The Undeniable, Glaring Bias of the Mainstream Media

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On March 30, 2016, the National Enquirer released a bombshell report, accusing Sen. Ted Cruz of having 5 mistresses, and the mainstream media was all over it, pressing him on the accuracy of the charges, reading between the lines if he didn’t explicitly deny every detail of the report, and talking about it incessantly for days.

Yet all of this was based on one single report from a notorious tabloid, and without any substantiated claims at that.

More recently, after the 2005 video surfaced of Donald Trump’s infamous conversation with Billy Bush, a number of women came forward accusing Trump of inappropriate sexual behavior (serious charges to be sure), and he too was dogged with this incessantly by the mainstream media, who now had even more salacious material to report.

The women were interviewed on TV, and their accusations dominated the headlines day after day. This — in contrast with the flood of stunning, Clinton-hurting, WikiLeaks revelations — was big news. This was what really mattered to the American people. This is what they needed to hear in the closing weeks before the elections.

Hillary Exposed, the Media Ignores

And then yesterday, October 18, lightning struck again, but this time, it was Hillary Clinton being accused of sexual scandals (with both men and women), and the accuser was actually someone who allegedly worked closely with the Clintons for years.

The bombshell was reported once more by the National Enquirer, and it was given immediate, massive exposure by being featured as the lead story on the Drudge Report, read by millions of people each day.

You might say, “That’s odd. I didn’t hear anything about that.”

But of course. The mainstream media doesn’t think you should hear about it, just like they don’t think you should hear about the WikiLeaks revelations or other stories that could help Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

Yet it was nothing more than an Enquirer story that launched the non-stop attacks on Ted Cruz, and from the initial reports, it appears that the witness indicting the Clintons is far more credible than those attacking Cruz. Yet thus far, the mainstream media is largely silent on the matter.

As I scanned the online news sites of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, along with the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek, not one of them had one syllable about these charges against Hillary Clinton — and I searched these sites 8 hours after the Drudge headline went live.

At the same time, almost all of them had one or more article about Trump’s alleged sexual sins. (But wait. I stand corrected. The Washington Post website really did have much more important news to cover, giving pride of place to this story: First lady shimmers in Versace at the Obamas’ final state dinner. Yes, this is far more important than the other national news.)

Why the Double Standard?

Why the ridiculously obvious double standard? Why the frenzied reporting of a National Enquirer report accusing Cruz of sexual infidelities but such studious silence when the same publication accuses Hillary? Did this notorious tabloid suddenly become reputable when it targeted the staunchly conservative Cruz but again became disreputable when it targeted Hillary?

Worse still, as others have pointed out, the mainstream media has all but ignored the WikiLeaks email dumps, although the information contained in them so far would be enough to sink most campaigns. The coverage has been minimal, at best, and quite understated at that, giving the viewer the feeling that the news is marginal, while what really matters is whether Trump touched a woman on a plane 30 years ago (or, more recently, in other settings).

To further underscore this glaring double standard, if the current batch of WikiLeaks emails had come from the Trump campaign rather than the Clinton campaign, with his people insulting Catholics and with his right-hand man expressing disappointment that it was a Muslim, not a white American, who was one of the San Bernardino murderers, the media would virtually crucify Trump, with shrill calls across the nation demanding that he step down and that he fire his campaign manager immediately.

But when it is Hillary Clinton and John Podesta at the center of the firestorm, the email scandals take a very distant back seat to the sex charges against Trump. (Which, to repeat, I absolutely do not minimize, if true.)

And what if Trump had been guilty of using a private email server for classified government correspondence, as Hillary was? What if his staff had destroyed his laptops and cellphones, refused to answer more than 100 incriminating questions from Congress, pleading the Fifth Amendment, and then were granted immunity? The media would be shouting hysterically, “Cover up! Expose the dirty rascals!”

Instead, when it is Hillary at the center of these very serious charges, they join in the cover-up.

But should this surprise when recently released reports indicate that political donations from the media are 27-1 in favor of Hillary over Trump? And should it surprise us when off-the-record meetings are set up with media elites and the Clinton campaign?

As if further evidence of the media’s extreme bias was needed, just look at the mainstream media’s virtual blackout of two damning videos produced by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, apparently documenting serious campaign abuses by operatives allegedly working directly with the Clinton campaign. You didn’t hear about those either? No surprise. The media doesn’t seem to think you should.

Recently, conservative pundits Pat Buchanan and George Will have agreed with Trump that, on some level, “the system” is rigged, with Buchanan claiming that, “Big Media is the power that sustains the forces of globalism.”

It’s No Surprise

But again, none of this should surprise us.

As I noted in Outlasting the Gay Revolution:

[Liberal media bias] has been documented for several decades, beginning in 1981, when professors S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman “released a groundbreaking survey of 240 journalists at the most influential national media outlets — including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS — on their political attitudes and voting patterns.” The survey found these “media elites” to be shockingly liberal, to the point that “54 percent did not regard adultery as wrong, compared to only 15 percent [of the general public] who regarded it as wrong,” while, “Ninety percent agree that a woman has the right to decide for herself whether to have an abortion; 79 percent agree strongly with this pro-choice position.”

I say it’s high time for a media revolution and a listener-viewer-reader revolt, which would mean that the media leaders report the news in an unbiased way, and if that is not possible, they then clearly declare their biases.

And if they won’t do either (or if their biases are too offensive), we take our business elsewhere.

Are you with me? (For more from the author of “The Undeniable, Glaring Bias of the Mainstream Media” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Debate 2016: The Cave Man Versus the Borg Queen

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Last night’s presidential debate put me in an uncharacteristically Bible-quoting mood. After watching it, this inspired verse haunted my mind: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:19).

I realized that this is the choice that faces us on Election Day: The seedy, fallen, life that all of us slog through after the Fall, with sudden irruptions of Grace that can save us, if we will let it. Or a shiny, polished, smoothly crafted death, a beautiful death (euthanasia).

Donald Trump is the lumpy, rough-shod reminder of how man really is — comprehensively fallen, with occasional glimpses of decency, with natural virtues that God made crusted over by sinful habits and clouded by self-deception. The kind of man whom preachers have to yell at, but whom they bother to since they have ears. They aren’t cyborgs.

Trump knows that men can be dogs because he has for decades been one. He knows that businessmen will take whatever advantage the law allows them because he has done so. He’s aware that foreign relations rest on strength and self-assertion, not happy talk and children’s scrawls of rainbow-pooping unicorns. He’s the sin-hammered face we see in the mirror each day, when we peer through our own deceptions and make an examination of conscience. And it isn’t pretty. We’d rather look at some shiny, man-made idol.

Hillary Clinton is the flawless mechanical goddess of a newborn pagan religion. She’s the Witch-Queen of Narnia, dispensing endless boxes of delicious Turkish Delight that makes us so very sleepy. In her dream world, if we can believe it, politicians can take tens of millions of dollars from dictatorships like Saudi Arabia that torture rape victims for the “crime” of adultery, but not be tainted by it. They can be trusted to delete tens of thousands of emails from illegal private servers holding national security secrets, because why would the leaders of our democracy lie to us? Isn’t that a cynical, ugly thing to think? It’s in our interest to think happy thoughts instead.

Every refugee, whatever his age or commitment to jihad, is one of the innocent “women and children” whom we may safely welcome into our country. An apocalypse-hungry despotism like the government of Iran can be trusted with nuclear weapons, because they really mean us no harm. No woman would ever abort her nine-month-old child except for the very best of reasons. It is cruel to suggest otherwise. (What kind of monster are you? Trump’s simple, visceral horror at such abortions just proves what we always said about that man.) The “rebels” in Syria who are backed by al Qaeda only want to establish a Swedish-style democracy, and if you don’t agree then you are clearly someone who is sick with Islamophobia.

Your sickness is deplorable. But it is not incurable. Just turn over the power to rule by decree to the nice judges whom Hillary will appoint from Harvard Law School, and they will make laws for you — you won’t even have to vote on them. If you tried to, it wouldn’t matter, anyway. So rest your little head on her icy lap and let her tell you a story. Don’t talk back—that isn’t polite.

Donald Trump is the seedy boss you’re pretty sure will sexually harass your daughter. Hillary is the cool, unflappable doctor whom you learn, too late, intends to euthanize your parents. Trump has no good excuses for his behavior — it’s just what guys do, ya know? But Hillary’s story is letter perfect. She has charts ready, and figures. She has calculated to the minute and even the second the number of “happy moments” your aging parents (an army vet, a mother of five, it doesn’t matter) can expect out of earthly life. She has totaled them up in an algorithm against the “happy moments” she can offer some stranger in Syria with the money not wasted on their “useless” medical care. She can quote the U.N. Charter, and maybe Kahlil Gibran, on why you ought to be happy with her decision. But the bottom line is: she decides. If you got involved, started invoking some of those obsolete religious tenets she already told you need changing … well that would just make things messy.

And we like things neat and clean. We like to think well of ourselves. We like to imagine that we are pretty much free of sin, while those other people — those troglodytes in tacky hats who listen to trashy music — embody what’s wrong with the world. They subscribe to “middle ages dictatorships” and bitterly cling to their guns and their religion. We don’t want to be grouped with them. The taint might rub off on us.

And that’s why the best and brightest, the folks who know how to look out for their long-term rational self-interest, are backing Hillary Clinton. They know that it suits their good cheer and bottom line to believe in the icy goddess, and repeat her happy tales. They know none of it is true, but it doesn’t really matter. By the time of the day of reckoning they will be dead. And as every parent in a no-fault divorce has told himself as a mantra, “Kids are so… resilient.” (For more from the author of “Debate 2016: The Cave Man Versus the Borg Queen” please click HERE)

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If Hillary Packs the Supreme Court, Democracy Is Dead. We Should Give It a Decent Burial.

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If you want a young person to have a hopeful, patriotic view of the U.S. government, you probably shouldn’t set his first trip to Washington, D.C. on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. As I wrote back in 2008:

The first time I ever saw our nation’s capital was on the March for Life, way back in high school on a bus the Knights of Columbus rented to take us down there. Those vast, wedding cake buildings that represent the authority of the U.S. government, adorned with flags, bronze statues, bas-reliefs and grand inscriptions… it all seemed such a miserable sham. Those structures built out of butter cream looked to me like whited sepulchers. The Supreme Court on whose steps we stood seemed a structure built of bones, and the city a fortress defending a vast and soulless regime of death. And so it stands today.

When that essay appeared, the question of unborn children’s rights was still a live one, resting on the faithfulness of Republican presidents. Today, if the upcoming election hands the White House to Hillary Clinton, and if Senate Republicans fail to fight her doggedly like wildcats on every Supreme Court appointment, the issue is dead and gone. It goes in the medical waste dumpster along with the Court’s 58 million victims.

A Clinton court menaces the rest of us who escaped the womb intact. Chief Justice Mark Tushnet (or his chemical equivalent) would indeed treat Christians and conservatives as “losers in the culture war” who deserve no more consideration than defeated Japanese or Germans — as the Harvard Law professor and plausible SCOTUS appointee wrote back in March.

The left already uses the Supreme Court as a permanent Constitutional Convention, in which five progressives use the battered text of our founding document like the letters in a ransom note — clipping and pasting as they like, to yield the meaning they want. A Clinton court would switch from scissors to a shredder.

Our Constitutional right to spend our own money and time to influence elections — imagine that! I thought the First Amendment was just for flag-burning and porn! — hangs by a thread, on the decision in Citizens United which Hillary has pledged to overturn. So does the future of free journalism, if you remember the left’s dogged attempts to imprison the likes of David Daleiden and James O’Keefe.

Our basic human right, marked out in the Second Amendment, to defend ourselves by owning private firearms is dangling dangerously on a similar narrow vote on the Court, in another decision Clinton opposes.

Our religious freedom is already in Clinton’s gunsights. She never admits our “free exercise of religion,” but only “freedom of worship,” in language crafted by the Organization of the Islamic Conference to cover the narrow privilege that Orthodox monks have, a few times a week, to offer quiet services in places like Istanbul — though they’d face jail time if they criticized Islam. Combine this with Obama administration threats to church groups’ tax exemptions, California’s attacks on Christian colleges, Hillary’s demand that Christians’ “beliefs must be changed” to accommodate abortion and the Clinton campaign’s attempt to blow up the “medieval dictatorship” that is the Catholic church, and you know exactly what to expect:

The rights of orthodox churches and believers will be pared down relentlessly, while churches that cooperate with progressivism will rake in federal contracts — until we really do have something like the two-tier Chinese system: in Column A will be the approved “patriotic” churches, and in Column B the faithfully Christian ones, which the state persecutes at will.

We Face Rule by Decree, Like Natives in a Colony

Keep in mind that we’re not facing a Democratic president who will pass evil or foolish laws on any of these subjects. No, we face someone who will appoint lifelong judges who will rule us by decree. None of these issues — unborn life, free speech, gun rights, or religious liberty — will be settled by the Congress and the Executive via the democratic process, in a law subject to repeal. They will be carved in stone by the god-like fingers of five philosopher kings, hoisted far out of reach of mere peons like you and me. For our lifetimes, and perhaps for our children’s, they will be dogmas enshrined on altars. Democracy will be dead.

What will we tell our kids once that has happened? When we have to inform them that their Christian school has been taxed into bankruptcy and is closing; that we cannot protect them from home invasions by coddled illegal immigrants; that the faith we are sharing with them is condemned by their own government; that there are certain subjects on which they are not even free to speak — how will we explain that? Or the fact that they can’t even vote on it? It’s a conversation you might need to have very soon, so it’s time to start thinking about which words you’ll use.

When I was young, democracy still seemed vital. At age 11, I became a pro-life activist, ringing doorbells and collecting signatures for the Right-to-Life Party candidate for New York City mayor — radio host Barry Farber. No he didn’t win, but he out-polled the liberal, pro-choice Republican Roy Goodman, coming in second. Taking part in that action sparked my faith that in America, the people could have a voice. It set me on track to a lifetime of activism — volunteering for pro-life Senate candidates and later for Ronald Reagan, then to editorship of the pro-life, conservative paper at Yale, and finally, to The Stream.

If I had a child in the America ruled by Hillary’s appointees, would I encourage him to emulate my actions? It might not even be fair. It would surely damage his future, as being a baptized Christian used to haunt Soviet citizens as a black mark throughout their lives.

In fact, I think we will have to teach resistance. We aren’t called to give the next generation “success tips” but the Truth — as my Irish Catholic mother passed along to me when I was only eight. Again, from 2008:

I cannot forget the actual day in 1973, when Harry Blackmun (moved to change his mind on the subject by a Rockefeller Foundation report on U.S. “overpopulation”) issued the farrago of logical fallacies [Roe v. Wade] which still makes [first-year] law students blush. I saw something about it on the news. Only eight years old, I needed the story explained to me, and asked my mother. She tried her best:

“Well, the government just decided that if a woman is going to have a baby, and she doesn’t want one, now she doesn’t have to.”

“So what can she do?”

“Now she can go to a doctor, and he’ll take out the baby.”

“Won’t it be alive?”

“No. The doctor will make sure it’s dead.”

“They’re allowed to do that?”

“Yes, John. Now they are.”

“In America? Really?”

It’s a question I still ask myself.

(For more from the author of “If Hillary Packs the Supreme Court, Democracy Is Dead. We Should Give It a Decent Burial.” please click HERE)

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Christian Conservatives, Be Assured That President Hillary Clinton Will Declare War on You

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The Stream is winding down its coverage of Planned Parenthood’s 100th anniversary with a roundup of the best social media posts about the anniversary and The Stream‘s own #100forLife campaign against it.

Planned Parenthood and its supporters tweeted with #100YearsStrong, and many pro-lifers borrowed it to engage in some intense debates. One writer from Teen Vogue (where she ran an interview of Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards) engaged us back. While some became a bit agitated, such as one Planned Parenthood supporter who said she would “slit her wrists” before voting for Republicans, for the most part the banter remained respectful.

Make no mistake about it. If you are a conservative Christian and Hillary Clinton becomes our next president, she will declare war on certain aspects of your faith. Your religious liberties will be targeted, and your biblical beliefs will be branded disturbing, if not downright dangerous.

Do not be deceived.

She has made herself perfectly clear on this in the recent past, and we deny this is to our own peril.

Writing for the left-leaning Washington Post, Marc Thiessen, former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush, declared that “Hillary Clinton is a threat to religious liberty.” He began his October 13 column with these two sobering paragraphs:

In a speech not long before she launched her 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton made a stunning declaration of war on religious Americans. Speaking to the 2015 Women in the World Summit, Clinton declared that ‘deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.’

Religious beliefs have to be changed? This is perhaps the most radical statement against religious liberty ever uttered by someone seeking the presidency. It is also deeply revealing. Clinton believes that, as president, it is her job not to respect the views of religious conservatives but to force them to change their beliefs and bend to her radical agenda favoring taxpayer-funded abortion on demand.”

Thiessen is not overstating the case, and in light of one recent court case and one pending bill, both in California and both with potential to go to the Supreme Court, the real dangers of a Hillary Clinton presidency can hardly be exaggerated.

Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that pro-life pregnancy centers are required to promote abortion, meaning, that if a pregnant woman comes to them not knowing what to do about her pregnancy, along with counseling her about adoption or keeping her own baby, they must also refer her to a local abortion clinic.

Yes, under the California Reproductive Freedom, Accountability, Comprehensive Care, and Transparency Act, this is the law; the Ninth Circuit upheld it.

What an absolute outrage, and what an infringement on religious liberties, since these pro-life centers, which are invariably run by conservative Christians, are being forced to violate their sacredly held beliefs.

Hillary Clinton supports legislation like this, and she would absolutely appoint Supreme Court justices who would support this as well. She has made this abundantly, unequivocally clear for many years, without wavering, and she is the most favored Planned Parenthood candidate in history.

As I wrote previously, if you vote for Hillary Clinton, you will have the blood of the unborn on your hands.

And note also the extreme hypocrisy of this ruling, since abortion clinics are not required to refer their clients to local pro-life pregnancy centers. They are not even required to show the mother an ultrasound of her baby, since that would allegedly infringe on her rights.

God forbid that you remind her that she has a baby in her womb.

In an email announcing the Ninth Court’s ruling, Matt Bowman, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel, said, “It’s bad enough if the government tells you what you can’t say, but a law that tells you what you must say — under threat of severe punishment — is even more unjust and dangerous.”

The ADF is considering appealing the ruling, which, as stated, could ultimately make it to the Supreme Court, but with Hillary as president, you know how the court will rule.

Do you want to facilitate this by helping to elect her to the highest office in the land? Do you want to be one of the people who helped empower her to be president?

This brings me to a major bill in California, SB 1146 which “would officially label private Christian colleges with Christian values, morality, and even dorm policies which conflict with the LGBT agenda as ‘discriminatory,’ and make the colleges liable to state (and federal) lawsuits as well as vicious attacks by activists. . . . The goal is to make Christian colleges surrender their belief systems and force the LGBT agenda onto every facet of education. California is the first state in the US to attempt this outrageous action. If it passes there, it will surely spread to other states.”

This is the exact kind of legislation that Hillary Clinton would promote and celebrate, fully backed by her handpicked Supreme Court justices.

This would also be harmony with her oft-quoted phrase that “gay rights are human rights,” and therefore any group or denomination or nation that opposes the goals of LGBT activism is guilty of opposing human rights. And let’s not forget the pressure Hillary Clinton put on African nations in her 2011 speech in which she made clear that nations across the continent would need to change their policies regarding homosexuality.

Not surprisingly, there was a major backlash to her speech, with John Nagenda, a senior adviser to Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni, stating, “Homosexuality here is taboo, it’s something anathema to Africans, and I can say that this idea of Clinton’s, of Obama’s, is something that will be seen as abhorrent in every country on the continent that I can think of.”

Can you imagine the kind of pressure Hillary Clinton would put on American Christians who remain opposed to same-sex “marriage” and LGBT activism in our children’s schools? After all, if she took it upon herself to tell sovereign African nations what to do, what would she seek to impose on her own country as president? And I haven’t even mentioned the open disdain expressed towards conservative Christians in her campaign’s recently released emails.

So I’ll say it again: Do not be deceived. We already know how a Hillary Clinton administration would view people like you and me.

I do understand that many of you cannot find it in yourself to vote for Donald Trump, but whatever you do, do not vote for Hillary Clinton, and please encourage your conservative Christian friends not to vote for her either. To do so is to hand her the tape to gag your mouths and the rope to fasten your hands.

You have been forewarned. (For more from the author of “Christian Conservatives, Be Assured That President Hillary Clinton Will Declare War on You” please click HERE)

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Rigged Election? Past Presidential Contests Sowed Doubt and Nearly Led to Violence

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In the 2016 presidential election, one candidate is warning about voter fraud, while another proclaims Russians are interfering. It’s not the first time contenders have alleged some form of a “rigged” election.

Tuesday in the Rose Garden, President Barack Obama dismissed concerns of fraud.

“I have never seen in my lifetime, or in modern political history, any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections process before votes have even taken place. It’s unprecedented,” Obama said.

“There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s elections, in part because they are so decentralized and the number of votes that are cast,” the president added. “There is no evidence that has happened in the past, or instances that will happen this year.”

While such complaints have been rare before votes were cast, they were very prominent in certain presidential elections, as was evidence that votes weren’t always counted properly.

In my book, “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections,” I write about some of the most controversial presidential elections that left large segments of the population believing their president was selected instead of elected. In two elections, the aftermath nearly led to mass violence.

1800: John Adams vs. Thomas Jefferson/Thomas Jefferson vs. Aaron Burr

James Monroe, who was aligned with the Democratic-Republican faction led by Thomas Jefferson, worried about reports that Jefferson supporters were arming for revolt, and said, “Anything [like] a commotion would be fatal to us.” Jefferson much preferred a convention to amend the Constitution if the opposing Federalists continued down this road.

Though it would be Alexander Hamilton who would play a massive role in the outcome, there was a great flurry of activity that led up to the final result. Moderates in both camps didn’t want to see the country torn apart should the die-hard Federalists push it to the deadlock and try to appoint a president. …

Thousands poured into Washington, prepared for partisan violence if there was what the Jeffersonians called “usurpation.” President John Adams would assert years later, “ … a civil war was expected.”

Benjamin Franklin’s cautionary words, “A Republic, if you can keep it,” were put to the test. As it turned out, Americans could keep it.

Flaws and all, these were men with enough character and intellect to realize the folly of clinging to power or risking bloodshed to obtain it. The nation truly could have been on the brink of collapse while still in its infancy.

1824: John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson

On Feb. 14, 1824, Henry Clay accepted the offer of the President-elect John Quincy Adams to serve as his secretary of state—presumably making him the next heir apparent since the last four men to lead the State Department became president.

Andrew Jackson and his supporters immediately called this a “corrupt bargain” between Adams and Clay.

The enraged Jackson said Speaker Clay approached him with a similar offer—to make him president in exchange for Jackson appointing him as secretary of state. As Jackson told it, he had too much character to accept such an offer. So Clay went to Adams with the same offer and received a different answer.

Clay and Adams denied that any deal was made. Clay even demanded a congressional investigation into the allegations, which found no proof. It is one of those things that can be difficult to prove or disprove if no witnesses were present for those meetings. Above all, having those meetings to start with seems a miscalculation on the part of Adams who should have known it might look suspicious.

That said, there is no question who Clay preferred between the two. The only real question is who was telling the truth, Jackson or Clay, on the charge that he made the same offer to both rivals. Clay considered the optics of becoming secretary of state as well, he later told friends, but thought he couldn’t reject the nomination because: “It would be said of me that, after having contributed to the elevation of a president, I thought so ill of him that I would not take first place under him.”

1876: Rutherford B. Hayes vs. Samuel Tilden

Henry Watterson, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a Democratic congressman from Kentucky, on Jan. 8, 1876—which he called “St. Jackson’s Day” because it marked the Battle of New Orleans—called for “the presence of at least 10,000 unarmed Kentuckians in the city” to march on Washington to ensure Samuel Tilden was elected.

His friend Joseph Pulitzer, still building a vast newspaper empire, went further, calling for 100,000 people “fully armed and ready for business” to ensure that Tilden became president.

Angry Democrat mobs across the country would chant, “Tilden or blood,” and reportedly in a dozen states, club-wielding “Tilden Minutemen” had formed threatening to march into Washington to take the White House for their candidate. This came to Tilden’s chagrin, who sought to calm the rowdiness, as he didn’t want to be responsible for an insurrection.

Still, with all the bellicose verbiage from the newspapers and the masses, it was the Democrat hierarchy in the South that was ready to make a deal, though not the Northern Democrats.

Richard Smith of the Republican Cincinnati Gazette reached out to Southern powerbrokers.

Rutherford Hayes asserted to Smith in early January 1877: “I am not a believer in the trustworthiness of the forces you hope to rally.” But, he told the newspaperman he did back internal improvements and education funding in the South believing it would “divide the whites” and help “obliterate the color line.” …

On the night of Feb. 26, 1877, four Southern Democrats, Reps. John Y. Brown and Watterson of Kentucky, Sen. J.B. Gordon of Georgia, and Rep. W. M. Levy of Louisiana, met with Ohio Republicans James Garfield and Charles Foster, both House members, and Ohio Sen. Stanley Matthews and Ohio Senator-elect John Sherman at the Wormley House hotel in Washington to see if a deal could be reached to prevent the House Democrats from blocking the results with a filibuster.

The men talked about details through the night, and by morning agreed to stop the House Democratic delay tactics that were blocking the certification of the Electoral Commission’s findings, on the condition of ending Reconstruction, appointing a Southern Democrat to the Cabinet, and providing federal money for southern projects. These were things Hayes expected to do anyway.

1960: John F. Kennedy vs. Richard Nixon

Earl Mazo, a Washington reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, began his investigation after he said Chicago reporters were “chastising” him and other national reporters for missing the real story.

He traveled to Chicago, obtained a list of voters in the suspicious precincts, and began matching names with addresses. Mazo told The Washington Post: “There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted. I remember a house. It was completely gutted. There was nobody there. But there were 56 votes for [John F.] Kennedy in that house.”

Mazo also found that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s charge that other counties were doing the same thing in favor of Republicans proved to be true—but nothing on the scale of what happened in Chicago.

In Texas, Mazo found similar circumstances.

The New York Herald Tribune planned a 12-part series on the election fraud. Four of the stories had been published and were republished in newspapers across the country in mid-December.

At Richard Nixon’s request, Mazo met him at the vice president’s Senate office, where Nixon told him to back off, saying, “Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis” in the midst of the Cold War.

Mazo didn’t back off and Nixon called his editors. The newspaper did not run the rest of the series. “I know I was terribly disappointed. I envisioned the Pulitzer Prize,” Mazo said. …

The entire matter wasn’t void of accountability.

Illinois state special prosecutor Morris Wexler, named to investigate charges of election fraud in Chicago, indicted 677 election officials, but couldn’t nail down convictions with state Judge John M. Karns.

It wasn’t until 1962 when an election worker confessed to witness tampering in Chicago’s 28th Ward that three precinct workers pleaded guilty and served jail sentences.

Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh reported hearing tapes of FBI wiretaps about potential election fraud. Hersh—whose books indicate he is a fan of neither Kennedy nor Nixon—believed Nixon was the rightful winner.

2000: George W. Bush vs. Al Gore

Al Gore campaign aide Bob Beckel intended to make that moral case to Florida’s electors—and perhaps electors in other states—who could be convinced to follow the will of the people. Gore did not need all of the state’s electors, just four.

For that matter, he didn’t think it had to be limited to Florida. He thought demonstrating statistics to prove Gore’s win could sway enough of the George W. Bush electors to switch their votes since they were not legally bound.

The Wall Street Journal first reported that Gore’s team “has been checking into the background of Republican electors with an eye toward persuading a handful of them to vote for Mr. Gore.”

Beckel insisted afterward he never had plans to try to blackmail electors to collect Gore votes, which he thought the article implied. But in an interview on Fox News on Nov. 17, 2000, Beckel said: “I’m trying to kidnap electors. Whatever it takes.” Beckel later explained what the Founders wanted: “The idea was that electors, early on, were to be lobbied.”

Pro-Gore websites even started popping up, listing the names and contact information of Republican electors across the country, asking the public to barrage them with demands to vote for Gore and follow the will of the people.

Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nichols sent an email to supporters asking them to “Help Stop Democratic Electoral Tampering.” Responding to the chairman, Beckel said: “The Constitution gives me the right to send a piece of mail to an elector.”

It never made a difference. No electors shifted, but it did serve as another twist as the 2000 election story unfolded—and another PR fumble for Democrats. (For more from the author of “Rigged Election? Past Presidential Contests Sowed Doubt and Nearly Led to Violence” please click HERE)

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Time for Conservative Intellectuals to Get Comfortable With the Right to Bear Arms

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The right to keep and bear arms is a vital element of the liberal order that our Founding Fathers handed down to us.

As I argue in a new essay for The Heritage Foundation, the founders understood that those who hold political power almost always will strive to reduce the freedom of those they rule and that many of the ruled always will be tempted to trade their liberty for empty promises of security. The causes of these political phenomena are sown in the nature of man.

The Constitution, including the Second Amendment, is a device designed to frustrate the domineering tendencies of the politically ambitious. The Second Amendment also plays an important role in fostering the kind of civic virtue that resists the cowardly urge to trade liberty for an illusion of safety.

Armed citizens take responsibility for their own security, thereby exhibiting and cultivating the self-reliance and vigorous spirit that ultimately are indispensable for genuine self-government.

While much has changed since the 18th century, for better and for worse, human nature has not changed. The fundamental principles of our regime and the understanding of human nature on which those principles are based can still be grasped today.

Once grasped, they can be defended. Such a defense, however, demands an appreciation of the right to arms that goes beyond the legalistic and narrowly political considerations that drive contemporary gun-control debates.

Regrettably, too many American opinion leaders, forgetting or rejecting the reasons that justify this right, have been extremely uncomfortable with the Second Amendment.

The progressive left, for example, largely has been united in promoting restrictions on civilian access to firearms. Lawyers as well, who Tocqueville famously thought could serve America as a kind of democratic aristocracy, have been hostile to gun rights.

Until 2008, federal judges—our most elite corps of attorneys—never once had sustained a Second Amendment challenge to a government regulation. State courts, for their part, generally had upheld gun regulations under legal tests that practically gave legislatures a blank check. And the organized bar has lobbied for decades in favor of more restrictive controls on firearms.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court finally rediscovered the Second Amendment, it so far has protected only a narrow right to keep a handgun in one’s home, and it did that much only by a narrow 5-4 vote. Especially after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, there is little reason to expect that the court will adopt doctrines that offer robust protection for the right to keep and bear arms.

Conservative intellectuals have offered little resistance to conventional elite opinion. Few of these pundits raise their voices against infringements of the right of self-defense, which is the core principle on which our liberal republic was founded. Some, including George Will and Charles Krauthammer, even advocate repeal of the Second Amendment so that the citizenry can be disarmed.

The principal sources of discomfort with the Second Amendment are the authoritarian impulse that comes so naturally to those who wield political power (either directly or through their influence over officeholders) and the cowardice that such people seek to instill in those they rule.

As a crime-control measure, restricting access to weapons by law-abiding citizens has been a proven failure, for reasons with which our Founders were quite familiar. Support for such policies is a sign either of ignorance about their effects or of disregard for the principles on which our republic was founded.

Conservatives constantly and rightly complain about the erosion of individual liberty by bureaucratic government, about the enervating effects of the nanny state, and about the suffocating atmosphere of euphemisms and repressed resentment imposed by the political correctness police. Whatever else has contributed to the decay of America’s republican spirit, forgetfulness or ignorance about the philosophy underlying our free institutions is among the least excusable failings that public intellectuals can display.

That philosophy was articulated by John Locke, William Blackstone, and every one of our Founding Fathers. If more pundits paid more attention to their views, fewer people would think that the right to arms is a product of romanticism about guns or an outmoded 18th-century mentality.

The American right to keep and bear arms, and its continuing value, reflect the reality of human nature and a reasoned response to that reality. The same cannot be said for the views of conservatives who would gut or even repeal the Second Amendment. (For more from the author of “Time for Conservative Intellectuals to Get Comfortable With the Right to Bear Arms” please click HERE)

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Pray for Hillary Clinton. Not as the Likely Next President, but as a Person

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Throughout the 2016 presidential election cycle, I’ve offered prayers for the nation, for the GOP, for the conservative movement, and other causes. I’ve added some prayers for Donald Trump, and asked God that Hillary Clinton, if elected, would govern differently than her record suggests she would.

But I’ve never offered a prayer for Clinton herself, for her soul. And I don’t think I’m alone.

Why Hillary?

First, we all need prayer. Remember such vivid dictums as “there but for the Grace of God go I,” and “all have fallen short of the Glory of God.” The Bible is full of them.

Second, Vox’s Emily Crockett was right when she said in an e-mailed comment to me that “Hillary was a victim of Bill’s affairs. He cheated on her. He humiliated her.”

I’ve never been married, and I was only 13 when Bill Clinton was impeached. It’s certainly possible that older conservatives are right that the Clintons’ marriage has been more about convenience than love.

But for a moment, I’m removing my political/conservative/reporter hat. Hillary Clinton had to stand by her husband on for a decade when he was hit with various accusations of infidelity as governor and president. Even if she married Bill for power, Hillary could not have been happy to be tied to the credible accusations against her husband. I cannot imagine it wasn’t shameful, embarrassing, etc.

On the flip side, let’s assume Clinton really is the power-hungry politician so many on the right, including myself, tend to think she is. Certainly, Wikileaks has confirmed that her political and policy principles are as up for grabs as her husband’s or Donald Trump’s marital vows. And she truly did enable Bill, attacking his accusers throughout the 1990s.

But that means she needs prayers even more. What sort of person would deal with the national embarrassment of her husband’s impeachment just to gain power? Who would be so cold-hearted so as to remove the modest protections of the Hyde Amendment in order to force taxpayers to fund more abortions? And, likewise, who would so willingly engage in a corrupt pay-for-play at her family’s foundation with dictatorships (such as Saudi Arabia) that kill over differences in religious beliefs?

And those are just her latest public policy sins.

Hillary is Not The Enemy

Hillary Clinton is not the enemy. Neither is Donald Trump or President Barack Obama. Their positions in U.S. politics say more about our national depravity than anything else — they are merely the logical conclusion of decades of abandonment of fiscal, moral and cultural principles by voters and others.

The enemy is whatever has brought us to this state of affairs — Satan, if you will. Hillary is a willing participant in his corruption of the world — we all have free will — and therefore she needs our prayers.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen a lot that has caused me to believe Hillary Clinton would do severe damage to this country. It’s not enough to convince me to vote for Trump, who was good friends with Bill and Hillary until he decided to switch parties and a host of his own political principles in order to make his own run for the White House.

But I noticed last week that I’ve almost stopped seeing Hillary as a person. As many on the Left see Trump, I’ve fallen into the trap of viewing the former First Lady and Secretary of State as the embodiment of the Democratic Party’s largely successful efforts to restructure the values and principles of our nation.

Hillary Clinton is a dishonest politician whose principles appear to be related to gaining power. Plain and simple. But she’s also a person. And it’s up to me to help her as best I can, if only for her soul — never mind the nation, and the hundreds of millions of lives a Hillary White House would affect.

Whether my prayers help her is up to God. But it’s the least I can do for her, and for myself. (For more from the author of “Pray for Hillary Clinton. Not as the Likely Next President, but as a Person” please click HERE)

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‘No Snitching’: What Happens When Communities Stop Trusting Police

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Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood has long been a haven for gang violence and gun crimes. But the community’s response to a recent shooting calls attention to a two-word phrase that has compromised public safety and cost countless lives: Stop snitchin’.

On Saturday, a 2-year-old girl was shot in Roxbury, marking the fourth shooting in 10 days, according to the Boston Globe. Her father, a suspected gang member, is thought to have been the original target.

Speaking to the Globe, the Rev. Miriam E. Sedzro, who pastors a local Lutheran church, said that “[p]eople have to talk” to police, instead of letting “predators prey on a community.”

“This ‘no snitching’ makes no sense to me …,” Sedzro said. “The way you create a community is you work together. You watch out for each other. You don’t let the criminals intimidate you.”

The “stop snitchin’” code goes back decades in America, illuminating the chronic police-community divide and mistrust. In 2005, then-mayor Thomas Menino infamously started a P.R. war against the widely circulating “Stop Snitchin’” T-shirts in Boston, which he believed discouraged witnesses from reporting crimes by instilling fear. Before this, other high-crime east coast cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore had launched their own wars against so-called snitches.

Brenda Peoples, the grandmother of the 2-year-old Roxbury girl who was wounded over the weekend, told the Globe that Saturday’s shooting exposed her to the consequences of remaining silent:

“She wants her community to speak up for her granddaughter. Peoples abides by a motto she learned working for the [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority]: If you see something, say something. She believes this is the only way anyone will be caught, the only way to stop the violence.”

“I wish the young people, the youth around here, would take life a little more seriously,” Peoples said. “This retaliation thing … it’s back and forth, back and forth. She’s going to be 3 in January. She doesn’t have any sense of all this [violence] going down.”

This is the type of story that the mainstream media won’t cover because it shows how a widespread lack of trust in local law enforcement can actually lead to more crime. Today, people are told that “systematic racism” and “institutional bias” within law enforcement are the biggest threats facing minorities in inner-cities. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and running mate Tim Kaine have used this argument to justify federal intervention in community affairs.

When enmity exists between police and citizens, communities suffer. Roxbury is just one example of this. When anti-cop hatred and mistrust bar police from doing their job, “predators” — be they gangs or the DOJ — will step in to claim that authority. (For more from the author of “‘No Snitching’: What Happens When Communities Stop Trusting Police” please click HERE)

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Why Conservatives Will Need a New Party If/When Hillary Wins

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When John Quincy Adams entered office in March, 1825, he had lofty ideas both domestically and on the global front. The younger Adams had one of the most impressive resumes of a new president. He was widely regarded as one of the most successful secretaries of state in our history, and presided over the tranquil years of the Monroe presidency. Yet, the Jacksonian Democrats who dominated Congress, buoyed by the voting bloc of the southern states, absolutely decimated Quincy’s agenda and rendered his entire presidency an utter failure. There is no reason the same dynamic cannot occur during a potential Hillary presidency. Sadly, it won’t until a true alternative party is conceived.

Whether you love, hate, or tolerate the current GOP nominee, the reality is that unless something cathartic occurs before the critical mass of early voting begins, Hillary Clinton will be elected president on November 8. Don’t shoot the messenger. Just three weeks out from the election (and much less when mass early voting is factored in), it’s time conservatives of all stripes at least give some thought as to a game-plan past the sensational news of the day in the media.

Republicans like Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas. (F, 42%) already have a game plan in place if and when Hillary is elected: make Hillary’s presidency a great success. In other words, nothing too different from the GOP’s modus operandi during the Obama presidency.

Here is a revealing tweet from an Austin Statesman reporter covering John Cornyn’s speech to a local Chamber of Commerce this week:

Thus, Cornyn’s biggest agenda item for a Hillary presidency is to grant her George Soros’s top policy agenda — jailbreak — which will help create a permanent Democrat majority. These people have no sense of the fact that even if Hillary wins she will have no mandate, Republicans will control the majority of state governments, the House, and very possibly the Senate. In a constitutional system that is working properly — with a party that cares to exercise its power appropriately — Hillary’s presidency should be dead on arrival. Yet, GOP leaders are already planning to greet her with tailwinds instead of headwinds.

Although Quincy Adams was a brilliant, honorable, and patriotic son of a Founding Father, the political adversity in which he found himself was insuperable, exactly what should be confronting Hillary if she wins … if only there was a true opposition party. She would have won only because of the dumpster fire in the Republican Party, not based on popular support for a single policy. Nobody wants a flood of refugees, Obamacare is spiraling out of control, and nobody likes her personality or has any trust in her leadership. She holds all of the policies of Obama that the electorate has already repudiated, albeit lacks the personal charm that has kept the lame duck president afloat. In fact, she would come in as the most hated president to begin their term in office since … well … John Quincy Adams.

Congress, together with the states, can completely cripple Hillary’s agenda if they actually cared to do so. Sure, Hillary would never do anything positive and would still have some latitude to implement some very dangerous things on the foreign policy front, but the fact that people regard a pending third term of Obama as the death of humanity reflects the reality that there is NO Republican Party left.

Not only will Republicans decline to use the power of the purse to block Hillary’s radical agenda or encourage allies in the state to thwart implementation of her policies, they will seek ways to look like they are “governing.” Every Republican will run for office as outraged against her agenda, and 2018 will be a repeat of 2010 when everyone was a “Tea Party candidate.” 2020 will be a repeat of 2012 in which the candidate with the most name recognition and promoted by Fox News will be the GOP nominee. By that point, we will have mandated sex change operations. Heck, our own military during a time of war and internal morale crisis has already published a handbook on sex changes. We simply don’t have the time to continue down this failed path. We’ve already been in the wilderness for 27 years.

The entire shelf-life of the Whig Party, which Quincy Adams helped found, was shorter than the 27 years the GOP has been around as a fake opposition party since 1989. Immediately after it became apparent that the Whigs stood for nothing as it related to the issue of the time, it was ditched for, ironically, the creation of the Republican Party. We’ve come full circle.

The modern-day Republican Party has controlled the House of Representatives, the body closest to the people and the branch controlled fully with a simple majority, for 18 of the past 22 years. Despite the unmitigated disaster of the presidential election, and the banality of the array of GOP senators running for reelection, Republicans are still better than even odds at keeping the Senate, even if Trump loses in a landslide. The bottom line is that the people don’t want the fundamental transformation. There is no popular mandate for Democrat polices. Outside of their impervious demographic firewall of support, there is a reverse mandate against their policies. Americans don’t want to give all of government to Democrats, yet this false flag operation of Republicans has allowed the worst cultural and fiscal transformation in our history on their watch, even though Democrats controlled the trifecta of the federal government for only two years.

Moreover, in the state, Democrats have held only a minority of state governments for most of the past two decades. Republicans, on the other hand, now control two-thirds of the state legislative bodies and in 23 states they control the trifecta of state government. Democrats enjoy full control in just seven states. Yet, little has changed to thwart the agenda of the far-left on most issues. On the seminal issues of our item, such as Obamacare, Islamic refugee resettlement, and funding for Planned Parenthood — which should be slam dunk policy — Republicans have been impotent if not complicit in the problem.

The biggest question that conservatives must answer the day after the election is: for how much longer will they continue doing the same things and expecting different results? The sooner that question is resolved, the quicker we can chart a new course that will be embraced by a majority of the country, which is clamoring for something different. The imperative to act and the opportunity for a clean break from the past were never stronger. At this point, it’s all a matter of initiative. (For more from the author of “Why Conservatives Will Need a New Party If/When Hillary Wins” please click HERE)

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The Only Birthday Planned Parenthood Cares About

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One hundred years ago this month, eugenics advocate Margaret Sanger founded the organization today known as Planned Parenthood. While many on the Left will celebrate this anniversary, Planned Parenthood’s “birthday” — an irony given its grim business of preventing actual birthdays — deserves no such distinction. So rather than celebrate, we should mourn the millions of unborn children who have been denied the chance to live. Today, Americans should ask how did we get here? How did a nation that prizes life above all other rights become a massive supporter and taxpayer-funded enabler of ending that basic right? And what can we do to turn the tide and make unlimited abortion a thing of the past?

Since its inception, Planned Parenthood has been directly responsible for the deaths of nearly seven million unborn children. It was founded upon Margaret Sanger’s reprehensible belief that the human race could somehow be “improved” by ridding the world of less fortunate minorities. Never heard that? The media don’t report it

.But take a look at Sanger’s own words. In a 1923 New York Times article, Sanger explained that her goal was the “release and cultivation of the better racial elements in our society and the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extirpation of defective stock — those human weeds which threaten the blossoming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

“Defective stock.” “Human weeds.” That’s how Sanger viewed minorities, immigrants, the disabled, and the “feeble-minded,” as her cruel determinism labeled it. All, according to Planned Parenthood’s founder, were to be marked for segregation and sterilization.

No sentiment could be further from the universal principles on which our nation was founded. Sanger rejected the very premise of our Declaration of Independence, that all people “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” And so does the organization she founded.

Over the years, Planned Parenthood has cunningly and deceptively marketed itself as an organization that exists to champion women’s health. It has tried to cloud the true mission of its business by also providing routine services that nearly any other clinic or medical provider can offer. But, unlike most other clinics, Planned Parenthood draws its main profits — not from women’s health — but from abortion on a massive scale, funded by the American taxpayer. No one should be fooled by their modern rhetoric; one hundred years later Planned Parenthood continues to operate on the principle that an unborn child — which the abortion lobby now calls a “clump of cells” or a “fetus” rather than their previous terminology of a “human weed” — is not equal to other human beings and should be eliminated.

Even more troubling, Planned Parenthood’s abortion business is growing at a ghastly rate. In 1973, Roe v. Wade opened the floodgates of industrialized abortion, and from 2012 through 2014 alone, Planned Parenthood took the lives of 978,818 children. That is almost a million unborn babies in three years. By itself, Planned Parenthood now accounts for nearly one-third of all abortions in the United States.

Planned Parenthood has profited mightily from its life-ending practices, growing into a billion-dollar behemoth that generates up to 40 percent of its clinic revenues from the hundreds of thousands of abortions it performs every year. In Planned Parenthood’s 2015 Annual Report, the group listed a total revenue of nearly $1.3 billion. And although nearly half of its funding comes from American taxpayers, Planned Parenthood nevertheless generously compensates its top officers. And it spends millions on political advertising and lobbying. In a just society, no one should profit, much less get rich, from taking innocent life. Nor should any organization engaged in the abortion business get a dime of taxpayer money.

Liberals may continue to contend that abortion and women’s health care are synonymous — look no further than the Democrat nominee who has long supported abortion without limits. But the pro-life movement’s years of work promoting a culture of life in the decades since Roe has begun to change hearts and minds. Thankfully, our nation’s younger generations are becoming more pro-life than ever before. A Gallup poll found that when compared to all other age groups, young adults were the most likely to say abortion should be illegal. More women are also turning to adoption instead of abortion, granting families who cannot have children their wish of becoming caring, loving parents.

Pro-lifers are not only changing hearts and minds, they’re also successfully encouraging states to pass laws that limit and discourage abortion, such as bans on partial birth and late-term abortion, requirements that mothers be provided with sonograms, parental notification requirements, and incentives to encourage adoption. But our work is not done. We must continue our efforts to expose the abhorrent practices of the abortion industry, and we must not stop until the culture of abortion becomes a thing of the past.

While anti-life advocates may choose to celebrate Planned Parenthood’s founding, we will instead mark this day as one of remembrance for an entire generation who never reached their first birthdays. We will recommit to building a culture of life that cares for mothers, nurtures their children at every stage of development, and rejects the destructive culture of organizations like Planned Parenthood and all those who would permit the taking of human life. (For more from the author of “The Only Birthday Planned Parenthood Cares About” please click HERE)

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