Cities of Refuge: Why Are People Creating Hundreds of Places of Refuge All Over America?

All over the United States, cities of refuge are being created. Now when I say “cities”, I don’t mean vast areas of land that can hold hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Rather, I am talking about much smaller places of refuge that can accommodate dozens or hundreds of people. In a few cases, I know of places of refuge that will be able to take in thousands of people, but that is about as big as they get. There are individuals all across America that have specifically felt called to build communities where large numbers of people will be able to gather when society totally collapses. So why is this happening? Why do so many people feel such an urgency to create cities of refuge that would presumably never be used if we don’t ever see full-blown societal breakdown?

In the headline, I claimed that hundreds of these “cities of refuge” are being created, but the truth is that it could easily be thousands. I have personally talked to countless numbers of people that are like my wife and I and are planning to be able to take in members of their own extended families when things get really crazy. But there are others that are taking things to an entirely different level.

I was recently contacted by a man in New York state that plans to convert a hotel and surrounding facilities into a place of refuge that could potentially accommodate hundreds of people for an extended period of time. I know of a ranch in southern Idaho where the staff has been feverishly preparing to take in thousands of people when society starts completely falling apart. And I have corresponded with so many others both inside the United States and outside the country that are creating these types of communities.

It has been estimated that there are three million preppers in America today. But those that are creating these places of refuge are not just “prepping” for themselves. Instead, they feel called to prepare a place of safety where others will be able to gather when times get really crazy.

Due to the wide reach of my articles, I have had a lot of people involved in these communities reach out to me over time. Some have graciously let my wife and I know that there is a place for us if needed during a major emergency, and others have wanted for us to become personally involved in what they are doing. I wish that I could get involved in all of them, but there is a limit to what any one of us can do. But I always encourage people to keep pressing forward with their preparations, because without a doubt they will be needed someday.

In addition to what is happening inside the United States, there are others that have already left this country and are creating places of refuge abroad. There are people that are doing this in South America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East.

And of course every “place of refuge” looks different. As I mentioned above, some plan on transforming existing hotels or ranches into places of refuge. Others plan to use open land to host large numbers of RVs or to construct vast tent cities.

But there are five big things that all places of refuge need to be thinking about…

1. Food – It is going to take vast quantitites of food to even feed dozens of people. When you are talking about hundreds or thousands of people, the amount of food required for a place of refuge will be off the charts.

2. Water – None of us can live without water, and it has been estimated that the average American uses 80 to 100 gallons of water every single day. Of course we would all use a lot less during an emergency situation, but if your “place of refuge” does not have easy access to water that could become a major problem very rapidly.

3. Shelter – It is nice to think that you are going to take in a lot of people, but where are all of them going to sleep? Most people don’t think of mattresses or cots as “survival items”, but the truth is that they are going to be greatly in demand when things get crazy.

4. Power – If the electricity goes off and stays off for an extended period of time, what are you going to do? How will people stay warm, how will you cook food, and how will your community function without any artificial light whatsoever? Having an alternative source of power for your place of refuge is very important.

5. Security – If there was a full-blown collapse of society, any place that still has ample resources is automatically going to become a target. So it is great if you have everything that your community will need, but if you have no way to protect it you can end up losing it all very quickly.

For even more tips on preparing for what is ahead, please see my recent article entitled “70 Tips That Will Help You Survive What Is Going To Happen To America“.

There are a lot of preppers out there that are only preparing for themselves and their immediate families, and anyone else that comes looking for assistance when things get really hard will end up looking down the barrel of a shotgun.

But there are so many others that feel called by God to prepare a place for large numbers of people to gather during the coming storm. They are doing this by faith, because such places have never been needed before in modern American history. Perhaps if you go all the way back to the Great Depression of the 1930s you could find large groups of people that needed somewhere to go, but since that time we have generally been regarded as the wealthiest and most prosperous nation on the entire planet.

Unfortunately, things are rapidly changing in this country. Our economy is in the process of crumbling, there is evidence of social decay all around us, natural disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity, and World War 3 could erupt in the Middle East at any time.

If I am right, the time when these cities of refuge will be needed is not that far away. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans are not preparing for what is ahead, and so most of them will be absolutely devastated by the great trials that are directly ahead of us. (For more from the author of “Cities of Refuge: Why Are People Creating Hundreds of Places of Refuge All Over America?” please click HERE)

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The One Tweet That Perfectly Sums up the 2016 Election

Here’s a funny summary of how the GOP presidential race shakes out today…

Trump is clearly the person to beat, but both Cruz and Rubio are keeping it close for second – making it a three man race . . .

OH Gov. John Kasich and one day future governor or senator or congressman Ben Carson have no shot at earning the nomination at this point. (Read more from “Cruz Demands Release of NYT Tape Showing Trump Scamming Conservatives on Immigration” HERE)

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Trump-Voting Christians: Retribution for Liberal Pastors Who Cry ‘Wolf’?

The Republican presidential race could effectively be decided by the votes of millions of Christians across the South, many of whom would call themselves “evangelical” or “strongly pro-life.” Yet polls show that many of them, perhaps a majority, are supporting Donald Trump. So are many of my fiercely pro-life Catholic friends. Is such support a canny calculation about who’d be the most effective commander — not pastor — in chief (as Jerry Falwell, Jr., tells his people)? An angry reaction to years of sitting at the back of the GOP bus (per Rusty Reno)? A moral scandal (see Erick Erickson)?

There are elements of truth in each account, but there is something much deeper going on. I’m a longtime critic of Donald Trump — I was quoted in the Daily Beast story that called him “Planned Parenthood’s favorite Republican” — because I do not trust his character or his promises. I don’t think he means what he says. He is a salesmen, who is crassly using the legitimate fears of Americans to sell us a presidency that would deliver even less than his scam Trump University. He won’t full-throatedly denounce the hateful race zealot David Duke. I don’t think he’ll even build a wall.

But I must speak up in defense of some of Trump’s supporters and their motives, if only to help conservatives reach out to them more effectively. And the time for that is short.

Donald Trump is part of a worldwide reaction among Westerners — Christian, non-Christian, and quasi-Christian alike — against the hijacking and perversion of Christianity by the left. The Gospel call to promote real social justice, be kind to the needy, and look past race and nation, has been stolen and replaced with a milk-and-water humanitarian liberalism that George Soros could endorse. Indeed Soros funds it, pouring millions into leftist Christian groups that promote his leftist, transnational goals — from bigger government to lax immigration and “marriage equality” laws.

The worst instance I’ve seen in America of this distortion of Christian morals came from a Catholic, Chicago’s Archbishop Blaise Cupich, but I’m sure that readers could furnish plenty of Protestant examples. When the gruesome videos exposing Planned Parenthood’s profiteering in unborn children’s organs were released, Cupich wrote an op-ed where he smooshed together this ghoulish greed with utterly unrelated issues, and treated them as equal:

While commerce in the remains of defenseless children is particularly repulsive, we should be no less appalled by the indifference toward the thousands of people who die daily for lack of decent medical care; who are denied rights by a broken immigration system and by racism; who suffer in hunger, joblessness and want; who pay the price of violence in gun-saturated neighborhoods; or who are executed by the state in the name of justice. [emphasis added]

How could Christians take seriously warnings from someone like Cupich about the real excesses and extremes of Donald Trump, when he has worn out his voice crying “wolf”? I suspect that something similar is happening in Protestant circles, that real conservative Christians whose positions are perfectly compatible with the Gospel, rightly understood, suspect that those who warn them against Donald Trump are little Baptist or Methodist equivalents of Archbishop Cupich.

Nor is Cupich a lonely voice. The official statements of the U.S. Catholic bishops are no more balanced in their treatment of immigration, and are echoed by the rhetoric of (curiously well-funded) evangelical groups that take the same liberal positions. Tell someone he is not a Christian — not that he’s mistaken or misguided but that he is not a Christian, as Pope Francis sort of said of Donald Trump — because he opposes granting amnesty to lawbreakers, then giving them the vote and welfare benefits and affirmative action preferences. Tell him that for long enough, and eventually that man will throw up his hands and say, “Fine! If Christianity is what you say it is, maybe it’s just for church and not for politics. Because that’s just plain crazy.”

But Christianity is not crazy. Its politics aren’t utopian, and the demands it makes of us as citizens can never conflict with the verdict of prudence and justice. To say otherwise is to suggest that the God who made our reason never wanted us to use it, but to blindly follow emotion — or succumb to emotional blackmail. The method that Christians since the early Church — from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, from Luther to William Wilberforce — have used to discern the meaning of what Jesus taught us in the Gospel is to apply the test of reason. That is how we know that Jesus did not really call for universal celibacy, or pacifism in the face of foreign invasion, or communism instead of private property.

Because He loved us, He knew that His Father had made us “good,” and that even our Fall had not completely destroyed our instincts — for instance, the urge to “be fruitful and multiply,” or our need to defend our families from violence, or our duty as prudent stewards of Creation. To say otherwise is to suggest that the heretic Marcion was right, that Jesus came to free us from the corrupt creation of a wicked or foolish “God,” rather than to reconcile us to our loving Father, and His.

We see the same revolt against pseudo-Christian utopian flapdoodle all across Europe, in the patriotic parties that are rising against their nation’s reckless elites, which are dissipating their democratic sovereignty and flooding their countries with bigoted Muslim colonists — some of whom rape women in Europe’s streets. Such parties are routinely and fiercely condemned by most Christian clergy in those countries, who echo Pope Francis’ utopian rhetoric on immigration — which differs from Catholic doctrine. Some of those Europeans, tragically, are letting their clueless pastors drive them out of the church altogether, and embracing crass neo-pagan movements, with names like “Soldiers of Odin.” This is a double win for the devil: disfigure the Gospel to make it seem repulsive, then harvest the souls of those who walk away.

The way that leftists unwittingly do this devil’s work is to take some element of Christian ethics and grossly exaggerate it, cut it off from any context, and make of it an idol. Hence “compassion,” “inclusiveness,” “social justice” or “equality” take the place of the person of Jesus and become the object of worship. C.S. Lewis warned against this temptation in Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. In its fullest form, such political idolatry can be seen in Liberation Theology, which perverts the church into a revolutionary Marxist vanguard.

Of course, the devil is nothing if not subtle, and he can play both sides of the spectrum. Millions of Germans perverted the Gospel on Hitler’s behalf, adopting a “German Christianity” that pretended Jesus was an “Aryan” who came to save us from the wicked Old Testament Jews (there’s Marcion again). No doubt there are some Americans today calling themselves Christians who really care more about their race, or social class, or economic well-being. And some of them are voting for Donald Trump. But it’s unfair, futile, and frankly un-Christian to pretend that this accounts for all of them. Donald Trump is a symptom of a much deeper disease. If we don’t root it out of our churches, no one will listen to their political voice anymore, and no one should. (For more from the author of “Trump-Voting Christians: Retribution for Liberal Pastors Who Cry ‘Wolf’?” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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Which Presidential Candidate Has the Longest Record Fighting for Gun Rights?

It’s easy to forget the cold, dark days of winter, 2013.

The horrific tragedy of Newtown had touched the hearts of the nation, and every news outlet — every one — was blaming the Second Amendment community for what happened there.

GOA was receiving death threats — not only against us, but against our children. Even Fox News was opining that the battle against Bloomberg’s gun control was hopeless, as every news outlet spent every hour of the day predicting that our organization — and the “gun manufacturers’ lobby” [sic] in general — would be absolutely and totally destroyed.

It was in this context that Senator Ted Cruz agreed to lead a team of senators to defeat every word — EVERY WORD — of Bloomberg/Obama gun control.

Working with us, Cruz implemented a brilliant strategy which used the complex rules of parliamentary procedure to send Barack Obama and Harry Reid running with their tails between their legs.

And the Cruz/GOA victory emboldened gun owners to take the Senate away from the anti-gun crazies in 2014 and return it to pro-Second Amendment principles.

Make no mistake: Had Ted Cruz not done what he did, the gun rights community would have been completely demoralized and defeated.

We would have been unable to achieve the electoral victories that we won in 2014, and instead, we would have been fighting desperately to fend off the succession of follow-up gun control measures that Bloomberg and Obama promised.

But that’s not the way history unfolded.

Because of Cruz, the efforts to enact gun registration and gun and magazine bans were stopped in the Senate.

And with Gun Owners of America supporting Cruz’ strategy, the liberal media blasted GOA for helping him defeat gun control in the Senate:

“Democrats Blame ‘Gun Owners of America’ for Gun Control Setback.” — TPM, April 8, 2013

“The group [GOA] has already been successful in both freezing senators, particularly Republicans, who have appeared to be on the fence about supporting bills to expand background checks.” — New York Times, April 3, 2013

“When Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, backed away from bipartisan talks to expand background checks earlier this year, he did so after Gun Owners of America and its members flooded the senator’s office with e-mails and phone calls.” –Slate, April 4, 2013

But that’s not all.

Cruz rapidly followed up our victory over gun control by leading the effort to kill Marco Rubio’s anti-gun Gang of Eight amnesty bill.

Cruz did that by arranging to have the Senate-passed bill “blue-slipped” in the House as an unconstitutional Senate-initiated revenue measure.

Furthermore, Cruz put a “hold” on the Senate calendar to prevent Harry Reid from secretly trying to stick the unconstitutional Senate measure onto a minor House-initiated revenue bill.

Had Cruz not implemented our successful strategy, up to 11,000,000 new anti-gun voters would have turned the entire country into an anti-gun “utopia” comparable to California.

Of course, none of this was a surprise to us. Cruz had helped argue the Heller case. And as a result of Cruz’ advocacy and the arguments of other top Second Amendment attorneys, the Supreme Court has now recognized this fundamental truth: The Second Amendment is a God-given individual right applicable to all Americans.

Marco Rubio is a good-hearted articulate young man who, as he gains more experience, could have a great future in the Republican Party.

But his inexperience in negotiating with Senator Chuck Schumer over the Gang of Eight amnesty bill almost cost us EVERYTHING. Had Marco succeeded in giving a path to citizenship for 11,000,000 anti-gun voters, we would have been on a glide-path that ultimately would have made our battle for gun rights hopeless.

Similarly, many of our good-hearted friends have been inspired by Donald Trump’s willingness to stand up to the feckless Republican establishment.

But, if he were to gain the nomination, we just don’t know where Trump would be on the Second Amendment.

In his autobiography, Trump endorsed the semi-auto ban and a longer waiting period on firearms purchases. And, caught unaware by a questioner, he endorsed Chuck Schumer’s plan to take away guns from anyone Barack Obama chose to put on a secret list — which suggests he doesn’t understand some of the seminal issues which face us.

And now Trump is bragging about the “deals he’ll make” specifically with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. That’s REALLY SCARY.

So, in short, that’s why we believe Ted Cruz is the ONLY REAL CHOICE for gun owners.

In head-on-heads, Cruz does well against Hillary Clinton — unlike the incendiary Trump. Thus, he has a better chance of uniting the base and winning the election — rather than going down in a burst of flames.

And, when he arrives at the White House on January 20, the entire wretched “legacy” of Barack Obama will be repealed — on Day 1.

For this reason, Gun Owners of America urges you, in the strongest possible terms, to support Ted Cruz for president.

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Cruz and Rubio Just Hit Trump With All They’ve Got – There’s Just One Problem…

Cruz/Rubio Slug Trump. But is it too little too late?

As conservatives, we swore to ourselves that we would not let the liberal media pick our nominee again – like we did the past few cycles. Yet, in debate after debate, the entire focus and narrative has been framed by the media in the form of hitting Donald Trump from the left. This has resulted in many conservative voters (rightfully) thinking Trump is the presumptive anti-establishment candidate who will tear down the political class. A case of circular logic, no doubt.

We never had an opportunity to observe candidates actually debate Trump from the right in a sustained fashion and actually reveal just who this man is, a man who is close to sealing the nomination. Part of this was the fault of the other candidates declining to truly assail Trump on the issues, but much of it was because of the media narrative and the pathetic moderators.

Tonight’s debate was different. It was, by far, the most informative debate as it relates to educating the public on Trump’s record. This is because the two leading challengers, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio actually took the fight to Trump in a sustained manner. Wolf Blitzer does deserve credit for formulating good questions that actually afforded the candidates the opportunity to inform the public about the real Donald Trump. Unfortunately, the combination of a number of factors; namely, the clownish anchor from Telemundo, Wolf’s intervention to save Trump from a beat down on numerous occasions, and the distraction of Carson and Kasich’s presence at the debate, prevented the voters from seeing a full-throttle clash between the three real contenders.

In the first half of the debate, Rubio had stronger opportunities to hit Trump on his liberal, incoherent record. But in the second half of the debate Cruz took it to Trump like never before, and he did so by deftly demonstrating how Trump is a consistent liberal and how he would be the worst person to go up against Hillary Clinton, given his political glass jaw. Whether it’s support for Planned Parenthood, socialized medicine, the Libya intervention, liberal immigration policies, or his appalling position on Israel, Trump got exposed tonight. Heck, I work in this business and didn’t even know that Trump supported the ridiculous Libya intervention, just like Rubio did. How are conservative voters supposed to know Trump’s record if this is not litigated in a sustained debate?

Cruz also had the added benefit of tossing in Rubio and landing a lot of punches on his record, while taking no effective incoming fire. He efficiently lumped Rubio in with his attacks on Trump, establishing that they both have inconsistent records.

Finally, the most effective performance from Cruz was his ability to litigate the case against Trump’s decades’ long support for Democrat candidates. While this has been tossed at him parsimoniously throughout the campaign, nobody has successfully revealed in long form how he is responsible for – and tied to – the very system he claims to hate.

Rubio landed a punch that will likely stick with Trump when he showed how Trump is guilty of the very repetitive bromides that Rubio himself was criticized for in New Hampshire. Coupled with Cruz’s attacks on Trump’s record and persona, it stripped bare for the public the person who was once thought as the consummate “alpha male in the room.”

However, Rubio himself was exposed by the Telemundo moderator for changing his position on repealing DACA. Rubio actually admitted that he originally said he wasn’t going to repeal it “before he was running for president.” That in itself reveals the problem many of us have with Rubio: he is only a conservative when trying to win our votes. Ironically, Rubio was actually wrong about that because he announced for president on April 13 and gave the Univision interview, in which he said he would not repeal DACA without finding a replacement, on April 18.

Which leads to the next important outcome of the debate. Cruz lost South Carolina largely because Trump and Rubio called him a liar for an entire week. That accusation stuck with him. In this debate, whether it was Trump on socialized medicine, support for the Libya invasion, or Rubio’s record on immigration, Cruz was vindicated and demonstrated it with painstaking fact by using the words of his opponents. It is in fact his opponents who are the liars.

Cruz can now hold his head high running as the only consistent conservative and finally making that case effectively to the public.

Rubio also turned in a solid night and performed well. But again, “performance” has sadly been the extent of his conservatism when you look at his record.

The question going forward is this: while Trump will likely bleed some support from this debate, was this too little, too late to take down Trump? In addition to coming at the 11th hour, the Trump beat-down was incomplete. Every time Rubio and Cruz trapped him and knocked him off his game, Wolf Blitzer took them off Trump’s beaten body or John Kasich interrupted with nonsense. If this race does indeed continue past next week, conservatives must demand that the debate be limited to the top three candidates and that conservatives ask more questions in an extended format. A townhall format would work out better. We need a Lincoln-Douglas style debate between the three of them with a conservative moderator to simply keep the time and go to commercial break.

If Trump is indeed the nominee, many people will be asking the following two questions: why in the world didn’t the contenders take him down sooner and why do we continue to let the media frame our debate, and by extension, control the destiny of our movement? (For more from the author of “Cruz and Rubio Just Hit Trump With All They’ve Got – There’s Just One Problem…” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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Huckabee Tells Trump ‘Just Say No’ to Releasing Tax Forms – There’s a BIG Reason Why

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a young political candidate who thought people would praise his transparency if he released 20 years’ worth of income tax returns, going all the way back to when he was first married. Alas, nobody gave him credit for his honesty or charitable giving. The only people who cared were his political opponents, who poured over his forms, hunting for any obscure item they could wrench out of context and turn into attack ads. The unsurprising twist: that young candidate was me. And the moral I learned was: “Never help somebody load a gun when it’s pointed at your own head. It’s not going to end well.”

Donald Trump is the latest candidate to be pressured to release his income tax forms. My Reaganesque advice to him: “Just say no!” Some have tried to interpret that as me favoring Trump, but I’ve given this same advice to candidates for years: Don’t release your personal tax forms. Trump, like every other candidate, is required by law to release detailed financial information. It must be signed under oath to verify that it’s accurate on penalty of perjury. Trump has done that, and it’s available for all to see.

Personally, I think that’s better than income tax returns. We all know how complicated tax forms are, particularly for someone like Trump. No average human can comprehend them; that’s why we have to pay experts to do our taxes. Do you really think some junior reporter at the Washington Post will understand Trump’s voluminous tax forms? If he did, he’d be a seven-figure CPA. (Read more from “Huckabee Tells Trump ‘Just Say No’ to Releasing Tax Forms – There’s a BIG Reason Why” HERE)

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Donald Trump Is Right – Here Are 100 Reasons Why We Need to Audit the Federal Reserve

When one of our major politicians gets something exactly right, we should applaud them for it. In this case, Donald Trump’s call to audit the Federal Reserve is dead on correct. Most Americans don’t realize this, but the Federal Reserve has far more power over the economy than anyone else does – including Barack Obama. Financial markets all over the planet gyrate wildly at the smallest comment from Fed officials, and virtually every boom and bust cycle over the past 100 years can be traced directly back to specific decisions made by the Federal Reserve. We get all excited about what various presidential candidates say that they “will do for the economy”, but in the end it is the Fed that is holding all of the cards. The funny thing is that the Federal Reserve is not even part of the federal government. It is an independent private central bank that was designed by very powerful Wall Street interests a little over 100 years ago. It is at the heart of the debt-based financial system which is eating away at America like cancer, and it has no direct accountability to the American people whatsoever.

The Fed has been around for so long that most people assume that we need it.

But the truth is that we don’t actually need the Federal Reserve. In fact, the greatest period of economic growth in United States history happened during the decades before the Federal Reserve was created.

A little over 100 years ago, very powerful forces on Wall Street successfully pushed for the creation of an immensely powerful central bank, and since that time the value of the U.S. dollar has fallen by about 98 percent and our national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

The Federal Reserve does whatever it feels like doing, and Fed officials insist that the institution must remain “independent” and “above politics” because monetary policy is too important to entrust to the American people.

To me, this is absolutely ridiculous. Everything else, including our national defense, is subject to the normal political process, and yet the decisions made by the Fed are so “important” that the American people can’t have a voice?

It is high time that the American people begin to learn what the Federal Reserve is really all about, and that can start with a full, comprehensive audit of all of the Federal Reserve’s activities. Yesterday, Donald Trump came out in favor of such an audit…

Previously, Trump has made quite a few comments that were very critical of the Fed. For example, last year he told Bloomberg News that he believed that the Federal Reserve was “creating a bubble”…

“In terms of real estate, if I want to develop … from that standpoint I like low interest rates. From the country’s standpoint, I’m just not sure it’s a very good thing, because I really do believe we’re creating a bubble.”

And of course Trump was exactly right about that too. By pushing interest rates to artificially low levels and creating billions upon billions of dollars out of thin air during the quantitative easing era, stock prices were driven to ridiculously high levels. Now that the artificial support has been withdrawn, stocks are beginning to crash, and the financial collapse which is starting to happen is going to be far worse than it otherwise would have been because of the Fed’s actions. The following comes from one of my previous articles…

As stocks continue to crash, you can blame the Federal Reserve, because the Fed is more responsible for creating the current financial bubble that we are living in than anyone else. When the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates all the way to the floor and injected lots of hot money into the financial markets during their quantitative easing programs, this pushed stock prices to wildly artificial levels. The only way that it would have been possible to keep stock prices at those wildly artificial levels would have been to keep interest rates ultra-low and to keep recklessly creating lots of new money. But now the Federal Reserve has ended quantitative easing and has embarked on a program of very slowly raising interest rates. This is going to have very severe consequences for the markets, but Janet Yellen doesn’t seem to care.

I don’t understand why so many Americans continue to support the Federal Reserve.

We don’t need a bunch of central planners setting interest rates and determining monetary policy. We are supposed to have a free market system, and the free market should be setting interest rates – not the Federal Reserve.

Unfortunately, just about every nation on the entire planet now has a central bank. Even though the nations of the world can’t agree on much, somehow central banking has been adopted virtually everywhere. At this point, more than 99.9% of the population of the world lives in a country that has a central bank.

There are still some minor island countries such as the Federated States of Micronesia that do not have a central bank, but the only major nation not to have one right now is North Korea. And nobody in their right mind would ever want to live there.

So how in the world did this happen?

Did the people of the world willingly choose this debt-based system or was it imposed upon them?

To my knowledge, there has never been a single vote where the population of a nation has willingly chosen to establish a central bank. I could be wrong about this, but I have never heard of one.

It is the elite that have always wanted central banking, and now they pretty much have the entire planet in their grasp.

That is why we should applaud Donald Trump when he stands up to the elite. And it isn’t just regarding the Fed that he has done this. The following comes from an excellent article that was just written by Dan Lyman…

Ultimately, Trump knows it is the global elite who have pried our borders wide open. He knows it is THEY who are responsible for the tens of millions of Third Worlders pouring into our nations. He knows that THEY are the monsters who need the world to be constantly at war. He knows THEY are radically altering our food supply with GMOs and poisonous chemicals. He knows THEY are responsible for poisoning our drinking water, filling our skies and air supplies with toxic waste, genociding our unborn children, collecting data on all citizens to implement the Orwellian police state, forcing poison into our babies’ veins – and soon the rest of us, redistributing what remains of our wealth under the guises of ‘saving the planet’ or ‘refugee aid,’ allowing and funding the ISIS Islamofascists to decimate places like Syria and Iraq in Satanic fashion, promoting the psychotic LGBT Nazis to goose-step all over our religious liberties and gender-privacy in school bathrooms. If there is a societal cancer metastasizing somewhere, it can usually be traced back to the same sources.

Yes, there are many things that we can criticize Trump and the other Republican candidates for. But when they nail something, we should be willing to admit that they got something right.

In this case, Donald Trump is absolutely correct to call for an audit of the Fed. As I promised in the title of this article, I want to share 100 reasons why the Fed should be audited. The following list has been adapted from one of my previous articles…

#1 We like to think that we have a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, but the truth is that an unelected, unaccountable group of central planners has far more power over our economy than anyone else in our society does.

#2 The Federal Reserve is actually “independent” of the government. In fact, the Federal Reserve has argued vehemently in federal court that it is “not an agency” of the federal government and therefore not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

#3 The Federal Reserve openly admits that the 12 regional Federal Reserve banks are organized “much like private corporations“.

#4 The regional Federal Reserve banks issue shares of stock to the “member banks” that own them.

#5 100% of the shareholders of the Federal Reserve are private banks. The U.S. government owns zero shares.

#6 The Federal Reserve is not an agency of the federal government, but it has been given power to regulate our banks and financial institutions. This should not be happening.

#7 According to Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Congress is the one that is supposed to have the authority to “coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”. So why is the Federal Reserve doing it?

#8 If you look at a “U.S. dollar”, it actually says “Federal Reserve note” at the top. In the financial world, a “note” is an instrument of debt.

#9 In 1963, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 11110 which authorized the U.S. Treasury to issue “United States notes” which were created by the U.S. government directly and not by the Federal Reserve. He was assassinated shortly thereafter.

#10 Many of the debt-free United States notes issued under President Kennedy are still in circulation today.

#11 The Federal Reserve determines what levels some of the most important interest rates in our system are going to be set at. In a free market system, the free market would determine those interest rates.

#12 The Federal Reserve has become so powerful that it is now known as “the fourth branch of government“.

#13 The greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was when there was no central bank.

#14 The Federal Reserve was designed to be a perpetual debt machine. The bankers that designed it intended to trap the U.S. government in a perpetual debt spiral from which it could never possibly escape. Since the Federal Reserve was established 100 years ago, the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5000 times larger.

#15 A permanent federal income tax was established the exact same year that the Federal Reserve was created. This was not a coincidence. In order to pay for all of the government debt that the Federal Reserve would create, a federal income tax was necessary. The whole idea was to transfer wealth from our pockets to the federal government and from the federal government to the bankers.

#16 The period prior to 1913 (when there was no income tax) was the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

#17 Today, the U.S. tax code is about 13 miles long.

#18 From the time that the Federal Reserve was created until now, the U.S. dollar has lost 98 percent of its value.

#19 From the time that President Nixon took us off the gold standard until now, the U.S. dollar has lost 83 percent of its value.

#20 During the 100 years before the Federal Reserve was created, the U.S. economy rarely had any problems with inflation. But since the Federal Reserve was established, the U.S. economy has experienced constant and never ending inflation.

#21 In the century before the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation was about half a percent. In the century since the Federal Reserve was created, the average annual rate of inflation has been about 3.5 percent.

#22 The Federal Reserve has stripped the middle class of trillions of dollars of wealth through the hidden tax of inflation.

#23 The size of M1 has nearly doubled since 2008 thanks to the reckless money printing that the Federal Reserve has been doing.

#24 The Federal Reserve has been starting to behave like the Weimar Republic, and we all remember how that ended.

#25 The Federal Reserve has been consistently lying to us about the level of inflation in our economy. If the inflation rate was still calculated the same way that it was back when Jimmy Carter was president, the official rate of inflation would be somewhere between 8 and 10 percent today.

#26 Since the Federal Reserve was created, there have been 18 distinct recessions or depressions: 1918, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1929, 1937, 1945, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1960, 1969, 1973, 1980, 1981, 1990, 2001, 2008.

#27 Within 20 years of the creation of the Federal Reserve, the U.S. economy was plunged into the Great Depression.

#28 The Federal Reserve created the conditions that caused the stock market crash of 1929, and even Ben Bernanke admits that the response by the Fed to that crisis made the Great Depression even worse than it should have been.

#29 The “easy money” policies of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan set the stage for the great financial crisis of 2008.

#30 Without the Federal Reserve, the “subprime mortgage meltdown” would probably never have happened.

#31 If you can believe it, there have been 10 different economic recessions since 1950. The Federal Reserve created the “dotcom bubble”, the Federal Reserve created the “housing bubble” and now it has created the largest bond bubble in the history of the planet.

#32 According to an official government report, the Federal Reserve made 16.1 trillion dollars in secret loans to the big banks during the last financial crisis. The following is a list of loan recipients that was taken directly from page 131 of the report…

Citigroup – $2.513 trillion
Morgan Stanley – $2.041 trillion
Merrill Lynch – $1.949 trillion
Bank of America – $1.344 trillion
Barclays PLC – $868 billion
Bear Sterns – $853 billion
Goldman Sachs – $814 billion
Royal Bank of Scotland – $541 billion
JP Morgan Chase – $391 billion
Deutsche Bank – $354 billion
UBS – $287 billion
Credit Suisse – $262 billion
Lehman Brothers – $183 billion
Bank of Scotland – $181 billion
BNP Paribas – $175 billion
Wells Fargo – $159 billion
Dexia – $159 billion
Wachovia – $142 billion
Dresdner Bank – $135 billion
Societe Generale – $124 billion
“All Other Borrowers” – $2.639 trillion

#33 The Federal Reserve also paid those big banks $659.4 million in “fees” to help “administer” those secret loans.

#34 During the last financial crisis, big European banks were allowed to borrow an “unlimited” amount of money from the Federal Reserve at ultra-low interest rates.

#35 The “easy money” policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have created the largest financial bubble this nation has ever seen, and this has set the stage for the great financial crisis that we are rapidly approaching.

#36 Since late 2008, the size of the Federal Reserve balance sheet has grown from less than a trillion dollars to more than 4 trillion dollars. This is complete and utter insanity.

#37 During the quantitative easing era, the value of the financial securities that the Fed has accumulated is greater than the total amount of publicly held debt that the U.S. government accumulated from the presidency of George Washington through the end of the presidency of Bill Clinton.

#38 Overall, the Federal Reserve now holds more than 32 percent of all 10 year equivalents.

#39 Quantitative easing creates financial bubbles, and when quantitative easing ends those bubbles tend to deflate rapidly.

#40 Most of the new money created by quantitative easing has ended up in the hands of the very wealthy.

#41 According to a prominent Federal Reserve insider, quantitative easing has been one giant “subsidy” for Wall Street banks.

#42 As one CNBC article stated, we have seen absolutely rampant inflation in “stocks and bonds and art and Ferraris“.

#43 Donald Trump once made the following statement about quantitative easing: “People like me will benefit from this.”

#44 Most people have never heard about this, but a very interesting study conducted for the Bank of England shows that quantitative easing actually increases the gap between the wealthy and the poor.

#45 The gap between the top one percent and the rest of the country is now the greatest that it has been since the 1920s.

#46 The mainstream media has sold quantitative easing to the American public as an “economic stimulus program”, but the truth is that the percentage of Americans that have a job has actually gone down since quantitative easing first began.

#47 The Federal Reserve is supposed to be able to guide the nation toward “full employment”, but the reality of the matter is that an all-time record 102 million working age Americans do not have a job right now. That number has risen by about 27 million since the year 2000.

#48 For years, the projections of economic growth by the Federal Reserve have consistently overstated the strength of the U.S. economy. But every single time, the mainstream media continues to report that these numbers are “reliable” even though all they actually represent is wishful thinking.

#49 The Federal Reserve system fuels the growth of government, and the growth of government fuels the growth of the Federal Reserve system. Since 1970, federal spending has grown nearly 12 times as rapidly as median household income has.

#50 The Federal Reserve is supposed to look out for the health of all U.S. banks, but the truth is that they only seem to be concerned about the big ones. In 1985, there were more than 18,000 banks in the United States. Today, there are only 6,891 left.

#51 The six largest banks in the United States (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) have collectively gotten 37 percent larger over the past five years.

#52 The U.S. banking system has 14.4 trillion dollars in total assets. The six largest banks now account for 67 percent of those assets and all of the other banks account for only 33 percent of those assets.

#53 The five largest banks now account for 42 percent of all loans in the United States.

#54 We were told that the purpose of quantitative easing was to help “stimulate the economy”, but today the Federal Reserve is actually paying the big banks not to lend out 1.8 trillion dollars in “excess reserves” that they have parked at the Fed.

#55 The Federal Reserve has allowed an absolutely gigantic derivatives bubble to inflate which could destroy our financial system at any moment. Right now, four of the “too big to fail” banks each have total exposure to derivatives that is well in excess of 40 trillion dollars.

#56 The total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts is more than 381 times greater than their total assets.

#57 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has a track record of failure that would make the Chicago Cubs look good.

#58 The secret November 1910 gathering at Jekyll Island, Georgia during which the plan for the Federal Reserve was hatched was attended by U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Department A.P. Andrews and a whole host of representatives from the upper crust of the Wall Street banking establishment.

#59 The Federal Reserve was created by the big Wall Street banks and for the benefit of the big Wall Street banks.

#60 In 1913, Congress was promised that if the Federal Reserve Act was passed that it would eliminate the business cycle.

#61 There has never been a true comprehensive audit of the Federal Reserve since it was created back in 1913.

#62 The Federal Reserve system has been described as “the biggest Ponzi scheme in the history of the world“.

#63 The following comes directly from the Fed’s official mission statement: “To provide the nation with a safer, more flexible, and more stable monetary and financial system.” Without a doubt, the Federal Reserve has failed in those tasks dramatically.

#64 The Fed decides what the target rate of inflation should be, what the target rate of unemployment should be and what the size of the money supply is going to be. This is quite similar to the “central planning” that goes on in communist nations, but very few people in our government seem upset by this.

#65 A couple of years ago, Federal Reserve officials walked into one bank in Oklahoma and demanded that they take down all the Bible verses and all the Christmas buttons that the bank had been displaying.

#66 The Federal Reserve has taken some other very frightening steps in recent years. For example, back in 2011 the Federal Reserve announced plans to identify “key bloggers” and to monitor “billions of conversations” about the Fed on Facebook, Twitter, forums and blogs. Someone at the Fed will almost certainly end up reading this article.

#67 Thanks to this endless debt spiral that we are trapped in, a massive amount of money is transferred out of our pockets and into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy each year. Incredibly, the U.S. government spent more than 415 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt in 2013.

#68 In January 2000, the average rate of interest on the government’s marketable debt was 6.620 percent. If we got back to that level today, we would be paying more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt and it would collapse our entire financial system.

#69 The American people are being killed by compound interest but most of them don’t even understand what it is. Albert Einstein once made the following statement about compound interest…

“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.”

#70 Most Americans have absolutely no idea where money comes from. The truth is that the Federal Reserve just creates it out of thin air. The following is how I have previously described how money is normally created by the Fed in our system…

When the U.S. government decides that it wants to spend another billion dollars that it does not have, it does not print up a billion dollars.

Rather, the U.S. government creates a bunch of U.S. Treasury bonds (debt) and takes them over to the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve creates a billion dollars out of thin air and exchanges them for the U.S. Treasury bonds.

#71 What does the Federal Reserve do with those U.S. Treasury bonds? They end up getting auctioned off to the highest bidder. But this entire process actually creates more debt than it does money…

The U.S. Treasury bonds that the Federal Reserve receives in exchange for the money it has created out of nothing are auctioned off through the Federal Reserve system.

But wait.

There is a problem.

Because the U.S. government must pay interest on the Treasury bonds, the amount of debt that has been created by this transaction is greater than the amount of money that has been created.

So where will the U.S. government get the money to pay that debt?

Well, the theory is that we can get money to circulate through the economy really, really fast and tax it at a high enough rate that the government will be able to collect enough taxes to pay the debt.

But that never actually happens, does it?

And the creators of the Federal Reserve understood this as well. They understood that the U.S. government would not have enough money to both run the government and service the national debt. They knew that the U.S. government would have to keep borrowing even more money in an attempt to keep up with the game.

#72 Of course the U.S. government could actually create money and spend it directly into the economy without the Federal Reserve being involved at all. But then we wouldn’t be 17 trillion dollars in debt and that wouldn’t serve the interests of the bankers at all.

#73 The following is what Thomas Edison once had to say about our absolutely insane debt-based financial system…

That is to say, under the old way any time we wish to add to the national wealth we are compelled to add to the national debt.

Now, that is what Henry Ford wants to prevent. He thinks it is stupid, and so do I, that for the loan of $30,000,000 of their own money the people of the United States should be compelled to pay $66,000,000 — that is what it amounts to, with interest. People who will not turn a shovelful of dirt nor contribute a pound of material will collect more money from the United States than will the people who supply the material and do the work. That is the terrible thing about interest. In all our great bond issues the interest is always greater than the principal. All of the great public works cost more than twice the actual cost, on that account. Under the present system of doing business we simply add 120 to 150 per cent, to the stated cost.

But here is the point: If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good makes the bill good.

#74 The United States now has the largest national debt in the history of the world, and we are stealing roughly 100 million dollars from our children and our grandchildren every single hour of every single day in a desperate attempt to keep the debt spiral going.

#75 Thomas Jefferson once stated that if he could add just one more amendment to the U.S. Constitution it would be a ban on all government borrowing…

I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government to the genuine principles of its Constitution; I mean an additional article, taking from the federal government the power of borrowing.

#76 At this moment, the U.S. national debt is sitting at $18,141,409,083,212.36. If we had followed the advice of Thomas Jefferson, it would be sitting at zero.

#77 When the Federal Reserve was first established, the U.S. national debt was sitting at about 2.9 billion dollars. On average, we have been adding more than that to the national debt every single day since Obama has been in the White House.

#78 We are on pace to accumulate more new debt during the 8 years of the Obama administration than we did under all of the other presidents in all of U.S. history combined.

#79 If all of the new debt that has been accumulated since John Boehner became Speaker of the House had been given directly to the American people instead, every household in America would have been able to buy a new truck.

#80 Between 2008 and 2012, U.S. government debt grew by 60.7 percent, but U.S. GDP only grew by a total of about 8.5 percent during that entire time period.

#81 Since 2007, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio has increased from 66.6 percent to 102.98 percent.

#82 According to the U.S. Treasury, foreigners hold approximately 5.6 trillion dollars of our debt.

#83 The amount of U.S. government debt held by foreigners is about 5 times larger than it was just a decade ago.

#84 As I have written about previously, if the U.S. national debt was reduced to a stack of one dollar bills it would circle the earth at the equator 45 times.

#85 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his entire fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for 15 days.

#86 Sometimes we forget just how much money a trillion dollars is. If you were alive when Jesus Christ was born and you spent one million dollars every single day since that point, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.

#87 If right this moment you went out and started spending one dollar every single second, it would take you more than 31,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.

#88 In addition to all of our debt, the U.S. government has also accumulated more than 200 trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities. So where in the world will all of that money come from?

#89 The greatest damage that quantitative easing has been causing to our economy is the fact that it is destroying worldwide faith in the U.S. dollar and in U.S. debt. If the rest of the world stops using our dollars and stops buying our debt, we are going to be in a massive amount of trouble.

#90 Over the past several years, the Federal Reserve has been monetizing a staggering amount of U.S. government debt even though Ben Bernanke once promised that he would never do this.

#91 China recently announced that they are going to quit stockpiling more U.S. dollars. If the Federal Reserve was not recklessly printing money, this would probably not have happened.

#92 Most Americans have no idea that one of our most famous presidents was absolutely obsessed with getting rid of central banking in the United States. The following is a February 1834 quote by President Andrew Jackson about the evils of central banking…

I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the Bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out and, by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I will rout you out.

#93 There are plenty of possible alternative financial systems, but at this point all 187 nations that belong to the IMF have a central bank. Are we supposed to believe that this is just some sort of a bizarre coincidence?

#94 The capstone of the global central banking system is an organization known as the Bank for International Settlements. The following is how I described this organization in a previous article…

An immensely powerful international organization that most people have never even heard of secretly controls the money supply of the entire globe. It is called the Bank for International Settlements, and it is the central bank of central banks. It is located in Basel, Switzerland, but it also has branches in Hong Kong and Mexico City. It is essentially an unelected, unaccountable central bank of the world that has complete immunity from taxation and from national laws. Even Wikipedia admits that “it is not accountable to any single national government.” The Bank for International Settlements was used to launder money for the Nazis during World War II, but these days the main purpose of the BIS is to guide and direct the centrally-planned global financial system. Today, 58 global central banks belong to the BIS, and it has far more power over how the U.S. economy (or any other economy for that matter) will perform over the course of the next year than any politician does. Every two months, the central bankers of the world gather in Basel for another “Global Economy Meeting”. During those meetings, decisions are made which affect every man, woman and child on the planet, and yet none of us have any say in what goes on. The Bank for International Settlements is an organization that was founded by the global elite and it operates for the benefit of the global elite, and it is intended to be one of the key cornerstones of the emerging one world economic system.

#95 The borrower is the servant of the lender, and the Federal Reserve has turned all of us into debt slaves.

#96 Debt is a form of social control, and the global elite use all of this debt to dominate all the rest of us. 40 years ago, the total amount of debt in our system (all government debt, all business debt, all consumer debt, etc.) was sitting at about 3 trillion dollars. Today, the grand total is approaching 60 trillion dollars.

#97 Unless something dramatic is done, our children and our grandchildren will be debt slaves for their entire lives as they service our debts and pay for our mistakes.

#98 Now that you know this information, you are responsible for doing something about it.

#99 Congress has the power to shut down the Federal Reserve any time that it would like. But right now most of our politicians fully endorse the current system, and nothing is ever going to happen until the American people start demanding change.

#100 The design of the Federal Reserve system was flawed from the very beginning. If something is not done very rapidly, it is inevitable that our entire financial system is going to suffer an absolutely nightmarish collapse.

(For more from the author of “Donald Trump Is Right – Here Are 100 Reasons Why We Need to Audit the Federal Reserve” please click HERE)

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Huckabee Just Revealed the One and ONLY Way Trump Won’t Be President

By Mike Huckabee. After Tuesday’s Nevada Caucuses, the opera may not be over, but the fat lady is clearing her throat.

Donald Trump’s 45.9% total in Nevada was larger than Cruz’s and Rubio’s put together. It was also his third straight win, and in states that couldn’t be more diverse, culturally, politically and geographically. Next week brings us Super Tuesday. If any candidate is going to derail the Trump super-train, it needs to happen then. One complication: polls show him leading everywhere but Texas.

Many establishment Republicans still cling to the slender hope that Trump has reached his ceiling; and if only all the other candidates but one would fall on their swords and quit, all their supporters would flock to the last non-Trumpian man standing. Sorry, but that’s a pipe dream . . .

Blasting Trump for not being a consistent conservative also won’t dissuade his supporters. It’s as simple as the old saying: “When you point a finger at someone else, three fingers are pointing back at you.” Trump’s supporters have heard for years that they had to vote for “consistent philosophical conservatives” if they wanted to shrink government, reduce spending, secure the borders and stop Obama’s leftist agenda. They gave the GOP both Houses of Congress, and what did they get in return? Obama’s Iran nuclear deal and a budget that funds every item on the Obama wish list.

It’s now obvious that name-calling and badgering candidates to quit will not work. At this point, there is only one way for any other candidate to beat Trump. It’s the same way a Republican will have to defeat the Democrat in November: by doing a better job of convincing voters that he’s heard their concerns and will act on them. (Read more from “Huckabee Just Revealed the One and ONLY Way Trump Won’t Be President” HERE)

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Donald Trump Keeps Winning. Here’s What Could Make Him Lose.

By Alexander Burns. Donald J. Trump has snatched three straight victories, built a powerful lead in national polls and knocked several opponents out of the 2016 presidential race. His path to the Republican nomination looks wider than ever. But it could still contain pitfalls and roadblocks. Here are some of the ways he could still stumble . . .

In a race that began with 17 candidates, Mr. Trump has benefited from deftly playing his opponents against one another. With four left, he can still control the race with far less than a majority of the vote.

Neither Senator Marco Rubio of Florida nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is likely to give way willingly, or join forces with the other. And two long-shot candidates would still snarl efforts to unite the anti-Trump vote: Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and Ben Carson have plodded on despite their slim chances. But should the field suddenly dwindle to one or two rivals of Mr. Trump, perhaps after Super Tuesday, it would test the breadth of his support as never before . . .

The stage may get even tougher for him starting Thursday night in Houston: He can no longer count on a large field of opponents to shield him from a formidable puncher like Mr. Cruz, or from Mr. Rubio, who is also seeking to break through. (Read more from “Donald Trump Keeps Winning. Here’s What Could Make Him Lose.” HERE)

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Where the Hell Was Trump When We Needed Him?

There is one overarching message from this campaign season: Republican voters are sick of being betrayed. They are sick of the fact, as reflected by the Conservative Review scorecard, that only a handful of Republican members fulfill their campaign rhetoric and actually fight for us on the important issues upon assumption of office.

As someone who has fought every major legislative battle since Republicans took over the House in 2010, I can tell you these political foxholes are pretty lonely. We tend to know everyone who was down for the struggle when it mattered. Nowhere was this foxhole lonelier than during the pitched battle against Obama’s war on American sovereignty.

As a veteran activist of the 2006-2007 amnesty fight—the fight that inspired me to dedicate my career to politics professionally—I was alarmed that in 2013, when Rubio and the boys were promoting Obama’s amnesty bill, there was no staunch opposition to be seen or heard from. We lost much of our coalition from the previous decade and so many people had been bought out by the open borders cartel. Even talk radio, outside of a few perceptive ones like Mark Levin, was slow to understand what was happening. We were pulling our hair out waiting for the reinforcements to arrive and help us expose the danger of this bill. It was around this time of the year when the Gang of Eight was forging the deal and nobody in the Senate other than Sessions, Cruz, and Vitter could be found fighting it.

This begs the question: Where the hell was Donald Trump’s aggressive voice and impervious persona when we needed him on this fight or any other political battle? We are not talking about ancient history here; this was three years ago. If his passionate words about our sovereignty are to be taken at face value, it’s hard to explain his silence at the time. In fact, a few months later, after the bill had passed the Senate and gained full momentum, Trump was actually pimping the Dream Act and mimicking Rubio’s talking points. As this Buzzfeed article notes:

‘You know, the truth is I have a lot of illegals working for me in Miami,’ he told them, using the term for undocumented immigrants those in the meeting found offensive. ‘You know in Miami, my golf course is tended by all these Hispanics — if it wasn’t for them my lawn wouldn’t be the lawn it is; it’s the best lawn,’ Pacheco recalled Trump saying.

Trump said he knew the work of undocumented people is what makes his golf courses and hotels great.

‘At the end of the day, what we’re looking at is a value proposition for America,’ Tijerino said to Trump at the end of the meeting, referring to immigration legislation.

‘You’ve convinced me,’ Trump said to the delight of the activists in the room. [Buzzfeed: 8/26/2015]

But it gets worse.

You want to know what was a really lonely foxhole? When Obama began illegally implementing his executive amnesty with the Morton Memos in June 2011 and the original DACA amnesty in the summer of 2012. By the time Obama went for the second round (DAPA) in November 2014, our hard work fighting the Gang of Eight had paid off and a critical mass of people were wondering if we still lived in a democratic republic or a monarchy. But it wasn’t always like that. At the time, I wrote a column noting how we were in a constitutional crisis and Obama must be stopped. Yet, Obama was able to expand upon the amnesty in the summer of 2012 – in middle of the presidential election! – and nobody within the party’s establishment wanted to even discuss it, much less make it the central issue of the campaign. In fact, it was at that point that Marco Rubio punctuated Obama’s administrative Dream Act by introducing his own version codifying it into law.

During the summer of 2012 and the general election, Mitch McConnell refused to even discuss the issue and demurred to Mitt Romney because, “he is the leader of our party.” The thing is that Romney refused to make executive amnesty a campaign issue. He declined to even promise to overturn the illegal edict. He was completely mum when the Supreme Court, led by Kennedy and Roberts, sided with Obama in an egregious decision forcing Arizona to follow Obama’s illegal amnesty instead of congressional statutes.

In one of the most consequential and tragic mistakes ever made by the Republican Party, they diffidently joined with Obama and refused to fight him on amnesty. Yet, when Romney lost the election, they had the temerity to blame his loss on Romney’s phony lurch to the right on the issue during the primary. It was this sentiment that led to the two-year push for the Gang of Eight that destroyed our political capital and allowed Obama to irrevocably flood America with illegal aliens from Central America.

Yet, not only was Donald Trump’s belligerent voice absent in this fight, but he also echoed the very obnoxious sentiments promulgated by the worst elements of the GOP establishment. He blamed Mitt Romney for being too conservative on immigration:

‘Republicans didn’t have anything going for them with respect to Latinos and with respect to Asians,’ the billionaire developer says.

‘The Democrats didn’t have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, but what they did have going for them is they weren’t mean-spirited about it,’ Trump says. ‘They didn’t know what the policy was, but what they were is they were kind.’

Romney’s solution of ‘self deportation’ for illegal aliens made no sense and suggested that Republicans do not care about Hispanics in general, Trump says.

‘He had a crazy policy of self deportation which was maniacal,’ Trump says. ‘It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote,’ Trump notes. ‘He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.’ [Interview with Ronald Kessler of Newsmax: 11/26/2012]

Isn’t it amazing how politically correct and establishmentarian Trump is when there is no personal political gain at stake?

The tragic irony of the present is that, despite Trump’s unprecedented jingoism, he is following Romney’s 2012 campaign playbook. He is suddenly running to the right on the issue in order to win the primary when, much like Romney, he was never fighting for us before he had a personal political stake in doing so. We know how that story ended. Sadly, when he inevitably loses or [if he wins] lurches back to the left, conservatives would be blamed for it – the same way he blamed Romney for being too conservative!

Last night, Trump appeared with Sean Hannity and defended his foxhole conversions on numerous issues. He said he has “evolved on many issues” just like Ronald Reagan. The problem with this comparison is that Reagan was serving as a robust voice for conservatives on the major issues of the time for decades before running for president. He was fighting communism as president of GE during the ‘50s. Sixteen years before running for president in 1980, Reagan delivered the landmark “Time for Choosing” speech at the Goldwater nominating convention. In sharp contrast, 16 years before running for president in 2016, Trump was on Meet the Press promoting every licentious liberal view under the sun, including partial birth abortion.

Moreover, when Reagan was a Democrat during the ‘30s, it wasn’t exactly like the Democratic Party of today. This ain’t your grandfather’s Democrat Party. And Reagan certainly wasn’t promoting the very talking points of Gerald Ford and the party establishment he sought to defeat just a few years prior to running.

What is so disappointing for most of us who have bled for the cause is that this is about America’s future more than any cult of personality. Trump likes to brag how he is the man who single-handedly shifted the focus to immigration. Imagine if he would have “seen the light” and “evolved” just a few years earlier when we actually could have nipped the irreversible damage in the bud?

We’ve had a number of Republicans stab us in the back, even after fighting for our causes during the early years of their careers. We’ve never had someone fight for us who had never demonstrated a desire to fight for our issues until it came time to win an election. If we are so gullible as to accept a charlatan after being betrayed by these very same establishment liars for so many years, we deserve the governance we get. It’s time for conservatives to overcome the excitement of fighting words, and remember the essential importance of fighting deeds. (For more from the author of “Where the Hell Was Trump When We Needed Him?” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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Obama Making America a Magnet for Criminals, Contagious Diseases

Ever since colonial times, our political leaders have always been careful to ensure that those immigrating to our land would be net contributors to our society. From the 1600s on, colonies passed laws barring entry of criminals, those with communicable diseases, and those likely to become a public charge. States continued this tradition after they became part of the federal union and when Congress started regulating immigration in 1875 and 1882 they followed suit on a national level.

Even during the open period of immigration towards the turn of the twentieth century, immigration officials carefully examined every immigrant and denied entry even to those with eye diseases, even if it meant splitting up an entire family. These laws and practices were rooted in the common sense principle that the first order of a government, vested with power by the consent of the governed, is to protect the sovereignty of the citizenry above other interests.

How far we have come from this bedrock principle. Our country is now flooded with the impoverished, criminal elements, and those bringing in diseases we eradicated long ago. Here are two disturbing stories that illustrate the point.

Immigrants with HIV and STDs:

Obama’s HHS recently announced its intention to lift the ban on immigrants with STDs. Jon Feere of the Center for Immigration Studies explains the significance of this decision:

In his first year in office, President Obama lifted an entry ban on foreigners with HIV. In his final year in office he will lift the entry ban on three more sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). The president’s own Health and Human Services department says this guarantees more infections in the United States, proving once again that immigration is the defining issue for politicians like Obama. Increased immigration trumps all other concerns.

While tuberculosis, leprosy, syphilis, and gonorrhea are still on the list of diseases that would render an immigrant-carrier inadmissible, it does us no good for all the illegal immigrants who are carrying these diseases but are not deported.

Now, you might be wondering how the people’s representatives have lost control over our sovereignty and how unelected bureaucrats can overturn long-standing law and tradition unilaterally. Yup, you guessed it: this began with a Republican president. On July 30, 2008, President Bush signed into law the United States Global Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria Reauthorization Act (H.R.5501/S.2731). Among the many pork provisions in this bill, Section 305 repealed a 1993 law (INA §212(a)(1)(A)(i)) categorically banning immigrants with HIV. By repealing that language, HHS was given full discretion to determine who is admissible and who is not. Now we are stewing in the Obama misery Republicans helped create in 2008.

Criminal Aliens:

New internal ICE figures posted by the Washington Examiner reveal that 88,000, or 60%, of all criminal aliens apprehended in the last fiscal year were released into our population. So after promising to focus on criminal aliens, Obama has suspended deportation for them as well, thanks to the green light given to him by liberal Republican senators like Marco Rubio. This is on top of the existing statistics prior to last fiscal year. Between the 179,027 criminal aliens ordered deported but still at large and the 194,791 convicted criminal aliens who have not yet been issued deportation orders, there are over 375,000 identified criminal aliens that have not been deported.

Who is looking out for the best interests of the American people? These stories are tailor-made for the presidential candidates to seize upon and promise a return to our traditional values on immigration. Any takers? (For more from the author of “Obama Making America a Magnet for Criminals, Contagious Diseases” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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