Semper Fi! (See 1 below.)
And
Obama takes credit for everything except what actually he is responsible.
Paul Douglas should come out of his grave yelling and screaming.
Now one of the most divisive presidents in our history is going around talking about unity.
More crap talk from an a..h... (See 1a and 1b below..)
https://www.youtube.com/embed/
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An essay about the consequences of American withdrawal. (See 2 below.)
And:
Surviving Trump.(See 2a below.)
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My strongest friendships have always transcended both religion and politics.
I have also been a contributing member of Christians United For Israel (CUFI) for decades. (See 3 below.)
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Stacey Abrams offers more nonsense to Georgians. (See 4 below.)
And
Even the docile Swedes are willing to take only so much. (See 4a below.)
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Dick
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1)September 7, 2018 Mr. Mark Parker Nike Word Headquarters
One Bowman Drive Beaverton,
Oregon 97005
RE: Colin Kaepernick & Nike’s “Just Do It”campaign
Dear Mr Parker,
“Sacrificed Everything”
Sorry, he only gave up much of his fan base.
Some of my fellow Marines and soldiers in the Korean War who did not come home “Sacrificed Everything”. Other Marines and soldiers came home much like myself with scars and full of shrapnel, and some missing limbs. That is sacrifice.
I dearly love my country and my flag that I shed blood for and can’t even sing our national anthem without tears falling down my cheeks.
I gave up my season tickets to my alma mater OU Sooners football and basket ball because some of the black kids bowed there heads and put their hands behind their backs. Disrespectful.
“Just don’t do it” is my new banner.
I gave all my Nike clothing (11 items) to the Salvation Army and will never again wear anything that has the Nike slash on it. I will encourage my friends to do the same.
I am hopeful that some stores have the gonads to toss your line out.
Respectfully, Patrick W. Fedde
501 Copperfield Dr.
Edmond, Oklahoma 73003
1a)
Obama Calls Benghazi A Wild Conspiracy Theory. Benghazi Hero Levels Him.
Former President Barack Obama suggested on Friday that outrage over the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi — which resulted in the deaths of four Americans — was a result of "wild conspiracy theories."
Obama, trying to help the Democrats in the 2018 midterms, attacked President Donald Trump while speaking at the University of Illinois where he accepted the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government.
"But over the past few decades, the politics of division and resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican party," Obama said.
Obama then attacked Republican members of Congress, accusing them of embracing "wild conspiracy theories like those surrounding Benghazi."
Shortly after Obama made his remarks, Kris Paronto, a former Army Ranger who was a private security contractor working for the CIA at the CIA annex in Benghazi, slammed Obama.
Paronto, who is credited with saving approximately 20 people during the attack, wrote on Twitter:
Benghazi is a conspiracy @BarackObama ?! How bout we do this,let’s put your cowardly ass on the top of a roof with 6 of your buddies&shoot rpg’s&Ak47’s at you while terrorists lob 81mm mortars killing 2 of your buddies all while waiting for US support that you never sent
#scum
#scum
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2)
The Cost of American Retreat
The world order that the U.S. built after World War II required sacrifice and commitment, but it brought unprecedented benefits. What happens if it disappears?
The liberal world order established by the United States a little over seven decades ago is collapsing. This should not be surprising. It was always a historical anomaly. The long period of prosperity, widespread democracy and peace among the great powers was a dramatic departure from the historical norm. It certainly was not where the world had been heading before 1945.
Less than 80 years ago, liberalism outside North America was on its death bed. Dictatorships were thriving, the great powers were fighting their second global conflagration, and acts of unspeakable inhumanity were being committed in the very heart of Western Judeo-Christian civilization and in the ancient civilizations of the East. The very idea of progress seemed absurd.
The dramatic change of course after 1945 was not due to some sudden triumph of our better angels or embrace of Enlightenment principles that had been around for centuries, nor was it the natural unfolding of Universal History in the direction of liberalism. Liberal ideals triumphed because, for the first time, they had power behind them. A new player arose on the international scene: the United States. It possessed a unique and advantageous geography, a large, productive population, unprecedented economic and military power, a national ideology based on liberal principles, and a willingness, after the war, to use its power to establish and sustain a global order roughly consistent with those principles.
That order—with its mutually reinforcing security, economic and political components—has created a geographical and geopolitical space in which liberalism has taken root, spread and evolved. But it was always artificial and tenuous, challenged from within and without by natural forces—the always potent antiliberal aspects of human nature and the competitive and anarchic tendencies of geopolitics. Like a garden, it can last only so long as it is tended and protected. Today, the U.S. seems bent on relinquishing its duties in pushing back the jungle.
Among the many complaints heard now against the liberal order is that it was imposed by an often oppressive, selfish, hypocritical and incompetent American hegemony. And there is truth in that—the liberal order was erected and defended by humans. But what, in the real world, was the better alternative?
The world the United States confronted after World War II had been on a steady course toward destruction since the 19th century. The rise of Germany and Japan, and the relative decline of Great Britain, had produced a seemingly endless cycle of war in Europe (1870, 1914, 1939) and in East Asia (1894, 1904, 1914, and 1931-1945). The global economy had broken down into protectionist enclaves and become an arena for geopolitical competition. Fascism and communism had been on the rise since the 1920s. Even after the defeat of Germany and Japan, populations were devastated and inclined to radical or authoritarian solutions.
No one contemplating the direction of history in those years put their money on the triumph of either peace or liberalism. And had the United States simply gone home after World War II, as it did after World War I, the old patterns would likely have persisted.
President Harry Truman (left) with Secretary of State Dean Acheson in 1950. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Regretting their abstention in the interwar years, Americans decided that they could no longer sit “in the parlor with a loaded shotgun, waiting,” as Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it in 1950. Protecting what he called the “American experiment of life” required creating “an environment of freedom” in the world and deterring aggressors before they gained control of distant continents. The only guarantee of peace was “the continued moral, military and economic power of the United States.” America would have to be “the locomotive at the head of mankind.”
The architects of the new order were not utopian idealists. They believed in the inherent sinfulness of humans, the competitiveness of nations and the tendency of all orders to collapse. They had stared into the abyss and seen the depths to which humankind could fall. They knew the world they created would be flawed and costly to defend, but they believed an imperfect liberal order was better than none at all.
We tend to view the decades after 1945 through the lens of the Cold War, and Soviet communism certainly preoccupied Americans. Yet the response to the Soviet threat, which included the deployment of U.S. forces permanently in both Europe and East Asia and the creation of the global alliance structure, produced a geopolitical revolution. Within the confines of that system, normal geopolitical competition all but ceased. Nations within the order, in Western Europe and East Asia, didn’t compete with each for military superiority, form strategic alliances against one another or claim spheres of influence. Since no balance of power was necessary to preserve the peace among them, as it always had been in the past, they could shift substantial resources and energy from military to economic and social purposes.
Today, some call this “free-riding,” but that misunderstands the revolutionary transformation that proved essential to global peace and prosperity. Historically, Japanese and German economic success had translated into military power and a challenge to the geopolitical hierarchy. But after 1945, their economic miracles simply added to the strength of the liberal world order against potential challengers, most notably the Soviet Union.
The liberal world order was not really “rules-based,” as some say today, at least not in military and strategic matters. The U.S. generally paid little more than lip-service to the United Nations when it used force, and often did not even consult with allies. Yet it did make substantial concessions. At the heart of the order was a grand bargain: The other liberal powers ceded strategic hegemony to the U.S., but in return the U.S. would not use that hegemony to constrain their economic growth. It could not insist on winning every transaction. There had to be a relatively level playing field—at times even one that favored the other liberal powers.
The success of the order was critical to the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. The Soviets, deprived of opportunities for geopolitical gain, saw themselves falling dangerously behind economically, to the point where they ultimately sued for peace. And yes, the success of the liberal order was accompanied by disasters like the Vietnam War, and American policies were often misguided, selfish, oppressive and resented. Nor in the end did Russia and China, the two great powers outside the order, ever choose to join it except as trading partners.
Yet American hegemony was never so intolerable as to drive other members out. On the contrary, nations banged on the door to come in. Participants in the order, then and now, have shared the implicit understanding that however flawed the American-led liberal world order might be, the realistic alternatives would almost certainly be far worse.
Today many Americans seem to have lost sight of that eminently realistic judgment, and this has happened, unfortunately, just at the moment when the world is slipping back into old patterns. Autocracy, not so long ago dismissed as an anachronism, has shown a strength and resilience that Franklin Roosevelt’s generation would have recognized, while the democracies suffer from paralysis and self-doubt, as they did in the 1930s.
Advanced communications and computing technologies, once thought to be forces for cooperation and freedom, have been turned into weapons of illiberalism. The globalized economy, instead of producing convergence, remains an arena for great-power competition. Nationalism and tribalism are re-emerging. Territorial aggression and obsessions with borders have returned.
In short, the forces of history and powerful elements of human nature are bringing us back to where we were before the U.S. took responsibility for global peace and the preservation of liberalism.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, flanked by other world leaders and top advisers, faces President Trump at the G7 summit in June 2018. PHOTO: JESCO DENZEL /BUNDESREGIERUNG/GETTY IMAGES
And Americans today are responding much as they did then. Some still believe in the inevitable march of progress, putting their faith in social and economic revolution. Others bid the liberal order good riddance. On college campuses it is synonymous with imperialism and white capitalist exploitation. In the White House and on the American and European right, it is seen as an international elite conspiracy working against the interests of ordinary people.
And across the political spectrum, there is broad agreement that American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War has been a series of disasters. This is said to include not just the Iraq and Afghan wars but also a range of longstanding strategies and attitudes: supporting democracy overseas, expanding NATO and regarding the U.S., hubristically, as the world’s “indispensable nation.”
None of this began with Donald Trump. His “America First” is a pithier version of Barack Obama’s call to focus on “nation-building at home,” and the policies of the two administrations have more in common than either would like to admit. A new “realism” is in vogue, best articulated by thinkers such as Barry Posen and John Mearsheimer. It calls for paring back commitments in Europe and Asia, pulling out of the Middle East and adopting a policy of strategic “restraint.” It is time to accept the world “as it is,” not as we might wish it to be.
It all sounds so sensible. The problem is that, after decades of living within the protective bubble of the liberal world order, we have forgotten what the world “as it is” looks like. To believe that the quarter-century after the Cold War has been a disaster is to forget what disaster means in world affairs.
Which other quarter-century would we prefer? The first quarter of the 20th century included World War I and the birth of communism and fascism. The second saw the triumph of Hitler and Stalin, the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, World War II and the invention and use of nuclear weapons. Even the quarter-century beginning in 1950 included the Korean War, the Vietnam War, three Arab-Israeli Wars and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Perhaps our biggest failure is our unwillingness to imagine that things could look again as they did in the first half of the 20th century, with a few besieged democracies hanging on in a world dominated by dictatorships. Aggression was the norm then, not the exception, and every weapon invented by scientists was eventually put to use.
It should be hard to have a 1930s mentality today, since we know what happened next. But we comfort ourselves that those past horrors cannot be repeated. We see no Hitlers or Stalins on the horizon, forgetting that our forebears did not see them either. Those ambitious tyrants rose to power at a time when they faced few constraints: No nation or group of nations was willing or able to sustain an international order of any kind, much less one that might resist them.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (left) toasts Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in 2017. PHOTO: MIKHAIL SVETLOV/GETTY IMAGES
Today we know that Vladimir Putin has grand ambitions but not yet the capacity to realize them. He reveres Stalin, but he is not Stalin. What would a less constrained Putin do? A Russia that restored its Soviet and imperial borders would be a far different player on the international scene than the Russia now confined east of Ukraine and the Baltic nations.
Today a more powerful China, with a new premier-for-life, is moving away from the cautious foreign policies of the Deng era. We cannot yet know what an even more powerful and less constrained China will want or do as it expands its regional and global influence, especially if it does so by military means.
We should also recall that the European peace established since the Cold War is less than three decades old. Prior to World War II, wars in Europe were brought on by a combination of growing nationalism, collapsing democracies and global instability, all of which are visible today. Those who oppose the American promotion of democracy abroad generally have non-Western nations in mind, but let’s not have too much faith in the West. Few of Europe’s democracies date back before World War II. It was in the West that fascism and communism arose, and it is in the West that democracy is at risk once again.
The emerging consensus today is that the U.S. has been doing too much. But what if we have been doing too little? We wanted to believe that the course of history was taking us away from the war, tyranny and destruction of the first half of the 20th century, but it may be taking us back toward them, absent some prodigious effort on our part to prevent such regression. Those who call themselves realists today suggest that we can do less in the world and get more out of it. It is a lovely fiction. Our real choice is between maintaining the liberal world order, with all its moral and material costs, or letting it collapse and preparing for the catastrophes that are likely to follow.
Nothing is determined, not the triumph of liberalism or its defeat. As we have seen these past 70 years, tremendous human progress and human betterment are possible even in a dangerous world. To know that the jungle will always be there is not to despair of keeping it at bay, as we have done more or less successfully for decades. But make no mistake: The liberal order is as precarious as it is precious. It needs constant tending lest the jungle grow back and engulf us all.
This essay is adapted from Mr. Kagan’s new book, “The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World,” which will be published by Knopf on Sept. 18. He is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
2a)We’re Surviving Trump Just Fine
By Holman. W. Jenkins Jr.
The Donald Trump of Bob Woodward’s book is the Trump of the Helsinki press conference with Vladimir Putin: ill-prepared, bombastic and overconfident.Hysteria aside, the Woodward book shows the president as an amateur.
A press conference is a classic pseudo-event, manufactured to make the participants look good. Failing to make himself look good (as he also failed to do after Charlottesville) revealed nothing about Mr. Trump so much as his political amateurishness that even his freakish success in 2016 cannot cure.
The Woodward book is best understood as an antidote to a humorless and self-righteous press’s overintepretation of the Trump phenomenon. The Washington Post and the New York Times dwelled on the same half-dozen anecdotes: One underling called him an idiot. Another disobeyed his orders. Another snatched an unsigned letter from his desk to abort some presumptively dopey action. Et cetera.
Then came a redundant op-ed in the New York Times, by an unnamed Trump official, probably one whom Mr. Woodward didn’t find worth talking to. He claimed that he too was working to stop Mr. Trump’s bad ideas. Hooray for me, the author seemed to be saying.
Maybe we need to have a conversation about competence. Dean Acheson, President Truman’s top foreign-policy adviser, left South Korea out of the free world’s “defensive perimeter” in a speech in early 1950 and thereby may have invited the Korean War. Lyndon Johnson used questionable intelligence from the Gulf of Tonkin as a pretext to escalate in Vietnam. The Pentagon, having spent 11 years using no-fly zones to maintain a balance of power between the Iraq’s confessional communities, knew how to avoid civil war in Iraq. George W. Bush threw it all up in the air by handing the country to the Shiites and calling it democracy.
I could go on.
In the Woodward book, Mr. Trump says after the appointment of special counsel Bob Mueller: “Everybody’s trying to get me. . . . They’re going to spend years digging through my whole life and finances.”
So at least he is compos mentis about some things.
To a national-security aide who interrupts his golf program, he says, “I want to watch the Masters. . . . You and your cyber . . . are going to get me in a war.”
One might wish some other presidents had been so interested in golf.
Skeptical about U.S. purposes in Afghanistan, he tells an aide: “Why are you jamming this down my throat?”
These words could be engraved on every president’s forehead.
My purpose here is not to elevate President Trump in anyone’s estimation, but to inject some realism about the presidency. Barack Obama spun his wheels on impotent attempts to build a legacy out of expansions of the entitlement and regulatory state in ways that don’t look like much now. But he avoided major disasters. Mr. Trump is, functionally, Mr. Obama without the ambition (putting aside his odd ideas about trade) and has been rewarded with 4% growth, which is finally delivering the kind of “hope and change” that might make a difference in the lives of Mr. Obama’s “hope and change” voters.
If this is incompetence, we can tolerate it. If his tenure leads to a downgrading of the presidency and a reassertion of Congress as the proper policy maker for the country, all the better.
Instead of telling us what we already know about the Trump White House, Mr. Woodward’s investigative chops might have been better employed in getting to the bottom of the strange election that gave us President Trump in the first place.
The FBI became a vehicle by which unknown foreign agents, plus one known foreign agent, plus various U.S. partisan confederates, tried to insert unsubstantiated allegations about Mr. Trump into the campaign.
The shambolic and self-defeating public intervention of the FBI director on behalf of Hillary Clinton was set in motion by secret Russian intelligence about which the public is still being kept in the dark.
A considerable cross-section of the Obama-Bush leadership class in Washington was so alarmed about the prospect of a Trump presidency that they invented, or fell for, a story about how he was a Russian agent.
For the record, I keep hearing from Trump voters who are satisfied they got the wrecking ball they voted for, aimed at this selfsame Bush-Obama elite. No candidate for president in my lifetime came wrapped in less false advertising.
Which leaves only the problem of how to make sure the high-risk Trump presidency does the most good with the least harm. Happily, from the testimony this week, the job is well in hand among Mr. Trump’s shifting cast of helpers from mostly the same elite.
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3)
The New Jewish-Christian Amity
By Abigail Shrier
Social changes lead to a confluence of worldviews between the Orthodox and the evangelical.
Soon after meeting the fellow who would become my best friend in law school, I confessed something to him: I’m pro-Israel. For Orthodox Jews, this allegiance isn’t simply a matter of politics. As close to my heart as any article of faith is the land God granted Abraham with the promise to multiply his descendants like stars in the sky.
I had reason to be nervous about broaching the subject. I’d spent the previous two years, 2000-02, as a graduate student in Europe, a period that coincided with the second intifada. I learned then—with every fire-bombed synagogue in France and the cries of the rabble that stormed Oxford carrying Israeli flags defaced with swastikas—that otherwise sensible people can transmogrify when the topic of Israel arises.
My new friend, one of only two Southern Baptists I’d known, let out a barking laugh. The North Carolina church where he’d worshiped as an undergraduate, he told me, had two flags: One American, the other Israeli. Supporting and loving Israel was part of his faith, too.
This was my introduction to the new friendship between Orthodox Jews and religious Christians. American evangelical Christians’ affinity for Israel and Jews is decades old. But the affection long went unrequited. Only a negligible percentage of Jews were Orthodox, and Jews of all denominations viewed religious Christians’ enthusiasm for them with suspicion, uncomfortable with its perceived predication on Jews’ conversion.
In 1999 the Southern Baptist International Mission Board published a prayer book that directed its practitioners to inform Jewish friends that they could accept Jesus Christ and remain Jewish. A coalition of leaders of all major rabbinical seminaries, Orthodox included, was so bothered by this deception that it sent a letter to the Southern Baptist president, Rev. Paige Patterson, asking him to stop. If you like us only because you’re trying to trick us into conversion or hope we will meet a fiery end—so the thinking went—you can take your friendship somewhere else.
In any case, we Jews didn’t need the Southern Baptists. America has long been a tolerant place, where Jews have enjoyed full acceptance. Israel benefited from broad bipartisan political support. If Jews found Christians’ conversion attempts or end-of-days plans disconcerting, we had other friends to choose from.
But over the past several decades, the American Jewish community has experienced profound demographic change. Reform and Conservative Jews have few children (1.7 births per woman), attend synagogue less often, increasingly intermarry with non-Jews, are less supportive of Israel, and are generally becoming less distinguishable from non-Jewish progressives.
Amid this decline, Orthodox Jews have staged an unlikely comeback. After near-eradication in Hitler’s Europe and predictions of their disappearance in the 1950s, they now make up 10% of the American Jewish population. That may not sound like much, but as Rabbi Mitchell Rocklin noted in Mosaic magazine last year, “because of their significantly higher fertility, especially when contrasted with the below-replacement birthrates among other, larger sectors of the community, they are on pace to double their share every generation.”
When we talk about American Jews, we often think of loyal Democrats who prefer the cultural aspects of Judaism to the religious strictures. I grew up in the Conservative movement, a version of Judaism in which observance is generally less strict and more egalitarian than Orthodoxy. I loved our synagogue, camps and schools. But year by year I watched with dismay as traditionalism and Torah too often gave way to political progressivism. There are still religiously committed Jews of liberal denominations—but too few. Most are dissolving into the waters of a secular America that, by and large, describes itself as having no religion at all.
Orthodox Jews may one day become the majority of all affiliated American Jews. And, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center report, they “more closely resemble white evangelical Protestants than they resemble other U.S. Jews.”
In July the New York Times published an interactive online map, displaying granular detail of voting precinct results from the 2016 presidential election. I searched out many of the Orthodox neighborhoods of the New York area: Borough Park, Brooklyn; Rockaway, Queens; Lawrence and Woodmere, Long Island; Monsey, N.Y.; Ocean Township, Lakewood, and Paramus, N.J. I know people from many of those places, and the map confirmed what I suspected: They may talk like New Yorkers, but they vote like Nebraskans.
This is new. In 2000 most Jews—Orthodox included—still faithfully voted Democrat, preferring Gore-Lieberman to Bush-Cheney. But by Mr. Bush’s second term, the Orthodox communities had shifted rightward, partly because of the second intifada, which made them more grateful for Christian Zionism. They’ve never really looked back. According to the AJC Survey of American Jewish Opinion 2017, Orthodox Jews preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton by a margin of 2 to 1.
Unlike secular and non-Orthodox Jews, who still tend to view religious Christians’ affection with suspicion, Orthodox Jews are less concerned by the theological reasons for the support. Whether it stems from eschatology or God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12 (“I will bless those who bless you and curse him who curses you”), we simply appreciate the friendship. As Ambassador David Friedman noted at the dedication of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, evangelical Christians “support Israel with much greater fervor and devotion than many in the Jewish community.”
When Pew reported last year that a minority of American Jews view evangelical Christians favorably, the Coalition for Jewish Values, a right-wing political organization of Orthodox rabbis, released a statement: “When people wish us well in this world, observant Jews recognize that this is generally a good thing, and trust that God knows how to sort everything out in the next.” This particular sentiment is widely held by Orthodox Jews: critiquing Christians’ theology isn’t our business, and God only knows what they’d make of ours. As for conversion to Christianity, it is all but unheard of among Orthodox Jews.
At a time when kindness and common cause can seem so hard to come by in America, this growing fellow-feeling is something to celebrate. Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews send our children to religious schools, attend regular prayer services, are leery of secular universities that would teach our children to deplore our values, and fear government intrusions into our religious life. It is, one might say, a match made in heaven. When former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee spoke last year to a packed sanctuary at my synagogue, the largest Orthodox congregation in the Western United States, he received a standing ovation.
I could hardly accuse George Washington of lacking vision for the country he helped found. But in 1790, he wrote a letter to the Jews of Newport, R.I., in which he offered this blessing: “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.” With this friendship, America has done much better than that.
Ms. Shrier is a writer living in Los Angeles
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4)ABRAMS WALKS ON VOTE TO STOP SEX TRAFFICKING IN GEORGIA
4)ABRAMS WALKS ON VOTE TO STOP SEX TRAFFICKING IN GEORGIA
(Athens, GA) - Radical Stacey Abrams has an extreme agenda that will undermine public safety in Georgia. On the campaign trail, she unapologetically advocates for the end to cash bail - a policy recently implemented in California that will flood the streets with criminals. In the State House, Abrams put politics first and intentionally skipped two votes (HB341) to end sex trafficking in Georgia. In response, Kemp for Governor released the following statement:
"Stacey Abrams is a radical, career politician who coddles criminals, protects sex offenders, and attacks our men and women in uniform," said Cody Hall, Press Secretary. "In the General Assembly, Abrams literally walked on a bi-partisan bill to end sex trafficking. Georgia has the sixth highest number of sex trafficking cases in the nation, but when it came time to punish those who buy and sell our children, Stacey Abrams put her extreme agenda first and was nowhere to be found.
"When it comes to ending sex trafficking, crushing gangs, and punishing criminals, Brian Kemp will put our families ahead of politics. He will always show up and do the right thing. As governor, Brian Kemp will put hardworking Georgians - and our safety - first."
"Stacey Abrams is a radical, career politician who coddles criminals, protects sex offenders, and attacks our men and women in uniform," said Cody Hall, Press Secretary. "In the General Assembly, Abrams literally walked on a bi-partisan bill to end sex trafficking. Georgia has the sixth highest number of sex trafficking cases in the nation, but when it came time to punish those who buy and sell our children, Stacey Abrams put her extreme agenda first and was nowhere to be found.
"When it comes to ending sex trafficking, crushing gangs, and punishing criminals, Brian Kemp will put our families ahead of politics. He will always show up and do the right thing. As governor, Brian Kemp will put hardworking Georgians - and our safety - first."
4a)EUROPE
Sweden’s Far Right Rises in a Campaign D
By
STRÄNGNÄS, Sweden—With his gelled hair and jovial eloquence, Jimmie Akesson could have been mistaken for a talk-show host as he addressed a crowd recently in this idyllic lakeside town.
In fact, Mr. Akesson is the leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats, a party with roots in neo-Nazism that is poised to become a leading political force in Sunday’s elections. And he credits the rise to the party’s stance on crime in Sweden, which is seeing rising rates of rape and of murder involving firearms that he blames on its liberal asylum policy.
“Our questioning of mass migration and how to push back against crime—everybody is talking about that now. That’s of course in our favor,” Mr. Akesson said in an interview after his campaign appearance, which featured a big screen that flashed crime statistics and images of burning cars.
Election posters for Sweden Democrats in Stockholm, above. Below, Jimmie Akesson, the party’s leader, spoke last month in Landskrona, Sweden.
PHOTO: JOHAN NILSSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Nationalists and antiestablishment groups have flourished around Europe since a wave of refugees sparked a crisis across the continent in 2015.
But Sweden, one of the world’s most affluent and progressive nations, is poised for a particularly dramatic swing from a broad liberal consensus to extreme polarization. Polls put the Sweden Democrats in first or second place, and either outcome could leave center-left and center-right blocs struggling to form a stable government.
Sweden’s economy is growing, jobs are plentiful and the welfare system leaves no one by the wayside. And overall crime rates, while high by Western European standards, remain low, particularly when compared with the U.S.
Yet immigration has become the defining issue in the campaign, in part because many Swedes are rattled by surging violent crime in small urban enclaves populated mostly by people of foreign origin.
A shrine in Rosengard with a picture of a youth who was killed in a recent street shootout.
When President Trump declared last year that Sweden was struggling with immigration, he drew global condemnation and a social media campaign called #LastNightInSweden.
But several Swedish researchers and commentators—many from immigrant families—are now echoing his criticism, helping to erode a decadelong pro-immigration consensus.
Sweden has been taking more than five times more refugees per capita than the U.S. for over a decade, according to Joakim Ruist, an economist at the University of Gothenburg. It accepted 160,000 asylum seekers in 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis.
Today, over a fifth of Sweden’s 10 million people have foreign roots and the migrant community is often poorly integrated.
Unemployment is around 4% among native Swedes but exceeds 16% among the foreign born, and 23% for non-European immigrants, despite generous subsidies for companies that hire migrants, said Tino Sanandaji, an economist who wrote an acclaimed book on immigration policy.
Concerns about immigration have boosted support for the Sweden Democrats and pushed parties that have supported immigration to harden their rhetoric. Ulf Kristersson, leader of the center-right opposition, said its past immigration policy has been “very unsuccessful.”
The Sweden Democrats were founded in the late 1980s, and the group’s early incarnations included Swedish neo-Nazis and members of white nationalist movements.
The party renounced such ideology nearly two decades ago. The 39-year-old Mr. Akesson, who took over in 2005 and hasn’t been linked to neo-Nazism, has polished the party’s hard edges to woo centrist voters and even conservative immigrants. The party first entered parliament in 2010, with 5.7% of the vote.
Like Mr. Akesson, many pollsters credit the party’s rising support to growing fears about crime. Last year, police reported more than 320 shootings, dozens of bombings, and 7,226 rapes—a 10% increase over 2016. Norway, a nation half the size of Sweden, recorded only one gun homicide in 2017 compared with Sweden’s 43. Mr. Akesson cites data reported by Sweden’s national broadcaster showing that 58% of convicted rapists were foreigners in a recent five-year period.
Ulf Bostrom, a Gothenburg police officer, makes a point of not carrying weapons or body armor when he visits neighborhoods with large numbers of immigrants, because he believes it helps him establish a rapport with residents.
Hand grenades are being used so freely by criminal gangs that they are now cheaper than ice cream cones in high-crime neighborhoods, according to police.
The Ipsos Global Worry survey, published in July, showed that 73% of Swedes thought the country was heading in the wrong direction—the fifth worst result among 28 countries surveyed.
The gloom isn’t limited to native Swedes. Gamal El Fahl, an Egyptian refugee, says he will vote for the Sweden Democrats because of rampant crime in the Hjällbo district of Gothenburg, where he lives.
“Sweden has become dangerous since I came here 27 years ago. It will be a disaster if they accept more people from the Middle East like myself,” he said. “They are importing their values, their fanaticism.”
Hjällbo is one of 61 places in Sweden designated as “vulnerable areas” by police, because of a mix of criminality and social problems.
During the daytime, such problems are almost invisible thanks to high public spending on infrastructure and generous welfare benefits for all. But after dark, gangs rule many of these places, said Ulf Bostrom, a Gothenburg police officer.
A former weightlifter, Mr. Bostrom makes a point of not carrying weapons or body armor when he visits neighborhoods with large numbers of immigrants, because he believes it helps him establish a rapport with residents.
“Ethnic Swedes moved out of these areas over the last three decades, and a small number of criminals and religious extremists are keeping the population hostage,” he said. “Yet instead of solving problems, politicians have been saying that even discussing ethnicity and culture is racist.”
“Kids here talk about going to each other’s funerals,” said Christian Glasnovic, standing, who runs a Rosengard youth center.
Morgan Johansson, the country’s center-left justice minister, says the growing role of immigration in the political conversation is a broader European trend.
“For 25 years we have had problems with gang-related crime,” he said. “This has nothing to do with the immigration crisis of 2015.”
Yet many in Sweden don’t trust parties that have held power for decades to tackle the country’s challenges, said Patrik Ohberg, a political scientist.
In Rosengard, a district of the city of Malmö that has seen 10 murders this year, inspector Mats Svensson said children as young as 15 are being used by gangs to transport murder weapons, including Kalashnikov assault rifles.
Virtually all crime suspects—and victims—are of foreign origin, he said, yet the state has no policy to end the vicious circle. “We can’t go on like this. We need to stop mass immigration and take care of these neighborhoods before racism starts to spread together with crime.”
Christian Glasnovic, himself an immigrant, runs a Rosengard youth center. “Kids here talk about going to each other’s funerals,” he said. “Integration has failed, we are segregated. We need to reconnect the state with the people, before it’s too late.”
In Rosengard, children as young as 15 are being used by gangs to transport murder weapons, including Kalashnikov assault rifles, said police inspector Mats Svensson
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