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Illegal Immigration It’s About Power
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Journalist Mike Allen of Axios recently said that one word described Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and that word was “unafraid.”
The context for his remarks on Fox News’ “Special Report” was that Mueller had just spun off to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York a bit of his limitless investigation into President Donald J. Trump. Allen’s comment was like so many others from media and pundit types since the special counsel was launched. If there’s one word to describe the media’s relationship to Mueller, it’s “unquestioning.”
Pundits and politicians have said, repeatedly, that he is “somebody we all trust” with “impeccable credentials.” No matter what his office does, from hiring Democratic donors to run the Trump probe to aggressively prosecuting process crimes, he is defended by most media voices. Criticism of Mueller by people who aren’t part of the Trump Resistance is strongly fought, with claims that disapproval of anything related to Mueller and how he runs his investigation undermine the rule of law.
Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino’s explosive new book (with D.C. McAllister), Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump, spotlights the left’s broken trust with the American people and the blatant criminality of the Obama/Clinton Deep State. Since the moment Donald J. Trump and his wife Melania glided down the Trump Tower escalator into history, the Democrats and the allies in the Deep State have been committed to crushing him.
For Trump, it was obvious that draining the swamp was never going to be easy because everything possible would be done to disguise and protect the illegal activities of the Obama/Clinton administration. But who thought they would go this far?
Bongino has painted a highly detailed account of how the Obama administration criminalized our intelligence communities as well as other government agencies to stop Trump, and when that didn’t work to try and bring down the president of the United States.
The book relies heavily on left-leaning news outlets CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters, CBS News, The Hill, London-based The Guardian and numerous others. All of this is carefully footnoted in the book. In a recent speech, Bongino said,
Trevor Loudon speaks of the Far Left in our government and how they work with the Marxists and the Islamists. He names influential members of congress and those running for congressional seats in last weeks election. Absolutely frightening. Please share with your email lists. Nancy
America has undergone enormous change during the nearly eight decades of my life. Today, America is a bitterly divided, poorly educated and morally fragile society with so-called mainstream politicians pushing cynical identity politics, socialism and open borders. The president of the United States is threatened with impeachment because the other side doesn’t like him. The once reasonably unbiased American media has evolved into a hysterical left wing mob. How could the stable and reasonably cohesive America of the 1950s have reached this point in just one lifetime? Who are the main culprits? Here’s my list of the 10 most destructive Americans of the last 80 years.
10) Mark Felt – Deputy director of the FBI, aka “Deep Throat” during the Watergate scandal. This was the first public instance of a senior FBI officially directly interfering in America’s political affairs. Forerunner of James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and Andrew McCabe.
9) Bill Ayers– Represents the deep and ongoing leftist ideological damage to our education system. An unrepentant American terrorist who evaded punishment, he devoted his career to radicalizing American education and pushing leftist causes. Ghost wrote Obama’s book, “Dreams of My Father.”
8) Teddy Kennedy – Most folks remember Teddy as the guy who left Mary Joe Kopechne to die in his car at Chappaquiddick. The real damage came after he avoided punishment for her death and became a major Democrat force in the US Senate, pushing through transformative liberal policies in health care and education. The real damage was the 1965 Hart-Cellar immigration bill he pushed hard for that changed the quota system to increase the flow of third world people without skills into the US and essentially ended large-scale immigration from Europe.
7) Walter Cronkite – Cronkite was a much beloved network anchor who began the politicalization of America’s news media with his infamous broadcast from Vietnam that described the Tet Offensive as a major victory for the Communists and significantly turned the gullible American public against the Vietnam War. In fact, the Tet offensive was a military disaster for the NVA and Viet Cong, later admitted by North Vietnamese military leaders. Decades later Cronkite admitted he got the story wrong. But it was too late. The damage was done.
America is polarized in many ways, but one of the most significant is between generations in the Democratic Party. Coming out of the Great Depression and World War II, we present-day seniors saw liberalism as the promise of racial and social justice and broadly shared prosperity. We also saw it as a defender of civil liberties against abuses such as those that took place in the 1950s McCarthy era. Abroad, we supported a strong United Nations and other multilateral institutions to reduce conflict but had no illusions about the expansionist ambitions of totalitarian states.
In other words, the dwindling number of Greatest Generation and Depression-born Democrats came of age with a liberal tradition that is increasingly marginalized in today’s party. That was evident in Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation fight and in the party’s use of race, sex, ethnicity and other identity markers in politics more broadly.
The best example of the old Democratic Party’s aspirations was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provided that no citizen should receive favorable or unfavorable treatment based on irrelevant factors such as race, sex, national origin and religion. Our domestic agenda was further realized in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society: the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, the War on Poverty, federal aid to education and other measures designed to create greater opportunity for all, underwritten by a safety net for those who needed it.
You could feel the first big change in 1968 as a new generation in the West rebelled against established institutions and leaders. In the U.S., protest formed around opposition to the mistaken Vietnam War. I experienced this rebellion first as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s assistant in the Johnson White House, then as a vice president of Columbia University during the disorders there, and later as an active member of the antiwar movement and George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign.
There was idealism in the protests but also cynicism and a touch of totalitarianism. “We Demand!” often preceded the protesters’ list of objectives. You could have a discussion with them over coffee or in small groups, but when an audience was present, a professor, speaker or political candidate expressing a contrary opinion would often be shouted down, sometimes with obscene chants. “Never trust anyone over 30,” the slogan went (or, as I often thought silently, no one under 25). Those in established positions were usually judged reactionary no matter the substance of their views.
In a stern and defiant speech earlier this month, National Security Adviser John Bolton made clear that the United States will not join the International Criminal Court, will not cooperate with it, nor provide it assistance.
What will the United States do instead? “We will let the ICC die on its own,” Mr. Bolton said. “After all, the ICC is already dead to us.”
Denunciations were soon flying from academics, “human rights” groups and the major media.
On the front page of The New York Times, a “news” story pronounced: “On War Crimes Court, U.S. Sides with Despots, Not Allies.” In an editorial, The Washington Post charged that Mr. Bolton was harping on a “pet peeve” and “personal bugaboo,” raising issues that are “essentially irrelevant.”
These elite opinions could not be more wrong-headed.
The Trump administration has had one consistent and overriding foreign policy theme: Defending American sovereignty. In his address to the U.N. General Assembly a year ago this month, President Trump used that word — as well as “sovereign” — more than two dozen times.
Sovereignty was succinctly defined by President Lincoln in 1861. He said it implies “a political community, without a political superior.” In other words, it’s central to the question that is — and always has been — at the heart of politics everywhere: Who rules?
There are those who consider it imperative that the United States remain a political community without a political superior, that Americans rule themselves, that no institutions wield power over them without their consent, and that the U.S. Constitution be regarded as the supreme law of the land.
There also are those who believe such ideas are outmoded. They hope for change, and they’re working hard to achieve it. A fancy term for them is “transnational progressives.” A less fancy term: Globalists — proponents of global governance.
As jurors deliberate the fate of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, it’s a bit of a letdown for Trump critics that Manafort wasn’t charged with anything having to do with alleged Russia collusion in the 2016 presidential campaign. So what’s his prosecution all about?
To understand, it helps to know a bit more about the murky universe in which Manafort and his closest colleagues operated.
It’s illegal for foreigners to directly give money to U.S. politicians and political parties. But there’s a legal way around that. Believe it or not, foreigners — even Russian President Vladimir Putin or North Korean President Kim Jong Un — are permitted to pay big money to hire well-connected U.S. public relations firms, law firms and lobbyists to act as their “foreign agents.” From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, more than 15,000 foreign entities have hired thousands of Americans to do just that.
What do these foreigners get for the money? The kind of access of which most Americans can only dream: Meetings are arranged with powerful, influential people in politics and media, at think tanks and universities. U.S. tax money gets directed their way. Laws are written in their favor. Arms deals are made. Trade policies are developed. Positive op-eds appear in American newspapers, and sympathetic articles are published in the press to sway public opinion. Rarely are we — as taxpayers and consumers of the information — told about the money that traded hands in the shadows. We’re left to believe it’s all just organic.
Our government says it’s all good as long as the U.S. foreign agents disclose their business ties to the Department of Justice as required under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The idea is that as long as the relationships are made known, it’s not subterfuge. Problem is, few Americans read the disclosures or would even know where to find them, and have no idea about the extent to which foreign governments are secretly pulling strings in America every day.
