Among World Religions, Christianity Provides a Middle Way Between Jihad and Pacifism

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Every heresy starts with at least a tiny mustard seed of truth. However great a distortion it is to say that Christianity preaches pacifism, non-violence, and passive surrender to the aggressions of other cultures, faiths, and ideologies, that notion begins with something real. There is a stark difference between Christianity and the religions that have surrounded it for most of its history. To put it another way: would we need a long article of to refute the idea that Islam is a pacifist religion?

Hardly. It won’t take that long. In fact, let’s go ahead and do it. The self-styled prophet Muhammad began by preaching his distinctive religion, which many scholars see as cobbled-together bits of Judaism and extreme Arian Christianity (which denies Jesus’ divinity), two creeds that were common in the region of Arabia where he grew up, all filtered through an intense tribal nationalism. The Arabs had been disorganized, dispossessed, and frequently governed by foreign rulers for many centuries, practicing either fractured and primitive forms of paganism, or faiths that came to them from other nations — such as Christianity and Judaism.

Islam: A Warrior’s Religion

Muhammad’s creed, by contrast, told them that Arabs were in fact the people of God, that God’s own Word had been written in their own language before all eternity and dwelt alongside Him in heaven. No translation of the Koran from Arabic into any other language is even considered authentic by true believers, merely a paraphrase. The holy place where all must come to pray would be in Mecca, not Jerusalem, and the whole Arab peninsula must be purged of every other religion. After a decade or so of preaching this message with little success in Mecca itself, Muhammad fled to Medina, where warring clans turned to him as a peacemaker — and a political savior. He began to reign over Medina as a theocratic king.

Suddenly, the constant stream of messages that Muhammad claimed to be hearing from the Angel Gabriel took on a quite different tenor. While he had been weak and almost friendless, God had told him to preach tolerance and peaceful coexistence with other religions. Once he had at his disposal significant wealth and an army keen for commerce raids and conquest, Muhammad began hearing messages of quite another sort. These later messages, he would explain to his followers, “abrogated” the first set of teachings: the God in whom he believed was perfectly free to change his mind. (Indeed, the Islamic concept of Allah leaves Him quite unbound by reason, logic, self-consistency, or even the duty to keep His promises — only His Will is sovereign, and it’s quite free to prove capricious.)

It was at this point that the Islamic faith we have come to know and love took the shape it has kept ever since: it’s a creed of conquest that claims the whole non-Muslim world consists of sinful rebels against Allah who deserve to be subjugated by force and either converted or killed — though reluctant exceptions are offered in principle (quite often ignored in practice) for other monotheists such as Jews and Christians. Those peoples are damned to hell in the next life, but in this one they may be left to live in peace, provided they accept absolute subjugation to the authority of Muslims, defer to them in every sphere of life, refrain from making converts or advertising their faith, and pay a special, heavy tax.

Muhammad put this creed into practice, leading armies into battle, raiding caravans to raise money, and after massacring unbelievers who resisted his offer of faith or subjugation, taking women and girls as sex slaves. To this day, Muslim men are restricted to “only” four permanent wives, but are free to keep as many captured concubines as they can kidnap in wars fought for Islam. This doctrine is used today by ISIS in Iraq and Syria to justify the sex slavery of hundreds of non-Muslim women and girls. Unfortunately, Muslims consider Muhammad as the “perfect example” of human behavior, which means that virtually everything he did is worthy of imitation. Since he married a nine-year-old, that means that strict Muslim countries make it legal for their men to do the same — as Iran did in 1979 after its Islamic Revolution.

Christianity: A Middle Way Between Jihad and Servile Passivity

The example set by Jesus is … different, to put it mildly. Jesus responded to religious authorities who challenged His authority by engaging them in debate. He preached that we must go beyond the Old Testament’s call for proportional justice (“an eye for an eye”), and that when insulted with a slap we should “turn the other cheek.” He ordered us to “love your enemy” and “pray for those who persecute you.” He told His disciples that when they preached His message and were rejected, they should just quietly leave town. When gendarmes of the corrupt Temple establishment had Him arrested, He forbade His disciples to fight them, even healing the single Temple guard an apostle had rashly wounded. Insulted and beaten by guards, He spoke not a word of rebuke. From the Cross He did not denounce His persecutors, but called on His Father to forgive them, because they knew not what they were doing.

Jesus issued a powerful challenge to our natural (but fallen) instinct to avenge every slight, humiliate our enemies, treasure grievances, and wait for a chance for vengeance — in other words, to follow the advice of Niccolo Machiavelli, whose politics manual The Prince was essentially a self-help book from the anti-Christ. But the contrast between Jesus and Muhammad can be taken much too far, particularly if we pluck Christ’s statements out of their proper context and misunderstand His mission in a way that turns out to be perversely self-aggrandizing.

Don’t Try to Compete with Jesus

Because here’s the thing: Jesus is not meant to serve as our example in every single way. We are not called on to overturn the existing interpretation of sacred scriptures, for one thing. (Imagine if every Christian showed up at church and preached, “The Bible says unto you X, but I tell you Y!”) Nor is each of us a prophet preaching a brand new covenant between God and man. Few of us miraculously heal the sick, give sight to the blind, or dispense forgiveness to sinners on our own authority. As bad as some liberal Catholic parish Masses can be, we don’t have the right to rampage through the sanctuary, overturning the altar and scattering the liturgical dancers. (Resist the temptation, okay?)

Most of us are not even called to poverty, chastity, and obedience — as many of the apostles were, on whom monks and nuns model their very special and rare vocations.

Most important of all, not one of us is called to be a pure sacrificial victim, going willingly to our deaths at the hands of unjust authorities so that our suffering can make reparation to the Father for the sins of all mankind. Really. No matter how righteous and altruistic you’re feeling at the moment, Jesus has been there, and done that.

While Jesus called on us to carry our daily crosses, He did not threaten to nail us all up to them. The infinitesimally small percentage of Christians who face the stark choice between renouncing Jesus or dying as martyrs are in some ways emulating Jesus, but even they fall far short: their deaths do not forgive sins, though they can offer their sufferings in union with Christ’s for the sake of other sinners.

We are not sacrificial lambs going peacefully to the slaughter out of obedience to the Father for the sake of man’s redemption. And martyrdom isn’t God’s plan for the human race — or else He would have told us so. A few Christians in the early Church, during the Roman persecution, got it into their heads that it was virtuous to seek out martyrdom and turned themselves in to the pagan procurators to claim a glorious Christ-like death. The Church Father St. Gregory of Nazianzus condemned them for their rashness.

Our Duty to Defend the Innocent, on Pain of Sin

The Catholic Church at least does not teach that we are to simply surrender our lives to anyone who attacks us. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, relying on St. Thomas Aquinas, defends the lethal use of force for the “legitimate defense of persons and societies”:

Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow: ‘If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful. . . . Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s.’” (2263-4)

Nor are we expected — or even permitted — to leave innocent third parties defenseless at the hands of violent aggressors. As St. Thomas points out in another passage quoted in the Catechism: “Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for one who is responsible for the lives of others. The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm.” (2265)

We are called to use force, if need be at the risk of our own lives, to protect others. That responsibility has motivated Christian policemen, soldiers, and spies over the centuries. (For more from the author of “Among World Religions, Christianity Provides a Middle Way Between Jihad and Pacifism” please click HERE)

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The Left’s Appalling Whitewashing of Castro’s Legacy

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You will hear some people today excuse Fidel Castro’s crimes by begging that he accomplished social goals. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have already beclowned themselves on that front. They were merely the first.

Our own President Barack Obama opted for washing his hands, choosing to neither praise Castro after his death Friday, nor to condemn the tragedy his communist dictatorship has inflicted on the Cuban people for 57 years.

“History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him,” said Obama, playing Pilate.

No social accomplishment, to be sure, could justify keeping an entire people hostage, denying them the right to elect their own leaders or exercise any human rights for half a century. But there weren’t any accomplishments.

On the contrary, Castro destroyed a thriving society and imposed penury, either out of Marxist dogma or out of resentment that his out-of-wedlock birth had left him with a stigma among Cuba’s middle classes.

Cuba had problems in 1958, as many societies do. But on a number of fronts, it was the lead country in Latin America, or among the very top. Its social indicators were not just ahead of Asia and Africa, but also ahead of many European countries.

Many Europeans, including half of all my great-grandparents, immigrated to Cuba in the 20th century—barely a century ago—seeking to improve their lives economically. They did, and their granddaughter, my mother, went to law school.

After 57 years of communism it is risible to think of a single European immigrating to Cuba to improve his fortunes. Risible in a dark, macabre way.

That’s anecdotal, but the numbers back up what 2 million Cuban-Americans today (i.e., Cuban-born people who can speak freely) know to be true.

A study by the State Department’s Hugo Llorens and Kirby Smith shows, for example, that in infant mortality, literacy rates, per capita food consumption, passenger cars per capita, number of telephones, radios, televisions, and many other indicators, Cuba led when Castro took over on New Year’s Eve 1958.

The United Nations statistics leave no doubt. In infant mortality, Cuba’s 32 deaths per 1,000 live births was well ahead of Japan, West Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain (40, 36, 39, 33, 34, 50, and 53 respectively), and many others.

In food consumption, in terms of calories per day, Cuba was ahead of all of Latin America except cattle-rich Argentina and Uruguay. In automobiles per 1,000 inhabitants, Cuba’s 24 was ahead over everyone in Latin America expect oil-producing Venezuela (27).

As for literacy rates, Cuba’s 76 percent in the late 1950s put it closely behind only Argentina, Chile, and Costa Rica. Giant Brazil’s percentage, by comparison, was 49 percent.

And Cuba’s gross domestic product per capita in 1959 was higher than those of Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, most of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, again according to U.N. statistics.

In most vital statistics, therefore, Cuba was on a par with Mediterranean countries and southern U.S. states.

And today? Castro’s communism has not just left Cubans economically pauperized, but politically bereft, a situation that Obama’s unilateral concessions to Castro’s little brother, the 85-year-old Raul, Cuba’s present leader, has only made worse.

According to the Cuban Committee for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, which is recognized by Amnesty International and Freedom House, so far this year there have already been over 8,505 political arrests during the first eight months. This represents the highest rate of political arrests in decades.

Meanwhile, we are in the midst of a new Cuban migration crisis. The United States is faced with the largest migration of Cuban nationals since the rafters of 1994. The number of Cubans fleeing to the United States in 2015 was nearly twice that of 2014.

Some 51,000 Cubans last year entered the United States, and this year’s figures will easily surpass that. The numbers of Cuban nationals fleeing Cuba have now quintupled since Obama took office, when it was less than 7,000 annually.

President-elect Donald Trump has promised he will reverse Obama’s opening unless Raul Castro opens up Cuba politically. This Castro won’t do and there were reports today that dissidents are being rounded up and carted off.

And so far, Trump’s statement on the “brutal dictator” Castro has been the moral one and the one closest to the mark: “Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.”

Today, therefore, will be a day for clarity. What world leaders say about the departed tyrant will reveal whether they have an inner moral compass or not. (For more from the author of “The Left’s Appalling Whitewashing of Castro’s Legacy” please click HERE)

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How Trump Can Reshape US Policy Toward Refugees

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As a candidate for president, Donald Trump advocated a restrictive U.S. policy toward refugee resettlement and other forms of legal immigration.

In his speech accepting the Republican nomination for president, Trump said he would suspend immigration from countries that are “compromised by terrorism.”

Trump, when he assumes office in January, will find that he has significant authority to fulfill his pledge.

“He can decide how many refugees we take and from what regions of the world we take them,” said Kevin Appleby, senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies in New York, in an interview with The Daily Signal. “He has a pretty broad brush to pick and choose who he thinks is worthy of admission to the United States.”

Trump has not clarified his position on refugees since becoming president-elect.

But throughout his campaign, Trump targeted the U.S. refugee resettlement program, arguing the government’s vetting system needed to be tougher, especially for Syrians fleeing war and terrorism.

The Obama administration says the current vetting process for Syrian refugees is the most stringent screening for any category of legal immigrant. The process can take up to two years and involves in-person interviews, health tests, and other security checks with multiple government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.

About 14,500 Syrians have been resettled in the U.S. since last October. There is no known case of a Syrian refugee being involved in a terror plot in the U.S. In January, the U.S. government arrested two men on terrorism-related charges who came to the U.S. as refugees from Iraq.

In September, the Obama administration announced that it wants to resettle 110,000 refugees from around the world—including a substantial number of Syrians—for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. That’s up from 85,000 refugees last year.

The Refugee Act of 1980 gives the U.S. president unilateral power over how many refugees the country admits each fiscal year, and where they come from.

Congress is only consulted in the process and does not get an up or down vote on the numbers.

Traditionally, the refugee resettlement gets broad bipartisan support, but this year, many Republicans protested President Barack Obama’s pledge to raise the number admitted to the U.S.

“This has become a politically correct program where we are led to believe that we have to take refugees from all over the world no matter how dangerous the threat is,” said Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, in an interview with The Daily Signal. “We are out here trying to keep Americans safe. That is our No. 1 duty we have as elected officials.”

Babin has sponsored legislation pausing refugee resettlement from “terrorism hot spots” to the U.S.

He was among 37 Republicans who tried, but failed, to attach language to a must-pass spending bill passed in September that would have blocked federal funding to refugees from Syria, other countries in the Middle East, and North Africa until national security officials could guarantee that terrorists cannot infiltrate the screening process.

“Trump has the authority to do what we in Congress could not do, and suspend this program immediately, particularly from Islamic terrorist hot spots,” Babin said. “I urge him to follow through on his campaign promise.”

Refugee and immigration experts say Trump can indeed use his executive powers immediately to keep Obama’s 110,000 refugee target number for this fiscal year, or reduce it. He can even pause the program completely, or restrict refugees from specific countries.

“Trump has the authority to resettle 110,000 like Obama or zero refugees,” said Matthew La Corte, an immigration policy analyst at the Niskanen Center. “That is his decision with consultation with Congress and the State Department.”

Trump can also limit other forms of legal immigration to the U.S., as he and his incoming administration have hinted they may try and do.

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union” this weekend, Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, said, “We’re going to temporarily suspend immigration from [certain countries or regions] until a better vetting system is put in place.”

Under U.S. law, the president has authority to use a proclamation to suspend the entry of “any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States [who] would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Over six decades ago, Congress, worried that communists would try and enter the U.S., authorized this executive authority as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

Obama used this power in 2011 when he issued a presidential proclamation suspending the entry of “any alien who planned, ordered, assisted, aided, and abetted, committed or otherwise participated in” war crimes or other violations of humanitarian law.

But immigration experts say the power has not been applied as broadly as Trump has proposed.

For example, early in his campaign, Trump called for “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.” He later removed the reference to religion and instead proposed barring people from regions of the world with a “proven history of terrorism” against the U.S. and the West.

“The statutory authority is clearly there for Trump to do what he said he would do,” said William Stock, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, in an interview with The Daily Signal. “But the power under the law has usually been used in a case-by-case manner, impacting narrow classes of people. The broader the assertion of the authority, the more likely a successful court challenge against it.”

Opponents of Trump’s proposals, including refugee advocates and national security experts, say that limiting U.S. assistance to the most vulnerable of immigrants is detrimental to the fight against terrorism.

They say that such a withdrawal from the world makes the case for terrorist groups such as the Islamic State that seek to turn Muslims against the West.

“We are at a pivotal moment in our country,” Appleby said. “If we start closing our doors, pulling up the drawbridge will undermine our national interests. It gives the extremists more power to demonize us and use it as a propaganda tool. We are looked at as a humanitarian leader, and if we withdraw that commitment, the rest of the world will follow and then we will really have a crisis on our hands.” (For more from the author of “How Trump Can Reshape US Policy Toward Refugees” please click HERE)

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Fidel Castro’s Death Is an Opportunity to End Cuba’s Communist Dynasty

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You might hear some voices chiding Cuban exiles for rejoicing publicly over the death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, forgetting, willfully or not, their lives of suffering over the country he destroyed.

It’s important to remember, however, that whether done in exultation, in anger, or in sober reflection, the job right now is to constantly remind the world of the damage this one man and his communist ideology wreaked on an entire country and its millions.

This must be done to prevent his family from remaining in power. That should be front and center of any comments that are made or actions that are taken following the death on Friday of a 90-year-old dictator who was, on this earth, a very, very bad man.

Fidel’s younger brother Raul is leader now, but at 85, the actuarial tables don’t look good for him. More ominously, Raul’s son Alejandro is waiting in the wings to take the reins of political power. Economically, the son-in-law Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez Calleja is in charge of around 90 percent of the economy.

The policy that President Barack Obama and his young deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, have doggedly pursued, despite all the evidence to the contrary, has led only to a greater concentration of power in the hands of the new generation of Castros.

A new communist dynasty, a la North Korea, is taking hold 90 miles away because of Obama’s policies. This is something President-elect Donald Trump must prevent by rolling back, as he has promised, the unilateral concessions that Obama has made.

The military monopolies run by Rodriguez are displacing “self-employed” workers, the so-called cuentapropistas. There are fewer of these licensed “self-employed” workers in Cuba today than in 2014. One of the military-run tourist monopolies, Gaviota S.A., has announced that revenue had grown 12 percent in 2015 and expects to double its hotel business this year.

As for the dissidents, the Obama administration has abandoned them. Many have told me they feel betrayed by our president, and by extension, by the United States. Guillermo Fariñas, especially, has a reason to feel betrayed, as Obama promised him personally at a meeting in 2013 that he would take no step toward re-establishing relations with Cuba without prior consultations with the opposition. This did not happen.

And dissidents have suffered the consequences. Political arrests have intensified since December of 2014. Throughout 2015, there were more than 8,616 documented political arrests in Cuba.

And in 2016? There already had been over 8,505 political arrests during the first eight months, and they are expected to top 10,000. This represents the highest rate of political arrests in decades and nearly quadruples the tally of political arrests throughout all of 2010 (2,074), early in Obama’s presidency.

These figures come from the Cuban Committee for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, which is recognized by Amnesty International, Freedom House, and other major human rights groups.

And because Cuba’s communist leaders cannot allow Cubans to be in free contact with the outside world, internet connectivity has dropped. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has something called the Measuring the Information Society Report, which is the world’s most reliable source of data and analysis on global access to information and communication.

Last year, the International Telecommunication Union dropped Cuba’s ranking to 129 from 119. This means that Cuba actually has lower internet connectivity than some of the world’s most infamous suppressors of the internet, including Zimbabwe (which is 127), Syria (which is 117), Iran (91), China (82), and Venezuela (72).

The Castros, in other words, cannot let go of communism unless they’re pushed to do so. They have been in power for 57 years, more than 10 percent of Cuba’s history since Columbus’ discovery.

In that half-century, Cubans have been thrown into fetid and rat-infested underground dungeons, when not killed, for speaking their minds, organizing, and selling their own belongings—or attempting to flee their country to exercise these basic rights abroad.

Cuba’s gross domestic product per capita in 1959 was higher than those of Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, most of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, according to the United Nations’ statistics. Today, it is a pauperized state.

If Trump wants to drain the swamp in foreign policy, Castro’s death affords him a wonderful opportunity.

If there’s one person of whom it can truly be said that he leaves a better world behind for his departure, it is the Cuban dictator who died Friday. Whatever fate he’s dealt in the afterlife, we can safely say that Fidel Castro was no good on this earth. (For more from the author of “Fidel Castro’s Death Is an Opportunity to End Cuba’s Communist Dynasty” please click HERE)

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Green Party’s Stein Files for Wisconsin Recount

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Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein officially filed a request to election officials Friday to conduct a recount in the battleground state of Wisconsin.

State Elections Commission Administrator Mike Haas said Stein filed the request around mid-afternoon Friday, about an hour and a half ahead of a 5 p.m. CST deadline.

“The Commission is preparing to move forward with a statewide recount of votes for President of the United States,” Haas said in a press release. “We have assembled an internal team to direct the recount, we have been in close consultation with our county clerk partners, and have arranged for legal representation by the Wisconsin Department of Justice.”

Stein, who earned little more than 1 percent of the national vote, formally requested a Wisconsin recount Friday afternoon, vowing to do the same in the coming days in Michigan and Pennsylvania. There is no evidence of election tampering in the states where Trump scored razor-thin victories, but Green Party spokesman George Martin insisted “the American public needs to have it investigated to make sure our votes count.”

Wisconsin GOP Executive Director Mark Morgan issued a statement calling the recount request “absurd and nothing more than an expensive political stunt that undermines Wisconsin’s election process.” Republican Sen. Devin LeMahieu, who chairs the Senate elections committee, said he would re-examine state law next year to ensure “a candidate who received 1 percent of the vote cannot hold the results of an election hostage.” (Read more from “Green Party’s Stein Files for Wisconsin Recount” HERE)

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MARK LEVIN: Populism, Nationalism and Americanism

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I would like to discuss something rather foundational.

What do you think about this “new nationalism”? Do you think it’s new? What does it mean? Does it mean putting America first? Does it, in fact, put America first? Has this new nationalism been tried before? It very much has.

NEW NATIONALISM

The phrase “new nationalism” was actually coined by Theodore Roosevelt in a speech he gave in Kansas on Sept. 1, 1910. In that speech, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, later to become a Progressive Party candidate, in essence denounced the Declaration of Independence, and embraced the new nationalism.

He rejected the American heritage, in many respects, the limitations placed on the federal government, and he argued for a powerful central government that would take care of the general welfare of the people. It was a quintessential, aggressive, progressive speech. This is a speech that the Left venerates. In fact, Barack Obama, just a few years ago, visited the exact site where Theodore Roosevelt gave this speech. He gave his own speech and was extremely complimentary of Roosevelt’s.

Roosevelt thought that the general welfare of the people — their health, education, basic jobs and wages, and so forth — should be determined by the federal government. The Republican Party was the progressive party. The Democrat Party became the progressive party. You had two Progressive Era parties. The Republican Party, under Theodore Roosevelt, then William Howard Taft (albeit less so), and then of course Woodrow Wilson, who took the Democrat Party to the hard Left in what’s known as the Progressive Era.

Now before Theodore Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson, there were a few decades of what was called the Populism Era. There was even a political party called the People’s Party. The People’s Party was a populist party. It would become, in effect, a branch of the progressive movement and it was eventually devoured by that movement.

AMERICANISM

These terms — populism, nationalism, progressivism — are not the same as Americanism. Americanism is the embrace of our founding principles. Americanism is the embrace of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. Americanism is the embrace of free market capitalism, not crony capitalism. But for free market capitalism, there wouldn’t be a great middle class in this country. But for free market capitalism, we could have gone the way of Russia or these other communist regimes — the so-called proletariat rising up.

People forget the results of free market capitalism — our trajectory from electricity in every home to heat and eventually air conditioning. Free market capitalism gave birth to new forms of energy, which massively improved the lifestyles of almost all Americans. It made possible everything that runs on fossil fuels, including automobiles, engines, things we take for granted. It made possible the production and the refinement of steel. In other words, it created this great explosion of industrial America, making us the greatest, most powerful economic force on the face of the earth (and eventually, the greatest military force on the face of the earth). That’s what free market capitalism gave.

The progressives are an offshoot of the European socialists. Of course, there are 15,000 types of socialism. Broadly speaking, it is a mentality. The Europeans never had a Declaration of Independence. They had their own history to deal with, including monarchies and feudalism. We never had that in America. We were a clean slate. In many ways, that’s what enabled us to do what we did.

COMMERCE, TARIFFS, AND TAXES

When the framers of the Constitution met in Philadelphia, they didn’t sit there and think about how to create the most powerful central government they could to regulate trade. In fact, they included a Commerce Clause in our Constitution, the purpose of which is to promote commerce and trade between and among the states and between and among countries. Because we were getting killed with protectionism, from state to state and from our country to other countries. We couldn’t compete.

The purpose of the Commerce Clause is not to prohibit commerce. It is not to enable big government.

It is also true that they used tariffs at the time, after the Constitution was adopted, because they didn’t have an income tax, and in part, those tariffs were necessary to fund the federal government. But they weren’t for the purpose of empowering far-off Washington bureaucrats and politicians to manipulate the economy.

But back to the Progressive Era. These words — nationalism, populism, progressive — they’ve been around a very long time. They gave us, in 1909, the 16th Amendment — the income tax amendment, the federal income tax amendment. The vehicle for government to “let’s get the rich,” to get American companies to “pay their fair share.”

These words gave us the 17th Amendment in 1912. In the name of populism, we get to elect our senators directly. It’s very appealing, but we’re not supposed to be a pure democracy. We’re not supposed to be a populist society. We’re supposed to be a republic. Two of the worst ideas during the Progressive Era: the 16th and 17th Amendments — pushed by Republicans. Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. Both parties strongly supported it.

Then came President Herbert Hoover. President Hoover was a very successful businessman, and he believed he could manage the economy. He was very concerned about free market capitalism; he was very concerned about the loss of American jobs, the loss of American industry and so forth.

In 1922, again, the progressive Republicans — the populist nationalist Republicans — controlled Congress. And they passed the Fordney–McCumber Tariff; it covered all agricultural imports. And thus began trade wars. Other countries don’t sit back and watch this. They put their own tariffs in place. Our farmers were severely economically affected by this. They couldn’t sell into foreign markets, which they needed to do. So, in a short period of time, there was a recession. I call this a soft depression. Then in 1930, rather than protect farmers, a Republican Congress came up with Smoot–Hawley, enacting tariffs on over 20,000 imported products, which resulted in a worldwide tariff war.

In virtually every industry — ironically enough, in the automobile industry in particular — we couldn’t sell many products overseas. Countries responded to us and many of them ganged up against us. Of course, after the 1929 stock market crash, they were trying to fix these things. To save American jobs and stop them from going overseas, they destroyed American jobs, farmers and businesses. Of course, the federal government wasn’t getting the revenue it needed given what had taken place. So what did they do to compensate?

They turned to that precious federal income tax. They passed something called the Revenue Act of 1932. It increased the personal income tax dramatically, boosting the standard rate from 1.5 percent to five percent, and in some cases to eight percent. It placed a large surtax on higher income earners, leading to a total tax rate, depending on your income, anywhere from 25 percent to 63 percent. It massively increased the corporate income tax, along with several taxes on other forms of income and wealth.

What did that do? It further killed the economy. The Republicans did what the Democrats would later to: they panicked. They knew what they had started and how the chain-effect had led to this new suffocation of growth. You see, there was a small New Deal, under Hoover, before there was the big New Deal. Hoover put in place the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend money to banks, a home-loan bank, so the government could help the construction sector. Direct loans to state governments for spending on relief, infrastructure, and the Public Works Administration that could better coordinate federal public works and state public works, creating jobs for the unemployed.

Sound familiar? This all came along before we even got to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. This was populism, nationalism, progressivism.

Franklin Roosevelt raised taxes to 90 percent. He created the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Civil Works Administration, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the Public Works Administration. They took over a huge percentage of the gross domestic product. They had wage and price controls throughout all industries, even created trust councils that would oversee the grouping of various industries and regulate them just to make sure people weren’t “ripped off.”

We had double-digit unemployment. So a bad recession was turned into a depression, which was turned into a horrendous depression that lasted a decade. Study after study has said that the government did the exact wrong thing. They had a double-digit unemployment for years. No matter how much taxes were raised, no matter how many programs were put in place, no matter how much redistribution of wealth occurred, no matter how powerful the central government became, the people were miserable and suffering.

Why is this history important?

Because these terms are being thrown around by a lot of people who don’t quite comprehend the history behind them.

THE NIXON PERIOD

Moving into the Nixon period: We had wage and price controls that were set in place in 1971 to try to attack inflation. But what did wage and price controls do? Terrible dislocation of markets. And when the controls were lifted, of course, they spun out of control. Massive spending and massive redistribution of wealth.

Now Donald Trump is proposing $1 trillion in infrastructure spending — twice as much as Hillary Clinton did. They insist this is going to create jobs for the middle class and union workers and so forth.

How many more times are we going to do this? How many more times are we going to take money out of the private sector to fund some mastermind’s idea about how to create jobs?The great power of the American economy was not created by government or tariffs or protectionism or progressivism or populism or nationalism. It was created by Americanism, by Americans.

Economies go through evolutions. There was the horse and buggy, now we have the car. We used whale blubber to light lanterns, now we have electricity. Are we supposed to kill economic progress and evolution that improves lifestyles for the vast majority of Americans? Any country would kill to have the standard of living that we have in this country. Of course, you’d never know that listening to our politicians.

And yet it is they — with their government departments, their government agencies, their 80,000 pages of regulations this year and last year and the year before — it is they who destroy American jobs. It is they who create economic dislocation.

Man isn’t perfect. That means all of us together are imperfect. But if I make a mistake or you make a mistake, well then, I might feel it and 25 other people may feel it. But if I’m making these decisions for all of society, for the entire economy, and I happen to get elected to office so I have the power to do it, any decisions or mistakes I make impact everybody. That’s why you do not want concentrated control, centralized control of decision making.

What we lack is more economic competition, because the government plays favorites through its tax schemes and so forth. Our economy needs to be unleashed. We’ve have tried more government spending for a century. A trillion dollars over 10 years? This is a massive expense, and yet, in the big scheme of things, when you look at our GDP, it is a drop in the bucket. On the one hand, it bloats federal spending and the federal debt; on the other, the economy is so big it’s of minimal consequence. Whether these ideas come from Theodore Roosevelt or William Howard Taft or Herbert Hoover or Franklin Roosevelt, whether these ideas come from Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or yes, Donald Trump, they’re the same warmed-over ideas that do not work. This is why we believe in individualism, capitalism, and constitutionalism. That’s Americanism.

JACKSONIAN POPULISM

People romanticize the Jacksonian period. First of all, ironically, people who want to compare Trump to Jackson: Jackson, in his first race for the presidency, won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College vote. He won the popular vote like Hillary Clinton, but lost to John Quincy Adams.

Andrew Jackson wanted, among his top priorities, to eliminate the federal debt, and he did. How does spending a trillion dollars, on top of a $20 trillion fiscal operating debt and a $200 trillion unfunded liability debt come anywhere close to Jackson’s thinking on this sort of thing? It’s been tried a numerous times, and yet we’re going to do it again?

In this centralized government that gets to make all these decisions, Jacksonian democracy, as it came to be called, was not about centralized federal government. It was a rejection of the increasingly centralized decisions coming out of the federal government. But we need to be blunt, too. In the 1820s and 1830s, if you still owned slaves, you were in a distinct minority.

Jackson was a slave owner, and he was a brutal owner. But a lot was going on at the time, such as the battles between “the mercantilists,” the elitists on the East Coast and some of the other areas of the country (the agrarians, slave owners, non-slave owners, cotton growers, tobacco growers). There were a lot of tensions that would eventually lead to the Civil War.

Jacksonian democracy was an attempt to create a populist revolt against what was taking place. When people talk of Jacksonian democracy and agrarianism and nationalism and populism, that’s what they’re talking about. But in the end this was very destructive. Jackson got rid of the national debt, alright, and he did it so quickly that what happened was his vice president, who became his successor, Martin van Buren, inherited what would soon become the worst depression in American history.

PRESENT DAY POPULISM

You see, these notions of populism, nationalism, progressivism, they are antithetical to republicanism. The reason our Constitution is structured the way it is structured is to prevent mobocracy and to prevent despotism, by one or by an oligarchy. We have a beautiful system of checks and balances, of limited powers, that secure the unalienable rights of the individual.

Under a republican form of government, the individual has a responsibility to take care of his or her family. It’s what is called rugged individualism.

How does that ideal compare to today?

How does it compare to a government that swallows up an enormous percentage of the gross domestic product — of all goods and services produced in the private sector? A government that spends far in excess of what it collects with confiscatory taxes. The issue isn’t what it regulates, the issue is what it doesn’t regulate. To now say that we need a trillion-dollar infrastructure program, to now say that we need to further regulate our economy, which is heavily regulated with over 12,000 tariffs, to now say that that’s what the working men and women of America need? That that’s what’s going to give us the shot in the arm to create American jobs? This will be disastrous, as it always has been, as it always will be.

Many of the people hawking this are not men and women of the assembly line. They’re not men and women of agriculture. They’re not men and women of the steel mills and the oil fields and so forth. They’re bankers, developers, and businessmen. Like Hoover. Hoover didn’t get dirt under his nails. Woodrow Wilson didn’t get dirt under his nails. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t get dirt under his nails. These are theoreticians who reject or have forgotten what made this country great. That’s the problem. Nationalism and populism have far more in common with status-quo progressivism than they can possibly have with constitutional conservatism.

Virtually every form of tyranny that I’m familiar with is wrapped in populist arguments.

Tyranny comes packaged as “for the people,” or representing “the will of the people.” That’s how Mao Zedong represented his genocidal tyranny, that’s how Vladimir Lenin represented his genocidal tyranny, that’s how Hugo Chavez, the Fidel and Raul Castro brothers, Robert Mugabe, and the like represented their reigns. But populism is not republicanism.

This is not about class warfare; it’s about liberty. You want to live free or don’t you? When you live free, that means at times, things get difficult. But let me tell you something: When you don’t live free, it means things are always difficult.

How many more experiments must humanity go through before it becomes obvious that our system, as set up by the framers, is and was the best? How many more human experiments must we have? How much more spending until it becomes clear that the government doesn’t create jobs? Nobody spent more to “create jobs” than Franklin Roosevelt. Obama spends a hundred billion dollars on infrastructure, what did that do? Now Trump wants to spend a trillion dollars. What will that do?

I don’t care if you’re blue collar or white collar; I don’t even like those terms. Those are terms that some egghead came up with — just like “working people.” Well you’re either working or you’re not. What does that mean? What is a working people? I work very long hours, am I not a working person? Whatever my income is, whatever your income is, this is the vernacular of the progressive leftist. Working people, blue collar, white collar: No, we’re Americans. We are Americans. The goal is to create and defend and improve upon a society that has created the greatest amount of wealth for the most people, the greatest amount of freedom for the most people, despite and in fact due to our diversity. Our diversity of thinking, our diversity of acting, our diversity of producing.

All of these populist movements, whether on the pseudo-right or the Left, always demand egalitarianism. They demand material equality, on different levels and to a different degree. Somebody’s “earning too much,” somebody has “too much wealth.” Why should they have that when you have nothing? These philosophies overlap. And you know what they have something in common? The iron fist. (For more from the author of “MARK LEVIN: Populism, Nationalism and Americanism” please click HERE)

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GOOD THING DEMS RENAMED FOOD STAMPS TO SNAP: Otherwise We’d Have Confused It for a Massive Giveaway of Soda and Energy Drinks

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A new study just released by the USDA, offers a very detailed look at exactly how participants in the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” (SNAP, aka Food Stamps) spend their taxpayer-funded subsidies. Unfortunately for taxpayers, the amount of money spent on soft drinks and other unnecessary junk foods/drinks is fairly staggering. But, we suppose it’s a nice taxpayer funded subsidy for the soda industry…so score one for Warren Buffett and the Coca Cola lobbyists.

Per the study, nearly $360mm, or 5.4% of the $6.6BN of food expenditures made by SNAP recipients, is spent on soft drinks alone. In fact, soft drinks represent the single largest “commodity” purchased by SNAP participants with $100mm more spent on sodas than milk and $150mm more than beef.

Soft drinks were the top commodity bought by food stamp recipients shopping at outlets run by a single U.S. grocery retailer.

…That is according to a new study released by the Food and Nutrition Service, the federal agency responsible for running the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as the food stamp program.

…By contrast, milk was the top commodity bought from the same retailer by customers not on food stamps.

(Read more from “GOOD THING DEMS RENAMED FOOD STAMPS TO SNAP: Otherwise We’d Have Confused It for a Massive Giveaway of Soda and Energy Drinks” HERE)

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Report: Obama Ultimately Convinced Clinton to Concede on Election Night

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A new report suggests that Hillary Clinton’s concession call to Donald Trump in the early morning hours of Nov. 9 to congratulate him on winning the presidential election may not have happened if it weren’t for the urging of President Obama.

Amie Parnes, who serves as chief White House correspondent for The Hill, and Jonathan Allen are writing a book about Clinton’s defeat in the election. Among the stories they have compiled is the tale of what happened as the stunning results seemed to all but guarantee a Trump victory.

Parnes and Allen say that according to sources within the Clinton campaign and the White House, just after the Associated Press called Pennsylvania on behalf of Trump at approximately 1:30 a.m. EST, the president called Clinton.

His message was simple.

“You need to concede,” he told Clinton.

Clinton ultimately agreed to call Trump, but according to Parnes and Allen, not without hearing plenty of objections from members of her own staff, who believed there was still a chance Michigan and Wisconsin could turn into victories for Clinton.

“There was a lot of discussion about Michigan and Wisconsin and whether the numbers could flip it,” The Hill quoted one of the sources as saying.

While campaign chairman John Podesta went on stage to address supporters who had gathered to for what was anticipated to be a Clinton victory party at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City — he ultimately told them to go home for the evening because there were still votes being counted in the Rust Belt states — Clinton finally listened to what the president had suggested and decided to call Trump.

The Michigan outcome was so close — approximately 13,000 votes — that the state conducted its own recall, only to determine this week that Trump won by slightly more than 10,000 votes. The win officially gives Trump 306 electoral votes.

With Green Party candidate Jill Stein and other liberals demanding recounts in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, there are some conservatives pointing out the irony that Trump was ridiculed for not coming out and saying during the third presidential debate that he would automatically accept the results of the election if he were to lose. And yet, more than two weeks after the election, some on the Democratic side are the ones not willing to accept the results because Clinton has lost.

Stein said Friday that her online efforts have raised more than $4.5 million to launch recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Officials with the Obama administration are not among those unwilling to accept the results. In fact, the White House has tried to dissuade the financial and logistical investments necessary to challenge the final vote totals because it does not want to be seen as doing anything to disrupt the smooth transition of power between the Obama and Trump administrations.

Clinton has also not lobbied for any official examination of the results, although Podesta has reportedly been contacted by a group of data experts who claim they’ve seen circumstantial evidence of “irregularities” in some of the vote totals, particularly in certain counties in Wisconsin. (For more from the author of “Report: Obama Ultimately Convinced Clinton to Concede on Election Night” please click HERE)

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Retail Chain Removes Christmas Decorations From Shelves: ‘We’re a Muslim Business Now’

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The pastime of shopping for Christmas decorations ended early this year for the residents of Dortmund, Germany.

The town’s local Woolworths, a popular department store, announced it was now catering to Muslims, and that Christmas decorations were to only be on display for a few days.

A member of the store’s staff reportedly claimed, “We are a Muslim business now. We do not want to sell Christmas articles.”

A local shopper reported all of the shelves featuring Christmas decorations were full on a Friday in mid-November, but when she visited again a day later, everything had been removed. According to the managers of Woolworths — which has 300 stores in Germany — the demand for Christmas related items was too low to justify keeping them on the shelves.

“The Christmas articles are hardly in demand here. Already last year, everything remained unsold,” Seda Capakcur, the branch’s manager, said.

Diana Preisert, a spokesman for Woolworths, tried to reassure the public that it is not a Muslim company, and that Christmas-themed items could be purchased as early as September.

“Woolworths is, of course, not a Muslim company. Christmas merchandise is available from September onwards and should be sold out by the end of December,” Preisert said.

“In this branch, however, demand was too low. Therefore the goods were distributed to other branches,” she added.

Preisert mentioned that not many people in the area celebrate Christmas because of “local conditions.” The local conditions she’s referring to are recent immigration policies, which resulted in a huge influx of Muslim migrants and have drastically changed the area’s demographics.

According to city officials, the share of Christians in the total population of Northern Dortmund where the store is located is less than 30 percent.

The Sun reported that local internet users were outraged when they heard about the store’s decision, posting things like “makes me puke” and “the company has themselves to blame if their sales will not go up.”

Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, one of the individuals largely responsible for Germany’s immigration policies, tried to comfort people last month by suggesting Germans play Christmas Carols to stop the Islamisation of their culture.

While speaking at a Christian Democratic Union party in Wittenburg, Merkel claimed Germany was going to lose a piece of it’s homeland if citizens didn’t participate in passing on Christianity.

“How many Christmas carols do we still know? And how many of them are we passing on to our children and grandchildren?” she said.

Tensions over immigration issues have flared up throughout the year. One incident concerning a German primary school left parents furious when they found out their children were being forced to chant “Allahu Akbar” in Muslim prayer.

That incident came just weeks after parents complained their children’s nursery was refusing to acknowledge “Christmas rituals” in order to accommodate diverse cultures. (For more from the author of “Retail Chain Removes Christmas Decorations From Shelves: ‘We’re a Muslim Business Now'” please click HERE)

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Legendary Entertainer Is Quick to Respond to Inauguration Announcement

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Shortly after the announcement that Elton John would be performing at the presidential inauguration in January, the award-winning singer and pianist refuted the claim.

In an interview Tuesday with BBC, Anthony Scaramucci, a member of President-elect Trump’s inauguration committee, said John would be performing at the event.

“Elton John is going to be doing our concert on the mall for inauguration,” Scaramucci told the BBC.

Scaramucci went on to say that having John perform “shows our committment to gay rights.”

He added, “This will be the first American president in U.S. history that enters the White House with a pro-gay rights stance.”

After hearing Scaramucci’s announcement, a spokesperson for the legendary singer was quick to set the record straight.

“Elton will not be performing at Trump’s inauguration,” the spokesman told the New York Post.

Throughout the presidential campaign, John was a supporter of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. “We need a humanitarian in the White House, not a barbarian,” John said. “She is, without a doubt, the only candidate supremely qualified to lead this great nation in these challenging times.”

Although Trump used several of the artist’s songs on the campaign trail, “Elton’s music has not been requested for use in any official capacity by Donald Trump,” the singer’s spokesman said. “Any use of his music should not be seen as an endorsement of Donald Trump by Elton.”

In February, John told the Guardian he didn’t want his music associated with an American election campaign because he is British.

He admitted he had met Trump and was treated nicely; however, they have different political views.

“I’m not a Republican in a million years,” said John.

In an earlier announcement based on a report from the New York Daily News, musician Vince Neil of the band Motley Crue said the band had been invited to perform at the inauguration, “no matter who won.”

But Neil later said that after the Republicans won the election, the band’s invitation was rescinded. (For more from the author of “Legendary Entertainer Is Quick to Respond to Inauguration Announcement” please click HERE)

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