Ben sent me and a few other students of Omar a copy of the book in galley last month. At my request, Ben forwarded the blurbs his early readers offered to recommend the book. With Ben’s permission, I am posting them below in lieu of a formal review of the book this morning:
Victor Davis Hanson: “Benjamin Weingarten professionally and thoroughly dissects the strange case of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and demonstrates that much about the congresswoman is an enigma at best and a fraud at worst. We do not know, and authorities are apparently not interested in, her strange marriage…her tax avoidance, her violations of campaign financing laws, and her apparent disgust with a country that she…sought out and presently finds profitable. Weingarten’s case study of Omar serves as a larger indictment of the therapeutic mindset, which Omar manipulated so well on her way to notoriety and power. Weingarten suggests that if Omar had not existed, she would have had to be invented, given that she is a metaphor for a larger American pathology of progressive virtue-signaling and, ultimately, self-loathing.” – Victor Davis Hanson, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Dennis Prager: “American Ingrate is a serious, deeply researched work that makes the compelling case Rep. Ilhan Omar is the new face of the Democratic Party, and delves deeply into her background and beliefs. It compellingly sets forth the argument that she not only personifies but leads a Progressive-Islamist alliance held together by the glue of hatred of America, of Judeo-Christian values, of Western civilization, and of Israel. Read it and weep. Or better, read it and fight back. This is a manual in that fight.” – Dennis Prager, nationally radio talk show host and columnist, co-founder of PragerU, and New York Times bestselling author of ten books, including, most recently, the first two volumes of The Rational Bible, a five-volume commentary on the Torah
Far Left Liberalism has itself to blame for being the cause of the appeal of Bernie Sanders. The Democrat Party now has to contend with the possibility of Bernie being their nominee. Guess they really didn’t mean for the voters to take their extreme far left policies seriously ! Nancy
Bernie Sanders is riding the intellectual currents that the party and its elites have nurtured.
By the Editorial Board February 15, 2020
Bernie Sanders’s victory in New Hampshire on top of his tie in Iowa makes him a favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. Hard to believe, but in a winnable race against President Trump the opposition may nominate a socialist who wants the government to control energy production and health care, who wants nationwide rent control, and who calls America a “racist society from top to bottom.” No wonder Democrats like James Carville are in agony.
The Vermont revolutionary’s victory portends a long primary battle, unless Democratic voters elevate a single mainstream candidate who can challenge him. Mr. Sanders will get his 25% to 30% primary after primary, racking up delegates on his way to the convention. If other candidates keep dividing the other votes, he will be hard to stop, as Mr. Trump was for Republicans in 2016. Even if a single alternative emerges, Mr. Sanders won’t go down without a ferocious intra-party fight.
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How did this happen? How did Mr. Sanders move from the socialist fringe to the brink of controlling the Democratic Party? The Senator’s dogged persistence across decades and especially the last four years is part of the explanation.
Yet Mr. Sanders wouldn’t be this close to the White House if not for the complicity of Democrats and the liberals who dominate the academy and media. Rather than fighting the ideas that animate him and his millennial voters, they have indulged and promoted them. They created the political environment in which he could prosper. Consider the intellectual currents he is riding:
A personal note: I agree with the author of this article. I first visited the Soviet Union in 1982. Three of the photos I took on the street of the ordinary people were very telling. One was of an elderly woman selling a few shriveled up cucumbers on the street, another was an elderly woman sweeping the city sidewalk with her broom and the third photo was a truck parked on the street laden with bricks. A man was standing by the side of the truck obviously watching that the three elderly women loaded the bricks quickly and correctly ! In sharp contrast was the magnificent subway system with huge photos of Lenin adorning the walls attesting to the glory of Communism.
On my second trip to what was then called Russia in 1994 after the Berlin Wall had come down and the Soviet Union was dissolved. My late husband who was working in Moscow for an international company at the time. He was tied up and robbed in his hotel room at the MetropolHotel. Also, I had wanted to go back and revisit a wonderful restaurant that I had been to in 1982 but our company security people told us it was no longer safe to go there as the restaurant was now controlled by the Russian Mafia. An American couple that we knew who were also working in Moscow, bought an apartment and completely gutted and remodeled it. Their apartment was very lovely inside but because of the housing shortage, other apartments in their building were crowded with many Russian people living in each apartment that had one bathroom. Trying to put this delicately, let’s just say you had to be very careful where you stepped in the hallways !!!! Oh, one more thing, if driving in their chaotic traffic, definitely do not get stopped by the traffic police for any minor offense, as they will demand money from you.
On a more positive note, their museums and arts were world class. The Hermitage Museum has more Rembrandts than the Metropolitan Museum in New York !
God forbid that Bernie becomes president !!! Nancy
Before many Sanders voters were born, I saw his ideology in action in the Soviet Union and Britain.
By George Melloan Mr. Melloan is a former deputy editor of the Journal editorial page. His book about the costs of bogus science will be published in August by Lyons Press.
February 5, 2020
Socialist Bernie Sanders’s emergence as a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination is puzzling to many of us who have experienced socialism. We thought it dead—good riddance—when the Soviet empire collapsed 30 years ago. Our mistake.
One can only assume that the hardships endured by many millions of Russians, Chinese, Africans and Europeans have been forgotten, or never learned, by a new generation of Democratic voters. Mr. Sanders says he is a “democratic socialist,” whereas those unfortunates of the past were ruled by “communists.” He’s right that there are wide differences in degree. But although the postwar British Labour Party was freely elected, it brought Brits a more limited degree of the economic stagnation that afflicted the people of the undemocratic Soviet Union and its satellites.
China‘s Communist Party has infiltrated various levels of America’s infrastructure and is working to destroy the values of the United States, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during a speech Saturday, while also warning state governors to be wary of China’s infiltration.
“We can’t ignore China’s actions and strategic intentions,” he said while addressing the National Governors Association winter meeting. “The Chinese government has been methodical in the way it’s analyzed our system… it’s assessed our vulnerabilities and it’s decided to exploit our freedoms, to gain an advantage over us at the federal level, the state level and the local level.”
“Competition with China is happening. It’s happening in your state,” Pompeo added. “In fact, I’d be surprised if most of you in the audience had not been lobbied by the Chinese Communist Party directly.”
He said groups loyal to communist China are operating out in the open in Virginia, Minnesota, Florida and dozens of other states all around the country. Other Chinese groups, however, practice their nefarious actions in the shadows in an attempt to exercise influence over U.S. citizens and lawmakers.
The information provided by Diana West, author of ‘American Betrayal’ and now ‘The Red Thread’, in this video explains so much of what has been happening in our country in the attempt to discredit and impeach President Trump. Frightening ! Nancy
Why does Diana West believe that communist ideology has infiltrated America’s intelligence agencies? After looking into key figures involved in the Spygate scandal, what information did Diana West uncover about their ideological beliefs? How is Donald Trump a “counter-revolutionary” president, in West’s view? This is American Thought Leaders , and I’m Jan Jekielek. In this episode, we’ll sit down with Diana West, a journalist and author of “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.”
This is why the Democrats are trying to ruin Sander’s chances for being their nominee. All of this information on Sander’s past support for the Iranian hostage takers will be brought out in the election by the Trump campaign and the Democrats will go down in flames. Go Bernie !!!! Nancy
When Iran Took Americans Hostage, Bernie Backed Iran’s Defenders
By Ronald Radosh January 16, 2020
EXCERPT FROM THIS ARTICLE: If Sanders were to become the Democratic presidential nominee, all this will come pouring out in Trump ads on television and social media. Voters will see TV clips of the American hostages, blindfolded and abused, alongside Sanders as the Trotskyist elector supporting the Iranian kidnappers. Rest assured, Trump will make absolutely sure that it is Sanders’ own past that will bury him and perhaps the Democratic Party.
Bernie Sanders, a top competitor in the Democratic primaries, has attacked Joe Biden for bringing “just a lot of baggage” into the race. But if past views are a major consideration, consider the baggage that Sanders drags into the campaign.
Go back over 40 years, to the start of Iran’s long conflict with the United States. On April 1, 1979, the theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had returned to Iran from exile to assume command of the revolt, became Supreme Leader in December of that year. His rise was accelerated by the seizure on Nov. 4 of 52 American diplomats and citizens, and citizens of other countries, at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The hostage crisis became the means by which the Ayatollah crushed political opponents in Iran. Dealing with the hostage taking became the overwhelming political crisis for President Jimmy Carter. It lasted 444 days.
Virtually all Americans—Democrats, Republicans and independents—united in support of the hostages and the international call for their freedom. One prominent political figure on the 2020 stage, then almost completely unknown, stood apart by joining a Marxist-Leninist party that not only pledged support for the Iranian theocracy, but also justified the hostage taking by insisting the hostages were all likely CIA agents. Who was that person? It was Bernie Sanders.
She may not win the nomination, but her ideas show where the American left wants to go
By the Editorial Board, December 27, 2019
She’s the candidate with a plan for everything: That’s Elizabeth Warren’s brand. But even that sells her ambitions short, as we discovered after a tour of her 60-some policy papers. Ms. Warren is proposing a transformation of American government, business and life that exceeds what the socialist dreamers of a century ago imagined.
Her standing in the polls has fallen after missteps over Medicare, but she is still in the top candidate tier. Her ideas deserve to be taken seriously because they show where the American left wants to go:
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• Wealth tax: Tax net worth over $50 million at 2% a year, and 6% above $1 billion. To prevent the rich from yachting off, add a 40% “exit tax” on assets over $50 million upon renouncing U.S. citizenship. Estimated revenue: $3.75 trillion over a decade from 75,000 households. Most economists, including many Democrats, call that number a fantasy. Courts might also find the tax unconstitutional.
• Medicare for All tax:Charge companies with at least 50 workers an “Employer Medicare Contribution,” equal to 98% of their recent outlays on health care, while adjusting for inflation and changes in staff size. These varying fees “would be gradually shifted to converge at the average health care cost-per-employee nationally.” Estimated revenue: $8.8 trillion over a decade. If receipts fall short, add a “supplemental” tax on “big companies with extremely high executive compensation and stock buyback rates.”
• Global corporate tax: Raise the top business rate to 35%. Apply this as a world-wide minimum on overseas earnings by U.S. companies. Businesses would “pay the difference between the minimum tax and the rate in the countries where they book their profits.” Apply a similar minimum tax to foreign companies, prorated by the share of their sales made in the U.S. Estimated revenue: $1.65 trillion over a decade.
• Corporate surtax: Tax profit over $100 million at a new 7% rate, without exemptions. This would go atop the regular corporate rate. Estimated revenue: $1 trillion over a decade from 1,200 public companies.
• Slower expensing: “Our current tax system lets companies deduct the cost of certain investments they make in assets faster than those assets actually lose value.” Closing this “loophole,” she says, would raise $1.25 trillion over a decade.
• Higher capital gains taxes: Tax the investment gains of the wealthiest 1% as ordinary income, meaning rates near 40% instead of today’s 23.8%. Apply the tax annually on gains via a “mark to market” system, even if the asset hasn’t been sold. Estimated revenue: $2 trillion over a decade.
Will the Defeat of Trump in 2020 Lead to a Civil War ?
Steve Baldwin is a 35-year veteran of the conservative movement. He is the author of From Crayons toCondoms, the former executive director of Young Americans for Freedom, the former executive director of the Council for National Policy and a former California state legislator.
March 27, 2019 by Steve Baldwin
You don’t have to like Donald Trump to support him in 2020. Nor is it necessary for you to agree with everything he says or tweets. You may even dislike his style, his language and his sometimes abrasive behavior. But it is imperative for all voters to understand the choice we will have in two years and what the ramifications are if Trump loses the election. If you are a conservative thinking about not voting for Trump due to these petty reasons, well, grow up. We are now at a tipping point in American history in which the defeat of Trump will most likely launch a series of unconstitutional actions and decisions by the left which could very well lead to the destruction of America as we know it.
There are lots of discussions and chit-chat about a coming civil war on both leftist and conservative blogs, websites, news sites, etc., but is that really a possible scenario in our future? Let’s face it, we are already in the midst of a form a civil war today, both politically and culturally. Indeed, America has not been this divided since the Civil War of 1861-1865. But could this “soft” civil war evolve into more of an actual violent civil war? Afterall, it is clear to conservatives that many of America’s major institutions are under assault by a fanatical leftist movement that seeks to wipe out our Western and largely Christian heritage and replace it with an atheist, socialist utopia where supposed “equality” will be forced upon everyone and government will be the provider of all goods and services.
We’ve seen this movie before many times – the USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela, most of Africa, etc. Indeed, these countries were and are nightmare regimes that destroyed individual rights, religious freedom, the free enterprise system and free will. There’s no doubt that once socialism takes root, the accumulation of governmental power eventually leads to an Orwellian police state that controls all aspects of one’s life. Yes, there have been a few socialist countries the left points to that have not evolved into police states –the Scandinavian countries — but over the last decade those countries dropped their experiment with socialism and have since become, by some accounts, more free market-oriented than the USA. They were fortunate enough to dump socialism before it evolved into a police state.
The reality is that almost all socialist countries evolve into various forms of authoritarianism; just ask anyone who lived in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. But the socialist revolution here in America is already well under way. If one looks at many of our K-12 schools, our universities, the media and even many of our churches, they have been corrupted by the left and have become propaganda organs advocating socialist causes at the expense of their original missions. There is little doubt the push to socialism is escalating here in the USA.
It is a shame so many millenillials are unaware of the tyranny that socialism leads to. And that’s what the left is counting on. Very few millenillials read anything other than phone texts or social media posts and even fewer have ever read any of the great anti-socialist books such as Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell, Witness by Whittaker Chambers, Darkness at Noon and The God that Failed by Arthur Koestler and the Gulag Archipelagoby Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. One would think such books would be routinely assigned in our schools since, after all, it was only 29 years ago the USSR was the most serious threat to our freedom our country had ever experienced. Moreover, communism/socialism still exists today in China, North Korea and a few other places.
“A brilliant book based on a brilliant and true concept.” – TUCKER CARLSON
Remember America? There may come a time when no one will.
There will be no monuments to American heroes, no stories that will praise them. The United States will have become a dark chapter in human history, best forgotten.
In Erasing America: Destroying Our Future by Erasing Our Past (releasing August 21st), James Robbins reveals that the radical Left controls education, the media, and the Democratic party…. and they seek to demean, demolish, and relentlessly attack America’s past in order to control America’s present.
This toxic movement has already brainwashed an entire generation and is rapidly changing the cultural, historical, and spiritual bonds of our nation. American exceptionalism, history, and patriotism are a magnificent legacy, Robbins warns, but to pass it on to our children, we must view the past with understanding, the present with gratitude, and the future with hope.
Wondering if it’s really that bad? Here are some facts you’ll learn in Erasing America:
At Yale, residential Calhoun College is being renamed after students complained about the pro-slavery sentiments of John C. Calhoun. In Massachusetts, Simmons College claims saying, “God bless you” is an “Islamophobic microaggression.” In Virginia, school districts seek to ban To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because parents complained about the racial slurs in the books. Across the country, Christmas songs and movies are labelled as racist and sexist – and banned. In California, a San Francisco school district wants to rename George Washington High School because our first president owned slaves. In Arkansas, a monument engraved with the Ten Commandments was smashed to smithereens by a protester in a Dodge Dart. And in parks and squares across the South, statues of confederate generals and soldiers are disappearing.
Robbins wants you to understand the critical situation in America, and to use Erasing America to equip your fellow Americans against this Leftist propaganda – before it’s too late!
James S. Robbins is a senior fellow for National Security Affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council and a member of the advisory board to the National Civil War Museum. Formerly, he was an award-winning editorial writer at the Washington Times, professor at the National Defense University, and special assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His books include This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive (2010) and Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point (2006).
How is America to be defined? By its failures or its triumphs? Today, there seems to be an obsession with the former and a dismissal of the latter. Is this dark vision of the freest and most prosperous nation on earth an accurate narrative or a cynical distortion? James Robbins, columnist for USA Today and author of “Erasing America,” considers that question in this video. How we view America’s past will very much shape America’s future.
, and I’m Jan Jekielek. In this episode, we’ll sit down with Diana West, a journalist and author of “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.”