By Peter Buttigieg
St. Joseph’s High School
South Bend, Indiana
In this new century, there are a daunting number of important issues which are to be confronted if we are to progress as a nation. Each must be addressed thoroughly and energetically. But in order to accomplish the collective goals of our society, we must first address how we deal with issues. We must re-examine the psychological and political climate of American politics. As it stands, our future is at risk due to a troubling tendency towards cynicism among voters and elected officials. The successful resolution of every issue before us depends on the fundamental question of public integrity.
A new attitude has swept American politics. Candidates have discovered that is easier to be elected by not offending anyone rather than by impressing the voters. Politicians are rushing for the center, careful not to stick their necks out on issues. Most Democrats shy away from the word “liberal” like a horrid accusation. Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush uses the centrist rhetoric of “compassionate conservatism” while Pat Buchanan, once considered a mainstream Republican, has been driven off the ideological edge of the G.O.P. Just as film producers shoot different endings and let test audiences select the most pleasing, some candidates run “test platforms” through sample groups to see which is most likely to win before they speak out on major issue. This disturbing trend reveals cynicism, a double-sided problem, which is perhaps, the greatest threat to the continued success of the American political system.
Cynical candidates have developed an ability to outgrow their convictions in order to win power. Cynical citizens have given up on the election process, going to the polls at one of the lowest rates in the democratic world. Such an atmosphere inevitably distances our society from its leadership and is thus a fundamental threat to the principles of democracy. It also calls into question what motivates a run for office – in many cases, apparently, only the desire to occupy it. Fortunately for the political process, there remain a number of committed individuals who are steadfast enough in their beliefs to run for office to benefit their fellow Americans. Such people are willing to eschew political and personal comfort and convenience because they believe they can make a difference. One outstanding and inspiring example of such integrity is the country’s only Independent Congressman, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.
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.”
She promises to investigate Trump officials after she wins.
Editorial Board January 23, 2020
Think the fog of partisan Trump investigations will lift once the President leaves office, either in 2021 or 2025? Not if Elizabeth Warren has anything to say about it. With the Iowa caucuses approaching and her campaign fortunes flagging, Senator Warren now says that as President she’d launch an open-ended criminal investigation into her predecessor and anyone who worked for him.
Ms. Warren’s latest “anti-corruption” plan says she would create “a Justice Department Task Force to investigate corruption during the Trump administration and to hold government officials accountable for illegal activity.” She would order Justice to look for violations of “federal bribery laws, insider trading laws, and other anti-corruption and public integrity laws” as well as immigration-enforcement offenses.
“This will be no ordinary transition between administrations,” the document says ominously. Team Warren won’t be satisfied with taking control of the executive branch in an election. They also want scalps of choice ex-officials. The plan links to news articles about Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, White House Adviser KellyanneCon way and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson.
If there is evidence of a crime by a former Administration official, it should be investigated through the normal channels. Ms. Warren is proposing something different: A law-enforcement task force dedicated to searching for wrongdoing only by political opponents. This would be familiar in Latin American dictatorships where the party that loses an election may be jailed as retribution.
Pundits said Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign threat to investigate Hillary Clinton for her email mismanagement was a chilling breach of democratic norms. We opposed such an investigation but at least the alleged misconduct was limited to specific conduct by one official, whereas Ms. Warren wants investigations of all Republican officials for any political offenses.
Despite all the apocalyptic think-pieces and high-minded books, America has not become an “autocracy” three years into Donald Trump’s Presidency. The opposition party won the House in the midterms, proceeded to impeach the President, and its leading candidates are ahead in the head-to-head 2020 presidential election polls.
Yet in polarized times the temptation to criminalize political differences is stronger than ever. It will be especially strong for Democrats once they are back in control of the Justice Department. Down Senator Warren’s road lies a real threat to liberty.
The following is an abridged version of a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 2, 2019, during the College’s 175th anniversary gala. Videos of this and other speeches delivered during the gala are available at fourpillars.hillsdale.edu.
Today many condemn the idea of nationalism by connecting it to race hatred (e.g., white nationalism). But historically, the modern nation-state has proven uniquely suitable to preserving individual rights. The American nation in particular was successful in uniting individuals of different races, ethnic backgrounds, and creeds into one people based on shared principles, a unique physical space, and a common national story. Our nation is the best example in human history of positive nationalism.
The key to this benign nationalism is American citizenship, based on an understanding of American exceptionalism and formed by the American melting pot. But today, our citizenship is eroding and, along with it, American nationalism in the positive sense is disappearing.
American citizenship is eroding in three ways.
First, we are blurring the line between mere residents and citizens. We have between 45-50 million non-native-born residents in the U.S. today—the largest absolute number we’ve ever had. There’s no legal problem with the 30 million of them who have green cards or have acquired citizenship—although even 30 million is a challenge for the American melting pot to assimilate and integrate.
But we also have, according to a recent Yale and MIT study, about 20 million people who are here illegally. In regard to them, the classical ingredients of American citizenship—the right to leave or enter the country as one pleases, for example, or to vote in elections, or to reside here as long as one pleases—are being blurred.
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.
It’s nakedly political and procedurally defective, and so far there’s no public evidence of high crimes.
By
David B. Rivkin Jr. and
Elizabeth Price Foley
Mr. Rivkin and Ms. Foley practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. He served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations. She is a professor of constitutional law at Florida International University College of Law.
October 26, 2019
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has directed committees investigating President Trump to “proceed under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry,” but the House has never authorized such an inquiry. Democrats have been seeking to impeach Mr. Trump since the party took control of the House, though it isn’t clear for what offense. Lawmakers and commentators have suggested various possibilities, but none amount to an impeachable offense. The effort is akin to a constitutionally proscribed bill of attainder—a legislative effort to punish a disfavored person. The Senate should treat it accordingly.
The impeachment power is quasi-judicial and differs fundamentally from Congress’s legislative authority. The Constitution assigns “the sole power of impeachment” to the House—the full chamber, which acts by majority vote, not by a press conference called by the Speaker. Once the House begins an impeachment inquiry, it may refer the matter to a committee to gather evidence with the aid of subpoenas. Such a process ensures the House’s political accountability, which is the key check on the use of impeachment power.
The House has followed this process every time it has tried to impeach a president. Andrew Johnson’s 1868 impeachment was predicated on formal House authorization, which passed 126-47. In 1974 the Judiciary Committee determined it needed authorization from the full House to begin an inquiry into Richard Nixon’s impeachment, which came by a 410-4 vote. The House followed the same procedure with Bill Clinton in 1998, approving a resolution 258-176, after receiving independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s report.
Mrs. Pelosi discarded this process in favor of a Trump-specific procedure without precedent in Anglo-American law. Rep. Adam Schiff’s Intelligence Committee and several other panels are questioning witnesses in secret. Mr. Schiff has defended this process by likening it to a grand jury considering whether to hand up an indictment. But while grand-jury secrecy is mandatory, House Democrats are selectively leaking information to the media, and House Republicans, who are part of the jury, are being denied subpoena authority and full access to transcripts of testimony and even impeachment-related committee documents. No grand jury has a second class of jurors excluded from full participation.
Unlike other impeachable officials, such as federal judges and executive-branch officers, the president and vice president are elected by, and accountable to, the people. The executive is also a coequal branch of government. Thus any attempt to remove the president by impeachment creates unique risks to democracy not present in any other impeachment context. Adhering to constitutional text, tradition and basic procedural guarantees of fairness is critical. These processes are indispensable bulwarks against abuse of the impeachment power, designed to preserve the separation of powers by preventing Congress from improperly removing an elected president.
House Democrats have discarded the Constitution, tradition and basic fairness merely because they hate Mr. Trump. Because the House has not properly begun impeachment proceedings, the president has no obligation to cooperate. The courts also should not enforce any purportedly impeachment-related document requests from the House. (A federal district judge held Friday that the Judiciary Committee is engaged in an impeachment inquiry and therefore must see grand-jury materials from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, but that ruling will likely be overturned on appeal.) And the House cannot cure this problem simply by voting on articles of impeachment at the end of a flawed process.
Democrat candidates are falling all over each other to see who can offer more”free stuff”. The truly serious problem of Islam and Sharia Law subverting our country is not even mentioned. Nancy
AmilImani is an Iranian-born American and pro-democracy activist. His biography at CFP states he is “a columnist, literary translator, novelist and an essayist who has been writing and speaking out for the struggling people of his native land, Iran.
There is not a day that goes by that I read comments from all over the social media on major issues that threaten this land of the free. Many Americans know what the problems are, but they are helpless in solving them alone. Why? Because we are a representative republic and expect our elected representatives to know the problems and solve them. Americans love courageous leaders like President Trump and Senator Ted Cruz and despise weak politicians whose only art is playing with nonsocial words.
When was the last time you witnessed a courageous and knowledgeable representative stand up in the U.S. Congress to address the vital issue of Islam’s stealth jihad or Islamic subversion currently exploiting all aspects of American life? I do not remember.
, 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.”