Mass Shootings: The Unicorn Gun Control Policy as the Magic Solution

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Inevitably after a mass shooting, the discussion turns to the weapon. Well, if we can’t identify this unique profile of evil mass murderers before they strike, what if we ensured they never got a gun?

That certainly is a laudable goal. After all, we all want to make sure that bad guys or those who are mentally unstable don’t have access to a gun — or any other weapon. But show me the piece of legislation that would prevent most of these attacks.

It’s clear that the advent of social media is fueling a copycat mentality, which is why so many of them are now writing “manifestos.” There is no doubt that if none of these people got any notoriety, the copycat mentality would be limited, but how is that feasible with today’s technology?

Leftists would argue that if they were allowed to pass some magic gun bill, it would deny these people the means with which to commit these acts. But they need to consider the following:

Violent crime and murder have dropped precipitously, almost miraculously, since 1993. This is probably the only positive social trend we’ve enjoyed in recent years. This period coincided directly with the trend of loosening of gun laws in most states, particularly right-to-carry laws. In 1993, fewer than 30 percent of Americans lived in right-to-carry states; now that number has grown to 70 percent. According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, there are now 17.25 million people who hold concealed carry permits, a 273 percent increase since 2007. Violent crime, including from gun homicides, got cut in halfwhile the number of guns owned has increased over 60 percent since the 1990s. While this doesn’t categorically prove that more guns equal less crime, it certainly refutes the thesis of the Left that more gun control is the answer.

Over the past few years, after two decades of a steady decline in murder, violent crime has risen in some major liberal citiesdirectly after they enacted stricter licensing and background checks, “assault weapons” bans, and magazine capacity limitations. Meanwhile, most other jurisdictions continue to experience a drop in crime.

While the mass shootings are shocking, any public policy debate must look at crime and gun violence in totality.

While the rise in mass shootings is devastating, we should not lose sight of the fact that in 1993, there were 24,530 homicides, compared with 17,284 in 2017, despite the massive growth in population. The homicide numbers in most parts of the country are still historically low, even factoring in the mass shootings.

The Left will want to focus on AR-15-style rifles in particular, but even in 2017, with the worst mass shooting ever, only 403 of the 15,129 homicide victims died from a rifle shot, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting [table 8]. Almost four times as many people died from knife attacks, and 696 died from fists or other physical “personal weapons.” The overwhelming majority of murders were obviously from simple handguns, which no legislation will remove from the streets.

Most of those murders are caused by career criminals in the daily gang and inner-city warfare taking place in cities like Chicago and Baltimore. Particularly in Chicago, “a substantial portion of the city’s violent crime” is perpetrated by gangs working for the Mexican cartels empowered by our open border, according to the DEA. That is a much bigger public policy issue with much easier answers.

In my hometown of Baltimore, we have stricter rules than anything Democrats realistically want to enact at the federal level. Remember, Maryland requires a full license, not just a background check, just to own a gun in one’s home and not carry it. Yet gun violence in Maryland is soaring. In addition, following Sandy Hook, Maryland enacted a ban on magazines that hold more than 10 rounds and banned the sale of 45 commonly owned semi-automatic rifles that have been used in some of these mass shootings.

It’s simply not credible to support letting gun felons out of jail under the guise of “criminal justice reform,” loosening sentencing of known criminals, refusing to lock up any violent juvenile, such as the Parkland shooter, handcuffing the police, and encouraging sanctuary cities – but then suddenly claim a magical, gun-based solution to the vexing problem of first-time mass murderers. Liberals refuse to get tough on the elements of crime that drive most homicides in this nation, and in fact want looser standards for criminals, wishing at the same time to strip law-abiding citizens of the right to arm themselves. Many of the major cities in this country stand as a testament to this point.

The soft-on-crime crowd can’t have it both ways. They can’t seek tougher laws on guns while seeking lenient laws on the violent criminals. They can’t promote federal policies that incentivize or bully states into putting more names in a NICs database while promoting policies that encourage states to lock up as few criminals as possible. The entire criminal justice “reform” movement has created a culture, pressure, and incentive for cops and county governments to be as lenient as possible on incarcerating juveniles, the exact opposite of the cultural pressure from the past two decades.

This is why we need to focus on stopping violence in totality, not just one form of it, especially when we first need to learn the source of the trend. To virtue-signal about guns and Trump as a white supremacist while not only ignoring the homicide problem but promoting policies that will lock up fewer murderers is no virtue at all. It’s merely signaling to the media to further divide the country rather then pursuing commonsense solutions based on rational thought.

If “doing something” is limited to releasing criminals from jail while locking up the guns, it’s better to do nothing at all. (For more from the author of “Mass Shootings: The Unicorn Gun Control Policy as the Magic Solution” please click HERE)

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Growing up in a Baltimore Where Criminals Reign Supreme

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It was a dark night two years ago, and I had to head out to a prayer service just a mile away from my home outside northwest Baltimore City. The carjackings and break-ins had spread to the suburbs, and the security situation was worse than at any time in my entire life, including during the Freddie Gray riots in 2015 and during the crime wave of the early 1990s. My neighbors were scared to even take their trash to the curb at night, although there were plenty of muggings and carjackings occurring during broad daylight too. To carry my gun or not to carry – that was the question on my mind this particular night.

You see, growing up just outside northwest Baltimore City (the county is also called Baltimore) my entire life, I developed a good sense of caution mixed with a good sense of geography. I always had negative feelings associated with the direction “south,” because the further south we’d travel from home, the worse the potholes would be to maneuver and the more likely you’d get mugged … or worse. Perhaps it was ingrained in me from the day I was born in the hospital in the northwest, where there are shootings every night behind the Saini Hospital campus.

But that’s the thing about Baltimore City, or as we call it, “the City.” The criminals could carry guns all they want and rack up more homicides per capita than in any other city. Yet law-abiding citizens could never carry guns to protect themselves. The police would never be there for us if we were in a pickle, but boy would they clamp down on us if we were caught “illegally” carrying in Maryland.

This was the thought that weighed on me that summer night in 2017. For the first time in my life, I considered carrying my full-size H&K VP9 just to go out to the prayer service, which was a few blocks into the City’s northwest area. It would only be for a half-hour, and I felt I needed it just to get to my car in front of my own home in a suburb! Yet, like most law-abiding citizens, even though I knew that Maryland was violating the most inviolable natural right enshrined even before the Bill of Rights, I decided to abide by the state’s lawless law and not carry.

I knew how strict they were. You see, the police will never be there for you if you are violently attacked in one of the very common beatings that take place in the city and often wind up on Drudge’s website. Even after the fact, the “youths” who have accrued multiple felonies within a few months won’t serve a day in prison because … “criminal justice reform!” But let me tell you, if you are a peaceful citizen seeking nothing more than self-defense via a natural right enshrined in the Bill of Rights, those cops will somehow be there to catch you. And you won’t be a beneficiary of “criminal justice reform, either.

As a result of the criminalization of basic police work since 2015, Baltimore police have retreated from the procedures and policies that have resulted in the two-decades decline in crime in most other large metro areas. Crime in Baltimore has skyrocketed to the point that the city set a new record for homicides with the most homicides per capita of any city in the country last year. While most of the murders have been downtown, the robberies and muggings have spilled over into the suburbs. My neighborhood is, on and off, in the worst security predicament I’ve seen in my lifetime.

With the police on the sidelines, certainly it is up to the people to protect themselves, right? Well, the leftist deviants thought of everything. While they let criminals out of jail and prosecute police officers for doing their jobs, they seriously infringe upon the gun rights of law-abiding citizens. Very few people are allowed to carry guns in Maryland, and many individuals who want to become first-time gun owners must go through a long process lasting several months to even purchase a single firearm for home defense.

Baltimore has a higher homicide rate than Central America! Baltimore’s homicide rate in 2017 was 56 per 100,000 people. That tops the 51 per 100,000 rate in El Salvador and dwarfs the rates of 40 and 22.4 in Honduras and Guatemala respectively. Incidentally, the homicide rates are plummeting in those countries while migration skyrockets.

And guess what? The homicides spiked right after the state passed a strict gun control law regulating purchase of firearms and banning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.

Thus, in many ways the Twitter spat between President Trump and one of Baltimore’s congressmen, Rep. Elijah Cummings, is the perfect issue over which to frame the future of the country. Do we want a country like Baltimore? A country that will be a sanctuary for illegal aliens, drugs, cartels, and gangs, weak on crime, and tough on self-defense?

The primary purpose of a government is to protect the liberties of its citizenry. Citizens have no liberty without security because they are restricted from movement. Growing up in the Baltimore area, we always had to work around that restriction of movement and ascertain the “no-go areas” within the city. Do we want all of America to be that way, and do we now want to import the criminals of other countries as well? If the president frames his campaign message in those terms and actually chooses policies that will drive the wedge even farther between Baltimore and safety, security, and sovereignty, he will easily win a second term.

The media class is feigning outrage over Trump referring to west Baltimore as a “rat-infested” area. The Baltimore Sun, the house organ for the local Democrats who helped turn this once proud city of one million people into a failing cesspool with fewer than 600,000, retorted to the president, “Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.” Well, as a lifelong resident of the area, I’d agree with that sentiment, but with one caveat: It’s better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to have violent criminals and gangs protected by vermin politicians with no ability to protect against them. At least rats usually don’t kill and aren’t on drugs, so they run away when you try to defend yourself. (For more from the author of “Growing up in a Baltimore Where Criminals Reign Supreme” please click HERE)

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Trump Can’t Be Both the President of Growth and the President of Debt

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With the unemployment rate below 4 percent for 16 consecutive months, one would expect economic growth to be soaring. Yet even as we experience the best job market since the late 1960s, this is the first time in modern history that we have not experienced a year of 3 percent GDP growth. What gives?

Earlier today, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the economy had grown just 2.1 percent during the second quarter of this year (ending June 30). It also revised Q4 of 2018 down to just 1.1 percent, which now means that growth during the 12 months ending Q4 of 2018 was only 2.5 percent, not 3 percent as previously thought. This means that the U.S. economy has now gone 14 years without a year-over-year growth of 3 percent. It’s been 19 years since we’ve hit 4 percent, which was during 1997-2000.

While the numbers don’t portend a coming recession, it is highly unusual for us to go for 16 consecutive months with unemployment below 4 percent and 43 months below 5 percent, yet never attain 3 or 4 percent annual GDP growth. In fact, that has never happened before. During the late 1990s, the unemployment rate ranged from 5.3 percent to 3.9 percent – not even as good as today’s 3.7 percent – yet GDP growth was over 4 percent. Ditto for the late 1960s, when we saw years of 6 percent growth. During the mid 1980s, we saw this growth even with higher unemployment rates.

The debt is not just a problem for future generations in terms of a fiscal cost that will be borne by taxpayers. The exclusive focus on the future is what has fostered the Louis XV mentality of “after me, the deluge.” Let’s face it, we are a nation that doesn’t care about the future of our children. What is missing from the discussion is that the debt is permanently weighing down economic growth now.

Let’s peek into the numbers behind today’s topline GDP report. GDP comprises personal consumption expenditures, gross private domestic investment, government spending, and net exports. Seventy percent of the equation is consumption, and the robust 4.3 percent growth in consumption this quarter is a big part of what is keeping us even at 2.1 percent growth. This is not artificial and is good news. Consumption is a sign of a healthy job market, with more people earning money, as well as the tax cuts putting more cash in people’s pockets to spend. No matter whether our economy is fully free market or quasi-socialist, whenever there is more money in people’s pockets, these numbers will go up. We are now in a boom period, and the numbers are good.

But what else is propping up the number? Government spending! Gross government spending, which accounts for about 17.5 percent of the GDP pie, spiked 5 percent. Non-defense spending rose by 15.9 percent!

Thus, without the spending binge, which will be accelerated by the budget betrayal promoted by the president and backed by more Democrats than Republicans in the House, the topline number would have been lower.

But here’s the problem. While government spending juices up the economy in the short run, the debt that we must incur to continue that spending is permanently weighing down the economy in the long run.

Which leads us to the third component – gross private domestic investment. That is the engine of a supply side economy. Those numbers contracted by 5.5 percent this past quarter, the worst showing since 2015. Investment in non-residential structures plummeted by 10.8 percent, highly unusual with such a good job market.

Then, of course, there is the final component: exports. Net exports were down 5.2 percent because of the tariffs.

Here’s the reality: Our economy is nothing like it was in the 1980s or 1990s. We have a huge misallocation of resources, with all sorts of capital going into government-mandated schemes that increase dependency programs or debt, rather than the most efficient investments.

Then the debt itself is hurting us. So much money is now spent on paying off interest. As interest rates are pushed higher, more private money is used to purchase higher-interest Treasury securities rather than invest in capital goods, such as factories and plants. The more government is desperate to service this debt, the more it will drive up interest rates, which in turn will divert and misallocate more investors into Treasury bonds. This further makes interest on the debt even more expensive, constantly reinforcing itself in a vicious cycle of debt and higher rates.

At some point over the past decade, we crossed the Rubicon of irrevocable lethargic growth because of debt. Interest on the debt is the fastest-growing expenditure of government. That is a problem now. So, we can create jobs and wages even in a centrally planned economy, but the debt and market distortions are creating so much inefficiency and waste that they are permanently capping our growth. I don’t believe we will ever achieve protracted 3 percent growth until the debt crisis is solved.

The president has been convinced that we can grow our way out of the debt. The problem is the debt itself is weighing us down from growing!

With two months left until the budget deadline, the president could have spent the entire summer recess building the case for a better debt deal. Instead, he chose to support a bill nearly unanimously supported by House Democrats that will add almost $2 trillion more in debt over the next 10 years.

If Trump wants to be the president of growth, he can’t have it both ways and be the president of debt. (For more from the author of “Trump Can’t Be Both the President of Growth and the President of Debt” please click HERE)

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There Is No Greater Foreign Influence Than Illegal Immigration and Those Thwarting Our Laws

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While the political world will be paralyzed for much of the week with the fallout from the Mueller testimony and talk of Russian influence over our elections, the greatest foreign influence both sides of Congress are ignoring is illegal immigration. Our foundational laws protecting Americans from foreign invaders are being systemically ignored and delegitimized. That is the true foreign influence that should concern us all.

There are countless millions of illegal aliens in this country, many of whom came recently, including well over two million criminal aliens. Yes, there are that many of other countries’ criminals in this country, and there is no sense of urgency from the political class to remove them. ICE should be given full funding and awarded medals for getting rid of other countries’ drunk drivers and drug traffickers, murderers and child molesters. Instead, thanks to a lack of Republican support and a counter-narrative from supposedly conservative media, the left-wing media has empowered wealthy subversive NGOs and local politicians to thwart, fight, and delegitimize every deportation.

The disconcerting truth is that the laws on the books designed to protect Americans from foreign infiltrators – the most foundational responsibility of a national government – are being sabotaged. The very illegal aliens who invaded our sovereignty now have more influence on government, media, and pop culture than the American taxpayers who pay for their hospital stays and care.

The simple reality is that our laws are not enforced. After so much hype about at least going after the million or so illegal aliens with final deportation orders, just 35 individuals have thus far been apprehended.

While this is only one operation still in its early stages, it’s part of a systemic breakdown in enforcing sovereignty. During the first term of Obama’s presidency, when he was still enforcing the law and sanctuaries hadn’t yet begun widespread civil disobedience, deportations were averaging around 400,000 per year. Under this administration, only 230,000 were deported in fiscal year 2018.

Even if you ignore border deportations and just focus on interior deportations, the numbers are stark. During Obama’s first term, ICE was averaging roughly 18,000-22,000 interior deportations per month. That number dropped to around 6,000 a month after Obama suspended much of interior enforcement during his final two years. Even under Trump, we are averaging just 7,000 interior deportations a month so far this year.

Take Venezuela, for example. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, there were 67,000 Venezuelans who overstayed their visas in 2017 and 2018. Yet only 584 Venezuelan nationals were removed over that period, and most of them were turned back at legal ports of entry, not removed from the interior. It’s no surprise that more Venezuelans are now incentivized to come to the border. Yet rather than deterring them by enforcing current laws, House Democrats along with 37 Republicans voted to grant them more amnesty. The cycle of lawlessness inducing more illegal immigration, which in turn grows illegal immigrants’ influence on politicians who should be working for citizens, is working splendidly for the anarchist crowd.

While ICE is woefully underfunded given the task before it, it would help to actually enforce laws on the books that will make it harder for aliens to evade detection or be harbored by lawyers and politicians.

How is it that an illegal alien can get a driver’s license and cycle in and out of the criminal justice system, not only as a regular illegal alien but as one who was ordered deported – all without ever being detected? 8 U.S. Code §1304 requires alien registration. In fact, our laws were specifically designed to ensure that every alien is detected upon his first interaction with government or law enforcement.

The law requires every alien to get fingerprinted and documented with “a certificate of alien registration or an alien registration receipt card” pursuant to the Alien Registration Act of 1940. §1304(e) states:

“Every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt card issued to him pursuant to subsection (d). Any alien who fails to comply with the provisions of this subsection shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall upon conviction for each offense be fined not to exceed $100 or be imprisoned not more than thirty days, or both.”

Why is this not enforced? It would quite literally prevent every illegal alien crime because they would be immediately identified upon their first interaction with police or face prosecution for not registering.

Perhaps there should be a special counsel appointed to investigate how decades’ worth of immigration promises codified into law have been ignored, inducing an inalterable change in our country as a result of the ultimate foreign influence. If we feel too scared to enforce our own laws against foreign infiltration because of fear of reprisal from those very people, indeed we have a much greater problem than foreign influence; we have a problem of foreign control. (For more from the author of “There Is No Greater Foreign Influence Than Illegal Immigration and Those Thwarting Our Laws” please click HERE)

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Revealed: The Democrats’ Blueprint to Steal 2020 from the Voters of America

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The Democrats intend to steal the presidency in 2020. . .

Here’s three strategies they are implementing or have implemented

Participation in the process. This summer the State of New York attempted a two-step process to allow the maximum number of people to vote—whether they were legally allowed to or not. The one-sided, Democrat-controlled State bodies passed the issuing of driver’s licenses to non-citizens/illegal aliens. But that same group of Democrats also nearly passed the automatically completed voter registration of every license issued. Aliens would have had to “opt out.” Just in case they didn’t, the language also included a provision protecting the illegal voter and the authorities from any criminal wrongdoing. This measure passed one chamber, would’ve been signed by the governor, and had it not been for a true watchdog in the Assembly, would’ve already become law. With the enormous push by non-citizens storming our gates to get in, the corrupt powers incentivizing as much, you have to see the roadmap here could have dramatic impact anyway it is adopted.

The dishonest debate. I readily admit there is almost always a fair amount of exaggeration involved in presidential election cycles. But in the 2020 cycle there has existed two levels of dishonesty that is shockingly horrid. On one hand almost none of the things the Democratic candidates are saying are true. Capitalism hasn’t failed. America is not in decline. Our allies respect us more than at any time in the modern era (perhaps only beaten by the days just following 9/11). We have expanded safety, prosperity and liberty to every aspect of American life. The other layer of dishonesty is in the rhetoric of the new voices of the Democrat’s “fresh new faces.” “The Squad” and the followers who prop them up are not willing to work in the system. They claim patently false things. They claim shocking things. They claim to be informed. And they call “racism” to anyone who disagrees. The media seem to love these new voices and look upon them with almost zero scrutiny. The hope for Democrats is that between the “Squad” screaming these false claims loud enough (with the media’s reverberation) they will be able to sway voters to believe the one liar who gets the nomination.

The invisible manipulation and assistance from Big Tech. Senator Ted Cruz opined in a Senate hearing he chaired this past week that he hoped journalists would catch the biggest take away of the day. According to one of the day’s most credible contributors, Robert Epstein, in 2016 Google alone likely manipulated 2.6 million to as high as 10 million voters to choose Hillary Clinton. In 2018 using his perfected methods of monitoring search activity and effective responses with permission-granted use, Google alone may have influenced upwards of 78.2 million votes to be directed to a single party. His concern in 2020 is that upwards of 15-20 million votes may be directed to a single candidate. And lest you question his bonafides, he’s a Harvard educated Ph.D, a research psychologist with 40 years experience, and previous editor at Psychology Today & Scientific American MIND! He also campaigned, endorsed, and supported Hillary Clinton in 2016.

(Read more from “Revealed: The Democrats’ Blueprint to Steal 2020 from the Voters of America” HERE)

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The Democrats’ 2020 Campaign Theme Is ‘You Americans Are Terrible’

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The Democrats’ 2020 theme is that you are terrible and the party’s slogan will be “Americans suck, vote for us.” The precise candidate who will employ it is not important because they all embrace the notion that punishing the essential moral failure of you and me and every other Normal American is the key goal of the Donkey Party. That goes equally for the Handsey Old Prospector, the Socialist Squaw, Crusty the Commie, Spartacus Sharpton, Starchild, the Furry, Not Ms. Willie Brown, the Unfabulous Gay Guy, and the many Unfabulous Ungay Guys.

They all agree that you are terrible because you don’t know your place, which is behind a rock pushing it endlessly uphill for the benefit of people who hate you. . .

You’re stupid because you think there’s just two genders and that you don’t consider a “bi-curious femme-friendly questioning two-spirit” an option.

You’re a monster for wondering why boys in drag are competing (and setting “records”) in girls’ sports and for not accepting that men have periods too.

You’re terrible for interfering in things you know nothing about by rejecting any new endless wars – how dare you question the experts who have laid down such a solid track record of success over the last three decades! (Read more from “The Democrats’ 2020 Campaign Theme Is ‘You Americans Are Terrible'” HERE)

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Money Talks

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Prohibition Reconsidered

We are in a season of centennials of Prohibition-related events, from the 1917 vote by the U.S. Senate to submit the Constitutional Amendment to the state legislatures for ratification, to its eventual repeal in 1933.

I grew up hearing Prohibition dismissed as a doomed, quixotic attempt by over-religious backwoods meddlers to interfere in the private conduct of people whose ingenuity and staying power the reformers had badly underestimated.

But I’m not so sure about that anymore.

For one thing, the longing to free our people from the shackles of substance abuse was not exclusively religious. The 18th Amendment was one of five Progressive amendments passed within a 10-year period. It shared overlapping support with the amendments to enact a federal income tax, and to give women the vote.

Prohibition didn’t outlaw the consumption of alcohol, but its sale. It is analogous to laws against human trafficking, which do not outlaw humans.

The opposition was formidable, beginning with government itself. Woodrow Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, which enforced the Constitutional amendment, but the House of Representatives overturned his veto the same day, and the Senate did so on the following day.

Wilson cited arcane technical objections, but the father of the federal income tax almost certainly was alarmed by the revenue impact of Prohibition. At the turn of the 20th Century, the U.S. government drew one third of its income from taxes on liquor.

This was on par with the Romanov monarchs’ treasury in pre-Communist Russia, where about one third of royal treasury came from the pathological alcoholism of the miserable Russian peasantry.

Atheists and Nationalists Oppose Alcoholism

“Death is preferable to selling vodka,” the atheist Vladimir Lenin declared during the Revolution there, which he waged during roughly the same period as the U.S. movement for Prohibition.

Gandhi agreed with Lenin that alcohol was a tool of the ruling class for control over the poor and the colonized. No less than the British opium merchants, alcohol manufacturers worked hand-in- glove with colonial powers to reduce indigenous communities to passive dependency, indifferent to the resulting crime and family destruction. Gandhi’s struggle against British colonialism was in part a struggle for sobriety.

“The one thing most deplorable next to Untouchability,” he wrote in 1925, “is the drink curse.” At his urging, the Congress Party adopted alcohol prohibition as a high priority, and it was ultimately written into the first Indian Constitution in 1949.

“From South Africa to Egypt to Istanbul,” Villanova professor Mark Schrad wrote in the Washington Post, “prohibition became synonymous with anti-imperialism and self-determination.”

The hard-drinking British imperialist Winston Churchill didn’t take Prohibition lightly, and wrote in 1929 of his disdain for our combination of moralism and “the rat-trap rigidity of the American Constitution” that produced a gigantic “spectacle at once comic and pathetic.”

We Lose

Such haughty and cavalier elitism ultimately prevailed over earnest American democracy, with the help of enormous immigrant populations including some of my ancestors.

German-American beer manufacturers could have funded an aggressive resistance to enactment of the Prohibition amendment, but were on their best behavior immediately following World War I. They bided their time and gradually undermined support for the law over the next decade.

Other ethnic groups considered alcohol indispensable to their group identity or personal autonomy, and did their bit to doom the experiment. They abused the liturgical wine exception.

But none of these challenges were insurmountable. The government that had won the Civil War, settled the West, built the Panama Canal and prevailed in World War I could have made Prohibition stick. The failure and ultimate repeal of Prohibition was a failure of will.

Why We Capitulated

Despite remarkable postwar prosperity, Americans were losing confidence in themselves and in their democracy, under siege and ridicule by urban elites. Faculty academics made common cause with artists and entertainers to corrode and discredit traditional American beliefs.

In 1925, the “Monkey Trial” and its newspaper coverage cast doubt on our foundational beliefs in Divine creation. Several mainline Christian denominations have not recovered to this day, and many individuals have slipped into apostasy because they feel that unbelievers have won the argument.

Open repudiation of Christianity is less common than silent apostasy, in which the American believer quietly recedes into apathy and passive acquiescence. This was the air that President Calvin Coolidge breathed during his presidency from 1923 to 1929.

Follow the Money

He told Congress in 1926 that “local authorities, which had always been mainly responsible for the enforcement of law in relation to intoxicating liquor, ought not to seek evasion by attempting to shift the burden wholly upon the Federal agencies. Under the Constitution the states are jointly charged with the nation in providing for the enforcement of the prohibition amendment.”

But the (federal) Bureau of Prohibition, founded in 1920 to enforce the new law, was chronically underfunded even as Coolidge lectured the states. There was too little enthusiasm for enforcement, too little diligence, whether at the state, local or federal level. We said we wanted to end drunkenness, liver failure, wife-beating and family disintegration, but we were bluffing, unwilling to pay the price.

Are We For Real?

Today our bluff has been called again. We say that we want sovereignty and secure national borders. But are we willing to fund enforcement? Deep down, do we have confidence in ourselves, in our national identity, as a people who deserve to have and keep our own country?

We can make American nationhood stick. We can be a nation of laws. But it won’t happen spontaneously. It will have to be enforced, and enforcement will have to be funded.

I hope my descendants won’t look back on American nationhood as a doomed, delusional episode worthy of smirks and chuckles. But it’s not out of the question. Build the wall.

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The President Should Not Play Ball With Illegitimate Border Lawsuit

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Could a third-party organization get standing to select any district court it wants to control and determine who is admitted into this country at the international border? That is the question in light of the ACLU’s lawsuit against Trump’s asylum regulation. It is also the question the Trump administration needs to emphatically answer right now before lending legitimacy to this abuse of separation of powers.

On Tuesday, like clockwork, the ACLU and a bunch of open-borders groups sued the Department of Justice’s latest asylum regulation that simply affirms the integrity of the system. The proposed rule would limit asylum to those who didn’t game the system and pass up other countries that are a party to the asylum treaty before seeking asylum in the U.S. The lawsuit was so contrived that it was likely drafted even before the regulation was published, because it erroneously names John Sanders as head of Customs and Border Protection when the current acting commissioner is Mark Morgan.

Trump has the opportunity to cut this off and call upon his attorney general to declare that there is no legitimacy to this lawsuit and decline to send lawyers to the San Francisco court for this dog-and-pony show.

Forum-shopping and nationwide injunctions are illegitimate

It is simply absurd and illegal for a district court not on the border to rule on a national – even international – issue affecting entry at the border. Most of the family units are coming in at the Texas border, and none of them are in the Northern District of California. Only two percent coming in at the California border at all. Why did the ACLU go there? Because it has a 13-1 majority of Democrat appointees, and that is the district that has single-handedly vitiated the rest of our existing immigration laws.

It’s time for the Trump administration to once and for all declare that nationwide and universal injunctions by district judges are unconstitutional and violate the inherent limitation of “cases and controversies” spelled out in Article III powers. This will affect the rest of his presidency and the future of the republic on every issue, but most certainly on border security. Now is the time to force that issue.

There is no judicial jurisdiction over foreign affairs

It is momentous that the ACLU chose the Northern District of California, a point that must be publicized by the president and his attorney general. This is the very district court that, in 1996, said that the “exclusion of aliens is a fundamental act of sovereignty” and that “the right to do so stems not alone from legislative power but is inherent in the executive power to control the foreign affairs of the nation. (Encuentro del Canto Popular v. Christopher, N.D. Cal. 1996.) There is nothing more to talk about. Even if the Left is correct about the reading of base asylum statutes, which it is not because asylum is discretionary and never supersedes national security concerns, the president always has the authority to shut it off. It’s not just from statutory 1182(f) delegated authority, but as this very court said, from his own Article II authority over entry at the border. The president can deny entry to anyone he wants, certainly when we are seeing dozens of terrible effects on the American people and on the migrants themselves because of the rush at the border and the empowerment of the cartels and MS-13.

Once Trump establishes this is a foreign affairs issue, it destroys the Left’s next argument. The ACLU alleges that the DOJ violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) by not waiting 30 days to potentially implement the policy. Aside from the numerous reasons why the APA doesn’t apply here (see Alito’s partial dissent in the census case), 5 U.S.C. §553(a)(1) explicitly exempts a “foreign affairs function” from the APA.

The Courts have zero jurisdiction to give standing

If the Trump administration agrees to legitimize this case, it will not only give our sovereignty over immigration to the courts, something the Supreme Court has rejected for 130 years, it would be allowing courts to veto any policy without any requirement for Article III standing.

Courts don’t veto policies or laws. There is no judicial veto in the Constitution. What courts can do is grant relief to plaintiffs with valid standing when a cognizable injury is evident as a result of the denial of a constitutional right or a legally protected interest. As the Supreme Court said in 2013, “The law of Article III standing, which is built on separation-of-powers principles, serves to prevent the judicial process from being used to usurp the powers of the political branches.” (Clapper v. Amnesty International USA.)

7.8 billion people in the world simply don’t have standing to sue for the right to come here. That has long been settled. In Lem Moon Sing (1895), the court said that not only does Congress have full authority to exclude without judicial intervention, but the executive branch officials do as well. The court noted that one could not argue that if an “alien is entitled of right, by some law or treaty, to enter this country, but is nevertheless excluded by such officers” that the courts could get involved.

“That view, if sustained, would bring into the courts every case of an alien claiming the right to come into the United States under some law or treaty, but who was prevented from doing so by the executive branch of the government. This would defeat the manifest purpose of Congress in committing to subordinate immigration officers and to the Secretary of the Treasury exclusive authority to determine whether a particular alien seeking admission into this country belongs to the class entitled by some law or treaty to come into the country, or to a class forbidden to enter the United States.”

So, the new tactic of these refugee or open-borders agitation groups is to sue as if they, not the aliens, are the aggrieved party. Typically, the ACLU or another NGO will sue on behalf of a real plaintiff. In this case, they are asserting that they are the aggrieved party because, according to the brief filed in the N.D. of California, “The new Rule frustrates Al Otro Lado’s mission and will force Al Otro Lado to divert significant resources away from its other programs.” They claim they will lose revenue from taxpayer funds or have to strain their staff to function.

Folks, if the court were to legitimize this avenue of standing, then there is not a single policy of any sort that can’t be sued by anyone. Say you have an organization that offers legal help to tax cheats. Then government resolves to more aggressively clamp down on tax fraud. Can your tax cheat law firm get standing to sue the government because now there will be fewer clients and your revenue will be reduced? That is quite literally what the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, one of the litigants, claimed in support of obtaining standing to sue in this case.

The ACLU is bringing the lawsuit on behalf of East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, Al Otri Lado, Innovation Law Lab, and the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles.

The president or the attorney general should deliver a national address and read some of the ACLU’s brief word for word, and the American people will see the absurdity on their own. They already understand the absurdity of forum-shopping, nationwide injunctions, and judicial tyranny of one of 94 federal courts. Trump’s advisers and lawyers need to step outside to the real America and turn away from political Twitter, and they will see the American people do not want this swarm at the border, nor do they want the ACLU and California judges usurping power. It’s time they actually fight for the forgotten American taxpayer who never gets standing in any court to uphold the rule of law and sovereignty.

We either have three branches of government, or we have 1/94th of the unelected weakest branch determining foreign affairs. (For more from the author of “The President Should Not Play Ball With Illegitimate Border Lawsuit” please click HERE)

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Will the Desecration of the American Flag at ICE Facility Turn the Tide of the Border Battle?

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The overwhelming majority of Americans, including most swing voters, want Republicans to simply enforce our immigration laws and prioritize the needs of Americans over the desires of illegal aliens. Why won’t they?

Republicans will likely miss the powerful symbolism of illegal alien protesters ripping down the American flag at an ICE facility in Aurora, Colorado, and raising the Mexican flag. For those of us who are veterans of the fight for sovereignty, this act conjured up memories of the 2006 fight over amnesty that conservatives successfully turned into a law to protect sovereignty, a law yet to be enforced by our government.

In 2006, the Left, along with Sen. John McCain and President George W. Bush, tried to repeat the 1986 amnesty for illegal aliens already here. As always, the American people were dead set against it, but they just weren’t activated, because all of the political money and activism is on the other side. That all changed when illegal aliens started publicly attacking our flag, according to Michelle Malkin, who was the leading conservative voice fighting amnesty at the time.

“In the spring of 2006, the illegal alien amnesty mob finally pushed Americans over the edge,” said Malkin in an interview with CR.

“Ethnic grievance-mongers raised the Mexican flag over the American flag flying upside down at Montebello High School in southern California. The flag wars quickly spread to Florida, Texas, Arizona, and my now-adopted home state of Colorado. At the time, I wrote: ‘I predict this stunt will be the nail in the coffin of any guest-worker/amnesty plan on the table in Washington.’ I was right. Thanks to these unbridled displays of anti-American hatred, citizens rose fiercely to the defense of our borders and our laws — and the Bush amnesty plan crashed in flames.”

Malkin noted that “P.R. strategists for the sovereignty saboteurs have tried to clean up their act and dress up their endless amnesty campaigns in red, white, and blue” ever since they made that blunder. “They temporarily put down their foreign flags, stopped wearing their commie Che Guevara T-shirts, and cloaked their radical Reconquista aspirations in the less divisive rhetoric of ‘reform,’ ‘opportunity,’ and DREAMers. But they just can’t help themselves. They can never hide their true colors — and the Mexican flag-raising in Aurora this past weekend proved it. Once again, I predict doom for the border-erasers. They’ve crossed a line that Americans have not, cannot, and will not tolerate.”

What did conservatives get for their efforts in 2006? A mandate for at least 850 miles of double-layer fencing and a requirement that DHS achieve full operational control to prevent all illegal immigration and cartel activity at any land or maritime border within 18 months of passage. It’s just that the law was never implemented.

Moreover, President Bush actually started enforcing interior immigration laws and deporting illegal aliens with 287(g) and the Secure Communities program, where deportations were ramped up, an effort that bore fruit even well into the first term of Obama’s precedency, when we were averaging over 400,000 deportations a year. MS-13 was almost eradicated from the country as a result of this successful push by we the people.

The lesson of the flag is that America can survive a conventional invasion that is eventually repelled. At the “dawn’s early light” of September 14, 1814, despite a 25-hour bombardment of Fort McHenry, Baltimore, by the British navy, “our flag was still there.” There was no Union Jack flying over the fort, despite the superior British firepower. But when our government subverts our sovereignty laws and brings in millions of illegal aliens who then become the most powerful constituency in the country – with the ability to single-handedly command the legislative agenda of the House of Representatives for the month of July – our flag was easily removed from an ICE detention facility and the Mexican flag was raised for several hours.

An invading army is not counted in the census. An invading army does not steal birthright citizenship for their children. An invading army doesn’t sue us in court and change our language, at least not right away.

In that sense, those who recoil when we refer to the border situation as “an invasion” are correct. This is worse than an invasion. It is subtler, yet more enduring and transformational in the long run.

This very point, missed by the political elites, including many so-called conservative political elites, is understood even by many run-of-the-mill Democrat voters. According to a Harvard-Harris poll, by a margin of 2-1, independent and moderate voters want illegal aliens, even those with questionable asylum claims, “immediately turned back” at the border. That view is held even by 44 percent of self-described Hillary Clinton voters.

While Democrats are holding one hearing after another on how they can shield and encourage more illegal immigration at the border, Republicans are missing in action, not holding hearings in the Senate on all the harms illegal aliens are causing Americans. Most Republicans are clamoring to show that they care more about the treatment of the invaders than the constituents they represent because they think the Twitter bubble is representative of American voters’ sentiments on the issue. They are simply wrong.

According to Axios, a recent focus group of 12 swing voters in the swing state of Michigan demonstrated this point. “Immigration came up many times when these swing voters were asked to discuss their top issue heading into the presidential election,” reports Axios. “Their responses sounded a lot like the ‘America First’ message President Trump has been championing.”

This focus group was composed of the quintessential swing voters – people who voted for both Romney (2012) and Hillary (2016) or both Obama (2012) and Trump (2016). What did they find? “Eight of these participants, including one Romney-Clinton voter, agreed with this statement: “When we give migrants food, clothing, toiletries, and shelter, all we’re doing is encouraging more of them to come to the U.S., and we don’t want that.”

In other words, most moderate voters are to the right of even the messaging of the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.

Among conservative elites in D.C., going after unqualified birthright citizenship for people who break into the country is considered a no-fly zone. For the average American, on the other hand, it is a no-brainer. “We shouldn’t give away our birthright like candy,” said Shawn M. “Meaning that all they have to do is cross the border illegally, pop out a kid, and they’re a U.S. citizen. Two illegals do not a citizen make,” she added.

Indeed, the American people stood defiant against a naval attack by a superpower 200 years ago. They stood for the flag. They certainly won’t be cowed by an invasion of illegal immigration and social transformation without representation. The only question is whether the elites of the bipartisan oligarch in Washington will catch up to the mainstream of American thought. (For more from the author of “Will the Desecration of the American Flag at Ice Facility Turn the Tide of the Border Battle?” please click HERE)

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Pro-China Communists Working to Mobilize 40 Million New Voters Against Trump

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President Donald Trump and the Republican Party had better be ready for a tsunami of new Democratic voters coming their way in 2020.

Far from the easy victory many pundits are predicting, there’s a strong chance that the president and his party (strong economy notwithstanding) may be overwhelmed by an unexpected wave of new voters coming mainly from the South and Southwest.

The same pro-China, communist-led organizations that almost won gubernatorial races in Florida and Georgia in 2018, and have almost turned once-reliably Republican Virginia blue, are aiming to mobilize a staggering 40 million new voters against President Trump.

If this network can mobilize just 20 percent of the new voters they are targeting, Trump will be a one-term president. Donald Trump Jr.’s recent prediction that the 2020 election will be a battle between “freedom and communism” will prove horribly accurate.

While most commentators are focusing on Midwestern “battleground” states, the American far-left is looking further South. The Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) and its allies are looking to the millions of black, Latino, and low-income white potential voters in the South and Southwest who lean heavily Democrat, but traditionally vote in low numbers.

If the FRSO can mobilize several million new Democratic voters in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona over the next 18 months, Trump will find victory extremely difficult—even if he makes some gains in Northern, Midwestern, and Western states.

Florida, North Carolina, and Arizona are all extremely vulnerable. Georgia isn’t far behind, and even Texas is in play. If the communists can flip Florida and Arizona for the Democrats, Trump almost certainly loses. If Georgia and North Carolina turn blue, Texas is not even needed. If Texas goes blue, the Democrat/communist alliance rules the United States forever.

Who Is Jon Liss?

Jon Liss is one of the most influential and little-known political operatives in the United States today. A longtime leader of the FRSO, Liss has been building political influence in Northern Virginia for over three decades. He has been active in Tenants and Workers United, the Rainbow Coalition/Jesse Jackson presidential campaign, the Fairfax County Taxi-drivers Association, and the Left Strategies Collective.

Liss’s organization, FRSO, itself grew out of the Maoist “New Communist Movement” of the 1970s and has maintained ties to the People’s Republic of China. The FRSO is probably about 2,000 members strong, but it works in partnership with the 5,000 members of the equally pro-China Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the nearly 60,000-strong Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Working together in an alliance called the “Left Inside/Outside Project,” these three groups have infiltrated the Democratic Party in every state of the union.

Mass Voter Registration

In recent years, Liss has led New Virginia Majority (NVM), an Alexandria-based voter registration operation that has signed up several hundred thousand, mainly minority voters to turn Virginia to Democratic-leaning from a reliably Republican state. NVM is able to micro-target potential Democratic voters by using sophisticated demographic information and maps generated by an FRSO supporter based in the Geography Department of Wuhan University in China.

NVM’s Florida partner organization, New Florida Majority (NFM), almost elected far-leftist Andrew Gillum to the governorship of Florida in 2018, by helping raise the Democratic vote in the Sunshine State by more than 40 percent. Similar communist-directed mass engagement of minority voters almost elected Stacey Abrams to the governorship of Georgia and Beto O’Rourke to the U.S. Senate from Texas. They did succeed in electing Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Doug Jones to the U.S. Senate from Arizona and Alabama, respectively. In North Carolina, FRSO activists have used minority voters to elect several leftist Democrats to local government positions.

State Power Caucus

The lessons learned in Virginia, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, and Texas are now being applied on a national scale to oust Trump.

One of the main coordinating bodies for this ambitious project is the State Power Caucus, headed by Liss and FRSO affiliate Andrea Mercado of NFM.

Liss writes about this new strategy on the FRSO-aligned website Organizing Upgrade:

“Inspired by the disaster of Trump and Trumpism two years out, most organizers are engaged in barroom or coffee shop speculation about the 2020 election.

“Among the two dozen announced Democratic candidates, many debate: will it be Sanders or Warren, with their attacks on corporate Democrats? Will it be one of Hillary’s heirs, with their cozy relationship with Wall Street? Will Harris be the first Black woman nominated by a major party? If it’s Biden, do we sit it out?

“All of it is idle speculation unless ‘we’ collectively organize tens of millions of the 108 million eligible voters who didn’t vote in 2016. That’s right, one hundred and eight million eligible voters chose not to register or to vote in 2016. The non-voting block is disproportionately young, poor, and people of color.”

So what’s the solution?

“Dozens of state-based power building organizations have banded together to lead efforts to build a bottom up long term front against Trump and Trumpism. Over the last twenty-five years, state power organizations have grown to fill the political space created by the decline of Democratic Party local organization, the breakup and collapse of ACORN, and low levels of voter turnout. This reflects a shift from narrow Alinskyism and its very limited political engagement.”

For years, communist-influenced groups such as ACORN and its spinoffs have chipped away at the Republican voting base in scattered efforts across multiple states. What Liss reveals here is an effort to consolidate these groups into one front to massively amplify their effects.

Building the Caucus

According to Liss:

“Starting in the summer of 2017, many leading state-power organizations have come together as a caucus to support peer-to-peer learning and incubate innovate organizing practices. Included among the organizations that have been leading the State Power Caucus are New Virginia Majority, New Florida Majority, California Calls, Washington Community Action Network, and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.

“All told, there are 22 organizations from 15 states involved in the Caucus. Importantly, these organizations recognized the need to develop a systematic and long-term alternative to Trumpism.”

These groups, all affiliated with the FRSO, can credibly claim to have had a significant effect on voting patterns since the 2016 election cycle. However, they acknowledge that a much greater effort will be required to defeat Trump.

“We’ve also begun to assess the collective impact of state-based organizations. Looking at 2016, our rough estimate is that at most 4 million people were contacted and encouraged to vote. This is our high-water estimate. The actual number who actually voted is probably much lower still.

“Now, recall the 108 million people who were eligible but not voting? They are largely our ‘core’ constituency, or in other terms, they are our unorganized social base. This 108 million, when compared to the voting electorate, is more Black, more immigrant, more working class and poor.

“If we initially target just half of the 108 million, and we acknowledge that some in that half are going to disagree with our values and politics, some aren’t going to vote no matter what, and some are in geographies that we just can’t reach, we believe our real voter mobilization target number is 40 million, and we’ve agreed as a caucus to that number as our target. That’s our natural constituency.”

Liss sees this goal as a means to elect more socialists and communists to public office, but also to decisively defeat Trump as a step toward moving the country much further down the socialist road.

“The long game to defeat white nationalism and move past neo-liberal corporatism is by building a bottom up movement of 40 million people.”

New Party, New Society

In a follow-up article on Organizing Upgrade, Liss makes it clear that the State Power Caucus aims to go way beyond defeating Trump. The real goal is to build a new mass socialist party that will eventually be able to challenge for state power.

Liss is happy that the communist left has finally acknowledged the necessity of electoral work on the road to a socialist America. The Bernie Sanders movement has been a big part of this tactical shift. Liss writes:

“I’m old, but a little too young to have lived through the New Communist Movement of the 1970s and its battles to form revolutionary parties and pre-parties, that is, to build a disciplined band of professional revolutionaries to carry out a political line. … On the other hand, there is a unique, maybe even historic opportunity to build a political-strategic space to carry out electoral organizing.

“Increasingly, there is a sector of radical organizations who believe that electoral work is a key area of struggle. That is a huge shift from the last few decades: credit Bernie and his campaign for revitalizing the notion of socialism and the importance of elections, credit many immigrant rights, Occupy and Movement for Black Lives leaders for recognizing the need for mass action AND an electoral strategy.”

But all this new energy will be wasted without centralized coordination:

“It’s time to create a ‘general command’ or a place where all organized groups of people who view elections as key area of struggle and who view growing a base of radical ‘new majority’ Democratic voters as a central task. To be explicit, new majority Democrats refers to women, especially women of color, Black and immigrant voters, and sectors of young and working-class voters.”

It’s also imperative to support whoever the Democrats choose to challenge Trump:

“Our task is to build an organizational vehicle, what I call a ‘party-like space’ … around the following points: a) build a stronger, larger base of voters of color, younger voters and women voters (in Virginia, for example, Black women voters have been the motor for all progressive change), b) support existing state power organizations that is ,some of the dozens of social movement organizations contending for state level governing power, or at least organizations that are outside of the Democratic Party structures c) agree to support the Democratic candidate who emerges to take on Trump in the general election.”

So what would this party-like structure do? According to Liss, it would be “a valuable step toward a coherent approach for building a socialist movement.”

“On a strategic level, this party-like space would exist in order to build the foundations for a mass left organization capable of challenging elites in the two dominant parties, leveraging the strengths and demands of multiple movements, and making possible a struggle for life beyond Trump and Trumpism. Practical next steps should include:

1. Agree to these or similar points of unity …

2. Coordinate electoral plans.

3. Do real world work both together and apart, regularly and collectively assess progress, learn lessons and adjust strategies.

4. Recruit other projects and organizations to join this political space.

5. Develop working relationships to funnel members and volunteers to state power organizations, DSA, or the Working Families Party who are building independently of the Democratic Party, while also expanding the electorate and building the broadest front against Trump and Trumpism.”

Communist Inspiration

In order to illustrate the past successes of this approach, Liss cites the example of El Salvador’s often ruling FMLN, an electoral alliance built around the Communist Party of El Salvador.

“In El Salvador, 5 organizations under life-threatening duress managed to unite to create the FMLN. They started with very different strategic positions but created a process for collaboration and coordination. Over time, many of the differences were not nearly as important as the need to work together. Again, while longer term strategic considerations may develop over time, getting this real work started for 2020 is the way to start.”

Credible Threat

The FRSO and its allies have enough people and resources to make possible their plan to mobilize 40 million new voters against Trump.

Their leadership of the State Power Caucus and their control of 22 voter registration organizations in 15 states is no small army. Add to that massive funding from the Democracy Alliance, labor unions, and leftist foundations, and possible ongoing informational support from China. It’s clear that Trump has some serious under-the-radar opposition coming from the FRSO and the State Power Caucus.

These groups will work in California, Ohio, and other states, but the real focus will be Southern and Southwestern Republican-held states with high minority populations. North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Texas, and Arizona may well be the real battleground states this election cycle.

The outcome of the next election will either set the United States on a new upward spiral of freedom and prosperity, or it could send the United States and the West into a nearly unstoppable downward spiral into socialism and tyranny.

In World War II, the battle for civilization was decided in the battles of the Coral Sea, Midway Island, Normandy, and “The Bulge.”

The looming battle for civilization may well be fought in the ballot boxes of Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.

Re-posted with permission of the author.
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Trevor Loudon is an author, filmmaker, and public speaker from New Zealand. For more than 30 years, he has researched radical left, Marxist, and terrorist movements and their covert influence on mainstream politics.

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