RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iranians are famously savvy negotiators, so recent revelations that, under the U.S.-led global nuclear deal, Iran has far more leeway than we had thought to hide its nuclear progress and test ballistic missiles shouldn’t surprise us.

It should, however, alarm us.

The revelations – reflecting the precise wording of resolutions by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors and the United Nations Security Council – come amid increasingly aggressive Iranian behavior in the region, mocking any remaining hopes that the nuclear deal would moderate Tehran.

Iran watchers and nuclear experts were stunned to learn this month that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director general, Yukiya Amano, believes he has new instructions on what the agency should report on Iran’s nuclear program. The agency, he said, no longer should report broadly on the program but, now, only on whether Iran is meeting specific commitments under the nuclear deal.

Everything has a history and a pre-history, and that includes Donald Trump and his angry hordes. Trump is by no means the first American tycoon to stir up fears and resentments and attempt to ride a populist wave. One of his notable predecessors, mostly forgotten today, is Robert Welch.

Born in the last year of the 19th century, Welch built his fortune in the confectionery trade. His company came up with the Sugar Daddy and then, after a slide into bankruptcy, returned successfully with Sugar Babies and Junior Mints. Candy made Welch fabulously wealthy; but his forays into electoral politics—including a run in 1950 for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts—went nowhere. Welch found another vehicle to advance his agenda, which in its essentials amounted to anti-communism on steroids.

That vehicle was the John Birch Society, which Welch established in 1958. By that juncture, the embers of the McCarthy era had already begun to cool. The demagogic senator from Wisconsin had died the previous year, not long after discrediting himself by recklessly lodging unfounded accusations. But the John Birch Society, picking up where McCarthy left off, was nonetheless extraordinarily successful. At its peak, at the close of the 1950s, it boasted 100,000 members—mostly white suburbanites—managed by a paid staff of 200, with 60 regional coordinators running chapters across the United States, making it the largest conservative grassroots organization in the country.

This was an interesting Center for Security Policy panel at CPAC. http://www.religiousfreedomcoalition.org/2016/03/25/europeans-warn-america-of-civilizational-jihad/ “Do not let what has happened in Europe and Britain happen to America,” stated Paul Weston, leader of the small British rightwing party Liberty GB, on March 3 at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  Weston along with the Danish writer Lars Hedegaard warned in apocalyptic terms […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=15613 “It’s very important for us not to respond with fear,” said U.S. President Barack Obama, defending his decision to enjoy a baseball game in Cuba with his wife, daughters and dictator Raul Castro, while dozens of dead bodies and hundreds of body parts lay strewn across the Brussels airport and Metro station. “Groups like […]

At the outset, I will admit that this review of Thomas McCaffrey’s seminal book on the history of and devastation wrought by environmentalism from its earliest days to the present, Radical by Nature: The Green Assault on Liberty, Property, and Prosperity, cannot begin to do it justice. As I underscored the importance of Lisa McGirr’s groundbreaking book, The War on Alcohol, about how Prohibition fostered the growth of the pervasive, all-encompassing State, I can only point with some humility to the heavy lifters of these two books and to the stellar and indefatigable efforts of their authors to bring their works to fruition and to the public eye.

Radical by Nature could easily be retitled, The War on Man. McCaffrey begins his history and exposé of the whole environmentalist movement, from olden times and brings it up to the present. With meticulous detail, a compelling narrative, and abundant documentation, he paints the anti-man, anti-civilization trends and motives behind the environmentalist movement in all its variegated forms.

Lisa McGirr’s scholarly but hard-hitting and thoroughly documented exposé of the role of Prohibition in its contribution to the cancerous growth of statism, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, should be the touchstone of all future studies and analyses of why the country is in such poor shape. This is the State we recognize today, the one that demonizes smoking with bogus statistics and ubiquitous propaganda yet depends on and collects revenue on tobacco sales, the one that demonizes “recreational drug” use but prohibits pharmaceutical companies from perfecting and releasing life-saving drugs, the one that criminalizes private gun ownership by private citizens and would leave them defenseless against gun-toting criminals who do not care about the law and who will always get guns.