Did you know that conservatives, which is to say the far-Right, are spreading false and malicious accounts of violent action by Antifa, the movement that won the Second World War against the fascist axis powers?

Here’a a notable example.

Michelle Malkin wrote at Townhall:

 I will not be in much of a celebratory mood this coming Independence Day.

Our borders have collapsed. Our educational system is a wreck. And our constitutionally protected freedoms of assembly, speech and the press are under siege in the streets and across the internet. The ability of patriots to warn, expose and combat the threats to our national sovereignty is eroding daily.

Sorry to be a wet blanket, my fellow Americans, but this is no time for a parade.

In Portland, my young journalist friend Andy Ngo was hospitalized over the weekend after a brutal assault at the hands of Antifa thugs who rule the streets and run the city. Ngo has been smeared as a “provocateur” and a “propagandist” for exposing the bloody violence and anarchy of far-left “resisters”. He has been doxxed and physically threatened by anti-Trump, open borders radicals menacing him online. On Saturday afternoon, armed only with his smartphone, hand-held GoPro, bodycam and reporter’s backpack, Ngo braved a mob of black-masked agitators purportedly marching against “hate”.

They – the “mob” – are also against masks and violence. What? Do try to keep up! Hate is against hate, mask-wearing is against mask-wearing, the use of violence is to prevent the use of violence. (Don’t bring “logic” up. Logic is racist.)

As they passed the county courthouse and sheriff’s office, the anarchists taunted Ngo by name and hurled cups with unknown substances at him. One violent attacker dressed like a ninja, donning black gloves with reinforced knuckles, punched Ngo in the eyes. Another black-cloaked punk kicked Ngo in the groin multiple times as others pelted him with liquids, sprays and eggs. During the melee, as police stood by, his electronic equipment was stolen. He sustained brain bleeding and wounds to his head, face and neck.

Ngo was not alone. Two Oregonians who had come to support conservative speakers at a downtown rally nearby were set upon by black-masked vigilantes. Adam Kelly was hit in the head with fists, nunchucks, a metal Hydro Flask and a crowbar. Two massive gashes on his skull required more than 25 staples. John Blum was also overrun by people in black masks, who aimed bear spray or mace at him when he, Kelly and two others tried to come to the aid of others being assaulted by Antifa. The elderly Blum had carried a baton to defend himself, but was blinded and incapacitated while being hit, punched and dragged across the street with blood pouring down his face.

Antifa’s apologists in the liberal press scoffed at the savagery, mocking Ngo as a “f—ing snowflake” and downplaying the gang ambushes harmless “milkshaking”.

They have been falsely accused of putting quick-drying cement into their peaceful milkshake weapons. Who can believe that? As if warriors against fascism would stoop to do such a thing!

In total, medics treated eight people, including three police officers. “Three community members received treatment at area hospitals after they were assaulted with weapons. Two officers were pepper sprayed during the incident and were treated. Another officer was punched in the arm by a demonstrator and sustained a non-life-threatening injury. Another officer sustained a non-life-threatening head injury from a projectile,” the city blandly reported.

See? “Non-life threatening”.

Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler, a notorious social justice grandstander, spent Monday railing not against the barbarians who’ve hijacked the public square in his town, but against Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, who called out Wheeler’s history of stand-down orders. Portland Police Association president Daryl Turner amplified the critique, pleading with the City to “remove the handcuffs from our officers and let them stop the violence through strong and swift enforcement action.” Those handcuffs have endangered Portland’s citizens in multiple ways. Wheeler has declared Portland a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants, and himself a guardian against all foreign criminals evading deportation. In February, the city withdrew the police force from the Joint Terrorism Task Force’s partnership between the feds and local law enforcement – turning the Pacific Northwest metropolis into a safe space for jihad.

Will there be a federal investigation? Concerned citizens who can’t afford to wait have taken matters into their own hands. After just three days, more than 5,700 individuals have contributed a whopping $178,000 to a GoFundMe campaign I spearheaded to help with Andy Ngo’s security, medical and work costs. A separate fundraiser for Adam Kelly raised more than $11,000. On another front, internet sleuths are analyzing video to try and identify Antifa assailants – crowdsourcing the job Portland officials have failed to do.

No, there won’t be a federal investigation. The Antifa people are concerned citizens acting to keep the peace. They have the right to assemble under the first amendment. If they were violent at all it was only in self-defense, because people like Ngo, Blum, and Kelly are inherently violent by being against the anti-violence of Antifa. (Don’t start, you bourgeois moralists. We already warned you once against bringing up “logic”. Don’t make us do it again.)

At the same time as they propagate lies about Antifa violence, conservative journalists – protected by almost all the mainstream and social media – are outrageously claiming that white supremacists are not the major threat to the peace and security of diverse, inclusive, LGBTQWERTY undocumented citizens.

In doing so, they actually defend the American Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

Don’t believe us? Here, for instance, is David Catron writing at The American Spectator:

The Democrats face a unique obstacle in their bid to win back the White House in 2020. To win, they need to garner over 90 percent of the black vote, which requires considerable dissatisfaction in that community with its current plight. However, as President Trump said during his SOTU address, African-American unemployment stands at its lowest rate ever. The resultant increase in prosperity will make it more difficult for the Democrats to stir unrest. Thus, they need to create a new source of concern among blacks, and have hit upon the fiction of metastasizing white supremacy and violence against minorities.

Predictably, the media has enthusiastically abetted this strategy. Indeed, it is why they were so willing to run with the preposterous Jussie Smollett story and a long list of equally absurd hate crime hoaxes perpetrated since Donald Trump became President. It is why we are increasingly subjected to editorials in the major “news” publications claiming that killings perpetrated by “right-wing extremists” are on the rise and that this alleged increase coincides with the Trump era. A useful example is a New York Times op-ed titled, The Grave Threats of White Supremacy and Far-Right Extremism:

Killings committed by individuals and groups associated with far-right extremist groups have risen significantly. Seventy-one percent of the 387 “extremist related fatalities in the United States” from 2008 to 2017 were committed by members of far-right and white-supremacist groups, according the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Islamic extremists were responsible for 26 percent.

The first thing anyone familiar with cause-of-death statistics will notice about this passage is that the total is infinitesimal. The 71 percent figure the author, Thomas T. Cullen, attributes to “far-right and white-extremist groups” averages 28 per year. Every death is tragic, but this is less than half the annual fatality rate associated with bee and wasp stings. To suggest that this constitutes a “grave threat” to the republic is ridiculous. The author also fails to note that the 71 percent figure attributed to “far right” groups was derived by arbitrarily including every fatality that was not explicitly linked to Islamist or Leftwing groups.

This is no inadvertent error. The source of Cullen’s data explicitly states, “Total deaths include both ideologically and non-ideologically motivated killings.” That is, some of the fatalities that Cullen attributes to “far-right and white-extremist groups” were committed by people with no ideological ax to grind at all. He commits another telling sin of omission by belaboring attacks by alleged white supremacists while studiously ignoring several horrific Islamist mass murders. But by far the worst feature of Cullen’s op-ed is his “solution”. He praises the federal Hate Crimes Prevention Act, but laments certain inconveniences:

The hate crime law has its limitations. First, it requires proof that an individual acted because of a specific proscribed animus enumerated in the statute. That means investigators must uncover concrete evidence.

This character is the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, but he evidently dislikes the hassle of providing genuine evidence that a hate crime has been committed. His recommendation to the states is even worse:

States can authorize localities to place reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on demonstrations that will likely result in widespread violence and other criminal activity, like the rally in Charlottesville.

Evidently Cullen is unaware that the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees individuals the right to freedom of assembly. And it applies to every American, including the kind of creep who joins the KKK. Even the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) understands that neither the states nor the federal government are permitted to interfere with this provision of the First Amendment. In fact, the ACLU supported Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler in court after city (of Charlottesville) officials tried to revoke his protest permit. For those who can’t see why, the ACLU provides this explanation:

The ACLU is frequently asked to explain its defense of certain groups — particularly controversial and unpopular entities such as the American Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Nation of Islam. We do not defend them because we agree with them; we defend their right to free expression and free assembly.… Once the government has the power to violate one person’s rights, it can use that power against everyone.

Returning to the rise in white supremacist murders that has allegedly occurred under Trump, the actual data is telling. As to domestic terrorist attacks, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) shows that 14 percent were committed by white supremacy groups in 2016 and that this percentage rose to 53 percent in 2017. But this was due to the ratio of overall deaths versus attacks. During 2016, 49 of 71 fatalities occurred during one Islamist attack. Consequently, the percentage of deaths associated with other attacks was driven down. The fatality rate in 2017 was far lower, so White supremacist attacks (18 of 34) rose to 53 percent.

With regard to hate crimes in general, the FBI reported that they increased by 17 percent from 2016 to 2017. That rise was an artifact of the increased number of agencies reporting. More telling is the ethnicity of the offenders: 25.7 percent were Hispanic; 25.0 percent were non-Hispanic white; 21.33 percent were black; 19.1 percent were unknown; 8.87 percent were mixed race. In other words, there is apparently no “white privilege” when it comes to hate crime. If one checks political bias at the door, this looks like a bunch of violent thugs attacking one another, not for racial reasons, but because that’s what violent thugs do.

The evidence of pervasive white supremacist violence is pretty thin, if you allow for the number of random crazies that appear in any particular ethnic community. You won’t get the Democrats to admit this, of course. They need the black vote, so they will do and say just about anything. Thus, they claim that a guy from Queens and the GOP — the party that ended slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation — has revived the Democrat traditions of white supremacy and lynching. They seem to believe that this strategy will bring back the black voters who failed to show in 2016. This is even dumber than the Green New Deal.

“No ‘white privilege’ when it comes to hate crime”!? “The evidence of pervasive white supremacist violence is pretty thin”!?

Who do these conservative nuts think they’re fooling?

The New Left, a middle-class intellectual movement, reached its apogee with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States.

Its “long march through the institutions” is over now. It can rise no further. With the disintegration of the EU and the election of Donald Trump – accompanied by a strengthening of the Republican Party’s power, governing in most of the states and holding majorities in Congress – Leftism is starting its decline.

The Left is bankrupt of ideas; obsessed with trivial “problems”, largely fictitious, of “racism”, “sexism”, and “man-made global warming”.

Genuine problems of economic stagnation and towering national debt, Middle East conflicts, illegal immigration, the Islamization of Europe, nuclear arming of aggressive regimes, Islamic terrorism, have been effectively ignored, disastrously underestimated, or even exacerbated by the Leftist power elites.

Barack Obama, one of the worst presidents, was to a large extent elected by Whites wanting to prove that they weren’t “racist” by voting for a Black.

The support for Hillary Clinton’s bid for the highest office was similarly in conformity with “identity politics”, men being invited to prove they weren’t “sexist” by voting for a woman.

The only serious concern of the Left has been to stay in power. All it has brought wherever it has been able to exercise power unrestricted by constitutional constraints, has been slavery, starvation, torture, imprisonment, and hundreds of millions of deaths.

Though Americans have endured much in the eight years of Obama’s leadership, they have fortunately been saved by constitutional constraints from the worst that a Leftist government could do. The nearest the Left could come to imposing its collectivist ideology on the whole nation was implanting the idea that the greatest possible crimes, the worst political sins, were “racism”, “sexism” and “climate change denial”.

Michelle Malkin writes about the obsessive identity politics of the Left:

Here is what eight years of President Obama’s “post-racial” reign have wrought.

The weekend before Election Day, Hillary Clinton grinned from ear to ear at a Cleveland rally while reciting a verse from Jay-Z’s remix of Young Jeezy’s “My President is Black.” As the rapper and his Black Lives Matter-promoting wife, Beyonce, beamed on stage nearby, pandersuit-clad Clinton twanged with a stilted accent:

“Remember, Jay memorably said: ‘Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk, and Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run, and Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly’.”

This would be comical if not for the noxious cynicism of it all. Clinton may not remember (if she was ever aware in the first place), but the original version of “My President is Black” is a brazen middle finger to non-black America. Just a few lines after the verse Hillary quoted, the song taunts:

Hello Miss America, hey pretty lady

Red, white, and blue flag, wave for me baby

Never thought I’d say this s—, baby I’m good

You can keep your p—, I don’t want no more Bush

No more war, no more Iraq

No more white lies, the President is black

So the poster granny for liberal white privilege, groveling for black votes, kissed the rings of celebrity Obama BFFs Jay-Z and Beyonce by parroting an inflammatory anthem laced with profanities and radical racialized gloating.

Could there have been a more perfect beclownment to cap Clinton’s phony-baloney “Stronger Together” campaign?

After denigrating millions of Trump supporters as “deplorable” and “irredeemable” earlier this year, Clinton then unctuously confessed on election eve: “I regret deeply how angry the tone of the campaign became.”

Note the classic textbook employment of the passive voice to evade personal responsibility.

The good news is that after being blasted as haters by Clinton’s hate-filled minions, after being slapped down as racial “cowards” by Clintonite holdover Eric Holder, after being lambasted as “xenophobes” and “nativists” by immigration expansionists in both parties, after enduring a string of faked hate crimes blamed on conservatives, after ceaseless accusations of “Islamophobia” in the wake of jihad attacks on American soil, after baseless accusations of “homophobia” for protesting the government’s gay wedding cake coercion, and after mourning a growing list of police officers ambushed and targeted by violent thugs seeking racial vengeance, an undeniable movement of citizens in the 2016 election cycle decided to push back.

When all is said and done, one of the most important cultural accomplishments of Donald Trump’s bid will be the platform he created for Americans of all colors, ethnicities, political affiliations, and socioeconomic backgrounds to defy soul-draining identity politics.

Beltway chin-pullers expediently focused on Trump’s white and conservative supporters who are rightly sick and tired of social justice double standards. But they ignored the increasingly vocal constituency of hyphen-free, label-rejecting American People Against Political Correctness who don’t fit old narratives and boxes.

And the same “Never Trump” pundits and establishment political strategists who gabbed endlessly about the need for “minority outreach” after 2012 were flummoxed by the blacks, gays, Latinos, women and Democrats who rallied behind the GOP candidate.

The most important speech of the 2016 election cycle wasn’t delivered by one of the presidential candidates. It came from iconoclastic Silicon Valley entrepreneur/investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel who best explained the historically significant backlash against the intolerant tolerance mob and phony diversity-mongers.

“Louder voices have sent a message that they do not intend to tolerate the views of one half of the country,” he observed at the National Press Club last week. He recounted how the gay magazine The Advocate, which had once praised him as a “gay innovator”, declared he was “not a gay man” anymore because of his libertarian, limited-government politics.

“The lie behind the buzzword of diversity could not be made more clear,” Thiel noted. “If you don’t conform, then you don’t count as diverse [contributing to diversity], no matter what your personal background.”

Trump’s eclectic coalition was bound by that common thread: disaffected individuals tired of being told they don’t count and discounted because their views do not properly “match” their gender, chromosomes, skin color or ethnicity. That is exactly why the more they and their nominee were demonized, the stronger their support grew.

“No matter what happens in this election,” Thiel concluded last week, “what Trump represents isn’t crazy and it’s not going away.”

He’s right. I too often take for granted my own personal awakening about the entrenched tribalism of identity politics at a crazy liberal arts college in the early 1990s. The liberation from collectivist ideology is profound and lasting. Witnessing so many outspoken newcomers arrive at this enlightenment, however circuitous the route, has been the most encouraging and under-appreciated phenomenon of the 2016 campaign.

May the whole world now experience a profound and lasting liberation from collectivist ideology!

The Democratic Part is the party of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and corruption.

Appalling people run it.

Michelle Malkin writes at Townhall:

The Loathsome Cowboy rides again.

Ken Salazar, President Obama’s disgraced ex-interior secretary and former U.S. senator from Colorado, was named Hillary Clinton’s White House transition chair on Monday.

The pick confirms that a Clinton presidency would not only be Barack Obama’s third term ideologically, but also culturally. As in the Democratic culture of corruption.

Ken Salazar is a thug. Before stepping down as Obama’s interior secretary in 2013 “to spend time with family”, Salazar threatened violence against a local Colorado Springs Gazette reporter who had the audacity to challenge one of the ten-gallon hat-wearing bureaucrat’s cronyism-tainted deals.

At issue: How rancher and reported Salazar business associate Tom Davis profited handsomely from the Bureau of Land Management’s Wild Horse and Burro Program. Not long after Salazar took office, Davis paid $10 each for more than 1,700 federally protected horses who roamed on public lands. He then turned around and sold them for slaughter near the Mexican border for $154,000, despite signing a contract prohibiting him from doing so.

When Gazette reporter David Phillips (now at The New York Times) asked about the controversy at an Obama election night event in November 2012, Salazar snapped:

“You know what, never do that. This is a — this is the Obama — You know what, if you do that to me again, I’m going to punch you out. OK? Don’t ever, ever, from the Gazette or anybody else do that to me again. Set me up. You know?”

Caught on tape by Philipps and another witness, Knuckles Salazar issued an “apology”. But neither he nor Davis, who said he had previously hauled cattle for Salazar for years, ever answered for their actions. An Inspector General determined Salazar’s department “failed to follow its own policy of limiting horse sales and ensuring that the horses sold went to good homes and were not slaughtered”.  No penalties, no prosecution, no nothing.

Ken Salazar is a liar. He trampled the rule of law, defied court orders, and doctored scientific conclusions in the name of environmental protection. Have you forgotten? After the BP oil spill in 2010, the Obama White House imposed a radical six-month moratorium on America’s entire deepwater drilling industry. The sweeping ban — inserted into a technical safety document in the middle of the night by Obama’s green extremists — cost an estimated 19,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in lost wages.

The order was supposedly based on recommendations from an expert oil spill panel. But that panel’s own members (along with the federal judiciary) called out Obama’s environmental team for misleading the public about the scientific evidence … Salazar and eco czar Carol Browner oversaw the false rewriting of the drilling ban report to completely misrepresent the Obama-appointed panel’s own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict. 

Federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana blasted the Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. Feldman singled out the Salazar-run agency’s culture of contempt and serial “determined disregard” for the law.

“Much to the government’s discomfort and this Court’s uneasiness,” Feldman wrote, Salazar’s doctored report was “misleading” and the experts who wrote it called it a “‘misrepresentation’.  It was factually incorrect.” Once again, Salazar evaded accountability despite continued obstruction and repeated refusal to cooperate with nearly 50 public records requests from Congress regarding his post-BP spill decisions.

Ken Salazar hates American consumers and workers. He infamously told the Senate in 2008 that he would refuse emergency drilling requests in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge even if gas prices reached $10 a gallon. He arbitrarily pulled nearly 100 oil leases in Utah – costing the state thousands of jobs – based on bogus eco-claims that were refuted by the Interior Department’s own inspector general. Offshore and onshore, Salazar waged war relentlessly on the energy sector and the American West.

Ken Salazar is a job-killing, truth-sabotaging, law-skirting, media-bullying corruptocrat who just won’t let go of power.

In other words: a perfect headhunter for America’s Evita Peron.

Hillary Clinton has also been called America’s Angela Merkel – notably by Donald Trump – because like the German Chancellor, she wants to import millions of Muslims from the Middle East.

But we think that of all infamous women, Hillary Clinton most resembles Winnie Mandela. She became untouchable by the law because she was the wife of a powerful politician – and has gotten away with murder.

According to many polls at this moment, most voters want Hillary Clinton to be president.

Most voters, then, are choosing corruption.

The Clintons are powerful. They are above the law. In cahoots with Obama and his gang, they have corrupted the US State Department, the US Department of Justice, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

And it doesn’t stop there. Is there a government agency that has not been corrupted?

As we have touched on environmental protection, let’s look at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

We quote from Judicial Watch:

The senior Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official who scammed the agency out of nearly $1 million in pay without working, got service and salary awards throughout his lengthy career as a climate policy expert, according to records obtained by Judicial Watch.

His name is John Beale and he’s on the verge of completing a 32-month prison sentence for defrauding the government by claiming, while employed at the EPA, to be a “secret agent” for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and going on long vacations that he said were CIA missions.

While he committed the fraud the EPA regularly rewarded him with “Special Act or Service Awards” that included cash and time off … From 1991 through 1998 Beale received thousands of dollars in bonuses for his performance as well as a “Time Off Award” in 1998 … In 2001 he was rewarded yet again with a promotion to work at the White House as a “Senior Policy Advisor”. …

He was a senior level official who actually worked in the agency’s most powerful office, Air and Radiation (OAR), under President Obama’s current EPA Administrator, Gina McCarthy.

OAR is feared by American companies because it develops polices and regulations associated with climate change air pollution that can impose huge costs to both consumers and businesses. McCarthy headed OAR from 2008 to 2013 when Beale was a high-ranking senior policy adviser, which means the EPA Administrator directly managed him at the time.

Beale also defrauded the agency by receiving unlawful reimbursements for upscale personal travel, claiming to be away working for the CIA for 2 ½ years while he collected EPA paychecks and continuing to collect his full government salary years after officially retiring from the agency.

A U.S. Senate investigation blasted McCarthy, his boss at the time at OAR, for not taking action for months after learning that Beale committed fraud. “On March 29, 2012, an OAR official raised concerns about Beale’s retirement when he informed McCarthy that Beale was still on payroll,” the Senate report states. “Despite being aware of the fact that one of her subordinates was collecting a paycheck without providing any work product, this arrangement continued for seven more months before McCarthy ever contacted Beale.” In December 2012, McCarthy met with Beale for the first time in nearly 15 months and he told her he was no longer planning to retire. Beale wasn’t reported to the EPA Inspector General for another two months and, though McCarthy had cause to fire him, she let him retire voluntarily with full benefits. Remember, this is the woman who runs the agency now.

On August 23, 2013, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed criminal charges against Beale and a year later he was convicted of fraud and stealing $900,000 from the government. He’s on the verge of completing a 32-month sentence in a federal prison in Cumberland, Maryland. The Senate investigation determined that his actions, not only disgraced the agency, but also raised questions about its management and oversight abilities. In fact, despite Beale’s decades-long history of fraud and deceit many of his EPA colleagues refuse to view him as a criminal and even submitted letters to the court requesting leniency during his sentencing. “These officials’ reaction to the scandal suggests that an individual can steal a million dollars from taxpayers and perpetrate a crime for nearly two decades, but still be considered — by some — as an environmental legend,” the Senate report states. 

Such people are apparently preferred by more than half the nation to a man who does not express himself with precision. And whose taste is considered vulgar. Indeed, what is mere corruption compared to such faults?

Brooklyn Bridge, a cable-stayed suspension bridge, completed in 1883, spans the East River in New York. It was the brainchild of John A. Roebling

Here is an article by Michelle Malkin, titled Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge?:

How many times have you heard President Obama and his minions pat themselves on the back for their noble “investments” in “roads and bridges”? Without government infrastructure spending, we’re incessantly reminded, we wouldn’t be able to conduct our daily business.

“Every single great idea that has marked the 21st century, the 20th century and the 19th century has required government vision and government incentive,” Vice President Joe Biden infamously asserted. “Private enterprise,” he sneered, lags behind.

As always, the Beltway narcissists have it backward. Without private enterprise and free-market visionaries, public infrastructure wouldn’t exist.

Take the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, which turned 132 years old this week. It’s not a government official whose vision built that. It’s a fierce capitalist who revolted against unimaginative command-and-control bureaucrats in his home country.

Before he went on to pioneer aqueducts and suspension bridges across America, culminating in the Brooklyn Bridge, John Roebling was a government engineer in the German province of Westphalia. A cog in the Prussian building machine, he chafed under autocratic rule. No decisions could be made, no actions taken, he complained in his diary, “without first having an army of government councilors, ministers, and other functionaries deliberate about it for ten years, make numerous expensive journeys by post, and write so many long reports about it, that for the amount expended for all this, reckoning compound interest for ten years, the work could have been completed”.

Fed up with innovation-stifling conformity, subordination and red tape, the ambitious 25-year-old Roebling set sail for the U.S. in 1831 aboard the American-built ship August Edward. During the 78-day journey, he wrote of his hopes and dreams “to found a new home in the western continent beyond the ocean, a new fatherland free from tyranny”.  Upon arriving in Philadelphia, he celebrated his adopted land’s free-market economy.

“The numerous hindrances, restrictions and obstacles, which are set up by timid governments and countless hosts of functionaries against every endeavor in Germany, are not to be found here,” he reflected in a letter to friends and family.

“The foreigner must be astounded at what the public spirit of these republicans has accomplished up to now and what it still accomplishes every day. All undertakings take place through the association of private persons. In these the principal aim is naturally the making of money.” The pursuit of self-interest was in of itself a source of public good, he concluded, “principally (as) a result of unrestricted intercourse in a concerted action of an enlightened, self-governing people.”

Roebling failed at silkworm-farming, fabric-dying, rape seed oil farming and canary-raising before embarking on his engineering career. He patented an improved boiler for steamships, a safety gauge for a steam-boiler flue and a steam-powered motorcycle. He traveled wherever he could utilize his skills – constructing dams on the Beaver River, consulting on hydraulics on the Croton River Aqueduct, knocking on doors for work across Pennsylvania.

With unbridled determination to build a lucrative family business, he patented and pioneered America’s first commercially successful wire rope company. Frugal and financially savvy, Roebling operated on saved capital and refused to borrow. Several of his new clients paid him in stock, and he soon had a thriving investment portfolio. Coal mining companies in the anthracite region snapped up his sturdy cables.

Did he have “help” along the way? Plenty – from other capitalists, that is.

Roebling purchased his wire from industrial pioneer Robert Townsend, who had founded the first iron wire mill west of the Allegheny Mountains in 1816. Townsend, who had learned the wire-making trade from Baltimore wire weaver Hugh Balderson, manufactured rivets, nails, fasteners and telegraph wire, in addition to supplying Roebling with wire for his early experiments and projects.

Samuel Wickersham’s Pittsburgh Wire Works also supplied wire as Roebling gained more project work. And Sligo Iron Works made charcoal “blooms” for Roebling’s wire: large blocks cast from molten iron and later steel, which were then “hot rolled” at high temperatures between two rotating cylinders into wire rods.

Later, Roebling’s sons Charles and Ferdinand built a 200-acre state-of-the-art manufacturing campus, steel plant and village outside Trenton, N.J. Employing 8,000 workers, Kinkora Works produced everything from chicken wire and telegraph wire to tramway and elevator cables.

The suspension cables on the Golden Gate and George Washington bridges were manufactured by the Roeblings. So were the control cables in the Spirit of St. Louis, the first airplane to cross the Atlantic Ocean, and the tramway and construction cables used to build the Panama Canal. Even the wires used to stabilize the wings of the Wright Brothers’ aircraft used Roebling trusses.

Here’s the lesson White House progressives and Common Core historians won’t teach: Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge is a towering legacy of the countless pursuits of individual American innovators who benefited the public by benefiting themselves and their families. The wealth-shaming social engineers in Washington will never understand. Private profit is a public good.

John Augustus Roebling

(Hat-tip to our Facebook commenter Nadir H. Khan)

It has been reliably estimated by many researchers into the subject of “Global Warming” (or any of the other sobriquets by which it is known) that in fulfilling the draconian prescriptions of the Kyoto Accord or its successors, such as the United Nations IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, millions of jobs will be lost in the developed world, the quality of life in the industrialized nations will sink to substandard levels, and the inhabitants of the Third World will be deprived of the minimal immunities, comforts, and amenities to which they aspire.

Are the warmists aware  of that? Do they want to spread poverty?

Seems so. But they are not succeeding.

This is from PJ Media, by David Solway:

Fiona Kobusingye, coordinator of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda, has vehemently denounced the attempt to impose energy restrictions on African nations in the name of fighting global warming. “These policies kill,” she writes. As for the combustible Al Gore, he “uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year.” Her conclusion: “Telling Africans they can’t have electricity — except what can be produced with some wind turbines or little solar panels — is immoral. It is a crime against humanity” . …

H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the nonprofit National Center for Policy Analysis, would clearly agree. He correctly argues that recommendations based on “flawed statistical analyses and procedures that violate general forecasting principles” should be taken “into account before enacting laws to counter global warming — which economists point out would have severe economic consequences.” Such consequences are already in evidence. Benny Peiser, editor of CCNet science network, speaking at the Heartland Institute’s 2009 climate conference in New York, sounded the death knell of the green movement in Europe owing to huge costs and minimal results …  Environmentalist Lawrence Solomon quotes Spanish economist Gabriel Calzada, whose studies show that “every green job created ploughs under 2.2 jobs elsewhere in the economy” and that green jobs are proving to be unsustainable since the creation of even one such job costs $1 million in government subsidies …

These are costs that may be suffered in other, frankly ludicrous, ways as well. The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) in its 2008 Annual Report, published in 2009, jubilates over the replacement of motorized vehicles by “bicycle rickshaws”—which, it must be admitted, will certainly help to decongest metropolitan traffic. That it would reduce America and the West to Third World Status does not trouble UNEP overmuch. Perhaps that is the plan.

The much-ballyhooed T. Boone Pickens strategy of introducing large-scale windmill technology is now proving to be a similarly quixotic project, unsightly, land-consuming, bird-killing, neurosis-inducing, expensive and totally inadequate to its declared purpose of meeting even a fraction of our electricity needs. Alex Alexiev of the Hudson Institute has laid the cards on the table for all to read: green electricity bills are rising exponentially; Europe is gradually abandoning many of its green energy programs as cost-ineffective and injurious to both wildlife and human health; and, as of the end of 2008, American solar and wind-power stocks had lost 80% of their value …  Rhode Island’s Public Utilities Commission has rejected a deal to build an offshore wind farm that would have entailed “hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs…”  New Zealand has repealed its carbon tax scheme and Australia’s opposition party is vowing to follow suit.

The writing is on the wall in majuscule. The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) has closed shop, putting an end to its estimated $10 trillion carbon trading scheme. In August 2011, President Obama’s pet green project, the California-based Solyndra solar plant, filed for bankruptcy, costing the U.S. $535 million in wasted stimulus funds and 1,100 jobs …  Other such futilities are impending. The Beacon Power Corp, recipient of a $43 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy, has filed for bankruptcy after being delisted by the NASDAQ …  The solar cell company Spectrawatt, recipient of a federal stimulus boost, and Nevada Geothermal, which profited from Federal DOE and Treasury Department subsidies, are on the brink of failure …  Ener 1, which received a $118 million stimulus grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop lithium storage batteries for electric cars, has filed for bankruptcy protection … This is bad news for the plug-in Chevy Volt, the president’s car of choice, which is beset with problems anyway; GM had to suspend production to cut inventory owing to anemic sales …  Abound Solar, which makes cadmium telluride solar modules to the tune of a $400 million federal loan guarantee, has laid off 300 workers, amounting to 70% of its workforce … And now the electric vehicle battery company A123 Systems, beneficiary of $300 million in Obama’s Recovery Act funds and $135 million in state tax credits and subsidies, courtesy of Michigan’s former Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm, is about to go belly up …

The reason for many of these failures in green energy-production companies is simple. … As author Rich Trzupek explains, the energy density of convertible wind and solar is risibly low and dispersed, which renders electricity-generating power plants, whether large or small, “the most inefficient, least reliable, and expensive form of power we have” …  As happened in Spain, Europe’s bellwether country for climatophrenic ruination, Obama’s “solar alchemy,” which demonizes traditional forms of energy extraction and application, has become a recipe for an American economic debacle.

Finnish professor Jarl Ahlbeck, a former Greenpeace member and author of over 200 scientific publications, points out that “real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming.” Contrary to common belief, he continues, “there has been no or little global warming since 1995” …  His findings have been supported by many other studies. To adduce just a few instances: geophysicist Phil Chapman, basing his results on careful analyses from major weather-tracking agencies, reports that global temperature is “falling precipitously” ;  …  geologist Don Easterbrook, associate editor of the Geological Society of America Bulletin, Professor Emeritus at Western Washington University and former U.S. representative to UNESCO, is also convinced that recent solar changes suggest the advent of a new cooling cycle which could be “fairly severe” ; … and a new study conducted by three Norwegian scientists, Jan-Erik Solheim, Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum, indicates that the next solar cycle, which is imminent, will see a “significant temperature decrease” over and above the current decline …

Moreover, as Robert Zubrin has decisively shown in his recent Merchants of Despair, there exists robust scientific proof derived from ice core data and isotopic ratios in marine organism remains that Earth’s climate is a stable system, that CO2 emissions create surplus plant growth that in turn absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide, thus restoring climate equilibrium over the long haul, and that under cyclical conditions of global warming agricultural productivity naturally increases and human life immensely improves.

In a brilliant article for the Financial Post …  analyzing the eleven logical fallacies on which the argument for man-made climate change rests, Lord Christopher Monckton, known for tracking and exposing scientific hoaxes, has effectively proven that the anthropogenic thesis has absolutely no basis, neither in fact nor in theory. So-called climate skeptics need nerves of steel to oppose the reigning ideology. It takes no less courage and perhaps even more for a climate “Warmist” to buck the trend, as culture-hero James Lovelock has recently done. Lovelock, who in his 2006 The Revenge of Gaia prophesied the charring of the planet, now admits he had been “extrapolating too far.” Despite predictably hedging his bets and deferring catastrophe into the indefinite future, he avers that “we don’t know what the climate is doing” and disparages his previous work, including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers, as “alarmist” (MSNBC.com, April 30, 2012).

Nevertheless, the Global Warming meme continues to circulate in defiance of the accumulating evidence, which leads one to wonder who the real “deniers” are. In my own country of Canada, “Warmist” foundations are determined to continue issuing environmental fatwas, in particular to tie up state-of-the-art, economically productive oil pipelines in endless litigation. That such a move would impact national revenues and cost thousands of potential jobs is a matter of no concern.

But the cost of environmentalism is becoming of ever greater concern. Must do.

If the deceit and self-righteousness of Big Green don’t rouse voters and tax-payers to vocal opposition, the cost will surely do it.

Professional skeptics though we are, we think Osama bin Laden really is dead.

The American people, who paid for the raid by the SEALs who carried out the glorious act of revenge for them by killing him, should have been shown the corpse. As it was hastily disposed of (or so we’ve been told), they should be shown the photos of it.

But the president has decided we may not see them.

Does the president really have that power? If so, why?

And why should we not see the pictures of the corpse of the man who plotted 9/11? Is Obama afraid that some might gloat over them? (We would.)

And why have we been told lie after lie about the SEALs’ raid on his compound?

Michelle Malkin, a reliable provider of sound information and intelligent analysis, sets out the lies-thus-far, writing at Townhall:

Take One: Bin Laden died in a bloody firefight. …

Take Two: Bin Laden did not engage in a firefight. …

Take Three: Bin Laden’s wife died after her feckless husband used her as a human shield.

Take Four: Bin Laden’s wife did not die, wasn’t used as a human shield and was only shot in the leg. Someone else’s wife was killed, somewhere else in the house.

Take Five: A transport helicopter experienced “mechanical failure” and was forced to make a hard landing during the mission.

Take Six: A top-secret helicopter clipped the bin Laden compound wall, crashed and was purposely exploded after the mission to prevent our enemies from learning more about it.

Take Seven: The bin Laden photos would be released to the world as proof positive of his death.

Take Eight: The bin Laden photos would not be released to the world because no one needs proof …

Take Nine: Bin Laden’s compound was a lavish mansion.

Take Ten: Bin Laden’s compound was a glorified pigsty.

Take Eleven: Bin Laden’s compound had absolutely no television, phone or computer access.

Take Twelve: Bin Laden’s compound was stocked with hard drives, thumb drives, DVDs and computers galore.

Take Thirteen: Er, remember that statement about bin Laden being armed? And then not armed? Well, the new version is that he had an AK-47 “nearby.”

Take Fourteen: A gung-ho Obama spearheaded the “gutsy” mission.

Take Fifteen: A reluctant Obama dithered for 16 hours before being persuaded by CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Take Sixteen: Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and close advisers watched the raid unfold in real time … and a gripping insider photo was posted immediately by the White House on the Flickr picture-sharing website for all to see.

Take Seventeen: Er, they weren’t really watching real-time video “minute by minute” because there was at least nearly a half-hour that they “didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta clarified. Or rather, un-clarified.

Take Eighteen: Stalwart Obama’s order was to kill, not capture, bin Laden.

Take Nineteen: Sensitive Obama’s order was to kill or capture — and that’s why the SEAL team gave him a chance to surrender, upon which he resisted with arms, or actually didn’t resist with arms, but sort of resisted without arms, except there was an AK-47 nearby, sort of, or maybe not, thus making it possible to assert that while Decisive Obama did tell the SEALs to kill bin Laden and should claim all credit for doing so, Progressive Obama can also be absolved by bleeding hearts because of the painstakingly concocted post facto possibility that bin Laden somehow threatened our military — telepathically or something — before being taken out.

Take Twenty: “We’ve been as forthcoming with facts as we can be,” said an irritated [Jay] Carney [White House Press Secretary] on Wednesday.

So the SEALs, not Obama, made the decision to kill bin Laden.

Will Eric Holder’s Department of “Justice” now charge them with murder?

It looks like good news. At last offshore drilling is to be permitted. America is to be allowed access to its own oil and natural gas.

But there’s a catch, as Michelle Malkin says. She reveals the whole story:

The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.

If this were a sincere change of heart and an honest, stand-alone effort to wean America off foreign oil, it would be worth heralding.

But as always with this administration, there’s a catch, via the American Energy Alliance:

“One major flashpoint in the negotiations has been whether to share drilling revenue with states and to allow states to opt in or out of drilling along their coastlines. It was unclear late Tuesday whether Obama endorses revenue-sharing for states. ‘It appears the Northern Atlantic and entire Pacific Coast will now be under a de facto ban for drilling,’ said Patrick Creighton, a spokesman for the Institute for Energy Research. ‘Even if drilling is ultimately allowed in part of the Atlantic,’ Creighton said, ‘revenue sharing is an essential incentive for states.’ The administration’s plans could meet resistance from at least 10 Senate Democrats representing coastal and Great Lakes states who last week raised concerns about ‘unfettered access to oil and gas drilling’ that could jeopardize fishing, tourism and military exercises…”

GOP Rep. Mike Pence adds:

“As usual the devil is in the details. Only in Washington, D.C., can you ban more areas to oil and gas exploration than you open up, delay the date of your new leases and claim you’re going to increase production.

“The President’s announcement today is a smokescreen. It will almost certainly delay any new offshore exploration until at least 2012 and include only a fraction of the offshore resources that the previous Administration included in its plan.

“Unfortunately, this is yet another feeble attempt to gain votes for the President’s national energy tax bill that is languishing in the Senate. At the end of the day this Administration’s energy plan is simple: increase the cost of energy on every family in America and trade American jobs oversees at a time when millions of Americans are looking for work.”

Diana West raises a troubling question:

Should Fox News register with the State Department as a foreign agent — an agent of Saudi Arabia?

First off, is that a farfetched question? Not when a leading member of the ruling family of the Sharia-totalitarian “kingdom” of Saudi Arabia, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, has made himself the second-largest shareholder of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Fox News’ parent company.

Just as Steven Emerson believes that American universities using Saudi mega-millions (many from Alwaleed) to set up Islamic studies departments should register as Saudi agents, I believe an American news channel part-owned and part-influenced by the Saudi prince should, too.

Alwaleed’s long march through U.S. institutions is a mainly post-9/11 progression greased by his purchase of about a 5.5 percent stake in News Corp. in 2005, and his purchases, I mean, gifts, of $20 million apiece to Georgetown and Harvard Universities, also in 2005.

There have been other eye-catching displays of Alwaleed’s largesse — $500,000 in 2002 to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Hamas- and Muslim-Brotherhood-linked entity, and a whopping $27 million, also in 2002, to the families of Palestinian “martyrs,” aka suicide bombers. These, along with Alwaleed’s self-described “very close relationship” with Murdoch son and apparent heir-apparent James, a left-wing global-warmist with virulently anti-Israel views, should only deepen Americans’ concerns about Fox’s ties to “the prince.” Recently, Murdoch and Alwaleed have discussed expanding their business relationship through the Murdoch purchase of a substantial stake in Rotana, Alwaleed’s huge Arab media company.

Before entering his Murdoch association, Alwaleed gave a remarkably candid interview in 2002 about what Arab News described as his belief that “Arabs should focus more on penetrating U.S. public opinion as a means to influencing decision-making” rather than boycotting U.S. products, an idea of the moment.

The Arab News reported: “Arab countries can influence U.S. decision-making ‘if they unite through economic interests, not political,’ (Alwaleed) stressed. ‘We have to be logical and understand that the U.S. administration is subject to U.S. public opinion. We (Arabs) are not so active in this sphere (public opinion). And to bring the decision-maker on your side, you not only have to be active inside the U.S. Congress or the administration but also inside U.S. society.'”

And active inside U.S. society living rooms — even better. Alwaleed would seem to have hit on a Fox strategy some time after Rudy Giuliani refused to accept, on behalf of a 9/11-shattered New York City, his $10 million check-cum-lecture that essentially justified the al-Qaida attacks as having been a response to U.S. foreign policy. This was “such an egregious, outrageous, unfair offense that I would have nothing to do with his money either,” Sean Hannity said at the time on Fox News‘ “Hannity & Colmes,” his remarks (and those of other Fox personalities) recently re-examined by the left-wing group Media Matters. “This is a bad guy,” Hannity said. “Rudy was right to decline the money.” Bill Sammon called Alwaleed’s check “blood money,” adding, “we’re better off without it.”

How terribly ironic that this same “bad guy” is now a News Corp. blood-money bags, a boss who must be handled with care as, for example, Fox host Neil Cavuto did in a deferential interview with Alwaleed last month.

How does this influence Fox News coverage? It’s impossible to say. Alwaleed has bragged that it only took a phone call to ensure that Fox coverage of Muslim rioting in France not be described as “Muslim” rioting in France, a boast News Corp. has never denied….

Meanwhile, spokesmen for terrorism-linked and Alwaleed-endowed CAIR still appear on Fox shows, for example, while Dave Gaubatz and Paul Sperry, likely Fox guests as conservative authors of the sleeper-hit book “Muslim Mafia” (an expose of CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood), get zero airtime. The more important question becomes: How does Alwaleed’s stake in News Corp. affect what Fox News doesn’t cover?

If they don’t report, we can’t decide. This, for a Sharia prince, could be worth millions.

This is very disturbing.

For TV news we watch Fox almost exclusively. We are hugely entertained by Glenn Beck who’s doing a great job exposing the bad policies and bad policy-makers in the Obama administration. We regularly watch Bret Baier’s ‘Special Report’, eager to hear the opinions of Charles Krauthammer, Brit Hume, and Stephen Hayes. We quite often watch Sean Hannity. We bear with Bill O’Reilly because he brings us conservatives like Michelle Malkin who inform and interest us. We need Fox News.  If it is to become a propaganda instrument of the soft jihad we will be losing a highly valuable resource, irreplaceable as far as we can see.

Rupert Murdoch, what are you doing to us?

Michelle Malkin’s book Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (Regnery 2009) is, we’re happy to see, top of the NYT bestseller list for the fourth week running. As the leading supplier of  the most significant facts about Obama and his administration that the mass-media try to hide, she deserves the nation’s  gratitude.

This is from one of her recent Townhall columns:

Savor the silence of America’s self-serving champions of privacy. For once, the American Civil Liberties Union has nothing bad to say about the latest case of secret domestic surveillance — because it is the ACLU that committed the spying.

Last week, The Washington Post reported on a new Justice Department inquiry into photographs of undercover CIA officials and other intelligence personnel taken by ACLU-sponsored researchers assisting the defense team of Guantanamo Bay detainees. According to the report, the pictures of covert American CIA officers — “in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes” — were shown to jihadi suspects tied to the 9/11 attacks in order to identify the interrogators…

The ACLU’s team used lists and data from “human rights groups,” European researchers and news organizations that were involved in “(t)racking international CIA-chartered flights” and monitoring hotel phone records. Working from a witch-hunt list of 45 CIA employees, the ACLU team tailed and photographed agency employees or obtained other photos from public records.

And then they showed the images to suspected al-Qaida operatives implicated in murdering 3,000 innocent men, women and children on American soil.

Where is the concern for the safety of these American officers and their families? Where’s the outrage from all the indignant supporters of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose name was leaked by Bush State Department official Richard Armitage to the late Robert Novak? Lefties swung their nooses for years over the disclosure, citing federal laws prohibiting the sharing of classified information and proscribing anyone from unauthorized exposure of undercover intelligence agents.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero refused to comment on Project CIA Paparazzi and instead whined some more about the evil Bush/CIA interrogators. Left-wing commentators and distraction artists are dutifully up in arms about such “inhumane” tactics as blowing cigar smoke in the faces of Gitmo detainees. But it’s Romero blowing unconscionable smoke:

“We are confident that no laws or regulations have been broken as we investigated the circumstances of the torture of our clients and as we have vigorously defended our clients’ interests,” he told the Post. “Rather than investigate the CIA officials who undertook the torture, they are now investigating the military lawyers who have courageously stepped up to defend these clients in these sham proceedings.”

Courage? What tools and fools these jihadi-enablers be. Civil liberties opportunism is literally a part of the al-Qaida handbook. A terrorist manual seized in a Manchester, England, raid in 2005 advised operatives: “At the beginning of the trial … the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security before the judge. Complain of mistreatment while in prison.” Jihadi commanders rehearsed the lines with their foot soldiers “to ensure that they have assimilated it.”

Since 9/11, the selective champions of privacy have recklessly blabbed about counter-terrorism operations, endangered the lives of military and intelligence officials at Gitmo, and undermined national security through endless litigation… Now, caught red-handed blowing the cover of CIA operatives, they shrug their shoulders and dismiss it as “normal” research on behalf of “our clients.”

But don’t you dare question their love of country. Spying to stop the next 9/11 is treason, you see. Spying to stop enhanced interrogation of Gitmo detainees is patriotic. And endangering America on behalf of international human rights is the ultimate form of leftist dissent.