RUTHFULLY YOURS

Our nation’s centuries-old commitment to free speech and religious liberty was already under threat. But it took men wanting to use women’s bathrooms and vice versa for the Left to truly show its hand, plainly and unequivocally declaring that American legal traditions should be set ablaze.

Yesterday, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights published a “Statement Condemning Recent State Laws and Pending Proposals Targeting the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community” — a statement motivated by new Mississippi laws protecting religious freedom and by North Carolina’s much-discussed “bathroom law.” The Commission claims that any law requiring men and women to use bathrooms that correspond to their biological sex “jeopardizes not only the dignity, but also the actual physical safety, of transgender people whose appearances may not match societal expectations of the sex specified on their identification documents.”

While this is standard leftist rhetoric — notice it omits any concern for women and girls who will be exposed to male nudity and could be rendered more vulnerable to sexual predators — what follows is perhaps the clearest and most unequivocal statement of radical progressive legal philosophy I’ve ever read. It articulates three principles that, taken together, would render religious liberty permanently subordinate to the interests and demands of LGBT activists:

There is a growing obsession with death in what passes today for our culture. This would not be a disturbing trend were it simply a fringe phenomenon. But it is ubiquitous throughout the culture.

The first series I discuss here is “Dexter.” I have watched the whole series (seven seasons, from 2006 to 2013), but it was brought to my attention by Stephen Coughlin in his “Strategic Overview: Understanding the Threat & Strategic Incomprehension in the War on Terror,” p. 6, a synopsis of the salient points of Coughlin’s Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad. Coughlin writes in “Strategic Overview”:

From Catastrophic Failure [p. 34], “The “Dexter Standard,” was written to highlight the ridiculousness of the constraints placed on counterterrorism efforts to understand the nature of the threat. It argues there should be no controversy regarding analysis of a self-declared enemy’s self-identified warfighting doctrine and explains this through reference to the Showtime series Dexter. In the fall 2011 season, the plot revolved around a serial killer who acts in furtherance of an idiosyncratic End-Times scenario based on the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. Upon recognizing this, inspectors used Revelation as an essential analytical tool. The necessity of using Revelation was never questioned even as some inspectors were either nominally religious or non-believers. No one suggested that only Christian inspectors were qualified to investigate.

(I review in part Coughlin’s book in “Interfaith Bridges to Islam” on Rule of Reason.)

“Dexter” is Dexter Morgan, a forensic specialist in blood spatter analysis working for a fictive Miami police department. On the surface he is a calm, likeable fellow and gets along with most of his police colleagues. But, in secret, he is a serial killer. In fact, he is a homicidal maniac. He is a kind of vigilante who kills serial killers, and causes them to vanish. The bodies of his victims, each of whom is responsible for horrendous crimes and is ritually murdered by Dexter, are wrapped in plastic and dumped into the ocean. The problem with this, at least with me, is that once the serial killers have been “stopped,” no one knows what has happened to them and whether or not they are still at large and will strike again after a puzzling hiatus. Early in the series some of the bodies are discovered by a diving class. The unknown killer is instantly dubbed “The Bay Harbor Butcher.”

Their crimes are rarely solved by the police. The public is left in the dark about the status or demise of the killers. The police are left with big question marks. Dexter chooses not to enlighten them. He continues to analyze crime scenes and eliminate the serial killers.

My second problem with the series is that Dexter admits that he is homicidal. He likes killing killers. But his killing is done within the parameters of a “code” established by his father, a former (and now dead) policeman. This figure appears occasionally in flashbacks as a real character in the series, but mostly as a ghostly embodiment of a “conscience” with whom Dexter has an ongoing internal dialogue. This device is in addition to the intermittent voice-over narrative of Dexter.

Dexter confesses to an overwhelming urge to kill. He began as a child with animals and graduated to killing men (and some women, particularly the nurse who allegedly poisoned his ill father). It is something he says he cannot control. He is only at peace when he has killed someone. His father taught him everything he knows about tracking killers, capturing them, and finally dispatching them without leaving a single trace of himself or of the victim behind. He adheres to the “code” but sometimes questions his father’s wisdom, and sometimes his ghostly father questions his adopted son’s contemplated actions.

While all eyes are on both parties’ primaries, constitutional governance — liberty, popular sovereignty, and state power, those vital things the Constitution is supposed to shield from encroachment by the central government — continues to be shredded.

Two cases in point: President Obama’s pressure on the states to drop sanctions against Iran, and his continuing scheme to dictate immigration law unilaterally.

The invaluable Omri Ceren (citing a Bloomberg View report) alerts us that the State Department has sent monitory letters to the governors of all fifty states “suggesting” that they review any sanctions imposed against Iran. Over half the states have such sanctions, targeting not only Iran’s nuclear work but the regime’s other weapons work (e.g., ballistic missiles), terror promotion, human rights abuses, detention of Americans, etc.

Explains Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies:

[These sanctions] are an essential part of the non-nuclear sanctions architecture designed to both deter Iranian illicit behavior and to safeguard pension funds from the risk associated with entering Iran’s economy.

Alas, any counter-Iranian measure with real teeth is certain to fly in the face of President Obama’s Iran deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. As I’ve recently recounted, the text of the JCPOA expressly indulges Iran’s position that it will “cease performing [its] commitments” under the deal if it deems the sanctions to have been “reinstated in whole of part.” That threat should only relate to sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program, but — as the Obama administration well knew — many of the sanctions against significant Iranian entities (e.g., the National Iranian Oil Company and Bank Melli) are based on activities in addition to support for the nuclear program.

The Obama administration’s immigration policies, including outrageous executive orders and other such directives, have hobbled all efforts at immigration law enforcement. “Surges” of unaccompanied minors across our nation’s southern border, the release of thousands of illegal aliens who have serious criminal convictions — for crimes of violence, including rape, weapons possession, drug offenses and even homicide — have made it clear that the term “immigration law enforcement” is now a virtual oxymoron.

Now the Obama administration, to the consternation of Americans across the United States, is preparing to admit at least 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States with less scrutiny than ever before. This was the focus of my April 15, 2016 article for FrontPage Magazine, “How Obama’s Refugee Policies Undermine National Security: Obama orders ‘shields down’ in the wake of a succession of deadly terror attacks.”

Furthermore, the huge quantities of heroin and cocaine present in towns and cities across our nation lay waste to the administration’s absurd lie that our borders have never been more secure.

On June 27, 2015, CAPS (Californians for Population Stabilization) posted my article, “Heroin Epidemic: The Real Metric for Determining Border Security.” In my judgment, the failures of our immigration system, while devastating to America and Americans, is actually a twisted “success story” for organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a laundry list of other organizations and individuals that are intent on flooding America with huge numbers of foreign workers, tourists and students to maximize profits at an extraordinary price: obliterating the “American Dream” and even, all too often, costing Americans their very lives.

Clearly the Obama administration has done more than any other administration to undermine the integrity of the immigration system and hobble any efforts at immigration law enforcement. The immigration crisis is a long time in the making. Indeed, prior administrations of both parties also bear responsibility for the immigration crisis that now threatens national security, public safety and the future of our nation and our citizens.

Diversity is a neutral term, no more positive or negative than its array of antonyms such as homogeneity and uniformity. Iraq is certainly diverse. So is Syria or the Balkans; Japan and South Korea are not. Yet uniformity seems a virtue in the latter while difference in the former has birthed tragedy.

In other words, diversity as a positive demographic idea depends on how it is manifested within a particular political landscape. In the U.S., diversity was traditionally a word less fondly used than unity. Our coins, after all, do not bear the motto E singulis plures. And the Confederacy failed in its effort to allow the states their own diverse cultures without yielding to federal unity. The German-led invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was certainly one of the most diverse coalitions in history, the invaders eventually including, besides the Germans themselves, Finns, Hungarians, Italians, Romanians, and Spaniards, in opposition to a mostly unified Soviet Red Army.

How, then, did diversity become the mantra of the American 21st century? A few reasons stand out.

First, during the 20th century the U.S. was steadily moving toward a multiracial, intermarried, integrated, and assimilated society. As a result, the 1960s idea of “affirmative action” had largely become played out after a half-century of canonized use; by the 2000s it was beset with a variety of class and racial paradoxes. The country was no longer the 90/10, white/black binary that dealt with the issues of the Civil Rights era.

College.

The university will either change soon or simply implode; its present course is unsustainable and rests on the premise that schizophrenic deans and presidents can still manage to write and say things to student cry bullies that they hope their donors and alumni never read or hear.

Colleges overcharge insolvent students through tuition increases far beyond the annual rate of inflation—the Ponzi scheme predicated on guaranteed federal loans that cannot be repaid by poorly educated graduates and drop-outs, many with little skills or demonstrable education. Obama has already promised relief to the disabled student debtor: expect that more amnesties will follow, probably predicated on the basis of race, class, and gender. In the meantime, the number of disabled indebted students will mysteriously soar.

In response, the university freely imposes speech codes, allows racial segregation, and winks at censorship of texts. It has suspended due process in cases of allegations of sexual assault, and allows 1930s-like violence (reminiscent of the Brownshirts) to disrupt public lectures and assemblies—if the agendas of the protestors profess social awareness. Only the hard sciences and professional schools in engineering, mathematics, and medicine have for the moment partially escaped the ruin.

Online colleges are far cheaper and more concerned with offering skill sets for cash. Their spread has so far been checked by the lack of general education enrichment, by the mythical college experience of physically living in or walking about a beautiful campus, and by the lack of prestige accorded a for-profit, online diploma. But if the traditional American college has largely given up on liberal education (due to its deductive and politicized mandatory –studies courses), if being on a campus can equate to an unpleasant ordeal of thought policing and mob rule, and if a diploma from a major university does not suggest that one knows anything about history, literature, science, or basic facts concerning our civilization, why would the university need to continue? Cui bono?

It runs now partly on past momentum, and partly because taxpayers and alumni donors still subsidize it. If a majority were to feel that their money only empowers fascism among faculty and administration, and if they were to conclude that students are not sympathetic in their indebtedness, but rather increasingly arrogant and ignorant in their passive aggressions, then they might well simply pull the plug on what is becoming their Frankenstein monster.

Tribe.

A multiracial, single-cultural U.S. was an historical fluke. No other society has ever quite pulled that feat off—not Austria-Hungary, not Rwanda, not Iraq, not Yugoslavia. To ensure multiracial harmony, cultural unity (or what is now dismissively written off as the “melting pot”) was essential.

Yet the Obama era has reawakened ethnic chauvinism and multiculturalism in a way we have never quite seen before in recent American history. Who would have thought that in 2009, the racist firebrand, tax-delinquent, anti-Semite, former FBI informant, and conspiracist Al Sharpton would become the chief presidential advisor on race, or that the attorney general would refer to blacks as “my people” and the rest of the country as “cowards,” or that the president would urge Latinos to “punish our enemies,” or that something chauvinistic called “Black Lives Matter” would consider a corollary ecumenical “All Lives Matter” as racist, or that “white privilege” would be a slur hurled against the largely working white classes by mostly minority and white elites in academia, politics, journalism and the arts?

One reason American politics is so polarized is that President Obama has been so cavalier about his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws he dislikes. On Monday the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to one of his worst abuses, his 2014 order that rewrites U.S. immigration law.

In United States v. Texas, 26 states sued to block Mr. Obama’s executive diktat that awards legal status, work permits and other government benefits to some 4.3 million illegal immigrants, with no consent from Congress. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction stopping this ukase last year, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. Those were narrow rulings, but the Justices enlarged the case to reach constitutional questions and will hear an unusual 90 minutes of oral argument.

We support humane and economically rational immigration reform, but Texas isn’t about the policy merits. The case implicates the Constitution’s separation of powers and the basic precepts of self-government. The Anglo-American legal tradition began as the English rebelled in the late 1600s against the Stuart kings who claimed the power to suspend or dispense with laws passed by Parliament. The first two grievances against the Crown in America’s Declaration of Independence concerned such “Abuses and Usurpations.”

The Framers wrote Article II’s Take Care clause to prevent the President from claiming the same lawmaking powers. The executive shall—not “may”—execute Congress’s laws faithfully, in one of the Constitution’s most specific instructions.

Congress has debated a more generous immigration policy during the Obama years, and all the while Mr. Obama insisted he couldn’t act alone. “I am President. I am not king,” he told Univision in 2014. “I can’t do these things just by myself. We have a system of government that requires the Congress to work with the executive branch to make it happen.”

But reform failed, and two weeks after the 2014 midterm election Mr. Obama decided he could act like a legislature: “I take executive action only when we have a serious problem, a serious issue, and Congress chooses to do nothing.” He has no such authority. CONTINUE AT SITE

I covered the confirmation hearings in 1991. HBO’s movie heavily edits history to favor Anita Hill.

The current battle over President Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland is child’s play compared with the lurid brawl over George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas 25 years ago. On Saturday, HBO marked the quarter-century anniversary with “Confirmation,” a retelling of how Judge Thomas, a conservative, up-from-poverty black jurist from Pinpoint, Ga., saw his nomination nearly derailed by allegations of sexual harassment made by Anita Hill, a black attorney who had worked for him 10 years earlier.

Ms. Hill’s calm, graphic testimony during the three-day hearing on her charges sparked a national debate about the then relatively little-discussed issue of workplace sexual harassment. Ultimately, the Democratic-controlled Senate confirmed Mr. Thomas for the Supreme Court, 52-48.
As a reporter who covered the at times stomach-churning hearings, I wondered how “Confirmation” would handle a story that ultimately boiled down, as the saying goes, to one of he said-she said—he denied all and stunned the senators by accusing them of staging a “high-tech lynching.” She said he pestered her for dates and subjected her to disgusting, sexually charged conversation.

Despite a surface appearance of fairness, “Confirmation” makes clear how it wants the hearings to be remembered: Ms. Hill told the whole truth and Mr. Thomas was thus a desperate, if compelling, liar. Her supporters were noble; his Republican backers were scheming character assassins.

This is consistent with how the media conveyed the story at the time and, especially, in the years hence. Yet immediately after millions of people witnessed the hours of televised testimony, polls showed that Americans by a margin of more than 2 to 1 found Judge Thomas more believable than Ms. Hill. Viewers of “Confirmation” were deprived of several aspects of the story that might have made them, too, skeptical of Ms. Hill. The most-salient of many examples: CONTINUE AT SITE

Florent Groberg is the 10th living service member that fought in Afghanistan to be awarded the Medal of Honor. As is a tradition that was pioneered by David Letterman, he was invited on to The Late Show now hosted by Stephen Colbert.

Groberg was in the eastern part of Kunar Province in Afghanistan on a security detail for Col. James Mingus, when he saw two motorcyclists head toward his group then run away. At that moment a man came at them from his left, walking backward. When Groberg approached him and struck him with his rifle he realized he had a suicide vest on.
Without hesitating he grabbed the suicide bomber and dragged him away from those he was protecting at which point the man detonated at his feet. When the dust settled, 4 were dead and Groberg’s leg was wounded beyond repair. However, his swift thinking saved the lives of 24 others.

At the end of his interview with Colbert, Groberg did something incredible. The interview was taped shortly after the Paris attacks. Groberg was born in France and fluent in French, he took a moment to give a personal message to the people of France.

Simply incredible. A true hero.

Watch Groberg’s incredible interview on Colbert: