The chief US intelligence agencies appear to consider themselves a fourth branch of government. They now deem themselves not answerable to Congress, nor to this president.

This is because their recent, now departed, leaders put them on the side of the enemies of the US.

In the long sad years (2009 – 2017) when America was led by anti-America Barack Obama, who had been a member of the far-left New Party, was a follower of the Communist Saul Alinsky, and manifestly loved (supremacist totalitarian) Islam – particularly as it was represented by the Muslim Brotherhood – the heads of the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA all helped him  implement his anti-America policies. (For Obama’s warm relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, see, for instance, our posts here and here.)

Obama felt it was perfectly okay to choose Muslim Brotherhood personnel to be his advisers in the White House. So James Clapper, head of the NSA, lied to the public about the Muslim Brotherhood, declaring it to be  “largely secular”, peacefully pursuing “social ends, a betterment of the political order in Egypt”, with “no overarching agenda, particularly in pursuit of violence”.

James Comey headed the FBI and apparently considered it his chief duty to shield Obama’s secretary of state, and presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton from the justice she deserves for her numerous crimes, including selling the favor of her office as Obamas’ secretary of state for her personal enrichment.

Bad as Clapper and Comey were for the nation, the  worst of the three was the head of the CIA, John Brennan.

They all hoped and expected that the corrupt candidate Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election. Since she lost it, they have sprung with fury on the winner, President Trump. John Brennan recently described the president as “unstable, inept, inexperienced, and unethical”.

Joseph Klein writes at Front Page:

The words “unstable, inept, inexperienced, and unethical” more accurately describe Brennan himself.  

Brennan claims to be worried about the Russian threat to U.S. national security, which he accuses President Trump of irresponsibly ignoring. However, Russia is a shadow of the Communist Soviet empire it once was while Brennan was coming of age. What does it say about Brennan’s judgment when, by his own admission, he once “voted for the Communist Party with Gus Hall,” even though Hall by then had been a long-time enthusiastic supporter of  the Communist Soviet Union’s hardline expansionist policies? Brennan got through his first polygraph test to enter the CIA in 1980 by saying simply “I’m not a member of the Communist Party”. But he had no problem with voting for its ardent pro-Soviet Communist cheerleader, a fact he may have obscured during his CIA application process.

Fast forward to 2014, while Brennan was serving as CIA director under former President Barack Obama. Brennan referred then to Russia simply as “a major power,” not as an enemy of the United States or as a significant geopolitical threat. In 2016, as the U.S. presidential election year was getting into high gear, Brennan reminisced that what stood out in his 35-year career in U.S. intelligence was when he [said:

I welcomed the head of the Russian FSB [Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB], Alexander Bortnikov, to the CIA last year. And I walked with him across the lobby, across our infamous CIA seal there. It was rather surreal, that the head of the FSB and the head of the CIA were walking together.

Gus Hall would have been so proud of the man who once voted for him.

He only turned against Russia when he could claim to be outraged by the alleged “collusion” of President Trump with that country. Suddenly Brennan was implying that Russia was an enemy state after all.

As for Russia’s meddling in the U.S. presidential election during 2016, Brennan claims to have told the head of the Russian FSB, with whom he had such a cozy get-to-together at CIA headquarters the year before, that if Russia pursued its efforts to interfere, “it would destroy any near-term prospect for improvement in relations” between the two countries. Brennan’s rhetorical slap, with no immediate follow-up actions to impose severe consequences on Russia for its behavior, was inept at best.

All Brennan really did while in office on the subject of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election was to politicize the issue by pressing for an FBI investigation of alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.

Now, in a typical case of psychological projection, Brennan blames President Trump for not dealing effectively with Russia’s meddling in the U.S. election process, when that is precisely what Brennan failed to do himself when he had the chance. And in trying to distance himself from the infamous Steele dossier, which played such a critical role in moving the collusion investigation forward, Brennan may have committed perjury in his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in May 2017. Brennan claimed that he did not know who commissioned the Steele dossier and had “no awareness” whether the FBI ever relied on the Steele dossier as part of any court filing. He also denied that the CIA had relied on the dossier.

According to a report by Paul Sperry, published by RealClear Investigations on February 11, 2018:

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes next plans to investigate the role former CIA Director John Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials played in promoting the salacious and unverified Steele dossier on Donald Trump – including whether Brennan perjured himself in public testimony about it. … Several Capitol Hill sources say Brennan, a fiercely loyal Obama appointee, talked up the dossier to Democratic leaders, as well as the press, during the campaign. They say he also fed allegations about Trump-Russia contacts directly to the FBI, while pressuring the bureau to conduct an investigation of several Trump campaign figures starting in the summer of 2016.

If this turns out to be true, Brennan unethically abused his office as CIA director for partisan purposes to smear candidate Donald Trump and then lied about it to Congress.

As bad as all this is, Brennan was at his worst when it came to the global Islamist threat.

On May 26, 2010, for example, while serving as Obama’s deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism, Brennan delivered a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in which he claimed that Islamists or jihadists were not our enemies. He said that “jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community”. Throughout his tenure as both Obama’s deputy national security adviser and CIA director, Brennan fundamentally misunderstood the ideological underpinnings of ISIS that had its roots in traditional Islam, as embodied in the Koran and in the words and actions of Prophet Muhammad. Islam began in the first place the same way that ISIS developed in carrying out and spreading its literalist dogma during Obama’s presidency – as a religion built on jihadist conquests to kill or subjugate disbelievers and make Islam supreme in the world.

Brennan misunderstood the Islamic nature of ISIS? If that was the case, it would mean that the man was both ignorant and stupid. As he is neither (he is said to have converted to Islam while he was posted in Saudi Arabia, and is obviously too cunning to be plain stupid) the only conclusion to be drawn from the fact of his defense of both Islam and ISIS is that he is on their side.

During a February 13, 2010 address at a meeting at the Islamic Center at New York University, facilitated by the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), Brennan, whom some have claimed became a convert to Islam himself, said that Islam “helped to shape my own world view”.  He said Islam was “a faith of peace and tolerance and great diversity”.  He added, “We’re trying to be very careful and precise in our use of language, because I think the language we use and the images we project really do have resonance. It’s the reason why I don’t use the term jihadist to refer to terrorists. It gives them the religious legitimacy they so desperately seek, but I ain’t gonna give it to them.”

Brennan referred in his speech to Jerusalem by its Arabic name, Al-Quds. He blamed overzealous enforcement by the U.S. government for “creating an unhealthy atmosphere around many Muslim charities that made Muslims hesitant to fulfill their sacred obligation of zakat.

Zakat – one of the five obligations of a Muslim, called the “five pillars” of  Islam – is charity that goes to Muslims only, to promote Islam, which is to say the jihad, now being actively fought by the savage method of terrorism.

Apparently, Brennan was blind to the fact that many of these charities were used as fronts to fund terrorism, including the notorious Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. During the same 2010 Islamic Center speech, Brennan expressed satisfaction with the 20 percent recidivism rate among Guantanamo detainees, some of whom he acknowledged had participated in new terrorist attacks. “Twenty percent isn’t that bad,” he exclaimed.

In 2011, Brennan called for the FBI to eliminate its “offensive” curriculum and training materials, which made reference to “jihad” and “radical Islam”. 

Which plainly enough shows that he was, de facto, the Muslim Brotherhood’s man – heading the CIA!  

Both before and after Brennan served in the Obama administration, he has also consistently understated the threat posed by the radical fundamentalist Iranian regime and its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. In a paper he published in July 2008, Brennan called on U.S. officials to “cease public Iran-bashing”. …

As Obama’s deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism, Brennan advocated reaching out to the so-called “moderate” elements of Hezbollah.  As CIA director, Brennan praised the Iranian regime for what he said were the “concessions” its leaders supposedly made to reach agreement on Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal. He claimed the deal was “as solid as you can get”. 

In fact, Obama made all of the concessions, agreeing to a deal full of loopholes exploited by Iran, which in the end allows Iran a pathway to developing nuclear weapons and the missiles capable of delivering them.

On January 2, 2018, Brennan tweeted his displeasure with the Trump administration’s condemnation of both the Iranian regime and the nuclear deal:

With wholesale condemnation of Iran and nuclear deal over past year, Trump Admin squandered opportunity to bolster reformists in Tehran and prospects for peaceful political reform in Iran.

There were no “reformists in Tehran”, and no “prospects for peaceful political reform in Iran”.

In fact, the appeasement policies followed by Obama and Brennan bolstered the Iranian regime and filled its coffers with cash to fund its state sponsorship of terrorism and support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s brutal war on his own people. Obama and Brennan also turned a blind eye to the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses at home.

John Brennan, who entered the CIA despite his past support for the head of the U.S. Communist Party, rose to the top of the intelligence agency to become perhaps its worst director ever. He is the last person to give anyone advice on national security, let alone to President Trump, who has had to clean up the mess left behind by Obama and Brennan.

Seems that the less tax-payers’ money spent on education, the better. (No – of course not to zero.)

Good teachers are needed. Non-unionized teachers.

And parents that take their children’s education seriously.

Rob Shimshock writes at the Daily Caller:

The Trump administration requested $59.9 billion for 2018 — an amount $7.1 billion smaller than its 2017 budget. Lance Izumi, senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute, explained to The Daily Caller News Foundation why that is a good thing.

The education scholar highlighted the after-school, learning-oriented 21st Century Community Learning Centers (one of the initiatives the Department eliminated) as a particularly wasteful program.

“To eliminate those programs is a real plus for taxpayers and a real plus for students,” Izumi said, commenting on the Education Department’s elimination of funding to 17 programs it described as “duplicative” and “ineffective”. 

It “eats up about $2 billion per year, and it’s supposed to provide these after school and other supplemental programs,” Izumi told TheDCNF. “The problem is that virtually all the studies and research that’s been done on the program shows that there’s no connection between participation in this program and improved student performance in reading and mathematics.”

He said the U.S. Government Accountability Office examined 58 different 21st Century Community Learning Centers and discovered no correlation between enrollment in the programs and increased reading scores.

In fact, “Students produced lower reading scores by participating compared to those who did not,” the scholar said. “You have very poor attendance among the student participants in the program…less than 50 percent of the students who attend more than 30 days.”

“Why should we be spending all this money, these billions of dollars on a program that all of the data shows is not achieving its purpose?”

Izumi also commented on the $1.1 billion the Education Department hopes to dedicate to school-choice initiatives. He explained that even if the federal government bolsters charter-school funding, it makes little difference if state laws still impede the schools from opening.

“If a charter can’t get approved under state law, it really doesn’t matter how much money the feds give to charter schools because those charters will never be started in the first place,” the scholar added.

Izumi opined on the special interest groups criticizing the Department’s budget cuts to teacher training programs.

“The teachers organizations are crying bloody murder,” the scholar acknowledged. “It may be a perk for the teachers to get a day off or to get professional-development training and it may fund an industry of professional-development trainers, but it’s not doing any good for the students, which is the reason the system exists in the first place.”

But the most important question is what are teachers teaching? What are students learning? What does too-much-money actually buy for the rising generations?

An article at the Mises Institute by Carol A. Vance and Loyd S. Pettegrew, published in September 2016, revealed dismal findings:

Since 1980, during the Carter Administration, America’s K-12 education system has come under increasing control by the dictates of the federal Department of Education (DOE) with failing results, taxing states and filtering the money through Washington to return a portion of it back to the states. In 2002, the Bush Administration approved the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act creating punishing amounts of federal paperwork and bureaucracy for local schools, requiring a $1B grant in special funding to help state and local education systems comply. In 2015 Congress enacted new legislation, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), to allegedly overcome the NCLB federal intervention. The Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke says, “ESSA does not accomplish these critical policy priorities” to reduce the interference and excessive hours of standardized testing time. The 2016 DOE budget is $70.7B excluding a Presidential request for an additional $75B mandatory funding over ten years for Pre-K education.

What is America getting for federally-funded interference in education? The US spends over 23.2% of per capita income on its students each year, 9% more than Singapore while over 26 other countries that spend less outscore US students. Charles Murray says that even after substantial resources were dedicated to assist minorities over a 10 year period, SAT scores have indeed dropped for Amerindians ( -28%), Latinos (-26%), Blacks (-14%) and Whites (-6%) while substantially increasing for Asians (+54).

Of 64 countries in the International Student Assessment, the U.S. ranks 35^th in math and 27^th in science. Singapore spends almost half of what the U.S. spends in primary education and about 70% on secondary education while internationally scoring first in math and second in science. Ironically, while more than 1.7M students are now homeschooled, the National Center for Educational Statistics does not produce statistics on the likely difference in achievement between homeschooled students and public education students.

Students in institutional schools are measured repeatedly, however. A typical student takes 112 mandated standardized tests between pre-K classes and 12^th grade; by contrast, most countries that outperform the U.S. on international exams test students three times during their entire school careers.

In spite so much testing and measuring, the standards are being manipulated to enhance the illusion of improving student performance. The modern thinking appears to be that “everyone must be a winner”.  A variation of this is “average is over”, a perverse twist on economist Tyler Cowen’s thesis. In K-12, only children with extremely low I.Q.’s, juvenile delinquents or truants receive average grades, and rarely do students receive D’s or F‘s. In most states, students with English as a second language are passed along with C grades regardless of performance. Piereson & Riley note that the Department of Education released data showing that from 1990-2000 high school graduate GPAs rose a third of a point and one public school district in northern California altered student grading so that students scoring above 80% received A’s and students below 20% were given F’s.

In the past 30 years, the Department of Education has exerted an increasing influence on K-12 education. K-12 teachers, overwhelmingly if not exclusively, are the products of schools of education whose influence is largely left-leaning and their teachings politicized. David Labaree, Professor in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education has states that “education schools are solidly in the progressive camp ideologically.” Stotsky concludes that K-12 English classes have increasingly become ersatz social studies classes with biased content taught by moralizing pedagogues who are untrained in either history or social science. Teachers Unions maintain a strangle hold on local school districts and principals’ ability to terminate ineffective teachers.

In 2000 Clinton created the National Education Standards and Improvement Council for teaching American history. None of the 31 standards mentions the U.S. Constitution; the National Standards Advance Placement history exam also politicized American history in a highly progressive manner.

Revisionist history books represent the horrors of the American revolutionists and their colonial oppression. No period of American history is being celebrated; instead the historians have apologetically presented our forefathers as war mongers and racists. We foresee the day when the Constitution will be burned in effigy because so many authors were slave owners.

Science exists in a sustainability vacuum where climate change is presented as gospel in place of the scientific truths of the elective courses in Physics.

States have banned classic literature for its “incendiary” themes including Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, Catcher in the Rye; while age appropriateness is certainly a valid concern, an outright ban is unconstitutional. As a by-product of this censorship, Yale freshmen recently petitioned faculty to remove the “nondiverse” English literature of Shakespeare, Dickens and Bronte from the required curriculum.

Notably some of the brightest spots in K-12 education exist in isolated places including New York and California where parents fought the government and union to take charge through organizations like Excellent Educational Solutions and the Harlem Success Academy.

President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union Address, mandated government controlled pre-school education for millions of young children and represents a new stealth opportunity for left liberal indoctrination. The U.K. adopted Pre-K in 2007 for children age 3-4, with underwhelming results which don’t include educational attainment of the children. While a child’s academic gains were at best marginal in the U.K. (small improvements by age 5 and no improvements by age 11), was free child care for parents. Gerard Robinson argues that with the Pre-K schooling now an educational reality, the government not parents has clearly become the controlling force in early childhood education. We can only imagine that in the U.S., this is another opportunity to create a new entitlement and progressively indoctrinate even younger children without any parental controls.

Then Donald Trump was elected to the presidency. Now, Rob Shimshock tell us, less money is being spent by the federal government on education.

If, in addition, Common Core were to be eliminated, and much more attention paid to what is taught, American children might become better educated.

At least up to 12th. grade. After that, if they enter a university and are forced to study blackness, femaleness, whiteness, Hispanicness, and anthropogenic-global-warmingness, whatever good their school did them will rapidly be undone.

(Hat-tip to Don L for the Mises Institute link)

Where you live, are you and your property protected by law? Is there a free press? Impartial justice? Can you say whatever you want to say, wherever and whenever you choose? Can you vote for your preferred representative in the body that makes the laws you live under? Can you make and implement lawful decisions affecting your own life and the lives of your dependents without hindrance from a person or institution?

If so, it is because white men have made it possible.

Do you move about in cars, buses, trains? Fly in airplanes? Watch television? Use a phone? Work and play on a computer?

If so, it is because white men have made it possible.

Nevertheless, white men and all that they have created are an abomination. They are the curse of the earth.

If you are a white man, you need to hang your head in shame and do penance. Whiteness itself is an unacceptable condition. So white women too, and white children, abase yourselves. Subjugate yourselves to non-white men and women.

You are oppressors. You are guilty of doing nothing but wrong.

This belief, growing in popularity throughout the civilized world, is not just a shallow notion held by an ignorant underclass, but is being seriously taught – or preached – in the most prestigious universities.   

A case in point:

The College Fix reports that Yale University deplores “whiteness”. 

Yale University is offering a course this semester which aims to help students understand and counteract “whiteness”, exploring such topics as “white imagination,” “white property” and “white speech.”

According to the syllabus for “Constructions of Whiteness” obtained by The College Fix, the English course is an “interdisciplinary approach to examining our understanding of whiteness.”

The class, which is apparently being offered for the first time this semester, discusses “whiteness as a culturally constructed and economically incorporated entity, which touches upon and assigns value to nearly every aspect of American life and culture”.

The goal of the class is to “create a lab for the construction of counternarratives around whiteness in any creative form: play, poem, memoir, etc.,” states the syllabus.

Taught by Professor Claudia Rankine, the class is divided into eight topics: Constructions of Whiteness, White Property, White Masculinity, White Femininity, White Speech, White Prosperity, White Spaces and White Imagination, according to the syllabus.

Students in the course are asked to read books such as [white] Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, [white] Richard Dyer’s White: Essays on Race and Culture, and [white] Richard Delgado’s and [white] Jean Stefanic’s Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror.

Other required readings include Hazel Carby’s White Woman, Listen!, [white] Juliana Spahr’s My White Feminism and Professor Rankine’s own work, The White Card.

Rankine did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The College Fix.

The Fix also reached out to the chair of the English department, Langdon Hammer, and professor of English & African American studies Jacqueline Goldsby. Neither responded.

Outside of Yale, Rankine is active in the theater community. Her play The White Card is being produced at Boston’s Emerson Paramount Center. The play, which centers around “a conversation at a dinner party”, focuses on the question: “Can American society progress if whiteness stays invisible?”

Classes like “Constructions of Whiteness” are not unique to Yale. A controversial course titled “The Problem of Whiteness” is currently offered this semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Meanwhile, Stanford University offered a class in the fall called “White Identity Politics”, during which students discuss the “possibilities of … abolishing whiteness”.

At the University of Michigan last December, meanwhile, a workshop taught white employees how to address the “discomfort” of being white, instructing participants how to “recognize the difficulties they face when talking about social justice issues related to their White identity, explore this discomfort, and devise ways to work through it”.

Another example, mentioned above (many are easily found on the Internet), also reported by The College Fix:

Stanford University is slated to offer a class this fall called “White Identity Politics,” during which students will “survey the field of whiteness studies” and discuss the “possibilities of … abolishing whiteness”, according to the course description.

Citing pundits who say “the 2016 Presidential election marks the rise of white identity politics in the United States“, the upper-level anthropology seminar will draw “from the field of whiteness studies and from contemporary writings that push whiteness studies in new directions.”

Questions to be posed throughout the semester include: “Does white identity politics exist?” and “How is a concept like white identity to be understood in relation to white nationalism, white supremacy, white privilege, and whiteness?”

“Students will consider the perils and possibilities of different political practices,” according to the course description, “including abolishing whiteness or coming to terms with white identity.”

The course will be taught by instructor John Patrick Moran. Reached by e-mail, Moran declined to comment, instead directing The College Fix to Stanford communication’s office.

Ernest Miranda, a spokesman for Stanford, told The Fix via e-mail that “‘abolishing whiteness’ is a concept put forward in the 1990s by a number of white historians. Their belief was that if other white people would, like them, stop identifying politically as white, it would help end inequalities.”

White people “identify politically as white”. A fact proved by “the 2016 Presidential election” which “marks the rise of white identity politics in the United States”.  The underlying fact – so obvious and incontrovertible –  being that President Donald Trump and all who voted for him are … you guessed it …. racists, white supremacists.

Miranda added that “abolishing whiteness” is “among the past and current concepts that will be considered” in the “White Identity Politics” course. The Fix requested a copy of the syllabus, but Miranda declined, saying “We do not share our course materials.”

Reached by e-mail, Stanford Professor Tomás Jiménez [an associate professor of sociology and comparative studies in race and ethnicity], told The Fix that he sponsored a student-led class at Stanford on whiteness last semester, [and] said via e-mail:

Whiteness is the set of behaviors and outlooks associated with the racial category, white. Just about any social category and subcategory has a ‘-ness’ to it. So, liberals and conservatives; men and women; Wisconsinites and New Yorkers are all social categories, and adding ‘ness’ to any of them is shorthand for the behaviors and outlooks associated with that category. 

A racist is someone who believes that every individual is chiefly characterized by the alleged qualities of his race. “The behaviors and outlooks associated” – by the racist – “with that category”.

This movement against “whiteness”, led by whites, is a crude and cruel cult of racism plain and simple.

It is very stupid and deeply immoral.

Watch Donald Trump, President of the United States, as the Colossus standing astride the world, to whom the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world bring their tribute – their promises of doing business, more business, much more business in America, with investments of vast sums.

Several of the CEOs acknowledge that President Trump’s tax reform and deregulation have prompted them to grow their business in the United States.

Could any other American politician do this?

It’s altogether too much for THEM to bear! The man is a billionaire who loves life, lives well, and enjoys himself tremendously both at work and at play; has a wife who is one of the most beautiful women in the world, and is also graceful, gentle, intelligent and competent; has handsome successful children and bright charming grandchildren; and, on top of all that, has become the most powerful man in the world. To add a final insult to THEM, he is perfectly healthy at the age 0f 71; immensely energetic and strong; and fully capable of continuing to do what he wants to do.

And then, try as THEY might to find something he has done terribly wrong to blot his intolerably immaculate escutcheon, THEY cannot find anything!

Actually, it is even worse for THEM. Far worse. Because not only is he victorious, THEY are defeated. Probably (with luck) irrecoverably. He has risen to power at a moment when THEY had  almost conquered the world; almost made it poor; almost brought the nations – possibly even including the USA – into universal homogeneity at the lowest level of subsistence in subjection to THEM running a world communist government (in order to “save the planet” from people using cars and making things in factories); almost destroyed Western civilization.

We are enthusiasts for Trumpism because we are warriors against THEM.

As such, do we exaggerate his achievements? If so, by how much? Overlook his flaws? If so, what are they?

As a corrective to our possibly overindulgent judgment of the president, we reproduce an article by Victor Davis Hanson; surely a reasonable and fair assessment of the Trump presidency thus far and prospectively. It is also necessary to know that it appeared at the mostly, persistently, and emphatically anti-Trump National Review:

As President Trump finished his first full year in office, he could look back at an impressive record of achievement of a kind rarely attained by an incoming president — much less by one who arrived in office as a private-sector billionaire without either prior political office or military service.

As unintended proof of his accomplishments, Trump’s many liberal opponents have gone from initially declaring him an incompetent to warning that he has become effective — insanely so — in overturning the Obama progressive agenda. Never Trump Republicans acknowledge that Trump has realized much of what they once only dreamed of — from tax reform and deregulation to a government about-face on climate change, the ending of the Obamacare individual mandate, and expansion of energy production.

Trump so far has not enacted the Never Trump nightmare agenda. The U.S. is not leaving NATO. It is not colluding with Vladimir Putin, but maintaining sanctions against Russia and arming Ukrainians. It is not starting a tariff war with China. The administration is not appointing either liberals or incompetents to the federal courts. A politicized FBI, DOJ, and IRS was Obama’s legacy, not Trump’s doing, as some of the Never Trump circle predicted. Indeed, the Never Trump movement is now mostly calcified, as even some of its formerly staunch adherents concede. It was done in by the Trump record and the monotony of having to redefine a once-welcomed conservative agenda as suddenly unpalatable due to Trump’s crude fingerprints on it.

On the short side, Trump has still not started to build his much-promised border wall, to insist on free but far fairer trade with Asia and Europe, or to enact an infrastructure-rebuilding program. Nonetheless, Trump’s multitude of critics is unable to argue that his record is shoddy and must instead insist that his list of achievements is due mostly to the Republican Congress. Or they claim he is beholden to the legacy of the Obama administration. Or they insist that credit belongs with his own impressive economic and national-security cabinet-level appointments. Or that whatever good came of Trump’s first year is nullified by Trump’s persistent personal odiousness.

At the conclusion of Trump’s first year, the stock market and small-business confidence are at record highs, and consumer confidence has not been higher in 17 years. Trump’s loud campaign promises to lure back capital and industry to the heartland no longer look quixotic, given new tax and deregulatory incentives and far cheaper energy costs than in most of Europe and Japan. Trump has now ended 66 regulations for every one he has added. Few believed a Republican president could cut the corporate-tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent while capping state- and local-tax deductions for mostly high earners to $10,000. Those are the highlights of a comprehensive tax-reform and -reduction agenda that will likely accelerate the economy to an even more rapid growth rate than Trump’s first two full quarters of annualized increases in GDP of more than 3 percent. Dozens of large companies are already passing along some of their anticipated tax cuts to employees through increased wages or bonuses — dismissed as “crumbs” by House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. Rising workers’ wages and anticipated tax credits and savings for the lower and middle classes for now are rendering almost mute the age-old fights about state-mandated minimum-wage laws.

The mostly unheralded nixing of the Obamacare individual mandate — once the great ideological battlefield of the Affordable Care Act — will insidiously recalibrate the ACA into a mostly private-market enterprise.

Domestic oil production is slated to exceed 2017 record levels and soon may hit an astonishing 11 million barrels a day. “Peak oil” for now is an ossified idea, as are massive wind and solar Solyndra-like government subsidies and the mostly unworkable Paris Climate Accord. Gas, oil, and coal production are expected to rise even higher with new Trump initiatives to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge field in Alaska, encourage more fracking on federal lands and offshore, and complete needed pipeline links while encouraging coal exportation.

For all the political horse-trading over extending or ending the Obama executive orders on DACA, illegal immigration has declined according to some metrics by over 60 percent. It is now at the lowest levels in the 21st century — even before the ending of chain migration and enacting of new border-security initiatives. Abroad, the ISIS caliphate is for all purposes now extinct. Its demise is in part due to Trump’s outsourcing of the conflict to Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who liberated ground commanders from Obama-administration-era legalistic rules of engagement. Trump’s appointees, such as Mattis, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have worked in concert to restore U.S. deterrence.

Variously called “principled realism” or a new “Jacksonianism”,  the Trump doctrine has now replaced the “strategic patience” and “lead from behind” recessionals of the prior administration and not emulated the neoconservative nation-building of the George W. Bush administration. New pressures on nuclear North Korea have prompted the toughest U.N. trade sanctions in history on the rogue state. After Trump’s fiery and erratic rhetoric and muscular displays of U.S. naval and air power in the Pacific, Pyongyang has agreed to landmark talks with Seoul. China is slowly beginning to pressure North Korea to stop launching missiles. Beijing’s Asian neighbors are beefing up missile defense and growing closer to the U.S. For now, the bad cop Trump and the good cops Mattis and McMaster have encouraged friends and frightened enemies, although the shelf life of such diplomatic gymnastics is limited.

Trump almost immediately voiced support for mass demonstrations in Iran, in a manner Obama failed to do in 2009. An ironic fallout of the disastrous 2015 Iran deal may be that the theocracy so hyped its cash windfalls from American relaxation of embargoes and sanctions that it inadvertently raised Iranians’ expectations of a rise in the standard of living. Then it dashed just those hopes by squandering hundreds of millions of newfound dollars in subsidizing Hezbollah, conducting a costly expeditionary war to save the genocidal Bashar al-Assad regime, and likely continuing an exorbitantly costly nuclear-weapons program. What is different about Iran’s internal unrest this time around is twofold. The Trump administration is not invested in any “landmark” deal with Tehran that requires ignoring protesters in the street. Trump also does not envision revolutionary and terror-sponsoring Iran as a “very successful regional power” with “legitimate defense concerns”. Rather, he sees Tehran, along with ISIS and al-Qaeda, as the chief source of Middle East unrest and anti-Americanism.

Moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, in line with past congressional mandates, along with threatening to curtail Palestinian aid, only reifies what is now widely accepted. The new Middle East is not the old. There are no longer any ongoing and viable “peace plans”, “road maps”, or “summits”.  America is becoming energy-independent and immune to oil boycotts. There are new and greater threats than Israel to Arab regimes, from nuclear Iran to the scourge of Islamic terrorism in Iraq and Syria. Patience is wearing thin as after 30 years the Palestinians still cannot create transparent and consensual government. Seventy years after the birth of Israel, the Palestinians still insist on being called “refugees” — when most of the world’s millions of displaced persons decades ago moved on.

Yet as Trump heads into the 2018 midterms, his favorability ratings are unimpressive. Because of loud Democratic threats of using impeachment proceedings to undermine the Trump project, the 2018 fight for the House is taking on historic importance. It is not just a referendum on the Trump agenda, but likely a means to seek to discredit or remove Trump himself — even if the prosecution in the Senate would likely never find the necessary 67 votes. In sum, an embattled Trump now finds himself in a war on all fronts. The first and most important conflict is one of favorability. Trump’s actual approval ratings, as in 2016, are probably somewhat higher than the low 40s reported in many polls. But Trump’s image is still astonishingly dismal in relation to his unappreciated achievements. For congressional Republicans to survive the midterms and retain majorities, Trump perhaps has to hope that the economy will grow not just at 3 percent but even more robustly — with marked rises in workers’ take-home wages due to tax cuts and labor shortages. Is it really true that politics can be reduced to “It’s the economy, stupid”? Obama failed to achieve 3 percent growth per annum over his eight years. As a result he may have lost both houses of Congress, but he also was reelected. More likely, no one quite knows the exact political consequences of economic growth. Between November 1983 and November 1984, the economy grew at 7 percent and ipso facto ushered the once “amiable dunce” Ronald Reagan into a landslide reelection victory over a previously thought-to-be-far-more-impressive Walter Mondale. Yet this time it may be that 3 percent GDP growth will not mitigate Trump’s personal negatives but 4–5 percent would.

It is said that Trump is also at war with himself, in the sense that his tweeting alienates the key constituencies of women voters and independents. Conventional wisdom assures that Trump’s off-the-cuff invectives only fuel his critics and overshadow his achievements. In the heart of immigration negotiations, Trump was quoted secondhand as having called Haiti and other formerly Third World countries “sh**hole” countries and thus undesirable sources of mass immigration to the U.S. Whatever the reliability of reports of the slur, Trump is certainly not the sort of politician to have said instead, “It would seem wiser to encourage diverse immigration, including immigration from the most developed countries as well as the least developed” — even as many people privately agree with Trump’s earthy assessment that immigration should be far more selective and include a far greater variety of countries of origin.

Both Trump’s spoken and electronic stream-of-consciousness venting can be unorthodox, crude and cruel, and often extraneous. But can anyone measure whether and to what degree his Twitter account energizes and widens his base more than it loses him supporters otherwise sympathetic to his agenda? The orthodox wisdom is that Trump should let his achievements speak for themselves, curb his raucous campaign rallies, and restrict his daily tweets to expansions on his agenda and achievement and leave the feuding to subordinates. When Trump has avoided ad hominem spats, and been filmed conducting policy sessions with his cabinet and congressional enemies and friends, he has looked and acted “presidential”.  How good then must Trump’s record become to overshadow both the prejudices against him and his own inner demons to achieve favorability ratings that will provide coattails for his congressional supporters and fuel an even more ambitious second-year agenda? Again, time is running out, and in the next ten months the economy must boom as never before or Trump must learn to sound more like a Ronald Reagan than a Howard Stern.

Trump is simultaneously at war with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Once again, the critical element is time in the sense of the looming midterm elections. So far, after months of media speculation and press leaks, there is no evidence of Russian–Trump collusion. Robert Mueller’s investigative team has been riddled by charges of conflicts of interest, workplace unprofessionalism, and political bias. The basis of the entire writ against Trump, the Fusion GPS–Steele dossier, is now mostly discredited. The file’s lurid sexual accusations alone likely won it notoriety in 2016 among journalists and Obama-administration enablers. The more that is learned about the Steele opposition-research file — paid for by the Clinton campaign, polluted by Russian rumor-mongering, peddled to the FBI, manipulated by the Obama administration to justify FISA surveillance, likely leaked to pet reporters by Obama-administration and Clinton-campaign officials — the more apparent it may become that Mueller is investigating Russian collusion in entirely the wrong place. Another irony is that pushback against the Mueller fishing expedition may prompt reinvestigations into the earlier election-cycle-aborted inquiries about Clinton email improprieties. The Obama administration also likely acted improperly in ignoring the Clinton–Uranium One connections and Hillary Clinton’s violations of agreements with the Obama administration to report the sources of all private donations to the Clinton Foundation during her tenure. So far resistance at both the Department of Justice and the FBI to releasing documents pertaining to all these avenues of interest has stymied House and Senate inquiries. If the Republicans lose the Congress, these investigations will shut down entirely. Democratic majorities will give Mueller a free hand to do as he pleases without worries about past complaints over the ethical shortcomings of his investigation. Select Intelligence and Judiciary Committee hearings will likely give way in the House to impeachment proceedings. But if within the next nine months there are new explosive revelations about the improper or even illegal uses of the Steele dossier and the Clinton scandals, while the Mueller team settles for face-saving indictments of former Trump subordinates for transgressions that have little to do with the original Mueller mandate to investigate Russian–Trump collusion, then Trump will win the legal war. In that case, Trump finally will not only weather the collusion crisis but find himself a political beneficiary of one of the most scandalous efforts to subvert a political campaign and improperly surveil American citizens in recent American history.

Trump wages a fourth war against the proverbial mainstream media, whose coverage, according to disinterested analyses, runs over 90 percent anti-Trump. Negative Trump news fuels Trump-assassination chic in popular culture, the rants of late-night-television comedians, the political effort to grandstand with impeachment writs, calls to invoke the 25th Amendment, and lawsuits alleging violations of the emoluments clause. The threats of a Madonna, the raving of Representative Maxine Waters, the boasts of the “Resistance,” the efforts of blue states to nullify federal immigration law or to dodge compliance with unwelcome new federal tax statutes, and the conspiracy fables of Representative Adam Schiff are all fueled by media attention and preconceived narratives hostile to Trump. The anti-Trump news is still determined to accomplish what so far the Clinton campaign, Obama holdovers, and deep-state bureaucrats have not: so discredit Trump the messenger that his message becomes irrelevant. Trump apparently fights his war against the media in the fashion in which toxic chemotherapy battles cancer. His personal and electronic rants against “fake news” and “crooked” journalists are intended to exhibit media biases and thus discredit negative coverage just before the public tires of Trump’s own off-putting venom. On the one hand, Trump’s anemic approval ratings might suggest the media are winning in their 24/7 efforts to portray Trump as a Russian colluder, rank profiteer, distracted golfer, tax cheat, sexual predator, trigger-happy warmonger, or senile septuagenarian. On the other hand, the media are polling worse than Trump. And his battle has nearly destroyed the credibility of CNN, which has fired marquee journalists for false anti-Trump narratives, been embarrassed by hosts mouthing scatological venom, suffered employees’ hot-mic wishes for Trump’s death, and seen its anchors and special correspondents reduced to on-air rants. For now, no one knows whether Trump’s war against the media is pyrrhic, in that he may defeat his journalist enemies and even render their entire networks discredited, but at such costs that he is no longer politically viable.

Trump is waging a fifth and final war against Democrats. So far Trump has sucked all the oxygen out of the Democratic atmosphere. Politicians and operatives are so obsessed with proving Trump a liar, a cheat, a pervert, a con artist, or an incompetent that they have offered so far no viable opposition leader or alternative agenda. But will just being not-Trump make Democrats preferable? The centrist Democratic party of the 1990s no longer exists. It has become instead a coalition of patched-together progressive causes. The redistributionism and neo-socialism of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are now Democratic economic mainstays. Barack Obama’s lead-from-behind legacy remains Democratic foreign policy. Identity politics still constitutes the culture of the party establishment.

In more practical terms, for all the animus against Trump the person, his agenda — tax cuts, deterrence, reindustrialization, middle-class job growth, closing the borders, the melting pot — is increasingly polling well. In many cases, Trumpism is more popular than Democratic signature issues such as tax hikes, larger government, more entitlements, open borders, more identity politics, and European Union–like internationalism.

The idea of Oprah Winfrey as the 2020 Democratic nominee and the unwillingness of Democrats to secure the border reveal what can happen when a party is reduced to defining itself as not being the incumbent president. The Republicans learned that lesson in their four-time failure to defeat the hated Roosevelt. Democrats in the 1980s had little to offer the country other than not being the supposed buffoon Ronald Reagan. Shutting down the government is also rarely a winning strategy for an out party — as the Republicans learned in their politically disastrous 1995–96 showdown with Bill Clinton. In 2018, it may be enough for congressional candidates to run on anti-Trump invective without expressing strong views on the issues or identifying with any particular national leader. But it won’t be so in 2020, especially if the Trump agenda grows more popular and Trump allows it rather than himself to become his signature message.

For now, all that is certain about Trump’s first year is the 2016 truism that past prognostications and current polls are irrelevant. The jester candidate, Donald Trump, destroyed, not just beat, his 16 primary rivals. The doomed candidate Trump defeated the most well-financed, experienced, and media-favored Democratic candidate in memory. The inept President Trump’s first year was not liberal or directionless, but marked the most successful and conservative governance since Ronald Reagan’s. Trump’s critics insist that his comeuppance is on the horizon. They assure us that character is destiny. Trump’s supposed hubris will finally earn an appropriately occasioned nemesis. But in the meantime, nearly half the country may be happy that the establishment was not just wrong but nearly discredited in its non-ending, prejudicial dismissal of the Trump agenda and, so far, the successful Trump presidency.

So: HOWL globalists, socialists, warmists, feminists, Muslims, and Democrats.

He is impervious to your insults.

He is charitable and generous. Yes, he is.

He is not a “racist” or “anti-woman”. Certainly not.

He does not take drugs, drink alcohol – or even coffee.

He has not colluded with the Russians, or any other foreign power. (Obama did with the Russians and the Iranians. Hillary Clinton did with anyone who would pay her.)

He flourishes, he laughs, he acts, he wins.

They who have become Death to our civilization, know that what they are doing is unequivocally wrong. Yet they are possessed with a passion to do it. Because it is wrong. Because they want our civilization to be destroyed.

They take whatever measures they can to achieve their end. The end.

But they know they have to lie about their motives and aim. For bringing off their potentially terrible and tragic objective, they depend on the gullibility, ignorance, and lack of attention of most people going about their daily business.

The springs of the death-wish are deep in European culture. It is profoundly unhealthy; a sickness born of Romantic nihilism. Young, healthy America should be free of it. But it was borne across the sea in the intellectual baggage of the New Left “Frankfurt School” of Marxists. So even in America now, the Left joins in the process of ruination, though most of the minions probably haven’t the least idea of where they are headed or why. (See here and here and here.)

Bruno Waterfield wrote at The Telegraph in November, 2014:

If any individual represents the “old Europe” and the wheeling and dealing that led to the flawed euro and the EU constitution it is Jean-Claude Juncker, who is one of the last believers in a federal Europe.

Mr Juncker, 59, was until last December the prime minister of Luxembourg and the EU’s longest serving leader until he was forced to resign last year in a bizarre scandal involving illegal phone tapping by the Grand Duchy’s secret service.

Luxembourg’s fiscal policy and tax agreements with hundreds of multinational firms transformed his country from an economy based on industry to one based on finance.

Ironically he got his job as Luxembourg’s leader after Britain vetoed Jean-Luc Dehaene, the Belgian PM, for the job of European Commission President in 1994.

After the veto Jacques Santer, the prime minister of Luxembourg, took the post, and his keenly ambitious employment minister Mr Juncker took the helm of the tiny country, running it as a fiefdom until December 2013. Mr Santer’s commission, which oversaw the construction of the euro, collapsed in ignominy amid scandals over endemic corruption in March 1999.

The longest serving veteran of Brussels deal-making, until last year Jean-Claude Juncker headed the powerful Eurogroup meetings of eurozone finance ministers firefighting the crisis in the EU’s single currency – an institution he had helped create, warts and all, in the Nineties.

“We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back,” he said of the euro’s introduction.

At the height of the eurozone crisis, Mr Juncker was described as the “master of lies” for organizing a meeting of finance ministers to talk about whether Greece could remain in the single currency and then trying to deny it was taking place.

Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung accused Mr Juncker of “taking the lead on the deception” and warned he had managed “to fritter away the last remaining trust the people of Europe still have”.

Mr Juncker has never hidden his view that the compromises and deals being worked out in EU meetings or leaders or ministers need be protected from public scrutiny, by lies if necessary.

“When it becomes serious, you have to lie,” he said.

In May 2011, he told a meeting of the federalist European Movement that he often “had to lie” and that eurozone monetary policy should be discussed in “secret, dark debates”.

He also sparked controversy by suggesting that the eurozone economic policy was incompatible with democracy.

“We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it,” Mr Juncker cynically quipped last year.

Mr Juncker was also closely linked to the EU constitution, before the French referendum on it in 2005 he predicted, correctly, that Europe would ignore any popular rejections.

“If it’s a Yes, we will say ‘on we go’, and if it’s a No we will say ‘we continue’,” he said.

Following the No votes in France and the Netherlands, Mr Juncker claimed that in reality voters had actually supported deeper European integration, triggering accusations that the European elite was in denial over public hostility to the EU.

“If we were to add up all the votes of the people who wanted “more Europe” as a yes , then I think we would have had a yes vote,” he said.

Mr Juncker went on to play a leading role in the resurrection of the EU constitution in the form of the Lisbon Treaty and advised Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister, to mislead the British public over “transfers of sovereignty”.

“Of course there will be transfers of sovereignty. But would I be intelligent to draw the attention of public opinion to this fact?,” he said of Mr Brown and British calls for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

Raised in a working-class family in Luxembourg’s rust-belt industrial south, Mr Juncker joined the centre-right Christian Social party the year he finished school, in 1974.

Ostensibly conservative, the Christian Social parties of Europe are, like all other self-named conservative parties, actually socialist.

He got his first ministerial job in 1982 and describes himself as having a “red streak” that makes him acceptable to many European socialists.

He is typical of the rotting zombies who arbitrarily rule the EU.

Slowly the common people of western European countries are waking up to the horror that is engulfing them. They are organizing, they are marching in protest. And the zombies try to destroy  them by falsely labeling them “neo-Nazis”.

They have someone to look to for inspiration: President Trump. His revolutionary movement is spreading. It may be the salvation of our world.

What qualifies an American to be president of the United States, apart from his or her birth in one of them, and being over the age of 35?

Whatever training, talents, experience, knowledge, opinions, accomplishments qualified a person in the past are no longer applicable. Forget about them. There is a new set of qualifications.

His or her skin color comes first. He or she must not be white.

Next comes his or her gender. “Cis-heteronormative Male” is out. Any of the other 73 genders are acceptable. So take out “he, him, his” from the discussion.

Next, she or ze must be a show-biz celebrity, the more successful the better. It is personal popularity that counts, not ability to do the extremely difficult job.

Next, she or ze must have an emotionally moving life-story, preferably rags-to-riches.

And finally, she or ze must place herself or zirself on the far left of the political spectrum.

Out of 323,000,000 people right now, there is just one who fits the new bill perfectly; just one that the Democratic Party can confidently nominate for the presidency in 2020: the billionaire TV star Oprah Winfrey.

Hollywood has chosen her, because she made this speech at the Golden Globes.

https://youtu.be/50K8EvEEWE0

It is a moving speech. Never mind that she says the six men who raped the young women coming home from church were never “persecuted’ when she meant “prosecuted”. Never mind that she condemns corruption but has not been heard protesting against the extreme corruption of the Obama administration including Hillary Clinton’s. Never mind that she makes a victim of the arrogant and victimizing media. Never mind that many of the women present – notably Meryl Streep and Oprah Winfrey herself – enabled men like Harvey Weinstein to make victims of women, while the actual victims had not been invited to the Golden Globes. She delivered her speech well. She is likable. The Democrats are in dire need of a plausible candidate for the presidency. So hardly had the applause for her speech died away, when her name was being put forward.

Breitbart reports on what the polls (the same polls that predicted an easy win for Hillary Clinton in the last presidential election) predict for Oprah in competition with President Trump:

According to a Rasmussen Reports survey released on Wednesday, 48 percent of likely U.S. voters would choose entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey in 2020, while 38 percent would choose Trump.

Notably, an additional 14 percent of voters said they would be undecided in a contest between the two. Buzz surrounding a possible presidential bid for Winfrey began after her speech at the Golden Globes on Sunday night. Winfrey used the occasion of becoming the first black woman to receive the Cecile B. DeMille award, to speak about a promising future for minority women and, to credit other women who have spoken out about sexual harassment in Hollywood.

According to Yahoo, “Polling outlets have surveyed Oprah’s popularity in the past, and a March 2017 Quinnipiac poll found Oprah with a 52 percent favorability rating and massive 72 percent favorability rating with Democrats. The latest Rasmussen poll shows Oprah with a 55 percent general favorability, and 27 percent “very favorable” rating.

“And yet despite that strong popularity return for the television personality, 69 percent of respondents to the March 2017 poll said she shouldn’t run for president.”

The short article includes the information that CNN cites two unnamed sources, both “close friends” of Oprah who “claim that she is ‘actively thinking’ about a presidential run”.

The left-leaning media will surely choose her.

Can the Democratic Party itself be far behind?

Will hers be safe hands to guide the ship of state through the tumult of a dangerous world?

That is the wrong question.

Ask not what she can do for your country. Ask only what your country can do for her.

This is our Facebook abstract of Mark Steyn’s review of the film Darkest Hour, about how Winston Churchill saved Britain and the world from Nazi Germany:

We are at the great hinge moment of the twentieth century. That year in which the moth-eaten British lion and its distant cubs stood alone is, more than any other single factor, the reason why the world as ordered these last seventy years exists at all. Joe Wright’s film is very good on the sense of one small island on the periphery of Europe having the noose tightened almost hour by hour. Britain and its lion cubs fought on, playing for time until first the Soviets and then the Americans joined the war against Germany, Italy and Japan. At its heart, the story of one long-serving politician in the spring of 1940 is the definitive example of the Great Man theory of history. It was his very particular qualities – ones that did not necessarily serve him well in peacetime or in other wars – that changed the course of human events. As with Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, one’s admiration for the film is tempered by a terrible profound sadness – for a people who “won the war, and lost their country anyway”: the “long island story” is ending, and without anyone feeling the need to lie choking on the ground over it. To anyone old enough to remember an England where one could “walk into any pub in the country and ask with perfect confidence if the major had been in”, that sense of loss can bring tears to the eye. This is the film of an actual, real-life superhero. You leave the theater with the cheers of the House ringing in your ears …and return to a world where quoting Churchill in his own land can get you arrested.

Read the original in its entirety at Mark Steyn’s site here. It is well worth reading. We introduce it with our abstract in order to use it as a springboard for observations of our own.

Among all that stirs emotion there, above all, for us, is this:

… a terrible profound sadness – for a people who “won the war, and lost their country anyway”: the “long island story” is ending, and without anyone feeling the need to lie choking on the ground over it.  

It is astonishingly true that hardly a murmur of regret is heard from the educated classes of Great Britain, the classes of hereditary leadership, the political talking heads, the opinion formers, the professoriate, the historians, the think tanks, the men and women at present in power or firmly seated in the establishment, for the loss of their country.

They do not want to talk about it. And they do not want you to raise the issue.

Many are pretending that it isn’t happening; or that, if it is, it’s a bother that will  just go away.

But yes, there are those who are choking on the giving away of their country. They are the “horny handed sons of toil”. From the scorned and bullied working-class. The class for which the rulers claimed socialism needed to be established, but for whose opinion the rulers never give a toss.

The “Football Lads” march silently in their tens of thousands to the sites where Muslim immigrants have carried out acts of terrorism. They stand there in sorrow.

Tommy Robinson, who was once a “football hooligan” is now a leader of such resistance as there is in England. He is heavily and persistently harassed by police and frequently locked up for months on end by complicit judges on false charges. He is a brave man who has been abominably treated.

Anne Marie Waters almost certainly won a  recent election held for a new leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), but was summarily informed she had lost it. UKIP might still stand for British independence from Europe under its usurping leader, but it will cast a very disapproving eye on any of its members who might “lie down on the ground and choke” over the end of the “long island story”. So Anne Marie Waters formed a new party called the ForBritain Party. The establishment and the media are calling it a “far right” party to discredit it.

Unspoken, but fully implied by real events is this declaration by the government and the media;

We want the end of the island story. The end of England. The end of Britain. We want it to become a tyrannical Islamic state.

One of the EU Commissioners says that Europe is “too white”. He wants to see it go black and brown. He wants it to be flooded by migrants from the Third World.

A former prime minister of Sweden says that the country he led belongs not to the Swedes but to the Muslim immigrants.

Some say this is happening to Europe because it feels guilty for its past imperialism and colonialism. A Leftist notion now almost universally accepted.

But Sweden had no colonies.

And among those European countries that did, Britain brought enormous benefits to its conquered territories: notably a fair judiciary, freedom of speech, a free press, and in many cases literacy. For Britain to be ashamed of its vast and splendid empire is absurd and even disgraceful. Yet its shame was manifest when England hosted the Olympic Games and told the world how proud it was of its (rotten) National Health Service, and made not a mention of its empire.

France took good cooking to its foreign conquests.

True, some European countries brought mostly dread. Germany did. And Spain and Portugal with their Inquisitions. To know what horror Belgium brought, one has only to read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

Almost all these empires have shriveled away. There are only bits and pieces left of the old British Empire.

But the most important good that Europe – chiefly Britain – gave to the human race, to be taken and kept by any who will for its immeasurable benefit, was the Enlightenment.

The values on which the United States of America was founded were Enlightenment values (not “Judeo-Christian” values as we have argued fully elsewhere).

They are the values – reason, individual liberty, property, rule of law, equal justice under the law for each individual – that need to be defended. But they are not being defended in western Europe, all of which, including Britain, is bending to primitive, cruel, unjust Islamic laws and traditions. 

The United States of America – saved from Europe’s fate by President Trump – remains, at least for the present, the last best hope of mankind.

In our post Paying to be hated and betrayed (January 1, 2018), in which we deplored the giving of foreign aid by the United States, we also reported that President Trump was stopping aid to the terrorism-sponsoring state Pakistan.

He tweeted:

The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!

Meanwhile, Britain under the weak and incoherent leadership of Prime Minister Theresa May, is increasing its aid to Pakistan.

The Daily Mail reports:

Britain is to increase foreign aid to Pakistan by more than £100 million even though it has a space programme and nuclear weapons.

The Asian country is now the biggest recipient of UK handouts despite preparing to splash out billions on arms including a new fleet of submarines.

It comes after the Mail yesterday revealed how £300 million of British taxpayers’ money is being handed out to Pakistanis on pre-loaded cash cards as part of a scheme dogged by claims of corruption.

The allegations have led to renewed calls for the UK to ditch its foreign aid targets when there is a crisis in social care at home.

Figures from Britain’s overseas aid department, the Department for International Development, show total spending on Pakistan will soar by more than 30 per cent this year.

Some £441 million will be handed to projects in 2016-17, up £105 million from £336 million in 2015-16.

Yet Islamabad has unveiled a massive military spending plan, pumping £654 million into the defence budget this year – an 11 per cent boost to £6.7 billion. 

The figures do not include money spent on its atomic weapons programme. The country is one of a small number of nuclear powers, and has between 110 and 130 warheads.

Pakistan spends around 3.6 per cent of its national income on defence, compared to Britain, which only just fulfils its Nato commitment of at least two per cent.

Last year Pakistan announced it would buy eight new submarines at a cost of around £4 billion, with the country expected to lavish more than £10 billion on new weapons by 2024.

Its space programme has successfully launched a satellite and has an annual budget of around £19.5 million.

Backbenchers have been calling on Theresa May to ditch the Government’s commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on overseas aid when there is a crisis in care for the elderly in Britain. …

The Prime Minister’s spokesman last night said the system helped focus aid on ‘those who need it, when they need it’. The aide said the policy was ‘an investment in our security’ and claimed there were ‘robust’ policies in place to protect against fraud and corruption.

There are no such policies in place. In no way is this vast handout toPakistan an investment in British security.

[Another] spokesman added: ‘Our investment in Pakistan is making the world a safer place by tackling poverty, improving governance and disrupting serious crime, which left unchallenged breeds violent extremism and drives mass migration.’

It is a myth, a lie, an apparently ineradicable illusion that “poverty breeds violent extremism”. There is not a trace of evidence that it does or ever has.

It needs to be noted that most of the gangs that “groom” underage girls for prostitution in Britain are Pakistani Muslims.

It also needs to be recalled that Pakistan has persistently aided the Taliban, has sheltered Osama bi Laden, and imprisoned the doctor who finally revealed bin Laden’s hiding place.

Pakistan does no good to the West. On the contrary, it does as much harm as it can. There is no justification for giving vast sums of British tax money to Pakistan. None.

Who in the days of Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, or for that matter at any time in the past, would have believed that a British government could be so stupid?

And the party in power calls itself the Conservative Party!

(Hat-tip for the Daily Mail report to our British associate, Chauncey Tinker, editor of the online magazine of political commentary, The Participator.)

Soon there will be war with North Korea. Unless its dictator has a sudden change of mind and voluntarily gives up his nuclear warheads and the ballistic missiles that can deliver them, they will need to be taken from him by force. The likelihood of the change of mind is very small. So the chance of war is very high.

In the war, a lot of people will die. They will probably be mostly North Koreans. There could be many deaths among South Koreans. There may be deaths of civilians in the United States.

Why is China rushing troops to its border with North Korea? It’s a reasonable speculation that they will shoot down radioactive North Koreans attempting to flee nuclear attack. China is not likely to risk war with the United States over North Korea. Nor is Russia.

The Daily Star reports:

People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces are said to have been moving by night towards China’s river border with the North.

And Chinese commanders are reported to have recently conducted the so-called “war ceremony” – urging their troops to be ready to fight.

Columns of PLA trucks have been pictured on the move near Yanji City which is close to the triple border between China, Russia and North Korea.

Wars fears have spilled over into the New Year as Kim Jong-un warned the “nuclear button” is on his desk .

China is North Korea’s only traditional ally and has been coming under pressure to tackle Kim Jong-un from the US.

Sources cited in Chinese media claimed the PLA are “preparing for war on the Korean Peninsula” .

China would be expected to use its military forces to help quell a flood of refugees should the US attack North Korea.

There will be deaths among the US military. But that is what soldiers always face. An army exists to kill, and every soldier in it risks being killed. There is no point in pretending otherwise.

Obama tried to turn the army into a social service. That was a huge waste of tax-payers’ money.

If members of the Libertarian Party, or the Green Party, or the Bernie Sanders musty movement, or some pacifist church, or the Leftist media, or the deep state, or the Democratic Party don’t want war to happen – what is their alternative?

The army will fight, as it did in World War II. It will fight to win under the command of President Trump and General Mattis.

And the war will be fought by men. Not by women, or transgenders, or pacifists, or  Communists, or snowflakes, or social justice warriors, or professors, or lawyers, or play-play “resisters” like the Antifa thugs.

Men will fight it, men will kill in it, men will win it, and men will die in it.

And a rogue nation will be deprived of the power to do far greater damage and kill far more people.