The choice is becoming increasingly clear. Stark would be an even better word for it.

Voters can choose between –

Keeping the Republic set up in 1787 and prospering now as never before under the leadership of President Trump, by voting for his Republican followers.

Or changing into the North American Venezuela by voting for the other major political party forming rapidly to replace the Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialist Party, under the leadership of an old communist, Bernie Sanders, and a young communist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The North American Venezuela. It is a vision hovering in the spacious skies over the purple mountains and the fruited plain.

AP reports:

A week ago, Maine Democrat Zak Ringelstein wasn’t quite ready to consider himself a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, even if he appreciated the organization’s values and endorsement in his bid to become a U.S. senator.

Three days later, he told The Associated Press it was time to join up. He’s now the only major-party Senate candidate in the nation to be a dues-paying democratic socialist.

Ringelstein’s leap is the latest evidence of a nationwide surge in the strength and popularity of an organization that, until recently, operated on the fringes of the liberal movement’s farthest left flank. As Donald Trump’s presidency stretches into its second year, democratic socialism has become a significant force in Democratic politics. Its rise comes as Democrats debate whether moving too far left will turn off voters.

“I stand with the democratic socialists, and I have decided to become a dues-paying member,” Ringelstein told AP. “It’s time to do what’s right, even if it’s not easy.”

There are 42 people running for offices at the federal, state and local levels this year with the formal endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America, the organization says. They span 20 states, including Florida, Hawaii, Kansas and Michigan.

The most ambitious Democrats in Washington have been reluctant to embrace the label, even as they embrace the policies defining modern-day democratic socialism: Medicare for all, a $15 minimum wage, free college tuition and the abolition of the federal department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Congress’s only self-identified democratic socialist, campaigned Friday with the movement’s newest star, New York City congressional candidate Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old former bartender who defeated one of the most powerful House Democrats last month.

Two-head Communism

Her victory fed a flame that was already beginning to burn brighter. The DSA’s paid membership has hovered around 6,000 in the years before Trump’s election, said Allie Cohn, a member of the group’s national political team. Last week, its paid membership hit 45,000 nationwide.

There is little distinction made between the terms “democratic socialism” and “socialism” in the group’s literature. While Ringelstein and other DSA-backed candidates promote a “big-tent” philosophy, the group’s constitution describes its members as socialists who “reject an economic order based on private profit” and “share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships”. 

Note that, voters. Even private relationships will be monitored by the planners of the social order. It completes the totalitarian vision. 

Members during public meetings often refer to each other as “comrades”,wear clothing featuring socialist symbols like the rose and promote authors such as Karl Marx.

Four-head Communism

The common association with the failed Soviet Union has made it difficult for sympathetic liberals to explain their connection.

“I don’t like the term socialist, because people do associate that with bad things in history,” said Kansas congressional candidate James Thompson, who is endorsed by the DSA and campaigned alongside Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, but is not a dues-paying democratic socialist. “There’s definitely a lot of their policies that closely align with mine.”

Thompson, an Army veteran turned civil rights attorney, is running again after narrowly losing a special election last year to fill the seat vacated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Even in deep-red Kansas, he embraces policies like “Medicare for all” and is openly critical of capitalism.

In Hawaii, 29-year-old state Rep. Kaniela Ing isn’t shy about promoting his status as a democratic socialist in his bid for Congress. He said he was encouraged to run for higher office by the same activist who recruited Ocasio-Cortez.

“We figured just lean in hard,” Ing told the AP of the democratic socialist label. He acknowledged some baby boomers may be scared away, but said the policies democratic socialists promote — like free health care and economic equality — aren’t extreme.

Republicans, meanwhile, are encouraged by the rise of democratic socialism — for a far different reason. They have seized on what they view as a leftward lurch by Democrats they predict will alienate voters this fall and in the 2020 presidential race.

The Republican National Committee eagerly notes that Sanders’ plan to provide free government-sponsored health care for all Americans had no co-sponsors in 2013. Today, more than one-third of Senate Democrats and two-thirds of House Democrats have signed onto the proposal, which by one estimate could cost taxpayers as much as $32 trillion.

The co-sponsors include some 2020 presidential prospects, such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and California Sen. Kamala Harris.

Those senators aren’t calling themselves democratic socialists but also not disassociating themselves from the movement’s priorities.

Most support the push to abolish ICE [the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency] which enforces immigration laws …

… and want to abolish national borders.

So not even a North American Venezuela?

No nations, no nation-states. No national governments, no voting, no political parties, no law to enforce.

The hovering vision fades.

If the comrades have their way, the reality will be even worse than Venezuela.

… aka Democratic Socialism.

Now here’s a story for our time:

B’rack Clinton Smith is just eighteen, so he has come of age to vote. He is a white man. And he knows it is a shameful thing to be a white man. So he is also a feminist. And an environmentalist. Enrolled at a college staffed fully by black and brown Leftist mainly female and all feminist teachers, he aims for  three degrees in, respectively, Black Studies, Wymyns’ Studies, and Transgender Studies. And yes, thank you for asking, he is hugely enjoying his college days, which he mainly spends protesting. “Like it’s enormous fun. Like it’s exciting. Like it’s exhilarating.” He is a leading member of two student organizations: “Resistance Now” and “Diversity and Inclusion Now”. Both are affiliated to Antifa. He has the black clothes and the face-hiding hood in his wardrobe and has twice joined in an Antifa attack, once on the windows of a bank (which resisted breaking under blows with baseball bats) and once on a visiting woman lecturer who said that … Actually, he’s forgotten what she said if she ever got to say anything, but it had to be something that showed she was a fascist, so she deserved the broken collar-bone she got.

B’rack was asked by a CNN journalist, a few days ago, to describe his ideal America. He replied that it would “be like” open borders, no prisons, no police, everyone would get free education K-PH.D with no tests, free health care including free contraception and free abortions, free marijuana, a guaranteed minimum income, free housing, and a job in government for anyone who wanted it  – for him , personally, preferably the presidency.

“We want like real equality, with no one being a cent richer than anyone else. Like real diversity, real inclusion,” he said.

“What would you call your political philosophy?” the sympathetic CNN journalist asked him. “Communism?”

“Yeah … you know, Democratic Socialism,” B’rack replied.

“And you expect life would be much better for everyone under that system?

“Like exciting, yes. Like exhilarating.”

Who will tell him, and millions of his contemporaries, that  life for most people under Communism – sorry, I mean Democratic Socialism – is invariably, dreary, poor, hungry, regimented, precarious and painful? (Though of course, if he got to be president of the new Democratic Socialist America, he would be one of the few for whom it would be like fun.)

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh writes at Canada Free Press:

This is a wake-up call for young and old Americans, wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, Mao’s hammer and sickle t-shirts, holding “I support socialism” posters, and proudly displaying Hillary and Bernie bumper stickers …

If I could show young people today what communism is, those clamoring for socialism and communism to be brought to American shores,  those who are tired of capitalism because they are so fat and happy, they want the challenge of poverty and want, the challenge of the communist code-speak of “social justice” and “egalitarianism”, I would send them to Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea for a few months so that they could experience first-hand what the utopia they see as paradise is like.

If I could show young Americans the rotten socialist countries that illegal aliens have fled, the same illegals who are now giving us the finger, burning and stomping our American flag, boldly waving their flags, the total disaster they have made of their countries, while demonizing our successful America that generously put them on welfare ahead of our veterans, perhaps you might see reality.

I would ask them to come with me to see where I grew up, the cinder block grimy apartments that are still standing today.  The entrance and stairwell are unchanged; the damage from the 1977 earthquake is still visible, reinforced concrete pieces dangling on the side like loose teeth. The lives of ordinary people, the proletariat, are mostly unchanged too.

I would ask them to come shop in the same neighborhood shopping center now overrun by small individual shops looking like an ill-planned bazaar, with walls that have not been painted inside and outside for decades. The poverty and scars of communism are hard to erase by time when neglect is perennial and nobody cares about the proletariat poor.

The community organizing apparatchiks lived well then and the global communist elites live well today even though communism officially “fell” in 1989. Communism has morphed into a more powerful and insidious global movement that attacks and brainwashes the population through schools and bogus global warming.

I would take them to the city hospital with its dirty wards, broken cement floors, cracked walls, unused shower stalls, with blood and other bodily fluids staining the beds, the walls and the floors, and slimy smelly bathrooms that seldom see any disinfectant.

If they want Bernie’s socialism so badly, I would take them to Venezuela, formerly a well-off country with rich oil reserves, brought to bankruptcy and penury by the lying socialists who gave the poor a dusting of free food and basic medical care but when the money dried up due to gross mismanagement and theft of the economy by the ruling communist elites, the handouts disappeared. The incompetence of socialist and communist community organizers brought the country to its knees, with inflation exceeding five digits.

Pause here. No good management, no degree of competence, can keep the money from drying up. It is a system that does not make money, only spends it. As the great Margaret Thatcher said, “The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”.

But please go on, Dr. Paugh.

I would show you, dear Millennials aspiring for Bernie’s manufactured Socialist Democracy, Venezuelans standing in long lines for basics that you take for granted, food, toilet paper, diapers, detergent, or digging in trash cans for scrap food. I would show you Venezuelans having to kill zoo animals because they could not feed them and then cooking them for their families.

Perhaps you would be willing to be injected with medicine by doctors and nurses in dirty white coats using the same syringe and few needles, boiled in rusty pans because the clinic or hospital cannot afford autoclaves and disposable medical supplies, everything is rewashed and reused. Maybe you are willing to have root canal and surgery without local anesthesia?

Liberal women demand free birth control and menstrual pads because they are too entitled to take responsibility for their own existence and basic expenses, they want daddy government to take care of all their needs from cradle to grave while they stay glued to their social media profile on Instagram or watch with bated breath how many new fake friends and likes they may gain on Facebook. Be careful what you wish for because welfare dependency on government for all needs is a grave disease which is very hard to cure if ever.

Socialist countries, not the Fabian variety, cannot even provide such items for sale in the empty stores because they mismanage everything so disastrously.  They are excellent speakers and community organizers who draw naïve and ignorant progressive fools into their ideological “everything free” fantasy.

You Millennials are not even sure which bathrooms to use or what gender to call yourselves, but your list of economic demands gets larger and larger every day; everything is a right in your brainwashed minds muddled by smoking too much pot; you listen to cunning communist teachers who have never traveled to, nor lived under a communist dictatorship but you believe them nevertheless.

Millennials should learn the facts of real historical events under socialism and communism from those who have experienced it and escaped from it, not the revisionist history in textbooks and the lies spun by the communist academia and financed by globalist billionaires who have made their fortunes under much maligned capitalism.

Bernie Sanders is selling socialism to you, young and old Americans, a failed ideology of violence, confiscation of property and land, starvation, poverty, political oppression, and loss of freedom.  There is no equality, compassion, and social justice under socialism and communism. …

There is no justice at all. Justice can only be individual, and under Communism  – whoops! I mean Democratic Socialism – the individual does not matter.

…  just exploitation of the weak and disarmed. The tyrants like Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Ceausescu, and Stalin, who had previously sold socialism to the masses have killed millions of their own people once those oppressed woke up and refused to follow the vicious path that destroyed their freedom and their lives.

Imprisoned them, tortured them, killed them by the million for no better reason than that they could.

We appreciate Dr. Paugh as a guide to the horrors and terrors of C0m … of Democratic Socialism. But our impulse is not to “take” young Leftists to see the depressing results of that system, but to send them to live under it. Send them to Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba – whichever communist hellhole will let them in. To live as the oppressed people live. How long would it take before they start begging to come home to the free and prosperous country they were born in? A year? A month? A week? A day?

Commenting on what is said in this video, John Hinderaker writes ironically, shockingly, and accurately at PowerLine:

[The] entertaining video of Tucker Carlson and Cornel West … offers a good explanation of why socialism always fails, from the perspective of the vast majority. … Tucker asked West: If democratic socialism works, why doesn’t Venezuela have toilet paper?

Of course West’s answers are lame –“real” socialism has never been tried, blah, blah, blah. You could infer from this that West is an idiot and, if he were arguing in good faith, that would be a fair assessment.

But I think the truth is worse. I think the leaders of the socialist movement are perfectly well aware that the inevitable result of socialism is tyranny and mass poverty. But for them, this isn’t a bug, it is a feature. In fact, it is the whole point. Socialism is now, and always has been, a pretext under which power-mad psychopaths seize power and terrorize their fellow humans.

Viewed with cold realism, socialism works very well for those who bring it about. It worked for Lenin and Stalin. It almost worked for Trotsky, but socialism is like Game of Thrones – it is a risky business. It didn’t work for the Old Bolsheviks for the same reason: they lost out to the more vicious and more power-crazed socialist, Stalin. It worked for Yezhov, Yagoda and Beria, although they, too, lost out after years of demented revels. It worked for Khruschev, Brezhnev and Andropov.

Socialism worked for Mao. It worked for Fidel Castro. It worked for Erich Honecker and Nicolae Ceaușescu, until the very end. It worked for Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, again with sad ends that didn’t inflict anywhere near enough pain to negate the years of glory and power that went before. It worked for Hugo Chavez, who like Castro, parlayed socialism into a multi-billion dollar fortune, and it has worked so far for Nicolas Maduro. All of these psychopaths, and many others, got exactly what they wanted out of socialism. From their point of view, it is a successful ideology.

While the vast majority suffer under socialism, such suffering is by no means universal. Any number of commissars, Stasi informants, Cuban snitches, petty apparatchiks with dachas, etc., have parlayed their sadistic tendencies into good livings and what they want most, power over others. If you follow Twitter, or generally pay attention to the American Left, you see an army of would-be commissars who yearn for the day when they can accuse a neighbor of wrongthink and have him sent to an American Gulag. In the meantime, they settle for mob action, “doxxing,” and so on.

Socialism isn’t misguided, it is evil. Socialism isn’t a failure, any more than the Black Death was a failure. Sadly, it has worked all too well for more than a century. 

Those cunning human demons who get power, riches, and sadistic satisfaction out of imposing Socialism, need dumb believers to let them impose it.

Kurt Schlichter, a master of sardonic derision, writes at Townhall:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is less hideously unattractive than the usual Democrat potentate or potentatette and has therefore been anointed the new face of her pathetic party. This dumb woman, who looks like Huma Abedin without the pedohubby and the weird relationship with Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit, took advantage of her even dumber New York district in order to get elected to Congress by calling herself a “socialist”.  Yeah, the subject of a thousand Trader Joe’s house brand chardonnay toasts is a proud adherent of the ideology that butchered 100 million people in the last century. …

Ocasio-Cortez is an idiot, like all adolescent socialists, so she qualified to be the Great Pinko Hope for a party in decline. Here’s how bad she is – she apparently went to college, got a degree in economics, and still ended up a socialist. If she went to med school, she would have probably left a chain smoker.

As for life experience, she was a bartender. Now, being a bartender is an important occupation that provides demonstrable social benefits, and everyone should have at least one crappy job on their resume because it builds character, but it shouldn’t be the only thing you’ve ever done if you want to be in Congress. …

It was only a fun job for her anyway. Not a necessary one. Contrary to what she pretended – in typical socialist style – she did not grow up in the Bronx (though she was born there). She is the daughter of a successful architect and grew up in one of the richest counties in America.

The left is always trying to make [Socialism] happen. It’s not going to happen, not least of which because us militant Normals have about 400 million or so guns and we aren’t super excited about giving up our stuff or our freedom to a bunch of Marxist weirdos who think we should work harder so their voter base doesn’t have to. But they keep trying to sell us this polished fecal matter of an ideology. In 2009, they put Obama’s smug mug on the cover of Newsweek and announced “We’re all socialists now”, but it soon became obvious that we aren’t anything like socialists now. And, in fact, Newsweek is barely anything at all now, though under socialism, instead of teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, it would be nationalized and we’d all be working to subsidize it so its hack staff could keep their loser sinecures.

A few years later, they tried again by releasing Bernie Sanders from the Old Commies Home to nearly beat Stumbles McMyTurn. That failed and now it’s this nitwit’s turn to spray perfume inside the outhouse.

Naturally, the Pink Dummy was summoned to make the rounds of MSNBCNN in the wake of her win over some other liberal tool. This avatar of a failed nineteenth century death cult was hailed as the future of the Democrats because as the leftist precincts in New York City go, so goes America. She did the same tap dance about socialism that all these twits do – see, socialism isn’t scary. Why, “socialism” is just another word for things we all do together, except when the socialists are in charge they kill you if you defy them. …

Pampered spawn of history’s most prosperous and freest society, these goofs are really excited about something they can barely articulate, so they sputter and spit out words like “justice” and “equality” and then get on their iPhones to call their disappointed dads because they are short on cash …

It’s amusing that so many of us Normals understand socialism better than the socialists do not only in terms of what Marx said, and what history says, but in terms of firsthand knowledge. A lot of us Normals have seen socialism up close and personal. Guys like me actually went and lived in its ruins. If you spent significant time, as I have, in the former Yugoslavia, or Ukraine, or even helping to guard the West German border from those friendly fraternal socialist dudes to the east, you’ll be stripped of any illusions about that garbage ideology.

Socialism is about taking your stuff and your freedom and killing you if you complain. They try to pass it off as just Liberalism 2.0, but then you usually don’t call something by a name unless you mean it. If they don’t mean “socialism” why do they call themselves “socialists”?

They use the term, counting on the stupidity of people educated in public schools (Yah government!), but they are coy about what they really mean. They always point to Sweden and Denmark and Norway when they talk about “socialism”, as if those were their role models … Yet, how come we always see the most excited champagne socialists trekking off to visit the dictators in Havana and Caracas and not the elected leaders in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Oslo?

Venezuela is the socialist paradise that dare not be spoken of. I guess when people are so equal they all have to break into the zoo to eat the zebras, equality stops sounding so awesome.

But see, Venezuela isn’t true socialism. Nothing is ever true socialism, which is super convenient since any country that has ever dabbled in socialism tends to run short of food, medicine, and toilet paper. But I bet smart people like Gulag Barbie can totally make socialism work this time, and you’ll be prosperous and free and have your own pet unicorn. …

They are always sure to stick the “democratic” in front of the “socialism” when they try to sell it to the suckers, but that’s a grift. Do they contend that if we vote in socialism and find that it sucks – as every single country that has tried it has found – we can vote it out again? Yeah, uh huh. Seems legit.

[But] Socialism is a train that, once you board, never stops except if you derail it – which we would have every moral right to do if this hateful creed were imposed upon us.

You see, socialism is the doctrine [by which] people like you and I get to slave away for the benefit of the people those in charge decide are worthy – especially those in charge. …

Socialism means what’s theirs is theirs and so is what’s yours. Our private property – what we have worked for and accumulated over decades – is no longer ours. It’s theirs, to be done with – to be redistributed – as those in power wish. And if you object, they will send people with guns to make you comply.

In contrast, in freedom and capitalism, the people with guns protect you from having what’s yours taken.

They don’t say it, but we Normals are the engine that they intend to power their socialism. We’re supposed to continue working and building and creating just as hard as we did when we kept the rewards. Note how the recipients of socialism – the elite, the bums, the hipster doofuses with their stupid Che T-shirts – never seem to expect that they might be asked to sacrifice too? We’re supposed to give up our property and labor to benefit them, but what do they contribute? New grievances? …

Marxgirl wants to start off with free college, which means you pay for other people’s college too. Notice how there’s no expectation that her fans contribute toward the benefit they are receiving? And then she’s for free health care, which means you pay for other people’s doctors too. Again, the recipients are not expected to work for their own benefit. Want to guess what she wants to do with the means of production? And with private property? And the rights of people who oppose her schemes?

Oh, and she’s also for banning guns. Gee, I wonder why.

“Community organizer” is a euphemism for “Communist”.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who just won the Democratic primary for the 14th Congressional District (NY-14) in New York City (which includes much of the Bronx and Queens), is a community organizer.

She is also, reports the Washington Times, “a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America — a socialist — and she just won a congressional primary in New York City.”

The paper adds: “What a face slap to America. What an affront to all the Founding Fathers forged.” It makes her “an enemy of America”.

It does.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)* are also Communists. They don’t say they are, but they are:

We are socialists because we reject an economic order based on private profit, alienated labor, gross inequalities of wealth and power, discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender expression, disability status, age, religion, and national origin, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo. We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships. We are socialists because we are developing a concrete strategy for achieving that vision, for building a majority movement that will make democratic socialism a reality in America. We believe that such a strategy must acknowledge the class structure of American society and that this class structure means that there is a basic conflict of interest between those sectors with enormous economic power and the vast majority of the population.

Communists do not like nations. They do not want borders.

(Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist and refers to the Scandinavian states as realizations of his ideals, but he took his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, not Denmark, Sweden, or Norway.)

According to In These Times, this is Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s agenda:

Open borders; Medicare for all; tuition-free public college; housing “as a human right”; a federal jobs guarantee (ie. everyone can work for the government); replacing fossil fuels with “renewable energy sources” (to combat “man-made global warming”).

I’m advocating for a working-class agenda, for the safety and security of working-class people, it means healthcare, housing and immigration. They’re issues of, “Can I stay here tomorrow?” If there is any seat in America that is advocating for the abolishment of ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] it should be NY14. It is a district that is 85 percent Democratic. We have very little to risk by taking bold and ambitious positions. Even for those who aren’t immigrants, we are all so deeply invested in the lives and the future of immigrant families in NY-14, and everybody here cares about this issue.

I support Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) plan for a $146 billion investment in Puerto Rico. I think that if Congress really cared and if Congress actually had a vision, we could use Puerto Rico as an example for how we can approach the ravages of super storms and climate change moving forward. Puerto Rico’s entire power system has been wiped out. … Costa Rica can operate on 100 percent sustainable, renewable energy. Puerto Rico is a small island and I believe we can make those investments to make that happen. …  I think that we need a Marshall Plan for Puerto Rico, and to switch to 100 percent renewables on the island. It’s a small enough place that we can do that, and we can show the world what recovery in an era of extreme climate change looks like. …

I think Obamacare should go further, for instance, but I don’t think that Obamacare was bad. It just wasn’t good enough.

I believe that the Republican Party is long gone, and the only real hope for responsible governance is the Democratic Party. So I believe that the fight for the Democratic Party is really the fight over the future of this nation.

This nation? The open borders she wants would eliminate this nation.

She believes that government should be the supplier of all needs.

How would government pay for all that it supplied “free”?

Well, she knows how. According to this biography, she has a degree in Economics. “Born to a working-class Puerto Rican family in the Bronx, New York, Ocasio-Cortez graduated from Boston University, majoring in economics and international relations, and later worked for Senator Ted Kennedy’s office where she focused on immigration issues.”

I really wonder how many members of the Democratic Party actually have a degree in economics like I do. The Pay-Go plan (Nancy Pelosi’s plan) is so indicative of a lack of understanding of how we need to grow. I’m advocating for the ideas because I have an understanding of how the economy works. If we did Pay-Go during the Great Depression, we would still be a developing nation. We need a New Deal.

President Roosevelt’s NewDeal was a failure. Designed to cure the Depression, it failed because FDR did not understand what caused the Depression: government interference in business, fixing prices.

But government interference in the economy is Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s plan:

There has almost never been a period of substantial economic growth in the United States without significant investment. And no investment pays off within the same cycle. No investment pays off within the same year — especially a governmental investment. … The idea that we’re going to austerity ourselves into prosperity is so mistaken, and honestly I feel like one of the big problems we have is that, because Democrats don’t have a deep understanding of or degrees in economics, they allow Wall Street folks to roll in the door and think that they’re giving them an education. They’re not. It’s a con, and they’re getting conned because they don’t understand the transformative power of the purse that Congress has. It’s not just Democrats. I don’t think most of Congress understands how economics works.

She understands how economics work: she would print money, as Roosevelt did.

As the socialist president of Venezuela did. 

So if  her agenda were to be implemented, how much longer would it take for this nation to be brought to ruin than it took President Maduro to reduce Venezuela to misery, destitution, and starvation?

And is that what the people of the Bronx and Queens really want?

*Breitbart reports: The DSA is the largest socialist organization in the US and is known for its far-left ideology. It was established in 1991 by six members of the House of Representatives, including Bernie Sanders, Ron Dellums and Maxine Waters. Read all about it here.

They really are coming after all of us.

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh writes at Canada free Press:

I am sure there are many Americans who have no idea nor care what The Draft International Covenant on Environment and Development (DICED) is. They should. The Draft Covenant is the Environmental Constitution of Global Governance.

The first version of the Covenant was presented to the United Nations in 1995 on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. It was hoped that it would become a negotiating document for a global treaty on environmental conservation and sustainable development.

The fourth version of the Covenant, issued on September 22, 2010, was written to control all development tied to the environment, “the highest form of law for all human activity”.

Law for ALL human activity! Think of that. Totalitarianism beyond the wildest dreams even of a Stalin – or Islam.

The Covenant’s 79 articles, described in great detail in 242 pages, take Sustainable Development principles described in Agenda 21 and transform them into global law, which supersedes all constitutions including the U.S. Constitution.

All signatory nations, including the U.S., would become centrally planned, socialist countries in which all decisions would be made within the framework of Sustainable Development.

In collaboration with Earth Charter and Elizabeth Haub Foundation for Environmental Policy and Law from Canada, the Covenant was issued by the International Council on Environmental Law (ICEL) in Bonn, Germany, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with offices in Gland, Switzerland and Cambridge, UK.

Federal agencies that are members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) include the U.S. Department[s] of State, Commerce, Agriculture (Forest Service), Interior (Fish and Wildlife, National Park Service), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The same agencies are members of the White House Rural Council and the newly established White House Council on Strong Cities, Strong Communities (Executive Order, March 15, 2012).

That is to say under Obama. Of course.

The Draft Covenant is a blueprint “to create an agreed single set of fundamental principles like a ‘code of conduct’ used in many civil law, socialist, and theocratic traditions, which may guide [sic!] States, intergovernmental organizations, and individuals”.

The writers describe the Covenant as a “living document”, a blueprint that will be adopted by all members of the United Nations. They say that global partnership is necessary in order to achieve Sustainable Development, by focusing on “social and economic pillars”.  The writers are very careful to avoid the phrase, “one world government”.  Proper governance is necessary on all levels, “from the local to the global” [they say].

The Covenant underwent four writings, in 1995, 2000, 2004, and 2010, influenced by the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, by ideas of development control and social engineering by the United Nations, “leveling the playing field for international trade, and having a common basis of future lawmaking”.

Article 2 describes in detail “respect for all life forms”.

Except the human life form (see Article 33 below).

Article 3 proposes that the entire globe should be under “the protection of international law”. 

Article 5 refers to “equity and justice” [code words for socialism/communism – the author].

Article 16 requires that all member nations must adopt environmental conservation into all national decisions.

Article 19 deals with “Stratospheric Ozone”. “Rex Communis is the customary international law regime applicable to areas beyond national jurisdiction: in particular to the high seas and outer space.”

Article 20 requires that all nations must “mitigate the adverse effects of climate change”. [If we endorse this document, we must fight a non-existent man-made climate change – the author.]

Article 31, “Action to Eradicate Poverty” requires the eradication of poverty by spreading the wealth from developed nations to developing countries.

The perfect recipe for making the entire human race extremely poor. 

Article 32 requires recycling, “consumption and production patterns”.

Article 33, “Demographic policies,” demands that countries calculate “the size of the human population their environment is capable of supporting and to implement measures that prevent the population from exceeding that level”. In the Malthusian model, humans were supposed to run out of food and starve to death. In a similar prediction, this document claims that the out-of control multiplication of humans can endanger the environment.

The assumption is, as the socialist assumption essentially is, that all human beings are alike – or ought to be – like ants, so what does it matter which ones live and which ones are eliminated? 

Article 34 demands the maintenance of an open and non-discriminatory international trading system in which “prices of commodities and raw materials reflect the full direct and indirect social and environmental costs of their extraction, production, transport, marketing, and where appropriate, ultimate disposal.”The capitalist [ie. market] model of supply and demand pricing [the only possible way of establishing prices – ed] does not matter.

This erroneous article of Marxist faith has been the main cause of the downfall of every socialist regime from the USSR to Venezuela.  

Article 37 discusses “Transboundary Environmental Effects and Article 39 directs how “Transboundary Natural Resources” will be conserved, “quantitatively and qualitatively”. [For a future generation more worthy of them than we are? -ed.]  According to the document, “conserve means managing human-induced processes and activities which may be damaging to natural systems in such a way that the essential functions of these systems are maintained”. [?]

Article 41 requires integrated planning systems, irrespective of administrative boundaries within a country, and is based on Paragraph 10.5 of Agenda 21, which seeks to “facilitate allocation of land to the uses that provide the greatest sustainable benefits and to promote the transition to a sustainable and integrated management of land resources“. The impact assessment procedure is developed by the World Bank. …

Writers of the Draft Covenant are approximately 19 U.S. professors of Law, Biology, Natural Resources, Urban Planning, Theology, Environmental Ethics, two General Counsel Representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, chair of the IUCN Ethics Working Group, two attorneys in private practice in the U.S., a judge from the International Court of Justice, a U.S. High Seas Policy advisor of the IUCN Global Marine Programme, foreign dignitaries, ambassadors, and 13 members of the UN Secretariat, including the Chairman, Dr. Wolfgang E. Burhenne.

Since this Draft Covenant has a Preamble and 79 articles, it is obviously intended to be a “world constitution for global governance”, an onerous way to control population growth, re-distribute wealth, force social and “economic equity and justice”, economic control, consumption control, land and water use control, and re-settlement control as a form of social engineering.

Article 20 is of particular interest because it forces the signatories to DICED “to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change”. When President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, “climatologists” from Hollywood, and millennials brainwashed by their professors that CO2 is going to destroy the planet and kill us all, took to microphones and podiums to express their displeasure with such a “criminal” decision.

It did not matter that the President explained … that this accord was nothing else than an economic scheme to steal and redistribute wealth from the United States to the third world … President Trump explained how many millions of American jobs would be lost …

How did man become the main perpetrator of climate change? How did we become so powerful that we can change climate with our very existence, but, if we pay carbon taxes to the third world, we correct our guilt of existing, of breathing, and we turn climate into a favorable proposition for all – no hurricanes, no tornadoes, no droughts, no hail, no torrential rains, no earthquakes, no tsunamis, nothing but serene climate year after year? 

The Club of Rome, the premier environmental think-tank, consultant to the United Nations and the alleged writer of U.N. Agenda 21’s 40 chapters, explained:

The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy is humanity itself.

… Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment … said:

No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about social justice and equality in the world.

Timothy Wirth, President of the U.N. Foundation, said:

We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.

The sad thing is that many mayors around the country have decided to disobey President Trump’s decision on the Paris Climate Accord and reported publicly that they will continue their membership even though such a move is illegal under our Constitution. …

These dissenting mayors have not pledged their allegiance to the U.S. Constitution but to the Global Covenant of Mayors, one of the arms of implementation around the globe of U.N. Agenda 21, now morphed into Agenda 2030. Using grants from our own government, the Compact of Mayors and the European Union’s Covenant of Mayors have influenced initiatives at the local, city, and state governments, forcing their globalist agenda called “visioning” on the hapless population who are now forced to accept decisions made by mayors and boards of supervisors that are robbing them of freedom of movement, of their property rights, of the use of their cars, of farming, in the name of “transitioning to a low emission and climate resilient economy”, a pie in the sky goal.

The real goal is to transform and redistribute the wealth of developed countries and to arrest their development by eventually curbing completely the use of fossil fuels and turning them into a more primitive society dependent on unreliable solar and wind power.

Such a global society would have no borders, no sovereignty, no suburbia, no private property, no cars, and would be controlled by the United Nations umbrella of octopus NGOs.

… Dr. Ottmar Endenhofer, International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Co-Chair of Working Group 3, stated:

We [UN-IPCC] redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy… One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore…

President Trump can save us from this appalling threat of world communist government – if he is allowed to serve his term, best of all his two terms, in office.

But the totalitarian Left is fighting hard to bring him down. It is prepared to use violence. It is using violence. So will only war now save humanity from a terrible Last Age – and then extinction?

Parties of the socialist Left are dying in Western democracies.

No need to look at Venezuela where the most recent total wreck of a country has been brought about by socialism to see that the creed has lost its appeal. Look at France, Britain, America.

The Socialist Party is finished in France:

Samuel Earle writes at The Atlantic:

The most open presidential race France has seen since the formation of the Fifth Republic, with four candidates in close contention, saw no place for the Socialist Party, a stalwart of the French political scene for the past half century. The election was full of surprises, scandals, twists, and turns. But for numerous reasons the Socialists were never really in the mix.

The Labour Party is done for in Britain:

Jason Cowley writes at the leftist New Statesman:

The stench of decay and failure coming from the Labour Party is now overwhelming. Speak to any Conservative MP and they will say that there is no opposition. Period. … Labour is fatally divided inside parliament and outside it. On its present foundations this Labour house cannot stand. The MPs do not want the leadership. The leadership does not want the MPs; it wants to unhouse them. [Jeremy] Corbyn … is not a leader … [He] has failed even on his own terms, and his failure has created a crisis of the left …

The Labour Party has had to advertise  for people who will stand as their candidates in the forthcoming general election.  Prime Minister Theresa May has called it because she expects to increase her (not very conservative) Conservative Party’s majority by a very large number.

The Democratic Party in America became a socialist party. It lost heavily in the 2016 elections and is now in tatters.

This is what the American Left looks like these days. These are self-described “anti-fascists”. They call themselves Antifa. Their banners are intentionally made to look like the banners of the Nazis. And they themselves look very like ISIS.

Thus this pictorial statement:

And what of the Democratic Party leaders?

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is rapidly going senile.

Honeymoon-in-Soviet-Russia Bernie Sanders distances himself from the Democratic Party yet has captured the support of its base. A strong indication of the party’s disintegration there, as socialist Bernie leads the flock far off into limbo.

And what of Tom Perez, Chair of the Democratic National Committee?  The party that won’t condemn Antifa finds its susceptibilities hurt by Perez’s constant swearing! And a minority of Democrats are disturbed by his announcement that the party will no longer tolerate members who are against abortion on demand. So-called “pro-lifers” are not wanted. In fact, abortion has become so central an issue that the party could fairly be named “the Abortion Party”. On its way into oblivion, that is.

Tragically, though, it will leave behind it an heir that is even more thoroughly totalitarian, even more ruthlessly oppressive, even more cruel than most socialist tyrants – the Left’s foster-child Islam.

Why do tens of millions in the West prostrate themselves before advancing, conquering, oppressive Islam?

Why do millions of Americans still vote for the Democratic Party?

This essay offers a chilling explanation.

It is from Jihad Watch, by Alexander Maistrovoy:

“Progressive man” refuses to recognize the crimes of Islam, not because he is naive, fine-tempered or tolerant. He does it because, unconsciously or subconsciously, he has already accepted Islam as a religion of salvation. As he accepted Stalinism, Hitlerism, Maoism and the “Khmer Rouge” before it …

Joseph de Maistre, a French aristocrat of the early 19th century, argued that man cannot live without religion, and not religion as such, but the tyrannical and merciless one. He was damned and hated, they called him an antipode of progress and freedom, even a forerunner of fascism; however, progressives proved him right again and again.

It may be true of most people that they “cannot live without religion”, but it is not true of all. We wonder how, since the Enlightenment, and especially now in our Age of Science, people can live with a religion. We agree, however, that those who need a religion are not put off by its being “tyrannical and merciless”.

Is there a religion, whether deity-worshiping or secular, that is not tyrannical and merciless?  

In their nihilistic ecstasy, Homo progressicus threw God off the pedestal, trampled upon the humanistic ideal of Petrarch, Alberti and Leonardo Bruni, who relied on Reason and strove for virtue, and … found themselves in complete and gaping emptiness. They realized that they could not live without the God-man — the idol, the leader, the ruler, who would rely on the unshakable, ruthless idea of salvation — not in the other world, but in this real world here and now. And with all the passion so inherent to their shallow, unstable, infantile nature, they rushed out in search of their “prince on a white horse”.

The idols of the progressives were tyrants armed with the most progressive ideology: Robespierre, and after him Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and finally — Islam.

Islam does not, of course, claim to be “progressive”. It derives from – and is stuck in – the Dark Ages. But the self-styled progressives of the West are welcoming it and submitting to it.

In the 20th century, the Western intelligentsia was infected with red and brown bacilli.

Walter Duranty ardently denied the Holodomor.

That is Stalin’s forced famine in the Ukraine that killed many millions. Walter Duranty denied that it was happening in his New York Times reports.

Bernard Shaw and Romain Rolland justified OGPU terror and the kangaroo court in Moscow; Aragon, Barbusse (the author of the apologetic biography of Stalin: Stalin. A New World Seen Through the Man) and Jean-Richard Bloch glorified “the Father of nations”.

“I would do nothing against Stalin at the moment; I accepted the Moscow trials and I am prepared to accept those in Barcelona,” said Andre Malraux during the massacre of anarchists from POUM [the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification] by Communists in Barcelona in 1937.

Let’s guess: who is writing about whom? “Lonely overbearing man … damned disagreeable”, “friendly and commonplace”, possessing “an intelligence far beyond dogmatism” … “sucked thoughtfully at the pipe he had most politely asked my permission to smoke … I have never met a man more fair, candid, and honest”. Got it? It was Stalin, as portrayed by H. G. Wells.

How many sufferings – Solzhenitsyn recalled — were caused by progressive Western journalists, who after having visited the GULAG, praised Potemkin villages with allegedly heated barracks where political prisoners used to read Soviet newspapers sitting at clean neat tables? Indeed, Arthur Ransome (The Guardian), an American journalist and a fan of Mao, Agnes Smedley, New York reporter Lincoln Steffens (after the meeting with Lenin he wrote,“I have seen the future and it works”), Australian-British journalist Leonore Winter (the author of the book  called Red Virtue: Human Relations in the New Russia) and many others sympathized with the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union. Juan Benet, a famous Spanish writer, suggested “strengthening the guards (in GULAG), so that people like Solzhenitsyn would not escape”. The Los Angeles Times published Alexander and Andrew Cockburn, who were Stalin’s admirers.

Hitler? Knut Hamsun, Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize, described Hitler in an obituary as a “fighter for humanity and for the rights of all nations”. The “amorousness” of Martin Heidegger for the “leader of the Third Reich” is well known. In the 1930s, the Führer was quite a respectable person in the eyes of the mass media. Anne O’Hare McCormick – a foreign news correspondent for the New York Times (she got a Pulitzer Prize) — described Hitler after the interview with him: he is “a rather shy and simple man, younger than one expects, more robust, taller … His eyes are almost the color of the blue larkspur in a vase behind him, curiously childlike and candid … His voice is as quiet as his black tie and his double-breasted black suit … Herr Hitler has the sensitive hand of the artist.”

The French elites were fascinated by Hitler. Ferdinand Celine said that France would not go to “Jewish war”, and claimed that there was an international Jewish conspiracy to start the world war. French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet rendered honors to Ribbentrop, and novelist, essayist and playwright Jean Giraudoux said that he was “fully in agreement with Hitler when he states that a policy only reaches its highest form when it is racial”.

The Red Guards of Chairman Mao caused deadly convulsions in China and ecstatic [sympathetic] rage in Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Jan Myrdal, Charles Bettelheim, Alain Badiou and Louis Pierre Althusser. In Paris, Barbusse and Aragon created “the pocket monster” — Enver Hoxha [Communist dictator of Albania]; at Sorbonne University, Sartre worked out “the Khmer Rouge Revolution” of Pol Pot, Hu Nima, and Ieng Sary. Noam Chomsky characterized the proofs of Pol Pot’s genocide as “third rate” and complained of a “vast and unprecedented propaganda campaign against the Khmer Rouge”. Gareth Porter, winner of the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, said in May 1977: “The notion that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea adopted a policy of physically eliminating whole classes of people was … a myth.”

In the 70’s, the whole world already knew the truth about the Red Guards. However, German youth from the Socialist Union of German Students went out  on demonstrations with portraits of the “Great Helmsman” and the song “The East is Red”.

In the USA, they went into the streets holding red flags and portraits of Trotsky and Che Guevara, and dream of “Fucking the System” like their idol Abbie Hoffman. The hatred of “petty bourgeois philistines”, as Trotsky named ordinary people, together with the dream of guillotines, bayonets, and “red terror”, keep inspiring Western intellectuals like Tariq Ali, the author of the revolutionary manual Trotsky for Beginners.

“The middle class turned out to be captured by ‘bourgeois-bohemian Bolshevism’,” Pascal Bruckner wrote.

Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot passed away, but new heroes appeared in their places. Leading employees of CNN – reporter Peter Arnett, producer Robert Wiener and director of news department Eason T. Jordan – had excellent relations with close associates of Saddam Hussein, pretending they didn’t know anything about his atrocities. Hollywood stars set up a race of making pilgrimages to Castro and Chavez. Neo-Marxist professors and progressive intellectuals, such as Dario Fo, Jean Baudrillard and Martin Amis, welcomed the triumph of al-Qaeda on September 11.

The romanticization of  the “forged boot” and “iron hand”, the worship of “lonely overbearing” men with “the sensitive hand of the artist” — this explains the amazing easiness with which recent anarchists, pacifists, Marxists, atheists, after having changed a couple  of ideologies, burden themselves with the most primitive, barbaric and despotic religion of our time: Islam.

Atheists of the Left only, being atheists who dispense with belief in the supernatural but still need a religion.

What they crave for is not religion as such. They don’t want Buddhism, Bahaism, Zoroastrianism, or even the mild Islam of the Sufi or Ahmadiyya version. They want a religion that would crush them, rape their bodies and souls, and destroy their ego — one that would terrify them and make them tremble with fear, infirmity and impotence.

Only bloodthirsty medieval Islam is able to do this today. It alone possesses unlimited cruelty and willingness to burn everything on its way. And they  gather like moths flying to the flame: communists Roger Garaudy, “Carlos the Jackal”, Trond Ali Linstad, Malcolm X, Alys Faiz; human rights defenders Jemima Goldsmith, Keith Ellison, and Uri Davis, the fighter against Zionism for the rights of the Palestinians. Fathers favor Castro, such as Oliver Stone; their sons accept Islam, such as Sean Stone. According to a public opinion poll conducted in August 2014 (Madeline Grant, Newsweek), “16% of French citizens support ISIS”. There are 7% to 8% of Muslims living in France. Who makes up the rest 8% to 9%?

Ken Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn, John Brennan, Hollywood stars, Ylva Johansson, Sweden’s Integration Minister, who like her boss Stefan Löfven claimed that “there was no connection between crime and immigration”; Michael Fabricant, a former vice-chair of the Tory party, who said that “some conservative Anglicans are the same as ISIS”; German politicians that established a media watchdog to “instruct the press to censor ethnicity and religion in crime reports” (a modification of Soviet censure); the Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Phillips, who believes that it is inevitable to recognize Sharia courts in Great Britain; atheist-apologist for Islam (O my God!) CJ Werleman; Canadian Liberals, who support  the anti-Islamophobia motion; Georgetown professor Jonathan Brown, who justifies slavery and raping of female slaves; Wendy Ayres-Bennett, a UK professor who is urging Brits to learn Urdu and Punjabi to make Muslim migrants feel welcome; Ohio State University, that offered a course on “how Muslims helped build America”; the Swedish state-owned company Lernia encouraging the replacement of standard Swedish with the “migrant-inclusive accent”; American feminists with the slogans “Allahu akbar” and “I love Islam”, who endorse the BDS movement; Swedish feminists wearing burkas in Iran; “proud  feminists” such as Elina Gustafsson and Gudrun Schyman defending Muslim criminals who raped Swedish girls – all of them and thousands of others have already converted to Islam, if not de jure, then de facto.

They appeal to Islam to escape from their fears, complexes, helplessness, and uselessness. They choose the despotism of body and spirit to deprive themselves of their freedom – the freedom that has always been an unbearable burden for their weak souls full of chimeras. They crave slavery.

They are attracted by Islam today, but it’s not about Islam. It’s about them. If Islam is defeated tomorrow and a new Genghis Khan appears with the “religion of the steppe”, or the kingdom of the Aztecs rises with priests tearing hearts from the chest of living people, they will passionately rush into their embrace. They are yearning for tyranny, and will destroy everything on their way for the sake of it. Because of them, “we shall leave this world here just as stupid and evil as we found it upon arrival”. (Voltaire)

Barack Obama thinks that his presidency has been a great success. That if he could have stood for a third term, he would certainly have been elected again.

And yet he is not entirely comfortable in his mind that he has accomplished everything he intended to while he had all that power.

We can reproduce the list if his top four aims with a fair chance of accuracy:

The empowerment of Iran. Okay, done that. Tick it off.

Compulsory health insurance as a step towards a national health service (“Obamacare”). Tick.

The emptying of Guantanamo prison for prisoners of war and terrorists (“Gitmo”) and its closure. Gosh! Not achieved. Try again. Not many prisoners left. Can I do it before January 19? Let them go, let them go, let them go!

The final settlement of the Israel-Palestine problem, to be accomplished to the advantage of the Palestinians, and to the severe disadvantage of Israel, possibly facilitating its ultimate extinction. TICK.

The  deal with Iran may be torn up by Trump? My State Department will stop that happening.

Obamacare will be repealed? I doubt it.

Gitmo still open. Damn!

Israel f***ed. Yay!

Now carve my head on Mount Rushmore.

Ben Shapiro writes at Townhall:

President Barack Obama likes to see himself as a moral leader. “The arc of the moral universe is long”, Obama likes to say, quoting Martin Luther King Jr, “but it bends toward justice”. According to Obama, Obama is a genteel representative of decency and good grace, a man pointing America toward a broader vision, a fellow questing for social justice and contextual consideration.

In reality, he’s a narcissistic fool. And like Burgess Meredith’s character in The Twilight Zone, he will be left standing in the ruins, bewailing the fates that abandoned him, leaving no worshipful admirers upon whom to lean.

Obama’s legacy is one of failure all around the world. He leaves office with a genocide in Syria on his record – a genocide he pledged to prevent, then tolerated and finally lamented, mourning the fates while blithely ignoring his own cowardice. Libya, meanwhile, remains a full-scale disaster area, with tens of thousands of refugees from that failed campaign swamping Europe, along with those fleeing Syria, and his leftist European allies paying the political price.

Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, stands on the brink of a nuclear dawn, its pockets filled with billions of dollars, its minions ascendant from Tehran to Aleppo to Beirut. Obama made that happen with nearly a decade of appeasement and a willingness to abandon freedom-minded Iranians to the tender mercies of the mullahs.

Meanwhile, Russia has only expanded its reach and influence, invading the sovereign nation of Ukraine and seizing Crimea to the deafening silence of the Obama administration. Russia has flexed its muscle in Kaliningrad, where it has stocked missiles, and in Syria, where it has assured Syrian President Bashar Assad’s continued dominance.

China has grown its sphere of influence across the South China Sea, putting American allies from Taiwan and Japan to the Philippines directly under its thumb. Thanks to Obama’s military cuts, China believes that it can bully American allies into embracing Chinese supremacy in international waters – and it may be right. Simultaneously, Obama continues to drive America into debt, and the Chinese are large buyers of that outstanding debt.

The communist Cubans have been re-enshrined; so have the socialist Venezuelan authorities. The Islamic State group remains an international threat, and western capitals have been struck by Islamic terror time and again, to Obama’s teeth-gnashing and general inaction.

Not so sure about that teeth-gnashing. Does Obama give a damn about Islamic terrorism?

But at least Obama is truly putting his focus where it’s necessary: on declaring that our only ally in the Middle East, Israel, has no historic claim to its own existence and threatening Jews with sanctions for building bathrooms in East Jerusalem.

Right. The sarcasm is necessary. Exasperation is hard to express adequately.

Obama came into office amidst grand promises to restore America’s place in the world.

Did he? If so, he saw its place as lower, not higher. We seem to remember that he desired – perhaps not saying so in exactly these words – to bring America down a peg or two.

Unless our place is the outhouse, he’s failed. But at least he feels good about his accomplishments, even if thousands have died – and thousands more will die – in order to ensure his moral stature in his own mind.

“Ceterum autem censeo Carthaginem esse delendum” – “Apart from all this, Carthage must be destroyed“.

That was the statement Cato the Elder (234-149 BCE) made at the end of every one of his speeches in the Roman Senate during the Punic Wars (Rome against Carthage), no matter what the rest of the speech had been about.

The statement became a slogan, often shortened to “Carthago delenda est”.

For years we have copied Cato the Elder by writing “The UN must be destroyed” at the end of every post that mentions that evil institution.

Now the need for it to be wiped off the face of the earth, or at the very least expelled from American soil and denied American tax-payers’ money, has been made urgent by the iniquitous action of its “Security Council”, initiated by the perfidious outgoing Obama administration of the US government, against the state of Israel. (See our post Obama’s parting act of extreme vindictiveness, December 23, 2016. For the harm the resolution will do see here.)

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

The United States pays 22% of the total UN budget. What we get for our $3 billion a year is a corrupt organization whose dysfunctional and hostile agencies are united in opposing us around the world.

The United Nations does only two things consistently and effectively: waste money and bash Israel. Sometimes it manages to do both at the same time.

After an extended, and no doubt costly, visit to the region, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women blamed Muslim men beating their wives on Israeli settlements.

No wonder the UN Security Council just condemned them. Who wouldn’t rightfully be upset that Jews living in Jerusalem somehow causes poor Mohammed to batter his wife?

The Jewish State is the UN’s scapegoat for anything and everything. The Palestinian Authority blamed Israel at the UN for Global Warming. WHO [the World Health Organization, a UN agency] denounced Israel for violating “health rights”.

Israel is one of the foremost inventors and manufacturers of advanced life-saving medical technology in the world. Extremely effective Israeli teams rush to places where disasters occur to provide medical assistance, always free of charge. Israel even cures its enemies free of charge, and returns them to enemy territory to continue plotting its destruction.

And even when Muslim terrorists stab Israelis, it’s still Israel’s fault.

The latest anti-Israel vote at the UN has led to calls to defund the corrupt organization which, even when it isn’t actively trying to hurt us or our allies, is making the world worse every which way it can.

Just this summer the UN admitted that it had spread cholera that killed tens of thousands in Haiti. Sexual abuse allegations against its staffers were up 25% last year. In the spring, the UN admitted that peacekeepers from three countries had raped over 100 girls in only one African country. …

Here’s what we get for our $3 billion.

UNRWA schools are turning out students who want to fight for ISIS.  The UN’s email system has been used to distribute child pornography. UN staff members have smuggled drugs, attacked each other with knives and pool cues, not to mention a tractor. This month the UN marked Anti-Corruption Day despite refusing to fight its own corruption. The former President of the UN General Assembly was arrested on bribery charges last year. He had also headed UNICEF’s executive board. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is battling accusations of bribery.

Some of this might be defensible if the UN did anything useful. It doesn’t. It’s just a slush fund for redistributing our money to a vast UN bureaucracy and anyone willing to bribe it for benefits.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the UN vote by beginning the process of defunding the UN. And there’s every reason in the world for us to also stop tossing money at the United Nations.

It’s something that we and every sane country should have done decades ago. If you give money to the UN, it will end up anywhere and everywhere except where it’s supposed to go. But defunding the UN isn’t enough. There is no reason for us to remain there at all.

The United Nations has never met any of its lofty goals. During the Cold War it became a playground for the Communist powers. The USSR, the second signatory to the UN charter, helped force out the first signatory, Taiwan. Even while the treaty was being signed, it was taking over Poland, the 51^st signatory.

These days, the United Nations is a forum for Islamist powers and the rotting remains of the Communist front to continue its war against the free world while seducing weak-minded nations into going along.

We are not making the world a better place by being members of this anti-American organization which vacillates between being evil and useless.

You can always count on UN peacekeeping troops to run away whenever they might be called on to use force. The head of the peacekeeping mission in South Sudan was fired by the UN for refusing to protect aid workers, including Americans, who were being raped and assaulted. …

The UN was brought into being in the aftermath of the horrors of World War II. Instead of ending “the scourge of war”, the UN has a solid track record of uselessness and complicity in the face of genocide.

Israel was the first to alert the UN to Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia. But Moscow and its Syrian ally conspired to protect the Communist dictatorship. The UN did not condemn the killing. And only a generation later did it convene the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, which has been running for almost twenty years. It took ten years to arrest Brother Number Three, the Foreign Minister of the Communist terror state, whose lies the United Nations chose to believe when the butchery was taking place.

He died six years later while still on trial.

The UN has been apologizing for its non-response to the Rwandan genocide for decades. But apologizing for not doing anything is what the United Nations does best. That and condemn Israel.

Earlier this month, the UN Security Council couldn’t even manage to pass a ceasefire resolution on Syria.

Venezuela, which championed the anti-Israel resolution, took time out from starving its own people to protect Assad. Why in the world would anyone take this vote, or any UN vote, seriously?

The UN’s Human Rights Council members include China, Cuba, Russia, Saudi Arabia and, of course, Venezuela. UN Women, the body dedicated to empowering women, includes China, which forces women to have abortions; Pakistan, where women can be murdered by their male relatives for marrying on their own; and Iran, where it’s practically illegal for a woman to leave the house.

The United Nations does not promote its own ideals. Or ours. Instead, it sanctimoniously violates them. Providing every brutal dictatorship with equal representation hasn’t ushered in an age of human rights. Allowing Islamic terrorists and the radical left to denounce their enemies hasn’t made the world better. And throwing $3 billion a year at the towering UN swamp on Turtle Bay only wastes our time and money. …

The UN doesn’t share our ideals. It’s time to build our closest alliances with the countries that do.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called the 2030 agenda a “Declaration of Interdependence.” We must declare our independence from the UN’s interdependency of corruption and tyranny.

We should defund and withdraw. Where quarreling diplomats once preened in the tower above Turtle Bay, seagulls will soar and young couples will walk with their children. The billions we waste on the UN will go toward taking care of our people. And once we are free of the UN, we will actually be able to promote real human rights instead of pandering to the dictators and Islamists of the United Nations.

Like the League of Nations, the United Nations is a failed experiment. The only difference is that, despite decades of wars, genocides and terror, we still haven’t pulled the plug.

President Obama has betrayed his own country – the country he has led for eight years – by colluding with the UN against Israel. 

President Trump will have the opportunity to pull out of the UN and drain the swamp in Turtle Bay.

UN delenda est.

A collectivist plot hatched at Evil HQ, aka the UN, is being surreptitiously implemented throughout the United States.

Everyone needs to know about it.

It is called Agenda 2030. 

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh writes at Canada Free Press:

As we cheer the election of a new President, the highly successful entrepreneur and businessman Donald Trump, having averted the advance of global communism and global citizenship, we must not forget the massive damage that has already occurred in our country and around the globe, involving the much debunked manufactured global warming turned into a profitable climate change industry worth trillions, accomplished through the non-stop work and indoctrination of the United Nations Agenda 2030, an onerous plan which has infiltrated every aspect of our society, limiting our freedoms and controlling every facet of our lives under the guise of “sustainable development”. 

One month after the establishment of the United Nations, UNESCO was created by its first director, Julian Huxley. UNESCO’s first task was to teach the world’s school teachers how to indoctrinate their students to become citizens of the world. Judging by the amount of global citizenship preparedness advertised by colleges and universities in the U.S. today, UNESCO has been highly successful. Their materials on the topic of Toward World Understanding, brainwashed many generations in schools around the globe that “nationalism was bad, and had to be replaced with the idea of world citizenship”. (UNESCO Publication 356)

The effort to transform our children into global citizens mutated into the International Baccalaureate Program, an expensive and highly secretive curriculum from Switzerland, supported and paid for by local taxpayers. Parents thought that it was a superior education to our public schools when in reality it is just another attempt to indoctrinate them into global citizens, devoid of national pride, American history, and turning them into full supporters of global governance.

The relentless global governance promoters are convinced that their social engineering philosophy of collectivism is far superior to our free market capitalism. They are not dissuaded by the monumental failures of Cuba, Venezuela, Soviet Union, North Korea, China, Eastern European countries, and other nations forced to survive on the idea of “daddy government knows best”.

With its final goal of a “global neighborhood” (Our Global Neighborhood, 1995), the government-managed society rejects the idea of private property and does not think that controlling the use of private property constitutes taking, despite the existence of our 5th Amendment which requires that government justly compensate owners for the taking of their private property.

The final barrier in the United Nations completion of this global neighborhood is the voluntary funding for the United Nations. The ideas of creating a global tax and a global currency have been introduced numerous times. In 2010, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revealed its plan to create a global currency.

“International rules, institutions and practices that limit the behavior of people in the United States come from international entities such as the UN, UNESCO, UNEP, UNDP, WTO, ISO and other alphabet bureaucracies,” which creep into domestic policy via non-governmental organization (NGOs) lobbyists who advocate for global governance, politicians, federal employees, and delegates to U.N. meetings. Most in Congress support and promote the principle of global governance but their constituents have no idea what that means.

Why is global governance bad? Our system of freedom and self-governance cannot co-exist in a world governed by the United Nations’ tin pot dictatorships.  They believe that “government is the source of individual rights, and can give or deny those rights to individuals or organizations as the government deems necessary”, in the interest of the collective. …

We are at the crossroads of global governance, enabled by the voluntary participation of developed nations, particularly the United States, which has dragged its citizens into agreements, initiatives, and partnerships, whereby the voters were never consulted about such partnerships and initiatives, they were only subjected to the Vision of the globalists, pushed forward by elected politicians’ voluntary membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI). …

Plans that erode our individual freedoms and national sovereignty start at the local level with promises and euphemisms that are relevant to a particular locality and sound benign enough to the busy American, preoccupied with making a living and supporting his/her family.

The visioning process starts at the local level by a local planning agency (an NGO) or ICLEI itself with a federal grant attached to it. ICLEI was created in 1990 “to advance the concept of sustainable development”, the lynchpin of U.N. Agenda 21 of 1992 and now U.N. Agenda 2030. 

Yes, Agenda 2030 morphed out of Agenda 21. We have expounded, and expostulated about, Agenda 21 in these posts: Beware “Agenda 21”, June 24, 2011; Agenda 21: the “smart growth” conspiracy, November 21, 2011; Three eees for environmental equalizing economics, December 4, 2011; Dark city, May 31, 2012; Destroying American wealth and sovereignty by diktat, June 6, 2012; The mystic UN and Agenda 21, August 3, 2012; Pleistocene Park, August 11, 2012; The death of nations, September 18, 2012; Home sweet closet, December 7, 2012; Getting rid of mother, January 30, 2013; Teaching submission to world government, April 14, 2013; Be alarmed, April 6, 2014; Your tiny home is frozen, July 14, 2014; Agenda 21 grinds slowly but exceeding small, December 7, 2014.

This is how the plot is being carried out:

Once the grant is in place, a facilitator is appointed to lead the visioning process of the local community. Participants are initially chosen carefully in order to support the plan. One local elected official is also included while the community knows nothing about it until the end of the process.  The group may call itself “Yourtown 2030” and will put forth their pre-planned ideas of what your town should look like in 2030 in order to have a “sustainable community” and “smart development”. Anything else [it is implied] is catastrophic for the community.

Any objections are eliminated by advertising a “consensus”. The goals chosen by this visioning are usually recommendations taken from U.N. Agenda 21 or the President’s Council on Sustainable Development documents.

Next comes the plan of action which includes “bike paths, walkways, greenbelts, conservation areas, high-density areas, mixed-use housing, five minute walk or bike to work , shopping, and play, urban boundary zones”, and other buzz-words from the sustainable development vocabulary.

As the plan is near completion, the group starts feeding information to the press in the local media. Public events are held that gloat over the righteous sustainable development and sustainable communities. The elected official on board with the visioning plan is “expected to convince the majority of the governing board to adopt the plan of action”.

Glossies will be printed and mailed out to the population, convincing the community that their visioning plan will make the community better in the 21st century if they protect the environment by reducing their carbon footprint, their commute, their car use, their suburban living, and other activities that make life fun and free, but, the world will be a better place for all.

The elements of the plan are never really publicly debated before elected officials, and, it is too late to oppose it once it is so heavily publicized. The private landowners are usually never consulted, nor are the taxpayers. Many times, once the plan has been adopted and implementation has begun, the community starts feeling the pain of the visioning plan. Local comprehensive land use plans are often so restrictive, the farmers can no longer use their pastures, their lakes, their land, their water to grow food, or plant crops.

Dr. Paugh goes on to describe in detail how the collectivizing plan is being implemented step by step in the area where she lives, Woodbridge, Va. (Go here for the official account of what is happening there, but please read Dr. Paugh’s account first.) Watch out for the same thing being done in your district. (It is being done in ours.)

Finally, she reminds us what this is really all about:

The American Planning Association, one of the main vectors of sustainable development change in this country, has a host of definitions and requirements for any inhabited place in the country as to how the Strong Neighborhood Initiative (SNI) should be implemented according to a specific blueprint designed years ago by the U.N. Agenda 21 planners in Rio.

The neighborhoods must “promote or protect air and water quality, protect groundwater resources, and respond to the growing threat of climate change”, a threat that is not real. “Green infrastructure” must be used, such as “local tree cover mitigating heat gain”. Communities must “utilize measures or practices to protect or enhance local biodiversity and the environment”.

At the end of the day, none of these plans are really about improving the lives of the people, they are about herding humans into small areas where they are more easily controlled by the government. 

If this is not stopped by the new Republican government, one of the worst evils President Obama has allowed to be done will live long after him.

Post Script: The UN must be destroyed!