President Trump acts as the framers of the Constitution intended the president of the United States to act. But many of his civil servants want him to be a mere figurehead without power over their actions and decisions.

In fact, this president has achieved enormous gains for America by his personal efforts, persisting despite unprecedented moves on the part of civil servants, Democrats and the media to hamper and even incapacitate him.

Most recently he has compelled NATO members to pay more for the defense of the West – the ostensible reason for the organization’s existence. Until now, the US has uncomplainingly borne by far the greater part of the financial burden. Now the US is complaining – though still bearing most of the costs. And the president’s achievement, the very change itself such as it is, angers civil servants in the State Department

Julie Kelly writes at American Greatness:

Since 2016, delinquent NATO allies have coughed up an additional $130 billion in new defense spending. Trump also is redirecting NATO’s focus away from Russia and insisting the alliance address more serious threats such as cyber security, Syria, terrorism, and China.

But it’s not supposed to happen this way. Any progress with America’s allies—or enemies—only can be achieved, we are cautioned, through proper channels of carefully constructed diplomatic finesse.

Very important people with very important advanced degrees from very important universities must be involved at every step. Coaxing American allies to stop welching on their debt requires many white papers and think tank conferences and pricey parties at well-appointed embassies.

Before the president speaks with another head of state, polite talking points must be drafted and edited and redrafted and approved by dozens of people with lengthy titles who occupy offices situated along the Potomac River decorated with many impressive diplomas and commendations.

So it’s understandable why people who have been groomed their entire lives to one day serve as the deputy director assistant undersecretary of East Samoan Affairs are a little huffy at the Trump Administration. During her opening statement before the House Intelligence committee, ousted Ukrainian ambassador Marie Yovanovitch warned Congress about a “crisis” at the State Department. No, the crisis isn’t about rising tensions in Iran or the ongoing instability in the Middle East or desperate Venezuelans fleeing to neighboring countries.

The crisis, Yovanovitch emotionally explained, is empty corner office suites and silent cell phones and bruised egos. “Leadership vacancies go unfilled and senior and mid level officers ponder an uncertain future. The State Department is being hollowed from within in a competitive and complex time on the world stage. This is not a time to undercut our diplomats.” Morale, she warned, is low.

But Yovanovitch only told a portion of the harrowing situation besieging Foggy Bottom. There are more “horror stories”, according to GQ reporter Julia Ioffe. No, not horror stories about child trafficking or forced starvation or mass slaughter around the world. Ioffe tells the terrifying account of how one American diplomat in the U.K. got his walking papers from Trump’s appointed ambassador to that country. Trump, Ioffe fumed, is waging war on America’s diplomats!

Lewis Lukens, the deputy chief of mission (yes, his actual title) in London, got the boot after he offered effusive praise of Barack Obama in two speeches last year. In addition to raving about the previous president, Lukens gave Trump a few shots, asking Brits not to give up on the “special relationship” between the two countries.

Lukens was referring to Trump’s criticism of both former British Prime Minister Theresa May and London Mayor Sadiq Khan. In fact, Lukens tweeted his support for Khan a few hours after Trump ridiculed the London mayor for his response to a deadly terror attack in June 2017. Lukens also asked the Trump White House to stop criticizing May. It’s interesting how the diplomatic graces of these self-important envoys don’t ever apply to their American boss.

So Lukens, who worked for Hillary Clinton and helped set up her illicit email system when she was head of Obama’s State Department, got the ax about two years later than he should have. But rather than presenting Lukens’ ouster as a cautionary tale of how a disloyal political hack finally got his comeuppance, Ioffe instead claims his sob story is a “grim illustration of how the administration—through three years of attempted budget cuts, hiring freezes, and grotesquely personal attacks—has eviscerated the country’s diplomatic corps”.

Ambassadorships remain unfilled as are one-third of foreign service positions overseas, according to Ioffe. Recruitment in the foreign service is way down.

“Many of Trump’s political ambassadors have an unfounded belief that government bureaucrats are overwhelmingly Democrats and liberals and working against Trump’s agenda, and that’s just not the case,” Lukens, the Obama appointee, said⁠—presumably with a straight face.

But it’s not just Obama/Clinton loyalists who are living a nightmare. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. Ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush and a frequent Trump critic, cringed at the president’s performance in London this week.

“When interacting with allied leaders, Trump’s predecessors have generally followed a golden rule: Disagreements with friends are okay—but only behind the scenes, not in public,” Burns sniffed. “Trump, in contrast, seems to relish going after the Europeans in full view of the rest of the world.” Burns was aghast at Trump’s “testy” exchange with French President Emmanuel Macron. (In an April op-ed for the Washington Post, Burns called Trump “NATO’s most urgent and difficult problem”.)

But the real crisis for former State Department bureaucrats and their colleagues who have been recycled back to the Ivy League campuses whence they came is not that Trump poses an existential threat to national security; it’s that he poses a legitimate threat to their professional sinecures. If indeed the State Department is being “hollowed out”, no one outside the Beltway or the Kennedy School of Government has noticed.

Trump, almost single-handedly, is addressing the international fiascos left behind by Barack Obama including North Korea, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and China to name a few. He’s pushing our allies to get on board while pulling out of poorly-enforced and outdated international pacts that handicap Americans.

Meanwhile, the global chaos that the diplomatic class predicted under a Trump presidency hasn’t come to pass: “Donald J. Trump is entirely unqualified to serve as President and Commander-in-Chief. He is ignorant of the complex nature of the challenges facing our country, from Russia to China to ISIS to nuclear proliferation to refugees to drugs, but he has expressed no interest in being educated. We fear the damage that such ineptitude could cause in our closest relationships as well as the succor it might offer our enemies.”

That passage was part of a letter signed in September 2016 by 75 “former career ambassadors and senior state department officials”, as they humbly described themselves.

They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now. And there’s no strategic plan or multilateral talks that can save them from their transparent career angst. As Harry Truman observed in his memoirs about the challenges he encountered in recognizing Israel, “The foreign service officer has no authority to make policy. They act only as servants of the government, and therefore they must remain in line with the government policy that is established by those who have been chosen by the people to set that policy.”

Folks like Lukens and Yovanovitch and Burns might not like that reality. But it is they, not Trump, who are the problem.

The teasing question is: what are they – the US government’s servants who deal on Americans’ behalf with other countries – for, what are they on the side of?

President Trump is on the side of America: his slogans are “America First, and “Make America Great Again”. Among his chief foreign policies are: to trade with other nations prosperously for America; to put an end to China’s economic exploitation of America; to be militarily strong against perceived enemies, chiefly Russia and China; to demand that America’s allies pay their promised share of defense expenses; to keep rogue states from becoming nuclear powers or using nuclear weapons if they have them; to maintain friendly relations with friendly nations and ease tension with unfriendly nations; to prevent illegal and subversive immigration.

What is there in all that for America’s representatives and agents to object to?

They did not object to Barack Obama’s foreign policies. They cooperated enthusiastically with him. Among his chief policies were: paying huge sums of money illegally to Iran, an extremely oppressive tyranny, and enabling it to become a nuclear power; appeasing Russia by refusing to honor America’s commitment to provide defensive arms to Ukraine; stealthily supporting the enemies of allied Israel; encouraging illegal immigration; befriending Communist Cuba, another extremely oppressive tyranny; promoting world government through the United Nations and  “climate change”  pledges that would have harmed the American economy; conniving at corruption in foreign governments;  assisting the Muslim Brotherhood, the self-declared enemy of America and the West, to gain power in Egypt, and encouraging Islam generally to spread through the West?

What can be concluded but that a multitude of Americans appointed to serve the interests of their nation, are for tyranny, corruption, communism, the spread of Islam, unlimited immigration, the impoverishment of America in the name of combatting “climate change”, the weakening of America’s defenses, its governance by an international body, and so its dissolution as a free, prosperous, strong, independent nation-state?

The destruction of the Republic. Could there be any greater treason than that?

President Putin made this very short speech to the Duma:

In Russia, live like Russians.  Any minority, from anywhere, if it wants to live in Russia, to work and eat in Russia, it should speak Russian, and should respect all Russian laws. If they prefer Sharia Law, and wish to live the life of Muslims, then we now clearly advise them to go and live in those places where that’s the state law. 

Russia does not need Muslim minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell ‘discrimination’!

We will not tolerate disrespect of our Russian culture.

We had better learn from the suicides of so-called democracies – America, England, France, Germany, and Holland – if we are to survive as a nation.

The Muslims are taking over those countries, but they will not take over Russia!

Our Russian customs and traditions are not compatible with the lack of culture or the primitive ways of Sharia Law and Muslims.

When this honorable legislative body thinks of creating new laws, it should have in mind the Russian national interest first, observing that the Muslim minorities are not Russian.

The Duma gave him a standing ovation.

A well-informed, Trump-supporting, Republican-voting conservative who sent us the speech, commented:

It is a sad day when a Communist leader makes more sense than so many of our elected officials in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate.

I know it’s hard to believe, but Putin has become a true national leader in the way no West European can begin to approach. Imagine Angela Merkel or Francois Macron or Theresa May or even Boris Johnson in that role. Ha! Ridiculous! Trump also fails the test, but mostly because of the pathological hatred of the leftist scum. However, Trump contributed to that thanks to his compulsive Twitters and off-the-cuff remarks. He would do much better to just shut up and let the democrats annihilate one another.

To which we replied:

We cannot agree with you about the president’s tweets. The media do not report him accurately or fairly so he uses tweeting to communicate directly with the electorate –  and a very successful tactic it has proved to be. Each approving reader feels he is being addressed personally. As each listener at his rallies feels too. At those rallies, how they love him for it! They scream their delight. We enjoy every minute of it. He makes us laugh – with him – within five seconds. So do his tweets. He must not stop. He will not stop. He will be re-elected, probably with a landslide.

And our correspondent answered:

I must repeat that Trump does himself no favors with his compulsive Tweeting or Twittering; whatever the damn thing is called.

You are correct that die-hard Trump fans love it. But they are barely 40% of the population. My best guess is that another 30% of the population are Trump haters: Liberals, Socialists, Communists, psycho-leftists, Antifa thugs, et al. and they will never vote for Trump no matter what. The middle 30% are up for grabs, and some of them are alienated by Trump’s style. Generally, they like him on issues like the economy, immigration, anti-Iran, quasi-anti-China (especially its compulsively greedy trade policies), and others, but they think he is not very presidential. If Trump can win 25 out of the 30 percent in the middle, he will be re-elected in a landslide approaching 65%. Even if it turns out to be only 60% that also qualifies as a landslide. However, he cannot afford to lose the vast majority of those in the middle, and this is especially important in winning a GOP majority in the House, to get rid of the likes of Jerry Nadler, Adam Schiff, the four-creep “squad”, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and the rest of the psycho-left, “progressive” wing of the democratic party. You are no doubt correct that he cannot stop; he will not stop. It’s who he is. I hope you are correct that the vast majority of the country loves it, but I have my doubts.

We invite our readers’ comments.

While the West is busy raging and plotting against President Trump, complaining about Russia, destroying statues, submitting to invasion by hordes from the Third World, deciding whether to let citizens return who had gone to help ISIS kill and torture, disentangling the European Union, adding new pronouns to the English language, changing men into women and vice verse, China has been reaching out, near and far, grasping chunks of the world by its real needs, making itself the center of a new international trade order, which could some day be a new political order with Beijing as its capital.

China calls it the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Wikipedia describes it thus:

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a development strategy adopted by the Chinese government involving infrastructure development and investments in [so far] 152 countries and international organizations in Europe, Asia, Middle East, Latin America and Africa.

“Belt” refers to overland routes for road and rail transportation, called “the Silk Road Economic Belt”; “Road” refers to the sea routes, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road.

The old name “Silk Road” makes the Belt sound long-established, connoting beautiful merchandise being carried by traders from East to West, a romance of mutually beneficial trade.

Because the Chinese government wants the world to understand that its initiative is good for all concerned:

The Chinese government calls the initiative “a bid to enhance regional connectivity and embrace a brighter future” .

And it isn’t only regional, the connectivity: distant parts are brought into the embrace too:

North, central and south belts are proposed. The North belt passes from China through Central Asia and Russia to Europe; the Central belt from China through Central Asia and West Asia to the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean; the South belt from China to Southeast Asia, South Asia, to the Indian Ocean through Pakistan.

The land corridors include:

The New Eurasian Land Bridge, which runs from Western China to Western Russia through Kazakhstan, and includes the Silk Road Railway through China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region, Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland and Germany.

The China–Mongolia–Russia Corridor, which will run from Northern China to the Russian Far East. 

The China–Central Asia–West Asia Corridor, which will run from Western China to Turkey.

The China–Indochina Peninsula Corridor, which will run from Southern China to Singapore.

The Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Economic Corridor, which runs from southern China to Myanmar.

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor.

All of which is over land.

But China is reaching across the seas too.

The Maritime Silk Road is the name of the sea route corridors. It is a complementary initiative aimed at investing and fostering collaboration in Oceania [Australia and the islands round it], Africa, and South America, by way of the South China Sea, the South Pacific Ocean, and the Indian Ocean area.

And China has made an agreement with Russia to create an ‘Ice Silk Road’ along the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic (a maritime route which Russia considers to be part of its internal waters). There Chinese and Russian companies are cooperating in oil and gas exploration, infrastructure construction, tourism, and scientific expeditions.

Most of the countries joined to China by Belt and Sea Road have become members of China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

The bank provides funds for the joint projects, each one of which is part of the great world-wide infrastructure project.

So China has become the indispensable benefactor of countries that could not on their own afford to build their “ports, railways, highways, power stations, aviation and telecommunication facilities”. China joins them together in vast international enterprises. For instance: “the super grid project aims to develop six ultra high voltage electricity grids across China, north-east Asia, Southeast Asia, south Asia, central Asia and west Asia” .

Formal respect is paid to global warming belief:

The wind power resources of central Asia would form one component of this grid.

Back in 2016, This Week in Asia pointed out in what ways and how greatly China would benefit from BRI:

[The Chinese] will generate enough demand abroad to keep their excess steel mills, cement plants and construction companies in business, so preserving jobs at home. They will tie neighboring countries more closely into their own economic orbit, so enhancing both their hard and soft power around the region. They will further their long term plan to promote their own currency as an international alternative to the US dollar. And to finance it all, they will set up a new multi-lateral infrastructure bank, which will undermine the influence of the existing Washington-based institutions, with all their tedious insistence on transparency and best practice, by making more “culturally sensitive” soft loans. The result will be the regional hegemony they regard as their right as Asia’s leading economic and political power.

The paper predicted that BRI was “doomed to fail”. But it seems to be succeeding.

European governments, other than those of Poland and Belarus, have not yet agreed to step on to the Belt, but Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte intends to, and it is rumored that Britain’s insane Prime Minister Theresa May is thinking of it.

General Electric and Caterpillar have signed up to work on BRI projects.

New Zealand has launched itself on the Road.

No doubt President Xi Jinping has his eye on North America.

This would be a good time for him to woo Canada with the Brighter Future song, while Justin Trudeau is still there making destructive decisions.

As for the US, we wonder – did Xi broach Belt and Road propositions to President Trump? If he did, we can probably guess the gist of the answer he got.

But what will the next US President say? Will he/she/zir take America into the warm embrace of China?

Ads like this, the Chinese suppose, will win the hearts and minds of American millennials:

But for now – has anybody noticed that China’s hegemony is growing by the day, not just in its region, but world-wide?

Julian Assange, the man who published secrets stolen from the Pentagon by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning, was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London yesterday (April 12, 2019) and is being held in jail while an extradition request from the US is being considered.

AP reports:

A bearded and shouting Julian Assange was pulled from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and hauled into court Thursday, the start of an extradition battle for the WikiLeaks founder who faces U.S. charges related to the publication of tens of thousands of secret government documents.

Police arrested Assange after the South American nation revoked the political asylum that had given him sanctuary for almost seven years. Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno said he took the action due to “repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols”.

In Washington, the U.S. Justice Department accused Assange of conspiring with former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to break into a classified government computer at the Pentagon. The charge was announced after Assange was taken into custody.

His lawyer said the 47-year-old Assange would fight extradition to the U.S.

Assange took refuge in the embassy in 2012 after he was released on bail in Britain while facing extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations that have since been dropped. He refused to leave the embassy, fearing arrest and extradition to the U.S. for publishing classified military and diplomatic cables through WikiLeaks.

Manning, who served several years in prison for leaking troves of classified documents before her sentence was commuted by then-President Barack Obama, is again in custody in Alexandria, Virginia, for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks.

Over the years, Assange used Ecuador’s embassy as a staging post to keep his name before the public, frequently making appearances on its tiny balcony, posing for pictures and reading statements. Even his cat became well-known.

But his presence was an embarrassment to U.K. authorities, who for years kept a police presence around the clock outside the embassy, costing taxpayers millions in police overtime. Such surveillance was removed in 2015, but the embassy remained a focal point for his activities.

Video posted online by Ruptly, a news service of Russia Today, showed several men in suits pulling a handcuffed Assange out of the embassy and loading him into a police van while uniformed British police formed a passageway. Assange … shouted and gestured as he was removed …

He later appeared in Westminster Magistrates’ Court, where District Judge Michael Snow wasted no time in finding him guilty of breaching his bail conditions, flatly rejecting his assertion that he had not had a fair hearing and a reasonable excuse for not appearing.

“Mr. Assange’s behavior is that of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interests,” Snow said. “He hasn’t come close to establishing ‘reasonable excuse’.”

Assange waved to the packed public gallery as he was taken to the cells. His next appearance was set for May 2 via prison video-link in relation to the extradition case.

Assange’s attorney, Jennifer Robinson, said he will fight any extradition to the U.S.

“This sets a dangerous precedent for all journalist and media organizations in Europe and around the world,” she said. “This precedent means that any journalist can be extradited for prosecution in the United States for having published truthful information about the United States.”

Asked at the White House about the arrest, President Donald Trump declared, “It’s not my thing,” and “I know nothing about WikiLeaks,” despite praising the anti-secrecy organization dozens of times during his 2016 campaign.

Speaking in Parliament, British Prime Minister Theresa May said the arrest shows that “no one is above the law”.

A stupid remark that, inapplicable to Julian Assange. It would apply to people in power who evade answering for their crimes, such as Hillary Clinton.

Moreno [President Lenin Moreno of Ecuador] said in a video posted on Twitter that Ecuador was no longer willing to give Assange protection. Other Ecuadorian officials in Quito accused supporters of WikiLeaks and two Russian hackers of trying to destabilize the country. …

Assange has been under U.S. Justice Department scrutiny for years for WikiLeaks’ role in publishing government secrets. He was an important figure in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe as investigators examined how WikiLeaks obtained emails that were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and Democratic groups.

WikiLeaks quickly drew attention to U.S. interest in Assange and said that Ecuador had illegally terminated Assange’s political asylum “in violation of international law”.

“Powerful actors, including CIA, are engaged in a sophisticated effort to de-humanise, de-legitimize and imprison him,” the group said in a tweet over a photo of Assange’s smiling face. …

Assange’s arrest came a day after WikiLeaks accused Ecuador’s government of an “extensive spying operation” against him. It alleges that meetings with lawyers and a doctor in the embassy over the past year were secretly filmed. …

Former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa called [President] Moreno’s decision “cowardly”, accusing him of retaliating against Assange for WikiLeaks spreading allegations about an offshore bank account purportedly linked to Moreno’s family and friends.

Allegations were made that the publication by Wikileaks of the stolen information endangered American agents in foreign countries. Of course that would tell against Assange. But he has denied it, and it has not been confirmed.

Assange was at one time accused of acting for Russia, which he also denied.

We agree with Mark Steyn’s opinion of the matter.

At issue is not the honesty or the virtue or the motives of Julian Assange.

The issue is liberty. 

We would like to know our readers’ opinions. 

The British government is failing to accomplish Brexit – the country’s exit from the European Union, for which a majority of Britons voted in a referendum.

Why? Because the government and the Civil Service consist of people who want Britain to remain in the EU. They know the EU is undemocratic, deeply corrupt, and intent on Islamizing its member states, but that’s what they like about it.

The voters who put in the Tory [Conservative] government are angry. So angry, that when they were asked in a recent poll, “would you vote Tory or for the Brexit Party in the potential Euros (European Parliament elections]?”, 92 % said they would vote for the Brexit Party.

James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:

92 percent is a significant majority of Conservative voters who will be seeking to punish their own party in the likely Euro elections by voting for one of their more strongly Eurosceptic rivals — either Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party (the only other option offered in this ad hoc poll) or UKIP [the United Kingdom Independence Party].

The Conservatives are going to get creamed if and when the next Euro elections happen, of that there’s no question. Their natural constituency won’t easily forgive the party for betraying Brexit in the way that [Prime Minister] Theresa May and her Cabinet of Remainers have done.

But the bigger question is: what will happen when Conservative voters’ loyalties are tested in a general election?

It’s a very important question because on the answer depends the fate of Britain. …

Is there a terrifying possibility that the Labour Party, led by the Communist Islamophiliac Jeremy Corbyn, could be voted into power?

Delingpole fears the answer may be yes:

In normal times, there’s not a snowball’s chance in Hell that a terrorist-supporting, anti-Semitic, hard-left loon like Jeremy Corbyn would ever get voted into power by the generally sensible British electorate.

But these are not normal times. Various clever rich people have already made sure to move their assets offshore in preparation for the massive confiscatory spree and capital controls which will instantly follow the election of Corbyn’s socialist regime.

I used to think they were just being paranoid. Now I’m starting to worry they may have been prescient.

The now-far-left Labour Party might win not because the British want what it’s threatening them with, but … what? Because the Conservatives are threatening them with much the same thing?

There is no general appetite for our broadly free market democracy to be replaced by Venezuela-style collectivism. But collectivism, nonetheless, is what Britain may get because of what political analyst Matthew Goodwin correctly identifies as the “perfect storm” threatening the Conservative party with its greatest existential crisis in living memory:

Today, the dark clouds that are swirling above Britain’s most successful party are visible to all; the government’s disastrous handling of Brexit; a Cabinet that is deeply split; a parliamentary party that has fractured; a Conservative electorate and membership that are at logger-heads with their leaders; a rebooted and well-funded populist Right under a re-energised Nigel Farage; and a fundamentally damaged Conservative brand. At no other point in Britain’s post-war period has the Conservative Party looked so vulnerable.

You may say the Conservatives have brought this disaster on themselves. And you’d be absolutely right. To my mind this goes far beyond Brexit — which merely brought matters to a head.

The rot set in a long, long time ago when the Conservatives decided that they no longer wanted to be conservative. …

This tectonic shift has been building for some time, driven on the one hand by the forces of Fabianism and cultural Marxism, on the other by the Conservatives’ surrender of their core philosophies in favour of “pragmatism” (i.e. drifting leftward to shake off the “nasty” tag, which of course they’ll never lose because the people who dictate the terms are their even more left-wing opponents).

For a forensic analysis of what has gone wrong, I recommend this must-read essay by David Eyles at Country Squire titled Post-Brexit Tory Doom::

The result of the Conservatives having abandoned conservatism is the unintentional creation of a philosophical void. It has meant that the Conservatives, upon taking office, have found themselves unable to forge political direction for the country. Indeed, David Cameron almost prided himself upon this by describing himself as “pragmatic” – in other words he blew with whatever wind direction was prevailing at the time. Into this void has stepped the Civil Service, which instead of being politically neutral as it always used to be, is now heavily politicised towards the Left. In addition, the rest of the élites which oversee so much of our public life have ensured that the Westminster Conservative Party have been softened up socially and culturally over dinner party tables. The Civil Service has thus successfully guided the Conservative government into territory that is now firmly occupied by the Leftist Clerisy.

As in the US, the administrative state is a swamp in which reptiles of the Left work to transform the nation into something nearer to their Socialist ideal.

No doubt the forces of Fabianism and cultural Marxism have contributed to the turning of the Conservative Party into a party of the Left. No doubt the treason of the civil servants has worked to make the change. But what must have done more harm than anything else to the nation as a whole, wrecking its ability to govern itself is – the EU.

Britain’s membership of the EU has been one of the worst mistakes in the islands’ history. Perhaps the very worst. It was like an abusive marriage. Europe debauched Britain not by violence, not be rapine and plunder, but by psychological corruption. The British got into bad company and were led astray. Britain has caught the morbid sickness of Europe.

The British were never Europeans. They are greatly different from the continentals. Their kind live in North America and Australia. Regardless of what the maps contend, psychologically speaking the Atlantic Ocean is much narrower than the English Channel.  

The European states – at least those in the south –  never could govern themselves well. Could never get the hang of it. Their elected governments changed so often, the representatives who had far to come to the capital cities where the parliaments sat, barely had time to get unpacked before they were on their way home again. Unless they fell under tyrannous dictators.

The British had a talent for governing (even though they messed up with the American colonies).

And the British used to have contempt – healthy or inexcusably racist according to your point of view – for Europeans. They called them by abusive names: Frogs, Krauts, Spics, Wops … “Wogs”, originally a rude word for Africans, came to be applied to all foreigners generally. The expression “Wogs begin at Calais” was a common refrain. When Britain joined the European Union, many lamented, “Now Wogs begin at Land’s End” (the westernmost point of England).

The British became, or tried to become, Europeans. They caught the lethal European sickness. Can they recover? If Brexit is finally accomplished, will the nation start to heal?

We share James Delingpole’s worry that it might not.

Have those arrogant globalist elites trying to rule the world been stopped at last?

Have the nationalists, slowly awaking from their passivity and apathy to vote for Brexit and Donald Trump, to put on yellow vests and shout angrily in the streets of their Western cities, stopped them?

We quote Michael Barone writing at Investor’s Business Daily on 2/1/2019:

Turnout at Davos was lousy this year. President Trump, preoccupied by the government shutdown, was a no-show at last week’s World Economic Forum there. So were British Prime Minister Theresa May (Brexit) and French President Emanuel Macron (“gilets jaunes”). Chinese President Xi Jinping, Davos’ 2018 star, and Russian President Vladimir Putin weren’t there either. Neither were some of the usual financial and media big names.

From all of this, you might get the impression that the world’s political, financial and media elites have lost much of their prestige these days, which, of course, they have.

It’s an enormous contrast with elites’ sunny confidence, over much of the quarter century after the fall of the Soviet Union, that they could remake the world … 

Consider Mexico. The NAFTA trade agreement was proposed by the Reagan administration, negotiated by the Bush administration and ratified by the Clinton administration, with plenty of support from both parties, especially Texans (Lloyd Bentsen, the Bushes) close to the border. They hoped to make Mexico more like the United States, and to regularize Mexican immigration.

There has been some convergence, with life in much of Mexico resembling Texas, but also with large parts of California resembling Mexico. Illegal immigration surged up until the 2007 economic crisis.

Even more ambitious was the bipartisan elites’ project of bringing China into the world trading system. The hope was that an increasingly prosperous Chinese populace would demand more freedom and democracy. That hasn’t happened; instead, Xi Jinping has regressed toward one-man rule.

Meanwhile, serious academic studies have substantiated non-elite charges that Chinese imports have cost America hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs. In return, American consumers have been able to buy clothes, toys and gadgets at increasingly low prices. But for many, it is at the cost of the dignity and sense of self-worth achieved by earning a paycheck.

The chief project of European elites, the “ever-closer” European Union, has arguably worked out worse. The Euro currency that was supposed to tie Europe together has instead (as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher predicted) widened the rift between the Mediterranean countries and an increasingly dominant Germany. Britain voted for Brexit — leaving the EU — in 2016, and elites, despite astonishing contempt for voters, have so far failed to reverse that verdict. …

In each case, these elites have underestimated the force and persistence of national cultures …

Perhaps the success of American military leaders in transforming post-World War II Germany and Japan turned out to be misleading. Those two countries drew on ethical and parliamentary traditions rooted in those societies and not wholly destroyed by short periods of dominance by Nazi thugs and murderous militarists. Mexico and China have different traditions, and there is no vital tradition of European unity.

Elites are impatient with people they regard as their inferiors. If you question Eurocrats’ undemocratic drive for an “ever-closer Union”, you are told that without the EU, France and Germany would once again go to war — obvious nonsense. If you advise more respect for nationalist traditions, you are told that all nationalists are Nazis — obvious nonsense again.

If you say that competition from low-wage workers in Mexico and China might cause substantial job loss in the United States, you are told what every college grad learns in Economics 101 (but what sounds counterintuitive to non-college grads), that free trade benefits both importers and exporters. You can argue that Mexican immigration and Chinese job competition peaked before 2007, but they still obviously rankle many voters.

So the political, financial and media elites have taken beatings at the ballot box … Their failures to make course corrections and their lack of respect for decent nationalism have been costly. Something to talk about if they slink back to Davos next year.

“Slink back” is good!

But to answer our opening questions: No, there is still many a battle ahead before Merkel, Macron and May – probably never accepting that they were wrong – are driven from power. The rickety EU is not yet about to be pushed over to explode in a cloud of dust. And in the US, because badly educated 18-24 year olds who have no stake in the economy are allowed to vote, there is a real danger of socialist environmentalist race-obsessed feminist globalists coming to power in the next decade.

Tommy Robinson has been released from prison.

He is the leader of the grass-roots resistance movement of the British people against a tyrannical and treacherous government intent on Islamifying the United Kingdom.

They jailed him over and over again. They deliberately put him in prison among Muslims who beat him to a pulp. Though once they offered to stop persecuting him if he would become their tool, their secret agent!  He refused, so the persecution was stepped up.

They imprisoned him yet again in May this year. He was sentenced to thirteen months penal servitude by a kangaroo court. Now, on appeal, he has been freed – at least for a few weeks – by the Lord Chief Justice. Not, we suspect, because Britain is still a country under the rule of law, but because the ill treatment of Tommy has become an international scandal.

From Breitbart:

Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett quashed the contempt of court conviction … which saw [Tommy Robinson]  going from arrest to trial, and to prison in just five hours and under a blanket of enforced media silence.

The court’s written judgement stated the speed with which the original conviction was made “gave rise to unfairness”, and that there was a “lack of clarity” over evidence for the charge of contempt given to Robinson.

Further, the document states the original judge should have resisted “the temptation” to rule on Robinson’s behaviour there and then, as after he had offered to delete the video he created from Facebook the “urgency went out of the matter”. Instead, the judge should have referred the matter to the Attorney General rather than acting immediately.

In all, the judgement found, the original case had the opportunity to “have avoided the risk of sacrificing fairness on the altar of haste”, but failed to take it.

Robinson’s defence team have maintained that the unusual speed with which he was jailed had led to “deficiencies” in the legal process.

The QC defending Mr Robinson in the appeal told the court the original trial had been “unnecessarily and unjustifiably rushed”, had featured “procedural difficulties”, and the sentence was “manifestly excessive”.

Robinson had been live-streaming the arrival of defendants of another trial outside Leeds Crown Court at the time of his arrest, and part of his bail conditions prevents him from returning to that court. Another trial has now been ordered to take place by the Court of Appeal, but the Lord Chief Justice ruled that Robinson had already served sufficient time pending the outcome of the retrial, and was, therefore, to be released.

The order to release came after a short hearing which followed longer proceedings on July 18th, where the judges hearing the case delayed their finding to give themselves time to confer.

Now free, Tommy has described the torment he endured inside the prison.

Matthew Vadum writes at Front Page:

The jailers of newly freed human rights activist Tommy Robinson deliberately subjected him to inhumane treatment behind bars in England, according to independent journalist Ezra Levant of the Canadian news website, TheRebel.media.

The goal of the authorities seems to have been to silence Robinson, perhaps permanently.

“Tommy has endured two months as a genuine political prisoner, and I say that thoughtfully,” Levant said. “I don’t want to throw around the word political prisoner. Britain is still a great liberal democracy, but not in the case of Tommy Robinson, they weren’t.”

We don’t agree that Britain can still be described as “a great liberal democracy”.

Robinson’s lawyers, Carson Kaye of London, released a statement celebrating his release: “The rule of law and the right to a fair hearing are fundamental to every individual and this ruling [is] an example of the procedural safeguards of our system, and its potential for protecting every citizen equally.”

Well, they have to say that. If they said “Tommy Robinson is being released because of an international outcry against the injustice he’s been subjected to”, they would feel the heavy had of tyranny falling on their own shoulders, or its boot in their own faces.

… [On May 25, 2018] Robinson had been trying to bring transparency to an opaque legal system distrusted by the public. The 35-year-old married father of three used his smartphone to live-stream on Facebook the arrival of accused rapists on trial for acts allegedly committed while being part of a so-called Muslim grooming gang.

The filming of the alleged pedophile rapists infuriated trial judge Geoffrey Marson Q.C. because he had imposed a ban on publishing news from their criminal proceeding. Within five hours Robinson had been railroaded and sentenced to 13 months in prison.

But on Wednesday a judicial panel headed by Baron Burnett of Maldon, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, quashed Robinson’s contempt of court conviction and ordered him released on bail. The Court of Appeal ordered that Robinson be released pending a fresh trial on the contempt charges before a different judge. …

Marson failed to provide sufficient particulars of the contempt allegation, which meant Robinson did not know what case he had to meet. Because of the extreme rush, Robinson didn’t have sufficient time to work with counsel to prepare a defense. In fact, the proceeding was so expedited he had to rely on a public defender –as opposed to his own regular lawyer— who had no time to prepare. The appeals court questioned the appropriateness of the 13-month sentence and found it was wrong of Marson to hand it down so quickly without sober reflection, Levant said.

According to a three-page summary of the decision provided by the appeals court: “The order at Leeds Crown Court was also erroneously drawn up to suggest the appellant had been convicted of a criminal offence rather than having been committed for contempt of court.”

Marson’s mistakes were grave. “Errors like this have serious consequences upon the classification of prisoners, resulting in the deprivation of privileges and release on license.”

Ezra Levant is further quoted:

Robinson’s “brutal incarceration, solitary confinement, and the constant threats of violence he faced in prison, all flow from the errors of the judge in Leeds.”

Initially, Robinson was sent to Her Majesty’s Prison Hull, which is “one of the safer prisons in the U.K. for Tommy.” … “By safer I mean it is not dominated by Muslim prison gangs.”

But then a faceless bureaucrat in the prison system ordered Robinson transferred to the much tougher, Her Majesty’s Prison Onley, which is “a much more Islamized prison.” …

On whose orders, or according to whose policy, did the “faceless bureaucrat” incarcerate Tommy where he was likely to suffer the most?

Whose but the government’s?

And why?

Because the Islam-coddling rulers of the land wanted –

… either to get Tommy killed at the hands of a Muslim prison gang, or to force him to do what they knew he would do because he’s done it before – to request to be put into solitary confinement to save his own life. But the thing is you cannot live for 13 months in solitary confinement. You’ll go mad. It would be regarded as torture. But that’s where Tommy was placed. …

Prisoners would regularly be given access to the front of Tommy’s cell and they would open up the flap to his cell and shout threats at him. And this was permitted by the prison. It’s obviously a form of psychological torture. Let me give you more examples. There is also a window in Tommy’s cell for a breeze in the hot summer. The prisoners were permitted to go up to the window and spit into Tommy’s cell which is a form of assault and battery and it’s gross and it’s psychologically abusive so Tommy had to shut his window in this particularly hot British summer. …

On at least three occasions his cell door was accidentally not locked. Accidentally, eh?

Reviled by the Left and milquetoast Conservative Party leaders like Prime Minister Theresa May, Robinson has been trying for years to raise awareness about the Islamization of the U.K.

Milquetoast they may be in submitting to the corrupt rulers of the EU, but at home they’re sadistic bullies.

The deck is stacked against those skeptical of Islam. In the United Kingdom the police now monitor statements on social media and jail those who express frowned-upon sentiments. In the U.K., Big Brother is no longer just something from George Orwell’s prophetic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Political correctness and fears of being smeared as racist or Islamophobic have led authorities in the United Kingdom to downplay or ignore sex crimes committed by unassimilated, misogynistic Muslims who rape Britons. From the 1980s to the 2010s, as many as 1,400 Britons, mostly white girls, were raped largely by Muslim men in Rotherham, England. In recent years Muslim rape gangs have been uncovered in Rochdale, Telford, Aylesbury, Banbury, and in many other British communities.

The fear of “being smeared as racist” makes British officials tolerate appalling crimes committed by foreign gangs! Britons who used to sing that they “never never never shall be slaves”! Britons whose forefathers of the last thousand years fought fearlessly on battlefields at home and abroad for freedom and justice, afraid of being smeared as racist?

Yes. Afraid of being called a name. Let all the young daughters of the kingdom be debauched and sold, what is that compared to being called a name?

To no one’s surprise, Britons do not trust their government to deal with such grooming cases fairly or protect the public from such sexual predators. British politicians worship at the altar of multiculturalism and would rather protect criminals from victims.

And this seems to be why the British authorities felt they needed to silence Robinson.

Seems? That IS why they are trying to silence Tommy Robinson.

And the press is on the side of the tyrants. The BBC, the posh papers and the tabloids, all choose to denigrate Tommy. He is frequently called a “far right activist”, even a “neo-Nazi”. And of course a “racist”, “xenophobe”, “Islamophobe”, “bigot”.  None of which he is.  

Only the social media give him his due as hero and political martyr.

Here is what a Murdoch-owned rag called The Sun says about this genuine hero:

Tommy Robinson is a nasty thug and a grandstanding idiot.

He is not a freedom fighter. Nor is he the hero he is made out to be in the sewer which social media has become.

Nor is he a “reporter” fearlessly exposing an establishment cover-up of rapes by gangs of Asian men. That scandal has been exposed by actual journalists.

In fact Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, almost wrecked the trial of some accused of serious crime …

The crime of debauching and selling underage girls …

… thus potentially denying both them and their alleged victims justice.

Yesterday he was freed on appeal over his contempt of court. Supporters say he was locked up too hastily and for too long. But he was already serving a suspended sentence for the same offence.

His many convictions stretch from violence to fraud. We have no sympathy.

He tells his own story, not omitting the why and how of the violence and the fraud, in his book Enemy of the State. 

We think it more than likely that John of Gaunt, Henry V, Nelson, Wellington, Churchill would be proud of Tommy Robinson.

And busily at work fulfilling his messianic mission.

He goes by the name George Soros.

[Soros] confessed to having harbored “potent Messianic fantasies since childhood”, telling reporters: “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”

Jack Montgomery reports at Breitbart:

Italy’s deputy prime minister and minister of the interior Matteo Salvini has infuriated billionaire plutocrat George Soros, claiming the financier wants to flood Europe with migrant “slaves”.

The Lega (League) leader, who has surged in popularity since coming to office as head of one half of Italy’s new populist coalition government, made the comments in an interview on the In Onda television programme.

Salvini accused the convicted insider traderof financing the so-called civil society NGOs which have been racing the Libyan Coast Guard to pick up illegal migrants from smuggler boats a few miles off the North African coast, in order to ferry them to distant European ports.

“Soros wants to fill Italy and Europe with migrants,” Salvini told La7 TV viewers, adding that he “would like Italy [to become] a giant refugee camp because he likes slaves”.

Brilliant! Salvini found a soft spot and plunged the knife in where it obviously really hurt.

The populist later shared the comments on his social media, so they could be seen by an even wider audience. Open Society Foundations, Soros’s flagship NGO into which he recently poured 18 billion dollars, has now issued a furious denial, demanding Salvini stop “repeating these and similar false statements about Mr Soros”.

Yes, Salvini is a populist. The new government of Italy is a populist government. Populist movements are arising and growing all over Europe. Patriotic nation-state supporters, passionately against their countries being colonized by Islam. And gratefully inspired by President Trump.

Salvini has challenged the financier and his foundation before, claiming the NGO and its partners have made it their business to promote uncontrolled immigration, liberalization of drug use, and social policies which undermine the family and promote alternative lifestyles and gender identities.

And those are only some of the destructive plans this – not very smart but very cunning – mastermind of subversion works at night and day.

Without over-dramatizing, it can be fairly said that George “the Messiah” Soros is the arch-enemy of Western civilization.

“So no more families with a Mum and Dad. Isn’t it way better to have an ‘open society’ with six dads, three mums, 18 great-grandparents, and six cousins, who also change gender according to the mood of the day? … And sometimes they smoke pot together!” [Salvini]  quipped sarcastically.

“This is the project they [Soros and his minions] want to leave to our children. Why? Because then you no longer have a man or a woman — you have a number, an item, with no rights, no history, no thought, no nationality, no identity… They are very well organized enemies, and they are very rich,” he warned.

“But we’ll prevail. Because history tells us that when peoples wake up and realize that they are in danger, they react.”

Soros is not active only in Italy, being a key co-ordinator and funder of the elite campaign to overturn the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, and a determined foe of the anti-mass migration Hungarian government, which has warned against his network of “reliable allies” in the European Parliament.

He is extremely popular among the global establishment, however, being greeted in the style of a visiting head of state by President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, and holding many more recorded meetings with the Brussels executive than Britain’s Theresa May since the EU referendum.

George Soros also funds many – possibly all – of the anti-America anti-West groups in the US.  (For a list of them, and much more about him, see Discover the Networks here.)

But perhaps the title of this post should be Another messiah is here. Because there have been a great many self-named or acclaimed with that appellation. None of them has done the human race any good. Some have done much harm. George Soros can be classed among the worst of them in intention – though not the most effective.

As a bringer of sorrow and spreader of grief, he started his messiahship in his childhood by collaborating with the Nazis. For which he denies feeling any guilt – though he calls Nazism”a great evil”.  Now in his late eighties, he labors on in the service of evil.

The sums he lavished out of his own enormous fortune on subverting governments in Eastern Europe and South America (Hungary, Macedonia, Albania, Romania, Colombia) were generously  supplemented by (unwitting) American tax-payers. Obama’s State Department handed him $9,000,000 to help him subvert the government of Albania.

Will George Soros be allowed to “live out” his messiahship “comfortably”?

The conscientious people at Judicial Watch are doing what they can to acquire evidence of his guilt.

If they get it, perhaps the keen and energetic US Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, will have his Department of Justice investigate Soros with a view to indicting him.

Okay, okay! We only said “perhaps”. And yes, perhaps “keen and energetic” is an exaggeration.

Tommy Robinson was arrested on Friday, May 25, 2018, outside Leeds Crown Court for live-streaming interviews with people who were there to protest the prostitution of underage girls by the Muslim men who were on trial that day in the court. He did nothing wrong, nothing illegal. He had even asked a police officer where he could and couldn’t stand to do his interviews.

He was arrested because Theresa May runs a police state in which any criticism of Muslims is a greater offense than the pimping of underage girls. Within an hour, Tommy was arrested, tried, and sentenced to thirteen months in prison. Some reports say the charge was “disturbance of the peace”, some say “contempt of court”. He is likely to be put among the general population of the prison, where Muslims will beat him – possibly to death.

The court also forbade the reporting of his arrest and sentence.

But the word got out. And this has so incensed the British people – or some of them – at last, that his arrest was followed by riots in Whitehall.

The leader of the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, made a public protest (see the video here), and  raised the matter in the Dutch parliament, asking the Dutch foreign minister to take action on behalf of Tommy Robinson. A member of the German Bundestag offered Tommy political asylum in Germany.

Bruce Bawer writes at Gatestone:

The swiftness with which injustice was meted out to Tommy Robinson is stunning. No, more than that: it is terrifying.

Without having access to his own lawyer, Robinson was summarily tried and sentenced to 13 months behind bars. He was then transported to Hull Prison.

Meanwhile, the judge who sentenced Robinson also ordered British media not to report on his case. Newspapers that had already posted reports of his arrest quickly took them down. All this happened on the same day.

In Britain, rapists enjoy the right to a full and fair trial, the right to the legal representation of their choice, the right to have sufficient time to prepare their cases, and the right to go home on bail between sessions of their trial. No such rights were offered, however, to Tommy Robinson.

Tommy Robinson now belongs among the great national heroes of the British people.

Following on from yesterday’s post immediately below –

Newsweek reports:

More than 12,000 people have signed a petition asking President Donald Trump to let white people in South Africa emigrate to the U.S. amid a vote by the country’s parliament favoring a motion that could see South Africa’s constitution amended to allow for land to be stripped from owners without any compensation.

The motion … has once again stoked fears among the country’s white farmers of a violent and disastrous land redistribution akin to that which crippled Zimbabwe in the 2000s.

The online petition calls on Trump to “take the steps necessary to initiate an emergency immigration plan allowing white Boers to come to the United States.” Boer is the term used to describe South Africans of Dutch, German or Huguenot descent, who are also commonly referred to as Afrikaners.

The petition suggests that Trump should stop admitting refugees from Somalia and the Middle East, claiming they “cannot be properly vetted”,  and allow white South Africans into the country instead.

Other sources add: “White South Africans can be easily vetted and also possess skills that make them compatible with our [Western] culture and civilization.”

A similar petition, calling on European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Theresa May to allow white South Africans into EU countries, has gained nearly 17,000 signatures.

If those 17,000 who seek asylum in Europe or Britain are granted it, their doom at the hands of Third World barbarians will only be postponed.

According to another source (change.org):

The white South African population currently faces ethnic cleansing and persecutions at the hands of the ANC government, the EFF [Economic Freedom Fighters, the revolutionary political party led by Julius Malema who has threatened the genocide of white South Africans], and various individual anti-white aggressors. Over 4000 white farmers have been brutally murdered, [with the attacks] often including torture and rape and mutilation. Many white South Africans today live in poverty and squalor as a consequence of the ANC government’s Black Economic Empowerment policy which shuts whites out of the labour pool.

That is what the liberals of the Western world – who all but worshipped Nelson Mandela the Communist terrorist leader – have brought about.

The communist government of South Africa seems now to be following the Zimbabwe model. If so, the resulting economic ruin of the country will have repercussions throughout the world. South Africa is mineral-rich. It is one of the world’s biggest producers and exporters of gold. Stock-markets everywhere – including the US – will be hit. Anyone who is concerned about the state of the US economy will be wise to watch what is happening in South Africa.

(Hat-tip for the first information about the petition to our valued commenter, liz)