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Democrats hate walls. Yet, for the almost three years Trump has been president , Democrats
have been walling off money so America's southern border has remained porous resulting in a crisis, which Democrats deny has occurred as illegal immigrants flood our nation.
And
How to melt ICE:
There are many differences between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives believe there are consequences whereas, liberals believe all lunches are free. Conservatives believe you learn from experiences and accept the fact that failing is one of them. Liberals believe affirmative action spares you pain, rights wrongs and suffering is unnecessary. You get the drift? (See 1 and 1a below.)
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I have never met Malkin but hope to do so one day. I believe she is the white female equivalent of Candice Owen. She is a rational conservative, level headed and courageous. (See 2 below.)
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Game changer conference? (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Freedom From Consequences Isn't Freedom
By Ben Shapiro
On Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., desperate to revive his flagging campaign, proposed a far-reaching plan to wipe out all student debt. That plan falls hard on plans by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., his chief far-left rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, to make college "free" moving forward. Sanders' justification for allocating over $1 trillion of taxpayer money to relieving relatively more well-off people from debt freely incurred: True freedom means living free of consequences. Sanders tweeted: "Are you truly free if you graduate hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt? Are you free if you cannot pursue your dream because you don't make enough to cover your student loan payments? We will #CancelStudentDebt because there is no freedom without economic freedom."
This is an Orwellian redefinition of the term "freedom."
Freedom has traditionally meant the ability to make your own decisions -- and to live with the consequences of those decisions. I am free to buy a Lamborghini on credit, if Visa will extend me that credit; I am not deprived of freedom when Visa comes calling with a bill. Economic freedom amounts to the ability to make non-compelled decisions in the economic sphere. Sanders' economic plans offer precisely the reverse.
But Sanders' rhetoric here is merely the latest in a long line of such redefinitions from the American left. Franklin Delano Roosevelt suggested that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence" -- and proceeded to make more Americans dependent on government than ever before in American history. He declared "freedom from want" in January 1941, in the midst of a second Great Depression of his making -- the prior year, the unemployment rate in the United States was 14.45 percent. The mere declaration, as it turned out, did not end want. And the redefinition of freedom as government-sponsored dependency did not end in prosperity or freedom.
Nonetheless, the suggestion that freedom lies in prosperity -- not that freedom is the precondition for prosperity -- still retains draw. That's mainly because the human heart will always embrace the notion that our shortcomings spring not from choice but from circumstance. Sometimes that's true. But in a free country, it's far more often untrue. Still, that notion relieves us of responsibility while making demands of others. After all, if freedom lies in lack of college debt, then those who demand that you pay your debts are curbing your freedom.
In reality, here's what the #CancelStudentDebt plan would do: continue to drive up the cost of college tuition, with the taxpayer footing that cost. That's precisely what has happened in the past few decades as the feds have involved themselves in the supposedly vital task of ensuring that everyone goes to college. Never mind that many people don't need to go to college -- that coming out of college without a skill set but with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt is a bad bargain. College for all became the mantra; the government stepped into the breach; costs rose. Now government once more steps into the breach.
Canceling student debt may mean a more carefree life for those who voluntarily took on debt, but it means a more burdensome life for those who have paid off their debts, who didn't go to college or who haven't yet been born. And carefree doesn't mean free. It simply means that someone else may be taking responsibility for your decisions. My children are carefree; they're certainly not free.
Going to college is often seen as an important step toward adulthood. Responsible financial decision-making is a far more important step. Disconnecting the two just continues the infantilizing of American adults. But that's all part of Sanders' agenda, isn't it?
Ben Shapiro, 35, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of "The Ben Shapiro Show" and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller "The Right Side Of History." He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles.
1a)Reparations for Slavery
By Walter Williams
Slavery was a gross violation of human rights. Justice demands that all participants in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade make compensatory reparation payments to slaves. However, there is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. That means compensation would have to be paid by Africans and Arabs who captured and sold slaves to Europeans in addition to the people who bought and used slaves. Since slaves and slave traders and owners are no longer with us, compensation is beyond our reach and it's a matter that will have to be settled in hell or heaven.
Let's pretend for a moment that the reparations issue makes a modicum of sense. There's the question of responsibility. More explicitly, should we compensate a black person of today by punishing a white person of today, by taking his money, for what a white person of yesteryear did to a black person of yesteryear? If we believe in individual accountability, we should find that doing so is unjust. In other words, are the tens millions of Europeans, Asian, and Latin Americans who immigrated to the United States in the late 19th and 20th centuries responsible for slavery, and should they be forced to cough up reparations? What about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing slaves? Should they pay reparations to black Americans? What about non-slave-owning Southern whites -- who were a majority of Southern whites -- should their descendants be made to pay reparations?
Reparations advocates make the unchallenged pronouncement that the United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That's utter nonsense. While some slave owners became rich, slavery doesn't have a good record of producing wealth. Slavery existed in the southern states and outlawed in most of the northern states. Buying into the reparations argument suggests that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. And the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts.
The reparations movement would be an amusing sideshow were it not for its damaging distractions. It grossly misallocates resources that could be better spent elsewhere. According to the state Department of Education, 75% of black California boys cannot meet state reading standards. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore's 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state's mathematics exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. The same story of low education outcomes can be told about most cities with large black populations. I'd like to see lawyers bring class-action suits against public school systems in cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit, and Los Angeles for conferring fraudulent high school diplomas. Such diplomas attest a 12th-grade level of academic achievement when in fact those youngsters often cannot perform at sixth- or seventh-grade levels.
The nation's most dangerous big cities are Detroit, Oakland, St. Louis, Memphis, Stockton, Birmingham, Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta, Chicago, and Milwaukee. The common characteristic of most of these cities is that they have predominantly black populations and blacks have considerable political power as mayors, city councilmen and chiefs of police. Energy spent on reparations should be used to solve those problems.
As of 2014, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that's three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution. If money alone were the answer, the many issues facing a large segment of the black community would have been solved.
There's another possible reparations issue completely ignored: Blacks as well as whites live on land that was taken, sometimes brutally, from American Indians. Do blacks and whites owe American Indians anything?
Walter E. Williams's Latest Book American Contempt for Liberty is available on Amazon
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2)
Fun fact: I've been crocheting since I was 10, when my Tita Lisa taught me the magic of granny squares. Fellow yarn nerds will understand the heavenly bliss of spending hours at Hobby Lobby or Walmart immersed in a sea of alpaca, mohair, angora, super bulky and super saver skeins for blankets, baby clothes, hats, headbands, scarves, bookmarks and potholders. (Yes, I've made them all!) I passed on the tradition to my artsy teenage daughter; teaming up on a Christmas afghan for my dad last year was one of my favorite ever projects.
Are you surprised? You shouldn't be. Creativity and crafting transcend political ideology -- or so you might think.
This week, Ravelry.com, one of the internet's most popular gathering sites for crocheters and with a reported 8.5 million users, publicly smeared and ejected conservative members who support President Donald Trump -- all in the name of protecting their preciously "inclusive" safe space. Excluding to include. Welcome to opposite world. On Sunday (there's no rest for vengeful social justice warriors), Ravelry's founders announced:
"We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry. This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content."
The progressive operators at Ravelry declared that every right-winger on the fiber arts forum who supports our commander in chief is really just a KKK domestic terrorist wielding sharp needles instead of flaming crosses and nooses. It doesn't matter whether you support the White House because you are pro-borders, pro-life, pro-entrepreneur, pro-limited government, anti-collectivist or anti-socialist.
"We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy," Ravelry management declared.
In case you weren't clear on Ravelry equating all Trump support with virulent racism, the defamers decried: "Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy."
So watch out, America. Knitted MAGA beanies are the new MAGA baseball caps of hate. "TRUMP 2020" tea cosies are the new white hoods. Red, white and blue twisted cable ear warmers are subversive tools of racist oppression.
But here's the thing I know from being in contact with conservative knitters and crocheters over the past decade: Ravelry's ideological bigotry is not just about Trump. They simply cannot countenance anyone in their community who disagrees with them on any political matter. During the 2008 presidential election season and into 2009, I heard from Republican hobbyists whose lively discussion boards were shutdown on Ravelry.
Janna S. wrote to warn that "while this may not be making waves in the headlines, there is an upswing in conservative censorship that has hit cyberspace." A group on Ravelry called "The Bunker," which had more than 200 members who discussed GOP politics and knitting patterns, was singled out and shut down after liberal, pro-Obama members complained about its presence. Ravelry accused the conservative crafters of a "culture of anger and "us versus them" stance.
One of the Bunker's active members, Melissa, reported to me that Ravelry co-founder Casey Forbes had replied to right-leaning users asking how peacefully expressing their opinions violated their terms of service by "making excuses for the fact that he just doesn't like conservative people on his website. ... Many of our members are mothers or grandmothers and are completely harmless. We've all been discriminated against because we think and believe differently."
Meanwhile, rabid leftists who promoted misogynist sweaters slamming Sarah Palin as "c---y" went unpunished. A forum titled "What Would You Do To Sarah Palin" inviting liberal members to post physical threats was allowed to thrive. "The problem here is not that the site owners decided that they didn't want an active, vocal conservative group on their site. That is certainly their right as site owners," Melissa noted. "The issue is the double standard and the denigration of the reputations of all members of The Bunker and the injury and/or destruction of some members' businesses. The far-left is not only tolerated on Ravelry, they are nurtured and encouraged. Their bad behavior goes unchallenged."
This was more than 10 years ago, mind you, long before the latest wave of suppression, shadow-banning, algorithm-rigging, de-platformings, and defamation of right-minded people by Twitter, Facebook and Google/YouTube.
The speech-squelching imperative of the far left is a thread that traces back to the 1960s, when radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse popularized the "repressive tolerance" theory of modern progressives. "Liberating tolerance would mean intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left," Marcuse taught. "Certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed."
In advance of the 2020 election, no space in the internet square is safe from "inclusive" exclusion. Silicon Valley's overlords, like Ravelry's petty tyrants, have no interest in promoting diversity, discussion and community. They are bent on decimating debate and dissent while wrapped in thick, woolly blankets of hypocrisy and sanctimony.
Michelle Malkin's email address is writemalkin@gmail.com.
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3) Bahrain FM to Times of Israel: Israel is here to stay, and we want peace with it
Khalid bin Ahmed al Khalifa says Manama conference could be ‘gamechanger’ like Israel-Egypt Camp David Accords; urges Israeli leaders to ‘talk to us’ about Arab Peace Initiative
MANAMA, Bahrain — Bahrain sees the US-led economic workshop taking place in Manama this week as a possible “gamechanger” tantamount in its scope to the 1978 Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, the Gulf state’s foreign minister said Wednesday, also firmly backing Israel’s right to exist.
“We see it as very, very important,” Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa told The Times of Israel on the sidelines of the “Peace to Prosperity” workshop.
Khalifa also stressed that his country recognizes Israel’s right to exist, knows that it is “there to stay,” and wants peace with it.
He said the US-organized conference here, which is focused on the economic aspects of the Trump administration’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, could be like Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977, which helped pave the way to the Camp David Accords and the normalizing of relations between Egypt and Israel.
“As much as Camp David 1 was a major gamechanger, after the visit of President Sadat — if this succeeds, and we build on it, and it attracts attention and momentum, this would be the second gamechanger,” Khalifa said.
In an interview in his suite at Manama’s posh Four Seasons hotel, Khalifa did not commit to normalizing diplomatic ties with Israel in the near future, but unequivocally affirmed Israel’s right to exist as a state with secure borders.
“Israel is a country in the region… and it’s there to stay, of course,” he said.
“Who did we offer peace to [with] the [Arab] Peace Initiative? We offered it to a state named the State of Israel, in the region. We did not offer it to some faraway island or some faraway country,” Khalifa continued, referring to a Saudi-backed peace framework.
“We offered it to Israel. So we do believe that Israel is a country to stay, and we want better relations with it, and we want peace with it.”
While Bahrain might be only Arab state, besides Egypt and Jordan, to publicly acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, “we know our brothers in the region do believe in it” as well, he said.
Khalifa pointed to the Arab Peace Initiative as the blueprint for normalizing ties with Israel. Israel’s rejection of the plan is a “missed opportunity,” he lamented, but Jerusalem can always rethink its position.
He encouraged Israelis to approach Arab leaders about any issues they may have with the proposal.
“Come and talk to us. Talk to us about it. Say, guys, you have a good initiative, but we have one thing that worries us,” he said.
Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, said this week that the White House’s proposal for Israeli-Palestinian peace will not follow the contours of the Arab Peace Initiative, but be closer to Israel’s position.
In this June 25, 2019, photo released by Bahrain News Agency, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner talks to the audience during the opening session of the “Peace to Prosperity” workshop in Manama, Bahrain. (Bahrain News Agency via AP)
Turning to Trump’s peace plan, Khalifa said he has not yet seen the political part of the US administration’s two-pronged proposal, but sounded cautiously optimistic about it.
“We have to wait. I cannot talk about something that I don’t know. But we hope that this political plan will also be attractive to everybody,” he said. “Look at the workshop. It’s very attractive. You don’t want to give an attractive offer and then come and bring something that could stall it. We want to see it continue on the same momentum. So we’ll see it.”
Asked about which elements of a possible deal Bahrain could get behind, he replied: “Whatever you can agree on with the Palestinians.”
Speaking Wednesday at the conference, US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said he would like the White House’s economic plan to be adopted by the international community.
“This is a regional economic plan. Although Gaza and the West Bank are a major focus of this plan, it also includes Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon… it is very important that we focus on these economies as a whole,” he said.
“Most importantly, we want an international consensus… We want this to become not a United States plan, we want this to become an international plan. Now that the plan is out there, we’re looking for changes, we’re looking for additions, we’re looking for buy-in, and really as a next step that this becomes a collective” plan, said Mnuchin.
Mnuchin said: “This is a plan that can very much be accomplished.”
“I know there is a lot of money in this room,” he said to the smiling audience.
Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.
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