GLOBALIST BARACK OBAMA
AND NANCY PELOSI’S CONSPIRACY TO SABOTAGE HOMELAND SECURITY AND KEEP AMERICA FLOODED
WITH DEM VOTING ILLEGALS
"Along with Obama, Pelosi and
Schumer are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the
eight years of that administration." PATRICIA McCARTHY
One of the most disgusting things to come out of the
Obama administration was "Operation Fast and Furious," where members
of the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed
illegal gun sales to go through – commonly referred to as "gun
walking" – in order to track buyers and sellers they believed were
connected to the Mexican drug cartels. Nearly 2,000 firearms were sold and were
eventually found throughout the United States and Mexico. Two of them were used
to kill Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. BETH BAUMANN
Cash-rich Schumer gets caught exploiting the interns
Has anyone been louder in advocating for a higher minimum wage than New York's Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer?
He's bellowed that minimum wages should be raised to at least $12 an hour, attempting to shame Republicans for opposing him, by calling it, (kid you not), "a moral issue," as he put it. He's pretty much defined the Democratic Party in the minds of voters by his hammerings on the minimum wage. Then he went and put out an ad calling for unpaid interns. According to the New York Post:
WASHINGTON – Sen. Schumer listed job openings for unpaid interns — but said the posting was “made in error” after Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized members of Congress for seeking free labor.
Talk about exploitation.
It is exploitation, as it deprives anyone who's not independently wealthy of the opportunity to serve in the Senate. For free unpaid interns under Schumer, they labor, and he gets the end product of it for nothing, presumably in exchange for a good job recommendation to work for money from someone else. Such a guy.
Here's the kicker: It's not like he doesn't have money to pay interns. Actually, he does, according to the New York Post - a $65,000 congressionally appropriated pot, for his particular office, for just that. Then he went and decided it would be better to get them for free, and, I suppose, use the money some other way, some pleasant way for him, I'm sure.
Like he wouldn't know better - just look at his official photo, contemplating to himself how he can exploit the interns.
Now he says the ads were all a mistake.
Had enough?
The Schumer & Pelosi show
Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the twin nutters of Congress, were certain they could beat Trump at his own game, but have made fools of themselves, as usual. The stand-off is not over but with each passing day, the Democrats reveal more of their anti-American, pro-illegal immigration agenda. Conservatives have been sounding the alarm for years: Democrats do not care about American citizens!
We are an annoying inconvenience, especially those of us who do not buy what they are selling. We vote against them, which makes them angry. They lash out at us, call us names, impugn our intelligence with fervor. All of the late-night comics, the Bill Mahers of the comedy branch of the entertainment industry, are especially venal. Jimmy Kimmel has decried those who have contributed to the GoFundMe page to fund the border wall as meth addicts. It was begun by a Vet, Brad Kolfage, who lost three limbs and it's raised nearly $15m.
It appears that Democratic members of Congress are as snowflakey as millennials on our university campuses. They assume that anyone who opposes their ridiculous socialist, genderless, climate-alarmist, virtue-signaling directives is a Neanderthal, unfit to have an opinion. It is then thoroughly acceptable to malign such people, those of us who oppose every aspect of their anti-America-as-founded agenda, in any and every disgusting manner they can devise.
The left is all about identity politics. They assign all of us to a group -- racial, class, and/or all of their fabricated gender categories. The right is all about individuals, their character, their talent, their contributions to society. We do not care about skin color, economic class or sexual orientation. We do care about good vs. evil, right vs. wrong. This makes us quite villainous in the eyes of the left for whom everything is relative. For example, we do not think poverty causes crime, unlearned values of Western Civilization do. Try to steal an election? It is moral if it takes out an opponent. We are, it appears, the left vs. the right, very different on a neurological level.
Schumer and Pelosi have armed guards whenever they are amongst the public. But they are both fervent in their quest to deny us the right to bear arms and to prevent a wall on the southern border to protect us from the flood of lethal drugs that flow into the US. They are impervious to the crimes of the barbaric gangs like MS13, no matter how many innocent Americans they kill. They do not give a thought to the many illegals from terrorist nations that also seek to enter the country on a daily basis. Schumer, Pelosi and their willing subjects in Congress ignore completely the horrific hazards that cross the border every day. They want cheap labor, no matter how many Americans are left jobless, and they want, more than anything, a dependent underclass whom they mean to give the right to vote. They already vote anyway, thanks to the Left's rejection of Common-sense voter ID.
If there were a television program based on Schumer and Pelosi, it would have to be a comedy; the two of them are so inept, so childish. They would be Dumb and Dumber redux. Each of them seems to believe they run the country and can dictate to the president how he will govern. They demand that Trump abandon the wall. They have no intention of compromising; they only want to deny Trump and his supporters what they want -- border security that works. So enraged, so benighted, by Trump's presidency, they would rather see us overrun by migrants from third-world nations, like those who have destroyed the UK, Germany, Sweden, and the rest of Europe, than protect America as a sovereign nation.
The "government shutdown" is just a ploy, many times overused by now, relatively meaningless to the lives of most Americans. The Schumer & Pelosi show will do everything they can to hype it as a disaster, but we all know it is nothing of the kind. Trump must hold out for funding of the wall.
While there have been some bad actors in our government in the past, Schumer and Pelosi are the worst of the worst. They are equally arrogant, each thoroughly ignorant of reality beyond the bubble of wealth and privilege they inhabit. They both believe themselves to be smarter than the rest of us, when in fact they are both really dim bulbs, long past their sell-by date. Yes, Pelosi is good at raising money; how and why is a mystery. That each of them is repeatedly re-elected does not say much for their constituents' familiarity with the Constitution, the law, American history or the facts in their own communities.
San Francisco, Pelosi's district is now a hell-hole but for her walled compound. New York too, like California, is a state that residents are fleeing as fast as they can. Both states have been destroyed by moonbatty leftists; high taxes, dumbing down of education for political purposes, and the sacrifice of common sense to global warming alarmists. Schumer and Pelosi have for years been on board with every silly attempt to restructure, to transform, American society. They both jumped on the Obama bandwagon the moment he was elected. Along with Obama, they are responsible for incalculable damage done to this country over the eight years of that administration. While their constant appearances on television are so often humorous (Pelosi's silly, practiced hand gestures and Schumer's relentless badgering of Trump), they are not one bit funny. They are just loathsome.
Photo credit: U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos
There are many reasons to build that border wall, as former Secretary of Education William Bennett said on Sunday:
The Gospel According to Nancy: No Borders, Kill Babies (UNLESS THEY'RE LA RAZA ANCHOR BABIES!)
Tucker Carlson pointed out a few days ago how the already insufferable leader of the Congressional Democrats has recently been "ordained….an archbishop in the church of progressive sanctimony." For a while now, Nancy Pelosi's been the country's expert on morality (e.g., border wall: immoral; abortion on demand: moral). She's now taken to telling the country how much she prays, and she's urging others to do it, too – at least that old sinner, Donald Trump. After last Thursday's televised squabble in the Oval Office, Pelosi shared with reporters how she told Trump she was praying for him and urged the president (whom she also called a "skunk" while ridiculing his manhood) to accept the Democrats' budget proposal with no funding for a border wall. "In fact," she said with stomach-turning piety, "I asked him to pray over it."
When a smug person ends an argument by telling you to "pray over it," she's really saying, "Ask God. He knows I'm right!"
Summarizing her and Chuck Schumer's meeting with Trump, she told the media, "I myself thought we should open the meeting with a prayer, which I did. I told him about King Solomon, when he was to become king of the Jews, he prayed to God, he said: 'I need you to give me great understanding and wisdom, Lord.'"
King Solomon is Pelosi's favorite Bible character, especially because he proposed solving a problem by cutting a baby in half.
Now Sister Nancy's praying for Trump to keep the government open so federal employees can finish their Christmas shopping.
It's an axiom that if a conservative says his faith informs his political decisions, he'll be condemned for establishing a state religion, while liberals get to veer back and forth over the church-state centerline as freely as those motorists who love to text while driving. Right now the liberal media are applauding the way Pelosi "schooled President Donald Trump about the Bible," but it's not clear why. It's not as if they're suddenly in favor of anyone being schooled in the Bible, especially anyone in a public classroom.
Pelosi never bats an eye without a political motive. This Saint Nancy act might be her attempt to occupy the spiritual high ground that, obviously, Donald Trump has shown no interest in occupying himself. Pelosi wouldn't dare try this with a president like George W. Bush, who, while he didn't boast about his piety on TV, was recognized as genuine in his Christian faith – prompting the left's usual reaction: Ross Douthat wrote in 2006 that "the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era."
Theology was less of an issue for liberals during the Obama years; he was their messiah, and they just worshiped him. Meantime, Obama conspicuously dissed orthodox Christians with everything from calculated snubs and criticism to gratuitously tormenting the Little Sisters of the Poor, all the while devotedly celebrating the unblemished virtues of Islam. In 2015, Hillary bluntly stated that "[d]eep-seated ... religious beliefs ... have to be changed" to accommodate the unlimited abortion license. Then, last year, Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez said it is "not negotiable" that "[e]very Democrat" support abortion. Pelosi tried to mitigate Perez's remarks by saying "of course" there's room for pro-lifers in the Democratic Party, but try to find one who's not actually voting Perez-style.
This year, Pelosi watched the Democrats lurch wildly to the extreme left. For decades before that, they were trusted allies in the left's war on conventional morality and religion (except Islam!) for being repressive, patriarchal, and counterrevolutionary. It may be that, alarmed that the Democrat brand has become too materialistic, amoral, and atheist, she thinks she can give it religion. Maybe she can draw an unfavorable comparison between the reprobate and undisciplined Donald Trump and herself: the "ardent, practicing Catholic," who exhorts the President to beg for "the great understanding and wisdom" that she (and Chuck Schumer?) have already been granted by God. Haven't Republicans marched under the banner of morality and Christian values long enough? Now that they've elected the unholy Trump, why can't the Democrats seize that banner for themselves?
For one thing, because no evangelical or conservative Catholic would ever buy it. Sure, the Democratic Party is crowded with Catholics, but the serious ones left years ago. The leading unserious Catholic is Pelosi herself, who professes her devotion to the faith but does it while living in open, willful defiance of the Church's crystal-clear teaching against abortion: "It is the teaching of the Catholic Church from the very beginning that the killing of an unborn child is always intrinsically evil and can never be justified."
When her duplicity threatened to become an issue in 2004, Pelosi pretended that, moved by her "ardent" devotion to the Church, she had been studying the Church's teaching on the beginning of life "a long time," and she stated falsely to Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press that the Church has never defined it. Asked when human life begins, she replied, "We don't know," and that "[t]he point is, that it shouldn't have an impact on the woman's right to choose" – the "it" being when a human life begins, which shouldn't have an impact on the decision to get an abortion. Easy mistake to make when your catechism is Roe v. Wade.
Later, when a reporter mentioned the Gosnell infanticides and challenged her own support for partial-birth abortion, an agitated Pelosi snarled back that "[a]s a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this[.] ... This shouldn't have anything to do with politics." But as a politician, she never stops talking about it, and the sacred ground she was talking about wasn't human life, but the exercise of a mother's "free will" to terminate her child. In response, New York's Cardinal Egan said, "Anyone who dares to defend that [the unborn] may be legitimately killed because another human being 'chooses' to do so or for any other equally ridiculous reason should not be providing leadership in a civilized democracy worthy of the name." Her own bishop reluctantly corrected her misstatements in a public letter, necessitated by "the widespread consternation among Catholics" of her deliberate distortions of Catholic doctrine. Pope Benedict counseled her, in person, on the Church's express teaching, "which enjoins all Catholics, and especially legislators," to protect "human life at all stages of its development." Pelosi, " the respectful Catholic" who presumed to tell Trump to pray for wisdom, emerged from thatmeeting no wiser for it, obtusely extolling the "Church's leadership in fighting poverty, hunger and global warming."
Jesus warned against hypocrites who make a public display of praying "that they may be seen by men." The way Pelosi pretends to exemplify "prayerful" politics, and the way she told Trump "in private" that she's praying for him – and immediately announced it in a televised press conference – is pure Pelosi: cynical, addlebrained, phony. If it might hurt Trump, she'll pontificate how every MS-13 killer retains a "spark of divinity," then goes right back to her life's work snuffing out that spark from 60 million innocents and counting. The Bible never says it's intrinsically evil to build a wall or protect a border, but it's still got that commandment against murder.
Let the Democrats canonize this Pharisee if they need a patron saint. Her feast day can fall on January 22.
T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.
Pelosi's Stake in Illegal Immigration
The Minuteman Project, founded by Jim Gilchrist (who is also the co-author of the book Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders), is made up of citizen volunteers who watch our border with Mexico and report illegal entry to the border patrol. For performing that thankless task in full compliance with the law, Gilchrist and his colleagues have been falsely maligned as fascists, racists, and even murderers. They have been driven off the speaker’s platform at Columbia University and vilified by Leftist politicians and their handmaidens in the liberal press.
So it was no surprise that the mainstream media chose to ignore a recent press release, issued by his publisher, in which Gilchrist asked the question about Nancy Pelosi’s ethics that should be on the minds of every law-abiding American – including those immigrants who are following the law to become citizens here the proper way: “Do we really need a House Speaker whose every action is calculated to enhance her own financial interests, instead of focusing on how porous borders will affect the security of everyday American citizens?”
Gilchrist did not stop there. He demanded an investigation into Pelosi’s “economic stake in just the kind of illegal alien exploitation that we deplore in Minutemen.” But you would never know it from the liberal media, who - while ignoring this demand - have had no compunctions in calling for Speaker Hastert’s head in the wake of the Foley page controversy.
Gilchrist was reacting to my report several weeks ago in FrontPage Magazine that Pelosi – who owns non-union vineyards in Napa Valley where grape-picking depends chiefly on the availability of cheap foreign labor – is doing everything she can to help open the floodgates to more illegal immigration. And she wants the American taxpayers to pay their way. As even more proof of this than I previously reported, Pelosi does not want employers like her to be required to pay the cost of illegal aliens’ hospital care. She voted against a bill that would make employers liable for the reimbursements if an undocumented employee seeks medical attention. And she voted in favor of rewarding illegal aliens from Mexico with Social Security benefits.
At the same time, Pelosi has led the Democratic opposition to any effective border controls or documentation requirements. She opposed the Secure Fence Act of 2006, signed into law by President Bush, and voted against final passage of a border security and enforcement bill in 2005 which required that all businesses must use an electronic system to check if all new hires have the legal right to work in this country. She voted against a bill to bar drivers' licenses for illegal aliens in 2005. This year she opposed legislation requiring presentation of a legitimate government-issued photo ID to prove eligibility to vote, claiming that “there is little evidence anywhere in the country of a significant problem with non-citizen voters.” She is dead wrong. For example, an accused terrorist by the name of Nuradin Abdi was just recently reported to have illegally registered to vote at the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Nuradin Abdi was indicted earlier this year as part of a conspiracy to blow up the Columbus Mall.
How many other terrorist suspects may have slipped through the system because Leftists like Pelosi oppose any meaningful screens? Instead she continues to advocate our recognition of the flimsy, non-validated ID card that the Mexican consulates provide to illegal aliens before they cross over our border, called the “matricula consular”, which gives them phony documentation to set up bank accounts, apply for jobs, obtain social benefits, board airplanes, identify themselves to police, enter buildings that require IDs, obtain drivers’ licenses and then perhaps use those drivers’ licenses to try to illegally register to vote in our elections.
Pelosi also believes in giving sanctuary to illegal aliens. She opposed legislation to deny federal homeland security funding to state and local governments who refuse to share information they learn about an individual's immigration status with Federal immigration authorities. Pelosi’s hometown of San Francisco is one of the sanctuary cities she voted to protect for the benefit of illegal aliens. Pelosi even voted against strengthening our immigration law with regard to the deportability of alien terrorists.
Jim Gilchrist cut to the chase with this devastating observation that the mainstream media does not want you to read:
"As we’ve shown again and again in ‘Minutemen,’ the Democrats aren’t just hypocrites, but are working actively to subvert our legislative system to their own ends. Their only goal is votes, votes and more votes, no matter where they come from, no matter if they’re cast legally, no matter whether the person casting them is dead, alive, a citizen or an illegal alien."
Pelosi sees Jim Gilchrist’s Minutemen Project as a threat to her pro-illegal alien agenda. More illegal aliens mean more votes for the Democrats and more grape-pickers for Napa Valley vineyards like hers. So she even voted against a measure that would have cut off the use of U.S. taxpayers’ funds to tip off illegal aliens as to where the Minutemen citizen patrols may be located! She obviously wants to see the Minutemen put out of business – permanently. She can count on the liberal press to distort the work of the Minutemen and to keep out of the public eye Gilchrist’s pointed questions about her motivations for helping illegal aliens during the run-up to the mid-term elections that may make her the next Speaker of the House.
Gilchrist, of course, is accustomed to being vilified and prevented by the Left from getting his message out. In early October, he was prevented from finishing his speech at the "Minutemen Forum" sponsored by the Columbia College Republicans. Gilchrist had spoken for just a few minutes and managed to utter the words “I love the First Amendment” when a group of radical protestors took the stage and interrupted him, displaying a big banner saying "There are no illegals." More protestors then stormed the stage. Chaos erupted and the audience members who had come to hear Gilchrist speak never got the chance, which was precisely the protestors’ objective. As reported online by the staff of Columbia’s undergraduate newspaper, “a mosh pit of triumphal students and community members danced and chanted outside, "Asian, Black, Brown and White, we smashed the Minutemen tonight!" They also put out a statement declaring:
“The Minutemen are not a legitimate voice in the debate on immigration. They are a racist, armed militia who have declared open hunting season on immigrants, causing countless hate crimes and over 3000 deaths on the border. Why should exploitative corporations have free passes between nations, but individual people not? No human being is illegal.” (Emphasis added)
We have come to the point in this country where a bunch of radical protestors get to decide who is and who is not a legitimate voice in the debate on as critical a public policy issue as immigration. Such Leftists think that migration in a borderless world is a basic human right. They want no barriers, no guards, and no proof of lawful residency. They certainly do not want the Minutemen watching the border and reporting illegal entry to the authorities.
Leftist slogans like “no human being is illegal” are red herrings. It is not the human being who is illegal; it is what the human being does that may be illegal. One’s conduct is the test, not simply who one is. Immigrants who follow our rules are welcome here. Those who do not abide by our laws have no right to be here. A person who breaks into your house without your permission does not deserve room, board and a job as a reward, even if the intruder may be much poorer than you. He has broken the law and deserves to be punished for what he has done. Our country’s boundaries and rules for entry and residency similarly define who is permitted to be here and how we choose to protect ourselves. We are a land of immigrants, but we are also a land of laws with certain core values. Those seeking to enter our country and remain here must learn to accommodate to our laws and values, not the other way around. That is the way prior generations of immigrants did it, including those who passed through Ellis Island. Why should the law be thrown aside now?
What we are witnessing is a frontal challenge to our nation’s sovereignty. Mexico’s Foreign Secretary wants to drag us before the United Nations for intending to build a fence on our side of the border with our money to keep out aliens who seek to enter our country illegally. They will probably get a sympathetic ear as some UN bureaucrats believe there should be no such thing as “illegal” immigrants in the first place. For the first time in our history, Americans are being asked to cede the right to decide how we define ourselves as a nation and protect our own borders to a globalist governance body. Will Pelosi lead her liberal loyalists as House Speaker to support the UN against America’s right to control its own borders? Do we really want to risk finding out?
It is high time, as Jim Gilchrist demanded in the press release ignored by the mainstream media, that Pelosi come clean under oath as to her personal stake in the illegal immigration issue before she can do even more damage as House Speaker.
President Lopez-Obrador and the Wall
Over the last few years, I've had conversations with friends in Mexico. We usually end up talking about the border. For us, the border is illegal immigration. For Mexicans, it's guns and cash corrupting a very fragile political system.
As a Mexican friend said recently, the cartels have the politicians in their pockets, especially in the small towns where many of these vans full of cash and guns drive through.
There are many reasons to build that border wall, as former Secretary of Education William Bennett said on Sunday: By weight, 86 percent of heroin that entered the United States in 2016 was of Mexican origin, according statistics from the Drug Enforcement Administration."After 9/11 we shut down the border. When we shut down the border, drugs didn't come in," Bennett said. "If you shut down that border, if you close it off, if you build a wall, it can have a real and profound difference."
There is another reason, as any rational Mexican will tell you.
On a weekly basis, lots of cash and guns go south. They are the profits and rewards of the drugs going north. According to unofficial estimates:
Officials in Mexico believe the tide of laundered money could be as high as $50bn per year, a sum equal to about three per cent of Mexico's legitimate economy -- more than all its oil exports or spending on key social programmes. Internationally, money laundering represents between two and five per cent of global GDP, or between $800bn and $2tn annually, according to the UNODC.
It would be more difficult for money or guns to go south if you had a wall on the border.
So President Trump should pick up the phone and call President Lopez-Obrador. He should thank him for keeping the caravans in Mexico and discuss the benefits of the border wall. Why wouldn't the Mexican president support the wall? I'm sure that the Mexican army and police would love to see that wall go up.
The lack of a stable border hurts both sides.
PS: You can listen to my show (Canto Talk) and follow me on Twitter.
THE PHONY 'CRISES' OF PROGRESSIVES
Manufacturing a crisis to expand power.
December 26, 2018
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
In November 2008, President-elect Obama’s chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel signaled the new administration’s progressive sensibility when he said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” For an ideology impatient with the rules of political change and democratic persuasion, the urgency of alleged crises creates powerful opportunities for politicians to suspend those rules and bypass the process of deliberation in which citizens exercise their autonomy and sovereignty.
Emanuel’s progressive intent becomes clearer if we see its relationship to progressive psychologist William James’ famous metaphor, “the moral equivalent of war.” There are serious social-political battles to fight, the implication goes, and it’s the moral duty of everyone to fight for the right side. In the case of progressives, the right side is the “arc of history” progressively bending toward greater “social justice” and equality, but impeded by the superstitious, the greedy, the unenlightened, and the evil.
Delve deeper into James’ metaphor and you see its sinister dimensions. Heraclitus said, “War is the father and king of all: some he has made gods, and some men; some slaves and some free.” War is the original creative destruction, in which fortune can turn in mere minutes. As such war often demands that the machinery of consensual government be compromised. The demands of war––the need for rapid mobilization, provision of matériel, and decisions and actions whose success relies on decisiveness and speed–– has led even constitutional states to provide for an office or executive that can be temporarily allowed expanded power.
The powers of the ancient Roman office of dictator, or the extra-constitutional scope given to our commanders-in-chief during wartime, speaks to the unique circumstances that war creates. But the example of Julius Caesar illustrates as well the dangers of giving one man too much power. Appointed dictator for a year, Caesar had his term eventually extended to life. During his tenure Caesar encroached on and abused the constitutional powers of other Republican institutions. And at the time of his assassination, he was rumored to be planning on becoming a king.
The American Founders were obsessed with excessive power creating a tyrant. Caesar was their model of what to avoid, and his assassins like Cato and Brutus, the models to emulate. They designated the president the “commander-in-chief” in recognition of the necessity of concentrating power in times of conflict. But they gave the power of declaring war to the Senate. And fearing a successful, charismatic general like Caesar, who commanded the military means to achieve his ambitions, they subordinated military power to civilian authority.
The Founders limited presidential power for good reasons. History and their own experience with George III had taught them that “power is of an encroaching nature,” and that no man no matter now virtuous or noble, is beyond corruption by power. That’s what made Washington’s resignation of his commission after the Revolutionary War, and his refusal to run for a third presidential term, so remarkable and unprecedented. As George III himself said when told Washington would resign his commission, “If he does that he will be the greatest man in the world!”
Now we can see a major reason why progressives want to dismantle the Constitutional order: its limits on power hinder them from fulfilling their utopian schemes. Before he became president, Woodrow Wilson decried the institutionalized balance and separation of powers for the impediments it put on a visionary “leader of men” who could more efficiently discern what’s best for the citizenry and how to achieve it. Sounding suspiciously like the “messianic great leader” of many an autocracy, Wilson extolled a leader who possessed:
Such sympathetic and penetrating insight as shall enable him to discern quite unerringly the motive which move them in the mass . . . it only needs what it is that lies waiting to be stirred in the minds and purposes of groups and masses of men. Besides, it is not sympathy that serves but a sympathy whose power is to command, to command by knowing its instrument . . . The competent leader of men cares little for the interior niceties of other people’s characters . . . [except] for the external uses to which they may be put. His will seeks the line of least resistance; but the whole question with him is a question of the application of force. There are men to be moved: how shall he move them?
Such a leader should not be hindered by limits on his power, especially the division of the legislative from the executive branch of government. The president, as Wilson complained, should not be just “empowered to veto bad laws,” but “given the opportunity to make good ones.”
That Wilsonian ambition to “move men” to do what he wanted, and to “make good laws” was realized during Obama’s presidency, during which he used his “phone and pen” to circumvent Congress, issuing executive orders, signing letters, and other executive agency intrusions into the Article 1 law-making powers given to Congress.
And don’t forget his White House bureaucrat Cass Sunstein’s concept of the “nudge,” a kinder, gentler way of making voters do what you want through rewards and hidden persuasion–– the 21st century “soft despotism” answer to Wilson’s questions about how to “move people in the mass.” Of course, this implies what Wilson at least was honest about: that the “leader” knows what’s best for everybody else, and sees the machinery of representative government as being too slow or inefficient to achieve progressive ambitions for “improving” society or furthering “social justice.”
The “moral equivalent of war” metaphor also suggests other arguments for bypassing the Constitutional order. Like war, crises demand speedy action that democratic assemblies, deliberation, legislative procedures, and mechanisms of institutional accountability make difficult. And if crises aren’t available? As James’ metaphor implies, they can be created by one faction’s self-interested interpretation or exaggerations of the risks and dangers of inaction. When lives are at stake, the “urgency of now,” as Obama was fond of quoting Martin Luther King, makes adhering to the niceties of constitutional procedure dangerous as well as inefficient.
It’s not surprising, then, that for a century, progressives have exploited real crises, such as the Depression and two world wars, to increase the number and scope of intrusive executive branch powers. Several of the federal offices that Wilson created to manage World War I, for example, were refurbished for FDR’s New Deal, the greatest expansion of federal power up to then. But faux crises have been manufactured to achieve the same end.
No example is more revealing of this link between “crisis” and the expansion of federal and state power into business and private life than “climate change,” the meaningless euphemism for what used to be called “global warming,” itself shorthand for “catastrophic man-caused global warming.” The Fourth National Climate Assessment released last month is typical of the near half-century of hysterical predictions of civilization-ending catastrophe that conveniently will occur after this generation has passed on. And even as the free market has developed new technologies like fracking that have reduced carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S.--in 2017, 0.5% compared to the green EU’s rise of 1.5%--the climate-catastrophe industrial complex continues to call for more subsidies for “green” energy, and more Draconian reductions in carbon-based energy. Why would they do that? Because solving the climate “crisis” requires an expansion of government’s size, scope, and power to intrude into our lives, ability to appropriate our money, and create further limits on our autonomy.
Finally, just as during war we have seen Constitutional rights temporarily suspended, as Lincoln did habeas corpusduring the Civil War, or as Wilson did free speech rights during World War I, so too the progressives have been eager to limit our rights in order to keep such “obsolete and indefensible notions,” as progressive historian Charles Beard over a century ago described natural rights, from interfering with the progressives’ implementation of their utopian ambitions. So today we see calls to limit the First Amendment’s rights protecting speech and religion, or the Second’s right to keep and bear arms.
Our Constitutional mechanisms by design are cumbersome because the Founders’ primary aim was to defend political freedom, both of individuals and the states, from a centralized and concentrated power that inevitably seeks to expand at the expense of freedom. That’s why the progressives want to dismantle the Constitution’s checks and balances that limit power, and in the name of efficiency, justice, and equality, empower and expand technocratic elites who supposedly know better than individuals, families, communities, and the market what’s best.
We need to beware the hysterical cries that “something must be done!” about the “crisis” du jour. For when the crisis passes, more of our freedom will have gone with it.
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