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Congress is more of an impediment than any wall Trump wants to build when it comes to protecting our nation. The mass media and certain members of Congress, from both sides of the aisle, are the real enemies of the people.
McQuillan doubts Trump will be able to scale Congress.(See 1 and 1a below.)
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Education's soft underbelly - teachers who impregnate students minds with their own bias which they hide in a variety of ways.(See 2 below.)
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Will resistance eventually kill Trump's Palestinian- Israeli Peace Plan? (See 3 below.)
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Can America's intelligence agencies ever be trusted? (See 4 below.)
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A liberal op ed writer feels compelled to attack Hillsdale's Arn because this truly liberal college is a threat to his world. Academia is under attack and being eroded by liberal intellects who cannot abide views that differ from their tripe.
I am amazed when I find a radical liberal over 5 feet because they stoop so low in order to spread their pygmy thinking. (See 5 below.)
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Liberal racism is alive and well. (Se 6 below.)
And:
John James appears to be a great winner and his opposition to identity politics is the message that should resonate. He is the complete opposite of Obama's vomit. James is a West Point graduate, a consensus builder, a healer, articulate and handsome to boot. His message is what the black community needs to hear. Now will they listen? GO JOHN JAMES!
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Bruce Ohr kept rowing towards Russia in order to perpetuate Hillary's Trump Collusion myth. (See 7 below.)
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Cannon "father." (See 8 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Does Trump Have What It Takes to Win on Immigration?
President Trump has faced down the Chinese, the Russians, ISIS, and North Korea, but does he have what it takes to force Congress to fix immigration? I am beginning to think the answer is no. Congressional leadership has secured the votes, and worked the rules, to pass the president's agenda only when the members agree with his policies, such as choosing conservative justices or lowering taxes. On issues such as Obamacare and immigration, where the GOP establishment disagrees with Trump, he has failed.
On Obamacare, Trump gave up in disgust after killing the individual mandate. He can't do that on immigration. Fixing immigration was a big promise. He has got to deliver.
On Obamacare, Trump gave up in disgust after killing the individual mandate. He can't do that on immigration. Fixing immigration was a big promise. He has got to deliver.
The art of negotiation requires both carrots and sticks. Trump has shown little to offer or threaten that the impervious incumbents of the GOP want or fear. He has endorsed their candidates and campaigned for them and been rewarded with no loyalty. The rewards of their lobbyists and payoffs of crony corruption have made our politicians, especially leadership, independent of voters and of the president.
President Trump has Republican voters behind him on every detail of his immigration policy. Voters want a wall. They want more border patrol. They want an end to catch and release and an end to visa overstays. Voters also agree with Trump that we need to cut down legal migration. They want Muslim immigration heavily vetted and curtailed. They want an end to chain migration.
But as every conservative knows to our sorrow, Republican career politicians don't care about the wishes of ordinary voters.
To achieve Trump's immigration goals, he must force Congress to pass legislation and appropriate funds. Republican leaders are unable and unwilling to garner the votes. They've shown no inclination to fulfill their promises to secure our borders, adopting the Democrat priority of DACA amnesty instead. Neil Munro at Breitbart described earlier this year how Senate majority leader McConnell used Senate rules to sabotage Trump's immigration bill and help "an alliance of Democrats and roughly 15 business-first Republican Senators" who tried to "push an amnesty through the Senate."
But as every conservative knows to our sorrow, Republican career politicians don't care about the wishes of ordinary voters.
To achieve Trump's immigration goals, he must force Congress to pass legislation and appropriate funds. Republican leaders are unable and unwilling to garner the votes. They've shown no inclination to fulfill their promises to secure our borders, adopting the Democrat priority of DACA amnesty instead. Neil Munro at Breitbart described earlier this year how Senate majority leader McConnell used Senate rules to sabotage Trump's immigration bill and help "an alliance of Democrats and roughly 15 business-first Republican Senators" who tried to "push an amnesty through the Senate."
The GOP is chock-full of politicians who personally favor amnesty and high legal immigration and who fear the mainstream media more than Trump and his voters. They want to curry favor with Hispanic voters in their districts by continuing chain migration. They rely on rich donors who hire non-Americans. Like other elitists, they feel virtuous by being kind to illegals. They seem to enjoy demonstrating their power to ignore voters. The good of the country is of the least importance to them.
Trump knows he needs new tactics. He has started to threaten a government shutdown if that's what it takes to get border funding. This is supposedly to pressure Democrats, but it is equally a shot across the bow of the GOP. At the moment, these threats are classic Trump intimidation, not an action plan.
During a congratulatory call to Rush Limbaugh, President Trump admitted that he had conceded to Ryan and McConnell and agreed to no "fund the wall" shutdown before the midterms. Trump said he personally thinks a showdown on immigration during the September budget vote is worth the political risk, as after the midterms they may not get as favorable a bill. (This suggests the question: what is less favorable than zero? Because all we have is zero.)
Does Trump need political savvy and tools outside his usual skill set to outmaneuver these lifelong politicians on their home turf, the halls of Congress? Once the Kavanaugh confirmation is behind us, will Trump be freer to go after McConnell? Will Trump, the consummate deal-maker, roll up his sleeves and get the immigration deal through Congress, garnering the votes he needs one by one? Or will Trump's paradigm-busting approach find an unforeseen way through the Congressional roadblock?
It is obvious that Trump is aware of the challenge and committed to continue his record of promise-keeping. From recent rhetoric, it sounds as though Trump is moving immigration up to a top priority. His popularity among voters is growing, which strengthens his hand.
Can Trump win against Congress? So far, the answer is no.
1a)
COMMENTARY: Donald Trump hits the daily double
By Wayne Allyn Root.
President Donald Trump is winning on all cylinders.
First, Trump’s approval rating just hit 50 percent at Rasmussen. Trump is now 5 points higher than Barack Obama on the exact day of his second year in the White House.
But what’s truly amazing is Trump has had well more than 90 percent negative news coverage. Meanwhile, Obama enjoyed an 8-year lovefest with the media. It was eight years of genuflecting and knighting Obama a hero. After all that, Trump beats him by 5 points. Amazing.
Guess what this means? A majority of Americans don’t give a damn what the liberal mainstream media says anymore. We ignore it, avoid it or mock it. ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS and MSNBC have all neutered themselves. No one believes their propaganda, lies and fake news anymore. They’ve made themselves completely irrelevant. We’ve tuned them out. Which means they can’t change a single mind anymore.
Trump’s Twitter feed has more value than ABC, NBC and CBS combined. And Nickolodean and HGTV get higher ratings than CNN.
Now to the great economic news. The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s “GDPNow” measure (which predicts future GDP growth based on current data) just upgraded its third quarter GDP prediction from 4.7 percent to 5 percent growth. If that prediction comes true — right before the November elections — Trump’s GOP wins a huge victory.
How good is the economic news? In June, 155,965,000 Americans were employed. That’s the 11th time in 19 months under Trump we’ve set a record for the most Americans working. This guy is Houdini.
You know what that makes Obama? A fool. He put us $10 trillion in debt to create awful growth and a nation of crappy, part-time jobs.
Hispanic unemployment set another record low. But even more remarkably, the number for disabled Americans is also the lowest ever.
It gets better. These aren’t Obama’s crappy, low-wage, part-time jobs. High-wage manufacturing jobs were up by 37,000 in June. That brings Trump’s total to 400,000 new manufacturing jobs. Not surprisingly, with the economy booming and a job market this tight, worker pay raises are now the highest since 2008.
But the news gets even better for Trump. Democrats, Ivy League eggheads and the liberal mainstream media think they have a winning/wedge issue with Trump’s trade war. They call it “reckless” and “dangerous.” They keep claiming it will destroy our economy. Well, guess who disagrees? American businesses.
Seventy-one percent of business owners surveyed by the UBS Investor Watch support additional tariffs on China. Eighty-eight percent agree China engages in unfair trade practices. Sixty-six percent support additional tariffs on Mexico. Sixty-four percent support additional tariffs on the E.U. Sixty percent even support additional tariffs on Canada. Trump wins again. The people no longer care what the media say.
Trump just keeps saying what the American people want to hear. Trump says, “America first.” The people cheer. Trump says our “friends” in the EU are ripping us off. The people cheer. Trump signs an executive order rolling back affirmative action at colleges. The people cheer. Trump rolls back Obama-era gas mileage standards. Liberal environmentalists scream. But that saves $2,400 per car for middle-class Americans. The people cheer. Trump demands work requirements for anyone who gets food stamps. The people cheer.
The Democrat response? Socialism. Free health care. Free money for everyone. Free college for everyone. Free handouts for everyone. Reparations. Open borders.
Trump has hit the daily double. He’s destroyed the Democrat Party and the liberal mainstream media at the same time. Liberals have fallen into a very deep, dark hole. They may never crawl out.
Contact Wayne Allyn Root at Wayne@ROOTforAmerica.com. Hear or watch the nationally syndicated “WAR Now: The Wayne Allyn Root Show” from 3 to 6 p.m. daily at 790 Talk Now and at 5 p.m. on Newsmax TV.
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The Left is abusing American high school education in its struggle to gain and retain political power. We only found out about this incident by accident. How many more?
Ilya Feoktistov is a member of the board of directors of Americans for Peace and Tolerance.
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3)
Qatar's Opposition To Trump's Forthcoming Middle East Peace Plan As Reflected In Qatari Cartoons
In recent weeks, the Qatari media has been slamming the Trump administration's efforts to advance a regional peace plan that has come to be known as the "Deal of the Century." Qatari media reports and articles about this plan have described it as serving Israel's interests while eliminating the Palestinian cause. Furthermore, following reports in the non-Arab media that Saudi Arabia has been involved in formulating this plan, and against the backdrop of the growing crisis between Qatar and the "Arab Quartet" – i.e. the four countries, led by Saudi Arabia, which have been boycotting Qatar for the last year – the Qatari media has been accusing Saudi Arabia and other Arab regimes of collaborating with the Trump administration and betraying the Palestinians.[1]
On June 28, the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, directed by former Israeli Knesset Member 'Azmi Bishara, who is close to the Qatari regime, likewise published a report about the Trump peace plan, stating that it is the worst Middle East peace plan presented by the U.S. to date, that it completely disregards the Palestinian rights and the fact that the root of the problem is the Israeli occupation, that it resembles the plan of the Israeli right for ending the conflict with the Palestinians and constitutes an attempt to impose this Israeli position on the Arabs. The report also attacked certain Arab countries, chiefly Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Emirates, for cooperating with this plan, and assessed that it would not go forward as long as the Palestinians opposed it and continued to resist the pressures exerted upon them.[2]
This criticism of the Trump deal found expression also in cartoons published in the Qatari and pro-Qatar media. Many of the cartoons presented Arab support for the deal as a betrayal of the Palestinians and collaboration with the U.S. and Israel, while others addressed the deal itself, presenting it as serving nobody but Israel. Some cartoons expressed that the Palestinians' commitment to the right of return will not enable the deal to go forward. This was often represented by the symbol of the key, which represents the Palestinian refugees' insistence on the right to return to their former homes within the 1948 territories.
The following is a sampling of the cartoons.
Criticism Against Arabs Countries For Collaborating With U.S., Supporting The Deal Of The Century
Arab countries help the U.S. force the poisous "Deal of the Century" down the Arabs' throats (Al-Quds Al-Arabi, London, July 2, 2018)
"The Arab regimes" shake hands with Trump, who is pointing the gun of the "Deal of the Century" at them (Al-Arabi Al-Jadid, London, June 26, 2018)
"The Arab regimes" pretend to refuse "The Deal of the Century" while signing it under the table (Al-Arabi Al-Jadid, London, June 24, 2018)
"The Deal of the Century": The Arabs are in "Kushner's" pocket as he skips over the Jerusalem problem (arabi21.com, June 23, 2018)
Blinded by the U.S. and by false hopes for peace, the Arabs do not see that "the way to [liberate] Palestine" is via the gun, and are about to fall into the trap of the "Deal of the Century" prepared for them by Trump and Netanyahu (Al-Quds Al-Arabi, London, May 25, 2018)
"The Deal [of the Century]!": The U.S. gets money, Israel gets "Jerusalem" and the Arabs get a ticking bomb (Al-Arabi Al-Jadid, London, May 24, 2018)
The Deal Of The Century Favors Israel
"The Deal of the Century" as a star of david (aljazeera.net, March 9, 2018)
"The Deal of the Century" is an Israeli product in an American guise (arabi21.com, July 9, 2018)
The pro-Israel "Jared Kushner"(Al-Arabi Al-Jadid, London, June 14, 2018)
The Palestinian Adherence To Right Of Return Will Thwart The Deal Of The Century
"The Marches of Return and the Deal of the Century": the Palestinian marcher turns the table on the deal (arabi21.com, May 23, 2018)
"A Right Demanded Will Never Be Lost": The Palestinians' adherence to the right of return, symbolized by the key, is erasing the "Deal of the Century" (Al-Quds Al-Arabi, London, June 23, 2018)
A Palestinian erases "the Deal of the Century" with the key of the right of return (aljazeera.net, May 12, 2018)
The right of return shatters "the Deal of the Century" (Al-Quds Al-Arabi, London, July 19, 2018)
[1] See e.g., Al-Sharq (Qatar), June 15, 2018; Al-Raya (Qatar), June 24, 2018; arabi21.com, June 30, 2018; Al-Watan(Qatar), June 21, 29, 30, 2018, July 1, 2018.
[2] Dohainstitute.org, June 28, 2018.
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4)The Police Were Not Policed
By Victor DavisHanson
How can Americans now trust the intelligence agencies shown to be corrupt in the very recent past?
No doubt Russia must be watched for its chronic efforts to sow more chaos in American elections — despite Barack Obama’s naïve assertion in 2016 that no entity could possibly ever rig a U.S. election, given the decentralization of state voting.
Lately the heads of four U.S. intelligence and security agencies — Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, FBI Director Chris Wray, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone, and National Security Adviser John Bolton — held coordinated White House press conferences to remind America of the dangers of Russian chicanery. Trump, who is prone to conflate documented Russian efforts to meddle and cause chaos with unproven accusations of Trump-Russia collusion, should heed their warnings and beef up U.S. counter-espionage efforts and cyber deterrence.
But why do our intelligence heads seem to feel so exasperated that they’re not getting through to the American people? Why do they need to reassert the immediacy of the Russian threat?
The FBI joined forces with one political campaign to thwart the efforts of the opposing campaign. Has that happened before in American history?
Is it because Trump has poisoned the waters of American espionage and surveillance by his understandable furor over the never-ending Mueller investigation and his perceived downplaying of “Russian meddling”?
Not really.
Consider the larger context.
Most recently, it was disclosed, two years after the fact — and despite the FBI’s kicking-and-screaming refusal to release subpoenaed documents — that the FBI did, as alleged, offer to pay Christopher Steele to dig for dirt on the Trump campaign.
The FBI also knew that Steele was working on behalf of the Clinton campaign to find dirt on Donald Trump. We now also know that the FBI used at least one informant to spy on members of the Trump campaign. In other words, the FBI joined forces with one political campaign to thwart the efforts of the opposing campaign. Has that happened before in American history?
Pause for a minute and examine the recent history of the FBI leadership. The fired former director James Comey likely lied frequently to congressional committees when he claimed that the Steele dossier was not really a primary source for the FISA court writ against Carter Page.
Comey did write an FBI summary about the Clinton email scandal, exonerating Clinton, before he interviewed Hillary Clinton and many of the major figures in that scandal. Comey leaked at least one likely classified document, written on FBI equipment on FBI time, in a successful gambit to get a special counsel appointed, which turned out to be his friend Robert Mueller.
Comey misled a FISA judge by not fully disclosing the full origins of the Steele dossier as a product of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He also deceived a president by briefing him of selected bits of the dossier’s contents, but not informing the president that the source of most of that information was paid by the Clinton campaign.
Comey further misled the president by assuring him that he was not a subject of an FBI investigation while he repeatedly suggested to the media that Trump, in fact, was a subject.
In addition, Comey must have known that DOJ official Bruce Ohr — even after the election — served as a likely conduit to the FBI for info passed to Ohr by then-fired FBI informant Christopher Steele.
In other words, during the Trump presidency, one of his own top officials at the DOJ was secretly working with the FBI to undermine the Trump presidency.
Andrew McCabe, Comey’s deputy, was fired for misleading or lying to federal investigators. He oversaw the email investigation of Clinton, only months after Clinton’s associated PACs had provided most of the funds for the political campaign of McCabe’s wife.
Other FBI operatives, Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, were fired from the Mueller investigation for unethical and unprofessional behavior — as well as for rampant bias shown against the target of their own investigations.
The CI
An entire array of FBI agents and associated DOJ officials — James Baker, Peter Kazdik, Michael Kortan, David Laufman, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, James Rybicki, Peter Strzok, and Sally Yates — have now mysteriously either resigned, retired, been reassigned, or been fired for allegedly unethical or perhaps even illegal behavior. And we still do not know the full extent of the FBI’s use of spies implanted in the Trump campaign
Currently, congressional committees are likely to reinvestigate former CIA director John Brennan for serial false testimonies. Brennan has already lied under oath to Congress about the drone program, CIA monitoring of Senate staff computers, and his own role in seeding the Steele dossier to a senator and to DOJ and FBI officials. The CIA under Brennan apparently was knee-deep in efforts to push the FBI to monitor the Trump campaign, despite the fact that domestic surveillance is beyond the CIA’s legal mandate.
Members of the Obama NSC requested a record number of unmaskings of names associated with FISA surveillance. Many of the names of those surveilled were illegally leaked to the press. Former national-security adviser Susan Rice initially lied about her own role in such roguery and then awkwardly admitted it while insisting it was entirely proper and routine.
We also still do not know the full extent of incompetence, wrongdoing, or simple conflicts of interest of our intelligence and investigatory agencies in the Clinton email and Uranium One scandals.
The DOJ is hardly better than the intelligence agencies. Some DOJ officials signed misleading FISA warrants that they knew were not fully transparent. Attorney General Loretta Lynch improperly and secretly met with Bill Clinton while her agency was investigating Hillary Clinton. DOJ deputy Bruce Ohr may well have monitored and coordinated the spread of the Steele dossier to hurt the campaign of Donald Trump and then President Trump — and then hidden the fact that his wife had been hired to aid Steele. Rod Rosenstein did not recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller investigation of Trump, although he was a key overseer of investigations into the Uranium One and Clinton email scandals, the FISA requests, and the collusion allegations.
In addition, “many people in the State Department were also meeting with Christopher Steele,” Devin Nunes said in a recent interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “What on earth was Christopher Steele doing meeting with State Department officials?” The congressional oversight committee that Nunes heads is now interviewing many of these officials to determine why and how they were involved with the Steele dossier.
In sum, many within the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, the NSC, and the State Department may have been involved in the greatest scandal in American electoral history, by directing agents, informants, and employees to help one campaign to harm another — and then, even after the election, to work to undermine a sitting president. In addition, these rogue agencies spent two years fighting congressional requests to release incriminating information. And then, when they were forced against their will to cough up some documents, they redacted them so heavily that they’re almost undecipherable.
Former FBI director Comey spent months on a book tour, punctuated by daily back-and-forth feuding with the president of the United States. Former CIA director John Brennan is a current paid CNN analyst who devotes much of his commentary to calling the president treasonous and unfit. Former director of national intelligence James Clapper is a paid MSNBC consultant who has alleged that the president is a Russian intelligence asset.
So let us recontextualize the intelligence agencies’ current dilemmas.
Our current agency directors and cabinet are rightly calling universal attention to the ongoing threat of Russian espionage efforts.
They do so in concert because they are apparently worried, though they cannot say such openly, that President Trump himself and the American public are not yet sufficiently woke to these existential threats from Russia.
Such concern for the national security is fine and necessary.
But somewhere, somehow, someone must also must explain and rectify the past. For two years, the top employees of these agencies, most appointed during the Obama administration, have been engaged in unethical and illegal behavior, likely intended to throw the election to President Obama’s preferred candidate and then, after the election, to subvert the new presidency.
In other words, those who are warning of Russian collusion efforts to warp an election now work for agencies that in the recent past were doing precisely what they now rightly accuse the Russians of doing. The damage that Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and others have done to the reputations of the agencies they ran will live on well after their tenures are over.
The public will not be able to square such a circle — believe that the intelligence agencies are trustworthy now, while knowing they were deeply corrupt in the very recent past — unless there is some accountability for U.S.-government misdeeds.
We always expect Russian skullduggery, but we never anticipated election interference from those entrusted with protecting us.
For some reason, many still in the current FBI, CIA, DOJ, NSC, and State Deprtment are incapable of accepting that their agencies in the Obama years were weaponized to alter a U.S. election and were directed to do so by many top dogs in their Washington hierarchies.
Until we get the truth, an accounting, and some sort of justice, we will not quite become galvanized by those who rightly warn us of real Russian interference.
The reason?
We always expect Russian skullduggery, but we never anticipated election interference from those entrusted with protecting us and our institutions from our enemies.
The police were not policed — and so became like the enemies they warned us about
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5) Mr. Friedersdorf, Hillsdale Is Hale
The Atlantic writer’s venomous attack on my school relies on falsehoods.
Conor Friedersdorf, a journalist at The Atlantic, has written an article about Hillsdale Collegethat falls in the category of a relatively new (to me) literary genre called “concern trolling,” where someone wishing you ill pretends to wish you well by offering advice that is not in your interest. The article is full of venom and rubbish, the former weakened by the latter. The venom appears at the end, where the author invites Hillsdale students, alumni, and faculty to write him and agree with him that I am leading the college astray. He will then of course use the responses to try to do harm to Hillsdale. People may respond to Friedersdorf’s call — indeed, I am told that some have — but it will not work, which is where the rubbish comes in.
Friedersdorf’s “concern” rests on four allegations, all of them false.
The first is that I pretend that everyone at Hillsdale College agrees with me, and that I speak for the college when I speak about Donald Trump. I do neither. I make it explicit, frequently, that there are plenty of opinions about Trump at Hillsdale College, and not all of them are like mine. It is not my business to represent the political views of the college on the questions of today. Indeed, the college itself has no such views.
Therefore, when speaking on behalf of the college, I seldom dwell on Trump and most often do not mention him. I usually talk about the Constitution and its connection to liberal education of the best kind. Perhaps my views about these things are in some way in error, but it is surely legitimate for me to speak about them. I have given them considerable thought.
Second, Friedersdorf alleges that the financial well-being of the college was somehow behind my public support for Trump in the 2016 election — that I gambled the reputation of the college on Trump for fundraising purposes. The proof against this allegation is easy to adduce. The college was doing well financially long before Donald Trump began his political career, and it is doing well now. The fact is, people do not tend to give money to an undergraduate college to affect near- or intermediate-term politics.
Almost all of our students are between the ages of 18 and 21. It will be years before they do anything significant in politics, and most of them will not go into politics at all. We hope to equip them to lead fine lives in many fields, and that is what they do. I am proud of them all as they make a success of their lives in these many fields.
It is true, on the other hand, that several of our former students work in the Trump administration. I have a bond with most of them, a bond formed when they were teenagers or a little older, before I or they knew what they would do. I am proud of them. Their mature work stems in part from a devotion to civil and religious liberty that Hillsdale has sought to cultivate as part of its mission since before the Civil War. I did not, however, get them those jobs, nor did I make them the capable and fine people they have become. A lot of people did that, but mostly they did it themselves.
Third, it is alleged that, because I support Donald Trump politically, I am eroding the moral standards of the college and of its students. This is silly. What one teaches the young about morality is a very different thing from choosing whom to support for president of the United States. For the young, a whole life is before them, and it is right and possible to encourage them to build all of the virtues in themselves. The first step is for them to learn what those virtues are. We teach that.
The
The choice for president is by contrast sharply circumscribed: One opts for the best of two people. I made the choice for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. I thought that was an easy choice to make. I still think so. If one believes as I do that the Constitution is precious and in danger of eclipse by the modern administrative state, then one places a high value on stopping and reversing that. Donald Trump stated the intention to do this, and so far he has done it more than any president excepting, maybe, Ronald Reagan. This seemed and seems to me the decisive thing. I feel this acutely as a citizen, but also because of my station: I am responsible for keeping the college independent in service of its ancient mission, and the extension of the administrative state in recent years has threatened Hillsdale’s independence as surely as it has threatened religious liberty.
In other words, I made the kind of choice that is common: I selected the best among alternatives. Friedersdorf writes of Hugh Hewitt and me: “They talk as if doing what’s politically advantageous is obviously the best way forward.” Call me crazy, but insofar as politics is concerned, I think precisely that. For support, I refer Friedersdorf to the Nicomachean Ethics. I can show him the passages if he wishes. Human life being imperfect, choices often involve forgoing something good for the sake of something better, or accepting something bad to avoid something worse.
Fourth, Friedersdorf makes the extraordinary claim that it was improper to invite the current vice president of the United States to speak at a college commencement. I find it hard to take this seriously. Vice President Pence is a high officer under the very Constitution that Hillsdale is dedicated, in part, to serving. He is loyal to that Constitution. He is a friend of the college going back beyond his two terms as governor of Indiana to his days in Congress. And he is a good and decent man, a fact of which I have personal knowledge.
Friedersdorf makes something of the fact that I have said that there are things I regret about Donald Trump — chiefly, that Donald Trump has written and spoken often in the past, but not lately as far as I know, of his ambitions about women and his conquests of them. He has referred to them in demeaning ways. I wish he had not done that. He says that he wishes that, too. If I had disqualified him for my support on this ground, I would have been left with Hillary Clinton. I do not know her personally any more than I know Donald Trump personally, but she does not seem to me a paragon of the virtues. And however that may be, the records of America’s presidents and other politicians going back to the Founding era were often not morally pristine, but some of them did a good job in their offices anyway.
To those in the Hillsdale College community, and I know there are a few, who object to my endorsement of Donald Trump, I have said to them simply: I have no right to command you in politics, and you have no right to command me. So long as I make it plain that I am speaking in my personal capacity, as I do, then everything should be fine. Above all, I have said, we who are members of the college must cultivate our respect for one another, which lays the ground for the affection that is due to colleagues. It is a college, after all, and a good one. I have promised to do my part.
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6) Is Liberal Racism a Horse of a Different Color?
Bigotry is bigotry, whether systemic, as at Harvard, or idiosyncratic, like Sarah Jeong’s Twitter feed.
By Jason L. Riley
To paraphrase a well-known political figure, Ms. Jeong could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot a white person without losing the support of liberals. It’s a safe bet she was tapped by the Times because of these racial prejudices, not despite them. Editorial board members are hired to help formulate and express the official position of a newspaper. Ms. Jeong is being hired to speak for the Times, and they like where she’s coming from.
The Grey Lady attacks President Trump as a racist and sexist on a near-daily basis, and columnists like Charles Blow write about little else. So is it hypocritical for the paper to hire and defend a new editorial board member who has made no secret of her own biases? Of course it is, but that’s considered beside the point by people who share Ms. Jeong’s worldview.
The liberals who control most major media outlets specialize in applying different standards to different groups. Like the Times, Twitter had no problem with Ms. Jeong’s repugnant observations. Scores of tweets that included offensive phrases—“#cancelwhitepeople”; “are White people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun?”; “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along”—didn’t faze Jack Dorsey’s content monitors. But when conservative activist Candace Owens decided last weekend to reproduce Ms. Jeong’s posts and replace “white” with “black” or “Jewish,” Twitter temporarily suspended her account. Following a backlash, Twitter restored the account and claimed that “we made an error.”
Of course, the Times can hire whomever it pleases. But if it’s going to give the likes of Ms. Jeong a pass while lecturing us about growing intolerance on the political right, how seriously should readers take the paper’s nonstop Trump-is-a-bigot coverage? The president’s attacks on the media are often misguided and overstated—his daughter Ivanka is right; we’re not the enemy of the people—but major news outlets are doing plenty to erode public confidence in the news without any help from Mr. Trump.
Welcome to another example of the left’s inconsistency on race. If the goal is a postracial America, why does racial identity continue to be liberalism’s overriding obsession? Why is racism viewed as something to redirect rather than end outright? If you’re situated on the progressive left, racist views are OK to harbor so long as they’re targeted at the right groups for the proper reasons?
At Harvard, Asian students are currently out of favor among administrators for the sin of taking up too many slots in the freshman class. America’s most prestigious university, a bastion of liberal thinking, is being sued by Asian students for discrimination. Harvard wants a certain racial balance on campus, and Asians are getting in the way by academically outperforming applicants from other groups. The nerve.
Harvard can no longer credibly deny that it’s engaging in systematic racial discrimination. Internal documents that the school has been forced to disclose to fight the litigation suggest that Harvard is doing what has long been rumored. Nonetheless, school officials justify these racially biased practices. They insist, like Ms. Jeong and her defenders, that such bigotry is in the service of a noble cause. Unlike you or me, Harvard knows how to discriminate the “right” way.
Prior to World War II, and long before Harvard and other Ivy League schools had an “Asian problem,” the concern was too many Jews on the quad. The parallels are instructive. “Jewish students outperformed their Gentile classmates by a considerable margin,” writes Jerome Karabel in his 2005 book, “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.”
Then as now, the schools came up with ways to overcome that reality by de-emphasizing objective admissions criteria. Jews were less likely to participate in athletics or belong to social clubs other than Jewish fraternities, both of which were deemed “character” flaws for the purpose of bringing the “Jewish invasion” under control. These days, Asian applicants to Harvard receive consistently low “personal” ratings, which are then used to undercut their academic achievements under Harvard’s “holistic” assessment of their worthiness.
So long as the goal is not to level the playing field but to tilt it in a different direction, expect history to continue repeating itself.
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By AAN Staff
A veritable treasure trove of previously unreported government documents provides indisputable evidence that a research firm employed by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee to conduct opposition research on Donald Trump worked closely with the FBI, a high-ranking Justice Department official, and the intelligence community.
The underhanded collaboration continued into the early days of the Trump administration. (The Hill)
Fusion GPS's work and its involvement with several FBI officials have been well reported.
But a close review of these new documents shows just how closely Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, who reported to Obama-era Deputy AG Sally Yates, maintained contact with Fusion — and, in particular, its primary source, former British spy Christopher Steele — before, during and after the election.
Yates was fired by President Trump over an unrelated political dispute. Ohr was demoted recently.
Ohr’s own notes, emails and text messages show he communicated extensively with Steele and with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson. Those documents have been turned over in recent weeks to investigative bodies in Congress and the DOJ, but not reviewed outside the investigative ranks until now.
They also confirm that Ohr became a critical conduit for relaying information, often unsubstantiated, months after the FBI terminated Steele's role as an informant.
The Bureau itself concluded prior to Election Day 2016, that Steele leaked sensitive information to the press and was "not suitable for use" as a confidential source.
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8)A husband and wife who worked for the circus went to an adoption agency. The social workers there raised doubts about their suitability. The couple then produced photos of their 50-foot motor home, which was clean and well maintained and equipped with a beautiful nursery.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++The social workers then raised concerns about the education a child would receive while in the couple's care. "We've arranged for a full-time tutor who will teach the child all the usual subjects along with French, Mandarin, and computer skills.
Then the social workers expressed concern about a child being raised in a circus environment. "Our nanny will be a certified expert in pediatric care, welfare, and diet."
The social workers were finally satisfied. They asked, "What age child are you hoping to adopt?"
"It doesn't really matter......as long as the kid fits in the cannon."
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