RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a now forgotten column years back, a writer noted how times had changed in Britain since the 1960s. Back then, he wrote, it was the rock stars who filled the tabloids with their sex and excess. By contrast the British royals, raised on noblesse oblige, largely limited their public appearances to celebrations on behalf of hospitals, schools and other worthy causes.

The roles are now reversed. These days it is the British royals caught exiting nightclubs in the wee hours of the morning or captured playing naked billiards. By contrast, knighted rock stars emerge periodically from their landed estates to offer polite statements on the environment.

Something of the same has just happened this side of the Atlantic. At least since his victory speech promising to be president for all Americans—and notwithstanding the occasional tweet deriding “Saturday Night Live” as “nothing funny” or the New York Times as “failing”—Mr. Trump has mostly tried to sound positive and inclusive. Meanwhile, those who spent the 2016 campaign decrying Mr. Trump for his temperament and fascist tendencies are now exhibiting precisely those traits.
The most recent outburst came Friday night, when Mike Pence and some of his family took in a performance of the Broadway hit “Hamilton.” Having entered the theater to a mixture of cheers and boos, the vice president-elect at the end of the performance found himself lectured from the stage by the cast.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, who both wrote the musical and starred in it, tweeted that he was “proud” of the moment, which he characterized as “leading with love.” As Mr. Pence pointed out, cast members have a right to say what they please. But the rest of us likewise have a right to note how boorish and self-congratulatory they were.

Americans invented the core high-technologies that enable the modern digital age, but they didn’t get a large share of the jobs created by these new industries. High-tech is dominated by Asia, where governments target its growth as vital to their economic development. The relationship between industry and the state is tight. In countries like China, Taiwan and South Korea, government-corporate partnerships provide patient capital, skilled workers and protection for intellectual property.

Their progress has been remarkable. Between 1999 and 2014, the World Bank reports, global exports of high-technology products (computers, aerospace, electrical machinery, pharmaceuticals and other “R&D intensive” products) rose by about 220%. China’s share of that soared to 26% from 3%. America’s fell to only 7% from 18%.

American innovations from the 1960s, the peak of the government’s commitment to defense and aerospace R&D, created the basis for a trillion-dollar electronics industry. Researchers with corporate and federal support invented the key components: microchips, lasers, LEDs, flat-panel displays, memory chips, imaging devices and solar-energy panels, among others. Today, these manufacturing industries employ millions of Asians but relatively few Americans.

Asia got the jobs because Asian governments set out to build innovative industries. They helped license the technology from the U.S., educated engineers and skilled workers, subsidized joint ventures with American firms that provided crucial experience, and underwrote new industries with grants and low-interest loans.

Solar energy is the latest example. As R&D made solar cells commercially viable, American venture capitalists poured money into startups. But Asian companies, with government support, moved into solar beginning around 2000. They bought German technology and by 2007 had cut market prices so low that American manufacturers couldn’t compete. When those kind of jobs move overseas, it’s largely a one-way trip. Since Asia produces most of the components, bringing solar-panel factories back to the U.S. would be difficult.

Hey Democrats, want help to rally the country around Donald Trump? Here’s a great idea: Have a crowd of wealthy, out-of-touch Manhattan liberals (who can afford $849 tickets to “Hamilton”) boo Vice President-elect Mike Pence while the cast of the Broadway show lectures him on diversity.

The Democratic Party’s alienation from the rest of America was on full display at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Friday night. And the left seems completely oblivious to how ridiculous it looks to the rest of the United States. Professors at Yale and Columbia universities and other elite schools postpone exams and cancel classes for students who could not deal with the election results. Kids in Washington schools cut class with tacit approval from administrators to march in protest of the results of a free and fair election. School officials in Montgomery County offer grief counselors to “help students process any concerns or feelings they have about the election.” (Funny, I don’t recall anyone canceling exams or offering my kids grief counselors when Barack Obama was elected).

People in the American heartland see all this, and they shake their heads in disgust. Today’s Democrats have become a party of coastal elites completely disconnected from the rest of America. Doubt it? Take a look at a county-by-county map of the 2016 presidential election. You can drive some 3,000 miles across the entire continental United States — from sea to shining sea — without driving through a single county that voted for Hillary Clinton.

[Trump thinks artists owe him respect. They don’t.]

At the national level, the Democratic Party has been wiped out. Trump won five states that voted for Obama twice — Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida — pushing Democrats even further toward the coastal peripheries. As a result, Republicans now control the House, the Senate, the White House, and (after President Trump picks a new justice to replace Antonin Scalia) there will be a restored conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

If they do forbid waterboarding, they could broadcast McCain speeches 24/7…..prisoners would beg for waterboarding…..rsk

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) pushed back on President-elect Donald Trump’s past praise for waterboarding Saturday, maintaining that the U.S. wouldn’t use it as an interrogation tactic.
“I don’t give a damn what the president of the United States wants to do … we will not waterboard,” McCain said at the Halifax International Security Forum, according to reporters.

“I don’t give a damn what the President of the United States wants to do… We will not waterboard.” – @SenJohnMcCain #HISF2016
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) November 19, 2016

McCain: “I don’t give a damn what the [POTUS] wants to do, we will not waterboard… we will not torture people… It doesn’t work.” #HISF2016
— Michael Crowley (@michaelcrowley) November 19, 2016

“If they started waterboarding, I swear to you that we’d have them in court in a New York minute,” McCain added, according to TalkingPointsMemo.

McCain, who was held prisoner for more than five years during the Vietnam War, has long been a vocal opponent of waterboarding.

Trump expressed support during the campaign for authorizing any means necessary for interrogating terror suspects, including the use of waterboarding, saying in March that “waterboarding would be fine.”

McCain criticized Trump for his rhetoric on torture during the campaign. In June, McCain said there was no place for waterboarding in this country, noting it is considered a war crime and is ineffective.

“It’s not the United States of America. It’s not what we are all about. It’s not what we are,” McCain said then.

The last lynching in the United States began when Michael Donald, a 19-year-old African-American man, was kidnapped by two Klansmen. They forced him into the car at gunpoint, beat him, tied a rope around his neck, cut his throat three times and left him hanging from a tree on Herndon Street in Mobile, Alabama.

The search for justice ended two years later when U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions announced that the killers had been arrested. Local authorities had botched the case badly. But Sessions was determined to see that justice would be done. Federal and State resources were combined for a successful outcome.

The case brought an end to lynching culture and broke the KKK. But the man whose office investigated the case, who helped send one of the killers to the electric chair, would be smeared as a racist despite his history of fighting for civil rights and against racist abuses in dozens of court cases.

And it was those radical activists smearing him as a racist who had been exploiting black people.

The man named by President-elect Trump as his nominee for Attorney General of the United States had always played fair. Unlike so many on the left, he didn’t come wielding a racial double standard.

And that made him enemies.

When black voters complained about voter fraud being perpetrated, Sessions stepped in. The voter fraud was being committed by black activists. Among them was an influential figure whose past made him a hero to some. Ballots had been altered after voting. The defendants were caught mailing hundreds of absentee ballots by FBI agents. Others had been searching hospitals and nursing homes for the names of patients whose names could be forged on absentee ballots.

The abuses were truly despicable. In one case an African-American resident complained that her blind husband’s ballot had been altered and when she complained, she was warned to change her testimony.

The last best defense for voter fraud by the exploiters and abusers of black people was to cry racism.

The White House was racist. The FBI was racist. Sessions was racist. But the despicable lie was quickly shot down by the African-American public officials who had fallen victim to the fraud.

African-American Perry County Commissioner Reese Billingslea said, “It’s not a black-white issue — race has nothing to do with it.”

Federal bureaucrats have been in a frenzy of activity in Obama’s last months of office, pushing through 4,000 new regulations that will cost consumers more than $100 million. As liberal website Politico proudly reported, “Obama’s executive agencies are intent on pushing through the president’s priorities without congressional interference[.]”

Trump has promised to rein in our overreaching bureaucracy through attrition. His rival in the primaries, Jeb Bush, suggested three bureaucrats retire for each new hire. That might save some money, but it will not get the job done of ending corruption and bureaucratic tyranny.

We have elected a man famous for two words: “You’re fired!” For Trump to legalize that simple act, as necessary in the government as in business, will be nothing less than a revolution.

We have a VA that purposely lets vets die without medical care.

We have an EPA at war with the energy industry.

The Department of Education threatens public schools with loss of federal funds and mandates progressive lies about American history, teaching generations of schoolchildren to be ashamed of America and ignorant of our Constitution and our forefathers. Universities are forced by the DOJ to hire feminist and racialist thought police under an Obama bureaucrat’s interpretation of the Civil Rights Act.

We have an IRS that has a political enemies list its employees punish at the behest of Democrats.

Homeland Security and FBI are under a gag order that forbids them to use the term jihad or Islamic extremism.

Everywhere we look, regulations are strangling business, intruding into the personal lives and property rights of ordinary citizens. The cost to families is crushing. One among the hundreds of Obama’s new global warming regs: fuel-efficient furnaces will raise the price of furnaces almost $500.

To gain power, totalitarian movements always portray themselves as victims. And while they are in the process of abusing, they cry in front of the world posing as the abused. They stage “hate-crime” attacks against themselves because hate crimes are their political and cultural capital. When those hate-crimes don’t exist, they must be invented.

We are witnessing precisely this phenomenon at this very moment in regards to the myriad hoax “hate-crimes” that anti-Trump forces are manufacturing out of thin air and blaming on Trump supporters. The media are bolstering the entire hallucination process, with CNN leading the way.

Central to the whole narrative is the supposed “Islamophobic” anti-Muslim crime-wave sweeping the nation. The rumors spread and the media regurgitates the lies without any evidence to back them up. And then, after the hoaxes are debunked one by one, the media is, by that time, bored and no longer interested.

The latest “Islamophobia” counterfeit involves a Muslim student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (ULL). The Muslima alleged that her hijab and wallet were stolen by two white Trump supporters who were shouting racial slurs. The woman’s accusation incensed leftists and Muslims across the nation and the world, prompting the ACLU of Louisiana to issue a statement denouncing both the incident and, of course, Donald Trump. The investigation into the incident involved several law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. The Washington Post, New York Times and CNN, meanwhile, ate the story up.< But what happened to this Muslima’s story under tough police questioning? Well, the ULL student eventually broke down and admitted to police that she had fabricated the entire thing. By that time, of course, the media wasn’t too interested in such an innocuous little detail. Recently, The Huffington Post reported on an incident of “Islamophobia” under the headline “Islamophobia Just Drove This Boy And His Family Out Of America.” It was all so heartbreaking and unjust. The one little problem with the story, however, was that it never happened.

The Alt-Left is at it again. This time they are using their internet and media echo chamber to malign Steve Bannon, concocting a narrative that is false but endlessly repeated by their soldiers in the never ending campaign to malign conservatives and members of the Trump campaign. Playing the race card has become the modus operandi of the liberal/left political world.

Mr. Bannon, who has been appointed Chief White House Advisor and political strategist for Mr. Trump, has been a staunch and reliable friend of Israel and has hired a host of Jewish journalists during his leadership at the conservative Breitbart news magazine. He has been an ardent supporter of the Jewish state at the very moment many liberal Jewish organizations were condemning Israel and spouting fashionable anti-Israel criticisms emanating from the Left.

Like Mr. Trump before him, who for four decades was known as a champion of Israel, generous in charitable contributions to her, and someone who routinely hired Jews and accommodated their religious Sabbath needs, Mr. Bannon is likewise being accused of being anti-Jewish ever since he came on board the Trump Express to install a nationalistic and politically conservative legislative approach at odds with the liberal agenda.

The ADL (Anti-Defamation League) last week accused Mr. Bannon of anti-Semitism because, in their words, he is associated with nationalistic movements and anti-Semitic white supremacist groups. He is not associated with any anti-Semitic groups, though he is, like me, an American nationalist. After being forced to supply concrete evidence of anti-Semitism, the ADL backtracked slightly and only accused him of countenancing anti-Semitism.

In its founding years the ADL’s task was to fight anti-Semitism, but in the last few decades it has, like other establishment Jewish organizations, become an ideological arm of the Democratic Party, carrying its water for them, and viewing all of American life through the prism of a neo-leftist agenda no longer rooted in classical liberalism.

I do not agree with Donald Trump about much of anything. Early in the primary season, I wrote a little book titled “The Case against Trump.” I believe him to be morally unfit and intellectually unprepared for the office to which he has been elected. Which is why one of the most annoying of my tasks for the next four (one assumes!) years is going to be pointing out that while Trump may not be right about very much, his critics often are wrong.

Example A: Trump apparently does not want to live in Washington, and this has inspired a chorus of discord and dissonance to rival the oeuvre of Yoko Ono.

There is no particular reason for Trump to live full-time in Washington. Washington is a dump, one of the least attractive and least inspiring American cities. Trump Tower is a dump, too, a big vertical void in the middle of one of the least interesting parts of Manhattan, but Trump apparently likes it, and he has gone to the trouble of gold-plating his toilets, which you do not do unless you are really planning to plant yourself in place.

Trump’s hesitation to set up housekeeping in our nation’s hideous capital is not causing klaxons of alarum because people are concerned about good government. A nation genuinely concerned about good government would not have entrusted its chief administrative post to Donald J. Trump, a frequently bankrupt casino operator and game-show host. Rather, this is about Trump’s implicit declaration — one shared by his enthusiasts — that Washington is not the most important American city, much less the center of the world, which is where Washingtonians often mistakenly believe themselves to be.

About that much we can agree. National Review has kept its headquarters in New York for much the same reason: Politics should not be the central activity in our lives, or even in our shared public life, and consequently the political capital should be subordinate to the financial and cultural capitals. (Also, I suspect that while William F. Buckley Jr. was one of the most persuasive men of his generation, he’d have had an impossible time convincing his wife to live in Washington, even if he had thought it necessary.) Washington may desire to dominate our lives, but that desire can and should be resisted.