When two people share the same goals, they can disagree – even strongly disagree – and still have a productive discussion about how to reach those shared objectives. As comedian and author Owen Benjamin explains, the problem with America today is we no longer share the same goals, and that’s tearing us apart.
Were you shocked at the results of the 2016 American presidential election? Most people were, but Stephen Harper was not one of them. Here, the former Prime Minister of Canada explains the trends that foreshadowed Trump’s victory and left many political elites looking wildly out of touch.
Alexander G. Markovsky is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, a conservative think tank hosted at King’s College, New York City, which examines national security, energy, risk-analysis and other public policy issues, He is the author of “Anatomy of a Bolshevik” and “Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It.” He is the owner and CEO of Litwin Management Services, LLC.
This dead dog, expelled from Russia, acquired a new life in the United States and regained vitality to become a living lion within the Democratic Party.
The 2018 Democratic victory in the midterms brought new Marxist arrivals to the House of Representatives who are interpreting the elections as an endorsement of socialist policies. They dropped all the pretenses — no liberals, no progressives — they are proud Marxist-Leninists driven by the ideology and committed to converting this country into the United Socialist States of America.
This militant crowd is comprised of uninformed and misinformed people looking at themselves as unfortunate, underpaid, underappreciated victims of capitalism, overwhelmed with jealousy that there are people who are everything they are not.
The Democratic Party explicitly casts itself as an inheritor of Marxism. The Democrats’ demands are almost total inversion of the Constitutional arrangements and traditional American values. The economic redistribution, open borders, repeal of the Second Amendment, the abolition of the Electoral College, the election of a president by popular vote, voting rights and free health care to illegal aliens are just part of the comprehensive strategy of putting the harness of socialism around the necks of the American people.
The driving force of the Democratic Party is economic “inequality” — the argument socialists have never tired of invoking since the dawn of capitalism. The mantra brought into play by the French Revolution — “War to the palace, peace to the cottage” — is alive and well today in the Democratic Party. The seductive idea of wealth redistribution has proved to be irresistible to the masses discontented by the inequities. The philosophy of envy and siphoning from the rich appeals to a large segment of the population that does not realize that the definition of “rich” is a spiral of devolution that eventually will reach every business and every individual who works for a living.
From the Democrats’ perspective, President Donald J. Trump is a disrupter of what had been a smooth transition to the bright socialist future. In a concerted effort to denigrate the President and paralyze executive authority, they are branding him a racist and blatantly subvert every program on his agenda. To render him ineffective, they actively support a collective mania for ever more sweeping investigations of dubious claims, rumors, unsubstantiated allegations and innuendos that has descended over the President, his family, his associates, and nominees. People who cannot even spell “impeachment” demand one without any substantiation. They act as if their fiat is turning the country into chaos, or as Lenin called it, “revolutionary environment.”
The Immigration and Nationality Act mandates that all immigrants and refugees undergo a medical screening examination to determine whether they have an inadmissible health condition. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has technical instructions for medical examination of prospective immigrants in their home countries before they are permitted to enter the U.S. They are screened for communicable and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, hepatitis, polio, measles, mumps and HIV. They are also tested for syphilis, gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases. The CDC also has medical screening guidelines for refugees. These screenings are usually performed 30 to 90 days after refugees arrive in the United States.
But what about people who enter our country illegally? The CDC specifically cites the possibility of the cross-border movement of HIV, measles, pertussis, rubella, rabies, hepatitis A, influenza, tuberculosis, shigellosis and syphilis. Chris Cabrera, a Border Patrol agent in South Texas, warned: “What’s coming over into the U.S. could harm everyone. We are starting to see scabies, chickenpox, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections and different viruses.” Some of the youngsters illegally entering our country are known to be carrying lice and suffering from various illnesses. Because there have been no medical examinations of undocumented immigrants, we have no idea how many are carrying infectious diseases that might endanger American children when these immigrants enter schools across our nation.
Today’s progressives have embraced illiberalism, from speech codes to identity politics.
By
F.H. Buckley Mr. Buckley teaches at Scalia Law School and is author of “The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed.”
Dec. 31, 2018
President Trump’s support for criminal-justice reform surprised many on the left who pigeonholed him as an illiberal populist. Had they paid closer attention to Mr. Trump’s message, however, they’d have recognized that much of it is squarely within the American liberal tradition. With more self-awareness they’d have seen that their own abandonment of liberalism explains much of Mr. Trump’s support.
The First Step Act, which Mr. Trump signed last month, reduces the three-strikes penalty for drug felonies and retroactively limits the sentencing disparities for crack cocaine that disproportionately burdened African-Americans. That will reduce prison terms for about 2,000 current federal inmates.
Contrary to the depiction of Mr. Trump as racist, the act is wholly consistent with the way he campaigned in 2016. He invited minorities to vote for him because Democrats had left them behind: “What have you got to lose?” His pride in lower minority unemployment is obviously heartfelt.
In his economic policies too, Mr. Trump was anything but a flint-eyed conservative. He made it clear he wasn’t about to gut the welfare system. He wanted trade deals that would generally benefit Americans, and a border wall to preserve American jobs. In all this, he’s occupied the sweet spot in American politics, combining social conservatism with middle-of-the-road economic policies.
The media hasn’t paid much attention. Instead, it’s fixated on Steve Bannon and right-wing populism. Mr. Bannon makes common cause with European rightists and the brutish Yellow Vest protesters who destroyed a portion of François Rude’s “La Marseillaise” at Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. The Bannonites seem to have forgotten Edmund Burke’s lesson that while the English and Americans do revolutions well, the same can’t be said of the French.
U.S. conservatives aren’t like the European right, and there’s a reason. Constitutional liberties are the center of American nationhood and identity. If Americans (including Mr. Trump) have sometimes been illiberal, in time that’s been seen as un-American. The French National Front, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban—all that poses Molière’s question: What the devil have we to do with that mess?
If Mr. Trump’s tweets have been illiberal, so are the left’s policies. The identity politics that judges people by the color of their skin, the speech codes that silence conservatives on campus, the punishments meted out to religious believers who follow their convictions, the group rights that trample on individual rights—these are the causes that define today’s progressives. They’re antithetical to American liberalism.
Climate protests cost $91 billion in lost economic activity, chamber study finds
Keep it in the Ground activists target pipelines, fracking, terminals
by Valerie Richardson December 19, 2018
Climate activists fighting to derail pipelines and other energy projects have blocked $91.9 billion in U.S. economic activity and hundreds of thousands of jobs, according to a new report.
“Infrastructure Lost: Why America Cannot Afford to ‘Keep It In the Ground,’” released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute, quantified the cost of projects delayed or canceled as a result of environmental protests.
The report analyzed 15 targeted projects, including the hotly contested Keystone XL pipeline, Constitution Pipeline, and Oregon LNG terminal, as well as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 2014 fracking ban.
In addition to $91.9 billion in lost economic activity, the protests cost nearly 730,000 job opportunities and $20 billion in tax revenue to federal, state and local governments.
Will these liberals ever stop pushing “Identity Politics” on us ? It is like a mental illness with them as every one of our institutions is being influenced by their obsession ! It is all part of Cultural Marxism and the Far Left’s plan on forever changing our country. Nancy
Forget Monet or Hopper. The art museum’s new director wants to tackle ‘gender equality,’ ‘social justice’ and ‘diversity.’
December 19, 2018 by Roger Kimball
Mr. Kimball is editor and publisher of the New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books.
‘Every thing is what it is and not another thing,” observed the 18th-century British philosopher Joseph Butler. If that seems obvious, you haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on in the culture. Once upon a time (and it wasn’t that long ago), universities were what they claimed to be, institutions dedicated to the preservation and transmission of civilization’s highest values. Now they are bastions of political correctness, “intersectionality” and identity politics.
Something similar can be said of art museums. Although barely 200 years old as an institution, the art museum until recently existed primarily to preserve and nurture a love of art. Today, many art museums serve as fronts in battles that have little or nothing to do with art: entertainment, yes; snobbery and money, of course; and politics, politics, politics.
The latest example of this trend is particularly egregious because it involves one of America’s premier institutions, the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Established and endowed by Andrew Mellon in 1937, the National Gallery quickly became one of the nation’s two or three most exquisite art museums. In terms of the breadth, depth and excellence of its collection, its only real rival is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And because of its place in the nation’s capital (and its claim on the taxpayer’s purse—about $140 million of its $190 million budget comes from the U.S. Treasury), the National Gallery occupies a singular place in the metabolism of America’s cultural life.
Obituarists looking to write the epitaph of the American art museum could do worse than ponder the elevation of Kaywin Feldman, currently director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, to take the helm of the National Gallery in March when Earl A. “Rusty” Powell III, director since 1993, retires.
All the announcements of Ms. Feldman’s appointment have breathlessly noted that she will be “the first woman to hold the top job at the museum.” It’s meant as homage, and I hope I will be forgiven if I point out how patronizing are such declarations. In any case, the thing to appreciate about Ms. Feldman is not her sex but her slavish devotion to transforming the museum into a left-wing political redoubt.
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: Globalism is both an ideology and a culture of behavior. The creed is that the Western world, given its colonial and imperialist past, has a duty both to make amends to the former third world through magnanimously lending the global community elite Western expertise—whether through Kyoto- or Paris-like climate accords, foreign interventions guided by Western humanitarian principles, asymmetrical trade agreements, open borders, or U.N. mandates.
The globalist alone knows how global warming threatens us and how the ignorant masses must sacrifice to cool things down, how nationalism supposedly causes world wars, how sexism, racism, and homophobia have warped Western, but non-necessarily non-Western, society, and how human nature can be modified to avoid these pathologies through greater coercion, more relevant social education, improved material conditions, and greater secular ecumenicalism—a far better religion than calcified Christendom. The Western consumer—fat, “lazy,” played out—surely does not need any more affluence or income. His nation, therefore, can afford to subsidize, through his superfluous lifestyle, far nobler international crusades for mankind.
Against what or whom is the contemporary Western public pushing back?
The French non-Parisians against new green taxes on already unaffordable gasoline? Broke southern European Union nations against the financial demands of German bankers? The Eastern Europeans against French and German open-border mandates?
The British masses against both the EU and their own government that either cannot or will not follow the will of the people and implement Brexit? The American populists against outsourcing, offshoring, and illegal immigration?
The common target of all these populist pushbacks is an administrative and cultural elite that shares a set of transnational and globalist values and harbors mostly contempt for the majority of their own Neanderthal citizens who are deemed hopelessly unwoken to environmental, racial, gender, and cultural inevitabilities.
It’s undeniable: Around the world, nationalism is on the march, and the media and reigning political elites would have you believe this is a dangerous disaster in the making. So, why is Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, unafraid? Watch to understand.