Walls Are Beautiful

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The UK is building a wall to keep the denizens of the Calais “Jungle” migrant camp from invading cars and trucks after some 22,000 breaches of the port road. The “Jungle” is a nightmare for the local population which has been terrorized by the mob of migrants aspiring to invade the UK.

The French have blamed the British and the British have blamed the French. But the migrant invasion is not the fault of either alone. In a sense it is the fault of everyone in the European Union . . .

Instead of bringing countries together, open borders create conflicts.

The biggest source of tension between America and Mexico remains the open border. Not only is the open border bad for America, but it’s bad for Mexico. As profitable as the remittances might be, the cost of the cartels and migrants drawn to that border end up offsetting it.

What globalists fail to understand is that good walls really do make for better neighbors. Countries with walls may occasionally invade each other, but a lack of walls means that the invasion never stops. Walls are torn down in the name of peace, but the lack of walls is what makes peace impossible. (Read more from “Walls Are Beautiful” HERE)

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MAINSTREAM MEDIA BUREAU CHIEF: Hillary Campaign Pitched Me the Obama Birther Story Back in 2008!

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Hillary Clinton surrogate Sid Blumenthal personally pitched a reporter on the President Obama “birther” story when she was campaigning for president in 2008, a former Washington reporter said Thursday.

The Clinton campaign and the media have consistently refuted Trump’s claim Clinton started the birther movement, which Trump re-upped Friday when he said for the first publicly that he believes Obama was born in the United States. “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Trump said, drawing a slew of media fact checks almost immediately. “I finished it.”

But former McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief James Asher has backed up Trump’s version of events, saying he was personally pitched the story by a Clinton surrogate in 2008.

Clinton had tweeted: “President Obama’s successor cannot and will not be the man who led the racist birther movement. Period.”

And McClatchy replied: “@HillaryClinton So why did your man #sidblumenthal spread the #obama birther rumor to me in 2008, asking us to investigate? Remember?”

Blumenthal is a former aide to Clinton’s husband Bill Clinton and their long-time friend.

“#CNN says #Hillary team in 2008 never raised the #birther issue,” he said in another tweet Thursday night. “#SidBlumenthal, long-time #HRC buddy, told me in person #Obama born in #kenya.”

Nevertheless, as soon as Trump reiterated his criticism Clinton started the birther movement, the media started churning out fact checks.

“I covered it at the time,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said Friday, referring to the movement. “She and her campaign never, never started the birther issue.”

“Trump Drops False ‘Birther’ Theory, but Floats a New One: Clinton Started It,” blared a New York Times headline. And The Washington Post fact checker quickly spun up a piece declaring the claim “debunked.”

At one point the MSNBC chyron read: “Trump (falsely) claims Clinton started birther controversy.”

(For more from the author of “MAINSTREAM MEDIA BUREAU CHIEF: Hillary Campaign Pitched Me the Obama Birther Story Back in 2008!” please click HERE)

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Top Alaska GOP Officials Resign Rather Than Back Liberal Murkowski Over Libertarian Joe Miller

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The Alaska Republican Central Committee voted over the weekend to remove one of its members due to his decision to back newly-minted Libertarian U.S. senate candidate Joe Miller instead of the state’s moderate GOP incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, while other members chose to resign to support the insurgent candidacy.

As reported by Western Journalism, Miller was the 2010 GOP nominee who defeated Murkowski in perhaps the biggest upset in the 2010 federal election cycle, running as “Alaska’s True Conservative Choice.”

Then, as now, Murkowski had the most liberal voting record of any Republican up for re-election. During the last session of Congress, the senator voted with President Obama and the Democrats 72 percent of time, second only to Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.

As in 2010, incredulously Murkowski branded herself as a conservative (“The Conservative Voice For Alaska”) during this year’s Republican primary in which she faced no challenger with statewide name identification. She easily prevailed in an election with the lowest voter turnout in recent history.

The senator looked like she was on her way to an easy re-election in the red state until last week, when Miller accepted the Alaska Libertarian’s Party’s invitation to replace its candidate, who had chosen to end her bid.

Alaska GOP party chair Tuckerman Babcock knew Miller’s entry into the race was going to draw support from members of his party’s top leadership and called on any who wanted to back Miller to do the “honorable” thing and resign.

Dave Bronson, one of Anchorage’s district chairs, did not believe he should have to step down just because he wanted to support Miller — whose positions align with the state party’s pro-life, pro-family, pro-limited constitutional government platform — instead of getting behind a “Republican” senator whose votes do not.

Rather than resign, he put the issue up for vote at a central committee meeting last Saturday. Speaking before the body, he said “I am standing here before you because I am done with turning a blind eye to a Republican senator from Alaska who rejects our values and then expects our support every six years.”

Bronson, who serves as a board member of the Alaska Family Council, highlighted Murkowski’s claim to support traditional marriage during the 2010 election, then coming out not long afterwards in support of same-sex marriage. He also noted her vote to fund Planned Parenthood, even after the undercover videos revealed the organization was apparently guilty of selling aborted babies’ body parts.

He stated, based on Murkowski’s voting record and decision to run as an independent in 2010 against the Republican Party nominee, he does not doubt she would switch to being Democrat, if she calculated it would keep her in office.

“Disciplining me is the right thing to do,” Bronson conceded though wanting to keep his seat. “I openly supported that candidate for the US Senate who best reflected the principles of the Alaska Republican Party. It just happened to not be Lisa Murkowski.”

Reportedly, Bronson received hearty applause when he concluded his remarks from a significant portion of the audience with many rising to their feet to show their approval. However, the members of the Central Committee present voted 36 to 23 to remove him.”

Four other district chairs and one member of the Rules Committee, to date, chose to resign their positions to openly back Miller, while others reputedly plan to do so privately because they do not want to lose their seats.

Shannon Connelly of Palmer (about 40 miles north of Anchorage), who was vice president of the Mat-Su Valley Republican Women until this weekend and a district chair, is another who decided to step down. She told Alaska Public Radio that, in Miller, she has a candidate, “who is pro-life, which is a major thing for me,” adding, “I thought I can’t just sit back. I have to stand for what I believe in.”

The Alaska Right to Life endorsed Miller two days after he announced his candidacy.

In a release earlier this week, the group shot down the notion that Murkowski is “pro-life” as a campaign spokesman claimed and then was forced to walk back, noting Murkowsk received an 80 percent NARAL Pro-Choice America score in 2014, in contrast to most GOP senators (like Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and even John McCain), who received a score of zero.

In an unprecedented move, the Alaska Republican Assembly (which has described itself as the Ronald Reagan wing of the GOP) endorsed Miller this week.

Like Connelly, Ron Johnson, a member of the assembly, chose to resign as a Mat-Su Valley district chair this past weekend to back Miller.

He told Western Journalism, “This allows me to work for a candidate that holds Republican values. I’m a Republican because of the party platform, not because of the party. Many of us are.”

Johnson explained one of the reasons he decided to run for district chair was in response to how the Republican party failed to get behind Miller’s candidacy in 2010 after he defeated Murkowski.

The senator waged a write-in campaign narrowly defeating Miller in a three-way race, 39 to 35 percent, with the Democrat garnering 23 percent of the vote. Between her and her father, a Murkowski has held the seat since 1981. This year’s contest pits four candidates against each other: Murkowski, Miller, a left-leaning independent, and a Democrat.

Amy Demboski, a district secretary in Anchorage, is supporting Miller. She said party Vice Chair Rick Whitbeck threatened to remove her until she pointed out the Alaska GOP rules specifically state that only those who hold district chair positions or above are prohibited from publicly supporting anyone other than the nominee.

“Like many Alaskans, I don’t do well with intimidation and threats,” she said, and the GOP leadership backed off.

Demboski, who is a radio talk show host in the Anchorage/Mat-Su Valley area and was the Republican nominee for mayor of the city last year, affirmed Johnson’s observation that the state party did not appear to back Miller in 2010. Further, it was her sense that then-chairman Randy Ruedrich and others in leadership actively worked against him behind the scenes, while supporting Murkowski.

Demboski could not help but note the irony of the GOP’s loyalty test for Murkowski in 2016 in light of 2010, and pointed out the senator’s co-chair in that race was current Democrat Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott.

“Nobody is talking about and the party is pretending it did not happen,” she said.

Miller enjoys the support of not only Demboski, who is Donald Trump’s co-chair in Alaska, but also Bill Keller of the Kenai Peninsula, who was Sen Ted Cruz’s co-chair (along with Demboski and others) during the Republican presidential primary. Cruz won the primary with 36 percent of the vote to Trump’s 33.5 percent.

Keller said people “have been really grumbling about Murkowski” since the 2010 race. Like other prominent GOP members in the Last Frontier backing Miller, he cites Murkowski’s liberal voting record as the main reason he will not support her.

Alaskans appear in for a spirited contest to see who will represent them in the U.S. senate in January. A district chair, who voted against Bronson’s removal, told Western Journalism that Miller’s entry in the race creates the rematch people have waited six years to see. (For more from the author of “Top Alaska GOP Officials Resign Rather Than Back Liberal Murkowski Over Libertarian Joe Miller” please click HERE)

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Scathing Report: America’s ‘Ultimate Failure’ in Afghanistan

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A blistering new report blasts the U.S. government’s pouring of billions of dollars into projects in Afghanistan with inadequate oversight that in many cases fueled corruption on unprecedented levels and ultimately undermined America’s mission there.

The 164-page report, published online today by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), is the first in the agency’s “Lessons Learned” series, which takes a broader look at the U.S. government’s shortcomings in the 15 years since the 2001 invasion. SIGAR previously released report after report about the waste of millions of dollars in failed individual projects.

This report, titled “Corruption in Conflict,” says that at early on, the U.S. government did not “fully appreciate the potential for corruption to threaten the security and state-building mission in Afghanistan,” where some form of regular corruption has existed for centuries.

“The U.S. government also failed to recognize that billions of dollars injected into a small, underdeveloped country, with limited oversight and strong pressures to spend, contributed to the growth of corruption,” the report says.

In its dogged pursuit of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the U.S. threw its lot in with local “warlords” and their militias — men who later rose to prominence in the Afghan government and used their positions engage in “rampant corruption activities,” the report says. (Read more from “Scathing Report: America’s ‘Ultimate Failure’ in Afghanistan” HERE)

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2 More Docs Charge Coverup in Hillary Health Scandal

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With a significant number of top physicians expressing concern that the American people aren’t being told the truth about Hillary Clinton’s health, the Democratic Party nominee’s personal doctor is declaring she is fit to return to the campaign trail . . .

“My overall impression,” [Dr. Lisa Bardack] wrote,” is that Mrs. Clinton has remained healthy and has not developed new medical conditions this year other than a sinus and ear infection and her recently diagnosed pneumonia. She is recovering well with antibiotics and rest. She continues to remain healthy and fit to serve as president of the United States.”

Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, told WND the letter from Bardack “ignores all the pertinent questions” . . .

Dr. Lee Hieb, author of “Surviving the Medical Meltdown: Your Guide to Living Through the Disaster of Obamacare,” took no time in expressing alarm.

“From a distance, without formal evaluation there are still three things I know for sure regarding Hillary Clinton’s medical condition: 1) She has a neurological disorder; 2) pneumonia did not cause the episode on 9/11; and 3) she and her staff have been lying to cover up the truth of her condition for months if not years.” (Read more from “2 More Docs Charge Coverup in Hillary Health Scandal” HERE)

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What We Can Learn From the Gay Schoolteacher Who Allegedly Abused Boys

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It turns out that there was more to the story of a gay schoolteacher and his “husband” who were found dead August 25th as the apparent result of a murder-suicide. According to court documents, the men were under investigation for serially abusing underage boys, and with their deaths, even more boys are coming forward with reports of abuse.

According to People Magazine, “The apparent murder-suicide of a Minnesota elementary school teacher and his husband last week now seems to have masked a darker truth: Police say the couple, teacher Aric Babbitt and Matthew Deyo, are being investigated after multiple teenagers accused them of sexual abuse.”

Does this mean that all gay men, or at least, gay schoolteachers, are sexual predators, preying on underage boys? Certainly not, and to draw that conclusion would be totally unfair.

There are countless cases of heterosexual schoolteachers, both male and female, who have had inappropriate sexual relationships with underage students, and we don’t draw the conclusion that all heterosexuals, or, more specifically, all heterosexual schoolteachers, are sexual predators.

These heterosexual abusers include coaches, administrators, librarians, teachers, and others, and no one is branding all heterosexual coaches, administrators, librarians, and teachers as child abusers because of the heinous acts of a relatively few. (Note that even if the sex was consensual in some cases, it was still illegal and, because of the relationship, abusive.)

But there is something important we can learn when it comes to this gay couple and their alleged abuse of underage males, and it has to do with the unique role a gay teacher can have in our schools today.

In the case of Babbit, who since 2002 taught at Lincoln Center Elementary School in South St. Paul, Minnesota, the teenager who reported him to the police confessed to having an ongoing sexual relationship after coming out as gay.

The teen stated that Babbit was his “former elementary school teacher, volunteer work supervisor and mentor,” and that Babbit and Deyo “invited him to a jazz concert in Minneapolis soon after he turned 16, where they stayed overnight at a hotel. At the hotel, the two men allegedly plied him with alcohol and had sex with him, the teen said.

“The teen said he didn’t want ‘to do this, but felt unsure about how to say no,’ according to the Pioneer Press.

“The teen also allegedly provided police with Polaroid pictures of himself naked with Babbitt, who he said became his mentor after he came out as gay, according to CBS Minnesota.”

Again, this does not mean that all gay schoolteachers are sexual predators, but it reminds us that it is not uncommon for a gay teacher to take a student under his or her wings after that student comes out as gay (Babbit was seen as a mentor and father figure), with the parents having no knowledge of this whatsoever. The danger of such a teacher-student relationship is self-evident, and it is something that can happen with greater frequency within same-sex circles.

After all, if the parents do not affirm and celebrate their child’s coming out as gay, they are now the enemies, and the child needs to be protected from these bigots for his or her good. What better protector than a gay teacher?

Tragically, Gay-Straight Alliances (GSAs) are found in schools throughout America, beginning in middle schools, and in these GSAs, students can come out as gay to their peers and to participating school officials, and by school policy, this information can be kept from the parents. And groups like the ACLU fight vigorously for the “right” of these groups to exist.

Yet it is in GSAs that vulnerable, impressionable, and still maturing kids can be introduced into the larger gay culture — often with the help of older “mentors” — and this includes “youth pride” events where these children can get pamphlets instructing them on “how to ‘safely’ engage in homosexual oral sex, anal sex, and other behaviors.” (The pamphlet linked here is sickeningly graphic, with references to acts that the vast majority of adults, let alone children, would consider perverse.)

Again, this situation is uniquely prevalent in LGBT circles, and it is not surprising to read that, “‘In interviews with … victims, Babbitt and Deyo would expose the teens to porn, give them access to porn subscriptions, and encourage them to communicate with them without their [parents’] knowledge, on social media,’ police allege, according to the documents.

“The couple would also give their victims gifts, according to the documents: In one instance they gave a teenage boy, who was also gay, some underwear and yoga shorts, with Babbitt telling the teen’s concerned mom that it was a ‘gay thing’ and he was helping.”

The lesson, then, for parents, is obvious: First, you need to stand against any group or organization in your school that would allow your kids to confide sexual secrets to teachers or officials without your knowledge. This is absolutely unacceptable.

Second, if your child comes out to you as gay, rather than reacting in such a way that will drive him or her away, you must show that child unconditional love (without changing your biblical convictions) and encourage complete transparency so you can be there for your children when they need you the most.

And third, if your child does come out as gay, be on the lookout for any inappropriate relationship with an adult of the same sex. This really is a danger zone, and we need to be vigilant.

The safety and well-being of our kids is at stake. (For more from the author of “What We Can Learn From the Gay Schoolteacher Who Allegedly Abused Boys” please click HERE)

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Tim Kaine Is Running for the Job of Messiah

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Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine belongs to the strange subculture of people fixated on the Catholic Church and eager to change nearly everything about it. Kaine’s latest attempt to play pope unrolled last week, when he addressed the gay activist Human Rights Campaign, assuring them that the Church would drop its 2,000-year-old teaching on marriage.

Kaine thinks that the Church should base one of its seven sacraments not on Genesis, Leviticus and St. Paul, but on Obergefell v. Hodges. Forget the decrees of apostles, popes and bishops: Let’s reshape our faith to suit a secular court’s 5-4 majority, he seemed to say. Thomas More was willing to see his head hacked off rather than let the state tear up God’s rules about marriage, but Tim Kaine is more of a Henry VIII-style Catholic — that is, he makes up the rules as he goes along.

That would explain how Kaine could go from running for office in Virginia as a pro-life candidate to hobnobbing with baby-parts magnate Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood, and running on the Democratic Party’s rabidly pro-abortion platform — which opposes even the slightest protection for viable unborn children, protections that exist across even socially liberal Western Europe.

Now, I respect people who have lost their faith in one church’s creed and search out another — admitting what they’re doing like honest adults. According to Pew Research, some 40 percent of American Catholics leave the Church and don’t return. There are also those who feel unsure about one piece or another of the Church’s complex teachings, so they quietly ponder and pray.

But Kaine isn’t either such person. Instead, he’s one of those tribal Catholics who grew up believing that they somehow own the Church, so they have the God-given right to knock down its walls and install jacuzzis. Too many Catholics in positions of power and influence seem to agree. As I wrote in the Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism:

When a large group of highly educated people who have dedicated themselves to an organization with firm doctrines, strict rules, and stern demands — such as the Catholic Church— reject those doctrines, rules, and demands, what do they do with themselves instead? Shrug and join the United Methodist Church? … When families (like the Kennedys or the Bidens — and millions of less famous Irish and Italian American clans) have strong ethnic and historical connections to the Church, what do they do when they reject its teaching authority? The history of the Catholic Left after Vatican II gives us the answer: Such people focus on the parts of the original mission that still appeal to them — and jettison the rest.

Apparently the “parts” of the Catholic mission that Kaine is willing to cling to are those that can be soldered onto a left-wing political juggernaut. The New York Times reports that back in the 1980s, Kaine went with a band of radicalized Jesuits to Honduras. Once he was there, “Mr. Kaine embraced an interpretation of the gospel … known as liberation theology.” Columnist Ken Blackwell correctly notes that liberation theology (condemned by three popes, including Pope Francis) is “an avowed Marxist ideology inimical to the institutional Catholic Church and to the United States.” Blackwell also observes that

around the time Kaine was there, Jesuits were arrested for gunrunning, and, the next year, the Honduran government banned any more American Jesuits from coming to that country because of their left-wing activism.

They also expelled one American-born Jesuit, who also had to leave that religious community because he was too radical even for them. That priest was Father Jim Carney, and he was the one The New York Times tells us Kaine sought out across the border in Soviet-supported Nicaragua….

I spent my years in Catholic high school contending with Tim Kaine’s ilk: Disgruntled feminist nuns who admitted they hated Pope John Paul II, scraggly ex-seminarians who denied that Jesus’ body had risen from the dead, wizened oddballs who hated our faith but couldn’t find other jobs. They showed us Sandinista propaganda films in religion class. They lied to parents about what they were teaching, and bullied students who disagreed. I’ll never forget what one of those Tim Kaine clones said when I disputed his latest revision of basic Christian doctrine, and I cited the words of Jesus in the Gospel.

The teacher smiled thinly and said, “Jesus didn’t have an M.A. in theology from Catholic University. I do.” (For more from the author of “Tim Kaine Is Running for the Job of Messiah” please click HERE)

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Obama’s Absurd Double Standard on Defense Spending

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This week we learned that the Obama administration has requested $2.6 billion in emergency funding for Louisiana flood relief. While the specifics of the Louisiana flood relief request should be thoughtfully considered, the very nature of this request highlights the Obama administration’s absurd double standard on budget issues.

Back in July, President Barack Obama announced that he had decided to keep more troops in Afghanistan at the end of 2016 than he had previously planned, and more than he had proposed funding in his fiscal year 2017 Overseas Contingency Operations budget request. While the decision to keep more troops in Afghanistan was a step in the right direction, it immediately raised the question of how to pay for these forces.

The day after Obama’s announcement, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter suggested that the Department of Defense might need to submit a supplemental funding request to cover the costs of the increased Afghanistan mission. This supplemental request would be categorized as “emergency spending,” just like the Louisiana flooding request.

And here’s where politics enters the picture. While Obama has now submitted an emergency funding request for Louisiana by itself, he has so far, two months after announcing his policy change, refused to submit an emergency funding request for the mission in Afghanistan without pairing it with unrelated domestic spending requests.

A White House Office of Management and Budget spokeswoman publicly admitted that any funding request for Afghanistan would not be considered by itself because “any increase in funding must be shared equally between defense and nondefense.”

Some in Congress were understandably upset by this. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called it “extortion,” saying:

If the president believes that sending thousands more young Americans into war is in the national security interest of the United States, he should support the additional funding required to support those warfighters. Full stop. No caveats, no qualifications, and no strings attached.

It would seem this “extortion” only goes one way. According to the Obama administration, if the military needs increased funding to succeed in a mission, that funding increase has to be paired with unrelated domestic funding. But if additional domestic spending is needed, it apparently does not need to be paired with increased defense spending, as we witnessed with the recent Louisiana funding request.

As commander in chief, the president should take a more strategic view of the nation’s needs.

Ever since the Budget Control Act of 2011, the Obama administration has successfully fought to preserve a dollar-for-dollar link between defense and nondefense discretionary spending levels. According to Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress, every dollar added to the defense budget must be matched with a dollar added to the domestic budget.

This is an absurd, nonsensical way of budgeting that only survives in Washington. Threats to U.S. vital interests are rising and the U.S. military has been dramatically weakened under major budget cuts over the last five years, but any increase in the defense budget has to be matched with nondefense budget increases? This makes no sense.

Think about it in the context of a family budget. If one spouse wants to invest in a better, more expensive home security system due to increased crime in the neighborhood, will the other spouse refuse to agree to this funding increase without a dollar-for-dollar increase in funding toward a new car or an upgraded cable TV package? Of course not.

If threats are rising, and your security system needs to be improved, you will tighten your belt in other areas to pay for this increase. Only in Washington can a politician get away with holding a security funding increase hostage for completely unrelated domestic spending increases.

While the details of the Louisiana flooding relief request can be debated, the request shows that the Obama administration is only committed to the “dollar-for-dollar” principle when it results in growing domestic spending. When security spending is on the table, it is happy to use it as political leverage for its own priorities. Defense and nondefense should not be linked. What some call the “firewall” between defense and nondefense should be broken, and every dollar spent should be considered on its own merits.

This crazy suicide pact on spending needs to end. Afghanistan funding and other security needs should be considered on their own merits, and the defense budget overall should be increased in response to growing threats and a shrinking, weaker U.S. military. The American people deserve a reasonable budget process, not one that involves hostage-taking and extortion, or using the military as leverage for domestic agendas. (For more from the author of “Obama’s Absurd Double Standard on Defense Spending” please click HERE)

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No, the Constitution Isn’t Outdated

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Time tests quality, and the fact that our Founders’ creation has outlasted so many other regimes signifies their skill and prescience.

But for others, such as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Constitution’s age is a mark against it. Asked in a 2012 interview whether Egypt’s new government should look to other constitutions for guidance, Ginsburg replied, “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. I might look at the Constitution of South Africa.”

She added that Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms might also be a good place to start, as it is “much more recent than the U.S. Constitution. … It dates from 1982.”

More recently, this summer, 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner wrote in an op-ed for Slate that he “[sees] absolutely no value to … studying the Constitution.” His reasoning: “Eighteenth-century guys, however smart, could not foresee the culture, technology, etc., of the 21st century.”

Time tests quality, and the fact that our Founders’ creation has outlasted so many other regimes signifies their skill and prescience.

The left frequently claims that political science, like the natural sciences, is continuously advancing. Accordingly, a competently crafted constitution written in the early 1980s must almost certainly be better than a constitution written in the late 1780s. After all, the framers of Canada’s charter had the benefit of nearly two centuries of societal developments that our Founders could not have foreseen.

As Richard Stengel, former president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, wrote in a splashy 2011 article in Time magazine:

Here are a few things the Framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.

Stengel’s list is instructive as it gives the reader a sense of the changes liberals think our Constitution does not adequately account for. Take for instance: “airplanes, the atom, the internal combustion engine, and antibiotics.” These all represent technological or scientific innovations unknown to the Founders that, purportedly, have some relevance to structuring a government.

Some scientific and technological changes do require that we think carefully about the Founders’ intent when they were writing the Constitution. For instance, new technologies allow police to peer into homes without physically entering them, intercept an email or a text message, or track your car from their computer back at the precinct. Whether these things constitute a search or seizure of citizens’ “houses, papers, and effects” under the Fourth Amendment is an important question the Founders do not answer for us directly.

But by no means are we merely left to guess how the Constitution speaks to these modern conditions. Through the Founders’ own writings contained in the Federalist Papers, notes on the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention and correspondence, thoughtful judges and legal scholars get a clear sense of the spirit behind the words on the page.

Given the Founders’ concern that government would use warrantless searches to harass and condemn political dissidents, it is hard to imagine James Madison or Alexander Hamilton would approve of warrantless wiretaps, drone flyovers, and email dragnets conducted by federal agencies.

Other items on Stengel’s list—sexting, miniskirts, and Lady Gaga—belong to another category of societal development liberals often refer to when questioning our Constitution’s continued relevance: shifting social norms.

What they typically forget is our Constitution was never meant to address every new cultural development nor freeze American society in place as it existed at the turn of the 18th century. The Founders knew that the societal concerns and policy questions particular to their time would eventually be resolved and new issues would arise to take their place.

While the Constitution was not meant to steer the development of American culture in every sense, the Founders did think a free society demanded certain qualities of character among the citizenry: habits of self-governance, respect for the rights of others, and reverence for the law. But within those brackets is allowed some latitude for culture to develop organically and locally without the heavy hand of government at the helm.

While the Founders took special care to ensure the Constitution’s foundation could survive new developments in technology and society, the durability of the document owes as much to what the Founders knew about human nature and worked into our foundational text as it does what they recognized they could not foresee and left to future generations.

Our Founders believed government must be strictly restrained because those attracted to political power rarely restrain themselves. The Founders knew even the power of the majority should not be total, since infringements of individual liberty authorized by 150 million voters are often no more just than those authorized by a single ruler.

As Madison writes in Federalist 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”

When men and women sprout wings and halos, or seraphim and cherubim descend from the heavens to run our government, then it might be time to question the continued utility of our Constitution. But as long as human nature remains subject to the same failings the Founders wisely identified, we should be skeptical of liberal doctrines that allow the powerful to interpret the extent of their own power and protect only those individual liberties a bare majority approves of.

As yet, the heavens have not parted, and human nature is still as fallible as it was 229 years ago. Thankfully, our nation was blessed with a generation of men who had insight to perceive the essential character of man vis-à-vis government and the wisdom to craft institutions rooted in those unchanging realities. (For more from the author of “No, the Constitution Isn’t Outdated” please click HERE)

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Colleges’ War on Free Speech Continues

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The University of Chicago’s president, Robert J. Zimmer, wrote a Wall Street Journal article, titled “Free Speech Is the Basis of a True Education.” In it, he wrote:

Free speech is at risk at the very institution where it should be assured: the university. Invited speakers are disinvited because a segment of a university community deems them offensive, while other orators are shouted down for similar reasons. Demands are made to eliminate readings that might make some students uncomfortable. Individuals are forced to apologize for expressing views that conflict with prevailing perceptions. In many cases, these efforts have been supported by university administrators.

Sharing the president’s vision, the University of Chicago’s dean of students, John Ellison, sent a letter to freshmen students that read, in part:

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

Those are hardly the sentiments of dishonest and spineless administrators at other colleges. At DePaul University, a visit by conservative journalist Milo Yiannopoulos was disrupted by student activists. School security refused to restore order and later banned Yiannopoulos from returning.

Conservative Ben Shapiro was invited by Young America’s Foundation to California State University-Los Angeles to deliver a speech titled “When Diversity Becomes a Problem.”

University President William Covino wrote an email that read, “After careful consideration, I have decided that it will be best for our campus community if we reschedule Ben Shapiro’s appearance for a later date, so that we can arrange for him to appear as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity. Such an event will better represent our university’s dedication to the free exchange of ideas.”

But note that the university invited leftists such as Cornel West, Angela Davis, and Tim Wise without feeling a need for differing viewpoints.

Sociologist Barry Glassner is the president of Lewis & Clark College. Morton Schapiro is the president of and a professor of economics at Northwestern University.

Schapiro wrote in The Washington Post: “I’m an economist, not a sociologist or psychologist, but those experts tell me that students don’t fully embrace uncomfortable learning unless they are themselves comfortable. Safe spaces provide that comfort.”

Both presidents, in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, said campus protests are a “sign of progress” toward diversity and inclusion and are “noble” methods of change, as opposed to the opining of “pundits and politicians … from gated communities and segregated offices.” They added, “Students are coming of age in a time of political, social and economic turbulence unseen in a generation.”

Many college administrators have generalized contempt for American values. Here’s just a bit of the evidence. A reporter from Project Veritas covertly recorded an administrator at Vassar College following through on her request to shred the Constitution.

Carol Lasser, professor of history and director of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Oberlin College, said that “the Constitution is an oppressive document” because it intentionally makes change a slow process. Wendy Kozol, chair of comparative American studies at Oberlin, agreed, saying, “the Constitution in everyday life causes people pain,” and added that she rarely discusses the Constitution in class and that when she does, she tends to focus on specific amendments.

The University of Michigan and Case Western Reserve University have announced safe spaces to protect students from unwelcome opinions. University of California-Santa Barbara students want trigger warnings for all classes and the right to be excused from any lessons that might “trigger” them.

The courage shown by University of Chicago administrators is relatively rare. The academic tyranny seen on many college campuses reflects a dereliction of duty by those who are charged with the ultimate control—the boards of trustees.

Trustees have the power to fire a president and his key administrators for yielding to campus tyrants. College administrators buy into today’s nonsense because they lack backbone and are cowards. Worse yet, they may see merit in safe spaces, trigger warnings, and student disruption of speakers with uncomfortable ideas. (For more from the author of “Colleges’ War on Free Speech Continues” please click HERE)

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