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Ruth King

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The Wages of Altruistic “Virtue” by Edward Cline

By on February 28th, 2017

The governments of Europe have chosen altruism as the basis of their foreign policy vis-à-vis immigration. Angela Merkel of Germany especially has implemented the Stoic philosophy of Epictetus (c. 50 – 135 AD) and Marcus Aurelius of enduring without complaint the evils of an invasion by Third and Fourth World Islamic savages, because it is their Kantian “duty” or decreed categorical imperative for Germans to surrender their country, their lives, and happiness to the welfare and contentment of the contemptuous poor, the “oppressed” and the “needy.”

One of Epictetus’s Stoical “Golden Rules,” loosely translated, was: Be prepared to be self-sufficient unto oneself. Which is ancient but good advice, except that in Merkel’s “new” Germany, an individual should also flourish enough to support his enemies, the “refugees.” He is prohibited from deciding what is “sufficient.”

Kant’s “Golden Rule” of the categorical imperative is:Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law. (1785 – Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals).Act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law of nature.

The etymological and ethical root of altruism is:

“unselfishness, devotion to the welfare of others, opposite of egoism,” from French altruisme, coined or popularized 1830 by French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857), with -ism + autrui (Old French altrui) “of or to others,” from Latin alteri, dative of alter “other” (see alter). The -l- is perhaps an etymological reinsertion from the Latin word.

The word was coined by the French philosopher Auguste Comte in French, as altruisme, for an antonym of egoism.

So much for this brief lesson in philosophy. What have Europeans (and to a lesser extent, Americans) gained by their experiment in unlimited immigration altruism? The wages are high – in death, destruction, rape, crime, and parasitism by the invading savages as a “right” or “entitlement.” Let’s take a look of the benefits of personal and national selflessness as a virtue. Keep in mind, selflessness is also a paramount Christian virtue even among atheists and agnostics. Also, the “refugees welcome” crowd, at least in Europe, is shrinking:

Rapes in Sweden have skyrocketed by a shocking 1,472% since the mid-70’s, with 6,620 sexual assaults being reported to police in 2014 compared to just 421 in 1975. The country is now known as the rape capital of the west.

“77.6 percent of the country’s rapists are identified as “foreigners” (and that’s significant because in Sweden, “foreigner” is generally synonymous with “immigrant from Muslim country”), writes Selwyn Duke. “And even this likely understates the issue, since the Swedish government — in an effort to obscure the problem — records second-generation Muslim perpetrators simply as “Swedes.”

Rapes occurring in and around migrant camps are now so prevalent, that authorities in Germany are covering up details of incidents so as not to “legitimize” critics of mass immigration.

On the other hand, Swedes are awakening to their dilemma.

Wennerlund didn’t mind Christian immigrants, but he believes it’s not working with the Muslims, even though Sweden has had a Muslim population for decades. “Often they don’t want to come here and change,” he says. “They want to change us. And we don’t want to be changed. So that’s a conflict.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

America and the Liberal International Order By Michael Anton

By on February 28th, 2017

Note: Michael Anton is Deputy Assistant to the President for Strategic Communications, National Security Council. This article was prepared before the author accepted his current position. The views here reflect only those of the author. They do not represent the views of the Trump administration, the National Security Advisor, or the U.S. government.

In a year of upset political apple carts, none were rattled harder, or lost more fruit, than traditional notions of American foreign policy. Donald Trump shocked a lot of people over a lot of issues. But no anti-Trump Republican economists orchestrated elaborate letters, with hundreds of signatories, to swear they would never serve in a Trump administration. No dissident Republican trade negotiators ostentatiously switched parties and vowed to support Trump’s opponent. Nor did Republican immigration experts flood the cable networks to renounce and denounce their party’s nominee.

Yet all of the above—and more—happened with respect to foreign policy. The specific reasons why Republican foreign policy operatives chose to denounce Trump’s plans may never be clear. We shall instead explore what we think they had in mind.

Nearly all opponents of President Trump’s foreign policy, from conservatives and Republicans to liberals and Democrats, claim to speak up for the “liberal international order.” A word may have been different here or there (e.g., “world order”) but the basic charge was always the same. Whether voiced by Fareed Zakaria and Yascha Mounk on the left, Walter Russell Mead in the center, Eliot Cohen and Robert Zoellick on the right, or Robert Kagan on the once-right-now-left, the consensus was clear: Trump threatens the international liberal order.
Guarding the Liberal International Order

Sticklers may notice two problems with this argument. First, while a few critics hung their anti-Trumpism on the peg of “temperament,” most preferred to charge Trump with policy recklessness—yet then went on to insist that Trump had no policies at all. We shall leave this objection aside as excusable political hyperbole.

The second problem is much greater: why is it that no one quite got around to saying what, exactly, the “liberal international order” is? One must therefore infer a definition from their complaints, and I shall try to do so fairly, the goal being to understand these writers as they understand themselves.

In ideological terms, the liberal international order (hereafter “LIO”) is the post–World War II consensus among the victorious great powers (excluding the Soviet Union, and later mainland China) on (in descending order of consensus) security, trade, and internal political arrangements. In more concrete terms, it is the constellation of institutions built to further that consensus: the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, and other, later entrants such as the World Bank.

Celebrants of the LIO seem to think that no explanation of its utility or value is necessary. Affirmation is enough because its goodness is self-evident. Trump’s implicit questioning of that order therefore sounds blasphemous. And clerics tend to confront blasphemy not with patient clarification but with strident denunciation.

That the foreign policy establishment of the United States is a kind of priesthood is not necessarily a bad thing. Priests can be useful. Aristotle identifies the priestly function as one of six elements vital to his best regime. More to the point, in every regime, strategy is determined and diplomacy is conducted by an elite. Thinkers and doers from Plato to Machiavelli to the American Founders saw no way around this reality and no reason to find it unjust or worrisome.

Yet the arrangement becomes a problem when the elite forgets or at least can no longer articulate the original rationale for the policies it still advocates. That is the situation American foreign policy has faced since the end of the Cold War, if not before—a situation Trump pointed out in often pungent language.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Our World: Perez, Ellison and the meaning of antisemitism ByCaroline B. Glick The Democrats are in a dangerous place for themselves, for the US and for the American Jewish community.

By on February 28th, 2017

Was former secretary of labor and assistant attorney-general Tom Perez’s victory over Congressman Keith Ellison over the weekend in the race to serve as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee a victory of centrist Democrats over radical leftists in the party? That is how the mainstream media is portraying Perez’s victory.

Along these lines, Prof. Allen Dershowitz, a lifelong Democrat who promised to quit the party if Ellison was elected due to his documented history of antisemitism and hostility toward Israel, hailed Perez’s election. Speaking to Fox News, Dershowitz said that Perez’s election over Ellison “is a victory in the war against bigotry, antisemitism, the anti-Israel push of the hard Left within the Democratic Party.”There are two problems with Dershowitz’s view. First, Perez barely won. Ellison received nearly half the votes in two rounds of voting.

Tipping his hat to Ellison’s massive popularity among the party’s leadership and grassroots, Perez appointed the former Nation of Islam spokesman to serve as deputy DNC chairman as soon as his own victory was announced.

There is a good reason that Perez is so willing to cooperate with Ellison in running the DNC. And this points to the second problem with the claim that Perez’s election signals a move toward the center by Democratic leaders.

Perez is ready to cooperate with Ellison because the two men have the same ideological worldview and the same vision for the Democratic Party. As Mother Jones explained, “There’s truly not much ideological distance between the two.”

Far from being a victory for the centrist forces in the party, Perez’s win marks the solidification of the far Left’s control over the party of Harry Truman. Only hard leftists participated in a meaningful way in the race for leadership of the second largest party in America – a party that less than a decade ago controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.

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Meet the terrorist behind the next women’s march By Kyle Smith

By on February 28th, 2017

Here’s the left’s next great idea for bringing down President Trump: another women’s march. Which means another public instance of Trump haters shouting slogans to one another and mistaking it for constructive politics. What progressives need to defeat Trump is outreach, but all they have is outrage.

On March 8, organizers seem to be aiming for a different vibe than the librarians-in-pussy-hats element that made the first women’s march after Trump’s inauguration so adorable.

Instead of milling around Washington, organizers have in mind a “general strike” called the Day without a Woman. In a manifesto published in The Guardian on Feb. 6, the brains behind the movement are calling for a “new wave of militant feminist struggle.” That’s right: militant, not peaceful.

The document was co-authored by, among others, Rasmea Yousef Odeh, a convicted terrorist.

Odeh, a Palestinian, was convicted in Israel in 1970 for her part in two terrorist bombings, one of which killed two students while they were shopping for groceries. She spent 10 years in prison for her crimes. She then managed to become a US citizen in 2004 by lying about her past (great detective work, INS: Next time, use Google) but was subsequently convicted, in 2014, of immigration fraud for the falsehoods.

However, she won the right to a new trial (set for this spring) by claiming she had been suffering from PTSD at the time she lied on her application. Oh, and in her time as a citizen, she worked for a while as an ObamaCare navigator. You can see why she’s a hero to the left.

Rasmea Yousef Odeh spent 10 years in prison for her part in two terrorist bombings AP

Another co-author, Angela Davis, is a Stalinist professor and longtime supporter of the Black Panthers. Davis is best known for being acquitted in a 1972 trial after three guns she bought were used in a courtroom shootout that resulted in the death of a judge. She celebrated by going to Cuba.

A third co-author, Tithi Bhattacharya, praised Maoism in an essay for the International Socialist Review, noting that Maoists are “on the terrorist list of the US State Department, Canada, and the European Union,” which she called an indication that “Maoists are back in the news and by all accounts they are fighting against all the right people.” You know you’re dealing with extremism when someone admits to hating Canada.

The International Women’s Strike is meant to be a grassroots affair, with womensmarch.com promising more information about how to participate in local protests across the US. Women around the country are being urged to walk off their jobs and join a demonstration near them.

Angela Davis Getty Images

According to The Guardian piece, women should spend their day “blocking roads, bridges, and squares, abstaining from domestic, care and sex work” and “boycotting” pro-Trump businesses. Also every woman is supposed to wear red in solidarity.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: UNRWA: The Scam That Keeps on Scamming by Ruth King

By on February 27th, 2017

Many years ago, when I graduated from college, a friend and classmate got her first job in the visitor’s service of the United Nations. There were two perks. One was a free parking space and the other privileges to the debates in the General Assembly. Thanks to this I attended many sessions in the gallery as her guest. The “distinguished” members most often started their disquisitions by telling a humorous anecdote from their respective nations. They suffered greatly in translation but I can offer the punch line to a real UN joke–namely The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, UNRWA was established by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) of 8 December 1949 to carry out relief and works programs for Palestine refugees. The Agency began operations on 1 May 1950. In June 2017, its mandate and funding come up for review. It deserves to be shut down.

First of all, it is a numbers racket. According to its own statement: “When the Agency began operations in 1950, it was responding to the needs of about 750,000 Palestine refugees. Today, some 5 million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA services.”

Even if we accept the questionable number of 750,000 Arabs who left Israel, how is it that sixty-seven years later–again from the home page, we read: “UNRWA is unique in terms of its long-standing commitment to one group of refugees. It has contributed to the welfare and human development of four generations of Palestine refugees, defined as ‘persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.’ The descendants of Palestine refugee males, including legally adopted children, are also eligible for registration.“

Again, in its words: “UNRWA is confronted with an increased demand for services resulting from a growth in the number of registered Palestine refugees, the extent of their vulnerability and their deepening poverty.”

Since World War Two, hundreds of millions of displaced persons from every continent have been relocated. They have had to learn new languages, new alphabets and adapt to new cultural mores. They have become participants in the politics of their adopted countries. How is it then that only Palestinian Arabs merit assistance? Furthermore, why has the status of “refugee” become a heritable entitlement, bequeathed from generation to generation?

When members of the media traipse through the camps, they are seldom shown nearby housing with facilities and running water. Instead local Arabs stage themselves near running sewers, cynically using children as props. As soon as the journalists move on to the next stop in their bash-Israel “fact finding” tour, the cast moves back to their updated lodgings.

Today the world is confronted and affronted by a tsunami of refugees from the Middle East. They flee jihad and tribal and civil warfare. The demand for haven and social services is enormous and yet UNRWA services only Palestinian Arabs in camps in Gaza (why Gaza, which is now ruled by Arabs?), Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

In the midst of the mayhem in Syria, on Feb. 1, 2017 Mohammed Abdi Adar, a Somali national, assumed his duties as Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in the Syrian Arab Republic. He describes his mandate thus: “It is an important opportunity to serve Palestine refugees in Syria,” said Mr. Abdi Adar. “I look forward to working with the Syrian Government and other partners to help alleviate the suffering of Palestine refugees, who like the Syrians have experienced the dire consequences of the crisis over the last six years.” Why only the “Palestinians?” This is a form of “profiling” that raises no hackles among Western hypocrites.

And UNWRA’s so called relief is a canard since in its own words, conditions have worsened: “Over the years, these camps have transformed from temporary ‘tent cities’ into hyper-congested masses of multi-story buildings with narrow alleys, characterized by high concentrations of poverty and extreme overcrowding. The camps are considered to be among the densest urban environments in the world, but because camp structures were built for temporary use, over the decades the buildings have become overcrowded, critically substandard and in many cases life-threatening.”

Why after 67 years are Palestinian Arabs a priority when hundreds of thousands are facing death and violence perpetrated by Arabs on other Arabs?

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Meet the DNC’s New Organizer in Chief Tom Perez is both a hard-core progressive and a hard-fighting party insider. By John Fund

By on February 27th, 2017

The election of a new chair of the Democratic National Committee on Saturday was clearly an inside-baseball affair. Only 17 percent of Democratic voters had even heard it was happening, according to a new Morning Consult poll.

Media analysts breathlessly touted the race as one between Representative Keith Ellison, pushed by the forces behind Bernie Sanders’s insurgent challenge last year, and Tom Perez, a former secretary of labor who was supported by Joe Biden and effusively praised by Barack Obama and other establishment voices.

In reality, both candidates are hard-core progressives committed to the party’s scorched-earth opposition to the Trump administration. As Jeff Stein of Vox noted:

The purpose of this fight can appear somewhat mystifying. Perez was one of the most left-leaning members of Obama’s Cabinet, muting the contest’s ideological stakes by making it hard to understand what precise ideological division the party’s two factions are fighting over.

The more salient difference was in the candidates’ varying degrees of professionalism. Ellison, a former community organizer in Minneapolis, simply didn’t convince enough DNC members that he could raise enough money or manage the infrastructure that the party needs to rebuild if it is going to climb out of its electoral hole.

Even though Perez has won only one election in his life (for a Maryland county council), he convinced party insiders that he could rebuild the party’s cadre.

Conservatives need to pay attention, now that the “whip-smart” Perez (Obama’s words) is running the DNC.

“After nearly a decade as a powerful federal bureaucrat, Tom Perez will finally be able to be out in the open about using the law to help Democrats,” Christian Adams, a former career Department of Justice lawyer who worked for Perez and now runs the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation, told me. “At Justice, he used the law to help Democrats win elections. Now he can finally be honest about his agenda.”

Adams was one of several critics at Justice who observed just how political and biased Perez could be as he headed the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ from 2009 to 2013. In July 2012, a federal district-court judge concluded that the DOJ’s own documents in the New Black Panther Party case “appeared to contradict” the sworn testimony of Perez before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The New Black Panthers stood accused in early 2009 of being behind a blatant form of voter intimidation after two of their members stood outside a Philadelphia polling place with nightsticks yelling racial epithets at both black and white voters. After the case was effectively dismissed at the very moment it was on the verge of victory by Justice, the watchdog group Judicial Watch was refused access to documents on the case it had requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The case was heard by Judge Reggie Walton, the same federal judge who presided over the conviction of Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

Walton awarded attorneys’ fees and costs to Judicial Watch for Justice’s withholding of the documents. He also made it clear that while the original decision to dismiss the New Black Panther case pre-dated Perez’s appointment to the Justice Department, his direct involvement in the case’s aftermath may have contributed to a cover-up of the decision’s origins. Walton wrote:

The documents reveal that political appointees within DOJ were conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims in that case, which would appear to contradict Assistant Attorney General Perez’s testimony that political leadership was not involved in that decision.

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Palestinians: Why a “Regional Peace Process” Will Fail by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on February 27th, 2017

Many Palestinians sometimes refer to Arab leaders and regimes as the “real enemies” of the Palestinians. They would rather have France, Sweden, Norway and Belgium oversee a peace process with Israel than any of the Arab countries.

Hani al-Masr, a prominent Palestinian political analyst, echoed this skepticism. He, in fact, believes the Arabs want to help Israel “liquidate” the Palestinian cause.

The Jordanians are worried that a “regional solution” would promote the idea of replacing the Hashemite kingdom with a Palestinian state. Former Jordanian Minister of Information Saleh al-Qallab denounced the talk of a “regional conference” as a “poisonous gift and conspiracy” against Jordan and the Palestinians.

The Lebanese have for decades dreamed of the day they could rid themselves of the Palestinian refugee camps and their inhabitants, who have long been subjected to apartheid and discriminatory laws.

Israel as a Jewish state is anathema to Palestinian aspirations. Any Arab or Palestinian leader who promotes such compromise is taking his life in his hands. And Palestinian history will record him as a “traitor” who sold out to the Jews and surrendered to American and Israeli pressure.

Abbas and his Ramallah cohorts are already up at night worrying about the talking between Israel and some Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Such “normalization”, in the view of the PA, is to be reserved for after Israel submits to its demands.

Any “regional solution” involving Arab countries would be doomed to fail because the Palestinians and their Arab brethren hate each other. Any solution offered by the Arab governments will always be regarded as an “American-Zionist dictate.”

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The ISIS Terrorist the Left Loved A left-wing hero kills and dies for ISIS. Daniel Greenfield

By on February 27th, 2017

Before Jamal Al-Harith blew himself up near Mosul, he had been a celebrity and a hero of the left. He had received a million pounds for his “suffering” at Gitmo and been impersonated on stage.

He was played by Shaun Parkes at London’s New Ambassadors Theatre and by Andrew Stewart-Jones in the New York production at the Bleecker Street Theatre. The play was Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. The title was an interesting one considering that the play was defending Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists who had been fighting for the freedom to murder non-Muslims and oppress women.

Andrew Stewart-Jones has a role on Gotham, Shaun Parkes has appeared on The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells and Jamal Al-Harith headed off to join ISIS where he got to star in his own martyrdom video.

As Shakespeare’s Jacques declaims, “All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.” Jamal Al-Harith was a better actor than any of the actors who played him. And he knew that the secret to great theater is to bring down the house. But he also had an audience of leftists eager to suspend disbelief when an Islamic terrorist is lying to them.

A year before the 7/7 bombings tore apart London, West End theatergoers were treated to these sad sack stories of Muslim terrorists with British citizenship being detained at Gitmo. Then it was the turn of New Yorkers at a theater barely a mile from Ground Zero under the auspices of the Culture Project and its mission of “socially conscious theater”. And what’s more socially conscious than Islamic terrorism?

The actors playing the ISIS killer, in a production Variety dubbed a “chilling expose of the U.S. government policies”, recited his lies that he only went “to find out about the religion”. In the version of the terrorist’s fairy tale distributed by the left from the Guardian to the New York Times, he was actually a victim of the Taliban, wrongly detained and tortured by the Bush administration.

Night after night, melancholy actors in orange jumpsuits wearing steel chains, declaimed Al-Harith’s lies and excuses to lefty audiences who fueled their outrage with imaginary Muslim suffering. Meanwhile Americans, Brits, Iraqis and Afghans were being massacred by the friends of their real life counterparts.

Progressive theatergoers glowed when Al-Harith compared his time in Gitmo to the suffering of concentration camp inmates. “I got put in isolation for because I refused to wear my wrist band. I said, ‘In concentration camps they were given tattoos, and now they’ve given us these, it’s just the same really.'” And who could be more similar to a Jewish concentration camp inmate than a member of an Islamic ideology that believes in exterminating all the Jews?

How many of them cheered when he declared, “You know, I’ll walk out from here when I leave free, because I haven’t done anything at all.”

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Aliens Trespassing Sen. Schumer, his congressional cohorts, and leftist hypocrisy. Michael Cutler

By on February 27th, 2017

In order to minimize the dangers posed by aliens who run our borders and evade the inspection process, open borders / immigration anarchists insist that such illegal aliens are simply entering “Undocumented.” However, the unmistakeable truth is that these aliens are, in the parlance of immigration enforcement personnel, “Entering Without Inspection” (EWI).

For decades, beginning with the duplicitous efforts of President Jimmy Carter: Originator Of The Orwellian Term ‘Undocomented Immigrant’ to blur the distinction between lawful immigrants and illegal aliens, globalists inside as well as outside our government, have sought to undermine the enforcement of our immigration laws.

Recently, many journalists have whined that illegal aliens who purportedly have no “serious criminal histories” have been arrested by ICE under the Trump administration, ignoring that aliens who enter the United States illegally or violate the terms of lawful admissions are subject to arrest and removal (deportation) irrespective of whether or not they violated any other laws.

An alien who enters without inspection violates Title 8 U.S. Code § 1325 – Improper entry by alien and may face up to 2 years in prison if he/she has done this more than once.

Furthermore, an alien who has been previously deported and subsequently reenters without authority commits a felony that may, if the alien has a serious criminal history, carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison under Title 8 U.S. Code § 1326 – Reentry of removed aliens.

Congressional Democrats and some Republicans such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham have attacked President Trump for his plans to secure the U.S./Mexican border and effectively enforce our immigration laws.

McCain and Graham have aligned themselves with Senator Chuck Schumer likely because of their shared globalist views on immigration. They were, after all, members of the “Gang of Eight” or, as I have come to refer to them, “The Eight Gangsters.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Obama Lackey Tom Perez Takes Over DNC Obama’s Democratic Party gears up to wage war on the president. Matthew Vadum

By on February 27th, 2017

Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez’s weekend victory over Keith Ellison in the race to become DNC chairman shows Democrats learned nothing from their historic shellacking in November and that Barack Obama remains firmly in control of the party.

The win by community organizer and Obama loyalist Perez effectively constitutes a merger of sorts between the Democratic National Committee and Obama’s well-funded Trump-resisting pressure group, Organizing for Action. Perez replaces interim DNC chairman Donna Brazile who herself replaced Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida. The congresswoman was forced out last summer after her role in rigging the nomination process in favor of Hillary Clinton was exposed.

The Perez victory is also a sign that it’s business as usual for the deeply divided party that voters reduced to a regional rump in November and whose leaders think they lost because of bad messaging instead of bad ideas. The DNC, after all, is on record as endorsing the violent, racist Black Lives Matter movement and of accusing American police officers of systematically committing genocide against blacks. These people have learned nothing and are anxious to do the bidding of their unruly radical base that is already determined to impeach President Trump after a little over a month in office.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Washington, D.C., the consensus before the vote among conservatives this writer spoke to seemed to be that Ellison would be the better choice to lead Democrats because he is less palatable to Americans in the heartland who are turned off by his pro-Islamist, racist rhetoric. “Ellison would scare the sh** out of Americans in what the Left calls ‘flyover country,’” one participant said.

Alas, it was not to be.

On Saturday in Atlanta, Perez won the post in the second round of balloting, defeating the Muslim congressman from Minnesota on a vote of 235 to 200. To promote unity in the severely divided party, Perez asked that Ellison be made deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee. DNC members approved the appointment on a voice vote.

After the vote, Perez vowed to rebuild the party at all levels from “school board to the Senate” and reach out to disaffected voters in rural America. “We lead with our values and we lead with our actions,” he said, adding the party will concentrate on defending Social Security and Medicare and on “growing good jobs in this economy.”

“You know, our unity as a party is our greatest strength. And it’s his worst nightmare,” he said in a reference to President Trump. “And, frankly, what we need to be looking at is whether this election was rigged by Donald Trump and his buddy Vladimir Putin.”

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