The Mifsud Mystery

Posted on | July 25, 2019 | Comments Off on The Mifsud Mystery

Who is Joseph Mifsud? That question got a lot of attention Wednesday after Republican Rep. Jim Jordan pinned down Robert Mueller in the House Judiciary Committee hearing, asking the former Special Counsel why Mifsud wasn’t charged with lying to investigators. Mueller’s report mentions Mifsud, a former Maltese diplomat and now a London-based academic, 87 times. It was Mifsud who first told Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos later repeated this to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, who then reported it to the FBI, thus creating the pretext for opening an investigation into the Trump campaign. Misfud’s role in all this is, according to a report in The Hill by John Solomon, a key question being investigated by John Durham, appointed by Attorney General William Barr to explore the origins of the RussiaGate story.

Jordan’s questioning of Mueller in Wednesday’s hearing was brutal:

JORDAN: You gave us the answer. Page 192 of the report you tell us who told him. Joseph Mifsud. Joseph Mifsud is the guy who told Papadopoulos. The mysterious professor who lives in Rome and London. Works and teaches at two different universities. This is the guy who told Papadopoulos. He’s the guy who starts it all. And when the FBI interviews him, he lies three times and yet you don’t charge him with a crime. You charge Rick Gates for false statements. You charge Paul Manafort for false statements. You charge Michael Cohen with false statements. You charge Michael Flynn, a three star general with false statements. But the guy who puts the country through this whole saga starts it all for three years we’ve lived this now–he lies and you guys don’t charge him. And I’m curious as to why.
MUELLER: Well, I can’t get into it and — and it’s obvious, I think that we can’t get into charging decisions.
JORDAN: When the FBI interviewed him in February — FBI interviews him in February. When the special counsel’s interviews Mifsud, did he lie to you guys too?
MUELLER: Can’t get into that.
JORDAN: Did you interview Mifsud?
MUELLER: Can’t get into that.
JORDAN: Is Mifsud western intelligence or Russian intelligence?
MUELLER: Can’t get into that.
JORDAN: A lot of things you can’t get into. What’s interesting — you can charge 13 Russians no one has ever heard of, no one has ever seen, no one is ever going to hear of them, no one is every going to see them — you can charge them–you can charge all kinds of people who are around the president with false statements but the guy who launches every — the guy who puts this whole story in motion you can’t charge him. I think that’s amazing.
MUELLER: (INAUDIBLE) I’m not certain I–I agree with your characterization.
JORDAN: Well, I’m reading from your report. Mifsud told Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos tells the diplomat. The diplomat tells the FBI. The FBI opens the investigation July 31st, 2016 and here we are three years later, July of 2019. The country’s been put through this and this central figure who launches it all — lies to us and you guys don’t hunt him down and interview him again and you don’t charge him with a crime.

Here’s the big secret that Jim Jordan was driving at: Joseph Mifsud may have been working for U.S. intelligence — perhaps indirectly, on the payroll of a CIA front — and in his contact with Papadopoulos, may have been acting as an agent provocateur. In other words, the CIA may have been using Mifsud to test whether Papadopoulos was vulnerable to exploitation, and this “Russia has dirt on Hillary” business was part of the test. When Mueller says he “can’t get into that,” what he’s saying is that he’s forbidden by law from discussing “sources and methods” of U.S. intelligence, and this is a huge clue that the CIA was somehow involved in RussiaGate — a phony hoax that Hillary Clinton used during the 2016 campaign to smear Trump as Vladimir Putin’s “puppet.”

Who was calling the shots behind the scenes in 2016, when all this shadowy stuff was going on around Papadopoulos and Trump aide Carter Page? What was the role of Fusion GPS in this? As Ace of Spades remarked yesterday, it seems that dossier compiler “Christopher Steele provided cover as a front man for conspiracy theories first adduced by [Clinton supporters] Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer.” This would mean that the true origin of the RussiaGate hoax was the Clinton campaign itself, and if it is true that Russian intelligence hacked the DNC emails — well, how and why did that happen? Were the Russians doing this to help the Trump campaign? Or was there some ulterior motive?

We should soon start getting answers to some of these questions, and I don’t think the Democrats will be pleased by what we learn.

Category: MuellerGate

In The Mailbox: 07.24.19 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | July 25, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Rutger Hauer, RIP
Twitchy: Kamala Harris Comes Out Against Donald Trump Trying To Help An Imprisoned Black Man
Louder With Crowder: Google Engineer Calls Big Tech “Dangerous”, “Taking Sides”, also, “Jessica” Yaniv, You’re An Evil Predator

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Greatness: Google Engineer Says Big Tech Has Merged With Democratic Party To Sway Elections
American Power: The Mueller Disaster
American Thinker: Now Is The Summer Of The Democrats’ Discontent
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Good Idea News
Babalu Blog: Mexicans Unhappy With Violence, Turning On AMLO
BattleSwarm: Boris Johnson Elected Prime Minister
Camp of the Saints: On Immigration And #GOP Degeneracy
CDR Salamander: Professor Fleming Returns To Annapolis
Da Tech Guy: I’m Staying, also, I’m Old Enough To Remember When Conventional Wisdom Said…
Don Surber: Mueller Owes Trump $5.8 Million
Dustbury: Know Thine Audience
First Street Journal: Is The “Jessica” Yaniv Story A Hoax?
The Geller Report: Jihadi Bomber Detonates Self In Mogadishu Mayor’s Office, also, Mueller Says Democrats’ Collusion With Russia “Outside My Purview”
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Past His Sell By Date?
Hollywood In Toto: Soulfinder Hopes To Shame Comic Book Groupthink
Joe For America: Watch Rep. Jim Jordan Blast Mueller For Dodging Questions On Witch Hunt
Legal Insurrection: Sanders’ Presidential Campaign Hit With Federal Labor Complaint, also, Mueller – Russians Also Tried To Help HIllary
The PanAm Post: As Venezuelans Starve, Maduro Spends $200 MIllion To Host Sao Paulo Forum
Power Line: It’s Official – Democrats Don’t Like America, also, Mueller’s Testimony Bombed
Shark Tank: Sen. Rubio Says “Antisemitic Minority” Runs House, Not Pelosi
Shot In The Dark: Virtue-Hitchhiking
The Political Hat: Loyalty & Nationalism
This Ain’t Hell: New SecDef Confirmed, also, Phony Marine M/SGT Sentenced For Charity Scam
Victory Girls: Robert Mueller Claims He Doesn’t Know Who Glenn Simpson Is Or What Fusion GPS Is
Volokh Conspiracy: Mueller Hearings Another Summer Disappointment
Weasel Zippers: Ilhan Omar Says We Should Be More Fearful Of White Men, also, Rep. Ratcliffe Destroys Mueller & His “Exoneration” Word Games
Mark Steyn: Life, But Not As We Know It

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Category: Linkagery

Mueller Hearing a Democrat Debacle

Posted on | July 24, 2019 | 1 Comment

Whoever was responsible for the decision to hold today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing — and I suppose that must be the committee chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) — is an idiot. If the goal of Democrats in having former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testify was to gin up support for impeaching President Trump, they failed. Badly.

As the New York Post said, the hearing “was a total waste of time”:

Mueller made it clear long in advance that he didn’t want to testify, and wouldn’t talk about anything except what was in his report. He even got the Justice Department to issue a guidance instructing him to keep to his preferred limits.
That left committee Democrats using their time to read bits of the report, then ask the witness, That’s in the report, right?
Mueller would then say Yes or Let me check or Can you repeat the question?
Though he is a hugely accomplished public servant, he was a spectacularly unimpressive witness, often coming off as unfamiliar with his own report or otherwise confused.

Many observers were left with the impression that Mueller must have only been a figurehead in the two-year investigation of Russian “collusion,” and that the report issued under his name was entirely the work of the Democrat attorneys on the Special Counsel’s staff. Attempts by Republican committee members to get Mueller to address evidence related to Fusion GPS and the Steele Dossier went nowhere, as Mueller either disclaimed any knowledge of this evidence — despite it being included in his report — or asserted that he could not comment because he didn’t want to interfere with ongoing investigations.

Mueller’s befuddled demeanor seemed to confirm the suspicions of a “senior Democrat” — a former Obama administration official — that, at age 74, the former Special Counsel has become senile.

Democrats need to take a long, hard look at the man whose idea it was to stage this embarrassing spectacle. Who is Jerrold Nadler and is he competent enough to chair the Judiciary Committee?

Nadler, 72, has been in Congress since 1992 without accomplishing anything other than occupying a safe seat from a district that has not been represented by a Republican in more than 100 years. He is a short, fat, elderly symbol of the political decline of New York. The stagnating state lost two congressional districts after the 2010 Census, and the subsequent redistricting illustrated the priorities of the Democrats who control New York’s corrupt legislature. They screwed over Rep. Ed Towns, a black Democrat who had previously represented the Brooklyn-based 10th District, in a gerrymander that redrew the district to include the heavily Jewish West Side of Manhattan, which is only connected to a random blob of Brooklyn by the I-478 tunnel under the East River. Towns was forced into retirement to ensure a seat for Nadler, who had previously represented the 8th District. If the so-called “Justice Democrats” need a target for their next left-wing primary challenge, they should aim at Nadler’s old fat ass. Considering how much anti-Semitism now motivates the Left, it shouldn’t be hard for Democrats to recruit a Jew-hating “woman of color” to take out Nadler.

Category: Congress, Democrats, MuellerGate

In The Mailbox: 07.24.19 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | July 24, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.24.19 (Morning Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I really hate to say this, but things haven’t been going well for me lately. If you want to help, there’s a PayPal link in the LJ post, or if you’re averse to PayPal, my GoFundMe from last fall is still out there. Thanks in advance for any help you can spare.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Liberal Democrat From Chicago Encourages Concealed Carry
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #691
EBL: Enough About The Moon, It’s Time For Mars!
Twitchy: “Zodiac’s Body Count Grows!” Ted Cruz Just Delivered The Fatal Blow To Beta O’Rourke’s Ego
Louder With Crowder: Blaire White Calls Out “Jessica” Yaniv As A Predator, Demands Action From Trans Community

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott:
American Greatness: Nashville Residents Block ICE Agents From Taking “Tennessee Man” Into Custody
American Power: Mueller Testimony – Dueling Circus Realities
American Thinker: The Co-Conspirators In The Left’s Takeover Of The Democratic Party
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Cuban Regime Blames Gasoline Shortage On Increase In Vehicles
BattleSwarm: Tucker Carlson On Democrats & Rigged College Admissions
Camp of the Saints: The False Consciousness Of Pelosi & Her Fellow Mensheviks
CDR Salamander: South Korea Joins The Carrier Club
Da Tech Guy: The Flight From Hell, also, #Normalphobia Running Amok In The Democratic Party
Don Surber: Now Brexit Begins
Dustbury: Room & No Board
First Street Journal: Brett Kavanaugh & Al Franken
Fred On Everything: Democrats For Trump 2020
The Geller Report: Imam Brags “We Exploit Democracy To Seize Power”, also, Bernie Sanders Single-Handedly Exposes Democrats’ Minimum Wage Fraud
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, I Told You They Wouldn’t Like The New Rules
Hollywood In Toto: These Conservative Artists Defied Liberal Gatekeepers
Joe For America: Is Rashida Tlaib Mentally Stable Enough To Serve In Congress?
JustOneMinute: Mueller Time!
Legal Insurrection: Transgender “Woman” Files Complaint When Womens’ Salons Won’t Wax Her Balls, also, Fartacus’ Toxic Masculinity
Michelle Malkin: NYC’s Anti-Cop Anarchy – What Say You, Dante DeBlasio?
The PanAm Post: The Venezuelan Conundrum & European Double Standards
Power Line: Thelma & Louise Go To Israel, also, The US Commission On Civil Rights Strikes Again
Shark Tank: Trump Winning Over Hispanic Democrats In Florida
Shot In The Dark: The Brown Scare
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – France Tries To Tax American Companies, And More SALT Cap Follies
The Political Hat: Rights & Obligations Of Adulthood
This Ain’t Hell: CA City To Remove Gender Terms, also, Those Planes Were (Not) Really There
Victory Girls: Lies, Damn Lies, & Wikipedia Edits
Volokh Conspiracy: More On Liberals & Federalism
Weasel Zippers: More Details On Why ICE & CBP Detained An American Citizen For Three Weeks, also, Epstein’s Close Ties To The Democrats – It Wasn’t Just Bill Clinton
Megan McArdle: Conservatives Want To Revive A One-Time Trick From Over A Century Ago
Mark Steyn: Fly Me To The Moon, also, Speaking Ill Of The Ted

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Category: Linkagery

‘Ourselves and Our Posterity’

Posted on | July 23, 2019 | 2 Comments

The comments on my post yesterday about “oikophobia” blew up after it was linked by Vox Day — thanks! — and some of the new commenters took the conversation in directions I had not anticipated. Vox made his point simply: “The Dirt isn’t Magic. Neither is the Paper.”

Magic Dirt Theory, the ludicrous idea that geographical location has a transformative power, is a core theme of arguments by the open-borders lobby. We are expected to accept, as Vox has described it, “their idiotic theory that all immigrants will magically become Real Americans, real life nephews of their Uncle Sam, reborn on the Fourth of July by virtue of geographical relocation, thereby instantly negating of all of their racial, ethnic, religious, political, and cultural traditions.” No intelligent person actually believes this, and yet Magic Dirt Theory is one of the fundamental premises of all immigration arguments of the type that involve a solemn invocation of Emma Lazarus’s “huddled masses.”

Vox also scorns Magic Paper Theory, the idea that legal procedures are what really matter in terms of the immigration debate. Vox has criticized Sarah Hoyt for “den[ying] the existence of America as a nation of blood and soil,” and while I would certainly prefer to avoid any insult to Mrs. Hoyt, I think Vox raises a more subtle point: Conservatives who rest their arguments on the distinction between illegal immigration (bad) and those immigrants who “play by the rules” (good) are guilty of ignoring the way our immigration laws have been corrupted, beginning with the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. Leaving aside Vox’s invocation of “blood and soil” to examine immigration law as a matter of policy (as Peter Brimelow did in Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, which I recommend to anyone who wishes to understand this problem), we discover that the American people have been cruelly deceived by the political class.

Americans were given many promises by Ted Kennedy and the other advocates of that 1965 “reform,” who repeatedly and emphatically insisted that the new law would result in no significant demographic change in the country. All those promises were proven false within 20 years, so that by 1986, a Democrat-controlled Congress was able to compel President Reagan to sign a new “reform” (the Simpson-Mazzoli bill) that granted amnesty to millions, in exchange for what Americans were told would be stricter enforcement in the future.

The open-borders lobby within the Republican Party (which is nearly coterminous with the #NeverTrump crowd) has misrepresented the 1986 amnesty as something that Reagan actively promoted, rather than a measure forced upon him by Democrats in Congress. Reagan biographer Craig Shirley has debunked this revisionist mythology:

Everything that Ronald Reagan did was set against the backdrop of the Cold War. . .
It was 1986 when immigration became an issue at the forefront for the United States, when President Reagan signed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The Cold War was at its peak. He noted that the legislation was not for the sake of votes, or the sake of appeasement. It was for American security.
“Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people, American citizenship,” he said. Note also that this action was not blanket amnesty. While it offered citizenship to many illegal immigrants, it banned employers from hiring illegal immigrants — a major issue in today’s immigration debate — and set to enforce tighter immigration laws.

In 2006, Ed Meese explained the lessons learned from that amnesty:

I was attorney general . . . during the debate over what became the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. President Reagan, acting on the recommendation of a bipartisan task force, supported a comprehensive approach to the problem of illegal immigration, including adjusting the status of what was then a relatively small population. Since the Immigration and Naturalization Service was then in the Department of Justice, I had the responsibility for directing the implementation of that plan.
President Reagan set out to correct the loss of control at our borders. Border security and enforcement of immigration laws would be greatly strengthened — in particular, through sanctions against employers who hired illegal immigrants. If jobs were the attraction for illegal immigrants, then cutting off that option was crucial. . . .
The lesson from the 1986 experience is that such an amnesty did not solve the problem. There was extensive document fraud, and the number of people applying for amnesty far exceeded projections. And there was a failure of political will to enforce new laws against employers. After a brief slowdown, illegal immigration returned to high levels and continued unabated, forming the nucleus of today’s large population of illegal aliens.

Here is one of Reagan’s top lieutenants explaining that the good intentions behind the 1986 amnesty paved the road to our current hell. Many conservatives at the time argued against the 1986 amnesty, and it was their foreboding of doom — rather than the sanguine optimism of Reagan — which was ratified by actual events. One need not insult Sarah Hoyt for her pride in becoming a naturalized citizen to say that the value of American citizenship has been diminished by legislation and administrative policy (i.e., DACA) that amount to a refusal to defend our nation against foreign invasion. By a species of political fraud, Americans have been denied the ability to decide who is allowed to share “the blessings of liberty” that our forefathers sought to secure for us, and in enacting various swindles in the name of immigration “reform,” we see that our decadent elite have acted without “the consent of the governed.”

It is a consciousness of such betrayal that inspires the pessimism about America’s future we see in poll numbers about whether the country is heading in the “right direction” or is on “the wrong track.” In November 2016, just days before Trump was elected, an Ipsos/Reuters poll found that nearly two-thirds (64%) of Americans answered “wrong track” — more than twice as many as the 25% who said “right direction.” If our government cannot be trusted to “preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people, American citizenship,” to quote Reagan, then what is likely to become of “the blessings of liberty”?

We need not impugn the good intentions that led Reagan to sign the 1986 amnesty bill in order to say that the consequences were disastrous, nor do I think that Sarah Hoyt meant to justify bad policy by celebrating her acquisition of American citizenship. Her story of emigrating from Portugal — settling, of all places, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where the locals frequently mistook her for a Mexican — was a cheerfully humorous first-person narrative, surely not intended as a policy argument. Still, I think Vox Day’s larger point, that Magic Paper is no more a panacea than Magic Dirt, is essentially right. Under current law, the United States continues admitting as permanent residents many millions of people who don’t seem very likely to become “real life nephews of their Uncle Sam.”

Anyone who points out the fallacies of liberal mythology will predictably be smeared as a “racist,” and after being endlessly assailed with this insult, some conservatives will just shrug and go headlong over the cliff: “Fine. Whatever. I’m a racist. Who cares?” We can resist this temptation to auto-defenestration, however, by asking a simple question: “What is ‘racism’?” What does this word actually mean to those who use it as a weapon to disqualify anyone who disagrees with them?

Asking such questions will not, of course, protect you from the “racist” label — your liberal accuser doesn’t care what the word actually means, and can probably offer no evidence in support of his accusation, except that you’re not a liberal — but questioning the definition helps clarify the nature of your adversary’s animosity toward you. Whether you are more “racist” than anyone else (including your liberal accuser) is ultimately irrelevant to purpose of such accusations. A liberal doesn’t have to know anything about you personally, in terms of your life experiences and your interactions with people of different ethnic groups, to call you a “racist.” This is merely an insult, an assertion of your moral inferiority in an attempt to silence or discredit you by impugning your character.

By making the accusation of “racism” so promiscuously, and often in absurd ways contradicted by fact, the Left has devalued the word by stripping it of any useful meaning. Ralph Northam can wear blackface and not be discredited, because he’s a Democrat, while any Republican who criticizes a radical kook like Ilhan Omar is denounced as a “racist.”

This is not our fault. The ordinary American, without any special influence among the political elite, cannot be blamed for the results of policies that he never ratified, to which his consent was never really solicited. The division of our nation, with finger-pointing accusations of “racism” being hurled around in a war of words occasioned by the consequences of our failed immigration policy, cannot be blamed on the majority of American citizens who oppose these policies (or who would oppose them, if the issue were ever presented clearly to them in a factual manner). Perhaps even a majority of Democrats are unhappy to see a dangerous idiot like Ilhan Omar representing their party in Congress, which might prompt them to begin investigating how this Jew-hating radical became an American citizen in the first place.

While we are examining the meaning of words, perhaps Democrats (and also David French, but I repeat myself) need to research the etymology of patriotism. They will discover that it originates with a Greek word referring to the land of one’s ancestors (patris, “fatherland”). However uncomfortable you might feel about Vox Day’s use of the phrase “blood and soil” in connection to the debates over immigration, nevertheless we ought to consider how this ancient sense of patriotism — a willingness to defend one’s ancestral homeland — has been lost in recent decades.

As I remarked Monday, the authors of our Constitution said their purpose was to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” and if we are their posterity, we ought to be willing to defend the legacy of liberty that they bequeathed to us. If our corrupted and chaotic immigration system is a threat to our liberty (and I think my readers will agree it is), then we are unworthy of our inheritance if we refuse to do what is necessary to eliminate that threat. If you are smeared as a “racist” for speaking the truth about this situation, at least you have the consolation of knowing you are not a coward.

Category: Immigration, Racism

In The Mailbox: 07.22.19

Posted on | July 22, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Every Human Ever (Except Michael Collins)
EBL: National ice Cream Day, also, Is Erdogan Dead?
Twitchy: Ben Rhodes Leaves A Lot Of Details Out Of His Tweet About Israel Demolishing Structures
Louder With Crowder: Ricky Gervais Defends Real Women Against Transgender Creep Who Wants His Balls Waxed, also, Transgender Activist Wants To Hold Topless Pool Party For 12-Year-Olds

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Greatness: Can’t We All Just Get Along?
American Power: Erica Thomas’ Hate Hoax, also, House Democrats Prepare For Civil War
American Thinker: For Being Such An Idiot, Trump Is Pretty Smart, also, Jewish Fawning Over Omar Has Made Her More Aggressive
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Babalu PSA – How Not To Be A Douchebag To Cuban-Americans, also, Exodus Of Venezuelans Fleeing Socialism Reaches 5 Million
BattleSwarm: For All Mankind, also, Democratic Candidate Clown Car Update
Camp of the Saints: Sympathy For The Selfish Devil, also, The Vile Stench Still Emanating From The Kennedy Klan
CDR Salamander: Midrats Mid-July Free For All, also, The Marine Corps Commandant Just Changed The Game
Da Tech Guy: Chicago’s Proposed Casino Sites Show Why It’s Failing, also, Orange Man Bad, International Version
Don Surber: Judge OKs Trump’s Reform Of Obamacare, also, Democrats Woke – And Broke
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, All That Flesh
First Street Journal: Schadenfreude! Thomas Friedman Of The NYT Thinks President Trump Will Be Reelected
Fred On Everything:
The Geller Report: Daily Beast Claims Mariano Rivera Is “Far Right” For Being Christian & Supporting Israel, also, UK’s Muslim Rape Gang Members Get Over $600k In Legal Aid While Victims Get Nothing
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Pushing Back Twice As Hard
Hollywood In Toto: View Hosts Take Bold Stand Against Free Speech
Joe For America: Rashida Tlaib Screams In Rage While Being Ejected From Candidate Trump’s Speech
JustOneMinute: Biden V. Booker – The War To Interrupt The Snore?
Legal Insurrection: WaPo Confirms Fauxcahontas Worked To Limit Dow Chemical’s Liability For Breast Implants, also, Video Resurfaces Of Rashida Tlaib Screaming, Interrupting Trump At 2016 Speech
The PanAm Post: Putin Open To Sending More Troops To Venezuela
Power Line: Comey Lied To & Spied On Trump, also, The Washington Post Keeps Shilling For Antifa
Shark Tank: Another Dumb Accusation From Ilhan Omar
Shot In The Dark: State of The Media
The Political Hat: The One That Got Away From The NHS Infanticide Fetish
This Ain’t Hell: Thousands Show Up To Funeral Of Vietnam Vet Who Had No Living Relatives, also, Finding The USS Hornet (CV-8)
Victory Girls: Illinois GOP Folds Like Cheap Suit After Posting Jihad Squad Pic
Volokh Conspiracy: Legal Duty To Report Your Co-worker’s Off-The-Job Crimes?
Weasel Zippers: Rep. Tlaib – “We’re Going To Take The Money From The Rich And Give It Back To Those Who Earned It”, also, Old Miss Prof Declares MAGA Teens “Modern Day Hitler Youth”
Mark Steyn: The Lost Frontier, also, The Life & Death Of Colonel Blimp

Amazon Warehouse Deals

Category: Linkagery

‘Oikophobia’ and #NeverTrump: How Can We ‘Secure the Blessings of Liberty’?

Posted on | July 22, 2019 | 4 Comments

What has prompted our immigration crisis? Isn’t it the same sentiment that leads Democrats (and David French, but I repeat myself) to claim Ilhan Omar is a better American than anyone born here?

“Oikophobia,” a hatred of one’s native country (and of one’s fellow citizens) is the most remarkable proof that our elite class have become hopelessly degenerate. Consider David French’s argument that, unlike those of us who were born here, “immigrant citizens have actually done something to earn their status.” Well, what had Ilhan Omar done for America when she was naturalized at age 18? Less than my father did. Dad was an Alabama farmboy when he joined the Army at age 18 and he earned the Purple Heart in France in 1944. Is David French implying that being my father’s son makes me less worthy of American citizenship than Ilhan Omar? Isn’t this insulting insinuation at the heart of the open-borders argument, the idea that all immigrants are better than any America, because Americans are the worst people in the world?

If you are a native-born American — and especially if you are white — Democrats consider you infinitely inferior to Ilhan Omar. The tone of David French’s argument suggests he agrees with this assessment, and one does not persuade people by insulting them. Why can’t French, an intelligent man and an able lawyer who once did great work in the cause of academic freedom, see why his anti-Trump arguments fail?

The problem, I think, is that French has been swept along by the same floodtide of degeneracy that produces mobs of enraged anarchists on the streets of Portland and makes college campuses unsafe even for well-meaning liberals like Bret Weinstein. The election of Trump, and the rising populist sentiment that elected him, caught our elite by surprise. They were shocked to discover that a powerful plurality of Americans — nearly 63 million voted for Trump — had never accepted the notions of “progress” that prevail among the university-educated elite and in the urban communities where the elite reside. Among the core tenets of this elite weltanschauung is a belief in the superiority of immigrants. You might notice the way they quote Emma Lazarus’s poetry as if it had more authority than the Constitution, a reverence for the “huddled masses” being essential to what amounts to a religious faith among our otherwise godless elite. When I visited the campus of Harvard with Pete Da Tech Guy in the fall of 2017, we were immediately confronted on our arrival with a protest on behalf of so-called “dreamers.” Harvard students are not nowadays notable for their dedication to moral virtue — they get drunk and screw around quite shamelessly — but they are adamantly certain that it is morally wrong to deport illegal aliens.

Many years ago, Peter Brimelow pointed out that a major problem with U.S. immigration policy is that voters have seldom gotten a chance to express their preference at the ballot box. The elite of both parties seem generally agreed in preferring immigrants to native-born Americans, the Republicans beholden to corporate interests that want cheap labor and the Democrats seeing immigrants as future Democrat voters. Public opinion surveys indicate that most Americans see the issue of immigration as a matter of numbers. A majority would approve of accepting 250,000 new immigrants annually, and even if you bumped that number up to half a million, most people would be OK with it, but what we have had for the past 20 years is an unofficial policy of almost unlimited immigration. Our immigration laws are riddled with loopholes, and enforcement has been uneven and irregular, so that the combination of legal and illegal immigrants has amounted to more than 1 million every year since the mid-1990s. A majority of Americans oppose this, but prior to 2016, they never had a real chance to express their dissatisfaction at the ballot box. They had previously been offered no clear choice; choosing between open-borders Democrats and open-borders Republicans was no choice at all, as far as immigration policy was concerned, and some Republicans (including my late Cousin John) were worse than any Democrat on the issue. Trump’s blunt talk — “Build a wall!” — appealed to voters who had long been frustrated by the refusal of the political elite to address their concerns over our immigration policy (or non-policy, to be more accurate). The potency of that populist resentment startled not only the political class, but also the journalists and pundits who had acted as publicity agents for the elite’s open-borders consensus.

Much has been made of the harsh “tone” of President Trump’s rhetoric and of his mercurial temperament. His critics among the conservative commentariat make much of the “character” issue, saying that even though Trump has enacted many policies that conservatives have long advocated, he does not function as a role model, failing to represent the responsible and thoughtful character of a true conservative.

Trump’s coarse language and erratic behavior, however, are an integral part of his success. During the 2016 primary campaign, I compared him to the NFL legend Fran Tarkenton, a scrambling quarterback whose unpredictability made him an unsolvable riddle for opposing defenses. Trump seems to operate according to some internal gyroscope, an instinct that leads him to say and do things which no political consultant would suggest, but which nevertheless produce victory. Consider his tweetstorm last Sunday against “the Squad” of freshmen Democrat congresswomen who had been at war with Nancy Pelosi. Jumping into that fight seemed to contradict every sensible precept of effective politics, and even many Trump supporters were dismayed. Yet once again, Trump’s instinct was vindicated, as even many of his opponents agreed he had succeeded in making these four young left-wing radicals the “face” of the Democratic Party. In the process, not incidentally, Trump hijacked the news cycle for an entire week, so that nothing else (e.g., Joe Biden’s debut of his health-care proposals) had any real impact. And as we approach the next round of Democrat presidential debates, Trump is riding high in the polls (his latest result in an NBC poll matching his all-time best), and Democrats are becoming demoralized.

“Trump’s going to get re-elected, isn’t he?” people keep asking Thomas Friedman, and if his liberal friends are saying this to him, what does that suggest about the success of Trump’s methods?

That success only inspires the Trump-haters to louder shrieks of indignation, because to them it is wrong for him to keep winning this way. And yet it is not really the president they hate so much as the people who elected him. What David French and the other #NeverTrump Republicans don’t want to confront — what they cannot admit, not even to themselves — is that Trump’s success is a repudiation of their own weakness, a condemnation of their abject failure. The crowd of intellectuals at National Review and the now-defunct Weekly Standard considered themselves possessors of an authority that entitled them to prescribe policy and to anoint candidates for the Republican Party. Exercising this leadership prerogative, as an elite class as secure in its authority as any feudal aristocracy, our conservative intellectuals were always eager to claim credit when Republicans won elections, but when Republicans lost, they insisted that this was never their fault. Probably their zenith of prestige was in 2005, after Bush had been re-elected, which gave credence to Karl Rove’s talk of a “permanent Republican majority” based on a so-called “center-right” coalition. That hope quickly evaporated, with military disaster in Iraq followed by Democrats recapturing Congress in 2006 and then on to the economic catastrophe of 2008 followed by the election of Barack Hussein Obama.

Insofar as a Republican majority has been revived since that low ebb of 2008, it was first because of the Tea Party — a grassroots populist movement that powered the GOP House landslide of 2010 — and eventually the populist success of Trump’s campaign. If you were directly familiar with the Tea Party movement, as I was, you know that there is considerable overlap between those who attended rallies in 2009-2010 and those who are now the staunchest supporters of Trump. While immigration was not an issue the Tea Party concerned itself with, the movement’s prominent early supporters included Michelle Malkin, author of the 2002 book Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces, and a leader in opposition to the John McCain-backed amnesty proposals. In general, the Tea Party’s populist sentiment was expressed as a distrust of the Beltway establishment in both parties, including those Republicans who had supported corporate bailouts in 2008.

Because the #NeverTrump Republicans refuse to accept any responsibility for the failures of Bush-era GOP policy — although all of them, including French, marched in lockstep in support of those policies — they are at a loss to explain how or why they have lost their influence as intellectual leaders of the conservative movement. Instead, they denounce the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump as ignorant racists, which prompts the question: Why would anyone support “conservative intellectuals” who so emphatically agree with Democrats?

(Pierre Omidyar could not be reached for comment.)

Four years ago, Vox Day observed that French and the #NeverTrump conservatives “haven’t grasped the fact that the demographic changes to the United States have not only changed the way the political game is played, but have changed the game itself.” The country that elected and re-elected Ronald Reagan by landslide margins has ceased to exist, replaced by one in which Republicans can win the White House only by razor-thin margins, and the most important reason for this change is immigration. The demographic changes that have so transformed our politics did not “just happen.” It wasn’t some impersonal trend which caused this, but rather it was a matter of policy, and National Review was on the side of open borders, having purged Alien Nation author Peter Brimelow and sidelined John O’Sullivan. Not only did National Review purge those who dissented from their open-borders agenda, but also treated as persona non grata anyone who lamented this purge. They will call you a racist if you don’t support open-borders Republicans whose policies make it impossible for Republicans to win elections. Why do the editors of National Review think we should be grateful for their services in denouncing Republican voters as racist, as if there is a shortage of Democrats willing to perform this service?

Americans have grown tired of being lectured about how racist they are. The white people delivering these lectures — e.g., Joe Scarborough, Chris Cuomo, David Brooks — seem to believe that their moral superiority to the rest of us is so self-evident that we will enjoy and be grateful for the opportunity to be “enlightened” by them. Yet they are telling us nothing we haven’t already been told a million times, long before anyone imagined Donald Trump running for president.

David French’s insistence that Ilhan Omar is better than any native-born American simply because she is an immigrant — that our inheritance as Americans is a stigma of inferiority — is insulting, and the fact that he thinks we are too stupid to notice this is even more insulting.

The authors of our Constitution explained that their purpose was to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” If we are the posterity of our nation’s Founders — if we would deserve to be known as their heirs — then we have inherited an obligation to ensure that “the blessings of liberty” are preserved intact, that they may be enjoyed by future generations of Americans. So-called “Justice Democrats” like Ilhan Omar are a threat to that heritage of liberty, and yet David French, who wishes us to believe he is a conservative, seems to think that it is “racist” to oppose them. I do not exercise any control over what President Trump puts on his Twitter feed nor do Trump supporters seek my advice on what they should chant at rallies, but I know that Donald Trump prevented Hillary Clinton from becoming president, and that his willingness to call out Omar and her “Squad” (and to be smeared as a racist for doing so) indicates a keen understanding of what it will take to prevent Democrats from taking back the White House in 2020.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is something to be gained by playing “Nice Guy” with the Democrats, but if being nice were the criterion of political success, Jeb Bush might be president. And he’s not.

Get over it.

Category: Donald Trump, Immigration, Intellectuals

Rule 5 Sunday: Kathy Zhu

Posted on | July 22, 2019 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

The Miss World pageant organizers apparently have never heard of the Streisand Effect. On Friday, the pageant’s notional director stripped Miss Michigan, College Republican activist Kathy Zhu (@PoliticalKathy) of her title for allegedly “racist” tweets and her refusal to try on a hijab, and the result has been that a lot of people who never heard of Kathy are now aware of her and her unashamed support of President Trump – and they like her! Here she is dressed to kill for the pageant.