- The exoneration of
the Clinton crime family
August 9, 2017
Trump's
Unintended Consequences: The Unmasking of the Deep State
The term "Deep State" unleashes many
paranoid fantasies. Movies and spy stories abound about the existence of
dark, nefarious forces from our government aligned against us. But as
Joseph Heller once wrote, "Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they
aren't after you." One of the more disturbing revelations after
Trump's win was finding that these dark forces not only exist, but are powerful
and seemingly out of control.
"Deep State" is hard to define,
because it is composed of overlapping groups and individuals with complex and
differing agendas. It's an amalgam of people, agencies, and bureaucrats
that changes. The current leakers are part of it. For now, let's
say it's a mostly unelected, mostly leftist group within our government that
wants to govern us against the will of America's founding principles.
These people want the final say over our Republic. They want to rule, and
they form part of a powerful alliance against the current administration and
its voters. The one thing we can be thankful for is that they are showing
themselves to us in a way that should anger Americans of all political
persuasions. In the end, that's what we might hope for.
"Big Brother" was the term Orwell used
for the totalitarian presence of 1984 . We are not
there. Maybe not even close. But the problem of the Deep State is
that there seem to be those who want the kind of power Orwell described, the
kind of power the Soviets had, or the East Germans. It's likely that many
Deep-Staters don't even realize just how power-mad they have become.
Here is a small list with their fingerprints on
it:
- The unmasking and subsequent takedown of General Michael
Flynn
- The daily leaks designed to impede or
embarrass the Trump administration
- The unmasking of hundreds of private
citizens working with the Trump campaign as reported by Circa News
- The bogus "Trump dossier"
- The bogus Trump-Russian collusion narrative.
- The unseemly collusion between Robert
Mueller and James Comey
- The seeming insanity of Mueller probing a
nonexistent crime
- The exoneration of the Clinton crime family
- The IRS targeting conservative groups
And lots more.
What we are watching is a group using power willfully,
wrongfully, and oftentimes illegally to undermine and destroy political
opponents. They are after somebody. For
real. From this list, we can surmise that their opponents appear to be
those of us on the center-right. And to those of you on the left who
don't know: This happened, and it's happening. You can pretend it's not
so, but it is.
Okay, some of you are tuning out. This
can't happen here, it's tinfoil hat stuff, the left really isn't that bad,
you're being overly paranoid, blah, blah, blah. Sorry, but this is
seriously bad stuff.
I recall back when the PATRIOT Act was passed,
noting a comment by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. He said powers to
surveil, and powers that could cross the lines of the bad guys' civil
liberties, were well and good, but in the wrong hands, those powers could and
would be misused.
Well, he was right. At the time, I
considered his fears over the top, but I was wrong. The history of the human race is littered with
tyrants who concentrated and misused power. The genius of the American system adopted
by the founding fathers was limiting and decentralizing government in a way to
protect our citizenry against this kind of tyranny. Systems were put in
place to check, balance, and limit the things that could be done by the
government against its people. The Bill of Rights is directed at that
problem. These rights were called inalienable, the natural and normal
rights given to us by God, not by our government. These were to be our
birthright as a nation. It's one of the many reasons our country has been
great and can be great again.
We have had bad players in our government, we
have made lots of mistakes and done wrong things as a nation, but what we are
seeing played out now is simply unprecedented. There is a quote attributed to Valerie
Jarrett, Obama adviser-enforcer and all-around bad human, that goes like this:
After we win this election, it's our
turn. Payback time. Everyone not with us is against us, and they
better be ready, because we don't forget. The ones who helped us will be
rewarded; the ones who opposed us will get what they deserve. There is
going to be hell to pay. Congress won't be a problem for us this time.
No election to worry about after this is over.
Let me say, there is no proof she said
this. But one thing that is real for sure is that much of what they did
in that administration, with her help, was to institutionalize those ideas as
their operating manual. The IRS scandal targeting conservative donors and
conservative organizations was a perfect example. Read the horrifying
story in Forbes of what happened to Catherine Engelbrecht if you think this
didn't happen. A terrible line had been crossed. Had she been a
liberal, we would hear her name for forty years or more.
This was just the tip of the iceberg. The
left has weaponized the bureaucracies and agencies it inhabits. Leftists
have decided they will become the dominant culture in the CIA, FBI, NSA, IRS,
EPA, and the rest of our bureaucracies. They decided it's okay to be totalitarian,
it's okay to break the law, it's okay to go after their political opponents
with the force of government, it's okay because they are the ones who deserve
to win. The Deep State running
rampant is fine, as long as they run it. From Valerie Jarrett to Barack
Obama to James Clapper and James Comey, they all visibly overstepped their
rightful boundaries. They are proof of the saying that power corrupts,
and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Make no mistake: the prior administration went
rampant. The Deep
State did not originate with them, but they
stocked it with their
cronies. They stocked it with people of
similar left-leaning ideas, with similar left-leaning willingness to misuse
power. The Deep State became a weapon of intimidation and a deep abuser
of power. Thank God Hillary was
not there to take the baton.
So here we are, with the Deep State running
amok. They are aligned with
the Obamap-Clinton machine; they are generally in sync with the Obama-Clinton
goals. None of us knows exactly
how this works, who sets the agenda, or who has the capacity to give direction,
but it is real. We do know that many of the media are there to help, we
do know that most of the Democratic Party apparatus is there to help, and we do
know some of the players. We also know that most of the Democrat base,
and many of the party's voters, are naïvely on board, too. We may not
understand the mechanism, but we do know that the Deep State has become the
vanguard of the left's civil war, and it is not fictional.
They are self-motivated with a set of
goals. Get rid of Trump if they can. Get Trump's base to be
embarrassed of him or depressed if they can. Make certain that Trump
cannot succeed. Make certain his hands are tied in ways to make him less
effective. If nothing else, slow his progress to a snail's pace while
they marshal better forces.
The stupid party (Republicans), as usual, has no
clue. Too many Republicans just think this is normal or haven't the
stomach to fight. Heck, many of them are traitorously helping to take
down what their own voters and standard-bearer want to achieve. The
Democratic Party is fractured and has no idea how wrong this is (yet), and it
only helps parrot the talking points of its Deep State allies. Democrats
have no idea of the backlash they are creating toward themselves.
There is no distinct winner at this point.
But the battle is joined. It is clear that the Deep State intends
to continue using all its power to stop Trump, and to prevent a return to
checks and balances and limited government.
One important note: they are not winning.
The media may make it appear that they are, but they're not. Trump, his
administration and allies, and his voting base intend on continuing the fight
and winning. This is the major part of "draining the swamp."
The battle is in the balance, will last for years, and there are a lot of
reasons to believe that the Deep State will lose. One of the great
unintended consequences of Trump's win: They have been unmasked.
Push back hard enough, and they will lose.
They deserve to.
DEATH BY CORRUPTION:
What caused the destruction of the Democrat Party in
America?
Trump’s biggest mistake – not going after Hillary
When Donald Trump said he would not pursue
legal action against Hillary Clinton after he won the election, the majority of
his supporters were not happy. After all, what Hillary, her family. and the Clinton Foundation actually did, or were
accused of doing through credible evidence, was
obviously criminal.
Fast forward to today and the onslaught of
false Russian collusion accusations against President Trump and it is obvious
why not going after Hillary was a huge mistake.
After the election there always seems to be,
there is a kind of political vacuum period. It is usually called a honeymoon
for a newly elected president. Unfortunately, this period of time is mostly
controlled by the media.
In most cases this period is filled with
relatively positive and generally inquisitive news from the media about a new
president’s agenda, who he is putting together his team and figuring out
how he plans to implement his policies. There is often positive news during
this period about the new first family and how they will perform in their new
public role. But in the case of President Trump, it was abundantly clear after
a mostly vicious political battle between the Trump and Hillary. that there was
only one candidate eligible to be granted a honeymoon period by the liberal news
media – Hillary Clinton. And if Donald Trump were to actually win the election,
as he did, there be hell to pay. Welcome to Hell President Trump.
There is no way Donald Trump or any of his
political advisors couldn’t have seen this coming. And if there was any doubt
at all by Trump and his team that they would not get a traditional presidential
honeymoon, the hundreds of anti-Trump political rallies (more like violent
riots) across America calling for “resistance” to President Trump should have
been enough to erase any and all doubts. Not to mention the immediate
wall-to-wall negative liberal media coverage that began the day after the
election.
Donald Trump’s gut instinct to appoint a
special prosecutor to go after Hillary Clinton and her family foundation was
spot-on. Trump specifically promised America during a debate that he would do
this. As a business
man who is also well acquainted with
politics, Trump instinctively knew that
defeating
Hillary Clinton at the polls would not
stop the
attacks by the media, and that he needed
to stay on
offense and try to finish off Hillary
and the entire
Clinton political machine for good.
But Donald Trump did something he rarely
ever does – he went against his gut instinct; blowing his chance to fill the
political void with something he knew would eventually benefit his presidency.
Trump knew that that something to fill the political void was a legitimate
criminal investigation of actual crimes that had been committed by Hillary
Clinton.
Trump’s decision to let Hillary off the
hook could probably be chalked up as political naiveté – basically wishful
thinking on his part that the liberal media would see it as a peace offering
and reward him with a presidential honeymoon period. Fat chance! Donald Trump’s
political naiveté on this matter was and still is a huge disappointment to his
supporters.
The liberal media must have been ecstatic
when they realized Donald Trump was giving Hillary a total pass on her criminal
activity. The liberal media knew they had just been given a golden opportunity
to unleash relentless negative attacks on President Trump the likes of which
have never before been seen in American history. The liberal media happily gave
Donald Trump something for winning the election - a nightmare he will never
forget - a nightmare that has yet to end and will continue on for the next
four years if the liberal media continues to get their way.
When Trump announced that he would not
pursue legal charges against Hillary, the liberal media took that opportunity
and quickly filled the post-election political void with a manufactured story
of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in hopes of destroying the Trump
presidency before it could even get off the ground. That political void is now
so full of Russian collusion stories that President Trump’s agenda and
accomplishments are virtually unknowable by the average American citizen –
unless of course they watch Fox News, follow conservative web media or listen
to Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk-radio.
So what defense does President Trump, his
political team, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the conservative airwaves offer
against the Russian Trump collusion story? They tell whoever will listen that
Hillary Clinton actually did break the law. Seriously? So now President Trump
and his supporters want to prosecute Hillary Clinton after Trump said he
wouldn’t pursue legal action against her? Well that train has left the
station. The
golden
opportunity to take down Hillary and the
entire
Clinton machine was passed over by the
president
himself. And even if Trump now tries to revisit
Hillary’s criminal activities through lawful means, his efforts will be branded
as nothing but a political distraction to try and cover up the liberal media
driven fake Russian Trump collusion story.
Had President Trump honored his promise
and pursued a broad criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton and her family
foundation immediately after he was inaugurated the exact opposite could be
happening in the media right now. The political void that is now filled with
Russian Trump collusion stories could
have been
filled with criminal investigation
stories of Hillary
and her family foundation, collusion
between the
media and the Hillary campaign against
Bernie
Sanders, collusion between Hillary and
Russia
regarding the uranium deal and the
kick-backs to
the Clinton Foundation and Bill Clinton
personally
and probably much more. Had Donald Trump followed his
initial gut instinct and gone after Hillary and her family the tables would
have been turned on Democrats and the liberal media and the fake news about any
Russian Trump collusion would have been branded by the Trump administration and
conservative media as a political distraction by Democrats and the liberal
media in an attempt to cover-up investigations into actual crimes committed by
Hillary Clinton and her family.
So what can President Trump possibly do to
turn the tide against the Democrats and liberal media?
How about instead of using Hillary’s
criminal activities as a defense against the fake news Russian Trump collusion
narrative the Trump administration actually investigates her? If they are so
certain she’s guilty then enforce the damn law! And maybe, just maybe, if
President Trump urges AG Sessions to empanel a grand jury and re-open the
investigation into Hillary Clinton right now, the facts concerning her criminal
activity in the news might be enough to quell the Democrats and liberal media
zealot’s agenda and get them to ease up on pushing fake news and begin covering
news that matters to the forgotten men and women of this great country.
When Donald Trump said he would not pursue
legal action against Hillary Clinton after he won the election, the majority of
his supporters were not happy. After all, what Hillary, her family. and the
Clinton Foundation actually did, or were accused of doing through credible
evidence, was obviously criminal.
Fast forward to today and the onslaught of
false Russian collusion accusations against President Trump and it is obvious
why not going after Hillary was a huge mistake.
After the election, as there always seems
to be, there is a kind of political vacuum period. It is usually called a
honeymoon for a newly elected president. Unfortunately, this period of time is
mostly controlled by the media.
In most cases this period is filled with
relatively positive and generally inquisitive news from the media about a new
president’s agenda, who he is putting together his team and figuring out
how he plans to implement his policies. There is often positive news during
this period about the new first family and how they will perform in their new
public role. But in the case of President Trump, it was abundantly clear after
a mostly vicious political battle between the Trump and Hillary. that there was
only one candidate eligible to be granted a honeymoon period by the liberal
news media – Hillary Clinton. And if Donald Trump were to actually win the
election, as he did, there be hell to pay. Welcome to Hell President Trump.
There is no way Donald Trump or any of his
political advisors couldn’t have seen this coming. And if there was any doubt
at all by Trump and his team that they would not get a traditional presidential
honeymoon, the hundreds of anti-Trump political rallies (more like violent
riots) across America calling for “resistance” to President Trump should have
been enough to erase any and all doubts. Not to mention the immediate
wall-to-wall negative liberal media coverage that began the day after the
election.
ut instinct to appoint a special
prosecutor to go after Hillary Clinton and her family foundation was spot-on.
Trump specifically promised America during a debate that he would do this. As a
business man who is also well acquainted with politics, Trump instinctively
knew that defeating Hillary Clinton at the polls would not stop the attacks by
the media, and that he needed to stay on offense and try to finish off Hillary
and the entire Clinton political machine for good.
But Donald Trump did something he rarely ever
does – he went against his gut instinct; blowing his chance to fill the
political void with something he knew would eventually benefit his presidency.
Trump knew that that something to fill the political void was a legitimate
criminal investigation of actual crimes that had been committed by Hillary
Clinton.
Trump’s decision to let Hillary off the
hook could probably be chalked up as political naiveté – basically wishful
thinking on his part that the liberal media would see it as a peace offering
and reward him with a presidential honeymoon period. Fat chance! Donald Trump’s
political naiveté on this matter was and still is a huge disappointment to his
supporters.
The liberal media must have been ecstatic
when they realized Donald Trump was giving Hillary a total pass on her criminal
activity. The liberal media knew they had just been given a golden opportunity
to unleash relentless negative attacks on President Trump the likes of which
have never before been seen in American history. The liberal media happily gave
Donald Trump something for winning the election - a nightmare he will never
forget - a nightmare that has yet to end and will continue on for the next
four years if the liberal media continues to get their way.
When Trump announced that he would not
pursue legal charges against Hillary, the liberal media took that opportunity
and quickly filled the post-election political void with a manufactured story
of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in hopes of destroying the Trump
presidency before it could even get off the ground. That political void is now
so full of Russian collusion stories that President Trump’s agenda and
accomplishments are virtually unknowable by the average American citizen –
unless of course they watch Fox News, follow conservative web media or listen
to Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk-radio.
So what defense does President Trump, his
political team, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the conservative airwaves offer
against the Russian Trump collusion story? They tell whoever will listen that
Hillary Clinton actually did break the law. Seriously? So now President Trump
and his supporters want to prosecute Hillary Clinton after Trump said he
wouldn’t pursue legal action against her? Well that train has left the station.
The golden opportunity to take down Hillary and the entire Clinton machine was
passed over by the president himself. And even if Trump now tries to revisit
Hillary’s criminal activities through lawful means, his efforts will be branded
as nothing but a political distraction to try and cover up the liberal media
driven fake Russian Trump collusion story.
Had President Trump honored his promise
and pursued a broad criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton and her family
foundation immediately after he was inaugurated the exact opposite could be
happening in the media right now. The political void that is now filled with
Russian Trump collusion stories could have been filled with criminal
investigation stories of Hillary and her family foundation, collusion between the
media and the Hillary campaign against Bernie Sanders, collusion between
Hillary and Russia regarding the uranium deal and the kick-backs to the Clinton
Foundation and Bill Clinton personally and probably much more. Had Donald Trump
followed his initial gut instinct and gone after Hillary and her family the
tables would have been turned on Democrats and the liberal media and the fake
news about any Russian Trump collusion would have been branded by the Trump
administration and conservative media as a political distraction by Democrats
and the liberal media in an attempt to cover-up investigations into actual
crimes committed by Hillary Clinton and her family.
So what can President Trump possibly do to
turn the tide against the Democrats and liberal media?
How about instead of using Hillary’s
criminal activities as a defense against the fake news Russian Trump collusion
narrative the Trump administration actually investigates her? If they are so
certain she’s guilty then enforce the damn law! And maybe, just maybe, if
President Trump urges AG Sessions to empanel a grand jury and re-open the
investigation into Hillary Clinton right now, the facts concerning her criminal
activity in the news might be enough to quell the Democrats and liberal media
zealot’s agenda and get them to ease up on pushing fake news and begin covering
news that matters to the forgotten men and women of this great country.
HILLARY & BILLARY: Their Looting of
the Poor of Haiti
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly
spent in “public service” into admission into the upper stratosphere of
American wealth, with incomes in the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of
this vast wealth was a political machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton,
Inc.” This consists essentially of a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure
big business support for the Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their
personal fortunes. The basic components of the operation are lavishly paid
speeches to Wall Street and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate campaign contributions,
and donations to the ostensibly philanthropic Clinton Foundation.”
THE CLINTON GLOBAL
PARTNERSHIP WITH MUSLIM DICTATORS TO LOOT THE POOR
THE PHONY CLINTON FOUNDATION… FUNDED BY
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS, MUSLIM DICTATORS, CRIMINAL BILLIONAIRES….
THE SAVE CHELSEA CLINTON MOVEMENT
Chelsea lives in a $11 million dollar New
York City condo her parents bought with their bribes for speeches money.
The Clinton phony charity foundation has
paid out less than $9 million out of the hundreds of millions they have sucked
in from Obama’s crony banksters, Muslim dictators whom Hillary served as
Secretary of State and criminal billionaires Billary has long known on a first
name basis.
CLINTON’S ENTIRE POLITICAL LIFE HAS
BEEN A CESSPOOL OF SELF-SERVING
CORRUPTION!
HILLARY CLINTON: SERVANT TO (paying)
DICTATORS
HER PUTIN CONNECTION
"Secondly, for eight years Russian
businesses and businessmen closely aligned with Putin pumped millions into the
Clinton Foundation slush fund, paid her husband a half-million dollars for a
single speech, and got in return a substantial portion of our uranium assets
when, as Secretary of State, Hillary okayed their purchase."
HILLARY AND OBOMB’S DIRTY SAUDIS
DICTATORS…. How much as she sucked in?
MUSLIM
THE
CLINTONS SERVE THEIR 9-11 INVADING SAUDIS PAYMASTERS!
DANCING
WITH DICTATORS.... BOTH THE CLINTONS ARE EXPERT DANCERS!
“Facilitating strategic technology
transfer in return for money is an old Clinton game. The Chinese bought
their way to access of considerable space technology when Bill Clinton was
president. Remember Charlie Trie, Loral, and the rest of the crew?”
AND THEIR BRIBES JUST KEPT ROLLING……..
HILLARY & BILLARY AND RED CHINA!
“Facilitating strategic technology
transfer in return for money is an old Clinton game. The Chinese bought
their way to access of considerable space technology when Bill Clinton was
president. Remember Charlie Trie, Loral, and the rest of the crew?”
THE PROMISE TO EVERY INVADING
ILLEGAL: JOBS, UNDERGROUND TAX-FREE
ECONOMY, "FREE" GRINGO MEDICAL, ALL
THE WELFARE YOU WANT FOR YOUR
ANCHOR BABIES!
HERITAGE FOUNDATION:
Amnesty would add 100 million more illegals and cost Legals trillions!
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama
administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices
Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington
Times
" A Mexican illegal alien allegedly raped a girl in Kansas in September
after being deported ten times in the past six years alone, according to
reports."
"Republicans
should call for lower immigration to stop the Democrat voter recruitment.
But more importantly, all Americans should call for lower immigration in order
to offer a better opportunity of finding jobs for those millions of their
fellow Americans of all political persuasions who would like to work."
“What we're
seeing is our Congress and national leadership dismantling our laws by not
enforcing them. Lawlessness becomes the norm, just like Third World
corruption. Illegal aliens now have more rights and privileges than
Americans. If you are an illegal alien, you can drive a car without
a driver's license or insurance. You may obtain medical care without
paying. You may work without paying taxes. Your children enjoy free
education at the expense of taxpaying Americans.”
“Part of the problem, Santorum said, has
been the arrival of
millions of unskilled immigrants — legal
and illegal — in the
United States. "American workers
deserve a shot at [good] jobs,"
Santorum said. "Over the last 20
years, we have brought into this
country, legally and illegally, 35
MILLION mostly unskilled
workers. And the result, over that same
period of time, workers'
wages and family incomes have
flatlined." SEN. RICK SANTORUM
In the July/August version of the Atlantic ,
columnist Peter Beinart wrote an article titled, “How the Democrats Lost Their
Way on Immigration.”
“The next Democratic presidential
candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who
must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented
population to zero.”
inart, a frequent contributor to
the New York Times , New York Review of Books , Haaretz ,
and former editor of the New Republic , blames immigration for
deteriorating social conditions for the American working class: The supposed
“costs” of immigration, he says, “strain the very welfare state that liberals
want to expand in order to help those native-born Americans with whom
immigrants compete.”
Illustration by Lincoln Agnew*
The myth, which liberals like myself
find tempting, is that only the right has changed. In June 2015, we tell
ourselves, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and pretty soon
nativism, long a feature of conservative politics, had engulfed it. But that’s
not the full story. If the right has grown more nationalistic, the left has
grown less so. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways
that would shock many progressives today.
Listen to the audio version of this article: Download the
Audm app for
your iPhone to listen to more titles. In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks
havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of
law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a
liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers
who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants
is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of
low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see
Mexican flags waved at proimmigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush
of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate
with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”
The blogger was Glenn
Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.
Prominent liberals didn’t
oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s
economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented.
Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages
of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they
were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman
put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic
principles in conflict.”
Today, little of that
ambivalence remains. In 2008, the Democratic platform called undocumented
immigrants “our neighbors.” But it also warned, “We cannot continue to allow
people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked,”
adding that “those who enter our country’s borders illegally, and those who
employ them, disrespect the rule of the law.” By 2016, such language was gone.
The party’s platform described America’s immigration system as a problem, but
not illegal immigration itself. And it focused almost entirely on the forms of
immigration enforcement that Democrats opposed. In its immigration section, the
2008 platform referred three times to people entering the country “illegally.”
The immigration section of the 2016 platform didn’t use the word illegal ,
or any variation of it, at all.“A decade or two ago,” says Jason Furman, a
former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, “Democrats
were divided on immigration. Now everyone agrees and is passionate and thinks
very little about any potential downsides.” How did this come to be?
There are
several explanations for liberals’ shift. The first is that they have
changed because the reality on the ground has changed, particularly as regards
illegal immigration. In the two decades preceding 2008, the United States
experienced sharp growth in its undocumented population. Since then, the
numbers have leveled off.
But this alone doesn’t explain the transformation. The number of
undocumented people in the United States hasn’t gone down significantly, after
all; it’s stayed roughly the same. So the economic concerns that Krugman raised
a decade ago remain relevant today.
What’s Wrong With the Democrats? A larger explanation is political. Between
2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing
Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. To win the presidency,
Democrats convinced themselves, they didn’t need to reassure white people
skeptical of immigration so long as they turned out their Latino base. “The
fastest-growing sector of the American electorate stampeded toward the
Democrats this November,” Salon declared after Obama’s 2008
win. “If that pattern continues, the GOP is doomed to 40 years of wandering in
a desert.”As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more
influenced by pro-immigrant activism. While Obama was running for reelection,
immigrants’-rights advocates launched protests against the administration’s
deportation practices; these protests culminated, in June 2012, in a sit-in at
an Obama campaign office in Denver. Ten days later, the administration
announced that it would defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who
had arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16 and met various other criteria.
Obama, The New York Times noted, “was facing growing pressure
from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh
immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be
crucial voters in his race for re-election.”
Alongside pressure from
pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the
Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import
workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of
companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation,
formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration
policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us
to promote a similar agenda.
This combination of Latino
and corporate activism made it perilous for Democrats to discuss immigration’s
costs, as Bernie Sanders learned the hard way. In July 2015, two months after
officially announcing his candidacy for president, Sanders was interviewed by
Ezra Klein, the editor in chief of Vox . Klein asked whether, in
order to fight global poverty, the U.S. should consider “sharply raising the
level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders.” Sanders
reacted with horror. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he scoffed. He went on
to insist that “right-wing people in this country would love … an open-border
policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be
great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this
country.”
Progressive commentators
routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s
benefits. There isn’t.Sanders came under immediate attack. Vox ’s
Dylan Matthews declared that his “fear of immigrant labor is ugly—and
wrongheaded.” The president of FWD.us accused Sanders of “the sort of
backward-looking thinking that progressives have rightly moved away from in the
past years.” ThinkProgress published a blog post titled “Why
Immigration Is the Hole in Bernie Sanders’ Progressive Agenda.” The senator, it
argued, was supporting “the idea that immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking
jobs and hurting the economy, a theory that has been proven incorrect.”Sanders
stopped emphasizing immigration’s costs. By January 2016, FWD.us’s policy
director noted with satisfaction that he had “evolved on this issue.”
But has the claim that
“immigrants coming to the U.S. are taking jobs” actually been proved
“incorrect”? A decade ago, liberals weren’t so sure. In 2006, Krugman wrote
that America was experiencing “large increases in the number of low-skill
workers relative to other inputs into production, so it’s inevitable that this
means a fall in wages.”
It’s hard to imagine a
prominent liberal columnist writing that sentence today. To the contrary,
progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus
among economists on immigration’s benefits.(Illustration by Lincoln Agnew.
Photos: AFP; Atta Kenare; Eric Lafforgue; Gamma-Rapho; Getty; Keystone-France;
Koen van Weel; Lambert; Richard Baker / In Pictures / Corbis)There isn’t.
According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their
skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced
increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage
reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face
pressures to support immigration.
Many of the immigration
scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding
from, pro-immigration businesses and associations. Consider, for instance,
Giovanni Peri, an economist at UC Davis whose name pops up a lot in liberal
commentary on the virtues of immigration. A 2015 New York Times
Magazine essay titled “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing
Immigrant” declared that Peri, whom it called the “leading scholar” on how
nations respond to immigration, had “shown that immigrants tend to
complement—rather than compete against—the existing work force.” Peri is indeed
a respected scholar. But Microsoft has funded some of his research into
high-skilled immigration. And New American Economy paid to help him turn his
research into a 2014 policy paper decrying limitations on the H-1B visa
program. Such grants are more likely the result of his scholarship than their
cause. Still, the prevalence of corporate funding can subtly influence which
questions economists ask, and which ones they don’t. (Peri says grants like
those from Microsoft and New American Economy are neither large nor crucial to
his work, and that “they don’t determine … the direction of my academic
research.”)Academics face cultural pressures too. In his book Exodus ,
Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their
“desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists
have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George
Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s,
his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes
its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social
scientists.” Because Borjas is an immigration skeptic, some might discount his
perspective. But when I asked Donald Davis, a Columbia University economist who
takes a more favorable view of immigration’s economic impact, about Borjas’s
claim, he made a similar point. “George and I come out on different sides of
policy on immigration,” Davis said, “but I agree that there are aspects of
discussion in academia that don’t get sort of full view if you come to the
wrong conclusion.”
None of this means that liberals
should oppose immigration. Entry to the United States is, for starters, a boon
to immigrants and to the family members back home to whom they send money. It
should be valued on these moral grounds alone. But immigration benefits the
economy, too. Because immigrants are more likely than native-born Americans to
be of working age, they improve the ratio of workers to retirees, which helps
keep programs like Social Security and Medicare solvent. Immigration has also
been found to boost productivity, and the National Academies report finds that
“natives’ incomes rise in aggregate as a result of immigration.”
The problem is that, although economists differ about the extent
of the damage, immigration hurts the Americans with whom immigrants compete.
And since more than a quarter of America’s recent immigrants lack even a
high-school diploma or its equivalent, immigration particularly hurts the
least-educated native workers, the very people who are already struggling the
most. America’s immigration system, in other words, pits two of the groups
liberals care about most—the native-born poor and the immigrant poor—against
each other.
One way of mitigating this
problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in
the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what
Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes
highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal
perspective, is its cruelty. It denies many immigrants who are already here the
ability to reunite with their loved ones. And it flouts the country’s best traditions.
Would we remove from the Statue of Liberty the poem welcoming the “poor,” the
“wretched,” and the “homeless”?
A better answer is to take
some of the windfall that immigration brings to wealthier Americans and give it
to those poorer Americans whom immigration harms. Borjas has suggested taxing
the high-tech, agricultural, and service-sector companies that profit from
cheap immigrant labor and using the money to compensate those Americans who are
displaced by it.Unfortunately, while admitting poor immigrants makes
redistributing wealth more necessary, it also makes it harder, at least in the
short term. By some estimates, immigrants, who are poorer on average than
native-born Americans and have larger families, receive more in government
services than they pay in taxes. According to the National Academies report,
immigrant-headed families with children are 15 percentage points more likely to
rely on food assistance, and 12 points more likely to rely on Medicaid, than
other families with children. In the long term, the United States will likely
recoup much if not all of the money it spends on educating and caring for the
children of immigrants. But in the meantime, these costs strain the very
welfare state that liberals want to expand in order to help those native-born
Americans with whom immigrants compete.
What’s more, studies by the
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater
diversity makes Americans less charitable and less willing to redistribute
wealth. People tend to be less generous when large segments of
society don’t look or talk like them. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests
that greater diversity doesn’t reduce trust and cooperation just among people
of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among
people of the same race and ethnicity.
Trump appears to sense this.
His implicit message during the campaign was that if the government kept out
Mexicans and Muslims, white, Christian Americans would not only grow richer and
safer, they would also regain the sense of community that they identified with
a bygone age. “At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the
United States of America,” he declared in his inaugural address, “and through
our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each
other.”Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. To
promote both mass immigration and greater economic redistribution, they must
convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the
bonds of national identity. This means dusting off a concept many on the left
currently hate: assimilation.
Promoting assimilation need not
mean expecting immigrants to abandon their culture. But it does mean breaking
down the barriers that segregate them from the native-born. And it means
celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.
Writing last year in American Sociological Review ,
Ariela Schachter, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis,
examined the factors that influence how native-born whites view immigrants.
Foremost among them is an immigrant’s legal status. Given that natives often
assume Latinos are undocumented even when they aren’t, it follows that illegal
immigration indirectly undermines the status of those Latinos who live in the
U.S. legally. That’s why conservatives rail against government benefits for
undocumented immigrants (even though the undocumented are already barred from
receiving many of those benefits): They know Americans will be more reluctant
to support government programs if they believe those programs to be benefiting
people who have entered the country illegally.
Liberal immigration policy
must work to ensure that immigrants do not occupy a separate legal caste. This
means opposing the guest-worker programs—beloved by many Democrat-friendly tech
companies, among other employers—that require immigrants to work in a
particular job to remain in the U.S. Some scholars believe such programs drive
down wages; they certainly inhibit assimilation. And, as Schachter’s research
suggests, strengthening the bonds of identity between natives and immigrants is
harder when natives and immigrants are not equal under the law.The next
Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because
Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to
reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. For liberals, the easy part
of fulfilling that pledge is supporting a path to citizenship for the
undocumented who have put down roots in the United States. The hard part, which
Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough
immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet
that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.
Enforcement need not mean
tearing apart families, as Trump is doing with gusto. Liberals can propose that
the government deal harshly not with the undocumented themselves but with their
employers. Trump’s brutal policies already appear to be slowing illegal
immigration. But making sure companies follow the law and verify the legal
status of their employees would curtail it too: Migrants would presumably be
less likely to come to the U.S. if they know they won’t be able to find work.
In 2014, the University of
California listed the term melting pot as a “microaggression.”
What if Hillary Clinton had called that absurd?Schachter’s research also shows
that native-born whites feel a greater affinity toward immigrants who speak
fluent English. That’s particularly significant because, according to the
National Academies report, newer immigrants are learning English more slowly
than their predecessors did. During the campaign, Clinton proposed increasing
funding for adult English-language education. But she rarely talked about it.
In fact, she ran an ad attacking Trump for saying, among other things, “This is
a country where we speak English, not Spanish.” The immigration section of her
website showed her surrounded by Spanish-language signs.Democrats should put
immigrants’ learning English at the center of their immigration agenda. If more
immigrants speak English fluently, native-born whites may well feel a stronger
connection to them, and be more likely to support government policies that help
them. Promoting English will also give Democrats a greater chance of attracting
those native-born whites who consider growing diversity a threat. According to
a preelection study by Adam Bonica, a Stanford political scientist, the single
best predictor of whether a voter supported Trump was whether he or she agreed
with the statement “People living in the U.S. should follow American customs
and traditions.”
In her 2005 book, The
Authoritarian Dynamic , which has been heralded for identifying the forces
that powered Trump’s campaign, Karen Stenner, then a professor of politics at
Princeton, wrote:
Exposure to difference, talking about
difference, and applauding difference—the hallmarks of liberal democracy—are
the surest ways to aggravate those who are innately intolerant, and to
guarantee the increased expression of their predispositions in manifestly
intolerant attitudes and behaviors. Paradoxically, then, it would seem that we
can best limit intolerance of difference by parading, talking about, and
applauding our sameness.
The next Democratic presidential nominee should commit those words
to memory. There’s a reason Barack Obama’s declaration at the 2004 Democratic
National Convention that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative
America … There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and
Asian America; there’s the United States of America” is among his most famous
lines. Americans know that liberals celebrate diversity. They’re less sure that
liberals celebrate unity. And Obama’s ability to effectively do the latter
probably contributed to the fact that he—a black man with a Muslim-sounding
name—twice won a higher percentage of the white vote than did Hillary
Clinton.In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as
a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled
to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite
universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but
Americanness? What if she had said more boldly that the slowing rate of
English-language acquisition was a problem she was determined to solve? What if
she had acknowledged the challenges that mass immigration brings, and then
insisted that Americans could overcome those challenges by focusing not on what
makes them different but on what makes them the same?
Some on the left would have
howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.
*Opening photo credits: AFP; Alain Jocard; Alfons Teruel / Eyeem;
Bloomberg; Brooks Kraft; Chesnot; David McNew; David Ramos; Drew Angerer; Erik McGregor / Pacific Press /
LightRocket; Frederic J. Brown; Gerard Julien; Getty; Hector Vivas /
LatinContent; Jonathan Nackstrand; Lars Baron; Mike Roach / Zuffa; Omar Torres;
Orlando Sierra; Paul Bradbury; Paul Morigi / WireImage; Pradeep Gaur / Mint;
Rodin Eckenroth; Saul Loeb; Spencer Platt; Tasos Katopodis; Thomas Koehler /
Photothek; Victor J. Blue; Vitaly Nevar / TASS; Zach Gibson
A MAJOR THEME OF THIS BANKSTER-
FUNDED MOVEMENT IS OPEN BORDERS TO
KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED, BUILD THE LA
RAZA MEX WELFARE STATE ON OUR
BACKS TO KEEP THE HORDES COMING
AND PUT MORE ILLEGALS IN VOTING
BOOTHS.... IT SERVES THE SUPER RICH
OF
WHOM OBAMA AND THE CLINTON CRIME
FAMILY HAVE SERVED FROM DAY ONE.
They are aligned with the Obamap-Clinton
machine; they are generally in sync with the Obama-Clinton goals.
- The exoneration of the Clinton crime
family
August
9, 2017
Trump's Unintended
Consequences: The Unmasking of the Deep State
The term
"Deep State" unleashes many paranoid fantasies. Movies and spy
stories abound about the existence of dark, nefarious forces from our
government aligned against us. But as Joseph Heller once wrote,
"Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't after
you." One of the more disturbing revelations after Trump's win was
finding that these dark forces not only exist, but are powerful and seemingly
out of control.
"Deep
State" is hard to define, because it is composed of overlapping groups and
individuals with complex and differing agendas. It's an amalgam of
people, agencies, and bureaucrats that changes. The current leakers are
part of it. For now, let's say it's a mostly unelected, mostly leftist
group within our government that wants to govern us against the will of
America's founding principles. These people want the final say over our
Republic. They want to rule, and they form part of a powerful alliance
against the current administration and its voters. The one thing we can
be thankful for is that they are showing themselves to us in a way that should
anger Americans of all political persuasions. In the end, that's what we
might hope for.
"Big
Brother" was the term Orwell used for the totalitarian presence of 1984 .
We are not there. Maybe not even close. But the problem of
the Deep State is that there seem to be those who want the kind of power Orwell
described, the kind of power the Soviets had, or the East Germans. It's
likely that many Deep-Staters don't even realize just how power-mad they have
become.
Here is a small
list with their fingerprints on it:
- The unmasking and subsequent
takedown of General Michael Flynn
- The daily
leaks designed to impede or embarrass the Trump administration
- The
unmasking of hundreds of private citizens working with the Trump campaign as
reported by Circa News
- The bogus
"Trump dossier"
- The bogus
Trump-Russian collusion narrative.
- The
unseemly collusion between Robert Mueller and James Comey
- The
seeming insanity of Mueller probing a nonexistent crime
- The
exoneration of the Clinton crime family
- The IRS
targeting conservative groups
And lots
more.
What we are
watching is a group using power willfully, wrongfully, and oftentimes illegally
to undermine and destroy political opponents. They are after
somebody. For real. From this list, we can surmise that their
opponents appear to be those of us on the center-right. And to those of
you on the left who don't know: This happened, and it's happening. You
can pretend it's not so, but it is.
Okay, some of
you are tuning out. This can't happen here, it's tinfoil hat stuff, the
left really isn't that bad, you're being overly paranoid, blah, blah,
blah. Sorry, but this is seriously bad stuff.
I recall back
when the PATRIOT Act was passed, noting a comment by Glenn Reynolds of
Instapundit. He said powers to surveil, and powers that could cross the
lines of the bad guys' civil liberties, were well and good, but in the wrong
hands, those powers could and would be misused.
Well, he was
right. At the time, I considered his fears over the top, but I was
wrong. The
history of the human race is littered with tyrants who concentrated and misused
power. The
genius of the American system adopted by the founding fathers was limiting and
decentralizing government in a way to protect our citizenry against this kind
of tyranny. Systems were put in place to check, balance, and limit the
things that could be done by the government against its people. The Bill
of Rights is directed at that problem. These rights were called
inalienable, the natural and normal rights given to us by God, not by our
government. These were to be our birthright as a nation. It's one
of the many reasons our country has been great and can be great again.
We have had bad
players in our government, we have made lots of mistakes and done wrong things
as a nation, but what we are seeing played out now is simply
unprecedented. There
is a quote attributed to Valerie Jarrett, Obama adviser-enforcer and all-around
bad human, that goes like this:
After
we win this election, it's our turn. Payback time. Everyone not
with us is against us, and they better be ready, because we don't forget.
The ones who helped us will be rewarded; the ones who opposed us will get
what they deserve. There is going to be hell to pay. Congress won't
be a problem for us this time. No election to worry about after this is
over.
Let me say,
there is no proof she said this. But one thing that is real for sure is
that much of what they did in that administration, with her help, was to
institutionalize those ideas as their operating manual. The IRS scandal
targeting conservative donors and conservative organizations was a perfect
example. Read the horrifying story in Forbes of what happened to
Catherine Engelbrecht if you think this didn't happen. A terrible line
had been crossed. Had she been a liberal, we would hear her name for
forty years or more.
This was just
the tip of the iceberg. The left has weaponized the bureaucracies and
agencies it inhabits. Leftists have decided they will become the dominant
culture in the CIA, FBI, NSA, IRS, EPA, and the rest of our
bureaucracies. They decided it's okay to be totalitarian, it's okay to
break the law, it's okay to go after their political opponents with the force
of government, it's okay because they are the ones who deserve to
win. The Deep
State running rampant is fine, as long as they run it. From Valerie
Jarrett to Barack Obama to James Clapper and James Comey, they all visibly
overstepped their rightful boundaries. They are proof of the saying that
power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Make no mistake:
the prior administration went rampant. The Deep
State did not
originate with them, but they stocked it with their
cronies.
They stocked it with people of similar left-leaning ideas, with similar
left-leaning willingness to misuse power. The Deep State became a weapon
of intimidation and a deep abuser of power. Thank God Hillary was not there to take
the baton.
So here we are,
with the Deep State running amok. They are aligned with the Obamap-Clinton machine; they
are generally in sync with the Obama-Clinton goals. None of us knows exactly how this works,
who sets the agenda, or who has the capacity to give direction, but it is
real. We do know that many of the media are there to help, we do know
that most of the Democratic Party apparatus is there to help, and we do know
some of the players. We also know that most of the Democrat base, and
many of the party's voters, are naïvely on board, too. We may not
understand the mechanism, but we do know that the Deep State has become the
vanguard of the left's civil war, and it is not fictional.
They are
self-motivated with a set of goals. Get rid of Trump if they can.
Get Trump's base to be embarrassed of him or depressed if they can. Make
certain that Trump cannot succeed. Make certain his hands are tied in
ways to make him less effective. If nothing else, slow his progress to a
snail's pace while they marshal better forces.
The stupid party
(Republicans), as usual, has no clue. Too many Republicans just think
this is normal or haven't the stomach to fight. Heck, many of them are
traitorously helping to take down what their own voters and standard-bearer
want to achieve. The Democratic Party is fractured and has no idea how
wrong this is (yet), and it only helps parrot the talking points of its Deep
State allies. Democrats have no idea of the backlash they are creating
toward themselves.
There is no
distinct winner at this point. But the battle is joined. It is
clear that the Deep State intends to continue using all its power to stop
Trump, and to prevent a return to checks and balances and limited government.
One important
note: they are not winning. The media may make it
appear that they are, but they're not. Trump, his administration and
allies, and his voting base intend on continuing the fight and winning.
This is the major part of "draining the swamp." The battle is
in the balance, will last for years, and there are a lot of reasons to believe
that the Deep State will lose. One of the great unintended consequences
of Trump's win: They have been unmasked.
Push back hard
enough, and they will lose.
They deserve to.
OPEN BORDERS – HOW THE DEMOCRAT
PARTY DESTROYED THE GOP, THE AMERICAN WORKER and then AMERICA!
THE LOOTING OF AMERICA:
A PARTNERSHIP OF MEXICO, THE
MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
“But as
American sanctuary cities flouted Federal law and encouraged illegal
immigration after 1980, those working in the U.S. started to wire transfer
money back to their families in amounts that became so large that by the late
1990s remittances to Mexico were the second largest source of foreign revenues,
second only to oil revenues.”
October 18, 2016
Why Hillary and Her Wall Street
Donors Don’t Want Trump’s Wall
When GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump first talked about building
a “big, beautiful wall” at the southern border of the U.S. he was met with
fierce resistance. Given the facts that the southern border is the
main route used by drug smugglers and criminal illegal immigrants (all persons who cross the border illegal commit a Federal misdemeanor
the first time, a felony the second time) there would not seem to be a good reason
to resist lawful regulation of border entry. As usual, the answer may be
in who gains from the absence of a Wall, a
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