RUTHFULLY YOURS

Every time a Muslim terrorist shoots, stabs, bombs or runs over Americans, the default response is, “Let’s not jump to any conclusions”. That’s swiftly followed by media spin pieces claiming that the majority of terrorist attacks are really committed by white male Republicans and the Amish based on math so bad that even the world’s crookedest bookie wouldn’t go near it. And anyone who argues that the pattern of Islamic terror attacks is a call for common sense migration reform is regarded as a racist and a coward who wants to destroy the Constitution by blowing a handful of attacks out of proportion.

(And do you know how many people are hit by lightning or stung by killer bees every year.)

And whenever a suburban shooting happens, especially in a school, it becomes a clarion call to dismantle the 2nd Amendment. And that’s also backed by some of the world’s worst statistics.

The worst gun violence statistics trolls work for Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety. Bloomberg had bought Gracie Mansion out of the pocket change in his sofa cushion. But buying the office of mayor of New York City was a lot easier than his plans to buy the White House. Everytown was supposed to be a match for the NRA. But while the NRA represents gun owners, Everytown represents a lefty billionaire. And Bloomberg’s gun control trolls spent years dressing in drag to hide that simple fact.

There was Mayors Against Illegal Guns, but the group quickly began falling apart. Some members had to leave when they were caught misusing guns. Like Mayor James Schiliro who was arrested for waving guns around and demanding sexual favors from a young man. Then there was Ma Bloomberg’s Moms Demand Action. None of it worked. And Everytown for Gun Safety isn’t working either.

What does a fake group like Everytown do? It spreads fake statistics.

Everytown jumped on the Parkland, Florida school shooting to claim that there were “18 shootings at schools in the first 45 days of 2018.” If that sounds like a lot, you’re right.

But Everytown was being literally true, and false in every other way. There were 18 shootings at schools: counting suicides, accidental firearms discharges and shootings in the general vicinity of a school even when the building is completely empty. In around half of the shootings, no one was injured.

There was an interesting announcement on Wednesday for Ben Rhodes, formerly the Obama White House deputy national security adviser. Rhodes, you may recall, caught some flack at the end of Obama’s presidency for admitting to the New York Times that he was manipulating the media in his efforts to sell the Iran Deal: “We created an echo chamber,” [Rhodes] admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

On Wednesday it was announced that Rhodes is joining the board of directors of the Ploughshares Fund:

If you know anything about the Ploughshares Fund, and their role in selling the Iran Deal, having Rhodes on their board is a good fit:

In March 2015, Joe Cirincione, president of a foundation called the Ploughshares Fund, was interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered about the impending nuclear deal with Iran. “President Obama’s political opponents try to block everything he does,” he said. “But I think the center of the American security establishment is solidly behind the deal as it’s been outlined.” The interview was headlined on NPR’s website, “Nuclear Experts Remain Optimistic About Iranian Negotiations.”

Now that the Iranian deal has been finalized, so many discomfiting facts about the campaign to push it through a reluctant Congress have emerged that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. The latest revelations, however, are especially startling. On May 20, the Associated Press reported that Cirincione’s Ploughshares Fund apparently bought and paid for this favorable NPR coverage, giving the news outlet $100,000 last year and $700,000 in grants over a decade. Ploughshares also gave money to the Center for Public Integrity, which supports the influential nonprofit news outlet ProPublica, along with left-leaning publications such as Mother Jones and the Nation to beef-up their Iran coverage.

Every year in the United States, more than 600,000 prisoners wind up released from state and federal correctional institutions. According to the Justice Department, 67 percent of these ex-offenders get arrested within three years for committing a new crime. The federal government has sought for decades to solve the problem of recidivism by funding programs intended to lead ex-offenders to employment—a key factor in avoiding a return to crime—and analyzing their effectiveness. During 1971–74, for example, the Living Insurance for Ex-Prisoners (LIFE) initiative gave ex-offenders in the Baltimore area weekly income supports and help in finding jobs. The Job Training and Partnership Act of 1982 tried “vocational exploration” and “job shadowing.”

In 1994, Opportunity to Succeed provided job-placement assistance for “criminally involved individuals with substance abuse problems” in Kansas City, New York, Oakland, St. Louis, and Tampa. In the late 1990s, the Job Corps began providing “vocational and educational preparation coupled with job placement services.” Yet studies have shown little success for these projects in getting former offenders into long-term employment—and keeping them out of jail. “The accumulation of evidence during the past half-century indicates that ex-offender job placement programs are not effective in reducing recidivism,” wrote Marilyn Moses of the National Institute of Justice, the in-house think tank for the Justice Department, in a 2012 review of eight federally funded programs of this kind.

Government efforts in this area may have fared so poorly because it’s “not the government’s problem to fix,” as Brandon Chrostowski, a 36-year-old chef, puts it. “Since the beginning of time, it has been the people who move society.” In 2007, Chrostowski—who formerly worked in some of the world’s finest restaurants, including Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago and Le Cirque in New York City—founded the EDWINS (for “education wins,” Chrostowski has said) Leadership and Restaurant Institute in Cleveland to lead ex-prisoners into the culinary trades. A combination training course, restaurant, dormitory, and job-placement enterprise, EDWINS is doing what those federally funded initiatives have failed to do—reliably place the graduates of its six-month program into jobs, many for the first time in their lives. EDWINS operates its own dormitory for participants and some alumni; its curriculum includes a required seminar on French wines. Some 73 percent of its 150 “graduates” have found and kept jobs in one of the 60 Cleveland restaurants eager to hire those trained in the institute’s eponymous four-star French restaurant. EDWINS’s recidivism rate: 1.3 percent.

Columnist for National Review Andrew McCarthy spoke with Chris Buskirk and Seth Leibsohn about unpeeling all the layers of the ongoing story of the level of involvement of the Obama Administration in surveillance over former candidate and now President Donald Trump’s phone. They all discussed the Steele dossier, Nunes Memo, Grassley memo, and there is even a Gerald Ford joke worked into the mix. Listen to the podcast and read the transcript only at American Greatness.

Chris Buskirk: I am Chris Buskirk. He is Seth Leibsohn. Welcome back to The Seth and Chris Show. We’re joined by Andrew C. McCarthy. He is a columnist at National Review. He is a former federal prosecutor and he is the beneficiary of what I like to call the Andrew C. McCarthy Full Employment Act, which was one of the outgrowths of the Obama campaign and the Clinton campaign for President.

Andy, they’re never going to let you sleep as you unpeel the onion of the story of corruption during the final year of the Obama Administration, are they?

Andrew McCarthy: Boy, Chris, I will tell you, I have never, I’ve never seen a story like this that absolutely does not have a news cycle, maybe. I was a prosecutor still during the days of the Clinton, Lewinsky scandal, so maybe there was a story that maybe had a rhythm like this for a time but I’ve never seen anything quite like this. It’s amazing.

The bipartisan agreement to increase the Pentagon’s budget by $81 billion lets the U.S defense establishment fatten current programs and continue to do business as usual while avoiding questions about how to win wars. Such disconnection between ends and means puts bureaucratic interests over strategic success in war. Increasing the budget should be conditioned upon making sure that each increase actually contributes to victory in any theater of operations where the U.S is committed. And this means evaluating which missions—and in what ways—the dysfunctional parts of fiscal year 2019’s $678 billion should be reallocated

It would be difficult to argue that today’s budget does not contain at least $81 billion in waste. A few examples.

Since 2001, the U.S government has spent $2 trillion to $4 trillion—depending on whose estimates you believe—waging the “War on Terror.” The fight has been less than a shining success and, as currently conceived, is supposed go on forever. Why continue this hemorrhage of blood and treasure? Why not aim at ending it? What would it take to do that?

The Afghan war alone this year will cost at least $45.1 billion. Our military operations have no strategic objective, and no strategy for reaching any objective. Even continuing to prop up an unnatural, dysfunctional, Afghan central government seems less feasible by the day. America won’t be in Afghanistan forever. Figure out now how to leave advantageously.

Development of the F-35 fighter plane has cost at least $400 billion. The Pentagon says it needs another $1 billion to finish the plane’s development, and each fighter will cost $100 million. What does that contribute to prevailing in East Asia or anywhere else?

China’s J-20, roughly on the same technical level as the F-35, costs one-fifth as much. Quantity has its own winning quality. To achieve this unhappy balance, the U.S. government gave up on the best fighter in the sky, the F-22. If you cannot show how the number of F-35s you are planning to build before they bankrupt America can prevail in what theater of operations, stop pouring money into them, and figure out a way actually to prevail without them.

The news that billionaire investor Peter Thiel is decamping to Los Angeles to escape the stifling political conformity of Silicon Valley won’t shatter the republic, but pillars of the Valley would be wise to heed its warning. One reason the maestros of tech are becoming political targets is because they are seen as partisan and disdainful of middle America.

“Silicon Valley is a one-party state,” Mr. Thiel said last month during a debate at Stanford University. “That’s when you get in trouble politically in our society, when you’re all in one side.” He’s right.

Once such Valley icons as Intel and Hewlett-Packard were seen as nonpolitical. But the titans of recent vintage—Google, Facebook and others—are rightly seen as thoroughly allied with the political and cultural left. Google’s purging of conservative James Damore was something of a watershed of public recognition of this reality, and a declaration by a Facebook board member like Mr. Thiel is further affirmation of this bias.

Americans who once thought of Silicon Valley as a jewel of U.S. innovation are likely to turn against these companies if they see them as relentless political enemies. Mr. Thiel is giving his tech friends good advice.