowering Women’s Economic Activity Through Addressing Legal Barriers.”

The W-GDP Index quantifies prior legal reforms in the five crucial areas that affect women’s “full and free” economic participation in developing countries and can be used to track progress of the Trump administration’s Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative in removing barriers to equal economic opportunity for women.

Advancing women’s economic activity by dismantling regulatory barriers hindering them and providing them with the same legal protections as men can result in large increases in economic output and promote overall economic development.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

According to the Council of Economic Advisers’ report, “fully removing the legal barriers to women’s economic activity could increase annual global gross domestic product by $7.7 trillion, or 8.3 percent.” Ensuring women’s full and free participation in the economy, the report says, is “smart economic policy.”

The administration’s Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, which was spearheaded by first daughter and presidential adviser Ivanka Trump and launched in February 2019, involves the National Security Council, the State Department, and eight other relevant agencies.

Equally notable is that Congress has been paying keen attention to the initiative, too. Two lawmakers—Sens. Lindsey Graham, R.-S.C., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.—are leading a bipartisan legislative effort to have the initiative written into law.

This, Ivanka Trump said, “would permanently authorize W-GDP and establish women’s economic empowerment as a core facet of the United States foreign policy, in line with the president’s own national security strategy.”

The initiative aims to advance women’s empowerment and reach 50 million women in developing countries by 2025 by helping them start small businesses, attend vocational schools, and access loans, particularly through amending “laws in dozens of countries that restrict the ability of women to own property or work in the same jobs as men do,” The Washington Post reported.

As specified in the presidential memorandum on promoting women’s global development and prosperity:

It is the policy of the United States to enhance the opportunity for women to meaningfully participate in, contribute to, and benefit from economic opportunities as individuals, workers, consumers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors, so that they enjoy the same access, rights, and opportunities as men to participate in, contribute to, control, and benefit from economic activity.

Indeed, the administration has hit on one pragmatic tool; namely, empowering key segments of the society to lead transformation through free-market initiatives and structural reforms that respect human liberties. Advancing economic freedom is essentially about ensuring human empowerment.

Strengthening and expanding economic freedom guarantees an individual’s natural right to achieve her or his goals and then own the value of what they create.

Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate economist who has made considerable contributions to development economics, once noted: “Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity for exercising their reasoned legacy.”

According to The Heritage Foundation’s annual Index of Economic Freedom, liberalized economies not only have higher levels of entrepreneurial dynamism, higher standards of living, lower rates of poverty, and safer environmental standards, but also greater democratic governance, more social progress, and more gender equality.

Not surprisingly, as shown in the following chart, improving economic freedom and empowering women (measured by the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Index) go hand in hand.

Reaching a greater global audience since its inception, the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative has become a unique tool for using U.S. aid more effectively to encourage entrepreneurship, push private enterprise, and increase innovation while focusing on comparative advantage.

Promoting economic freedom in developing or repressed countries is a crucial pillar of America’s strategic foreign policy engagement that not only will advance U.S. interests, but also cement foundations of free-market principles and defend democratic values.

By using U.S. economic diplomacy in this unique way, America has practical opportunities to help women become agents of real and measurable changes in their home countries.

COMMENTARY BY

Anthony B. Kim

Anthony B. Kim researches international economic issues at The Heritage Foundation, with a strong focus on economic freedom. Kim is the research manager of the Index of Economic Freedom, the flagship product of the Heritage Foundation in partnership with The Wall Street Journal. Read his research. Twitter: .

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

Marriage Is the Ticket Out of Poverty

/in , , , , /by

Why are some millennials more financially secure than others? The answer has to do with individual life choices.

Americans who graduate high school, start working, get married, and have children—in that order—are significantly less likely to fall into poverty than others. These four core life choices, when sequenced together, provide the best path to a prosperous future.

This formula, known as “the success sequence,” is the key to both financial and general life success. Studies show that 97% of young adults who follow this sequence are more likely to work their way into the middle- or upper-income tiers by the time they reach their late 20s or 30s.

In particular, tying the knot before having children offers the most benefits. In their study on the “success sequence,” W. Bradford Wilcox, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and his colleague Wendy Wang, director of research for the Charlottesville, Virginia-based Institute for Family Studies, found that 95% of millennials who married before having children had higher family incomes than millennials who had children before marriage.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

That remains true even for millennials from low-income families and different racial backgrounds.

Children from two-parent families are also more likely to enjoy financial security than children from single-parent families. Recent research conducted by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution suggests that the increase in child poverty between the 1970s and the 1990s was a direct result of “the decline of stable marriage” and that child poverty would be significantly lower in the United States if more Americans had strong marriages.

The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector summed it up perfectly when he said “marriage remains America’s strongest anti-poverty weapon.”

With all the clear benefits of marriage, one would think Americans would eagerly jump to tie the knot. But that’s not the case: Marriage rates in America continue to plummet.

Americans are also getting married later. In recent years, the average age at first marriage for women is 27.8 years old and 29.8 for men. That’s a dramatic increase from 1960, when the average age was 20 for women and 23 for men. In addition, reports from the Urban Institute and Pew Research Center predict that a large number of millennials will remain unmarried through age 40 and that 25%, once they reach their mid-40s to 50s, are likely to have never been married.

To that end, we should all be worried about the social and economic costs that declining marriage rates have on society. Research shows that divorce and having children out of wedlock cost taxpayers $110 billion each year.

Regrettably, children are the ones who pay the price. Those born into single-parent homes are more likely to experience a whole host of destructive life events, such as dropping out of school or abusing drugs and alcohol.  The bottom line is that we need to incentivize more marriage in America, not less.

When it comes to policy, one way Congress can help is by eliminating the “marriage penalty” that exists in the tax code, which taxes two people more as a married couple than they would be taxed if they filed individually.

That’s why I’m proud to have joined a colleague, Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., to introduce a bill to eliminate this “millennial marriage penalty.” The bill would allow both spouses in a marriage to claim the $2,500 student-loan interest deduction instead of just one.

Fundamentally, the tax code should not financially stand in the way of two people getting married. Strong families are the building blocks of strong nations and Congress should do more to remove existing barriers so that marriage is easier for more Americans.

To learn more about The Heritage Foundation’s preferred tax policies and federal education policies, check out “Four Priorities for Tax Reform 2.0.“

COMMENTARY BY

Rep. Ted Budd

Ted Budd is the U.S. representative for North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District. He is a member of the House Financial Services Committee. Twitter: .

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Twitter piles on Richard Dawkins over Eugenics tweet

/in , , , , , , /by

The eminent expert in communicating science botches his explanation.

Twitter may not be the best medium for explaining the science of eugenics to a wary public, as the sometime Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Richard Dawkins, discovered this week.

Professor Dawkins, now aged 78, renowned as an evolutionary biologist and as the author of best-sellers about genetics and atheism, most recently Outgrowing God, chose to tweet about eugenics. This may have been prompted by a Twitter storm about back room boys at 10 Downing Street (of which more below). His words were not calibrated to endear him to the public:

Reactions? They ranged from “You absolute pin-headed simpleton” to “How’d the application of this play out in 1940s Europe?” to “The thing about people who believe in eugenics is that they always believe themselves to be the superior kind of human. No-one ever thinks that it could make people like them obsolete”.

Dawkins had to back-pedal very quickly to explain himself:

Dawkins was clearly not playing in the First Division this week. Professors in the Simonyi chair are supposed to make the public sympathetic to science, as its website explains:

The task of communicating science to the layman is not a simple one. In particular it is imperative for the post holder to avoid oversimplifying ideas, and presenting exaggerated claims. The limits of current scientific knowledge should always be made clear to the public.

Even scientists were exasperated. Dave Curtis, the editor of Annals of Human Genetics (a journal which was once titled Annals of Eugenics), posted a long Twitter thread explaining why humans cannot be bred like cattle and roses, contra Professor Dawkins. First, “humans have long generational times and small numbers of offspring. This would make any selective breeding process extremely slow”. Second, humans live in very different environments and most of the variation in their traits is due to the environment. It would be very difficult to identify individuals with ideal traits.

“We should bear in mind,” he adds, “that harsh selection pressures have been acting on humans up to the present and that there may be very little scope for overall improvement. In any event, we can confidently say that selective breeding to improve desirable traits is not practicable.”

The long and the short of the matter, in Dr Curtis’s opinion, is this: “People who support eugenics initiatives are evil racists. Also, modern genetic research shows that eugenics would not work.”

It’s surprising that Professor Dawkins thought that his puff for human eugenics would be applauded. James Watson, who won Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering DNA, has become a non-person after expressing eugenicist opinions which were interpreted as racist.

Just a whiff of eugenics was enough to force the resignation of one of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s advisors recently. Opposition research on Andrew Sabisky, a political “contractor” at 10 Downing Street, uncovered six-year-old opinions which were quickly denounced as eugenic and racist.

For example, in a comment on a 2014 blog post made by a user called “Andrew Sabisky”, it was suggested that compulsory contraception could eliminate a “permanent underclass”. It read: “One way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty.”

Having used internet history to make Sabisksy history, the media moved on to savaging Dominic Cummings, a key advisor to the PM who had hired Sabisky . A blog post from 2014 contained ideas which were described as eugenic. He suggested that the UK’s National Health Service IVF service should offer human eggs sorted by IQ to make a level playing field for rich and poor parents who want babies with a high IQ.

Prof Richard Ashcroft, a medical ethicist at City University, told The Guardian that this was nonsense: “This idea that we can use biological selection to improve individuals and society, and that the state through the NHS, should facilitate this, really is pure eugenics.”

The fracas demonstrates the schizophrenic attitude of the public towards eugenics. On the one hand, the word “eugenics” evokes racism and Nazism. It is this sense which has been weaponized to undermine the new PM. On the other hand, parents who want perfect children are encouraged to eliminate “defective” embryos. The media happily provides a platform for bioethics to promote such ideas. Another Oxford professor, Julian Savulescu has often explained why he supports eugenics:

“We practise eugenics when we screen for Down’s syndrome, and other chromosomal or genetic abnormalities. The reason we don’t define that sort of thing as ‘eugenics’, as the Nazis did, is because it’s based on choice. It’s about enhancing people’s freedom rather than reducing it.”

COLUMN BY

MICHAEL COOK

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge.

FOR MORE ARTICLE ON EUGENICS CLICK HERE.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Is it time to kiss the nuclear family goodbye?

The response of Wuhan Christians to the coronavirus outbreak puts the government to shame

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Judicial Watch Sues FBI for Seth Rich Records

/in , , , , , /by

I know many Americans remain concerned about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.

We know that the Seth Rich controversy came up in Peter Strzok-Lisa Page emails we just uncovered. In a heavily redacted August 10, 2016, email exchange, Strzok sends Page a forwarded message from unidentified agents from the FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO) discussing Rich.

A public affairs official whose name was redacted opens the WFO email chain, writing:

Various news outlets are reporting today that Julian Assange suggested during a recent overseas interview that DNC Staffer, Seth Rich was a Wikileaks source, and may have been killed because he leaked the DNC e-mails to his organization, and that Wikileak’s was offering $20,000 for information regarding Rich’s death last month. Based on this news, we anticipate additional press coverage on this matter. I hear that you are in class today; however, when you have a moment, can you please give me a call to discuss what involvement the Bureau has in the investigation.

An unidentified WFO agent responds: “I’m aware of this reporting from earlier this week but not any specific involvement in any related case.”

An unidentified WFO agent subsequently writes deputy assistant director in the bureau’s Counterintelligence Division Jonathan Moffa and Strzok: “Just FYSA. I squashed this with [redacted]”.

Strzok then forwards the email chain to Page.

Now, seeking the full truth, we have filed a FOIA lawsuit against the FBI for all records related to Rich, who was the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Voter Expansion Data Director.

Rich, 27, was murdered on July 10, 2016, according to the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. The DC police reported that Rich was killed at approximately 4:19 a.m. in the 2100 block of Flagler Place NW, Washington, DC.

No one has been charged in connection with Rich’s death. The DC police are offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible.

We filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the FBI failed to respond to our July 26, 2019, FOIA request seeking all records related to Rich and his murder (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:20-cv-00385)).

There is significant public interest in the Seth Rich murder, and the FBI’s game-playing on document production in this case is inexcusable.

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

DECADENT DEMOCRATS: From hating cops, Christians and Jews to mandatory vasectomies for every man over 50

/in , , , , , , , , /by

EDITORS NOTE: This is the thirteenth in a series titled Decadent Democrats. You may read all the previous installments by clicking here.

There is a common thread in all things Democrat – HATE!

Hate drives the Democrats more than anything else. Democrats hate cops, Christians (especially if they support President Trump) Jews. They also hate men who are over 50 and have more than three children.

Democrats hate cops

The notorious group Antifa is vocal about calling for violence including violence against law enforcement officers. This was recently demonstrated in Democrat controlled New York City.

Watch:

Democrats hate Christians

Democrat presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg attacked Christian Trump supporters for “violating their faith and scripture” at a recent townhall hosted by CNN. This is most interesting as Buttigieg is a sodomite, a practice that is forbidden in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Townhall’s Beth Baumann reported:

Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg attacked President Donald Trump’s Christian supporters during his town hall with CNN on Tuesday. According to Mayor Pete, he can’t seem to understand how Christians support President Trump.

Read more.

Watch:

Democrats hate Jews

At a town hall meeting in Nevada on February 18th, 2020, Bernie Sanders delivered thoughts on what he described as Israel’s “right-wing” and “racist” government. To be anti-Israel is to be anti-Semitic. Senator Sanders is Jewish and a Communist.

Watch:

Democrats hate men who produce children

Democratic state Rep. Rolanda Hollis has proposed an Alabama law that would require that all men get a vasectomy after they turn 50 or after the birth of their third child, whichever comes first.

This bill reminds us of Communist China’s One Child Policy.

USA Today’s Kristin Lam reports:

The bill’s sponsor, Democratic state Rep. Rolanda Hollis, said the measure gives perspective to reproductive health laws, including the state’s contested abortion ban.

“It always takes two to tango,” she told AL.com. “We can’t put all the responsibility on women. Men need to be responsible also.”

Hollis said the proposal is meant to “neutralize” the Human Life Protection Act passed last summer, which would make performing an abortion a Class A felony, punishable by life or 10 to 99 years in prison. A federal judge blocked the ban in October, and a lawsuit is pending.

[ … ]

If passed by the Republican-controlled state government, the bill introduced last week would require men to pay for their vasectomy. The proposal has drawn criticism from outside the state, including from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

“Yikes,” Cruz tweeted Sunday. “A government big enough to give you everything is big enough to take everything … literally!”

Read more.

Conclusion

Democrats have only hate driving their campaigns. Each day a new hate appears. Democrats have gone beyond just hating President Donald J. Trump. Democrats hate:

  • White men.
  • Straight men and women.
  • White women who support President Trump.
  • Black men and women who support President Trump.
  • Hispanic men and women who support President Trump.
  • Jewish men and women who support President Trump.
  • Men and women who support ICE and law enforcement.
  • Men and women who support our military.
  • Legal citizens of the United States of America.
  • And many more . . .

They now hate anyone who disagrees with them and their Socialist-Communist policies.

© All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLES:

President Trump’s Western Rallies Identify 20,193 New Voters Who Did Not Vote in 2016 and 14,706 Democrats Who Now Support Trump.

Sanders names daughter of Muslim Brotherhood leader as Virginia co-chair

These Numbers Show Why Bernie Dominated Nevada…And Why a ‘Stop Sanders’ Movement Isn’t Going to Happen

Buttigieg Takes Aim at Bernie’s ‘Inflexible, Ideological Revolution’ Following Nevada Loss

Democrats And Race: Seems Like Old Times

MSNBC Matthews to Establishment Democrats: Vote for Trump

RELATED VIDEO: Republican Candidate Anna Paulina Luna Supports Amnesty for Illegals in FL 13th District campaign for Congress.

VIDEO: This is what socialized medicine is — UK Doctors allowed to refuse care to ‘racists’!

/in , , , , , , /by

Fox Business posted on YouTube a video titled New rules in UK allow doctors to refuse care to ‘racists’: Report.

WATCH:

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog video posted by Eeyore is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Russia Wants Trump Over Sanders? No. Putin Wants Something Else

/in , , , , /by

So now we’re back to Russia is going to interfere in the election to help Trump? Or perhaps it never really left us? Democrats just refuse to let this trope go.

And only one person can truly be smiling over this: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But there’s a gigantic flaw in the latest whip-up. Does anyone really think Putin wants Trump instead of Bernie Sanders? Anyone?

Trump has completely blocked Putin’s expansionist ambitions after Russian ran wild under Obama in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria, and undermined their oil economy with the success of fracking and natural gas. Meanwhile, Sanders is an unrepentant Communist (as is Putin) because he has never, ever disavowed his fawning support for the Soviet Union, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela and holds to their underlying socialist principles. And for good measure, he wants to ban all fracking, which would be a huge benefit for Russia.

Here’s a guess about what’s going on — but a guess that is completely plausible and in line with facts and history:

Russia and the old Soviet Union have long interfered in American elections, and we know from the opened Soviet-era archives that the top goal was not always who won, but was to sow distrust in elections and discord among the American people.

I think we can agree they accomplished that goal in spades in 2016 with their useful idiots (an old Soviet term from the Lenin-Stalin era for Western leftist sympathizers, like Sanders) in the media and Democratic party.

And so now, if the goal is to sow distrust and discord, as an old Soviet KGB guy like Putin would want to do, then the best way to accomplish that after learning from the successes of 2016, would be make sure that American intelligence was aware that Russia was going to try to help Trump “again.” It would have to get out. The Russians may even try to plant the idea that Trump administration officials are working with them to further stir the pot of distrust from American to American.

This works on so many levels because the media and Democrats will run with it like foxes with their tails on fire and after 2020. They’ll spread it and spread it until the country is aflame again. And we will have four more years of investigations and accusations and “leaks” to the New York Times.

The only real problem is that no sane people — so we all know who that is ruling out — believes that Putin actually wants the guy that has armed his enemies in Ukraine and killed his troops in Syria to win in November. That would be Donald Trump, for those of you who only read the mainstream media. Putin would much rather have the full-on anti-American Communist sympathizer Bernie Sanders.

Of course all this is useful in setting the stage for impeachment and investigations if Trump wins re-election, which the odds are at this point that he will. Ironically, the same people who have worked to undo the 2016 election for more than three years and will do so again, managed to claim in the same breath that Trump is the one who is an existential threat to democracy.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Democrats Push ‘The Russians Are Coming!’ Hoax

CNN Clip from Nevada Just Summed Up Biden’s Entire Campaign

MSNBC Matthews to Establishment Democrats: Vote for Trump

EDITORS NOTE: This Revolutionary Act column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Will Christians Disappear Entirely From the Middle East? by Rami Dabbas

/in , , , , , /by

The Muslims long ago promised to drive out the Christians, and they are now fulfilling that pledge, except in one place.

The Middle East of the 21st century is quickly becoming monolithic, as it sheds the religious and cultural diversity that once existed. Though it gave the world all three Abrahamic religions, it is rapidly becoming the home of only one.

In recent years, the Christian population has decreased across the entire region, and in some Arab countries, the Christian component has been absent entirely.

  • In Iraq, home to the oldest Christian communities in the world, Jesus’ followers are going extinct amid an orgy of hatred and violence;
  • Only a few thousand of Turkey’s Christians remain, while once the country was home to millions;
  • In Syria, Christians one made up a full third of the population, but today account for just 10 percent;
  • In the 1930s, Lebanon boasted a majority Christian population, whereas now they are less than a third;
  • For the first time since the 1950s, Coptic Christians are leaving Egypt in large numbers;
  • And in areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, once-large communities of Christians (at some times even outnumbering local Muslims) have now been reduced to a tiny minority. The land in which Christ was born is today far from a peaceful place, while most of the Muslim Arab countries around are failed states full of extremism.

Every Christian who can is now packing his or her bags and seeking to leave. And that signals a dangerous future for the Middle East.

Failure of civilization 

This failure of civilization began many decades ago. Ever since the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks (1914-1918), which claimed about one million lives, Middle East Christians have been seeking safer haven.

Later, during the monarchy in Iraq, a policy of revenge was implemented against Christians over their cooperation with the British during World War I. The instability surrounding the fall of the monarchy in 1958 provided a chance for many Christians to escape to the West.

More recently, the rise of Islamist groups in Iraq has again reduced Christians to dhimmi status and subjected them to routine harassment and persecution. The result has been the same – a mass migration of Christians.

A brutal promise fulfilled

The Muslims have long chanted, “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people,” meaning they always intended to first drive out the Jews, then the Christians.

Well, most of the Jews were driven out of the Arab world over the past century. Now it seems it is the turn of the Christians.

But what will the Middle East become without its ancient Christian population?

The Christians are never coming back

Most worrying is that this process appears to be irreversible. All of the Christians migrants that I have spoken to insist they will never return under any circumstances.

Even if the security situation improves in the short term, there are no long-term guarantees in the Muslim Middle East. Christians reject the idea of any longer living like outsiders in countries where they are far more indigenous than the Muslims. Their immigration to greener pastures is permanent.

A light in the darkness

As always, we must point out that there remains one single country in the Middle East where Christians still live in peace and tranquility–the Jewish State of Israel.

Only in Israel can Arabs of all faiths coexist with the Jewish people and enjoy the democratic freedoms denied them in nearly every Arab country.

Is it any wonder that while Christian communities around the region are shrinking fast, the number of Jesus’ followers in His own country of Israel is actually growing.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Georgetown’s Hamas-linked Bridge Initiative hosts prof who says US war on terror is a manifestation of Islamophobia

UK textbook: “How could it be argued that the creation of Israel was a long-term cause of the 9/11 attacks?”

Muslim cleric: “I am raising my son to be a high-quality enemy of the Jews and a fantastic enemy of the Christians”

UK: Woman converts to Islam, plots jihad bombing of St. Paul’s Cathedral, says “I want to kill a lot”

Germany: 17-year-old Muslim migrant threatens passersby with a hatchet

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Bernie Sanders On “That Right Wing” and “Racist” Israeli Government by Hugh Fitzgerald

/in , , , , , , /by

At a town hall meeting in Nevada on February 18, Bernie Sanders delivered himself of some thoughts on what he described as Israel’s “right-wing” and “racist” government.

A report on that latest effort is here:

Senator Bernie Sanders says the United States must be “pro-Palestinian” as much as “pro-Israeli” and described the Israeli government as “right-wing” and “racist.”

Speaking during a televised town hall meeting in Nevada on Tuesday, the Democratic frontrunner for the US presidency said: “To be for the Israeli people and to be for peace in the Middle East does not mean that we have to support right-wing, racist governments that currently exist in Israel.”

But the American government has been “pro-Palestinian” for years; it has contributed billions in aid to the Palestinians, only to see much of that aid stolen by the leaders of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. It only stopped contributing to the Palestinians, and to UNRWA, when the Palestinians refused to end their “Pay-For-Slay” program, by which hundreds of millions of dollars have gone to the families of imprisoned or dead terrorists. And the U.S. also objected to UNRWA’s insistence that the descendants of the Palestinians who originally left Mandatory Palestine, and then Israel in the period 1947-1949, were also “refugees” and deserve international aid. Among the hundreds of millions of refugees since the beginning of World War II, only the Palestinians have been allowed to consider their refugee status as something that can be passed down through the generations.

The American government also objected to the extraordinary corruption and theft, whereby just two leaders of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal and Mousa Abu Marzouk, managed to make off with at least $2.5 billion apiece from the Hamas treasury, while some 600 lesser figures in Hamas, living in Gaza, became millionaires living in seaside villas. Yasser Arafat, of the PLO, managed to amass – according to American sources – between one and three billion dollars. The President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas and his sons Tareq and Yasser, have amassed a fortune of $400 million. Hanan Ashrawi, one of Abbas’s advisors, has a net worth of $46 million. Lesser figures in the P.A. have had to make do with tens of millions, or sometimes even millions. Still, for Palestinian leaders, it beats working.

Sanders apparently thinks the Likud is “right-wing” — one of his two favorite epithets for Israel — even though the party supports a welfare state that, in American terms, would be considered to be on the left. He fails to understand, too, that there is a nearly universal consensus among Israeli Jews that the country was right to annex the Golan for defensive purposes, and is justified in claiming an undivided Jerusalem as its capital. Israelis know, too, that control of the Jordan Valley is indispensable to the country’s defense against an invasion from the east, and that 460,000 Jews living in towns in the West Bank have a perfect right to be there, according to the Mandate for Palestine, which assigned to the future Jewish National Home all the territory from the Jordan River to the sea. Sanders has never given any sign that he has read, much less understood, the Mandate for Palestine, has never acknowledged the continuing relevance of that Mandate for the recognition of Israel’s rights today. He clearly has not read Article 80 of the U.N. Charter — known as the “Jewish People’s article” – by which the U.N accepted its responsibility to put into effect the Palestine Mandate’s provisions. Finally, Sanders has never mentioned U.N. Resolution 242, which established a second, independent justification for Israel holding onto those territories it won in the Six-Day War that Israel required for “secure and recognized boundaries.” Could it be that he doesn’t think the Mandate for Palestine, Article 80 of the U.N. Charter, and U.N. Resolution 242, don’t matter? How could he be so misinformed? Well, just look around at the political and media elites here and in Europe that appear, precisely, to ignore the Mandate, Article 80, and Resolution 242. Don’t confuse them with facts. Just repeat endlessly, with them, that Israel “must withdraw from occupied territories” to something close to the “1949 borders” (in truth, there were no borders established, only armistice lines, on the demand of the Arab states themselves), in order to bring about the “two-state solution.”

As for Sanders’ charge that the current Israeli government is “racist,” what is he talking about? Arab citizens of Israel have full equality with Jewish Israelis. They are members of the Knesset; they serve on the Supreme Court; they are high-ranking diplomats. They enjoy all the rights – freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, that other Israelis possess. The only difference is that they are not required to serve in the military, although they may volunteer to do so; there are now Arab and Druze officers in the I.D.F. There is hideous “racism” in the Middle East, but it is found among, and promoted by, the Muslim Arabs, not the Jews. The Muslims, after all, know from the Qur’an that they are the “best of peoples”(3:110) while the Jews, and other Infidels, are the “most vile of created beings.” (98:6).

The Qur’an contains many antisemitic verses, which have been usefully compiled by Robert Spencer: “The Qur’an depicts the Jews as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the wellbeing of the Muslims. They are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims (5:82); as fabricating things and falsely ascribing them to Allah (2:79; 3:75, 3:181); claiming that Allah’s power is limited (5:64); loving to listen to lies (5:41); disobeying Allah and never observing his commands (5:13); disputing and quarreling (2:247); hiding the truth and misleading people (3:78); staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance (2:55); being hypocritical (2:14, 2:44); giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad (2:87); wishing evil for people and trying to mislead them (2:109); feeling pain when others are happy or fortunate (3:120); being arrogant about their being Allah’s beloved people (5:18); devouring people’s wealth by subterfuge (4:161); slandering the true religion and being cursed by Allah (4:46); killing the prophets (2:61); being merciless and heartless (2:74); never keeping their promises or fulfilling their words (2:100); being unrestrained in committing sins (5:79); being cowardly (59:13-14); being miserly (4:53); being transformed into apes and pigs for breaking the Sabbath (2:63-65; 5:59-60; 7:166); and more.”

Bernie Sanders has never uttered a word about Muslim antisemitism. Is he afraid to confront the subject? Does he think it will go away if he refuses to discuss it? Has he not noticed the rise in antisemitism in Europe, largely attributable to the influx of millions of Muslims who bring with them, undeclared in their mental baggage, a deep and visceral hatred for Jews? Could it really be that he remains unaware of Muslim antisemitism? He never mentions the Palestinian (and other Arab) schoolbooks that drip with antisemitic venom, nor does he discuss those Palestinian children’s programs where sweet-faced Palestinian children, still in elementary school, chant their hatred for, and desire to kill, all Jews. Why not? Is it ignorance, or a desire by Bernie Sanders to protect the image of the Palestinians?

Sanders also spoke [at the town hall in Nevada] about the humanitarian crisis in the besieged Gaza Strip, where the youth unemployment rate is about 70 percent.

“Take a look at what’s going on in Gaza right now. You got youth unemployment, 70 percent, you know people can’t even leave the area,” he said.

Youth unemployment in Gaza is high for several reasons.

Mainly, there is the colossal corruption and mismanagement of the economy. Grasping Hamas leaders have been fixated on stealing money for themselves, money that was meant to improve the lives of all the Palestinians. A total of at least ten billion dollars has gone into the pockets of the late Yasser Arafat, Hamas leaders Khaled Meshaal, Mousa Abu Marzouk, Ismail Haniyeh, and 600 other second-tier leaders of Hamas, and in the P.A. gone to President Mahmoud Abbas and his two sons, Hanan Ashrawi, Saeb Erekat and others high up in the Palestinian Authority.

That money could have gone to vocational and professional training for young Gazans. It could have been used as seed money, too, to help the Gazans set up small businesses, or to invest in those that already exist but are starved for capital, so that they might expand. That would make a considerable dent in the numbers of those young Gaza’s who are currently unemployed. Sanders notes the 70% youth unemployment rate in Gaza, but has nothing to say about the reasons – which have to do with the grand theft by Hamas rulers uninterested in the plight of the people they presume to represent, as long as they and their families get theirs. The Hamas rulers have little ability to analyze and ameliorate the Strip’s economic problems. Government posts are distributed not to those who are the most capable economists and administrators, but to those whose loyalty to the leaders is assured. No wonder the Gazans have lost hope that their own Hamas-run government will help them.

Much of the aid money, too, both in Gaza and the West Bank, has gone into paying for weaponry of all kinds, and for the building of expensive terror tunnels. Those tunnels running from Gaza into Israel were built by Hamas, while those running from Lebanon into northern Israel were built by Hezbollah. These were enormously expensive to build and outfit with living quarters. All these terror tunnels have been located, and blown up, by the Israelis. A terrific waste of money that could have been used to build the Palestinian economy. Israel has tried to help the Palestinians — it left hundreds of greenhouses intact for the Palestinians of Gaza to take over once the Israelis left in 2005 — but the Gazans chose instead to destroy the greenhouses, stripping them of anything of value.

Bernie Sanders knows that the economy in Gaza is wretched, but does not see that wretchedness as the result of many bad decisions by the Palestinians themselves. It was a bad decision for Gazans ever to have allowed Hamas to be voted into power. This allowed the stupendous thefts by the new rulers, nearly seven billion dollars in aid money that was siphoned off for private gain by leaders of Hamas. In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority, rulers also helped themselves to a total of several billion — they weren’t quite as adept as Hamas leaders at diverting aid money to themselves. It was a bad decision to spend so much of what aid money remained on arms, including rockets, and terror tunnels. Sanders should publicly recognize that the economic mess in Gaza is not the fault of Israel, but of the choices the Palestinians themselves have made.

If Hamas would stop firing its rockets into Israel, the Israelis have indicated they would lessen restrictions on the movement of Gazan workers into Israel, where even now tens of thousands of jobs in construction and agriculture remain to be filled. The Israelis are even more keen than Bernie Sanders is to relieve unemployment among Gazan youth, because they know that many of those unemployed young men listen to the siren songs of terrorist recruiters, and furnish the cannon fodder for terror attacks on Jewish civilians.

“What American foreign policy has got to be about in the Middle East is bringing the Israelis, bringing the Palestinians together under the banner of justice.”

Sanders said: “It cannot just simply be that we’re just pro-Israel and we ignore the needs of the Palestinian people.”

The American government, Sanders needs to be reminded, has not been “just pro-Israel.” It was not “just pro-Israel” when, in 1956, President Eisenhower threatened to cut aid if Israeli troops did not withdraw from the Sinai. It was not “just pro-Israel” – in fact, was distinctly anti-Israel – when President Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski praised Sadat to the skies and exhibited a visceral dislike of Prime Minister Begin during the negotiations over the Camp David Accords; Carter always supported Sadat’s demands and belittled Begin’s attempts to explain Israel’s security needs; the result was the Camp David Accords, with Sadat – who was the one getting back all of the Sinai, territory Egypt had lost in its 1967 war of aggression – being heralded as a veritable Prince of Peace. Meanwhile, poor Begin, who was the one giving up “land for peace,” that is, tangible assets in exchange for a promise of peace, from Muslims who regard Muhammad’s Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya, and subsequent breach of that treaty concluded with the Meccans in 628 A.D., as the model for all subsequent treaty-making, was depicted by Carter, Brzezinski, and much of the mainstream press as being “unreasonable” in his own modest demands, none of which were met. Nor was America “just pro-Israel” when Barack Obama was president. He repeatedly demonstrated his palpable want of sympathy for the Jewish state, especially when, at the U.N.’s Security Council, the American ambassador, Samantha Power, abstained for the first time, instead of voting against, a resolution calling Israeli settlements “illegal.”

RELATED ARTICLES:

Infowars Crew Attacked And Injured At Bernie Sanders Rally

Ilhan Omar decries “anti-Muslim smears and hate speech against me” after Somali confirms she married her brother

US and Taliban agree to ceasefire that could see most American forces leave Afghanistan

DC panelists on Trump’s peace plan: US officials “have never, ever put out a document this long, this detailed”Paterson,

N.J. City Council ordinance will allow Islamic call to prayer over loudspeakers

Kansas City: Former Armed Forces trainee converts to Islam, plots jihad massacre at military base

The History of the Land Is Jewish, Not Palestinian

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

The Myth of Bernie Sanders’ Honesty

/in , , , , /by

Ah, feel the Bern. Love him or hate him — and avowed socialist Bernie Sanders does evoke extremes in feeling — even conservatives will credit him with being honest. But they shouldn’t. Not only has the Vermont senator and presidential contender changed positions to capture today’s “woke” Democrat Party left flank, but there are three factors to be considered when assessing honesty, and Sanders fails in the most dangerous way possible.

Oh, he certainly possesses authentic passion. Sanders isn’t empty to the core, as an early Arkansas Democrat critic said of Bill Clinton; he’s not a full-fledged opportunist such as Queen of Mean Amy Klobuchar or Pistol Pete Buttigieg, whose Marxist father, unbelievably, was a founding member of the International Gramsci Society (you can’t make this stuff up!). Nonetheless, Sanders would certainly understand late comedian Lenny Bruce’s observation, “We’re all as honest as we can afford to be.”

First there are the obvious, Romney-esque flip-flops. Sanders used to take what was once a not uncommon liberal position on immigration: Warning of how foreigners could take jobs from American workers and lower their wages (late head of the United Farm Workers union Cesar Chavez was a staunch opponent of illegal migration). Now he proposes decriminalizing border jumping, breaking up ICE and CBP and insists that free health care for illegals is a human right.

Sanders would also often part with Democrats and support Second Amendment rights, being from a largely rural state with little crime and a notable gun culture. But he flip-flopped badly enough in 2016 on protecting firearms manufacturers from unjust lawsuits that even Hillary Clinton could launch an attack on him while telling the truth. Oh, Bernie, we hardly knew ya’!

Yet these walk-backs are obvious and expected. Far more dangerous is the unseen dishonesty.

A great saying informs, “A man capable of deceiving only others is not nearly as dangerous as a man capable of deceiving himself.” The worst deception is self-deception. A normally dishonest person is to be reviled, but he could conceivably experience conscience pangs and decide to tell others the truth. But the self-deluded mislead others as a matter of course simply by relating what they’ve convinced themselves is truth, and, barring an epiphany-inducing conversion of heart and soul, can never set the record straight because their own perception is crooked.

I have great doubt there were many intellectually honest socialists even in the days of the Fabian Society and George Bernard Shaw. But now, being able to look back on the ideology’s history of blood and broken promises and economies — starting with Robert Owen’s failed New Harmony project in 1825 to the Bolsheviks to the Maoists to the Khmer Rouge and to Venezuela most recently, where people were eating cats and dogs — they must be rarer than a chaste starlet in Hollywood.

Socialism fails because it ignores man’s nature, that without a profit motive most people won’t be productive; wealth creation must be incentivized, and insofar as it’s not, poverty and suffering result.

Even the Soviets recognized that man’s nature contravened their aims. This is why the self-delusion of Lysenkoism, which preached the heritability of acquired traits (e.g., a plant whose leaves are plucked will have leafless descendants), was their official biological “science” until 1964. They knew that without an alteration in man’s nature that people could transmit to their progeny, their socialist program was imperiled.

While Sanders is no genius and more wizened than wise, he’s not a dumb man, either. So is there an excuse for his not knowing, at this late date, the devil he dances with in socialism? It’s like a 21st-century psychiatrist still subscribing to trepanation or a modern investment advisor recommending alchemy to increase precious metals holdings. It’s gross, damnable malpractice.

Yet, actually, while there may be no excuse for Sanders, there is an explanation. It’s called self-deception — and it’s anything but honest.

Then there’s the final factor to consider. People will state regarding Sanders, “Wow, say what you want about him, he’s sincere and just lets it all hang out. He flat out says he’s a socialist!” The idea is that the man is truly an open book.

Yet this is a flawed, dangerous analysis. It’s wiser to ask: If the beliefs Sanders openly espouses are this radical, how radical are the beliefs he’s keeping hidden?

Remember, again, as with all politicians, Sanders is “as honest as [he] can afford to be.” Everyone has filters. The Brooklyn-born son of an immigrant was a socialist activist long before he won political office (Mayor of Burlington, Vt.) at age 40. So masquerading as, let’s say, a Mitt Romney would never have flown. Moreover, you don’t have to provide all the details — in fact, you must avoid doing so — but you can’t ever effect socialism without creating a movement of fellow travelers. And proselytization is a prerequisite for doing this.

So Sanders had to find a place where his known radicalism was acceptable; ergo the Green Mountain State (where there just must be something in the water). He has been safely and lucratively ensconced in its politics ever since.

But what may Sanders be hiding that might not even be Vermont-approved? Well, note that recent Project Veritas undercover videos showed his campaign staff talking about putting political opponents in gulags, Soviet style, and even summarily executing them. (This, not to mention the Bernie supporter who committed the 2017 congressional baseball shooting and the one who just tried to burn a Calif. GOP office.) Of course, it would be unfair to definitively attribute to a man beliefs stated, unauthorized, by underlings.

Except that Sanders has not fired even one of these Marxists.

Consider as well that Bernie honeymooned in the Soviet Union and defended that evil empire’s bread lines.

So does the senator condone his underlings’ plans? The media aren’t asking — and he’s not telling. But in this case, inaction speaks louder than words, and birds of a feather….

Also note that one Sanders strange bird, Iowa field organizer Kyle Jurek, agrees with my assessment. “I think that he’s a legit socialist masquerading as a democratic socialist,” he said of his boss.

“Masquerading,” of course, is to pretend to be someone you’re not, and it characterizes politicians. So unless you’d risk a Bolshevik Bern, perhaps you should take the advice here of another left-winger, the late writer Maya Angelou: “When people show you who they are, believe them.”

Don’t be sandbagged by Sanders — because he’s many things, but honest ain’t one of ‘em.

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

© All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Bernie Sanders On “That Right Wing” and “Racist” Israeli Government

Bernie Staffer Caught Promising Gulags For Trump Voters

‘Light Them On Fire’: Bernie Sanders Organizer Wants Political Violence

Clarion’s 2020 Predictions: Bernie, Jew Baiters and Western Insanity

RELATED VIDEO: Understanding Bernie Sanders.

Copyright © 2024 DrRichSwier.com LLC. A Florida Cooperation. All rights reserved. The DrRichSwier.com is a not-for-profit news forum for intelligent Conservative commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Republishing of columns on this website requires the permission of both the author and editor. For more information contact: drswier@gmail.com.