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Counterfeit Elitism By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 6th, 2018

Those damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:

Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what’s going on.

Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican “strategist,” and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.

Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.

Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.

“Elite” is now an overused smear. But it is a fair pejorative when denoting a cadre that is not a natural or truly meritocratic top echelon, but is instead a group distinguished merely by schooling, associations, residence, connections and open disdain. If this is supposed to translate into some sort of received wisdom and acknowledged excellence, ordinary Americans may be pardoned for missing it.

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Identity U. The purpose of the university is no longer the pursuit of knowledge. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on February 6th, 2018

The diversity bureaucracy has finally swallowed an entire college. San Diego State University has just named to its presidency a vice chancellor of student affairs and campus diversity, hired from the University of California, Davis. The new SDSU president, Adela de la Torre, is a peerless example of the intersection of identity politics and the ballooning student-services bureaucracy.

As vice chancellor of student affairs and campus diversity at UC Davis, de la Torre presided over a division made up of a whopping 28 departments—not academic departments, but bureaucratic and identity-based ones, such as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual Resource Center; the Center for African Diaspora Student Success; the Center for Chicanx and Latinx Student Success; the Native American Academic Student Success Center; the Middle Eastern/South Asian Student Affairs Office; the Women’s Resources and Research Center; the Undocumented Student Center; Retention Initiatives; the Office of Educational Opportunity and Enrichment Services; and the Center for First-Generation Student Scholars. This gallimaufry of identity-based fiefdoms illustrates the symbiosis between an artificially segmented, identity-obsessed student body and the campus bureaucracy: the more that students carve themselves into micro-groups claiming oppressed status, the more pretext there is for new cadres of administrators to shield them from oppression. (The causation runs in the opposite direction as well: the very existence of such identity-based bureaucracies encourages students to see themselves as belonging to separate tribes.) The admission of students who do not share the academic qualifications of their peers also creates a vast bureaucratic genre of retention services, one now taking aim at traditional pedagogy said to handicap underrepresented minorities.

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Poland Seeks to Censor History Laws that impose an official view—even those banning Holocaust denial—are pernicious. Alan Dershowitz

Posted By on February 6th, 2018

Poland’s nationalist government is in the process of enacting legislation to criminalize speech that “claims, publicly and contrary to the facts, that the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.” The proposal would exempt “artistic or academic activity” but would prohibit ordinary citizens and politicians from accusing Poland of complicity in the murder of three million Polish Jews. Both the Israeli and U.S. governments have denounced the proposal, which restricts free speech and falsifies history.

True, the Germans built Auschwitz and other death camps on Polish soil. But the Germans could not have murdered the Polish Jews, and millions of other Europeans imported to death camps in Poland, without the active assistance of many Poles in identifying and rounding up victims. This complicity was incited by generations of anti-Semitic church sermons. Poles also murdered Jews during and after the German occupation—including in the Jedwabne pogrom in July 1941 and in Kielce in July 1946.

On the positive side, there were Polish Catholics, including priests and nuns, who risked their lives protecting Jews. There were many other righteous Polish individuals as well. Jan Karski risked his life by dressing as a death-camp guard so he could document the horrors, and the Ulma family was murdered for harboring Jews.

Poland’s role in the Holocaust is a mixed picture of complicity, heroism, complacency and willful blindness. It is up to historians to sort out the specifics and moralists to apportion blame. But it is not the role of law to stifle debate and to threaten those who question the current self-serving Polish government narrative.

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Democrats and FBI Abuses In the 1970s, progressives stood up for civil liberties. Today they’ve reverted to the J. Edgar Hoover era. By David J. Garrow

Posted By on February 6th, 2018

Only a few aging historians still remember Rep. John J. Rooney, but from the 1940s into the 1970s he was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s most powerful enabler. Rooney, a Brooklyn, N.Y., Democrat, led the House appropriations subcommittee that oversaw the Justice Department. He remained Hoover’s steadfast ally as presidents from Truman through Nixon came and went.

John Rooney personified an era in which congressional Democrats eagerly aided and abetted the FBI’s running amok, as the bureau surveilled political activists who attracted Hoover’s ire. Rooney’s retirement in 1974 ushered in a radically different age, featuring rigorous and aggressive congressional oversight. A new generation of Democrats, led by principled progressives like Sen. Frank Church and Rep. Otis Pike, courageously proved ready and willing to expose and eliminate the abuse of Americans’ constitutional rights that had long been Hoover’s political bread and butter.

The Church Committee, along with decades’ worth of Freedom of Information Act releases, exposed once top-secret documents that FBI executives never imagined would see the light of day. These files detailed the scale of politically motivated misbehavior that had occurred when executive-branch controls and meaningful congressional oversight were absent. As a historian who cut his teeth on that copious record, I found it unimaginable that congressional Democrats, or American progressives generally, would ever return to championing unquestioned acceptance of FBI claims that its surveillance practices must remain hidden from the public.

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Trump Drops the T-Word Democrats who fail to applaud him aren’t betraying the country.

Posted By on February 6th, 2018

Treason by any other name is not defined by refusing to applaud Donald Trump during his State of the Union speech last week. Still, at a discursive speech Monday in Cincinnati that was nominally about the strong economy, President Trump decided to drop the T-word on the Democratic hand-sitters. “They were like death, and un-American,” Mr. Trump said to the Ohio factory workers. “Somebody said treasonous. Can we call that treason? Why not? They certainly don’t seem to love our country very much.”

When politicians start accusing opponents of treason, our former Journal colleague Seth Lipsky has made it a practice to recall that “treason” is defined narrowly in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution.
President Donald Trump delivers a speech on tax reform after touring Sheffer Corporation in Blue Ash outside Cincinnati, OH, Feb. 5. Photo: jonathan ernst/Reuters

Perhaps we should be grateful to Mr. Trump for giving us the opportunity to quote the Founding Fathers: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”

Watching Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer scowl through the State of the Union speech, several words occurred to us: churlish, grumpy, resentful. But treasonous didn’t spring to mind. Mr. Trump’s mind no doubt is filled with smoldering anger because opponents have called him authoritarian, totalitarian, Hitler and insane.

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Has Israel Grown Too Dependent on the United States? Cracks are increasingly discernible in the famous “special relationship.” Can they be repaired? If not, could Israel’s national security survive the loss of American military aid?Charles D. Freilich

Posted By on February 5th, 2018

Charles D. Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel, is a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center. His new book, Israeli National Security: A New Strategy for an Era of Change, is forthcoming from Oxford.

Israel’s relationship with the United States is a fundamental pillar of its national security. Militarily, diplomatically, and economically, American support has for decades been a vital strategic enabler. For consultations on emerging events, Washington is usually Israel’s first and often sole port of call, almost always the foremost one, and inevitably the primary address when planning how to respond to such events. Indeed, Israel’s reliance on the United States is so great today that the country’s very survival is at least partly dependent on it—with, as we shall see, a variety of consequences not all of which are salutary.

I. The Origins and Growth of a “Special Relationship”

First, some historical background. Contemporary readers may be surprised to learn that, until the late 1960s, the Israel-U.S. relationship was actually quite limited and even cool. Only in the aftermath of the Six-Day War (1967) and especially the Yom Kippur War (1973) did it begin to evolve into a more classic patron-client setup, and not until the 1980s did it start to become the institutionalized and strategic “special relationship” we know today.

And it truly is a special relationship: a largely unprecedented arrangement for the U.S. and a critical one for Israel, encompassing ties in all spheres of national life—military, political, economic, diplomatic, and cultural. Even through episodes of government-to-government disagreement and discord, not to mention the continual criticism of various Israeli polices by American elites of one stripe or another, popular support for Israel remains high in the U.S., by some measures higher today than ever, and the security relationship itself remains not only fundamentally strong but extraordinarily close.

Let’s count the ways. Economically, the United States is Israel’s single biggest trading partner (only the EU taken as a whole is larger), with bilateral trade in 2016 running at approximately $35.5 billion. The two countries signed a free-trade agreement in 1986, the first such bilateral deal ever concluded by the U.S. Over the years Washington has, in addition, provided emergency economic assistance and loan guarantees.

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Peter Smith: The Art of the Real

Posted By on February 5th, 2018

You’ve heard the lie so often it has become a faux truth, one told and broadcast with such spite and frequency its propagators must be relieved they need offer only the headline shorthand ‘Trump is Putin’s stooge’. Yet the target of such enmity keeps winning. Like him or not as a man, we had all better hope that doesn’t change.

Did the FBI and Department of Justice use a dodgy and salacious dossier on Donald Trump, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, to repeatedly obtain a FISA warrant to wiretap the hapless Carter Pagem, for a time a bit player in the Trump election campaign? Did they deliberately omit to tell the judge about the provenance of the dossier? Did this mean that they wiretapped Trump Tower; which, incidentally, would have given them access the communications of Trump himself? Was Trump therefore right in March 2017 in claiming to have been wiretapped by the Dems?

The answer to all of these questions seems to be ‘yes’.

Is the whole Russian investigation a crock? Another ‘yes’. It is amazing really. After over a year of looking not one shred of evidence has been dug up to show collusion between Trump’s campaign and Putin. And yet the baseless slur continues, as it can. If nothing is found today or tomorrow, who knows what next week or month will bring if we keep digging.

Recall this all started with a suggestion that John Podesta (Clinton’s campaign head) had his emails phished (not ingeniously ‘hacked’ so far as we know) by the Russians in cahoots with Trump. The plot thickens. The Russians then passed them on to Wikileaks.

In other words, Trump and the Russians got into a (figurative or real) backroom to devise how to trick Podesta (or his staff) into revealing his email details and hence his dirty secrets. Why they stopped at Podesta, who knows? To this day we have no precise idea how it was done, but have to take it as fact from intelligence agencies that the Russians did it and, moreover, that Putin himself must have been personally complicit.

It is a joke. Where is the evidence? Apparently, you are disloyal if you ask. And, to boot, a Russian spy.

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Islamic London: “Run, Hide, Tell” by Daniel Pipes

Posted By on February 5th, 2018

Muslim-majority areas typically consist of poor, unattractive housing projects, remote from the city center, which long ago were abandoned by their original indigenous, working-class populations. They often feature men sitting around cafes and women cooped up at home. They suffer from a range of social pathologies, including unemployment, criminal gangs, and drug-trafficking.

In some instances, store names are only in Arabic.

The Muslim presence is implicit in the intense, pervasive, and depressing security measures installed against jihadi threats of violence. These range from signs urging “Run, Hide, Tell” to bollards, barriers, and gates.

To understand the development of Islam in Western countries, I make a habit of visiting Muslim-majority areas such as Lakemba in Australia, Lodi in California, and Lunel in France. But London, England, is unique in the extent of its Islamic impress.

Muslim-majority areas typically consist of poor, unattractive housing projects, remote from the city center, which long ago were abandoned by their original indigenous, working-class populations. They often feature men sitting around cafes and women cooped up at home. They suffer from a range of social pathologies, including unemployment, criminal gangs, and drug-trafficking.

London too has such areas, and they are very large; but what makes the English capital unique is the intense Muslim presence in the very most central and expensive parts of the city, where Muslims do not constitute a majority. This presence takes two main forms.

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The Cost of Illegal Immigration by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on February 5th, 2018

“At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the costs incurred by the presence of more than 12.5 million illegal aliens, and about 4.2 million citizen children of illegal aliens.” — Matt O’Brien and Spencer Raley.

It is also rather more than the single payment of $25 billion that it will cost to build a wall — five and a half times more, and every year.

“Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes…” — John R. Lott.

In 2015, included in the DEA’s drug-threat assessment was the fact that drug overdoses killed more people in the United States than car accidents or guns. Many of these drugs [were] smuggled in large volumes by drug cartels.”

In his State of the Union address on January 30, US President Donald J. Trump referred to the brutal murder of two 16-year-old girls from Long Island in December 2016 by members of the “savage MS-13 gang,” responsible for a spate of other gruesome killings in the area, as well.

Many of these gang members, he explained, had entered the United States illegally. “For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities,” he said.

Calling on Congress “to finally close the deadly loopholes that have allowed… criminal gangs to break into our country,” he listed the four pillars of his immigration-reform proposal:

A path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants who were brought to America by their parents.
The construction of a “great wall on the southern border” and enforcement by agents patrolling and securing the border.
Ending the visa lottery, “a program that randomly plans out green cards without regard for skill, merit, for the safety of American people.”
Ending the “current, broken system” of chain migration of distant relatives, and limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children.

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The Memo Reveals the Coup against America The memo has been released, now it’s time to release everything. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 5th, 2018

The Democrats and the media spent a week lying to the American people about the “memo.”

The memo was full of “classified information” and releasing” it would expose “our spying methods.” By “our,” they didn’t mean American spying methods. They meant Obama’s spying methods.

A former White House Ethics Lawyer claimed that the Nunes memo would undermine “national security.” On MSNBC, Senator Chris Van Hollen threatened that if the memo is released, the FBI and DOJ “will refuse to share information with the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.”

Senator Cory Booker howled that releasing the memo was “treasonous” and might be “revealing sources and methods” and even “endangering fellow Americans in the intelligence community.”

The memo isn’t treasonous. It reveals a treasonous effort by the Democrats to use our intelligence agencies to rig an election and overturn the will of the voters.

The only two “sources” 29 are Christopher Steele, who was funded by the Clinton campaign, and a Yahoo News article, that were used to obtain a FISA warrant against a Trump associate. That Yahoo story came from Michael Isikoff, the reporter who knew about Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky but suppressed it. It was based on more leaks from Steele which the FBI and DOJ chose to ignore. Steele’s identity was already well known. The only new source revealed is Yahoo News.

No vital intelligence sources were compromised at Yahoo News. And no Yahoo News agents were killed.

The media spent a week lying to Americans about the dangers of the memo because it didn’t want them to find out what was inside. Today, the media and Dems switched from claiming that the memo was full of “classified information” that might get CIA agents killed to insisting that it was a dud and didn’t matter. Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to deceive.