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July 2017

Women’s Studies Prof: ‘I Wish Someone Would Just Shoot’ Trump By Tom Knighton

I get it. Donald Trump isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Some people love him, some people hate him, and some of us just watch the left howl over the guy while personally feeling kind of “meh” about him as president.

But some Leftist academics, for example, hate him so much they wish for assassination. Here’s the latest example, as reported by The College Fix:

“Trump is a f*cking joke. This is all a sham. I wish someone would just shoot him outright,” tweeted educator Kevin Allred from his personal account Friday night.

Earlier that day, Allred also tweeted the infamous picture of comedian Kathy Griffin holding a decapitated model of Trump’s bloody head under the word “mood.”

Allred, who has a history of controversial tweets, was listed as an adjunct instructor in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program at Montclair State University as recently as July 29, according to a screenshot of the university’s website.

..

After Allred tweeted his presidential assassination sentiments on Friday, he received reaction — and some backlash. He quickly deleted the tweet, but continued to defend it, asserting just 25 minutes later in a tweet: “saying you wish donald trump was dead is different than making a direct threat against him. just saying … ”

In 2008, before Obama was even president, a Fox News contributor was forced to apologize for a joke regarding the then senator that was, at its worst, a similar kind of remark.

In 2010, blogger Solomon “Solly” Forrell was blasted by the left after tweeting that the country had gotten over the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy and would get over Obama being assassinated, too. The left was furious over it.

These were just two examples of liberal outrage over similar remarks. Why is it only wrong when the right does it?

CONTINUE AT SITE

The First Republican Candidate A dashing explorer before his nomination, John C. Frémont spent the 1856 presidential campaign fencing, riding his horse and strolling in New York. Robert K. Landers reviews ‘Lincoln’s Pathfinder’ by John Bicknell.

Accepting the Republican Party’s first presidential nomination in July 1856, John C. Frémont declared that the very “design of the nation, in asserting its own independence and freedom,” made it imperative “to avoid giving countenance to the extension of slavery.” This assertion about the hottest issue of the day would be Frémont’s “only substantive statement of the campaign,” John Bicknell notes in “Lincoln’s Pathfinder.” At the time, candidates for president customarily chose not to stoop to speechifying or actively seeking the voters’ favor.

That was fine with Frémont, a dashing explorer (nicknamed “the Pathfinder”) whose best-selling reports on his expeditions in the American West had made him famous. Though he had served briefly in 1850-51 as one of California’s first U.S. senators, the 43-year-old former Democrat was “a babe in the woods when it came to politics,” Mr. Bicknell says. Residing in New York City, the Republican candidate spent most of his time “fencing, riding his horse, and taking long walks through what was then still not an entirely urban landscape.”
American explorer, army officer and politician John C. Frémont.
American explorer, army officer and politician John C. Frémont. Photo: Getty Images
Lincoln’s Pathfinder

By John Bicknell
(Chicago Review, 355 pages, $26.99)

The campaign for Frémont was left to others, chiefly his wife, Jessie, the daughter of former Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Besides organizing the campaign, she made the case for Frémont to newspapermen and influential public figures whom she received in her New York home. Though women couldn’t vote, Mr. Bicknell notes, “Republicans were not shy about making direct appeals to women”—presumably hoping they would sway the men in their lives. Next to Frémont’s heroic but taciturn persona, Jessie’s own appeared “beautiful, graceful, intellectual, and enthusiastic,” as Frank Leslie’s Weekly described her. Women’s clubs sprang up in the North in her name. Women imitated her hairstyle, adopted her favorite color (violet) for their outfits, named their newborns after her—and turned out “in huge numbers” for Frémont rallies, which had banners hailing “Jessie’s Choice.”

Frémont faced strong opposition in the general election. Even his famous father-in-law, believing that preserving the Union was more urgent than containing slavery, was voting Democratic. Though candidate Frémont is the leading character in “Lincoln’s Pathfinder,” his opponents and the forces arrayed against the nascent, anti-slavery Republican Party necessarily play large roles, too.

Trump’s Unused Bully Pulpit As Reagan proved, there’s nothing as powerful as an Oval Office address.By William McGurn

Not yet a week after the most extravagant Republican Party botch since the Bill Clinton impeachment, Beltway fingers are still pointing. And why not? The failure to make good on seven years’ worth of ObamaCare repeal promises has many fathers.

Take your pick. Sen. John McCain’s pique. The squishiness of those such as Sen. Rob Portman who voted for repeal when it didn’t matter, and then voted nay when it did. Behind-the-scenes undermining by governors such as Ohio’s John Kasich. A GOP bereft of party discipline.

There is truth to all these. Even so, perhaps the most obvious reason goes almost unmentioned: The Republican bills were unpopular.
This does not mean they were bad bills, notwithstanding the many compromises lawmakers included. It does mean that their merits went mostly unsold to the public. This allowed Democrats and their allies to paint the bills as but the latest Republican attempt to rob from the poor ($800 billion in Medicaid cuts) to give to the rich ($600 billion in tax cuts).

Even more astounding is that as this narrative took hold the president of the United States neglected the greatest bully pulpit of all: the Oval Office.

Notwithstanding his flaws, Donald Trump has proved himself able to connect with voters, especially those who voted for Barack Obama, in a way other Republicans have not. But the Trump White House has yet to recognize the unique punch a formal, televised address from behind the desk of the Oval Office still carries, even in the age of Twitter .

Ronald Reagan’s use of the Oval to push his tax cuts through in 1981 is a textbook example. Yes, the Gipper schmoozed those on the opposite side of the aisle. He had to, given that Democrats controlled the House. But as likeable as he was, folks on both sides of the political aisle were skeptical about his proposed tax cuts.

In a July 27 Oval Office address, Reagan made his pitch. In simple language, he gently mocked the Democratic leadership claims that their bill “gives a greater break to the workers than ours.” He said the whole controversy came down to whose money it was—the people who earned it or the government that wanted to spend it. And his call for Americans to “contact your senators and congressmen” to urge them to vote for his tax cuts touched off what Speaker Tip O’Neill described as a “telephone blitz like this nation has never seen.”

Though it’s now popular to reminisce about the warm cuddly Reagan who put partisanship aside, that’s not the way it was seen at the time. The day after his speech, the New York Times reported Reagan had “engaged in a series of partisan attacks on his opponents on Capitol Hill.”

Roanoke College will launch a new Center for Economic Freedom

Roanoke launches new Center for Economic FreedomRoanoke College will launch a new Center for Economic Freedom with a special event in September.

Inspired by economist Milton Friedman and his passion for free markets and individual choice, the Center for Economic Freedom’s mission is to educate students and the community on the freedom of markets and individual choice in a liberal arts setting. Dr. Alice Kassens, the John Shannon professor of economics, will direct the Center, which will be funded by grants from several foundations.

Through the Center’s programs, the goals are to:

Promote an environment of educated discourse and discovery
Explore the role of economic freedom and individual rights in prosperous societies
Motivate students to actively seek opportunities in classically liberal minded scholarship and service
Develop a network of alumni and friends that remain active in the Center for Economic Freedom

The first event will be a public lecture to mark the opening of the Center for Economic Freedom Lecture Series on September 1 with featured speaker Dr. Chris Coyne. He is the associate director of the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Coyne has written several books, including Doing Bad by Doing Good: Why Humanitarian Action Fails. He is a prolific writer of articles for scholarly journals, has published numerous policy briefs, and also has written for the Daily Caller, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and others. Coyne is the co-editor in chief of the Review of Austrian Economics, the coeditor of the Independent Review, and the book-review editor of Public Choice. He is a member of the Board of Scholars for the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.

“I have admired Milton Friedman, both his work and style, since I first studied economics,” Kassens said. “The Center for Economic Freedom is a way to bring his ideas to students and the Roanoke College community to expand the public discourse regarding markets and regulation. I am thrilled to open the Center officially in September with a lecture by Chris Coyne.”

In addition to the annual lecture series, the Center will host a variety of events and activities for students, both those majoring in economics and those studying other disciplines. Opportunities for students include an economics reading group, a research assistantship, an economic freedom group and library of materials related to economic freedom. The center also will have a seminar travel fund to help support student travel. The center also will sponsor a faculty reading group and will hold Milton Friedman Remembrance Day each year on November 16, the anniversary of his death.

For more on the Center for Economic Freedom, visit the center’s web page, follow the center on Facebook
and Twitter @CEFreedomRC for the latest information. The email address is freedom@roanoke.edu.

The Pakistani Hackers Working for the DNC By Roger Kimball

At last, I am in a position to help the New York Times. It’s a good feeling. As anyone who has stumbled upon their website knows, our former paper of record, underscoring its insatiable appetite to provide the public with all the news that fits its agenda, prominently features a solicitation for hot tips: Got a confidential news tip? it asks. Click and amaze the world.https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/30/pakistani-hackers-working-dnc/

I have a tip, an important one, though I cannot in truth call it “confidential.” Over the last few days, in fact, it has been blazoned across the samizdat press, outlets that your typical Times reader may never have heard of, or, if he has, that he reflexively discounts.

What’s it all about, Alfie? Computer hacking. A senior political figure threatening law enforcement officials. Destruction of evidence. Collusion with foreign powers. Financial corruption. Incompetence. Maladministration. Hot stuff.

Russia? Trump, Sr., Jr., or both? Nope.

It’s U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), former head of the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton groupie, and, right now, the Barbie Doll in the center of (at last!) a real scandal involving a Pakistani computer guru called Imran Awan, his wife Hina Alvi, various other family members, and the computer servers of various Democratic congressmen, including Schultz.

Last week, Awan was nabbed by the FBI at Dulles Airport trying to flee to Pakistan. His wife had already flown the coop for Lahore in March, taking $12,400 with her. (The poor thing forgot to read the fine print you see in all those travel advisories that it is a felony to transport more than $10,000 in currency without reporting it.)

Sunday is a big day of the week for The New York Times. Were you or (per impossible) I the editor of the Gray Lady, this story would have occupied a prominent place on the front page of Sunday’s edition. And sure enough, there it was, above the fold . . . Oh, wait, I was mistaken. It was not DWS after all. Silly mistake. It was actually an African herder surrounded by a bunch of goats. Also above the fold was a rare Times story lambasting Donald Trump. About Wasserman Schultz and the Iwan scandal there was precisely . . . nothing.

Not that the Times has totally ignored the story. On Thursday, the paper ran a deflationary column under the headline, “Trump Fuels Intrigue Surrounding a Former I.T. Worker’s Arrest.”

Isn’t English wonderful? “Trump fuels intrigue” is almost neutral-sounding (almost). But what does it mean to your averageTimes reader? “Trump fuels,” i.e., forget about it. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Savor the opener:

For months, conservative news outlets have built a case against Imran Awan, his wife, two brothers and a friend, piece by piece.

To hear some commentators tell it, with the help of his family and a cushy job on Capitol Hill, Mr. Awan, a Pakistani-American, had managed to steal computer hardware, congressional data and even—just maybe—a trove of internal Democratic National Committee emails that eventually surfaced last summer on WikiLeaks. It helped that the story seems to involve, if only tangentially, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman who is the former chairwoman of the committee and an ally of Hillary Clinton’s.

I add the boldface to highlight the tilt. Further along in the story, the Times goes full bromide: “few if any of the fundamental facts of the case have come into focus. The criminal complaint against Mr. Awan filed on Monday alleges that he and his wife conspired to secure a fraudulent loan, not to commit espionage or political high jinks.”

“Political high jinks,” eh? Cute. I think that qualifies as an example of (wait for it) floccinaucinihilipilification, “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.” Neither espionage nor high jinks. Really, nothing but the usual noxious pabulum served up by conservative news outlets trading in fuzzy “fundamental facts.”

Right.

Yesterday at National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy laid out the case with his usual thoroughness and precision. McCarthy is the former federal prosecutor who put the Blind Sheik, the chap responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing, behind bars, a fact a I mention lest you think he was just another knuckle-dragging right-wing neanderthal whom you can ignore with impunity.

Check your ‘cognitive privilege,’ all you smart people! Thomas Lifson

Progressives, crazed with identifying new forms of oppression attached to the currently fashionable catchword “privilege,” have finally embraced the stupid as a victim class. Hey, let’s celebrate stupidity! Just ponder for a moment all the potential grand marshals for the inevitable Stupidity Day Parade in New York City, once the stupid are organized into a grievance-powered pressure group.

And where else, but at a university, a temple of higher learning?

In this case, one funded by taxpayers. The following is from a genuine column in the student newspaper of the University of Iowa. A student suddenly has discovered that being smart is just like being white: an unfair privilege. Dan Williams writes: http://daily-iowan.com/2017/07/25/williams-what-is-privilege-and-what-do-we-do-with-it/

Any of us could have been born the unluckiest person on the planet, which, by definition, picks out precisely one person. But we all have the privilege of not being that person. We are all privileged by comparison.There are many kinds of privilege besides white privilege: cognitive privilege, for example. We now know that intelligence is not something we have significant control over but is something we are born with. We are living in a society in which success is increasingly linked to one’s intelligence. This is not to say that intelligence is the only factor that is important. All that is implied is that below a certain threshold of intelligence, there are fewer and fewer opportunities. These opportunities are being shifted upward to jobs that require heavier cognitive lifting or else are being replaced by robots. Thus, the accident of having been born smart enough to be able to be successful is a great benefit that you did absolutely nothing to earn. Consequently, you have nothing to be proud of for being smart.

Once we have admitted the reality of privilege itself and identified some species of privilege, we are better able to talk about the temperature-rising topic of racial privilege.

I am not certain if Williams is an actual sophomore, but he certainly is sophomoric. He understands nothing about intelligence, though he pretends he does. (In fairness, I was once an undergraduate college student intoxicated with the new ideas I was learning. And it was my privilege to learn from scholars immersed in classical thought not progressive propagandists.)

Intelligence is not merely an inherited characteristic that exists independent of effort, practice, and practical application. In fact, genuine intelligence is a skill, best analogized to athletics, the other thing that the University of Iowa is famous for. Skills of any sort demand practice, effort, critical self-evaluation, coaching, and many other requirements.

Athletes can be born with excellent physical endowments, but unless they practice and try hard, they will end up as duffers. Pete Rose became a baseball legend, known as “Charlie Hustle” because he proved the point that sheer willpower is a major factor in athletic excellence. True enough, I will never be an NBA star owing to my meager physical endowments. But I would have been a much less awkward and pathetic amateur if I had at least tried.

Germany: Muslim Biker Gang Vows to “Protect” Fellow Muslims Police warn of spiraling vigilantism, parallel Islamic legal system by Soeren Kern

Muslim vigilantes enforcing Islamic justice have become increasingly common in Germany. The government’s inability or unwillingness to stop them has led to the rise of anti-Muslim counter-vigilantes. Germany’s BfV intelligence agency, in its latest annual report, warned that an escalating action-reaction cycle could result in open warfare on German streets.

The self-appointed “Sharia Police” urged both Muslim and non-Muslim passersby to attend mosques and to refrain from alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, gambling, music, pornography and prostitution. In November 2016, the Wuppertal District Court ruled that the Islamists did not break German law and were simply exercising their right to free speech. The ruling, which effectively legitimized Sharia law in Germany, was one of a growing number of instances in which German courts are — wittingly or unwittingly — promoting the establishment of a parallel Islamic legal system in the country.

“Even if we still refuse to believe it: Parts of Germany are ruled by Islamic law! Polygamy, child marriages, Sharia judges — for far too long the German rule of law has not been enforced. Many politicians dreamed of multiculturalism…. This is not a question of folklore or foreign customs and traditions. It is a question of law and order. If the rule of law fails to establish its authority and demand respect for itself, then it can immediately declare its bankruptcy.” — Franz Solms-Laubach, parliamentary correspondent, Bild.

German Muslims have established a self-styled biker gang — modelled on the Hells Angels — aimed at protecting fellow Muslims from the “ever-growing hatred of Islam,” according to Die Welt.

The emergence of the group, which aspires to open chapters in cities and towns across Germany, has alarmed German authorities, who have warned against the growing threat of vigilantism in the country.

Muslim vigilantes enforcing Islamic justice have become increasingly common in Germany. The government’s inability or unwillingness to stop them has led to the rise of anti-Muslim counter-vigilantes. Germany’s BfV intelligence agency, in its latest annual report, warned that an escalating action-reaction cycle could result in open warfare on German streets.

The gang, which calls itself “Germanys Muslims” (the possessive apostrophe is not used in German), is based in Mönchengladbach and now has offshoots in Münster and Stuttgart. It was founded by Marcel Kunst, a German convert to Islam who also uses the name Mahmud Salam.

The gang’s uniform consists of a black leather jacket with a logo depicting a one-fingered salute, the “Finger of Tawheed,” which represents belief in the oneness of Allah. The logo also includes the number 1438, which represents the current year in the Muslim calendar, as well as the number 713, which stands for GM (Germanys Muslims), the seventh and thirteenth letters of the alphabet.

Police say they do not know how many people belong to the gang, which was established in May. The group’s Facebook page, which has more than a thousand followers, describes itself as a “citizens’ initiative” which advocates for the “peaceful coexistence between Muslims and non-Muslims in Germany.” A mission statement dated June 15 reads:

“Our organization has been founded for only one purpose: To protect and support our brothers and sisters from the ever-growing hatred of Islam!!! To all non-Muslims who read this post, pay attention. The following could change your perception of us!!! We respect every religion and, as dictated by the Quran, do not force our faith on anyone!!! We do not sympathize with the Islamic State and are against compulsion in faith and in marriage!!! ISLAM DOES NOT RECOGNIZE HONOR KILLINGS AS IS OFTEN SUPPOSED!!! The raised finger in our logo is not from the so-called Islamic State. In our faith it symbolizes that there is only one God!!! We have summarized 40 commandments from the Quran for you….IMPORTANT. Whoever gets into a fight on the road or elsewhere (except for self-defense) will be expelled from our group without further discussion!!!”

Although “Germanys Muslims” claims to disavow violence, police say that several of its senior members are known to be Salafists, whose aim is to replace liberal democracy in Germany with Sharia law. One of its members, for instance, was detained as a security precaution during the Tour de France, which passed through Mönchengladbach on July 2.

German police describe the group’s founder, Kunst, as an “Islamist who moves in Salafist circles.” In a video that is no longer available, Kunst called on the group’s members to protect mosques and Muslim women.

In a July 27 interview with Die Welt, Isabella Hannen, spokeswoman for the Mönchengladbach Police Department, revealed that police met with Kunst on July 5 and warned him that “vigilantism will not be tolerated.” They also stressed that the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force (Gewaltmonopol) is the exclusive domain of the state. On July 28, “Germanys Muslims” issued a statement saying that the group respects the authority of the state. “So far, we have no evidence that they are a danger, but we are keeping our eyes on them,” Hannen said.

What Kind of Iran Did the U.S. Just Certify? by Reza Shafiee

For past 38 years, Iran’s Islamist regime has demonstrated that it is neither able nor willing to reform.

The time for the U.S. jettisoning its toxic “nuclear deal”, and for regime change in Iran, is now.

The Trump Administration reluctantly certified to Congress on July 17 that Iran had continued to meet the “required conditions” for the 2015 “nuclear deal”, signed by six world powers. Despite the certification, US officials were quick to remind Iranian regime that it is not out of the woods yet. Senior administration officials made it clear that President Trump intends to impose new sanctions on Iran for ongoing “malign activities” in non-nuclear areas such as ballistic missile development and support for terrorism.

The Trump administration made good on its promise just a day later, by imposing new sanctions on five individuals and 14 entities related to violations of what “primary” sanctions.

“The United States remains deeply concerned about Iran’s malign activities across the Middle East which undermine regional stability, security and prosperity,” said State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert in a statement, adding that “Iran’s support for US-designated terrorist groups, militias and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as well as domestic human rights concerns,” remain unresolved in the eyes of US officials.

The mullahs in Tehran try hard to shift world’s focus from their unneighborly activities in all other areas, such as sponsoring terrorist groups in the region, including the Lebanese Hezbollah, and, with the help of North Koreans, manufacturing indigenous missiles that are gradually improving in accuracy and range, and last but not least, oppressing Iran’s population.

A range of US officials have made it clear to the regime in Tehran that, no matter how hard it tries to whitewash its image, such behavior is unacceptable.

US Defense Secretary James Mattis said in an interview that Iran is not trustworthy and by “far the biggest threat to peace and stability in the region,” and he gave credit again to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for effectively using economic sanctions, and “forcing the Iranian regime to the negotiating table.”

Army Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of the U.S. Central Command also emphasized again that the Iranian regime remains the main source of instability in the region. “The Iranian regime,” he said, “remains the most destabilizing influence in the CentCom region.”

Such sharp comments on Iran’s role in the region and beyond are not limited to that of Mattis or Votel. US officials are now openly calling for “regime change.” President Trump named the Iranian regime among the “rogue regimes like North Korea… and Syria and the governments that finance and support them.”

After Iran’s fake-democratic elections on May 19, in which the slate of possible candidates was cherry-picked by the regime, and the declared reelection of Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, US policy on Iran requires a major overhaul. The Obama Administration’s ostensible vain hope was that after the nuclear deal was struck with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in the summer of 2015, the mullah’s regime would suddenly transform and turn into a responsible first-class world player. Two years into the deal with the Iranian regime, as foretold, the world is not a better place.

Old habits die hard, particularly with the rulers in Tehran. Hostage-taking of foreign nationals, and especially US citizens, has been a habit of this regime since day one. On July 17, an announcement appeared that Xiyue Wang, 37, a Princeton University student pursuing a Ph.D. in Eurasian history, had been arrested in Iran and sentenced to 10 years in prison on dubious charges of espionage. He is accused of spying for the US and the UK.

Mr. McCain Goes to Washington He chose to operate like the standard-issue politicians he likes to rail against. By John Fund

In 2008, presidential candidate John McCain bravely proposed a health-care reform that Fortune magazine said was a giant step toward “laissez faire liberty” in health care. He wanted to empower consumers to find the best health care and even end the tax break for employer-sponsored plans.

In 2015, McCain joined all but one other GOP senator in voting to repeal Obamacare. The next year he ran an ad in his primary campaign against a Tea Party Republican claiming he was “leading the fight to stop Obamacare.” That ad helped him win 51 percent of the primary vote.

Just this year, McCain introduced a bill to “fully” repeal Obamacare and replace it with a “free-market approach that strengthens the quality and accessibility of care.”

Then, last Friday, McCain faced a choice on the Senate floor. He could vote with all but two of his GOP colleagues for “a skinny repeal” bill and get to a conference committee, where negotiators from the House and Senate could devise a bill that might pass both chambers. Or he could effectively leave Obamacare in place, dooming any realistic effort at curbing it given the uniform Democratic opposition to any real reform.

McCain sided with the status quo, killing the “skinny repeal.” Journalists rushed to gush over his vote, cast only a few days after a surgery to remove a dangerous brain tumor. The New Yorker’s take was typical: “Throughout his political life, John McCain has for many reasons enjoyed bipartisan respect and even reverence: his independence of mind (usually), his candor (usually), his decency, his love of country.”

McCain’s stated reason for killing reform was that the bill in front of him “fell short of our promise to repeal and replace Obamacare with meaningful reform.” True enough, but this is a perfect example of letting the perfect be the enemy of the better.

Obamacare is a disaster that, left untouched, will be saved only by a massive taxpayer bailout of insurance companies. Premiums on Obamacare exchanges have gone up by double digits annually ever since their formation in 2013. Out-of-pocket expenses — including copays and deductibles — rose 40 percent, to $2,649 per person on average, between 2011 and 2014. Hundreds of counties across the country are likely to have no health insurers offering plans on their local exchanges next year.

Far from being a modern-day “profile in courage,” McCain’s vote against advancing Obamacare reform represents a complete reversal of the position he won his Senate election with last year. John Merline of Investor’s Business Daily notes that “In the private sector, promising one thing and delivering the other could be referred to as ‘deceptive trade practice.’ For some members of Congress, it’s just another day at the office.”

Like every American, I wish John McCain the best in his battle against a brain tumor. But in what may prove to be one of the most important votes he has cast in his 35 years in Congress, he chose to operate like the standard-issue politicians he likes to rail against.

Promoting Endless Race Hatred, in the Name of “Justice” Inside the agenda of the Equal Justice Initiative. John Perazzo

It’s quite likely that you’ve never heard of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) and its radical agenda, but this Alabama-based organization has had its eye fixed upon you and your country for a very long time. For nearly 30 years, it has been working relentlessly to advance the notion that because the United States is so thoroughly awash in racist inhumanity, its culture merits no respect — and no defense — whatsoever. And EJI can’t be dismissed as some sort of fringe lunatic group that’s barely scraping by on a shoestring budget; its coffers are flush with cash. In 2015-16, one of the largest and wealthiest corporations on earth, Google.com, announced that it was proudly giving EJI a cool $2 million in donations. Half of that sum was earmarked to fund the creation of “civil rights landmarks” such as a large national memorial honoring the 3,445 black Americans who lost their lives at the end of lynchers’ ropes from 1882-1964, plus additional memorial markers that would be situated at the various sites where those lynchings took place.

You might wonder why EJI deems it necessary to now dredge up the memory of a horrific practice that last occurred in this country 53 years ago. One would think that an organization that truly cared about the well-being of black people, might be more concerned by the fact that in any given year nowadays, the number of black-on-black homicides that occur nationwide far exceeds the number of white-on-black lynchings that have taken place in all the years since the Civil War, combined.

Obviously, then, EJI’s motivation has nothing whatsoever to do with promoting the safety of modern-day blacks. The group’s chief objective, rather, is to incessantly scold and shame Americans for their racist heritage, and to thereby make them lose all faith in the very legitimacy of their society — thus setting the stage for its ultimate collapse. In essence, EJI faithfully follows the counsel of the late pro-communist guru of “community organizing,” Saul Alinsky, who urged his fellow radicals to seize every possible opportunity to “rub raw the resentments of the people,” and to “fan the[ir] latent hostilities to the point of overt expression.” In that spirit, EJI is devoted to fomenting perpetual discontent and racial grievance in the hearts of black Americans — under the righteous-sounding banner of “social justice.” That’s because black discontent and grievance are good for business, when your business is to tear a nation apart along racial lines.

It is highly noteworthy that while EJI depicts lynching as an exclusively white-on-black phenomenon, there were in fact 1,297 whites lynched in the United States during that same 1882-1964 period. Obviously, this doesn’t in any way diminish the horror or the evil of the lynchings that were carried out against black people. Nor does it negate the fact that lynchings frequently had a racial component that targeted blacks, as evidenced by the fact that blacks comprised nearly three-fourths of all lynching victims. But as David Horowitz has pointed out, a majority of black lynchings were not incidents where groups of whites randomly chased down black people and strung them up for fun. Most black lynchings — like most white lynchings — were a form of extrajudicial “frontier justice” where angry mobs of vigilantes essentially anointed themselves as prosecutors, juries, and executioners. The mobs dispensed with due process and took it upon themselves to kill people — white or black — whom they believed were guilty of some transgression. Sometimes the transgressions were serious, like rape, homicide, or robbery. And sometimes, blacks were killed merely for violating social norms, like showing “disrespect” for a white person.

According to EJI, the practice of lynching “reinforced a narrative of racial difference and a legacy of racial inequality” that remains “readily apparent in our criminal-justice system today.” This legacy, we are told, is reflected in the “mass incarceration” that “has had devastating consequences for people of color” — e.g., “African Americans [today] make up about 13 percent of the nation’s population, but constitute 28 percent of all arrests, 40 percent of those incarcerated in jails and prisons, and 42 percent of the population on death row.” As far as EJI is concerned, these statistics are evidence of the “implicit biases” that “have been shown to affect policing … and all aspects of the criminal-justice system” — and cannot be attributed to the demonstrably higher rates of criminality in the black community. In short, we are asked to believe that everything stems, ultimately, from the fact that “the United States has done very little to acknowledge [its] legacy of genocide, slavery, lynching, and racial segregation.”

The Equal Justice Initiative is the archetypal subversive organization of the American Left. It rejects the very notion of colorblind justice as nothing more than a means of perpetuating a racist status quo that favors whites over blacks. And the alternative brand of “justice” that EJI proposes, is concerned only with offering up rationales for interracial hatred that never goes away. In short, EJI’s agenda is to promote, in the name of “justice,” racial strife that tears America apart.