RUTHFULLY YOURS

In September 2014, members of Congress were informed that disgraced former Homeland Security adviser Mohamed Elibiary was being relieved of his duties after a long series of controversies, including the fact that his tweets cheering the inevitability of an Islamic caliphate were used by ISIS supporters for recruiting purposes.

Now Elibiary has gone after Egypt’s Coptic Christian community — again — after a prominent Coptic businessman expressed support for Donald Trump. Elibiary ominously warned in a tweet today that such support would be “not good 4 Copts in Egypt.”

“They should change their dinner’s name then from Coptic Solidarity 2 Coptic Fascism. Trump’ll lose in Nov inshallah. https://twitter.com/walidphares/status/746135994232016896 …

“#PT Where’s wisdom in most prominent #Egypt’n Copt endorsing most anti-Islam Pres candidate in US history? That’s not good 4 Copts in Egypt”

This is not the first time that Elibiary has attacked the persecuted Coptic Christian community.

In September 2013, Elibiary went after the Coptic Christian community for nurturing anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiment just a month after Muslim Brotherhood cadres had burned down 70+ Coptic churches in Egypt:

There’s an underappreciated side to the now-infamous New York Times Magazine story about Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. As shallow and self-important as Rhodes comes across in the article, he clearly knows his audience. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes said. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” Rhodes, like much of the media he spins, is a well-educated member of the upper middle class. He is a product of the same progressive cultural and ideological milieu, and he thus has keen instincts for what he can get away with—and no shame about revealing it.

Rhodes has good reason for such confidence. Surveying America’s elite liberal arts institutions, with a focus on Oberlin College, The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller illustrates just how unhinged most institutions of higher education have become. Schools like Oberlin have for decades rejected the tenets on which they were founded—namely, that exposing young minds to the Western canon would teach them to think critically and yield productive, well-rounded members of society. Instead, Oberlin and many other once-prestigious schools have become cauldrons of radical leftism. Heller describes students who simply refuse to talk with classmates of other races; scholarship students who view the same college that provides them with free world-class educational opportunities as a “tool of capitalist oppression”; and students who feel they are being oppressed because their classwork distracts them from social activism.

Heller’s account confirms what critics of campus environments have been chronicling for years: that “trigger” warnings must be slapped even on the greatest books to protect students from ideas that might upset them, and that “identity” is treated as a kind of knowledge in itself—classic literature, not so much. Students at many of today’s leading institutions no longer study the classics. What do dead white males know about microaggression or cultural appropriation, anyway? At Stanford University, students recently voted down an initiative to institute a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement for undergraduates. Today’s academy replaces the knowledge and wisdom gleaned from Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus with political correctness, multiculturalism, and infantilization—to devastating effect.

Supposedly liberal and tolerant campuses create “safe spaces” limited to certain identity groups and those of a certain ideological inclination. In reality, safe spaces are safe only from the diversity their inhabitants claim to cherish. Activist students decry institutions based in “imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy,” as one group of aggrieved black students at Oberlin described it. One can’t escape the impression that liberal arts schools are more focused on coddling the next generation of community-organizing social-justice warriors than on educating them.

U.S. markets are in for a rough ride today following the British vote for freedom from the European Union and its anti-democratic Brussels bureaucracy. Investors should look beyond the short-term uncertainty and transition costs and consider the significant competitive edge the U.K. gains with this massive de-regulatory stimulus. The EU did not make London a world financial center—smart British policy makers and businesspeople did. Going forward, the U.K. can likely cut a trade deal with the EU along the lines of what Norway and Switzerland have done. Even if Britain can’t, as Matt Ridley noted this week, “container shipping, budget airlines, the internet and the collapse of tariffs under the World Trade Organization” have made it “as easy to do business with Australia and China as with France and Germany.”

“For the first time in modern history, most workers and families will be able to file their taxes on a form as simple as a postcard,” writes House Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady, who is rolling out a tax plan today with his Republican colleagues. Mr. Brady adds that the “current IRS will not exist,” and that Washington’s 35% corporate income-tax rate will fall to a flat 20%, among other significant reforms.

A Journal editorial calls the Democratic sit-in disrupting the House of Representatives “the most disgraceful floor spectacle since Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner with a cane in 1856.” The editorial board adds that the Pelosi Democrats “are betraying the public trust they hold. The first obligation of political leadership is to maintain order, and better still if politicians show respect for the rules of the government to which they belong. Democrats will ride to November on a protest politics that is antithetical to self-government, but they do America no good by bringing the methods of the bullying radical left to America’s House.”

A 4-4 Supreme Court deadlock means that President Obama’s lawless immigration order “is dead for the rest of his Presidency, as it deserves to be,” notes a separate editorial. “He said multiple times that he couldn’t issue such an order because there was no justification in law and ‘I am not a king.’ But he later decided to act like a king anyway when he couldn’t get his version of immigration reform through Congress. His order has further poisoned the politics of immigration and assisted the rise of Donald Trump. Thanks, Barack!” …Meanwhile Peggy Noonan reminds us today that Mr. Trump is no Reagan.

Economic forecasting has never been easy, but it may now be more wrong than ever. “Unpredictability may be the new normal,” says Roger Altman, founder and chairman of Evercore, as “financial markets and financial investors are increasingly driving the world economy.”

“It isn’t every day that a Supreme Court Justice guts his own precedent, but that’s what happened Thursday when Anthony Kennedy voted to uphold racial preferences in admissions at the University of Texas,” writes the editorial board.

Note: Yesterday, I testified before the House Judiciary Committee in Part II of a hearing on “Examining the Allegations of Misconduct Against IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.”

The hearing, at which three other lawyers also testified, explored impeachment principles. Below is the written testimony I submitted prior to the hearing.

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Chairman Goodlatte, Congressman Nadler, members of the committee, my name is Andrew C. McCarthy. For over eighteen years, I was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, retiring from the Justice Department in 2003 as the chief assistant United States attorney in charge of the Southern District’s satellite office (which oversees federal law enforcement in six counties north of the Bronx).

During my tenure in the office, I investigated, tried and supervised the prosecution of numerous criminal cases, running the gamut from organized crime and narcotics trafficking through political corruption and terrorism. In addition, I held various executive staff positions in the office, including deputy chief of the appellate unit, in which I wrote and edited briefs submitted by the United States to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and prepared other prosecutors for oral argument (in addition to writing briefs and presenting oral argument in numerous of my own cases).

During my Justice Department service, I was twice awarded the Justice Department’s highest honors: the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service in 1987 for the “Pizza Connection” organized crime and international narcotics trafficking case targeting the Sicilian mafia, and the Attorney General’s Award for Extraordinary Service in 1996 for the terrorism prosecution against the jihadist cell of Omar Abdel Rahman (a/k/a “the Blind Sheikh”) responsible for (among other atrocities) the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and an unsuccessful plot to bomb New York City landmarks.

Since retiring from the Justice Department, I have been a writer, focusing on matters of law enforcement, national security, constitutional law, politics and culture. Concededly, I tend to come at policy matters from a conservative and constitutionalist perspective; nevertheless, I have always believed the application of legal principles and precedent should be a non-partisan endeavor, just as it was when I was a prosecutor. In my post-Justice Department career, I have written several books, including (in 2014), Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

In a nutshell, Faithless Execution argues that the Framers saw impeachment as an “indispensable” tool (to quote James Madison) in the constitutional framework of divided authorities, which obliges Congress to police executive overreach. The principal purpose of the Constitution is to limit the power of government to intrude on the liberties and suppress the rights of the American people. Separation of powers is the primary way the Constitution guarantees these liberties and rights. Thus, the Framers were deeply worried that maladministration — including overreach, lawlessness, or incompetence — could inflate the constitutionally-limited executive into an authoritarian rogue who undermines our constitutional order.

WASHINGTON—A divided Supreme Court Thursday upheld racial preferences in public-university admissions, a defeat to a yearslong conservative drive to roll back affirmative action.

Writing for a 4-3 court, Justice Anthony Kennedy found that the University of Texas at Austin’s challenged plan passed constitutional muster because it was designed in a narrow way to improve diversity on campus. The school’s plan considered race as an additional factor when evaluating certain black and Hispanic applicants.

Justice Kennedy, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, said universities are defined by “intangible qualities…which make for greatness.”

“Considerable deference is owed to a university in defining those intangible characteristics, like student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission,” Justice Kennedy wrote in a 20-page opinion.

At issue was a long-running lawsuit filed by Abigail Fisher, a white applicant who was denied admission by the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. She alleged that the state’s flagship university violated the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee by giving an edge in admissions to black and Hispanic students.

​​“I am disappointed that the Supreme Court has ruled that students applying to the University of Texas can be treated differently because of their race or ethnicity,” Ms. Fisher said in a statement issued by the Project on Fair Representation, an organization that financed her case and has sponsored other litigation opposing government programs that benefit minorities. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton is a seasoned liberal politician, but one with few core beliefs. Her positions on subjects such as gay marriage, free-trade agreements, the Keystone XL pipeline, the Iraq War, the Assad regime in Syria, and the use of the term “radical Islam” all seem to hinge on what she perceives 51 percent of the public to believe on any given day.

Such politicians believe truth is a relative construct. Things are deemed false by politicians only if they cannot convince the public that they are true — and vice versa. When the majority of Americans no longer believe Clinton’s yarns about her private e-mail server to the point of not wanting to vote for her, then she will change her narrative and create new, convenient truths to reflect the new consensus.

Donald Trump is an amateur politician but a politician nevertheless. He is ostensibly conservative, but he likewise seems to change his positions on a number of issues — from abortion to the Iraq War — depending on what he feels has become the majority position. And as with Clinton, Trump’s idea of truth is defined as what works, while falsity is simply any narrative that proved unusable.

Politicians glad-hand, pander, and kiss babies as they seek to become megaphones for majority opinions. But ideologues are different. They often brood and lecture that their utopian dreams are not shared by the supposedly less informed public.