RUTHFULLY YOURS

Just like the climate change cabal, powerful gun control interests hide behind the façade of children to promote their policy agenda.

The gun control lobby is borrowing the playbook from one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in history: anthropogenic global warming.

From engaging celebrity activists to bullying private industry to portraying opponents as murderers, the well-funded and highly-orchestrated gun control lobby is copying the same approach that has been successfully deployed by the international climate change movement to sell the dubious claim that humans are causing global warming.
Indoctrination and Exploitation of Children

Textbooks are filled with bogus scientific “studies” about global warming and dire warnings about its consequences. Schools commemorate environmental holidays like Earth Day, so they can push climate dogma. Teachers are encouraged to tag climate change in every subject area from science to health to history. And whoever disagrees, or even mildly objects, is portrayed as a child-hating monster. After all, who wants to deny a safe future for our kids? Climate crusaders are even using children as litigants in lawsuits to sue the federal government for violating “the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as fail[ing] to protect essential public trust resources.”

“The heart and soul of the Republican Party belongs to Donald Trump,” writes Lloyd Green. If so, the GOP has an odd way of showing affection. Green cites a lack of Republican criticism of Trump, the president’s continued popularity within the party, and Trump’s rescue of incumbent Nevada senator Dean Heller from a primary challenge. All true. But when it comes to the president’s priorities and the nationalist populist style of politics he represents, Trump and the Republican Congress could not be farther apart.

Trump won the nomination and the presidency after distinguishing himself from the party in four ways. Since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have tended to support global economic integration, immigration, democratic internationalism, and entitlement reform. And yet Trump opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, called to renegotiate NAFTA, and wanted tariffs on China. His 2015 immigration plan championed a wall across the southern border, workplace enforcement, an end to birthright citizenship, and a tripling of border and customs agents. He repudiated the Iraq war and questioned the future of NATO. He swore that Social Security and Medicare would be off-limits. His brashness, colorfulness, insults, willingness to transgress norms, humor, novelty, and lack of political experience separated him from the GOP pack.

This program and its avatar won three Great Lakes states that had been missing from the Republican column for a generation. Trump also came within striking distance in Minnesota and New Hampshire. Obviously we do not know the exact relation between Trump’s nationalism and populism and the roughly 78,000 votes in three states that gave him an Electoral College victory. But the unexpected shape of his upset suggests that the trademark Trump issues of immigration, trade, nonintervention, and retirement security played some role both in attracting support for him and depressing turnout for Hillary Clinton.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12080/john-bolton-national-security-advisor

Gatestone Institute is so proud that its chairman, Ambassador John R. Bolton, will be leading the United States’ National Security Council. We warmly congratulate both him and President Donald J. Trump on an appointment that is great for America, great for its allies and great for the free world.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sprawling investigation into “Trump-Russia collusion” has devolved into a ludicrous media spectacle, a meandering situation comedy “about nothing” that is in quest of something, anything to be about.

If, after all of these months of investigation, he has no evidence of Trump colluding with Russia, then the conclusion is clear: it simply didn’t happen.

In recent weeks and months, the media has been busy dumpster-diving in Moscow for Russian Facebook bots, and chasing hot tips from a Russian prostitute turned part-time sex seminarist resisting extradition to Russia from a Bangkok jail.

They have been faithfully “reporting” as fact every illegal, anonymous leak from the conflicted special counsel’s office about its supposed next moves, which they assure their viewers and readers are getting closer and closer to Trump’s inner circle. Because OMG! RUSSIA!

Meanwhile, Mueller’s crack team was reduced to scouring the seashores of Seychelles for the next nothingburger “bombshell,” and then (when that didn’t blow up) they promptly pivoted to investigating the ominous possibility that some officials in the United Arab Emirates may have sought political influence with the new administration. Can you imagine?

The absurdity of it all has finally reached a point where it is doing irreparable harm to the reputation of America’s once-vaunted justice system. (The reputation of the press is too far gone at this point to hope for rehabilitation.)

Mueller’s partisan inquisition is based on a pack of lies. Its remit isn’t tied to a particular statute believed to have been violated and it is written in an open-ended way that it is, in fact, unprecedented for invocation of the special counsel law.

It is time, somehow, to end it. Now.

Fifteen years ago, North Korea banned John Bolton from the useless nuclear talks. “Such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled to take part in the talks,” its foreign ministry declared.

North Korea had freaked out because then Undersecretary of State Bolton had called Kim Jong Il, a “tyrannical dictator” and life in the socialist hellhole, a “hellish nightmare”.

Bolton would later describe that as one of his proudest moments.

Back then, North Korea had defended the move by pointing out that Bolton’s views differed “from the recent remarks of the U.S. president”. And so it could claim that he didn’t represent the United States.

Fifteen years later the game has changed. Kim Jong Il is dead and the President of the United States has called his successor, “little rocket man”, a “madman” and “short and fat”.

John Bolton very definitely does represent the views of this president.

And to prove it, President Trump has appointed him as his new National Security Adviser.

Bolton knew then that appeasing the North Korean dictatorship would never work. Bill Clinton’s bad North Korean deal paved the way for the even worse Iran deal. It took a decade and a half for an administration to actually listen to him. And his appointment sends a clear signal to North Korea.

CAIR attempts to present itself as an organization defending freedom and faith…and fails

The slogan for last weekend’s Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Philadelphia banquet, “Defending our freedom, living our faith,” sounds like an innocuous promotion of all-American values. Conference graphics were flanked by the Statue of Liberty and a minaret, while the event claimed to promote the peaceful intersection of the American and Islamic identities, featuring a former Obama adviser and a comedian for the adults and Mad Science and story time for the kids. However, behind the event’s playful, unassuming façade lay a sinister truth: that CAIR and its banquet represent Islamist apologists.

The keynote speaker, Dalia Mogahed, is a former member of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and is now the director of research at the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU). ISPU claims that it conducts “objective, solution-seeking research that empowers American Muslims to develop their community and fully contribute to democracy and pluralism in the United States.”

Despite her organization’s ostensible commitment to Western values, we’re not sure Mogahed is the best choice for an example for American Muslims seeking to “fully contribute to democracy.” For instance, Mogahed once granted a friendly interview on a radio show hosted by the Islamist movement Hizb ut Tahrir, which advocates the “eradication” of Jews. In her interview, Mogahed insisted that sharia law promotes “gender justice.”

Yet Mogahed appears downright moderate in comparison to the CAIR banquet’s master of ceremonies, Zahra Billoo.

President Trump has said he is at last assembling a Cabinet team to his liking, and late Thursday he announced that John Bolton will replace General H.R. McMaster as his National Security Adviser. It is a solid and experienced choice.

General McMaster, like others, reportedly had fallen out of favor with Mr. Trump. But there should be no doubt that General McMaster helped the President through a challenging first year, which included an array of problems inherited from the Obama Administration, not least the North Korean nuclear threat.

Mr. Bolton’s critics often accuse him of belligerence and reactive saber-rattling. He is indeed direct. No listener comes away from a conversation with John Bolton in doubt about where he stands. That must include Mr. Trump, who had Mr. Bolton under consideration to be his first Secretary of State last year and has discussed foreign issues often with him since.

The charge that Mr. Bolton can be an unguided missile misconstrues his ideas and experience. He served in the State Department during both Bush Presidencies. Under George W. Bush he created the multinational Proliferation Security Initiative in 2003, a useful effort explicitly designed to deter North Korea’s efforts to smuggle weapons materials.

Those wanting an understanding of John Bolton’s thinking on security issues should read the many essays he has written for these pages in recent years—most recently “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First” on Feb. 28.

Mr. Bolton’s first job will be to prepare the President for an historic meeting with Kim Jong Un. We may assume Pyongyang knows now that bluffing the U.S. won’t work.

Even in the mostly egalitarian city-states of relatively poor classical Greece, the wealthy were readily identifiable. A man of privilege was easy to spot by his remarkable possession of a horse, the fine quality of his tunic, or by his mastery of Greek syntax and vocabulary.

An anonymous and irascible Athenian author—dubbed “The Old Oligarch” by the nineteenth-century British classicist Gilbert Murray—wrote a bitter diatribe known as “The Constitution of the Athenians.” The harangue, composed in the late fifth century B.C., blasted the liberal politics and culture of Athens. The grouchy elitist complained that poor people in Athens don’t get out of the way of rich people. He was angry that only in radically democratic imperial Athens was it hard to calibrate a man by his mere appearance: “You would often hit an Athenian citizen by mistake on the assumption that he was a slave. For the people there are no better dressed than the slaves and metics, nor are they any more handsome.”

The Old Oligarch’s essay reveals an ancient truth about privilege and status. Throughout history, the elite in most of the Western world were easy to distinguish. Visible class distinctions characterized ancient Rome, Renaissance Florence, the Paris of the nineteenth century, and the major cities of twentieth century America.

A variety of recent social trends and revolutionary economic breakthroughs have blurred the line separating the elite from the masses.

First, the cultural revolution of the 1960s made it cool for everyone to dress sloppily and to talk with slang and profanity. Levis, T-shirts, and sneakers became the hip American uniform, a way of superficially equalizing the unequal. Contrived informality radiated the veneer of class solidarity. Multimillionaires like Bruce Springsteen and Bono appear indistinguishable from welders on the street.

Donald Trump’s sins do not absolve you of yours.

Former CIA chief John Brennan is a liar. And he’s not the kind of garden variety dissembler that we see in Washington all the time, either. Rather, Brennan is the kind of man who feels comfortable brazenly misleading the American people about an attack on democracy, and then shamelessly lecturing them about civic decency.

You may recall, as director of the CIA, Brennan oversaw an operation of illegal spying on a staffer of the legislative branch of the United States government. At least five agency officials under his watch broke into Senate computer files, viewing drafts of a report on torture and reconstructing emails of at least one staffer. Brennan would attempt to cover up the agency’s actions by doubling down, blaming the Senate, and pushing to fire at least one staffer charged with investigating his agency.

It wasn’t until the CIA’s inspector general confirmed this wrongdoing that Brennan began negotiating with the senators about owning up to the spying (which we still don’t fully understand). Even then, however, he was lying about it to the public. When asked about the CIA hacking into Senate computers at an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations, the intelligence chief responded that “nothing could be further from the truth. I mean we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the – you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.” Brennan went on to contend: “Let me assure you the CIA was in no way spying on [the committee] or the Senate.”

Gina Haspel, Trump’s pick to succeed Mike Pompeo as head of the CIA, is a thirty-year veteran of the agency, one well respected by intelligence professionals from both parties. If confirmed, she will be the first woman to run our most important security agency. But despite this feminist victory, the Dems are likely to muddy the waters at her confirmation hearings by smearing her with allegations she oversaw “torture” at a black site in Thailand in 2002. Typical of what we can expect is the New York Times editorial titled, “Having a Torturer Lead the CIA,” even as the charge about the black site was shown to be untrue.

Once again, the party bereft of ideas and principle resorts to emotional obfuscation and accusation to advance their ideological prejudices. So, once again, it is necessary to lay out the facts and partisan hypocrisy behind the “torture” charge that has damaged our ability to gather the intelligence necessary to defend our safety and security.

Start with the imprecise or even willfully distorted language that always perfumes unsavory ideologies. In everyday use, “torture” can mean anything from a visit to the dentist to the sadistic mayhem of brutal regimes like Iran or North Korea. As a result, indiscriminate, lurid connotations and emotions attend the use of a word like “torture,” which of course is what makes it so useful for partisan smears.

Laws, however, have to be more precise. The statute concerning torture in U.S. law defines it as “an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.” The law further clarifies “severe mental pain or suffering” as “the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering.”