Dear America, The LEFT Has Declared War On You

By Kevin McCullough |Townhall

While you’ve been busy enjoying your new jobs, improved wages, lower taxes, and less government interference in your life the left has decided that all of those things are immoral. 

They must be undone. 

And those who enjoy them must be made to understand that they are not good American citizens, but some sort of participant to hurt others. 

They would love to say it makes you a racist, except that African Americans and Hispanics are enjoying the best economy they’ve ever known in American history. 

They would love to say your lack of desire to give government more and more of what you earn makes you an elitist, except that you aren’t. 

You’re creating new companies, hiring more people, and taking control back of your personal choices. 

This leaves less capital for them to make choices for you and run your life with. Therefore when all options have been exhausted their desperation leaves them with only two options—conform to the new energy transforming life, business and people in America, or destroy it.

They are displaying raw unmeasured contempt for you.

In the past week public mobs—always organized by leftist groups—have taken to public harassment of women who merely work for the current administration.

Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was literally shouted at until she left a dinner at an eatery near the White House. 

Press Secretary Sarah Sanders just Friday evening was told she would not be served (nor her family) at the Red Hen eatery of the Shenandoah Valley in Lexington, Virginia. 

She was told she was refused service was because she works for the President. 

Secretary Nielsen has had additional groups camped outside her house playing loud speakers, disturbing the peace of she and her neighbors. 

Entitled leftist celebrities like Robert De Niro bogart awards shows encouraging viewers to sexually violate the President. 

Washed up former TV stars like Tom Arnold claim they will harass the First Lady at her son’s school. 

And true Hollywood losers like Peter Fonda claim that Sarah Sanders’ as well as Melania Trump’s children should literally be raped by pedophiles and sex traffickers.

They believe they can and will eliminate you in a big blue wave in November.

There is an obvious purpose in the illegitimate behavior that they are engaging in. 

Taking the primary methods of the losers from the “Occupy” movement they believe there is no moral barrier stopping them from doing anything at all (in their way of thinking) “necessary” to take back power. 

They believed they had finally launched America onto its great socialist enlightenment under dear leader Obama, and they all but believed they had eight more years with the Hillary Clinton presidency. 

The only problem turned out to be that she was a horrible candidate, and Trump understood the people of this country better than she did. That’s why he routed her. In a contest of states 33 to 17 is a spanking by any measure.

They no longer (if they ever did) believe in the rule of law.

That they had control of extended reach into law enforcement, justice, the judiciary, and all of the media and entertainment elite allies they enjoy, the left never believed that they would ever see the tornado of activity that has occurred in the first eighteen months of the Trump administration. 

A Supreme Court Justice who will reliably remove power from the hands of government, twenty-four appellate court judges, and seventy-one additional judicial appointments that all reflect that same judicial temperament add up to a limited window of time before much of the anti-constitutional hackery that has taken place over the last few decades is toast. 

But they are content to undo as much of what is true just and good as they can on any level. This week Gubernatorial candidate for New York—Cynthia Nixon—openly advocated for the elimination of Immigration & Customs Enforcement. She claimed they had gone adrift from their mission. Yet their mission is to do nothing but enforce immigration and customs law.

They have tried to ambush our representative form of governing—believing along the way they had the right to do so.

Their activist agents in the FBI (at least five of them identified in the report released by Inspector General Horowitz) demonstrated that there was no filter governing their approach to investigation. 

Agent Strzok volunteering in texts to sympathizers they he/they had the power to stop a lawfully executed election and that they would. 

The slimy behavior of Comey, Lynch, McCabe and Dr. Rice, their willingness to countenance, cover the backside for, and go the extra mile to mislead everyone only demonstrates this idea that they have no responsibility to respect the process of our republic. 

They feel entitled not only to disagree with us, but to rig the system against us in an attempt to force our conformity.

They will sink to any level necessary, even the prostituting or in some cases the threatened molestation of children to make their point.

That they were willing to threaten the children of the First Lady, the Press Secretary and joking or otherwise suggest molestation as a way to even the score against their opponents, is sick. 

That they literally seem unmoved by the fact that smugglers and human traffickers will thrive if we re-adopt their catch & release procedures is even worse. 

Yet, even in the debate over such policy, they lied in using pictures from 2013-14 to justify their rage.

They were just fine with TIME magazine lying through its teeth on this week’s cover, and they have no perception of the danger endless catch & release has on our neighborhoods, hospitals, and schools. 

All of which indicates their unwillingness to literally care for America as opposed to many others who wish to come here without a commitment to “be” American.

They believe you have no right to think, opine, govern, or act in any way that creates dissonance with their core beliefs.

Follow any number of left leaning celebrities, pundits, politicians, public figures & elected officials on Twitter (as I do) and you will easily see that everything I have argued here is already happening. 

The desperation at the loss of power, the open & undeniable hostility towards traditional America, their mockery making of our elections, laws, and public servants, their use of any and all tactics to fight back regardless of how gutter-prone they may be all pale in comparison to what they believe about their own beliefs. 

No longer interested in a pluralistic society with many different world-views competing in generations’ long struggle over ideas. They have had enough.

They are not interested in hearing opposing viewpoints, much less allowing them to prosper. 

This is why they want no church to teach that abortion is taking a human life, many sexual behaviors are literally unhealthy, or that people should choose to do good vis-a-vie their earnings vs. being forced to at the government’s point of a gun.

All of these were on display over the past week.

Every one of these points was illustrated on some level. 

They have declared a war on America. What America is. What she stands for. What she believes. 

They are angry. 

They are fueled by hate for everyone who disagrees with them—though many may describe it as piously as a law professor claiming to see a court case from all sides. 

They are bitter. 

And they are ticked that America is prospering, making more money, doing more good, and getting better sleep than they do.

War has been declared, and we can only hope that America responds in the best way she knows how—under God, with Liberty & Justice for all.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2018/06/24/dear-americathe-left-has-declared-war-on-you-n2493851

Yes, Obama separated families at the border, too

By Franco Ordonez & Anita Kumar | McClatchy

Photo From The Obama Administration In 2014: Detainees sleep and watch television in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center in Nogales, Ariz. The CPB provided media tours in Brownsville, Texas, and Nogales, that have been central to processing unaccompanied children. - Associated Press/June 18, 2014

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama separated parents from their children at the border.

Obama prosecuted mothers for coming to the United States illegally. He fast tracked deportations. And yes, he housed unaccompanied children in tent cities.

For much of the country — and President Donald Trump — the prevailing belief is that Obama was the president who went easier on immigrants.

Neither Obama nor Democrats created Trump's zero-tolerance policy, which calls for every illegal border crosser to be prosecuted and leads to their children being detained in separate facilities before being shipped to a shelter and eventually a sponsor family.

But Obama's policy helped create the road map of enforcement that Trump has been following — and building on.

“It's been going on for many, many decades and many years,” Trump said this week. “Whether it was President Bush, President Obama, President Clinton — same policies. They can't get them changed because both sides are always fighting. ...This is maybe a great chance to have a change.”

…

Obama took several actions that led to an outcry of fear and distrust, though his actions failed to get the attention the Trump administration has.

The White House declined to comment on specific actions of previous presidents. But a DHS official said it’s frustrating to be blamed for conditions at facilities that predate Trump and for creating new policies that were already in action.

“We’re enforcing the rule of the law,” said the DHS official, who is not authorized to speak publicly. “This is something that the previous administration didn’t do. ... The decades of ignoring this is what has led to today’s crisis.”

No numbers on children separated from their parents under Obama is available because the Obama administration didn’t keep them, according to Trump DHS officials.

Leon Fresco, a deputy assistant attorney general under Obama, who defended that administration's use of family detention in court, acknowledged that some fathers were separated from children.

Most fathers and children were released together, often times with an ankle bracelet. Fresco said there were cases where the administration held fathers who were carrying drugs or caught with other contraband who had to be separated from their children.

“ICE could not devise a safe way where men and children could be in detention together in one facility,” Fresco said. “It was deemed too much of a security risk.”

One of the most controversial measures that Obama took was to resurrect the almost-abandoned practice of detaining mothers and children to deter future illegal immigration.

The government had one lightly used 100-bed facility in central Pennsylvania and added three larger facilities in Texas and New Mexico holding thousands.

The New Mexico facility would later close and Obama would face legal challenges that stopped him from detaining mothers and children indefinitely.

A federal judge in California ruled that the Obama administration was violating a 20-year old case, known as Flores when it kept families detained for longer than 20 days. The Trump administration has used the Flores settlement as the backbone for the separation practice and Wednesday's order will likely cause more court challenges to Flores.

Chris Chmielenski, Numbers USA's director of content and activism, said the Obama administration was put "under incredible pressure" not to hold families.. Chmielenski argued the administration didn’t fight hard enough. "It's part of the reason we're in the position we are in," he said.

Obama took other controversial steps as well, including fighting to block efforts to require unaccompanied children to have legal representation and barring detained mothers with their children from being released on bond.

The administration also deported a teenage mother and her son back to Honduras soon after she attempted suicide at Texas family detention center.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article213525764.html

Black America's 'Stockholm Syndrome'

By Aubrey Shines | Real Clear Politics

Photo: Bishop Aubrey Shines and Dr. Alveda King, niece of 

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

For too long, black America has let its political voice and power be taken for granted.

When Kanye West recently suggested that African-Americans didn’t need to be Democrats, Rep. Maxine Waters quickly tried to put him in his place. 

Waters told Kanye, in effect, that he needs permission -- from his betters, presumably -- to say what he believes. In other words, don’t talk out of turn; follow the thinking of the group. 

She sounded like a plantation manager of old, insisting that everyone else follow the rules she and other black Democratic leaders set down for “their” people.

Black America’s monolithic loyalty to the Democratic Party does not empower blacks, however. 

If we are not “allowed” to entertain any political alternatives, we are left locked into a party that has not served our interests.

Call it a kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome: The condition that causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors.

Trillions of dollars have been poured into the inner cities, and yet these groupthinkers are blind to the seven-decade failure of the Democratic Party’s policies to improve the lives of black Americans. 

When they are asked if it would not be better if single moms and dads could take their tax dollars and send their children to schools that are not ravished by gangs and drugs, the groupthinkers echo the narrative that black politicians and white liberals have taught them: 

That school choice “starves” the failing public school system and harms their neighborhoods. 

These groupthinkers don’t tell you that members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the children of white Democrats typically send their own children to private schools.

I have recently come under attack for chronicling this history of the Democratic Party on Fox News and elsewhere. 

While I don’t advocate identity politics, I often remind African-Americans that even the late Malcolm X told the blacks of his day, “While you put the Democrats first, they put you last.” 

He also called blacks political chumps and traitors to their own race for reflexively supporting the party.

All Americans today are reaping the benefits of the Trump administration’s economic policies. 

Employment is at an all-time high; black and Hispanic unemployment is at record lows. 

December’s tax cuts doubled the tax credits for school-age children and raised take-home pay for nearly all American taxpayers. 

Incomes have risen in real terms for the first time in 18 years, tax refunds next year that will be substantially larger, 2 million-plus poor Americans are no longer on food stamps.

This has been achieved by the GOP, which was founded in 1854 as the anti-slavery party. 

What’s more, most states with Republican governors are outperforming so-called blue states — those run by Democrats. No matter what the color of your skin happens to be, economic opportunity comes from freedom, not higher taxes and big government.

Meanwhile, the economic fallout from group thinking can be seen in every major city in America, where the plantation supervisors are still channeling the failed oppressors’ spirit upon the minds of the weak. 

It’s long past time that black America shake off the plantation manager’s yoke and shake off its Stockholm syndrome. 

Groupthink has gotten this group nowhere.

Bishop Aubrey Shines is a pastor, author and evangelist.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/14/black_americas_stockholm_syndrome_137274.html

Yes, Hillary Should Have Been Prosecuted

By David French | National Review

I know this is ancient history, but — I’m sorry — I just can’t let it go. 

When historians write the definitive, sordid histories of the 2016 election, the FBI, Hillary, emails, Russia, and Trump, there has to be a collection of chapters making the case that Hillary should have faced a jury of her peers.

The IG report on the Hillary email investigation contains the most thoughtful and thorough explanation of the FBI’s decision to recommend against prosecuting Hillary. 

At the risk of oversimplifying a long and complex discussion, the IG time and again noted that (among other things) the FBI focused on the apparent lack of intent to violate the law and the lack of a clear precedent for initiating a prosecution under similar facts. 

It also describes how the FBI wrestled with the definition of “gross negligence” — concluding that the term encompassed conduct “so gross as to almost suggest deliberate intention” or “something that falls just short of being willful.”

After reading the analysis, I just flat-out don’t buy that Hillary’s conduct — and her senior team’s conduct — didn’t meet that standard. The key reason for my skepticism is the nature of the classified information sent and received. 

Remember, as Comey outlined in his infamous July 5, 2016 statement, Hillary sent and received information that was classified at extraordinarily high levels:

For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. 

These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. 

There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.

If you’ve ever handled classified information, you understand that there are often judgment calls at the margins. When I was in Iraq, I often made the first call about classification. 

In other words, I determined whether to send information up the chain via the unclassified system (NIPRNet) or the classified system (SIPRNet). Entire categories of information were deemed classified by default. Other categories were commonly unclassified.

But sometimes, I had to make a choice. And sometimes, the choice wasn’t clear.

The lack of clarity, however, wasn’t between unclassified and Top Secret.

Much less between unclassified and Top Secret/Special Access Program (TS/SAP). 

There might be tough calls between unclassified and confidential — or maybe between unclassified and secret. 

But the gap between unclassified and Top Secret, much less SAP, was and is vast, yawning, and obvious. 

In fact, the IG noted that “some witnesses expressed concern or surprise when they saw some of the classified content in unclassified emails.”

I bet they did.

The IG indicated that State Department security procedures were lax, and that if the DOJ were to prosecute Hillary, it would have to prosecute many other employees. 

Well, if the employees are sharing TS/SAP information on unclassified systems, then let the prosecutions commence. 

But I’m dubious that it’s common to share information that highly classified. 

In fact, when the IG outlined allegedly “similar” cases where the DOJ declined to prosecute, they weren’t similar at all.

Moreover, it’s important to remember that one can’t generally simply copy/paste or forward emails from classified to unclassified systems. (That’s likely why the emails on her homebrew system didn’t contain classified headers.) 

A person has to take information from one source and summarize it or painstakingly type it out on another platform. All of that takes effort. All of it requires intention. 

And it’s one reason why I have confidence that if Hillary had been Captain Clinton, United States Army, instead of Secretary Clinton, Democratic nominee for president, then the consequences would have been very different indeed.

In reading the report, I’m reminded of Homer Simpson’s famous declaration, that alcohol is the “cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” 

For Hillary, the FBI turned out to be first the solution to, then the cause of, the decline of her campaign. 

By wrongly refusing to recommend prosecution, it made her candidacy possible. 

By then failing to follow proper procedures in its two later public announcements, it helped end her presidential dream.

David French — David French is a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. @DavidAFrench

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/hillary-clinton-should-have-been-prosecuted/

Venezuela’s Long Road to Ruin

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady | The Wall Street Journal

A mother and her two children looking for food in garbage containers in the municipality of San Francisco, Venezuela, June 7. Photo: Humberto Matheus/Zuma Press

Few countries have provided such a perfect example of socialist policies in practice.

Word from Caracas is that locals have taken to scouring city streets for plastic garbage bags full of rubbish and, when they find them, emptying the contents so that they can resell the bags.

This sounds absurd, but it is believable in a country where extreme poverty has spread like the plague. Human capital is fleeing. Oil production is plummeting, and the state-owned oil company is in default. The garbage bag, imported with dollars, is a thing of value.

If anything was more predictable than the mess created by Hugo Chávez’s Marxist Bolivarian Revolution, it is the pathetic effort by socialists to deny responsibility. 

The Socialist Party of Great Britain tweeted recently that Venezuela’s problem is that socialism has yet to be tried. It blamed the crisis on “a profit-driven capitalist economy under leftist state-control.” 

Even more preposterous is the claim by some academics that economic liberalism in the 1980s spawned the socialism that has destroyed the country.

Learning from history is impossible if the narrative is wrong. So let’s clear the record: By the time Chávez was elected, Venezuela already had 40 years of socialism under its belt and precious little, if any, experience with free markets.

Military dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez was toppled in January 1958. Romulo Betancourt, an avowed socialist, was elected president later that year.

When Venezuela promulgated its 1961 constitution, Betancourt immediately suspended Article 96, which read: “All can freely engage in the profitable activity of their choice, without any limitations other than those provided for in this Constitution and those established by law for security, health or other reasons of social interest.”

This crucial protection remained on the shelf for 30 years, as a string of socialist governments employed price and exchange controls in counterproductive attempts to raise living standards.

Rent control in Venezuela dates to 1939 but was not enforced by Pérez Jiménez. In August 1960 Betancourt revived it, passing a new rent-control law and prohibitions on eviction. 

Since then, “not one apartment rental building has been built,” writes Vladimir Chelminski in his 2017 book, “Venezuelan Society Checkmated.” 

The legendary slums that climb Caracas’s hillsides are a testament to this socialist stupidity.

Carlos Andrés Pérez took the presidency for the first time in 1974. 

World oil prices had shot up as President Nixon’s domestic price controls crippled U.S. production. As a result, Venezuela felt rich. 

The national assembly granted CAP, as the president was popularly known, an “enabling law” so that he could rule by decree. 

He mandated salary increases for the entire nation and implemented, for the first time, a minimum wage.

He froze prices and issued crazy edicts. All commercial buildings had to employ elevator operators, and all public restrooms had to have attendants.

CAP put limits on foreign investment in everything from telecom and banking to food and electricity distribution, forcing foreigners to sell what they owned in Venezuela. 

He nationalized oil in 1976. The state expanded its role in iron, steel and aluminum and took control of coffee, cocoa and the previously independent central bank.

CAP and his successors ran up unsustainable debt. The bolivar had been fixed at between 4.3 and 4.5 to the dollar since the early 1960s. But by the late 1970s, with the central bank printing money, it was no longer worth that.

Buying dollars with bolivars became a lucrative national pastime until 1983, when President Luis Herrera Campins announced exchange controls. He also reinforced price controls, which by then applied to virtually everything, from cement, hotels and banking to parking lots, meat, milk and sugar.

When CAP returned to power in 1989, he inherited a fiscal and monetary time bomb. 

Out of options, he liberated almost all prices, along with the exchange rate, opened the country to foreign investment, and lowered import tariffs. 

He restored Article 96 of the constitution. According to Mr. Chelminski, a former executive director of the Caracas chamber of commerce, the positive effects included a notable recovery in foreign investment, exports and economic growth.

But Cuba had already infiltrated the military. Now it capitalized on the social unrest generated by the sudden reversal of policies, which exposed pent-up inflation. CAP also had credibility problems with investors. After two coup attempts in 1992 he was weakened and eventually removed for corruption.

Rafael Caldera took office for a second time in 1994 and restored price and exchange controls. By 1996, facing another collapse, he reversed course again, liberating prices and opening markets. 

The adjustment exposed reality but was painful, especially in the face of falling oil prices. 

Thus, the ground was fertile for an antiestablishment candidate in 1998.

Chávez was inaugurated in February 1999, in the midst of a recovery in oil prices and with the bolivar at 576 to the dollar. He tripled down on socialism, exacerbating a long history of destroying capital that would lead to today’s disaster.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-long-road-to-hell-1528652625