RUTHFULLY YOURS

Chautauqua Institution, originally a cultural center, is now a disseminator of Islamic messaging to reach out to uninformed Christians and Jews programmed to accept multiculturalism. Featured speaker Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic Center for Middle East Policy, is part of the worldwide movement financed by oil money.

In a lecture on August 9 at the Institution’s center at Chautauqua, N.Y., he spoke of American anxiety, incongruously blaming occasions such as buying jam at the grocers, where, alas, so many choices will cause regret that one hasn’t purchased the best option. He sees no beauty in the many fruits, flavors, or quality, or why, if one manufacturer makes jam and employs and pays a decent wage to improve life for himself and his neighbors, another cannot do the same in another locality.

Blind to possibilities, Hamid is instead guided by Islamic rules, allowing only one jam, or having one of his housebound wives make it. He prefers that leadership dictate one’s lifestyle by force; create one nation, the Ummah; one law, sharia; and one goal, world domination.

Where democratic nations have excelled in science and technology, medical advances, improvements in agriculture and water technology so that humanity may flourish, the Islamic culture is based on shame and honor, along with a high illiteracy rate to impede progress. Their greatness will come when all vestiges of advanced societies are destroyed.

Hamid described the universal condition as a “struggle,” but he meant “jihad,” as struggle is rarely part of the Western vernacular. Hamid is a moderate, unweaponed jihadi, hoping to conquer by message, to convince his conditioned audience that his culture is superior, and particularly to reach those who have chosen the altar of liberalism over Judaism and Christianity, from which derived those freedoms, morals, and ethics imperative to happiness and peace. Judaism and Christianity do not struggle for meaning; struggle is a proclivity of all forms of fascism, because authoritarianism provides no contentment.

The divisiveness that Hamid sees in America comes not from democracy, but from those who seek its destruction. Our laws provide respect for human rights, religious freedom, worker rights, a secure peace by combating international terrorism, stability, prosperity, open markets and economic development, improvement in the global environment and human health, and the enemy hopes to use our laws to defeat us. Arab-American author Nonie Darwish penned a warning: “America must protect its democracy, culture, and sovereignty from nations with aspirations of conquering us from within.”

We need only look to the Islamic Middle East to see Hamid’s “rich tapestry of traditions and contentment” — the rampant violence that has now created a “lost generation” of Middle East men — 30,000 suicides, 35,000 deaths from interpersonal violence, a ten-fold increase of fatalities from HIV/AIDS in 25 years (a side effect of FGM on women), and 144,000 deaths from wars in 22 Islamic nations.

It’s not every day this columnist finds himself on the same side as WikiLeaks, Glenn Greenwald and the American Civil Liberties Union.

That’s especially true for the ACLU, because these days it has too often let progressive politics trump its founding mission of protecting core civil liberties such as speech and due process. All the more reason, however, to applaud the ACLU for the principled—and unpopular—stand it took in Charlottesville, Va., for free speech.

In two tweets put out just hours after James Alex Fields drove his Dodge Challenger into the crowd, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring many others, the ACLU’s national office explained its work in Charlottesville this way. “The First Amendment is a critical part of our democracy,” it said, “and it protects vile, hateful, and ignorant speech. For this reason, the ACLU of Virginia defended the white supremacists’ right to march.”

This, of course, hasn’t tempered the outrage on Twitter , where the attacks on the ACLU are mostly variations of “How could you?” Or in the New York Times , where a Princeton prof complained that the ACLU goes out of its way “to defend the rights of provocative speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter to speak on campuses but has been virtually silent on cases involving leftist or progressive faculty members who face suspension for provocative comments.” On Monday Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe piled on, suggesting the violence was the ACLU’s fault.

The unkindest cut came from within, when a board member of the ACLU’s Virginia chapter resigned in protest of . . . well . . . the ACLU. “I won’t be a fig leaf for Nazis,” declared Waldo Jaquith.

Plainly Mr. Jaquith, when he joined the ACLU, somehow hadn’t noticed that way back in 1977 the organization had defended a similarly provocative plan by Nazis to hold a march in Skokie, a Chicago suburb where Jewish Holocaust survivors constituted a high percentage of the population. In the end the ACLU prevailed at the Supreme Court but lost many donors and members in the process. (Ironically, the Nazis never did march in Skokie.) CONTINUE AT SITE

After leaving the White House in January 2017, Barack Obama and his family set out to do what all newly retired presidents have done—go back home, or find a new one. In Obama’s case, though, the new residence is in Washington, D.C. At first, the Obamas presented their choice as temporary—they wanted to let their younger daughter, Sasha, finish high school in Washington, they said—but their purchase of an 8,200-square-foot, $8 million mansion suggests a permanent stay. Obama’s postpresidency is thus shaping up to be virtually unique in American history: rather than departing Washington, he is planting his flag there, establishing, in effect, a shadow presidency.

Obama’s move breaks with long-standing precedent. Conscious of threats to the safe transfer of executive power in the young republic, America’s early presidents departed Washington on the expiration of their terms. After relinquishing his commission as general following victory over the British, George Washington was compared with Cincinnatus, the retired Roman general who assumed emergency powers, saved Rome, and then returned to his plow. Washington repeated his valiant act when he declined a third term as president—Garry Wills calls him a “virtuoso of resignations”—and set the standard for future executives by going home when his political work was done.

The American ideal of a president is essentially republican: a citizen steps forward to serve the government and returns to private life when his term is up. Washington’s diaries and correspondence of 1797 are consumed with matters of housekeeping, husbandry, and accounts. Mount Vernon had gone to seed, and Washington was forced to shore up his personal finances. Though he stayed abreast of national events and voiced his opinions to his associates, he stayed out of the affairs of government; keeping a safe physical distance from the capital reinforced that resolution.

Following Washington’s model, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe each returned to their farms, in varying degrees of insolvency. True, John Quincy Adams, finding retirement dull, soon returned to public service as a congressman, a role he embraced and thrived in, but his ambitions were not imperial. Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren went home, too, when their terms in the White House were finished.

In the modern era, only one other former president remained in Washington after his term of office ended. Stroke victim Woodrow Wilson took up residence on S Street—just a few blocks away from the Obamas’ new Kalorama home. But Wilson was an invalid—indeed, he spent the last 18 months of his presidency in seclusion, with his wife largely managing the affairs of state. Unlike Obama, he was in no position to assert his postpresidential authority or impose himself as a presence on the national stage.

Harry Truman retired to Missouri, broke, in 1953. Dwight Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg, eight years later. In 1969, Lyndon Johnson lit his first cigarette in 15 years, telling his daughters, “I’ve now raised you girls. I’ve now been president. Now it’s my time!” He went to his ranch, grew a ponytail, and died within three years. Richard Nixon skulked off to California and reengineered himself as a statesman, Gerald Ford made himself rich, and Jimmy Carter became a professional humanitarian. Ronald Reagan rode off into the sunset. George H. W. Bush splits his time between Houston and Maine; his son George W., a full-time Texan, paints. Bill Clinton arguably broke the mold through his efforts to install his wife as president, but even that ambitious enterprise was centered in New York, not Washington.

Delivering on his promises, decimating the opposition

Hard to know which body is held in lower esteem, Congress or the media. But for a long time, the media thought they were invincible, based largely on their success after forming the JournOlist in
2007 – a cabal of 400 leftists who vowed to destroy anyone who said a single bad word about the poseur “president” Barack Obama.

When said poseur denied his lifelong friendships and political associations with fulminating anti-Semites, enacted the disaster of socialized medicine and socialized public education, eviscerated our military, doubled the national debt, signed a deal with genocidal Iran, and sang the praises of peaceful lslam as dozens of horrific Muslim terrorist attacks around the world attested to a decidedly sub-human species, JournOlist went into action to squash his critics like they were so many pesky cockroaches.

COLLUSION 101

The JournOlist’s goal last year was to insure that the, ahem, legacy of the poseur would be continued by another globalist shill, Hillary Clinton, who shamelessly extorted massive “donations” from foreign government leaders and tin-pot dictators alike to fill the coffers of the Clinton Foundation, a slush fund of undisguised bribes and payoffs designed to insure access to power. Curious that this windfall completely dried up the day after Nov. 8, 2016.

Not that anyone liked Hillary or could stop themselves from cringing as she bobbled her head, affected a southern accent in front of black audiences, and lied through her teeth at every turn.

No, to the real powers-that-be on the Council of Foreign Relations, behind the International Monetary Fund, in the cesspool known as the United Nations, and among the big-money guys on Wall St. who actually buy our politicians and so run our country, Hillary was yet another Barack Obama, an easy-to-manipulate functionary, a front person to do their bidding and move them closer to the One World Government – and total power and control – they all crave.

And why do they crave such immense power? Partly for the accumulation of even greater wealth – my bank account is bigger than yours! – but also because they genuinely believe that they are immeasurably smarter than the masses and so exquisitely suited to call all the shots about everything to do with human existence from cradle to grave.

UH OH – MEGALOMANIUS INTERRUPTUS

After nearly one hundred years of planning and plotting their takeover of the Democratic Republic of big bad capitalist America, the socialists and communists and jihadists among us – who under Obama, frighteningly, were implanted in the highest positions in virtually all departments of our government, hence the avalanche of leaks – were caught off guard when along came a genuinely unanticipated wild card into the presidential race of 2015-16, billionaire businessman and successful TV personality Donald J. Trump.

Everyone witnessed the patronizing and supercilious snickering of fake journalists like ABC-TV’s George Stephanopoulos, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Greenspan, CBS-TV’s Scott Pelley, NBC-TV’s Chuck Todd, everyone at CNN, starting with its president Jeff Zucker, at the prospect of a Donald J. Trump candidacy.

Everyone – except for us Trump believers – watched and believed all the pollsters, every single one of them, predict not a mere Hillary win, but a resounding victory, right up until 8 p.m. on the night of the vote.

And, of course, everyone remembers that in spite of all the billions spent on Hillary’s candidacy, in spite of every [inaccurate] poll, in spite of a Democrat Party that over decades has become expert at rigging elections, and especially in spite of the rancid collusion of the media in predicting her win, the American people had another idea.

Yahoo News on August 14th published an article that couldn’t have gotten it more wrong than if it tried. Well, Caitlin Dickson, the leftist author, tried, and got it wrong. In “As neo-Nazis grow bolder, the ‘Antifa’ has emerged to fight them,” her focus is not on the threat Antifa poses to freedom of speech and the right of free assembly with its policy of terrorizing with force and assault supporters of freedom of speech, but rather the alleged threat that “white supremacists” pose to it. An Atlantic article blames President Trump, and even candidate Trump, for being a catalyst for the growth of Antifa, because his alleged “racist” and “fascist” rhetoric was so hated by its members and by the Left. Peter Beinart, in his article, “The Rise of the Violent Left,” in the Atlantic, claimed:

Trump’s rise has also bred a new sympathy for Antifa among some on the mainstream left. “Suddenly,” noted the Antifa-aligned journal It’s Going Down, “anarchists and Antifa, who have been demonized and sidelined by the wider Left have been hearing from liberals and Leftists, ‘you’ve been right all along.’ ” An article in The Nation argued that “to call Trumpism fascist” is to realize that it is “not well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason.” The radical left, it said, offers “practical and serious responses in this political moment.”

According to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University, San Bernardino, Antifa activists participate in violent actions because “they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist.”

According to Antifa organizer Crow, Antifa is based on the idea of direct action, “The idea in Antifa is that we go where they (right-wingers) go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that. And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don’t believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece.