One woman's tough and tender approach to grassroots conservative principles in an era of unreasonable logic from those who claim progressive strategies but fail to heed how those same strategies have failed miserably throughout history.
"Be wise as serpents ... harmless as doves."
How Progressive Politics Have Devastated Cities and States - Discover the Networks
This section of Discover The Networks examines a number of different cities and states that have had long-term Democratic rule and today are plagued by high rates of crime, poverty, unemployment, and school failure as well as oppressive taxes. Notably, blacks and Hispanics in these places suffer disproportionately from these trends.
The unwavering inclination of so many voters in failing, Democrat-run cities to dutifully continue throwing their support behind Democrats merits serious analysis. One explanation lies in the so-called “Curley Effect,” identified in a famous 2002 article in the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization by Harvard scholars Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer. Its name derives from its prototype, James Michael Curley, who served four (non-consecutive) terms as mayor of Boston between 1914 and 1950.
This phenomenon, the authors explain, is the strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.” Forbes magazine puts it this way: “A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth. Counterintuitively, making a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.”
The Curley Effect typically occurs when Democratic political leaders adopt policies that redistribute wealth from the prosperous to the poor, causing the latter to become economically dependent upon their political patrons, and thus to become a permanently pro-Democrat voting bloc. At the same time, these redistributive policies cause the people harmed by them (i.e., those from whom wealth is extracted) to emigrate to other cities, states, and even countries, thereby further solidifying the political power of Curleyist practitioners.
For further details on the Curley Effect, click here.
The surge in family apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2016 is driven by migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, who together make up 90 percent of these apprehensions so far this fiscal year. The number of family apprehensions from these Central American countries more than doubled in the first six months of fiscal 2016 over the same time period in 2015 and spiked further in August.
Illegal border crossings by Central American children and families are surging again, approaching the record levels set in the summer of 2014, according to the latest data released for August. And border watchdogs say it’s all about Donald Trump and the upcoming election.
If the surge continues into September, fiscal 2016 will end on par with 2014, when President Obama was forced to address what was widely referred to as a “humanitarian crisis.”
That’s nearly 6,000 more than in August 2014 and brings the total to 369,411 with one month still to go in the current fiscal year.
Customs and Border Patrol processed a record 479,000 illegal crossers in 2014, but 2015 saw the number drop to 331,000 as Obama’s DHS claimed it had implemented some upgraded enforcement measures having to do with “priorities.”
Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection
“These priorities more sharply focus our limited enforcement resources on public safety and border security,” the DHS claims in a statement on its website.
Now with the huge spike in illegal crossings this summer, the final tally for fiscal 2016 is expected to reach 400,000, exposing Obama’s upgraded measures as a fraud, according to border hawks.
A border patrol agent from the El Centro sector in California who asked not to be identified told WND he believes the numbers are up because of the pending presidential election. The fact that Republican Donald Trump continues to close the gap with Democrat Hillary Clinton, actually pulling ahead of her in some polls, is a huge factor driving the surge, he said.
“This is just speculation on my part, but I’m sure we’re getting a rush before the election, because if Trump wins they’re going to put an end to this [catch-and-release] policy,” the agent told WND.
He said the majority of border agents are hoping for a Trump win. Their union, the National Border Patrol Council, has endorsed Trump.
“I’m not saying he’s going to stick exactly to his positions because I don’t believe that for any politician. But I do feel he’ll make a change for the better,” the agent said.
George Soros’ involvement in historic migrations
William Gheen, president and founder of Americans for Legal Immigration, or ALIPAC, agrees with the agent’s assessment on the main reason for the surge. He says there are “big money interests” fueling the surge, with the likes of billionaire George Soros greasing the skids.
“The greatest wave of illegal immigration in America’s history is now inbound. We’ve been warning our supporters about this since January because Obama has sent the green light around the world that America’s border defenses have been compromised by his office,” Gheen said. “And word of that has reached every corner of the earth, where it is estimated some 1 billion people could come to the U.S. if we continue to allow them to do so.”
Gheen said the illegals are “being told to come” by a network of pro-immigrant advocacy groups funded by Soros and other wealthy progressives.
“They’re being told to come by Soros-backed groups and politicians,” he said.
And he’s not alone in that belief.
George Soros
Caroline Glick, deputy managing editor for the Jerusalem Post, wrote an op-ed recently that also zeroed in on Soros as the main culprit in funding the surge of migrants not only into the U.S. but also Europe.
“On the surface, the vast number of groups and people he supports seem unrelated. After all, what does climate change have to do with illegal African immigration to Israel? What does Occupy Wall Street have to do with Greek immigration policies? But the fact is that Soros-backed projects share basic common attributes,” Glick wrote.
“They all work to weaken the ability of national and local authorities in Western democracies to uphold the laws and values of their nations and communities.
“They all work to hinder free markets, whether those markets are financial, ideological, political or scientific,” she continued. “They do so in the name of democracy, human rights, economic, racial and sexual justice and other lofty terms.”
In other words, adds Glick, “their goal is to subvert Western democracies and make it impossible for governments to maintain order or for societies to retain their unique identities and values.”
Late last year, Soros admitted his involvement in the European migrant crisis when he responded to Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s accusation that he was encouraging the historic migration out of the Middle East into Europe. Soros said “national borders are the obstacle.”
Soros funds pro-immigration groups on the one hand while on the other hand financing Democrat-sponsored get-out-the-vote projects, as documented by Discover the Networks.
Just two of these groups are:
America Coming Together: Soros played a major role in creating this group, whose purpose was to coordinate and organize pro-Democrat voter-mobilization programs.
America Votes: Soros played a major role in creating this group, whose get-out-the-vote campaigns targeted likely Democratic Party voters.
Gheen believes Democrats are illegally registering large numbers of immigrants – legal and illegal – to vote even though they’re not eligible because they don’t have full U.S. citizenship. He said the safeguards against this type of fraudulent practice are virtually nonexistent in most states.
“They’re getting them here to vote. No one is checking to make sure they are citizens when they register these immigrants,” Gheen said.
When he brought up this point on Fox News in 2010, Gheen said he was never invited back on the network.
“I was banned from Fox News after that,” he told WND.
Although it’s a felony for non-citizens to register to vote, no one is checking to make sure migrants aren’t being encouraged to lie and check the little box designating themselves as citizens, he said.
“So the Democrats are registering folks who aren’t eligible to be registered,” he alleges. “There’s a little question on the registration form asking, ‘Are you a U.S. citizen?’ If you check yes, no one checks that. There’s no significant verification process in any form or fashion. In areas that are big illegal alien areas, it’s been going on for at least six years.”
Gheen said his organization filed a formal complaint about illegal voter registration in Clark County, Nevada, after the 2010 election that saw Harry Reed narrowly re-elected. He got no response.
“I’ve been involved in past races monitoring on the ground, and we know that one of America’s biggest secrets is illegals are already voting in large numbers west of the Mississippi,” he said. “Democratic machine votes could be enough to tilt this election.”
The El Centro border agent told WND another reason for the surge at the border is that his sector and others have been losing agents through attrition faster than the government can replace them. He blames poor morale for the loss of agents.
“I can’t say for Texas, but over here in El Centro sector, in my sector, we’ve lost quite a few agents, partly because our union negotiated a bad deal for pay. Our pay has actually gone down. I’m gonna chalk it up to poor management coupled with lower pay, and the politics of it all, the catch and release, is gonna create a bad moral situation,” he told WND. “A lot of agents have gone to Customs or a completely different agency like DEA or ATF, or some of them have just completely gotten out of the federal government.”
He said some border stations like Calexico, California, are down by 100 agents or more.
“Calexico used to be well over 400 agents, and now they’re down to the low 300s,” he said.
“This has been going on as long as I’ve been here,” he added. “They say, ‘Oh we’ve got 19,000 border agents,’ but how many are in non-enforcement positions?
“Back-filling those lost through attrition is not keeping up. We’re not hiring enough to replace those who are leaving.”
The Obama administration’s Commission on Civil Rights has released a terrifying report that lays the groundwork for legal persecution of Christians in America.
The report, entitled “Peaceful Coexistence: Reconciling Nondiscrimination Principles with Civil Liberties,” asserts that religious liberty and the free exercise of religion are in truth merely an excuse for bigots and racists to get away with discrimination.
“There’s a fairly significant effort to suppress or subordinate religious practices and religious beliefs in service of a broader agenda.”
“The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ … remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance,” Martin Castro, chairman of the commission, said in a statement included in the report.
“Today, as in the past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality … This generation of Americans must stand up and speak out to ensure that religion never again be twisted to deny others the full promise of America,” Castro said.
However, the ones twisting anything in order to deny others the full promise of America are Castro and his leftist cronies on the commission who would subvert the First Amendment in pursuit of their ideological agenda.
“The secular … side believes that the nondiscrimination principles should take precedence over religious liberty principles,” said Peter Kirsanow, a member of the commission and a dissenting voice in its conclusions.
Ironically, it was Kirsanow who first requested the commission address the issue. “I sought to see if a balance could be struck between the two principles and whether they could peacefully coexist,” Kirsanow said. “Unfortunately it’s pretty clear at least one side doesn’t think that they can,” he added.
The commission’s report risks providing pretense for stripping Americans of their right to freely exercise their religion. “This report will be used to inform government at every level … as to how to approach any kind of issues related to religious liberty and nondiscrimination,” Kirsanow said.
“If there’s a tension between the two [and] if the various governmental entities follow the commission they will subordinate religious liberty,” he said.
“Statutes are subordinate to the Constitution,” said Kirsanow. “Nonetheless, if you look at the majority’s approach, they would sublimate constitutional principles to statutory principles of nondiscrimination.”
As Kirsanow noted, “It’s already happening.” In the last few decades, the country supposedly founded on the principle of freedom of religion has seen strong efforts from both federal and local governments to suppress freedom of religion. Indeed, a quick Google search produces volumes of examples in which religious freedom in America has been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.
In 2011, Catholic Charities of Illinois closed down rather than place foster children with single people or homosexual couples, as the state had ordered it to do. In 2014, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges threatened to rescind the accreditation of the evangelical Christian Gordon College for its policies on homosexuality and co-ed living.
In 2015, a Mississippi High School marching band was forbidden on threat of fine to perform a halftime show that featured a Christian hymn. This is of course to say nothing of the numerous Christians whose work revolves around the wedding industry — photographers, bakers, event venue managers — who have been fined or hauled in front of a judge for refusing to violate their deeply held religious beliefs.
"It's already happening, but this gives greater impetus and more fodder to those who would make religious freedom secondary to principles of nondiscrimination," Kirsanow warned.
"The slippery slope has turned into a cliff. You take the logical outcome of these things. We've seen the future already and it's coming very rapidly. There's a fairly significant effort to suppress or subordinate religious practices and religious beliefs in service of a broader agenda."
We did the sexual revolution once before. It didn’t go well.
Eric Metaxas
Sept. 14, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) - How often have you heard sexual progressives claim that those of us who hold to traditional sexual morality and marriage are “on the wrong side of history?”
But as one new book points out, it’s the proponents of the sexual revolution who are embracing a sexual morality that history left behind millennia ago—in the dusty ruins of the Roman Forum.
Yes, today Western civilization is undergoing a dramatic cultural shift. In just a few short years our society has fundamentally altered the meaning of marriage, embraced the notion that men can become women, and is now promoting the idea that grown men should be welcome to share a bathroom with women and young girls. Not unexpectedly, we’re also seeing movement toward the normalization of polygamy, pedophilia, and incest.
It’s precisely in times like this that we need some historical perspective. Which is why Lutheran pastor Matthew Rueger’s new book, “Sexual Morality in a Christless World,” is a timely godsend. In it, Rueger shows how Christian sexual morality rocked the pagan world of ancient Rome. The notions of self-giving love, sexual chastity, and marital fidelity were foreign, even shocking to the people of that time.
Citing existing scholarship, Rueger details the Roman sexual worldview that prevailed for hundreds of years. Women and children were viewed as sexual objects; slaves—male and female--could expect to be raped; there was widespread prostitution; and predatory homosexuality was common. Christian sexual morality might have been seen as repressive by the licentious, but it was a gift from God for their victims.
Rueger writes that “Claims in our day of being progressive and moving forward by accepting the ‘new prevailing views on sexuality and same-sex marriage' are horribly misinformed … Contemporary views about sexuality are simply a revival of an older and much less loving view of the world.”
But they are also a revival of an older and impoverished view of human beings. Imagine the reaction of a pagan Roman slave girl who learned for the first time that she had value—not monetary value as a piece of goods to be enjoyed or discarded by her owner—but eternal value because she was made in the very image of God.
Or imagine the pang of conscience felt by an unfaithful Roman husband when he learned that God became incarnate, and took on human flesh, and that how he treated his own body and the bodies of others mattered to God. Mattered immensely.
Folks, we can’t look away and ignore this unholy revival of pagan sexuality and its cheapened view of human beings. But we also can’t wring our hands in fear or throw them up in defeat. As Rueger points out, Christ and His Church radically transformed a far more sexually cruel and chaotic world than ours.
Look to those ancient believers who went before us: Rather than succumbing to or accommodating the spirit of the age, new converts in the early Church came to understand, as Rueger writes, that “Christian morality is based on Christ’s all-encompassing purity and self-emptying love…Christians could no longer live as the Greeks or Romans. Their worldview and self-view was distinctly different. They were now one with Christ in heart and soul.”
Now, their distinctiveness, as Rueger writes, “would not spare them from suffering; it would invitesuffering.” It’s pretty clear now that the same holds true for us. Will we bend the knee to this revived pagan sexuality, or will we hold out to a needy world the freedom of God’s plan for human sexuality?
"Why is is a bad idea to lift combat restrictions on women and subject them to the draft? Listen to Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, along with other Military experts at the Values Voter Summit last weekend."
No safe spaces for conservative students at Columbia University
It’s not easy being a conservative student at Columbia University. In fact, it’s downright hostile, if interviews from a student and recent alum of the Ivy League school are any indication.
Brian Min, a Columbia sophomore who describes himself as fiscally conservative and socially mixed, told The College Fix he fears he will be “physically assaulted” if he wears conservative clothing or voices conservative opinions on campus.
Min already said he feels he lost his gig as a writer for the Columbia Spectator last semester because of his political views. In March, he wrote a column on the terrorist attacks that happened in Brussels. He argued for the condemnation of Islamophobia, but when his peers interpreted his argument as “blaming Belgium for the Brussels attacks,” Min said it was strongly suggested he stop writing.
Today, as a political science major, a field in which he is often asked to give his opinions in homework assignments, Min said he is concerned his grades will be marked down for voicing conservative principles.
He fears “even citing statistics” in papers he writes if the statistics he references do not mesh with the opinions of his liberal professors, he told The Fix.
“Living in an echo chamber is horrible for the development of ideas and freedom of expression,” Min said. “I think the treatment of conservatives on campus is not fair because they do not get the same amount of media coverage as liberals and leftists on campus. They also are not equally respected—both students and speakers.”
While there are many conservatives on campus, most are essentially forced to stay in hiding due to fear. Several conservative Columbia students declined to be interviewed by The College Fix for this article, citing fear of retaliation by peers.
In effect at Columbia the vast majority of public voices are liberal.
Min said his friends have faced similar pressure.
One friend, after outed as a Donald Trump supporter, was ostracized by his floormates, some of whom ignored him and even refused to be in the same room with him, Min said.
Underscoring Min’s experiences, Benjamin Sweetwood, a recent graduate from Columbia College, told The College Fix as a student he was frequently mocked, laughed at, and harassed in class for defending conservative principles.
“In one of my classes, a girl jokingly threatened to ‘stab’ me, which elicited my light hearted response, ‘violence against men is not funny,’” Sweetwood recalled. “Another classmate was then divinely inspired to produce that ever so great intellectual retort, ‘You’re a white male,’ and another added, ‘a white cisgender male.’”
Another time, Sweetwood said as he hung flyers for a pro-Israel event, students followed him around and tore them down.
“Conservatives face intolerance everyday,” he told The College Fix. “Liberals have given themselves moral exception to do whatever they want to conservatives, because the assumption is that conservatism itself is evil, [thus] it’s okay to bully and silence it’s adherents.”
In a column published last month by The Tab, Sweetwood also detailed his experiences as a conservative at Columbia.
“Over the past year, hardly a day went by without some professor or TA cracking a joke in or out of class about the stupidity of Trump and his supporters,” he wrote. “An explanation or justification for such belittling of Trump’s supporters, was of course, always lacking. Some of the ‘smartest’ people at Columbia engaged in such behavior, and refused to even acknowledge that there could be someone on campus of a different mindset. When I did reveal for who I’ll vote for come November to teachers or fellow students, their shocked and triggered faces contorted into shapes.”
He also claimed that, as a freshman years ago, he was “pushed out” of the Columbia College Republicans because he wanted the group to more brazenly battle liberals on campus, and CR leaders didn’t want to make waves on campus.
Columbia’s not the only school in New York City at which conservatives face attacks or feel silenced.
As the New York Post has detailed, at NYU, Trump supporters feel the same way, resorting to clandestine meetings and using masks to shield their identities in photographs.
“Supporters generally try to keep it hidden from the rest of the student body,” said junior Dylan Perera, 22, an NYU student interviewed by the New York Post. “They’re afraid of losing friends, being ridiculed in class, getting worse grades and are even afraid of being assaulted and physically hurt.”
It’s not clear that Donald Trump understands the relationship between the president and the military
The national security forum with Clinton and Trump, in 3 minutes
Play Video3:00
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump answer questions on national security and foreign policy on NBC News. (Video: NBC News/Photos: Melina Mara/Post, Mike Segar/Reuters)
There was a very weird thread worth picking out of Donald Trump’s comments during NBC’s “Commander-in-Chief Forum” on Wednesday night. Over the course of a brief back-and-forth with moderator Matt Lauer, Trump shrugged at a past comment that he knew more about the Islamic State than America’s generals, disparaged those generals by saying they'd been “reduced to rubble,” suggested that his plan to defeat the Islamic State — long something he said was a secret — would instead be formulated with help from top generals and, ultimately, casually indicated that he might just fire most of the generals anyway.
Of the many ways in which Trump contradicted himself or betrayed a misunderstanding of how things work, this rapid evolution was hardly the most egregious example. There was, for example, his return to the idea that America should have purloined Iraq’s oil after ousting Saddam Hussein. He once suggested this should have happened to provide revenue to wounded soldiers; he now argues it would have blocked the rise of the Islamic State (or ISIS, as he calls the group).
“If we would have taken the oil, you wouldn’t have ISIS, because ISIS formed with the power and the wealth of that oil,” Trump told Lauer. How would we take it? “Just we would leave a certain group behind and you would take various sections where they have the oil,” he replied. One might wonder if we couldn’t just, you know, guard the oil on behalf of the Iraqis to curtail the Islamic State, if we’re putting people around the oil anyway? Well: “It used to be to the victor belong the spoils,” Trump said. But lest you think that implies that we — meaning advocates of the conflict such as Hillary Clinton — were somehow victorious in Iraq, we weren’t. “Now, there was no victor there, believe me. There was no victor," Trump said. “But I always said: Take the oil.” So it’s not “to the victor belong the spoils,” then, but “take the spoils of a sovereign nation for reasons that may vary over time.”
But, again: Let’s set that aside. Let’s focus on the generals.
The way the promotional structure of the United States military works is not complicated. Generals are not selected by being hired from the private sector thanks to their thorough LinkedIn profiles. Instead, they slowly rise through the ranks. Here is an interesting thread outlining what it takes to be promoted to general in various branches of the armed forces. The short version is that it’s the culmination of a flawless decades-long career within one branch that rides heavily on personal and professional chance. The long version is longer than that.
Trump offered his views on America’s top generals to Lauer over the course of a few questions.
“ ‘I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me,’ ” Lauer quoted Trump as saying, then asked: “Was that the truth?”
“Well, the generals under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have not been successful,” Trump replied. “I think under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble. They have been reduced to a point where it’s embarrassing for our country.”
“Have you lost faith in the military commanders?” Lauer pressed a bit later.
“I have great faith in the military. I have great faith in certain of the commanders, certainly,” he said. “But I have no faith in Hillary Clinton or the leadership.”
An audience member asked Trump for details on his promise to rapidly defeat the Islamic State. This is where Trump started talking about the oil, so Lauer brought it back to the terrorist group. “You very often say, I’m not going to give you the details because I want to be unpredictable,” he said. “But yesterday, you actually told us a little bit about your plan in your speech. You said this. Quote: ‘We're going to convene my top generals and they will have 30 days to submit a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS.’ So is the plan you’ve been hiding this whole time asking someone else for their plan?”
“No,” he replied. “But when I do come up with a plan that I like and that perhaps agrees with mine, or maybe doesn’t — I may love what the generals come back with.”
“If I win, I don’t want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is,” Trump added. “And let me tell you, if I like maybe a combination of my plan and the generals’ plan, or the generals’ plan, if I like their plan, Matt, I’m not going to call you up and say, ‘Matt, we have a great plan.’ ”
“But you’re going to convene a panel of generals, and you’ve already said you know more about ISIS than those generals do,” Lauer rebutted.
“Well, they’ll probably be different generals, to be honest with you,” Trump replied, then boasting of having the endorsement of 88 former military leaders. (As Lauer noted, that’s a number that is a bit lower than what Clinton claims.)
Trump offered that line about “different generals” casually, but it’s not an insignificant claim. As president, Trump’s ability to overhaul the leaders of the military is limited. As commander in chief, he can remove generals from positions but he “doesn’t enjoy Donald Trump-like powers to summarily fire service members,” as Brian Palmer explained for Slate back in 2010 (clearly when “The Apprentice” was still on the air). When President Obama relieved Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal of his command in 2010 after McChrystal gave some ill-advised comments to a reporter, McChrystal retained his rank as a four-star general, until he decided to retire. Trump could seek the counsel of other members of the military’s leadership, but he can’t simply clean house or bring in people from the outside.
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It’s not clear that Trump recognizes such nuances, though. He has in the past seen the line between the military and the commander in chief as blurrier than it is in reality. During a debate in March, Trump was asked by Fox News’s Bret Baier what he would do if the military refused to carry out his orders to commit acts of torture or target civilians.
“They won’t refuse,” Trump replied. “They’re not going to refuse me. Believe me.”
Buried in all of this are competing instincts: Trump’s lack of interest in being wrong and his great interest in being the boss. He threatens to oust top leaders of the military for little other reason than they were in positions of authority under Obama. While his prepared comments from Tuesday suggested that he would seek the counsel of service members who’d committed decades to protecting America’s interests, he tossed that to the side in favor of not being embarrassed by Matt Lauer, insisting that he still did have his own secret plan. Probably one that involves oil.
Bear in mind, the president’s role as commander in chief was the primary focus of the town hall. It’s what Trump was there to talk about. And, for good or bad, he talked about it.
Update: A retired major general from the Army Reserve emailed to note that “generals” is a broad group that includes one- and two-star generals — positions attained by promotion — and three- and four-star generals, who receive appointments.
