Prophetess: a cautionary tale 416
The Democratic Party is now led by a girl full of passionate intensity, little learning, and dreams of an all-powerful Democrat government supplying everything to everyone free of charge. She is counseling that all cattle be eliminated because they pollute the atmosphere. That aircraft be scrapped for the same reason. That no coal or oil be taken from the earth ever again. She declares that never again must vehicles running on gas pollute America’s roads. That every building in the country, homes and businesses, be torn down. If her prescriptions are carried out, she promises, the world will be renewed fresh and clean, and everyone will prosper.
“Kill all the cows,” she says.
Her rise to be the hypnotizing prophetess of her tribe recalls the story of Nonqawuse.
Nonqawuse was an orphan girl of the Xhosa, a nation of herders and farmers on the east coast of South Africa.
In 1856, when she was 15 years old, she returned one April day from the fields and told her uncle Mhlakazashe that she had met three spirits who said they were her ancestors. They had given her certain instructions for the tribe. If they were obeyed, the white colonists would be driven into the sea.
The instructions were that all the cattle of the tribe must be slaughtered because they were polluted. All cultivation of the fields must be abandoned. All the huts in which everybody lived must be demolished. Then not only would the evil whites be drowned, but the Xhosa would have more crops than ever before, pure and clean. New cattle would arise out of the earth, fresh and strong, and the tribe would prosper as never before.
Mhlakazashe believed what his niece told him because he recognized his dead brother from her description of one of the spirits. He went to see the chief, Sarili, and told him the story. Sarili believed it too. He ordered that all cattle must be killed.
The Xhosa obeyed. They destroyed their herds. No crops were attended to. They waited, shelterless, for the whites to be driven into the sea, for new cattle to appear, for their fields to become filled with sturdy grain.
They hung on the lips of the prophetess. Nongqawuse predicted that on February 18, 1857, the prophecy of the drowning would be fulfilled. On that day, she said, the sun would turn red and all the whites would be swept into the Indian Ocean.
February 18 came and went.The sun did not turn red. The whites stayed where they were carrying on with their white ways as usual. Chief Sarili went to see the prophetess. She told him that some people had not obeyed the spirits’ instructions, so the day of liberation had been postponed. The new date was eight days on. The chief had Nongqawuse’s word spread through the land. In eight days time a blood red sun would rise, there would be a heavy storm, and the dead would rise from their graves. Then the dramatic change would take place and the world would be made new. Before the eight days had passed, any cattle still alive must be slaughtered.
“Kill all the cows,” she said.
The eighth day dawned. The sun did not rise redder than usual. There was no storm. The Xhosa had no cattle and no crops. In the famine that resulted, most of the tribe, tens of thousands, died of starvation.
A hundred and sixty three years have passed since an ignorant girl full of passionate intensity made promises of a clean fresh world to her tribe, if only they would give up the filthy things on which they depended; a hundred and sixty two years since they followed her to ruin and death.
In 2019, the Democratic tribe of America might find a salutary message in the story of Nongqawuse if by some chance they should come to hear it.
The coming tyranny – nightmare or prophecy? 118
Is it likely, is it possible, that the people of the United States will vote to be ruled by Communists, feminists, and Muslim jihadis?
Yes. Some have already done so. New Democratic members of Congress include (left to right in the picture) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Hispanic) who has published a Stalinist agenda, and Rashida Tlaib (Palestinian) and Ilhan Omar (Somali) who are annihilationist enemies of Jews and the state of Israel and support the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah.
The Democratic Party is now a party of the extreme Left, with a Socialist and pro-Islam platform. It will do anything to take power including voter fraud. And the rising generation of voters has been indoctrinated at school and college to favor Socialism, Islam, and tribalism; to despise the US itself; and to treat patriots, white people, Jews, Christians, conservatives, constitutionalists, nationalists, and heterosexual men as deviants, miscreants, and provocateurs.
The Democrats in power will: make racist laws against Jews and white people; break the US alliance with Israel; ally with Russia, China, Cuba and Iran; heavily tax or totally confiscate your assets and savings; severely restrict your consumption of energy; limit the number of children you may have by enforcing abortion; criminalize nonconformist speech; monitor your communications for punishable violations of their speech code; rewrite history nearer to their hearts’ desire.
It will be one-party tyrannical rule. The United States will rapidly become poorer and weaker.
We have never hoped for any political outcome as much as we hope now that we are wrong.
The torch of Donald Trump 70
The Yellow Jacket protestors are out again in France (and Britain) this weekend (January12 and 13, 2019).
President Trump tweeted on December 8 last year. :
The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris. Protests and riots all over France. People do not want to pay large sums of money, much to third world countries (that are questionably run), in order to maybe protect the environment. Chanting “We Want Trump!” Love France.
The Trump-hating American media – which is to say most of them – dispute reports of French protestors chanting “We want Trump!” But they cannot know that none did. What is known is that at least some want what can be called “Trumpist” changes to French government policies.
James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:
France’s Gilets Jaunes protestors have jumped on the Trump train with a manifesto that could almost have been written by the Donald himself. The good news is that it contains an awful lot of sense – including demands for lower taxes, reduced migration and Frexit (French exit) from the European Union.
The bad news is that it hasn’t a prayer of coming to fruition because its demands are unrealistic, contradictory and will certainly be stymied by the sclerotic, anti-democratic, rampantly statist French political system – and also by the French people themselves.
We select from a list of the demands – as summarized in English by Delingpole in his article – some that we applaud. (See the yellow-vest picture below to read them all in French.)
Frexit: Leave the EU to regain our economic, monetary and political sovereignty (In other words, respect the 2005 referendum result, when France voted against the EU Constitution Treaty, which was then renamed the Lisbon Treaty and the French people were ignored.)
Constitutional amendments to protect the people’s interests, including binding referenda
Remove all ideology from the ministry of education, ending all destructive education techniques
Break up media monopolies and end their interference in politics. Make media accessible to citizens and guarantee a plurality of opinions. End editorial propaganda
Guarantee citizens’ liberty by including in the constitution a complete prohibition on state interference in their decisions concerning education, health and family matters
Prevent migratory flows that cannot be accommodated or integrated, given the profound civilizational crisis we are experiencing
We would like to think that the entire Gilets Jaunes protest movement, now spread to other parts of Europe, and to Britain, will achieve the destruction of the EU and stop Muslim immigration. For the present, we must be satisfied that demands for both are incorporated among the protestor’s demands.
To the extent that it is a patriotic nationalist movement, it may be said to have lit its flame from Donald Trump’s torch.
Climate alarmism: an agenda of global domination 4
When Barack Obama said nonsensically that he led “from behind”, he was simply excusing his inability to lead, and – though he did not mean to – demonstrating his weakness and cowardice.
Who except the former affirmative-action president doesn’t know that “lead” means being in front and having others follow?
Well, “his know-nothing fans” is the answer.
Now President Trump leads.
Politicians are rising in Europe who follow him in wanting to make their nations great again – by recovering national self-determination, stopping the intrusion of Third World hordes into their countries, and focusing on protecting the freedom and promoting the prosperity of their citizens rather than trying to affect the climate conditions of the next century.
In short, they see the need to act against the aggressive International Left.
And not only in Europe are they coming to power, but in South America too.
From Breitbart, by Thomas D. Williams:
Brazil’s new foreign minister said this week that his “main mission” in office is to combat the Marxist ideology of the preceding regime, including “climate alarmism” and abortion.
Ernesto Araújo, named as future foreign minister by president-elect Jair Bolsonaro, said that putting an end to Marxist ideology in Brazil’s foreign policy is “the main mission that the president has entrusted to me” in an op-ed published in the Gazeta do Povo newspaper.
According to Araújo, the Workers’ Party (PT), which governed Brazil for 13 years under Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, turned the country’s foreign policy into a tool to spread Marxist ideology, and the mission of the new administration is to dismantle that apparatus.
Among the Marxist elements pushed by the PT, Araújo cited climatic alarmism, knee-jerk third-worldism, adherence to abortionist policies in international forums, and the destruction of the identity of peoples through mass immigration.
“All these are elements of the PT’s ideology, that is, of Marxism,” he said.
“To cure a disease it is not enough to say that we detest it; it is necessary to know its causes and manifestations, its strategies and its disguises,” the minister said.
In an earlier blogpost, the future minister went into greater depth regarding his understanding of the aims of the climate change lobby.
“This dogma has served to justify increasing the regulatory power of states over the economy and the power of international institutions over national states and their populations,” Araújo wrote in mid-October, “as well as to stifle economic growth in democratic capitalist countries and foster China’s growth.”
Araújo, who is a vocal supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, said that China is the enemy of the West and that the globalist movement wants to transfer the economic power of the West to that country.
The minister’s words this week coincided with an announcement by the president-elect that Brazil has withdrawn its offer to host the United Nations COP25 climate summit in 2019, citing “current fiscal and budgetary constraints” as well as “the transition process for the newly elected administration’.
Greenpeace reacted strongly to the news, saying that the new government had “shamed the climate agenda” and lost an opportunity to position Brazil as a “climate leader” on the international stage.
“Shamed the climate agenda”? They mean the new Brazilian government makes “the climate agenda” look shameful.
Which it is.
In a statement this week, Greenpeace went on to call President-elect Bolsonaro, who will take office on January 1, an “environmental threat”, while lamenting that the new foreign minister Ernesto Araújo “believes that climate change is no more than a major international conspiracy, something that functions as an agenda of global domination”.
Which is exactly what it is.
Antifa: the fascist insurrection 311
Antifa is a revolutionary Marxist/anarchist militia movement that seeks to bring down the United States by means of violence and intimidation.
Those are the opening words of a new booklet, Antifa: A Growing Fascist Threat, published by The David Horowitz Freedom Center. Most of the content can be found online at Discover the Networks. All our quotations in this post come from that source.
Because Antifa is a movement with no centralized leadership, its constituents typically group themselves into autonomous local cells. Some of these cells meet only sporadically to strategize and plan future activities, while others meet as frequently as several times each week. Antifa activists communicate and recruit mostly through social media, using Facebook as their principal forum for organizing protests.
The movement is in alliance with – or swelled by – a dozen or so groups which similarly characterize themselves as “anti-fascist”.
By “fascist” they mean any person, organization, business, creed, movement, system, faction, party, institution that they don’t like because, they allege, he, she, it and/or they are “white supremacists” like the Nazis and the KKK.
They would have it believed that their motivation is idealist, utopian, selfless, supremely moral. They claim to be champions of “the oppressed” whom they identify primarily as “the poor, the black, and the brown”. (Video footage of Antifa riots indicate that the majority of its members are white. Some of their associated groups are predominantly or exclusively black. One such is the Black Panthers.) The oppression, they say, takes the form of “capitalism”, “materialism”, “colonialism”, “imperialism”, “racism”, “sexism”. Of these crimes they accuse all conservatives, Republicans, property-owners, bankers, retailers, patriots, the police, the military, and above all President Trump and the United States. One of their slogans, shouted at a rally in Berkeley, California, in August 2017, was: “No Trump, No Wall, No USA at All!”
The authors of the Antifa booklet declare, with reason, that the motivation is also “base criminal desires, and thrill seeking”.
Their protests against oppression take the form of violent attacks and rioting in the streets, parks, and public square. They attack people marked as their enemies with brass knuckles, poles, chains, clubs, rocks, knives, pepper spray, Molotov cocktails, smoke bombs, bottles of urine, and guns; and the property of their enemies with clubs, rocks, “chunks of pavement”, and fire. They have not yet killed anyone, but many of their victims have needed to be hospitalized. They know they are breaking the law, and that they can get away with it.
When Antifa activists participate in street demonstrations, they often employ a tactic known as “black bloc”, whereby they dress entirely in black and cover their faces with black masks or scarves, so as to make it nearly impossible for victims, witnesses, or law-enforcement personnel to identify any particular individual who has committed an act of vandalism, arson, theft, or assault. As the Antifa website CrimethInc.com explains, “When everyone in a group looks the same, it is difficult for the police or others to tell who did what.” Longtime Antifa activist Scott Crow confirms that the masks allows the activists to “become anonymous”, and thus “able to move more freely and do what we need to do, whether it is illegal or not.”
Who funds the insurgent rioters? Are they motivated at all by expectation of being paid?
One organization that can be definitively identified as a funder of the Antifa movement is the Alliance For Global Justice (AfGJ), which was founded in 1998 by members of the Nicaragua Network, an organization that had been created nineteen years earlier to support the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. AfGJ serves as the fiscal sponsor of Refuse Fascism, a constituent organization of the Antifa movement.
Describing itself as an “anti-capitalist”, “anti-imperialist”, “people’s think tank” whose activities include “a whole lot of organizing”, AfGJ seeks to train young activists to build a “unified grassroots movement” capable of creating “a socially, ecologically and economically just world” that offers “alternatives” to the “domination of governments, global financial institutions, and multinational corporations which denigrate the world’s peoples and devastate ecosystems”.
In its ongoing “struggle for liberation from Empire,” AfGJ denounces “neoliberal economics”, “corporate globalization”, and “privatization”, contending that “a just society is oriented toward meeting the needs … of its own people, not toward creating vast inequality and mega-profits for those at the top at the expense of the many”. To combat “the concentration of wealth and power [that] is the root cause of oppression,” says AfGJ, there must be a “fundamental change in international and national conditions that disempower people, create [economic and political] disparities, poison the earth, and plunder its resources”. By AfGJ’s reckoning, it is government’s duty to satisfy “the right of people to shelter, sufficient food, medical care, education, employment, [and] leisure”, and to dismantle societal “structures that distribute wealth in ways that deny anyone those basic rights”.
And who funds AfGJ?
AfGJ over the years has received funding from a number of left-wing philanthropies, including George Soros‘s Open Society Foundations, the Tides Foundation …
… which is also one of George Soros’s organizations. He is the would-be paymaster of universal chaos.
Among the other “left-wing philanthropies” on the list are the Bank of America Charitable Foundation and the Bank of America Charitable Gift Fund.
The Bank of America’s charitable arm supports an anti-capitalist movement?
Apparently, yes.
There are mayors of cities where Antifa riots have done harm to people and property, and certain police chiefs, who – perhaps out of sympathy with the insurrectionists – have looked on and let them do their vicious damage. This happened at Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, and at Berkeley on August 27, 2017.
The mainstream media do not want to criticize Antifa.
Over the course of several months in 2017, conservative political commentator/comedian Steven Crowder’s cohort, “Not Gay Jared”, infiltrated an Antifa group and shot a large amount of video while undercover, resulting in a goldmine of damning evidence showing that Antifa is an unwavering supporter of violence. … Local police in Utah were in on Crowder’s infiltration of Antifa, and Jared happily gave them all the footage that he captured as evidence. Crowder then tried to hand over his undercover exposé to members of the local and national media, including ABC News’s Nightline, and they all turned down his offer. “We were delivering a story to local and national news on a silver platter, which included infiltration, violence, and exposing the roots of a national domestic terrorist organization and no one even wanted to give it a glimpse?” Crowder said incredulously.
And the worst is yet to come.
There is clearly overwhelming evidence that there are growing ties between U.S. radicals and the Islamic State [ISIS], as well as several [ISIS] offshoots and splinter groups.
Ties between three key leaders of the Oakland [anarchist] group met in Hamburg with a leader of the AQAP [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] and the AQIM [Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb] … The leader from AQAP is an Egyptian-born male who is known to be in charge of finances and recruiting for the group. There is evidence from informants that he is helping the Oakland group acquire the weapons they are seeking, primarily bomb making equipment and toxic chemicals and gasses.
One of the men from Oakland traveled to Syria to meet with ISIS; the purpose was for training in tactics, but was thought to be primarily a bonding visit to discuss possible massive disruptive attacks in the U.S. While in Hamburg, several of the Oakland-based criminals were photographed throwing Molotov cocktails and wielding iron bars, which have been their weapons of choice, though they are almost certainly on the verge of upping the caliber of their weaponry for use in the U.S. Despite having their faces covered by masks, they were positively identified…. Making some sort of common cause with Americans who are determined to commit violence against the U.S. makes them potentially very useful to radical Islam.
The authors of the Discover the Networks booklet on Antifa rightly conclude:
In the final analysis, it can accurately be said that the Antifa communists and anarchists who so passionately denounce fascism, are quite literally fascists themselves.
Most importantly, they are terrorist traitors intent on starting a bloody revolution.
The day of the jacket 140
Ben Pile writes at Spiked – the website of Brendan O’Neill, a net-surfer’s island of political acuity – about a group that calls itself “Extinction Rebellion” (acronym, XR).
The extinction it is against is the one that man-made global warming is bringing (they passionately believe) to the human race and possibly all living things on earth.
Nothing says ‘take me seriously, I am here to save the planet’ quite like a fully grown man, with a full beard, dressed up as a Girl Guide.
(See the picture at the end of the post)
And –
And nothing better forges a sense of solidarity with ordinary people than obstructing London’s bridges and roads, causing traffic gridlock. Protests such as this took place in London over the past two weekends as part of a new movement called Extinction Rebellion (XR), which claims the human race is heading for extinction and calls for carbon emissions to be cut to net zero by 2025.
For decades, direct action of this kind has been environmental activists’ preferred mode of expression. Movements with a weight of numbers behind them only need to demonstrate their size to illustrate how much they resonate with the wider public. Environmental protests, having no such public support, instead use direct action or spectacle to draw attention to themselves. As well as blocking London’s roads, XR activists also glued their hands to government buildings and to the gates of Buckingham Palace. Such stunts get a great deal of attention, but they rarely arouse much public sympathy. …
Green MEP Molly Scott Cato claims that direct action is necessary because a conspiracy of ‘wealthy individuals and multinational corporations, backed by complicit politicians, has subverted the political process and blocked action’. But this conspiracy theory gets things completely the wrong way round. Climate change is almost exclusively a preoccupation of the wealthy. The global poor cannot afford to do without cheap fossil fuels like coal, while the working class in the West struggles to absorb the high cost of green taxes. Billionaires and corporations, on the other hand, fall over themselves to demonstrate their green credentials. And politicians from all parties, far from resisting environmentalist demands, compete to be the champions of environmentalism.
The UK’s Climate Change Act, passed in 2008 by the Labour government, was the first of its kind in the world. It bound the country to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 80 per cent. The current Conservative government is now considering plans that are even more extensive: reducing the UK’s CO2 emissions to zero by 2050. This will include the abolition of petrol and diesel engines, among other things. The only actual fetter on politicians’ green ambitions, so far, has been political reality. XR and its supporters demand regressive, authoritarian and controlling legislation to limit consumption and production. But in general, voters do not want to be poorer and less free.
For a glimpse of what the political reality has in store for green ambitions, take a peek at the protests on the other side of the channel. While last weekend’s Extinction Rebellion protests reportedly attracted 2,000 greens in London, the gilet jaunes movement, sparked by rising fuel taxes, has brought hundreds of thousands of people on to streets and motorways across the whole of France. Despite the inconvenience caused by the blockades and go-slows, the protests enjoy the support of around 70 per cent of the French public, reflecting the high level of opposition to President Macron’s green taxes.
France’s gilets jaunes (yellow vests) took to the streets last weekend for the second weekend in a row, with over 100,000 taking part in marches, blockades and go-slows. The previous weekend saw nearly 300,000 protesters all across the country, threatening to bring France to a standstill. The yellow vests take their name from the hi-vis jackets that all French drivers are required to own by law, which protesters have fashioned into their symbol of resistance. The movement is spontaneous, leaderless and not connected to any existing political party, union or organisation. Its ad-hoc demonstrations are organised on social media. What began as a protest against an environmentalist hike in fuel taxes has come to encapsulate a more general anger with the status quo. Many are particularly angry about the cost of living. [From Spiked]
Moreover, there is no other ‘rebellion’ in history that can match XR’s desperate, fawning obsequiousness. Protesting outside Buckingham Palace last Saturday, activist Gail Bradbrook read aloud a letter to the monarch: ‘With great humility, we now come to your majesty to implore you to act on our behalf: to fulfil your sacred duty to protect the realm.’ What kind of ‘rebellion’ appears ‘with great humility’? What kind of ‘rebellion’ begs the monarch to limit the material freedom of her subjects?
Sticking with the France comparison, this is akin to the starving peasants of the French Revolution demanding of the king and queen not only no cake, but also less bread.
The protesters themselves never tire of making historical comparisons. They flatter themselves with allusions to the Suffragettes, Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But King had ‘a dream’ in which places ‘sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice’. XR and other environmentalists, on the other hand, can only offer a nightmare vision: a catastrophic climate collapse to which the only remedy is ecological austerity.
See our critical portrait of Gandhi here.
History is full of weird, religious zealots with apocalyptic prognostications. While the climate debate is often presented as being about ‘the science’, environmentalists like XR’s Molly Scott Cato emphasize not science, rationalism and debate, but spiritual feelings. ‘As a Quaker, I don’t believe that spiritual wisdom resides in books or rituals but in the still, small voice that tells you when something must change’, she writes. The environmentalists’ belief in an impending apocalypse is a kind of religious conviction.
The Quakers’ still small voice of conscience doesn’t trouble them too much in North Korea, where they run collective farms worked by slave labor. [Note the second last paragraph of the article linked to, bearing in mind that in North Korean all farms are collective and use forced labor.]
Force is the method all these saviors of the earth favor.
Another XR campaigner and co-religionist of Scott Cato, Rupert Read, writes in the Conversation that, ‘As a Quaker, I cherish the opening words of the famous Shaker hymn: ‘Tis the gift to be simple’. Chillingly, he adds his own twist: ‘It isn’t enough to live a life of voluntary simplicity.’ Climate activism, ultimately, is about the authoritarian regulation of other people’s lives.
Doom-mongers have existed throughout history. But the question is, why have the likes of Extinction Rebellion become so prominent, causing such a splash in the media? It is a symptom of our times. The movement has emerged in an atmosphere where politicians struggle to offer a compelling vision of the future and are instead preoccupied with staving off a looming catastrophe. The self-styled rebels of XR, rather than standing against this pessimistic zeitgeist, epitomize it.
Such climate activists are in every country in the West, working to regulate all our lives, wherever we may be. They would have us live in enforced poverty.
The human race just might survive, they preach, if it limits its activities to the minimum necessary to gain bare subsistence.
It is an atavistic creed, yearning to return to primitive ways in which the human race could probably survive but individuals would have very short lives.
They are extreme puritans, and their rule would be totalitarian. Criticism would not be tolerated. Some environmentalists already call for prison sentences and some think capital punishment would be just for dissenters.
Now is the time to put on figurative yellow jackets and do some serious rebelling against them.
rebels against carbon dioxide
The hellish fire of Paradise 83
The earth of California burns as a result of human activity – or rather of the inactivity of environmentalists.
The Washington Post reports and comments:
The wildfires scorching California in the past few days have been vast, bringing their destruction and lethality to numerous communities across large swaths of the state, including one in Los Angeles County and another gigantic burn along the northern mountains.
The Camp Fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills north of Sacramento, is now the most destructive individual wildfire in California’s history. As of Saturday, it already had destroyed nearly 7,000 structures in and around the mountain town of Paradise and has been blamed for 23 of the 25 overall deaths, though more could come.
“This event was the worst-case scenario,” Butte County Sheriff Kory L. Honea said. “It’s the event that we have feared for a long time.” …
There are reports of about 110 people missing. …
in Southern California, authorities said two bodies were found, both burned, in Malibu in a vehicle that had been in the path of the wildfire …
About 200,000 people were displaced by the Woolsey Fire, which began mid-afternoon Thursday near Simi Valley, even as fire departments were responding to a second wildfire, called the Hill Fire, just west of Thousand Oaks. The Woolsey Fire proved to be explosive, expanding within 24 hours to some 35,000 acres. It raced from the Conejo Valley to the Pacific Ocean, across Highway 101 and the Santa Monica mountains, at speeds that impressed veteran fire officials. …
On Saturday, President Trump made his first comments on the wildfires, alleging mismanagement of the forests.
There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!
The Californian authorities – Democrats all, and passionate believers in man-made global warming – blame President Trump (and global warming – see below) for the fires, claiming that he does not provide sufficient federal funds for the vital work of neglecting the forests.
And what’s more, they say, he’s heartless:
A spokesman for Governor Jerry Brown (D) said that more federal forest land has burned than state land, adding that the state has expanded its forestry budget while the Trump administration has cut its budget for forest services. …
Brian Rice, president of the California Professional Firefighters, also responded to Trump’s earlier tweet.
The president’s message attacking California and threatening to withhold aid to the victims of the cataclysmic fires is Ill-informed, ill-timed and demeaning to those who are suffering as well as the men and women on the front lines. The president’s assertion that California’s forest management policies are to blame for catastrophic wildfire is dangerously wrong . . . nearly 60 percent of California forests are under federal management, and another two-thirds under private control. It is the federal government that has chosen to divert resources away from forest management, not California.
Who is right?
Matthew Vadum writes at Canada Free Press:
As huge wildfires continued to devour forests, homes, and businesses across California over the weekend, President Trump lashed out at the destructive, deadly policies long pushed by environmentalists that set the stage for the Golden State’s now-routine fiery catastrophes.
“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” President Trump tweeted Nov. 10 at 3:08 a.m. “Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!”
On Nov. 11 at 4:40 a.m. he followed up with: “With proper Forest Management, we can stop the devastation constantly going on in California. Get Smart!”
In-between the two tweets, Trump used Twitter to urge people in the affected areas to “evacuate quickly”, praised the “more than 4,000” who are fighting the Camp and Woolsey Fires in California, and expressed sympathy for the fire victims.
Idiot celebrities and clueless politicians weighed in across the fruited plain, eager to attack Trump. …
California Governor-elect Gavin Newsom (D), a strong supporter of the no-growth economic policies that caused the deadly fires, tweeted:
“Lives have been lost. Entire towns have been burned to the ground. Cars abandoned on the side of the road. People are being forced to flee their homes. This is not a time for partisanship. This is a time for coordinating relief and response and lifting those in need up.” …
But as usual Trump is right … and his critics are wrong.
Years ago environmentalist lobbies ideologically opposed to economic growth put the screws to California’s once-thriving wood-harvesting industry. New federal and state regulations came into effect make it increasingly difficult for the industry to operate.
“As a result, timber industry employment gradually collapsed, falling in 2017 to half of what it was 20 years earlier, with imports from Canada, China, and other nations filling domestic need,” Chuck DeVore, Vice President of National Initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, writes at Forbes.
As timber harvesting permit fees rose and environmental regulations intensified, industry employees left the field and “the combustible fuel load in the forest predictably soared. No longer were forest management professionals clearing brush and thinning trees”.
With all that kindling piling up on forest floors, today’s devastating wildfires were not hard to foresee.
Back in 2005 experts were predicting “larger, more devastating fires—fires so hot that they sterilized the soil, making regrowth difficult and altering the landscape,” DeVore writes. They saw the rise of “fires that increasingly threatened lives and homes as they became hotter and more difficult to bring under control. Federal lands have not been managed for decades …”
For decades before the election of President Trump …
… threatening adjacent private forests, while “federal funds designated for forest maintenance have been ‘borrowed’ for fire suppression expenses,” DeVore writes. “The policies frequently reduce the economic value of the forest to zero. And, with no intrinsic worth remaining, interest in maintaining the forest declined, and with it, resources to reduce the fuel load.”
Two decades ago there used to be an orderly burning of wood waste – including brush and smaller trees cleared by thinning efforts— from timber operations. … That waste fed “renewable biomass powered electric generating plants across the length of the state”, but taxpayer-subsidized solar power coupled with California’s air-quality regulations and less wood waste to use forced biomass generators to shut down.
“What used to be burned safely in power generators is now burned in catastrophic fires,” he writes. “Including the growing capture and use of landfill methane as a fuel, California’s biomass energy generation last year was 22% lower than it was 25 years before.”
Outgoing California Governor Jerry Brown (D) pigheadedly blames global warming for the fires but as Cato Institute meteorologist Ryan Maue noted on Twitter back on Aug. 5:
Please take a deep breath and read up on California’s forest management issues that are decades in the making. Governor Brown blames climate change for wildfires and avoids any meaningful conversation on policy solutions.
… Arms of the federal government which have long been under the influence of the same left-wing enviro-radicals who run California, are [also] largely to blame.
As always, government does badly what it takes it upon itself to do. As always, private enterprise does it much better:
In charge of 190 million acres of land, the U.S. Forest Service can’t manage land to prevent fires or protect property after blazes begin, Robert Smith, a distinguished scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said …
Private owners cannot afford to let their forests die of disease, insect infestations or wildfire. They are on the job 24 hours a day, unlike 9-5 government bureaucrats. If private owners fail they go bankrupt. If Forest Service managers fail, at worst they are transferred to another forest.
But though enviro-radicals in the federal government must bear their share of blame, President Trump’s accusation against the Californian government is not misplaced:
Smith laid some of the blame at the feet of radical environmentalists for preventing the Forest Service from managing woodlands by taking away the old or dead trees that are most likely to catch fire. The [Californian] government’s refusal to open roadways in forested areas also makes fighting fires unnecessarily difficult …
The evidence, Vadum says, is on the President’s side.
Paradise lost
BBCLGBTQ+ 240
Everyone in Britain who has a TV, or even just a radio, Internet connection, or a Smartphone, has to pay to keep the BBC going – under threat of severe penalty for delinquency.
What has this once much respected, once thoroughly trusted, sensible institution become?
Not respectable, not trustworthy.
Silly and menacing.
As Virginia Hale reports in an article at Breitbart:
The BBC is to fight a “heteronormative culture” with a raft of pro-LGBT reforms, despite figures showing sexual minorities are already overrepresented as much as fivefold in the broadcaster’s workforce.
Staff will be told to use gender-neutral pronouns for workers who say they are “non-binary” — identifying as neither male or female — under new BBC policies, which also detail plans to put additional support in place for transgender individuals, especially while they are “transitioning”.
Workforce training on diversity, inclusion, and “unconscious bias” will also be expanded to include LGBT issues, while non-heterosexual mentors will guide less senior staff who identify as a sexual minority.
Teams working in television, news and radio broadcasting have been told to increase representation of sexual minorities, specifically that they insert more “incidental” portrayals of LGBT relationships and individuals not directly related to a storyline or news item.
In addition, the BBC said it will raise the profile of employees who are not heterosexual and urge them to “bring their whole self to work”.
“Straight Ally” badges will be handed out to heterosexual members of staff.
The reforms were brought in following an internal survey of 300 LGBT members of staff, who called for “improvement” in a number of areas including the demand that the BBC adopt the umbrella term LGBTQ+ for sexual minorities so as to be “inclusive” towards people who claim to belong to identities other than Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender, including “Queer”.
James Purnell, director of radio and education, said:
One of our big challenges currently is around young audiences. In a recent YouGov survey only 51 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds said they identified as completely heterosexual. An organisation that appears to have a heteronormative culture is not one that is going to cut ice with them either as a consumer or an employee.
As Breitbart London reported last year, official government figures showing that just 4.1 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds reported themselves to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) was published just a week after an Ipsos Mori poll for the BBC showed only 66 per cent of young people said they were heterosexual.
Pause. Only two-thirds (at most) of the 16 to 25-year-old people of Britain are “completely” heterosexual?
No. To use an overused and much abused word correctly for once – INCREDIBLE!
Announcing in July the results of a confidential staff survey revealing that sexual minorities were overrepresented by about five times at the corporation the BBC praised the “very, very high” proportion of LGBT workers but insisted there was more to be done, suggesting a drive to hire lesbians.
According to the figures, more than 400 transgender individuals are employed at the BBC, while 11 per cent of its total workforce and 12 per cent of senior staff identified as sexual minorities.
The broadcaster’s seeking of an ever-more “diverse” workforce in terms of employing increasing numbers of staff from ethnic and sexual minorities is driven by the BBC’s “commit[ment] to reflecting and representing the diversity of the UK”, it claims.
It is unclear then why the significant underrepresentation of heterosexuals has at no point been raised as an issue of representation in the way lesbian staff numbers were.
Well, because Whites and heterosexuals are born despicable. Criminal. Because their ancestors were patriarchal imperialists. See? Understand now?
And about those “gender-neutral pronouns”. Surely it is not enough that they be used inside the temple itself?
Should they not also be used in the programs? In the news reports? In the drama, the movies, the documentaries?
Let’s review those Newspeak pronouns.
Here’s an American guide for university students (almost all US universities now being propaganda factories for the far-Left):
So the BBC has gone over, holus-bolus, to the dark side.
Ne is obsessed to the point of lunacy, as is the entire international Left, with race, “gender”, and the weather a hundred years from now.
(And – yes – also with promoting Islam.)
And the citizens of the United Kingdom are forced to pay for nem.
To save the earth 111
A new IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report has been emitted by the UN.
It says in effect, like all the other IPCC reports before it, “Hurry up and do something to save the earth from being burnt up by human activity – or else!”
Not a single prediction by the Warmists, since the first IPCC uttered its dire warning, has come true. But that does not discourage them.
From Investor’s Business Daily:
Assume for the sake of argument that everything environmentalists say about global warming is true. If that’s the case, then there is no chance of stopping it.
That’s what the latest UN report on global warming clearly demonstrates.
The headlines in stories reporting on the UN’s latest climate change report all say something along the lines of: “Urgent changed is needed to prevent global catastrophe.”
If global temperatures climb more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — compared with preindustrial temperatures — all hell will break loose, the UN says. There will be catastrophic flooding, drought, more weather extremes. Hundreds of millions will be susceptible to poverty by midcentury. Even at 1.5 degrees, terrible things will happen. …
Here’s an example of what the UN says would have to happen within the next 12 years [to avoid total disaster]. Keep in mind, this is the low end of the UN’s proposed changes.
- 60% of the world’s energy would have to come from renewable sources by 2030, and 77% by 2050. (The Department of Energy forecasts that renewables will account for just 27% of the U.S.’s electric power generation by 2050.)
- Coal use would have to drop 78%, oil 37% and natural gas 25% — compared with 2010 levels — within 12 years. (Last year, global coal demand increased, and use of natural gas has massively climbed in the U.S.)
- There’d have to be a 59% increase in nuclear power by 2030, and a 150% increase by 2050. (Good luck getting environmentalist to buy into that).
- Farmers would have to figure out how to cut methane emissions by 24% by 2030 (and still feed a growing world population).
Even those massive reductions won’t reduce enough CO2. So, the UN assumes the world will also remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. That’s despite the fact that nobody knows how to do that today.
The UN itself admits [actually hopes – ed] that achieving anything like these levels of greenhouse gas reductions “would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure, and industrial systems”.
It goes on to say that such an undertaking would be “unprecedented in terms of scale”. And it would require a “significant upscaling of investments”. In other words, massive amounts of money.
To say that changes of this magnitude within that time frame are unrealistic would be putting it mildly.
The last big attempt to get the world to cut CO2 emissions turned out to be a farce. As the UN itself admitted, the CO2 reduction pledges made by the 195 countries that signed on to the Paris Accords won’t come anywhere close to the level of CO2 reductions it says are needed to avoid “catastrophe”.
And countries aren’t even living up to those pledges.
On the whole, populations prefer to continue to exist. Obstinate, sinful, on they go.
In the EU, carbon emissions started climbing again last year. Germany is way off its carbon reduction goals, despite plans to spend $580 billion to overhaul its energy system. A recent report showed that only nine of 195 countries have submitted their CO2 reduction plans to the UN.
Does anyone honestly believe that these countries will suddenly decide to entirely decarbonize their economies in three decades?
So, if the chances of avoiding a climate “catastrophe” are gone, what should be done?
To be clear, we are highly skeptical of these doom-and-gloom scenarios. Past predictions of global warming catastrophes have failed to emerge. In the U.S., for example, there’s been no trend toward more extreme weather, drought or flooding, even though the planet has already warmed 1 degree Celsius. This year’s tornado season, in fact, has been the mildest on record. What’s more, environmentalists have issued these “point of no return” warnings for decades, only to revise them once the supposed deadline passes.
But if the alarmist predictions are true, there’s nothing that can plausibly be done at this point to stop it. That’s the real message of the annual UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
The chart contained in the Summary for Policymakers shows projected changes in global temperatures over the next 100 years. It also shows that temperatures will top the supposed 1.5-degree limit by around 2040, even if the world makes drastic reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions within the next two decades.
How drastic?
… The entire world [would have to] become entirely carbon free by 2055 at the latest. That’s just 37 years from now.
THE ENTIRE WORLD? MADE ENTIRELY CARBON FREE?
If all CO2 is removed, there will be nothing for green plants to feed on, so animals will starve, and then we must starve too.
Right. That’s the message.
For total carbon elimination, the world must be freed of all living things. Then whirl on, Earth, as a bare rock, cleansed of all polluting life and thus saved from overheating.
Steven Hayward points out that we are a highly adaptable species, and would not find it difficult to live in a world that was warmer by a few degrees.
Trouble is, as we see it, the alarmists would only become more importunate. Ever more drastic changes to our lives would be demanded. We can tolerate warmth, but can we tolerate the Warmists?
They claim the earth is doomed as long as we live and breathe. So we really have no choice. We must destroy the plants, mercy-kill the animals, and then commit suigenocide.
Okay. We’ll start getting used to the idea.
But there’s one thing we would like to do first.
WE MUST DESTROY THE UN.
And who knows but by that one small action we might save ourselves, all the kingdoms of living things, and the planet on which we dwell?
Prize lies 140
Obama claims that the eight years of his presidency were free of scandal. In fact, the scandals were many and appalling.
Obama claims to have stopped Iran becoming a nuclear power. In fact, he entered into a deal that permitted Iran to become a nuclear power.
Obama claims to have improved race relations. In fact, he worsened them.
Obama claims to have launched an economic boom. In fact, he never achieved even 3% GDP growth.
In sum, he was a weak and destructive president. The harm he did would not be easy to repair, and America is lucky to have found the man to succeed him who could not only mend what he had broken, and is doing so, but is going much further, turning the failure round and achieving success. Even some unprecedented successes. And all in record time.
Obama sees the repair as an undoing of the changes he wrought. As he puts it, “The status quo pushes back.”
The complaint comes from a speech he made at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Ill., on Sept. 7, 2018, when the university honored him with the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government.
The speech he gave on the occasion of receiving the prize included these claims:
Each time we painstakingly pull ourselves closer to our founding ideals, that all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights; the ideals that say every child should have opportunity and every man and woman in this country who’s willing to work hard should be able to find a job and support a family and pursue their small piece of the American Dream; our ideals that say we have a collective responsibility to care for the sick and the infirm, and we have a responsibility to conserve the amazing bounty, the natural resources of this country and of this planet for future generations, each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. …
To which political party does that last sentence most aptly apply? We say the Democratic Party? But then, the Left has a habit of accusing its opponents of the faults, failings, bad emotions, plots, conspiracies, evil intentions, underhand actions, and failures of which itself is guilty.
Most of you don’t remember a time before 9/11, when you didn’t have to take off your shoes at an airport.
Did he mention who was responsible for 9/11 and for us having to take off our shoes at an airport? No. Because he never did and never will blame Islam for its acts of terrorism.
Most of you don’t remember a time when America wasn’t at war, or when money and images and information could travel instantly around the globe, or when the climate wasn’t changing faster than our efforts to address it.
A strange combination of references. No one living remembers a time when America wasn’t at war, if the Cold War is counted. About the money and images he probably meant “remember a time when they could not …” And then he throws in as a certainty that there was a time when climate was not changing fast, but it is now.
And this was all before a change. What change? Have the wars stopped?
The only change he almost got right was a change to faster communications than ever before.
He claims that all three factors together brought about this consequence:
This change has happened fast, faster than any time in human history. And it created a new economy that has unleashed incredible prosperity.
Only, of the three phenomena he mentioned, could the faster communications be said to have promoted prosperity.
Actually, he just gabbled nonsense. And all to get in a claim to an “unleashed incredible prosperity” – the prosperity he claims as his own achievement.
He goes on to say how he rescued the economy from wicked men.
[T]he reckless behavior of financial elites triggered a massive financial crisis, ten years ago this week, a crisis that resulted in the worst recession in any of our lifetimes and caused years of hardship for the American people, for many of your parents, for many of your families. Most of you weren’t old enough to fully focus on what was going on at the time, but when I came into office in 2009, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. 800,000. Millions of people were losing their homes. Many were worried we were entering into a second Great Depression. So we worked hard to end that crisis, but also to break some of these longer term trends. And the actions we took during that crisis returned the economy to healthy growth and initiated the longest streak of job creation on record. And we covered another 20 million Americans with health insurance and we cut our deficits by more than half, partly by making sure that people like me, who have been given such amazing opportunities by this country, pay our fair share of taxes to help folks coming up behind me.
While it is true that employment rose before he left office, his claim that higher taxes (on “people like me”) were a formula for prosperity is false. President Trump’s tax cuts (for all tax payers) prove it. Furthermore, Obama heavily regulated business, and President Trump’s lifting of many Obama regulations has been a factor in creating the very real present economic boom.
And by the time I left office, household income was near its all-time high and the uninsured rate had hit an all-time low and wages were rising and poverty rates were falling. I mention all this just so when you hear how great the economy’s doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started. …
He came on then to his foreign policy.
Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and our combat role in Afghanistan, and got Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder. …
And even though your generation is the most diverse in history …
Nonsense! No generation is more “diverse” than any other.
… with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. …
[O]ver the past few decades, the politics of division, of resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.
Remember when a Republican Attorney General refused to prosecute a bunch of white people although they were breaking the law, on the grounds that he would not act against “his people”? No. Neither do we. But we do recall Eric Holder- Obama’s black AG – saying something like that in a case of the Black Panthers …
This Congress has … embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi, or my birth certificate.
The trick: he throws out, in passing, that the (factually accurate) report of his failure to send help to a US ambassador and three servicemen who were killed by Muslim terrorists in Benghazi was a “wild conspiracy theory’, and associates it with an unproved, unlikely, and petty story that he was not born in the United States. But the horrible events in Benghazi were proved and profoundly important.
He comes to his own party’s wild conspiracy theory:
[The Repulicans in power are] undermining our alliances, cozying up to Russia. What happened to the Republican Party? Its central organizing principle in foreign policy was the fight against Communism, and now they’re cozying up to the former head of the KGB, actively blocking legislation that would defend our elections from Russian attack.
And he calls the partial repeal of his unworkable health legislation “sabotage”:
Their sabotage of the Affordable Care Act has already cost more than three million Americans their health insurance. And if they’re still in power next fall, you’d better believe they’re coming at it again. …
He defends the media who gave him uncritical support in all he did, and never stp attacking President Trump. What is indefnsible in his eyes, is Trump hitting back at his media enemies. To do this, he lies again:
I complained plenty about Fox News – but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them enemies of the people.
We did hear that his administration “spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama ‘the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation’ after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources”. (See our quotations from Matt Margolis below.)
Next, he endorses the lie that President Trump sympathizes with Nazis:
We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers.
How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad.
How hard can it be to say that Islamic terrorism is bad? That Communism is bad? Too hard for him, it appeared.
Then comes the most blatantly impudent accusation of them all:
And we won’t win people over by calling them names, or dismissing entire chunks of the country as racist, or sexist, or homophobic.
Who, every minute of every day, calls whom “racist, or sexist, or homophobic”? Or all three?
Matt Margolis comments at PJ Media:
Today we saw just how far academia is going to perpetuate the myth of Obama’s “scandal-free” administration when he was awarded the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government by the University of Illinois. Not since the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has Obama been so undeserving of an award. But, I submit that this award is even worse than the Nobel Peace Prize he didn’t deserve. In 2009, the Nobel committee was at least ignorant of what Obama’s record would turn out to be. There is simply no excuse in 2018 for Obama to be receiving an Ethics in Government award. … The Paul H. Douglas Award is now forever tainted.
What, exactly, did the committee at the University of Illinois think Obama did to earn an Ethics in Government award? The Obama years were plagued by scandal and defined by a hyper-partisan government.
Last month I cited six Obama scandals where a special counsel should have been appointed to investigate but was not. Unlike Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Obama’s attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were partisan lackeys who did everything they could to protect Obama from being held accountable. Obama, Holder, and Lynch knew that if they left the investigating to Republicans in Congress they could write them off as partisan witch hunts and use any and all tactics possible to obstruct and stonewall those investigations, or in some cases, run their own sham investigation that cleared them of any wrongdoing.
I document thirty different scandals in my book The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. Each scandal on its own makes the idea of Obama receiving an ethics award laughable. All of them together make this award blasphemous. From the moment Obama took office he was under a dark cloud of scandal, having been involved in illegal negotiations with [the condemned criminal] Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich to give him a cabinet position in exchange for Blagojevich nominating an Obama-preferred candidate to his vacated Senate seat … yet Obama just received an Ethics in Government award? What a joke!…
There are plenty of well-known scandals that the committee that decided to award Obama had to have been aware of but chose to ignore. There was the Fast and Furious scandal, which involved sending guns to Mexico in the hopes of tracking them to drug cartel leaders. Not only did they lose track of a large number of guns, but one gun was found to have been used in the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The Obama administration tried to cover it up, and they stonewalled a congressional investigation, resulting in Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents. Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois?
The Obama administration also abused the Espionage Act to target reporters and their sources. They even spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation” after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources. Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois? …
There were also –
The Solyndra scandal [see here], the Benghazi cover-up, Uranium One, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the covering up of thousands of deaths of veterans waiting for care at VA hospitals, manipulating intelligence, paying ransom money to Iran, Project Cassandra [see here], spying on Donald Trump, the Hillary email scandal, which I should add, also implicated Obama, who communicated with Hillary via her private email address and used a pseudonym himself.
It’s bad enough when Obama claims he was scandal-free. But, when he receives an ethics in government award, it diminishes the meaning of ethics. It’s time to stop pretending Obama was scandal-free or ethical. … I’ve only scratched the surface of Obama’s scandalous and unethical presidency.
The only reason why Barack Obama was elected president was that he was black. He had nothing else to offer. A sufficient number of white Americans voted for him to get him into the White House for no better reason than that they needed to feel good, to prove to themselves, and the country and the world, that they were not “racist“.
Barack Obama, for all his expensive education, was ill-informed and strangely ignorant – and he embraced ideologies inimical to America. He seemed not to know how many states there were in the country he governed. He thought Austrians spoke a language called Austrian. He did not know how to pronounce “corpsman”. And he was a follower of the Communist “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, and a lackey of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He lied and commanded others to lie. Under his leadership, his party worked an elaborate plot, which it still pursues, to destroy the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump with false and slanderous allegations of treason.
If prizes were awarded for lying, Obama would deserve them all.