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Imposter Mayor Fashioning himself as an international progressive hero, Bill de Blasio has no real interest in the job he was elected to do. Seth Barron

Posted By on July 10th, 2017

Mayor de Blasio made a surprise departure from New York City yesterday—just one day after the assassination of NYPD officer Miosotis Familia while she guarded a violence-plagued Bronx corner—in order to attend anti-capitalist protests in Hamburg, site of the G-20 summit. A few hours after de Blasio’s plane departed, a train derailed in Penn Station, where extensive track work is scheduled to begin this weekend. It was the third derailment at Penn since March; the incidents have become so commonplace that New Jersey Transit commuters reportedly showed little surprise when their train car slid off the track.

The mayor has indulged his inflated sense of his own importance before: he loves to attend summits, conferences, rallies, and protests where he can pontificate about inequality. He particularly enjoys hobnobbing with international mayors. Soon after his inauguration, de Blasio met Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and burbled about their common goals. “It’s absolutely amazing by the way, 3,000 miles apart, we have come up with such a similar vision of what our cities need,” said de Blasio. “What we want to do now is constantly communicate as we implement this vision and help each other figure out what’s working and what’s not.”

Last September, after an Afghan immigrant had perpetrated a series of bombings in New Jersey and New York City, de Blasio, Hidalgo, and newly elected London mayor Sadiq Khan penned a joint op-ed titled, “Our Immigrants, Our Strength.” The essay made the false claim that “militant violence is astonishingly rare” among immigrants; the line was stricken from later editions.

Following President Trump’s election, de Blasio became particularly besotted with the potential of mayors to change the world. In this new era, de Blasio told the U.S. Conference of Mayors convention last January, “the role of mayors will be amplified. It’s a time where actual, tangible work is going to be more important than ever.” A few days later, at a protest on the night before Trump’s inauguration, de Blasio announced that “mayors are gathering from all over the country in a common cause . . . Mayors all over the country are signing this pledge for common action—that the next 100 days will be days of action together.” He then introduced a “dynamic, progressive leader from the heartland,” Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges, who echoed de Blasio’s grandiose rhetoric, asserting that President-elect Trump “will have to get through all the mayors in all the cities in this country if he wants to get to our beloved communities. When he comes for our artists, who are going to be more important now than ever with their voices of dissent, he’s going to have to get through me!” This inspiring vision of mayors as bulwarks against tyranny has no basis in history or law.

De Blasio’s meaningless and absurd promise to ensure that New York City adheres to the Paris Climate Accords underscores a fundamental truth about his mayoralty: he has no interest in what his job actually entails. Mayors do important work: they administer streets, schools, and police, and they manage a municipal budget. De Blasio has little interest in such banalities; he imagines that mayors are the true rulers of the world, because, as he told the Conference of Mayors, they “represent the majority of Americans.”

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Singing a Hwasong Jed Babbin

Posted By on July 10th, 2017

North Korea — and China — have us where they want us.

North Korea reached a milestone on the Fourth of July by launching its first ICBM, the “Hwasong-14.” Fired on a steep trajectory the missile flew for almost forty minutes before coming down about 800 miles from the launch pad. On a shallower trajectory, it could have reached Alaska.

The launch was accompanied, as usual, by a taunt from Kim Jong Un. This time he said the launch was a message to “the American bastards.”

Days before his inauguration, Mr. Trump wrote a tweet that said of North Korea’s ambition to develop an ICBM, “… it won’t happen.” Now it has.

The missile had some very important features. It was a two-stage missile, of which at least the first stage was liquid-fueled, meaning it took considerable time to fuel and, unlike solid-fueled missiles, had to be launched within a day or two after fueling.

The nosecone, in which a nuclear weapon could ride, is, according to a Washington Times report, very similar to a Chinese-supplied one Pakistan uses atop its nuclear-armed missiles. It may be that North Korea bought it from China or Pakistan or manufactured the nosecone itself. The missile’s engines closely resemble those of Russian-designed launchers, probably resulting from Russian scientists giving North Korea their designs and either Russian or Chinese engineers helping North Korea to develop a similar missile.

It is probable that the North Koreans haven’t yet devised a nuclear warhead capable of functioning after undergoing the enormous stresses of a missile launch and the tremendous heat generated during reentry into the atmosphere. But it’s only a matter of time, and not much time, until they do.

North Korea is under a total arms embargo by UN resolution. China would have violated the UN arms embargo by sending such missile nosecones to North Korea. There’s no reason to believe the Chinese haven’t and will continue to do so.

And they’ve done much more. China is almost certainly supplying the mobile missile launch systems such as those North Korea displayed in its huge April military parade.

On the day of the Hwasong-14 launch, the president launched his response on Twitter. He wrote, “North Korea has just launched another missile. Does this guy have anything better to do with his life? Hard to believe that South Korea and Japan will put up with this much longer. Perhaps China will put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!”

As they say on Monday Night Football, “C’mon, man.” South Korea and Japan are as dependent on us for defense leadership as the deadbeats of NATO despite their enormous investment in defense. They will have to follow our lead, and when we don’t lead, they’ll remain in a state of political entropy. China isn’t going to put any “moves” on North Korea because North Korea may be doing exactly what China wants it to do.

China’s goal is not to avoid war: it is to keep us tangled up with North Korea while it expands across the South China Sea and elsewhere. And although China has enormous influence on North Korea, China may not have the power to disarm Kim of his nuclear weapons or missiles unless it decides to remove Kim and substitute a more pliable puppet.

Yes, China doesn’t want an influx of North Korean refugees that might result from toppling Kim’s regime. But that concern pales in comparison to China’s fear of a unified, democratic, and U.S.-aligned Korea on its border. In short, relying on China to restrain or topple the Kim regime is foolhardy.

Mr. Trump said he was considering “some pretty severe things” in response to the North Korean missile test and said he’d confront the threat “very strongly.”

The Trump administration said that it would be ready to use force to counter the growing threat of a North Korean attack. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council that “[North Korea’s] actions are quickly closing off the possibility of a diplomatic solution,” and that America has “considerable military forces. We will use them if we must. But we prefer not to have to go in that direction.” That is an understatement.

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DAVID GOLDMAN: TRUMP IS RIGHT ABOUT SYRIA

Posted By on July 10th, 2017

The ceasefire in three Syrian provinces announced Friday after the Trump-Putin meeting in Hamburg is the first step in the right direction that the United States has taken in the Middle East in more than 20 years. The Syrian deal should be understood in the context of President Trump’s address in Warsaw the day before, a challenge to Russia to “join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.” Syria’s civil war has become a school of subversion for tens of thousands of Shi’ite as well as Sunni terrorists, and the major powers have an urgent interest in extinguishing it.

As a first step towards a “broader and more detailed arrangement,” in the words of a senior State Department official, the ceasefire opens a path to what I have called a Westphalian Peace, referring to the 1648 treaty that ended the devastating Thirty Years War. Trump achieved this result by calling Russia to account for past misbehavior while offering a deal that is in both countries’ best interests. It is a small step involving only a fraction of contested Syrian territory, but the agreement nonetheless breaks new ground.

The senior official briefing reporters July 6 said, this is an important step, but it is a first step in what we envision to be a more complex and robust ceasefire arrangement and de-escalation arrangement in southwest Syria. The official added that “there’s an expectation the Russians will use their influence to ensure that [the Iranians] respect the ceasefire.” He added, “The basis of the whole understanding is obviously that each side, each party to it uses its influence with those parties on the ground with which we have relationships. So we and Jordan, in particular, have good relationships with the Southern Front, with the principal armed factions in southwest Syria.”

As I explained in a June 9 essay [“No-one likes Trump, I don’t care”], “There is no way to end the conflict without an agreement with Russia and China, who are backing Iran’s intervention in Syria as much as Washington backed the Sunni rebels fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime. That means both sides must leash their own dogs.”

Trump sent a double message to Moscow in Warsaw. The address was reminiscent of Reagan’s spirited defense of freedom before the Berlin Wall in 1987, and not by accident. The defense of a beleaguered Western Civilization echoes a speech that White House chief strategistSteve Bannon made before a Vatican conference in 2014. The salient fact about the speech, though, is where it was given, namely in Poland, not in the Ukraine. America has fundamental interests in Poland, which is a NATO member and the land of origin of nearly 10 million Americans. It does not have fundamental interests in the Ukraine, a country artificially stitched together from Russian, Ruthenian, Polish and other ethnicities by Nikita Khrushchev as a buffer against the West.

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Tillerson Starting Shuttle Diplomacy in Middle East, Hoping to Resolve Dispute Over Qatar Washington fears conflict among U.S. allies will drag on for months By Felicia Schwartz

Posted By on July 10th, 2017

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson arrived in the Persian Gulf region for a round of shuttle diplomacy aimed at resolving a conflict among U.S. allies that Washington fears will drag on for months.

The former Exxon Mobil Corp. chief executive, who has close ties to many Arab officials in the region and has attempted to mediate the dispute, is throwing himself more deeply into efforts to resolve differences between Qatar on one side and Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt on the other.

The four countries accuse Qatar of funding terrorist groups and meddling in their domestic affairs, and severed diplomatic relations and imposed a transport ban on June 5. Qatar denies the allegations and accused the bloc of Arab nations of waging a smear campaign.

Top officials from the feuding nations have been passing through Washington in recent weeks, making their case to Mr. Tillerson and others.

The U.S. diplomat first traveled to Kuwait and later will head to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to try to bring the sides closer to a solution.

It is unclear if he will meet with Emirati and Bahraini officials this week.

“The purpose of the trip is to explore the art of the possible of where a resolution can be found,” said R.C. Hammond, a communications adviser traveling with Mr. Tillerson. “Right now…we’re months away from what we think would be an actual resolution and that’s very discouraging.”

Mr. Tillerson’s trip to the Gulf follows stops in Ukraine and Turkey, where he headed after the summit leaders from the Group of 20 leading nations in Germany.

Last week, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates met in Cairo to formally discuss Qatar’s response to a list of demands that includes curbing diplomatic ties with Iran, severing links with the Muslim Brotherhood and closing the Al Jazeera television network. CONTINUE AT SITE

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New Evidence on School Vouchers Some optimistic findings from Indiana and Louisiana.

Posted By on July 10th, 2017

Among teachers unions and their allies, an article of faith is that vouchers to allow attendance at private schools do nothing for students. All the more reason to look at two new studies tracking student performance in two states with voucher programs—Indiana and Louisiana.

Start with Louisiana. Today 7,100 students—nearly 90% of them African American—attend private or religious schools of their parents’ choice thanks to a statewide program that includes vouchers for private schools. In February 2016, Jonathan Mills of Tulane and Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas released a study that found declines in English and math after two years at a private school using a voucher.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. Messrs. Mills and Wolf expanded their study to include performance after three years, and when they did the results flipped. Their new study shows that, by the end of the third year, the differences between voucher students and those in public schools had been erased.

Meanwhile, researchers Mark Berends and R. Joseph Waddington focused on Indiana’s statewide voucher program that now serves more than 34,000 students. The study found that students using vouchers had declines in math and English for the first two years after leaving public school. But the longer these voucher kids stuck around in their new schools, the better they did—surpassing their public school peers in English after four years.

These studies are important in rebutting what has been an especially aggressive campaign this year against vouchers by unions and liberal journalists. With President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos supporting school choice including vouchers, the campaign is on to discredit them with or without persuasive evidence.

Student improvement after the first two years at a new school is also consistent with common sense. Parents and teachers know that changing schools can be a big adjustment for children, and private schools typically have different cultural mores and teaching habits. Most parents don’t look for private schools if their children are prospering in their current school.

It’s also a mistake to judge a voucher program entirely on standardized tests. There are many other indicators—from personal safety, to discipline, graduation rates and speciality curricula. The idea behind state performance tests is to give parents and taxpayers a way to judge how well schools are teaching and hold them accountable.

But education choice—whether in charters or vouchers—comes with the built-in accountability that they must compete to attract students, and parents can withdraw their children if they are unhappy. Even if test scores aren’t notably different, why should the default be keeping kids trapped in public schools rather than letting parents make the choice?

These new studies should give a boost to those who believe accountability comes from parents who know better than a distant education bureaucracy what schools best work for their children.

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Leftist Professors Throw a Tantrum at Wake Forest By George Leef

Posted By on July 10th, 2017

Just mention the name “Koch” and many leftist academics fly into a rage. Years of Two Minute Hates directed against Charles and David Koch for their thoughtcrime of using some of their wealth to push back against “progressivism” have rendered them incapable of clear thinking.

For evidence, consider the furor at Wake Forest University over the Eudaimonia Institute.

Professor James Otteson, a classical liberal who has written books about Adam Smith and The End of Socialism, came up with the idea for an institute at Wake Forest that would study the concept of human flourishing. It would bring together scholars from a number of disciplines to discuss the conditions that lead to human flourishing, or what Aristotle termed “eudaimonia.” Sounds harmless enough and there was no controversy over the proposal until Otteson was awarded a grant of some $4 million from the Koch Foundation. At that point, leftists on the faculty erupted.

One of Otteson’s faculty colleagues, Professor Robert Whaples (an economist) writes about the battle in today’s Martin Center article.

Whaples writes, “Libertarians and conservatives are a rare species on campuses and it appears that although some college professors have apparently never actually met any of them, just reading about their goals is enough to make their hair stand on end. It seems that Koch’s big idea is to push something called ‘freedom.’” Therefore, the innocuous idea of exploring human flourishing was turned into a provocation against leftism by the addition of some Koch money.

Professor Whaples, who is on the Institute’s board, went into a meeting with the opponents, intending to quell the opposition with calm and reason. No luck with that. He continues:

I explained that EI’s mission is genuine. It has begun to and will continue to study human flourishing from a wide range of viewpoints. Some of these viewpoints (those to the left of center) have increasingly claimed a monopoly on wisdom, knowledge, and understanding and have actively moved to push other viewpoints off campuses all over the nation and increasingly at Wake Forest. In a boat that is listing badly to one side, it is possible that EI will add balance and help right the ship by bringing in new viewpoints.

For saying that, I was told that my comments somehow confirmed the ideologically-biased mission of EI. Imagine that! You’re an ideologue only if you are open to opinions that aren’t firmly to the left of center.

What this episode shows, I believe, is that “progressives” no longer care about ideas but are all about power. They’ve got it and will use it against everything they dislike.

Whaples concludes on a mildly optimistic note: “Perhaps the faculty enemies of the Eudaimonia Institute would drop their opposition to it if they looked at what it does, rather than where its funds come from.” Perhaps, but my guess is that the self-righteous opponents will never get past the Koch connection.

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Report: Comey Memos Are Government Documents . . . and Some Are Classified Here’s what to make of the new information By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on July 10th, 2017

Based on “interviews with officials familiar with the documents,” The Hill is reporting that more than half of the memoranda former FBI director James Comey made regarding his conversations with president-elect and then President Trump contain classified information. The FBI, moreover, has determined that all of the memos are government documents.

This will come as a surprise to no one who has been following this story on National Review. In a column on Comey’s memos a month ago, I explained that there was no doubt the memos were government documents (regardless of the former director’s suggestion that they were his personal property, memorializing his “recollection recorded” of his conversations with the president). I further explained that, while Comey’s judgment that the memos were not classified was entitled to considerable weight, we could not make a conclusive judgment on this because (a) we had not seen them and (b) they had not yet been subjected to “a classification review . . . by the White House or the Justice Department.”

I was inclined to give Comey the benefit of the doubt on the classification question. If The Hill’s report is accurate, however, a classification review has now happened, and it has been determined that more than half of the memos contain classified information.

Comey has stated in congressional testimony that he made seven memos of the nine conversations he recalls having with Trump.

In another intemperate tweet this morning, President Trump asserted, “James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!” In reality, we do not yet know whether this is the case. For starters, The Hill’s report is based on leaks (which, I’d note, the president is not complaining about this time). The government has not taken a formal public position on the memos yet.

Second, even if we assume the report is accurate (as I am inclined to do), it indicates that at least four of the seven memos contain classified information — not that all of them do.

Comey testified that he gave at least one memo to an intermediary, a law professor at Columbia. (Full disclosure: The professor is a friend and former colleague of mine. I have not discussed the Comey memos with him.) The intermediary disclosed at least a portion of the memo to the New York Times. Thus, we do not know whether Comey gave all, some, or just one of the memos to the intermediary; we do not know whether the one memo we can be sure the intermediary got contained classified information; and we do not know whether the portion the intermediary shared with the Times was classified.

It is certainly possible that classified information was transmitted to persons not authorized to have it. But at this point, that has not been established.

There will be much to say about all this going forward. For now, I’ll stick to two precedents: Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus.

Claims about the classification status of Comey’s memos bring us right back to Hillary Clinton’s claims that her emails were not “marked classified,” and therefore that she lacked knowledge that they were classified when she stored and transmitted them. Ironically, as I recounted in the aforementioned column, it was Comey, then the FBI’s director, who debunked this theory (in his July 2016 press conference):

It is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

As I elaborated:

To put a finer point on it, whether or not something is classified depends on the contents, not on whether some official with classification authority has deemed it, say, “top secret” and stamped it as such. As we pointed out during the Clinton e-mails hullaballoo, many government documents are “born classified.” That is, the contents of the documents fit the classification categories spelled out in the controlling executive order (EO 13526).

That brings us to the Petraeus precedent, which is relevant for two reasons.

First, as I explained in the column, the prosecution of former CIA director Petraeus — who pled guilty to misdemeanor mishandling of classified information — demonstrates that “the government regards many communications between national-security officials and the president as classified.” Petraeus’s journals are very similar in this regard to Comey’s memos because, among other sensitive documents, they contained notes of Petraeus’s conversations with the president of the United States (while Petraeus was a general commanding U.S. forces overseas).

Although Petreaus’s journals were not “marked classified,” he clearly knew that the journals were highly classified, based on his high-ranking national-security position and training in the handling of sensitive information. He thus never disputed this fact.

Second, Petraeus also did not dispute that the person with whom he shared the journals — his paramour and biographer — was not authorized to have access to them. On this score, it is noteworthy that the woman in question actually had a security clearance. Petraeus, nevertheless, did not attempt to claim this authorized the transmission of the journals to her. Again, in his high-ranking position, he knew that even having a security clearance did not qualify a person for access to all classified information. One must have a security clearance sufficiently high to warrant access to the material in question — and some classified information (including what was in Petraeus’s journals) is so closely held that even an official with a top-secret clearance must have a “need to know” and be “read into the program” to which the information relates.

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Campus police told students to stop touting the benefits of fossil fuels on campus: lawsuit Dominic Mancini

Posted By on July 10th, 2017

‘Trespassing’

A lawsuit has been filed against Macomb Community College after its campus police tried to stop a group of students from handing out information touting the benefits of fossil fuels.

Three students working to advance their arguments at the Michigan college in late April were threatened with trespassing by the officers because the students did not have official permission from administrators to engage in public expression on campus, alleges the lawsuit, filed last week.

The lawsuit claims the college’s policy requiring a 48-hour pre-approval in person and in writing for expressive activity is a violation of students’ First Amendment rights. The suit also takes issue with the fact that even after such permission is obtained, the speech zone at the community college’s Central Campus is only about .001 percent of the entire 230-acre campus.

The three students, meanwhile, are now afraid to continue similar conversations in fear of being charged with trespassing, the lawsuit states.

The students are members of Turning Point USA, an organization dedicated to promoting the principles of freedom, free markets and limited government. The three students, one of whom donned a T-Rex costume, had been collecting signatures and speaking to passers-by about the benefits of fossil fuels at the time they were confronted by officers, according to Alliance Defending Freedom, which filed the lawsuit July 5 on the students’ behalf.

In a July 7 press release, the college states the students continued their activity even after their warning from campus police. The college also states that their policy does not engage in viewpoint discrimination.

“Macomb Community College is a strong proponent of free speech, with a policy on expressive activity that balances the First Amendment rights of individuals with the safety and security of students and visitors, as well as their ability to access college facilities and traverse college grounds,” the college states.

The policy does not apply to labor unions, allowing union members to engage in expressive activity without a permit.

Attorneys from Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the Turning Point USA chapter, stated that Macomb’s policy is unconstitutional.

“Of all places, public colleges are supposed to be budding laboratories for democracy. Administrators should encourage, not stifle, free expression,” said attorney Caleb Dalton in a press release.

The lawsuit calls on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan to declare the college’s policies unconstitutional, “to award nominal damages, and to block officials from further censorship.”

In an email to The College Fix, Turning Point USA spokesman Jake Hoffman stated that the organization is proud of its student leaders “for fighting these kinds of suppressive and discriminatory free speech policies.”

Macomb Community College spokeswoman Jeanne Nicol said the school does not comment on pending litigation.

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Sydney M. Williams Thought of the Day “A Culture of Hate”

Posted By on July 10th, 2017

Something with which we can agree – a nexus of hatred swirls around our nation, with President Trump as its axis. One side blames Mr. Trump; the other, his attackers. It’s unhealthy. “Hatred stirs up conflict, but love covers all wrongs,” is a line from Proverbs. Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural and facing the dissolution of the Union and years of war, spoke of the “better angels of our nature,” when he said, “We are not enemies, but friends.” For four years, his words proved too optimistic, as 620,000 American soldiers were slain between the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and the surrender at Appomattox in April 1865. Mr. Lincoln did not live to see it, but our “better angels” did prevail.

The Bible teaches that love is more powerful than hatred, and perhaps it is. But hatred is more unifying. In Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck wrote: “I asked,” ‘anyone know any Russians around here?’ And he went all out and laughed. ‘Course not. That’s why they’re valuable. Nobody can find fault with you if you take out after the Russians.’” Hatred unites us, which is what Steinbeck was positing – societies need someone to hate. In 1960, the Cold War was at its peak; fear of and loathing for Communism helped bring us together. Today, we live disunited, and our hatred has become for one another. It has been that way for a few years, but growing worst. We have lost confidence in and respect for our Western values. We no longer see ourselves as a force for good. What has gone wrong?

Mr. Trump may be the focal point, but he was not the catalyst for today’s self-hatred. That is something more deeply rooted. A compendium of universal values has replaced our Western ones. In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, historian Allen Guelzo said that the nation is more split than at any time since the Civil War. Some would argue that the late 1960s and early 1970s were as disruptive. But Professor Guelzo noted that some of today’s differences have long and deep roots. The Whigs (predecessors of Republicans) proposed a society that would be economically diverse, but culturally uniform – precursor to today’s free-market capitalism and nativism; while Democrats preferred economic uniformity, with greater tolerance for cultural and moral diversity – fore-runner of today’s statism and multiculturalism.

The compartmentalization of people into competing identity groups has eroded the political center and fed the fires of partisanship. Added to the conflagration has been the decline of what James Q. Wilson called a moral sense – the compass that guides us toward ethical norms and civil behavior. It is seen in shrinking church attendance, in the foundering of community groups that Harvard’s Robert Putnam has described. It shows up in the growth of PACs (political action committees), which use tax-advantaged dollars to promote issue-specific causes. We see it in the growth of life-time benefits for public employees, which crowd out public support for eleemosynary institutions that help the poor and disabled. It is abetted by an expanding sense of entitlement and dependency, with a concurrent drop in personal responsibility.

The Left looks upon Mr. Trump as a crude demagogue with autocratic tendencies, deserving of the press he gets. But that argument is fatuous. The Left has long treated their political opponents with supercilious disdain. Ronald Reagan was a dunce, a movie star with no grasp of domestic or international affairs. George W. Bush was stupid, the fortunate son of a distinguished family, a man who had drifted through prep school (Andover) and college (Yale), thanks to his heritage. President Reagan deftly deflected criticism with humor. Mr. Bush, a decent man, ignored the jabs. Donald Trump is different. He fights back. Is he thin-skinned, or is he fed up with the sanctimony and hypocrisy of the media and progressives, in the way they treat conservatives? I suspect the latter. While he targets the chattering classes with his Tweets, his audience is the forgotten men and women of middle America – those the elites from both Parties have ignored for years and whom Hillary Clinton referred to as “deplorable.”

While examples of hate can be seen on both the right and the left, it is in the intolerance of those claiming to be tolerant where hate is most insidious and where it can be most commonly found. Certainly, there are those on the right who oppose same sex marriage, who find insults to Christianity objectionable, and who question the ethics of late-term abortions. But most Americans cluster toward the center. They count on the bounty that government offers in terms of schools, highways, bridges, and aid to the elderly and the sick. They expect that those who cannot care for themselves will be cared for. They respect others, regardless of sex, politics, religion or race, and they expect to be respected in return. They abide by the Golden Rule of treating others as they would like to be treated. They have faith, and they believe in the rule of law. They recognize the impetuousness of youth, but expect college presidents and deans to act as adults. They don’t understand a culture that says a 16-year-old girl can be suspended for saying a prayer in school, but allows her to get an abortion without parental notification. They cannot understand politicians dividing people into identity groups – setting one group of Americans against another.

Those who philosophically disagree with me will say it is my bias, but it seems to me that the most heinous vitriol emanates from the left. They own our popular culture – from movies to music, from publishing to universities. Jacques Barzun, a French-American historian who was awarded medals of freedom by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, once wrote: “Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.” In our dealings with others, we should be governed not by fears of being politically incorrect, but by want of decency and respect. Many on the Right, including me, felt the policies of Mr. Obama were inimical to the concept of liberty. We argued our case, and we attacked those flaws in his character we saw epitomizing his failings. But, we never treated him the way the Left does Mr. Trump.

The media has long believed that authoritarians comes from the right, not the left. I would argue that extremism can come from either direction. Consider the last century, and the tyrants that arose out of Nazism and Communism? Neither group had any regard for human rights or liberty. Both killed millions of their own people. Their goal was power. Political extremism is not a continuum that stretches left and right. It is circular. Extremists meet on the opposite side of the circle from centrists.

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SOROS IS NO DREYFUSS: RACHEL EHRENFELD

Posted By on July 10th, 2017

Anti-Semitism should always be condemned. But it is somewhat ironic that leaders of Hungary’s Jewish community and Israel’s Ambassador in Budapest are rallying on behalf of a man who demeans Jews and gives millions to anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian organizations. That man who is Jewish by birth, but proud for growing up in an “anti-Semitic home,” is George Soros. http://acdemocracy.org/soros-is-no-dreyfus/

The Hungarian government is fighting Soros, who is campaigning against the Hungarian government’s immigration policies in the effort to force it to open its borders to illegal immigrants. As part of this fight, the Hungarians are attempting to curb the billionaire’s funding of opposition groups, as well as his Budapest-based Central European University by legislating education reforms that would close the institution, unless it complies with the country’s laws.

Soros, dubbed as the “only private citizen who had his foreign policy,” whose efforts to change Hungary’s domestic policies and reverse the law that would shut down the CEU has failed, addressed the European Commission’s annual economic meeting last June. He denounces the “the deception and corruption of the mafia state the Orban regime has established,” and led the European Union to take legal action against the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Orban responded with a billboard campaign featuring a smirking Soros with the caption: Let’s not allow Soros to have the last laugh”. It didn’t take long before Soros, and his supporters evoked his Jewishness and accused the government of anti-Semitism. Orban’s spokesperson responded: “The Hungarian government’s goal is to stop Soros’s migrant campaign, which is supporting the migration of illegal migrants into our country. The government is not criticizing George Soros for his Jewish origin, but for his supporting the growing number of migrants entering in uncontrolled crowds into Europe.” And Hungary is not alone in limiting the number of illegal, mostly Muslim immigrants who pose a great economic and security threat. Other European nations are also taking steps to stem the seemingly endless tide.

As for anti-Semitism, in November 2003, as Operation Iraqi Freedom was underway and anti-American and anti-Israeli/anti-Semitic demonstrations spread throughout Europe, Soros spoke at a meeting of the Jewish Funders Network in New York. Soros claimed that “The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute” to the rise of anti-Semitism. He assured his audience that once Bush and Sharon are removed from office, the world will go back to not hating Jews. “If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish. I can’t see how one could confront it directly,” he said. On December 4, 2003, Ira Stoll reported in the New York Sun that Soros declared “Israel “likely” was a big but secret reason for America’s war in Iraq.”

Soros has rewritten Middle Eastern history to better jive with his idea of the “poignant and difficult case” of “victims turning perpetrators.” Soros, much like the virulent anti-Semitic graphic daily propaganda in Arab, Palestinian and Iranian newspapers, has been comparing Israel’s self-defense against repeated attempts of annihilation by the Islamist/Arab terrorists to Nazi atrocities. The successful defense against terrorism, especially preemptive actions, is never appropriate in Soros’ book.