Depravity as a Civil Right

/0 Comments/in , , /by

Bringing Out the Best in Americans

The task of the historian is not to compile mere sequences of facts, dates and events, but to interpret them, to make sense of them, to explain consequences and implications – why these facts matter. And so history isn’t just a transcript of the past, but an explanation of today. How did these past facts change who we are and what we care about now?

I used to believe that the genius of Martin Luther King Jr. was to state the obvious, and then hold us to it. He didn’t invent equality and fairness, after all. We already believed in it, or thought we did.

When he said “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” that was a paraphrase of an 1853 sermon by white preacher Theodore Parker. It implied the bedrock assumption of American exceptionalism, that we are on the right side of history.

King identified our most cherished beliefs about ourselves as Americans, then challenged us to do the hard work of living up to our own exalted self-image. It seemed obvious, before he ever said it, that Americans should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

But it turns out that was not obvious at all. In 2019, very few Democrats still believe in color-blind government or politics.

There were lofty, noble lessons to take away from King’s teaching, and from the Civil Rights movement’s hard-won refinement of American equality: that we Americans owe one another a fair shake, that we can’t rightly turn a blind eye to the government’s habitual mistreatment of our fellow citizens.

Machiavelli, Meet Martin Luther King

But there were other lessons, not so lofty, not so noble: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. White guilt can be lucrative for professional victims. Identity politics can be a cottage industry for activists and unsavory hustlers until they gather enough momentum of influence to dictate public policy.

These toxic lessons are at odds with the lessons based on our aspirational American exceptionalism. The culture of grievance has, unfortunately, shaped the civic engagement of several other ethnic groups that eagerly imitated Black identity politics. This led to grotesque alliances that empowered genocidal abortion of more than 18 million Black American youngsters since I graduated from high school. This same alliance has barricaded the exits for Black and Hispanic children from failed urban school systems.

Eventually even vanilla white males learned how to harness the techniques of exaggerated victimhood to obscure and excuse the content of their character.

The Gay Agenda

The sophisticated psychological strategy to transform American culture and public policy on homosexual behavior, the so-called “gay agenda,” was laid out in “After the Ball,” a 1989 book by two Harvard-educated homosexuals, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen. Kirk, who died at 47 of undisclosed causes, was a neuropsychiatric researcher. Madsen’s expertise was in political messaging.

Kirk and Madsen proposed a three-part strategy: desensitization, jamming and conversion. It has been described as Orwellian. Without rehearsing the triumph of homosexuals following Kirk’s and Madsen’s blueprint, suffice it to say that their techniques work. Homosexual activists are in the driver’s seat now.

But will that be good for rank-and-file homosexuals? Or will they be victims of their apparent victory, like the aborted Black children? Will they be deprived of the legal right to seek therapy for their condition? Will lesbian athletes be deprived of scholarships and recognition in their sports by male homosexual intruders?

Will boys with same-sex attractions be deprived of safe havens like Boy Scouts in which to grow out of it, shielded from predatory adults? Will confused, vulnerable adolescent girls be able to fully participate in school and extracurricular activities without being subtly groomed by lesbian talent scouts on faculty? This appears to be a matter of indifference to many of our elites. The only child seduction that stirs them to outrage is by priests.

Pandering to the Implacable

We basically have a culture of appeasement now. We seem to think that if we capitulate, that will end the siege, and we’ll no longer be under attack. But the Sexual Revolution is ultimately totalitarian. Predatory libertines will not be appeased.

Kirk and Madsen urged pederasts at the North America Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) to drop out of Gay Pride parades and keep a low profile while mainstream gays established incremental gains by desensitization, jamming and conversion.

Parade organizers only excluded NAMBLA after exasperated lesbian participants laid down an us-or-them ultimatum. Gay rights founding father Harry Hay protested when the Los Angeles parade organizers excluded the child molesters. He carried a sign that said “NAMBLA Walks With Me.” Even Kirk and Madsen intimated in their book that the broader Gay movement might revisit issues of sex between men and boys after establishing enough political gains for mainstream gays.

Even some gay sympathizers recognize that, as cities and major corporations celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall homosexual riots this week, the stars have aligned for neo-pederasts to have another go at legalization.

“The taboo against sexualized children may very well be challenged by adults who grew up desensitized to explicit sexuality,” writes Rod Dreher in The American Conservative. “If so, then all of us — even those who believe the “After the Ball” strategy was deployed in the service of a good and just cause — had better be ready for the propaganda campaign.”

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Opinion: If a Straight Pride Parade Is Stupid, so Is a Gay Pride Parade

/0 Comments/in , /by

Personally, I agree with the people who say that the upcoming “straight pride parade” in Boston is a silly stunt. It’s not something that I would have any interest in attending, though I do appreciate the intentional irony of Milo Yiannopolous being named the parade’s grand marshal.

I believe I am on stable intellectual ground in calling the parade silly, as I have also said the same about gay pride parades. In fact, I think parades, in general — festive traffic jams, as I call them — are kind of stupid. But there are at least some justifiable reasons to throw one. Winning a war would be one good reason. Winning a Super Bowl would be another. If we are going to have a parade to announce our pride in something, it ought to be a real achievement. Or else it should at least be some occasion for actual celebration, such as a holiday like Thanksgiving or Christmas. But your sexual orientation is neither an achievement nor a holiday. You have not accomplished anything simply by being attracted to one sex or another.

It is argued that the real purpose of a gay pride parade is to resist and protest the persecution of homosexuals. Heterosexuals are not persecuted for being heterosexuals, so the argument goes, and therefore a heterosexual pride parade is pointless. But if that’s the point of a pride parade, then why do they call it a pride parade? If it’s really a protest, then call it a protest, or a rally, or a demonstration. And in that case, why do they hold these “protests” in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, rather than Tehran or Riyadh? It seems that these pride parades are held in precisely the places where gays are not persecuted.

All the evidence indicates that gay pride parades are indeed gay pride parades. That is, they are parades that give gay people the opportunity to announce their pride in being gay. Indeed, the New York City Pride Parade website calls its event a “pride celebration.” Another LGBT website puts it plainly: Gay people should “feel pride in being gay.” If you agree that gays should feel pride in their gayness, and that parades ought to be held across the country to celebrate that pride, and to “create inclusive places for self-expression” for homosexuals, then it would obviously be a ludicrous double standard to insist that heterosexuals are not entitled to a similar celebration for themselves. (Read more from “Opinion: If a Straight Pride Parade Is Stupid, so Is a Gay Pride Parade” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Medieval Diseases Spreading in Los Angeles Prove Twisted Democrat Priorities Endanger Public Health

/0 Comments/in , /by

Americans don’t have to look as far as Venezuela to see the massive failure of a government incapable of delivering the basics of what people need from their government. A brief look at California shows how the twisted priorities of Democrat political leadership are creating a dangerous environment for the residents of the Golden State.

While combatting climate change remains a top priority for Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democrat Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the streets of California’s cities are filled with homeless camps, garbage, and disease-spreading rats.

In a throwback to medieval times, Los Angeles is facing an infectious disease epidemic caused by flea-borne disease linked to rat-infested streets. Last October, the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health issued a health alert surrounding an outbreak of flea-borne typhus in the homeless population in downtown Los Angeles.

A month later, Deputy City Attorney Liz Greenwood was diagnosed with typhus, which she claims came from fleas carried by rats that are infesting City Hall and an adjacent building, City Hall East, where she worked.

Greenwood filed a $5 million lawsuit against the city, claiming she contracted typhus because the mayor and others in the city government did not clean up garbage on nearby streets, which allowed rats and fleas to flourish.

The type of typhus found in Los Angeles is called murine typhus, caused by a bacteria called Rickettsia typhi. The infection occurs when infected flea feces enters a person’s body through a cut or the eyes. Rats and other small animals carry the fleas into areas in close proximity to humans, where the exposure occurs. The symptoms include fever, headache, and joint and muscle pain, and it’s cured by antibiotics. If typhus is untreated, it can result in serious injury to organs.

Citing the California Department of Heath, NBC4 reported a new record of 124 cases of typhus in Los Angeles County in 2018.

In a related public health matter, the Central Division station of the Los Angeles Police Department had a rodent problem and other health-related issues and was fined for six violations by the California Department of Industrial Relations.

The department was faulted for “not having a program to exterminate and control rats, fleas, roaches, gnats, mosquitoes or grasshoppers in the building.”

One police officer from the Central Division recently contracted typhoid fever, which is caused by Salmonella Typhi, a different bacteria from that causing typhus. The source of the officer’s infection has not been determined yet.

Unlike typhus, typhoid fever can be a life-threatening disease and is not linked to fleas. Typhoid fever is a rare disease in the U.S. and can be spread by people or through contaminated water.

Solving the typhus problem is not rocket science and doesn’t require quantum physics. It’s basic epidemiology. The truth is you don’t need sophisticated equipment or a genius-level IQ to diagnose the problem. All you need is a pair of eyes and common sense. The rise in homelessness is leading to filth and garbage on the streets that attract rats and fleas.

The number of homeless in the city of Los Angeles has shot up 16 percent to over 36,000, reaching almost 59,000 in Los Angeles County in 2019. Remove the homeless from the streets and clean up the garbage, and the problem is solved.

A report on the source of the rat problem at City Hall was recently unearthed via a public records search. Predictably, the report blamed the homeless on the streets for the rat infestation, but for some reason, city elected officials did not publicized the study’s results. This correlates with the reluctance of city leaders to point to homeless camps as the root cause of the public health problem.

For some reason, the simplest possible solution is over the head of Mayor Garcetti. NBC4 News reported the city allows garbage to sit on the streets for months and has not implemented an aggressive program to eliminate the rat problem.

Unfortunately for Californians, their elected officials are worried about global issues such as climate change instead of basic sanitation and public health.

California is taking the lead on addressing climate change. The state has a cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and a goal of generating 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2045.

Garcetti has Los Angeles joining the Green New Deal parade. The mayor’s plan targets transportation with a goal of having 80 percent of cars powered by electricity or zero-emission technology and to have city residents drive fewer miles each year.

Meanwhile, disease-carrying rats are running the streets and infesting city buildings.

Los Angeles should serve as a warning sign to Americans that twisted Democrat priorities can deliver third-world results. (For more from the author of “Medieval Diseases Spreading in Los Angeles Prove Twisted Democrat Priorities Endanger Public Health” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Will Trump Draw the Line at the May Border Numbers?

/0 Comments/in , /by

Just three months ago to the day, I posted an analysis of the February border numbers, which were referred to at the time as “bonkers” and surpassing a “breaking point.” Well, three months later, with no “1182(f) shutdown” of immigration requests at the border triggered by the president, those very uncharted numbers have now DOUBLED.

Yesterday, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced that the number of illegal aliens apprehended at the border in May was roughly 144,000, a 32 percent increase from what we thought were unconscionable numbers in April. A whopping 132,887 were caught between points of entry and 11,391 at points of entry. The real shocker is that the total number of individuals coming in family units or as unaccompanied minors surged passed 100,000 for the first time, crushing April’s record by roughly 40 percent.

Now is the time for the president to either give a speech suspending all asylum requests and launching an operation against the cartels or cease calling this a sovereign nation.

The famous adage, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact,” came from Justice Robert Jackson, the great champion of individual rights and due process, the lead prosecutor at Nuremberg, and the lead dissenter in the Japanese internment case. He used this concept in his dissent in Terminiello v. Chicago (1949) after his fellow justices at the Supreme Court ruled that a Chicago ordinance leading to the conviction of a fascist speaker for speech that “stirs the public to anger, invites dispute, brings about a condition of unrest, or creates a disturbance” was unconstitutional.

Despite the fact that this disorderly conduct conviction, overturned by the majority of his colleagues, was a direct infringement upon the unambiguous and most foundational First Amendment rights of an individual citizen of the United States, Jackson famously wrote in his dissent that you reach a point when “the choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either.” He warned in a dissent joined by three other justices, “There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

Despite the flagrant constitutional violation by Chicago of the rights of a U.S. citizen, Jackson felt that the majority had reached the point of “accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means the removal of all restraints to maintain order.” He believed that treating this one aspect of the Constitution as a suicide pact “in the long run” would make “maintenance of free speech … more endangered if the population can have no protection from the abuses which lead to violence.”

Jackson’s broad principle is pure common sense of human survival. It was just a question of whether, in this particular case, upholding a strict view of the First Amendment would indeed cross that line. Five of his colleagues disagreed.

But what would they say in this case, when the Constitution gives the president foreign affairs powers to block entry into the country? When the law itself says these people, if the president chooses to let them in, “shall be detained” and placed in expedited removal? And yet, a single California judge grants standing for foreign nationals to sue for a phantom right to immigrate and not be detained, thereby trampling the social compact and sovereignty of every American citizen, empowering the cartels to bring in drugs, gangs, criminals, and weapons, and saddling American communities with the bill.

The cascading effects of an open border are insane enough, but with cartels orchestrating that flow, it is downright suicidal. Uninterrupted case law gives the president full authority to shut off migration, and his foreign affairs and military powers give him the authority to shut this down to deal with the cartels without any judicial intervention. This principle “has become about as firmly embedded in the legislative and judicial tissues of our body politic as any aspect of our government,” not “merely” by “a page of history … but a whole volume” (Galvan v. Press). The concept is “inherent in sovereignty,” consistent with “ancient principles” of international law, and “to be exercised exclusively by the political branches of government” (Kleindienst v. Mandel).

Indeed, Justice Jackson is the one who famously said, “Due process does not invest any alien with a right to enter the United States, nor confer on those admitted the right to remain against the national will” (Shaughnessy v. Mezei, (1953)). An alien’s claim to enter, much less a mass population transfer spawned by criminal organizations, is as antithetical to a fundamental civil liberty as fire is to water. The law could never impede a government from protecting the ultimate public order of national borders.

In fact, even as it relates to the Bill of Rights and freedom of speech for Americans, the Supreme Court in Feiner v. New York (1951), just two years after the Chicago case, sided with police in Syracuse, New York, who arrested a man for inciting a mob. Irving Feiner caused a riot in Syracuse in March 1949 when he urged black people to “rise up in arms and fight for equal rights” and was arrested and charged with breaching the peace after police told him three times to stop. This time, a majority of the court joined Jackson and believed that the facts on the ground showed that allowing an individual right to inhibit governmental action would be a bridge too far.

The majority opinion noted that civil liberties cannot make governments “powerless to prevent a breach of the peace” or to use “considered judgement” when “faced with a crisis” to exercise “their power and duty to preserve peace and order” given, among other factors, “the existing situation and the imminence of greater disorder.”

Could you imagine how the breach of peace, the crisis, and the existing imminent disorder at our international border would have been regarded by any judge of previous generations, weighed against an illegal alien’s “claim” to enter and fuel the mayhem?

Even with regard to habeas corpus rights of Americans, Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution states that “the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” While Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that this emergency power only applied to Congress, President Lincoln disagreed and ordered the military to suspend habeas corpus rights in Maryland to prevent a rebellion.

During his July 4, 1861, address to Congress, Lincoln famously asked in defense of his action, “Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated? Even in such a case, would not the official oath be broken if the Government should be overthrown when it was believed that disregarding the single law would tend to preserve it?”

Lincoln noted that the president must look to “the whole of the laws” and not let them collapse due to the fear of a “single law” being violated to “a limited extent.”

Again, even if the president didn’t have the power to deny entry into this country and even if we didn’t know that this is a prima facie fraud, there is no way someone could read asylum law so literally and stringently as to include a mass smuggling invasion that is so detrimental to this country when it violates the letter and spirit of every other area of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Nobody is asking President Trump to violate any law or constitutional right to prevent the global migration from dissolving this country. He merely needs to use delegated and inherent authority to shut off an orchestrated and criminal conspiracy of mass smuggling. Are we going to allow one judge’s interpretation of asylum law to shred every other immigration law for the benefit of millions of aliens and the cartels at the expense of all American citizens? Are we really prepared to allow all laws but the fake law of catch-and-release to go unexecuted so that our country go to pieces on behalf of people who have no right to be here? (For more from the author of “Will Trump Draw the Line at the May Border Numbers?” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

William Barr Is Washington’s Worst Nightmare

/0 Comments/in , /by

[William] Barr used the word “spying” during testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee with regard to his plan to look into counterintelligence activities against the Trump campaign during the 2016 election cycle. When he first uttered that word, it clearly startled every Democrat on the committee. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) immediately inquired if he really believed spying had occurred. Barr said, “I think spying did occur, yes.” That bullet continues to ricochet around the Beltway to this day. Indeed, his use of the “s” word was belabored at considerable length by Jan Crawford during the CBS interview with Barr that aired Friday:

On using the word, I mean, do you understand, and I know that some of the, some former intelligence chiefs have said that the president has made that word somewhat pejorative, that there is spying, this is a witch hunt, this is a hoax, and so your use of that word makes it seem that you are being a loyalist.

Having endured that word salad with his characteristic patience, Barr ignored the odd suggestion that “being a loyalist” was somehow improper. He did, however, make it clear that he had no intention of heeding the none-too-subtle attempts to stop him from using the verboten term. “It’s a perfectly good English word; I will continue to use it.” This is why Barr is so scary to Washington insiders. He’s an honest man with more concern for the truth than his popularity inside the Beltway. This has clearly caused considerable trepidation in the Justice Department, the intelligence community, the Democratic Party, and the media. . .

It goes without saying, of course, that the legacy media have denounced Barr for telling the truth. In his latest effusion for New York, Jonathan Chait informs his readers, “Barr has drunk deep from the Fox News worldview of Trumpian paranoia.” In response to the Attorney General’s common sense assertion during the CBS interview that it is unhealthy for our institutions to resist “a democratically elected president… by changing the norms,” Chait actually writes: “In fact, the opposition to Trump has been marked, on the whole, by its fastidious restraint.” This suggests that he should stay away from the bar before writing about Barr.

This kind of nonsense from the legacy media, combined with ridiculous claims by the Democrats that a man with William Barr’s record has no credibility and self-exculpatory balderdash from fabulists like John Brennan and James Comey, suggest that the real problem they have with the Attorney General is his blindingly obvious integrity. There are few things that scare the denizens of D.C. more than an honest man. The only thing they fear more is an honest man who doesn’t give a damn what they think of him. William Barr is their worst nightmare. (Read more from “William Barr Is Washington’s Worst Nightmare” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Trump Lurching to the Left on Crime Will Not Win Re-Election

/0 Comments/in , /by

Does President Trump believe that he will win re-election by exposing how radical Democrats have become since the Bill Clinton era, or by selling himself as to the Left of 1990s-era Democrats on crime? If he chooses the latter, shedding the law-and-order agenda he promised in 2016, it’s hard to comprehend the political calculus.

On Monday, President Trump tweeted, “Super Predator was the term associated with the 1994 Crime Bill that Sleepy Joe Biden was so heavily involved in passing. That was a dark period in American History, but has Sleepy Joe apologized? No!” A little over an hour later, he followed up by asserting, “Anyone associated with the 1994 Crime Bill will not have a chance of being elected. In particular, African Americans will not be able to vote for you. I, on the other hand, was responsible for Criminal Justice Reform, which had tremendous support, & helped fix the bad 1994 bill!”

Are we now the party of trying to out-left the Left and militate against one of the few bipartisan successes of our lifetime, which led to a huge decline in the homicide rate?

Defenders of the president will note that he is simply trolling Joe Biden in his usual style. But do conservatives win by trolling Democrats from the Left or by exposing their leftism? Do we win by repudiating their radicalism or validating it more aggressively than they do?

In reality, it used to be that Trump fully understood this issue.

Trump is correct. The sad reality is that violent crime is disproportionately committed by African-Americans. In 2017, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting, of the 11,883 homicide offenders whose race is known, a whopping 54 percent were black, 43 percent white, and three percent other. In 2012 (the last year the FBI broke down the race of those arrested for other offenses), African-Americans accounted for 32.9 percent of those arrested for rape, 55 percent of those arrested for robbery, and 34.1 percent of those arrested for aggravated assault.

Yet Trump was also correct when he asserted that African-Americans are disproportionately the victims of these crimes and are therefore hurt the most by weak-on-crime policies.

Indeed, in 2017, 1,272 more black people were killed (7,851) by homicide than white people (6,579). That is simply an astounding statistic given that black people compose just 13 percent of the population. In cases where the race of both the victim and offender were known, a staggering 88.4 percent of black homicide victims were murdered by black offenders.

Also, as Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald wrote in her must-read book, “The War on Cops,” “the statistics on the race of criminals as reported by crime victims match the arrest data.” She observes that dating back to 1978, “a study of robbery and aggravated assault in eight cities found parity between the race of assailants in victim reports and in arrests – a finding replicated many times, across a range of crimes.”

Why toss African-American crime victims overboard to placate the criminal leniency complex? They are most likely to be the victims of these proposals.

The prison population is plummeting and has been for a while, particularly among black people and younger folks entering the system. As Keith Humphreys, a noted psychiatry professor at Stanford University, observed in the Washington Post several years ago, data from the Bureau of Justice Statistic shows incarcerations of 18- and 19-year-olds has declined by 40 percent from 2003 to 2013. Last month, he noted the across-the-board decline in incarceration in recent years “with the black rate of decline outpacing that of whites.” According to Humphreys and co-author Richard Lane, “the African American male imprisonment rate has dropped by a third since its peak and is now at a level not seen since 1991. African American women’s rate of imprisonment has dropped 57 percent from its peak and is now at a 30-year low.”

Thus, the entire notion of the 1994 crime law inducing mass incarceration of blacks is refuted by the reality of the decline in black incarceration over much of the same period.

Sadly, crime is going up in many areas over recent years, and the drug trafficking is now driven by transnational gangs and cartels much more than by African-American criminals. Now is the worst time to become even more lenient in an already lenient system that is reluctant to lock people up, particularly if they are of a specific race.

Look no further than Baltimore to see the tragedy of pursuing racial talking points at the expense of good public policy and public safety. Back in the early 2000s, even arch-liberal Mayor Martin O’Malley understood the people wanted law and order, and he aggressively arrested criminals in the city. Since the city declared war on the cops, refused to lock up juveniles, and aggressively stigmatized incarceration of African-American criminals at all costs, things have changed. The homicide rate went from roughly 40 per 100,000 during O’Malley’s tenure to 57.8 in 2017, the highest rate in the nation and higher than that of El Salvador.

That is the legacy of the leniency complex that Trump should be against during his re-election campaign. At its core, we don’t have an incarceration problem in this country, nor do we have a “Jim Crow” justice system. We have a broken culture and family structure, widespread in but not exclusive to inner cities. It’s time to treat the ailment, not the symptoms, especially when the symptoms are “improving.” Unfortunately, black victims will be the most harmed by the dismantling of more aggressive policing, tougher sentencing, and more incarceration.

Being weak on crime hurts everyone, but disproportionately ravages African-American neighborhoods. Trump once understood this. (For more from the author of “Trump Lurching to the Left on Crime Will Not Win Re-Election” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Pakistani Duplicity Caused the United States to Lose in Afghanistan

/0 Comments/in , /by

“The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C.”

H. R. McMaster wrote that statement in his 1997 scathing critique of the Vietnam War, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. He was a major in the Army at that time. Now, he is a retired lieutenant general and former national security advisor to President Donald Trump.

It is indeed ironic that McMaster eventually contributed to what many people thought to be impossible by repeating the mistakes of Vietnam and losing the Afghanistan war—both in the field and in Washington, DC.

The real tragedy is that America’s leaders, in particular its military leaders, long knew that the war in Afghanistan could not be won having chosen to fight it in a manner that was alien to its nature, thus wasting both treasure and precious lives.

For over seventeen years we have wrongly applied counterinsurgency doctrine to a proxy war waged by Pakistan against the United States and Afghanistan. At the same time, we supplied Pakistan with generous aid packages to bribe them from pursuing a course of action opposed to our own, which they considered in their national interest.

Counterinsurgency was never a winning strategy as long as Pakistan controlled the supply of our troops in landlocked Afghanistan and regulated the operational tempo through its proxy army, the Taliban, which has maintained an extensive recruiting, training and financial support infrastructure inside Pakistan, where it has been immune to attack.

In essence, our leaders, through a combination of incompetence and indifference, allowed the United States to be defeated by Pakistan and paid them to do it.

Pakistan’s objectives for Afghanistan have always been different than those of the United States. Not only has Pakistan not helped the United States in Afghanistan, but from the very beginning through its support of the Taliban, Pakistan has actively worked against our interests and is responsible for prolongation of the war and the deaths and maiming of thousands of Americans and Afghans.

For example, Jalaluddin Haqqani, then the leader of the Haqqani Network, controlled the Khost region of eastern Afghanistan, which is where most of Osama bin Laden’s training camps and supporters were, was a CIA asset in the 1980s and met with U.S. officials soon after 9/11.

Journalist Steve Coll wrote:

“There was always a question about whether Haqqani was really Taliban, because he hadn’t come out of Kandahar; he wasn’t part of the core group. And it was quite reasonable to believe after 9/11 that maybe he could be flipped.”

In early October 2001, Haqqani made a secret trip to Pakistan, where Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, a religious hardliner and then director of Pakistan’s notorious intelligence agency, the ISI, advised him to hold out and not defect, promising that he would receive help.

Subsequently, Haqqani decided to stay with the Taliban and the Haqqani Network continues to be a threat and a source of instability in Afghanistan.

The United States was aware of Pakistan’s duplicity early on. Gary Berntsen, one of the first CIA operatives to arrive in Afghanistan, said:

“I assumed from the beginning of the conflict that ISI advisers were supporting the Taliban with expertise and materiel and, no doubt, sending a steady stream of intelligence back to [Pakistan].”

The same pattern of duplicitous behavior by Pakistan has continued over the last seventeen years.

Late last year, during a Taliban attack on the Afghan provincial capital of Ghazni, large numbers of Pakistani nationals were found among the dead, presumably fighting with the Taliban. The bodies were subsequently returned to Pakistan.

In a recently released video, Al Qaeda emphasizes its unity with Taliban and its role within the Taliban insurgency, as the jihadists, including Pakistanis, fight together to resurrect the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

And yet American political leaders and senior military officers have done nothing, preferring to remain puzzled or indifferent as to why we have not won in Afghanistan.

Pakistanis openly brag that they have defeated the United States.

Shortly before his death in 2015, Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head of Pakistan’s ISI, a committed Islamist and known as the “godfather of the Taliban,” said in an Urdu language television interview:

“One day, history will say that the ISI drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan with the help of USA and another sentence will be recorded that says the ISI drove the USA out of Afghanistan with the help of the USA.”

The Pakistani audience roared with laughter and applauded in approval.

The problem of Pakistan as the actual instigator of the Afghan conflict was never adequately addressed and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan remained largely untouched.

Pressure was never applied to Pakistan’s pain points, its moribund economy and financial insolvency and the existential threat of ethnic separatism, in particular among Pakistan’s Baloch and Pashtun populations.

On the ground in Afghanistan, the war effort has been a program on automatic pilot, where everyone has been constantly reassured that everything was going according to plan and “progress was being made,” a phrase I heard endlessly during my own 2010 tenure at International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Headquarters in Kabul. If the effectiveness of the strategy was ever questioned within the military chain of command, then it had no obvious effect.

Lacking any new ideas or even a recognition of reality, we chose to continue pursuing a proven inappropriate counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan, which has now forced the United States into direct negotiations with the Taliban, a concession we had previously refused to consider.

Yet, an American withdrawal will only become a humiliating defeat, if the United States is forced into strategic retreat from South Asia because we do not have a plan in place to address the changing regional conditions in a post–U.S. Afghanistan.

The only bargaining chip the United States has in peace negotiations is our presence in Afghanistan, which has been the primary target of the Taliban negotiators, insisting that the United States announce a six-month withdrawal plan.

The American “presence” argument is tenuous at best. The United States should be identifying new forms of leverage to bolster our negotiating position in the short term and, longer term, provide a basis for a new South Asian strategy.

The recently-announced effort to strengthen military ties with India is a step in the right direction.

The United States should also include measures to thwart plans by the China-Pakistan Axis for regional hegemony. Beijing intends to extend its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) throughout South Asia, including Afghanistan, and follow it with the establishment of military facilities, such as Chinese naval bases on the Arabian Sea.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the flagship of BRI. Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan is CPEC’s center of gravity and the location of a festering independence insurgency. Just recently, the Balochistan Liberation Army made a daring and high-profile attack on the Pearl Continental Hotel in the heart of the Chinese-run port of Gwadar, CPEC’s centerpiece project.

An independent Balochistan could fulfill a number of U.S. strategic interests in the region, for example: providing Afghanistan a friendly neighbor and access to the sea; eliminating a major area of Pakistan’s terrorist infrastructure; placing additional pressure on Iran, which has its own restive Baloch population; and blocking Chinese ambitions for economic and military dominance of South Asia.

The foundations of a new U.S. strategy in South Asia should include burden shifting and, when necessary, strategic disruption of our adversaries.

______________________________________________________

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, an international IT businessman and a veteran of Afghanistan, Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at [email protected].

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Race War of 1812

/0 Comments/in , /by

Multicultural War

The War of 1812 bicentennials passed with little fanfare in our corner of the Midwest, although it was a partly a contest for dominion over this region. The U.S. declared war against Great Britain that June, and it raged into the winter of 1815. It was no lark, and brought our fledgling republic to the verge of extinction.

American commanders anticipated danger at Fort Dearborn (Chicago), and ordered the evacuation of 148 soldiers, women and children that first August. But 500 British-allied Potawatomi braves ambushed them along the trail.

They killed 86, including two women and all 12 children. After downing one especially valiant defender, they cut out his heart and ate it, to absorb his courage. The Potawatomi marched their captives back to Fort Dearborn, which they burned to the ground on the following day.

Some of the ambushed Americans survived the battle, but not their captivity. Others were eventually ransomed. Whether it’s fair to call the battle a massacre or not, the Potawatomi attack helped galvanize white public opinion against pluralistic coexistence with Native American societies.

In the long run, winning the Battle of Fort Dearborn may have been the worst thing that could have happened to the Potawatomi. They were eventually dispossessed and expelled from their ancestral lands by white settlers who were unwilling to chance massacre of their loved ones every time a charismatic figure like Tecumseh or Tenskwatawa came along to appeal to Native American resentment.

In the meantime, British commanders induced some hasty frontier American surrenders elsewhere by playing “good cop, bad cop” regarding their Native American allies’ tendency toward massacre of their captives. But U.S. forces under William Henry Harrison deprived the British terror strategy of some of its bite when they hunted Tecumseh down in Canada and killed him at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813.

British Occupation of Washington

Native Americans weren’t the only ones burning U.S. facilities to the ground during the War of 1812, of course. British commander Robert Ross set the torch to Washington, including the White House. The British drove James Madison and his military commanders out of Washington, into what is now Montgomery County, Maryland.

The invaders occupied Washington before a King-sized storm damaged their fleet, extinguished their fires, and spun off a tornado that pitched two of their cannon into the air and tumbled them down Constitution Avenue. The British were haughty and stubborn people but they could take a hint, and abandoned our capitol 26 hours after their arrival.

Baltimore put up a much stiffer defense than Washington. Militia commander Samuel Smith, 62, assembled a force of 13,000 patriots and positioned them in a line of strong fortifications. When Ross attacked, Americans killed him, along with 300 of his fellow invaders. The British then called off their land attack, and called their war ships up near the coast to bombard Fort McHenry, which was all that kept the invaders off Baltimore’s docks.

The bombardment continued all day, and then all night. The fabled British fleet pounded Baltimore like an anvil: rockets, bombs, “a firelit clang,” as historian Bruce Catton wrote, “of broken metal against masonry.” And yet, when morning dawned, despite heavy smoke, Francis Scott Key could see that our flag was still there.

The Opportunism of Domestic Enemies

The valor in Baltimore was countered by a nauseating stench of Federalist treason to the north, where the Massachusetts legislature had called a wartime convention of New England states to undermine President Madison. Vermont and New Hampshire rejected the call but Rhode Island and Connecticut, to their shame, accepted.

Some New England fire-breathers were already advocating secession. If the British didn’t defeat the U.S. on the battlefield, they were confident they could persuade the New England states to secede from the war-torn republic.

The Federalists deliberated in secret at their convention, passed long-winded resolutions and demanded a series of Constitutional amendments, but American public opinion had turned against them. It was inexcusable that the Federalists had leveraged the wartime crisis as a partisan opportunity, and the American people were finished with them. When the party dissolved shortly thereafter, most Americans considered it good riddance to bad rubbish.

Over 200 years later, the Baltimore Ravens football team traveled to London to play a game. The American athletes stood respectfully for their hosts’ national anthem, “God Save the Queen.” But when their own “Star-Spangled Banner” was played, these men of Baltimore knelt in protest.

One broadcaster, a recently retired Ravens player, went onto the field to kneel in solidarity with the younger millionaires against our country. Their protest is based on a claim of disproportionate American police violence against Black men. It is factually false. It has been statistically disproved. But in postmodern Leftist culture, it is enough to self-congratulate and to make fact-free claims of moral high ground. The more emphatic their protest, the truer their accusation.

I hear the clanging of broken metal against masonry again. There will always be bombardment and conspiracy. Yet after Tecumseh and Robert Ross, after ESPN and Nike and Colin Kaepernick, after Ray Lewis and Eric Reid, our flag is still there.

Long may it wave over a land of free and brave Americans.

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

Al Jazeera’s Disgraceful Holocaust-Denying Video Showcases Qatari Evil for All to See

/0 Comments/in , /by

Over the weekend, Qatari regime propaganda outfit Al Jazeera published and subsequently took down an unfathomably anti-Semitic video that questioned the number of Jews murdered by the Third Reich, accused Jews of exploiting the unprecedented genocide of the Shoah in order to curry favor for a Zionist state, and argued that Zionism itself is ideologically derivative of genocidal Nazi ideology. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) deserves much in the way of credit for exposing this and helping to shame Al Jazeera into taking down the vile video.

This is truly awful stuff. Although it ought not to be breaking news that Al Jazeera, which is funded by the lavish terror-supporting emirs of the duplicitous Qatari regime and which previously served as the preferred mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, has a wee bit of an institutional anti-Semitism problem. As anti-Islamism activist David Reaboi wrote in The Washington Times in February:

Since Qatar’s most prominent export — the state-owned television network Al Jazeera — was founded in 1996, the [Muslim] Brotherhood has played a crucial role in programming and setting the editorial line, providing the network’s strong ideologically Islamist backing. …

In fact, Al Jazeera is the world’s most successful, sophisticated and influential state-directed information operation.

It is remarkably aggressive in service of Qatar’s foreign policy interests, which include four key elements: (1) undermining the stability of its neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; (2) promoting Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood in vulnerable, Western open societies; (3) financially and diplomatically supporting violent terrorist groups like Hamas, al Qaeda and the Taliban; and (4) assisting the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, in evading US sanctions as it seeks to develop nuclear weapons.

(Read more from “Al Jazeera’s Disgraceful Holocaust-Denying Video Showcases Qatari Evil for All to See” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE

What Donald Trump Knows That Conservative Intellectuals Don’t

/0 Comments/in , /by

This week, I gave a talk at Stanford on the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of Western Culture. Though no students objected, two members of the university’s administration sent out a newsletter portraying me as an anti-Muslim bigot. They said it was “unacceptable” I should speak on such a topic during the celebration of Ramadan. They managed — as they surely intended — to stir up some trouble, though not enough to bring the event to a halt.

Shame on them. For college administrators to try to convince college students that it is “unacceptable” for them to hear ideas they might disagree with is simply wicked. In my response from the podium, I explained that there are only two systems of speech: free speech and speech that is controlled by the powerful. If speech is going to be silenced on the grounds that it is hateful, you have to ask the question: who decides? The answer is always the same: the powerful — the government, the administration, big business, the mob. And it is never very long before “hateful” speech turns into “speech people in power disagree with.” That is why, for speech to be free, it must be free for everyone, even those we dislike. . .

These are not honorable sallies in a war of ideas. These are acts of force meant to seize terrain.

This is what Donald Trump understands that too many conservative intellectuals miss. The belligerent and obstreperous Trump was called to the presidency by voters who know that, while the war of ideas can and should be waged politely by American friends, a war for terrain is a much uglier business.

Thus, also this week, the Trump Administration boldly refused to join the so-called Christchurch Call, a Global agreement by 18 nations to censor online speech. Also this week, the Trump Administration launched a website where you can file a complaint if you feel you’ve been censored on social media for your political opinions. (Read more from “What Donald Trump Knows That Conservative Intellectuals Don’t” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE