Petulant Espionage: An LGBT Right?

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Around this time 42 years ago, I was in the home stretch of Army basic training. There had been weeks of schizophrenic weather in Missouri – wintry blasts alternating with warm fronts and storms. After an adolescence spent in the tropics and Alaska, I found heartland thunderstorms pretty scary.

But now the clime had turned glorious. It seemed that the omnipotent drill sergeants had ordered perfect weather for a triumphant graduation. The runs and push-ups that tormented us earlier that spring became faintly pleasant. I looked forward to rushing out of the barracks in the morning and feeling the gentle Ozark breeze in my face.

And then it was over. Hurried goodbyes to buddies, awkward congratulations from drill sergeants, and then we flew or bused to our Army schools to learn our jobs. Mine was the Military Police School in steamy Ft. McClellan, Alabama. When I got there, I only knew one guy from my basic training. We were quickly separated and I rarely saw him after that.

MP school went by quickly that summer. Some of it was self-paced material, and I graduated while it was still hot. But departing from MP school wasn’t as efficient as departure from basic training. I got stuck there after graduation, “painting rocks” as the cliche goes.

I’m not sure I ever actually painted a rock, but I mowed a lot of grass, ran a lot of errands, hid out, and provided some foul-tempered assistance to long lines of newly arrived privates who were picking up laundry and finding their bunks.

My first actual MP duty station was the Panama Canal Zone which, in those days, required a Secret security clearance. That’s the middle level of clearance, above a Confidential but below a Top Secret. They’d had about eight months to investigate my background since I filled out the application, but they weren’t finished.

The Security Clearance Application

There were questions about marijuana, seditious in-laws, and the big one: “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party USA or any other organization that seeks or advocates the overthrow of the United States government by violence or other unlawful means?” No.

Then came the question whether I had ever belonged to an organization on the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations? Well, kind of. The Attorney General had abolished that list a few years earlier, but they were still asking us the question.

I was briefly a teenage member of the Industrial Workers of the World, which made the list. It was frequently smeared as a Communist union, and it was indisputably radical, but purists would observe that it was a bitter rival of Communists rather than an ally.

As you can imagine, that required extra sheets on the application for my security clearance, explaining the arcane doctrine of classical anarchists to unseen clerks who weren’t likely interested. Their eyes probably glazed over as quickly as my mom’s.

She was concerned about my extremism years earlier, but an uncle reassured her with the Churchill quote about young radicals and old conservatives. Apparently the Army was reassured as well, and in due time I got my security clearance “orders” and flew out to my Canal Zone duty.

Years later, when I became an interrogator, I had to start all over again and give an account of my life on a new clearance application. It was a nuisance, but I was glad somebody was minding the store, glad we were methodically checking people out before entrusting secrets to them.

But times have changed. You would expect the system to tighten up after the 9-11 terrorism. Guidelines issued by former President Barack Obama, though, now allow dual citizens – people who have two national loyalties – to obtain the highest security clearances. They’re not even required to surrender their foreign passports first. People with serious tax delinquencies are not banned from the highest security clearances, as long as they enter into a payment plan. And most astonishing of all, bad lie detector results no longer prevent a person from getting a high security clearance.

Edward Snowden

The system was already limping before President Obama’s order. Edward Snowden used his security clearance and his job with a government contractor to copy between 50,000 and 200,000 National Security Agency documents, and 900,000 Department of Defense files, and distribute his selections to journalists for publication.

Russian and Chinese intelligence services were able to use this document windfall as a sort of Rosetta Stone to break the codes of the U.S. and Great Britain, and their NATO allies. The British withdrew agents from the field as they were compromised by the Snowden disclosures. A New York Times article based on Snowden documents exposed and doomed intelligence operations against al-Qaeda.

Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before Congress in 2014 that Snowden’s stolen documents disclosed “our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques and procedures.” Like British double agent Kim Philby before him, Snowden has taken up residence in Moscow.

James Cartwright

President Obama sent mixed signals about this kind of behavior. He denounced Snowden, but he pardoned Gen. James Cartwright, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two weeks before he was to be sentenced for lying to investigators about leaking details of our attempts to prevent the Iranians from developing an atomic bomb. How typical was Cartwright of the politicized careerists who survived the Obama military purge a decade ago? We’ll probably never know.

Bradley “Chelsea” Manning

Over the objections of Defense Secretary Ash Carter, Obama commuted the sentence of intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who had served seven years of a 35-year sentence for espionage. Manning, an enlisted Army man, was convicted of 21 charges at Court Martial, and confessed to 10 others.

Manning was able to betray his country because he had a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information clearance. I don’t know of any higher clearance. I am astounded that he was ever considered suitable for such a clearance.

Manning was on the verge of discharge from the Army during basic training for screaming defiantly at drill sergeants. In my day, that would have been the occasion for an “attitude adjustment.” But in the politically cautious 2007 environment, Manning was carried through graduation and sent along to MOS (job) training as an intelligence analyst.

During that training, Manning sent three YouTube messages to friends describing the inside of the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. He was reprimanded, but not dropped from the course or re-assigned to less sensitive duties. The ensuing betrayal was surprising only in its scope. He stole and distributed 251,287 U.S. diplomatic cables and 482,832 Army reports, mostly through WikiLeaks.

When Manning compounded his treason with pathology and announced he wanted to take female hormones, this became a selling point to Obamists for commuting his sentence. For the Obama staff, Manning’s homosexuality was redemptive.

LGBT Indifference to Espionage

CNN reported that Obama “came under intense pressure from LGBT groups (that have been stalwart supporters throughout his political career) to show eleventh-hour compassion towards Manning” before Trump entered office.

These are the same Obamists who claim to be aghast that Trump shows minimal deference to their politicized inside-the-beltway intelligence establishment. This is the same Obama who was outraged by WikiLeaks’ disclosures of scandalous Democratic National Committee emails.

His clemency for Manning was a slap in the face to lunch-pail intelligence officers in the field and to allies who trusted us, whose security and strategic positions were harmed by Manning’s petulant espionage. And it was a cautionary tale about Sodomites.

By that term, I do not just mean active homosexuals, but also their allies and enablers, as in the historical Biblical account of Sodom. We cannot rely on their loyalty. They are a tribe unto themselves.

I acknowledge that homosexuals have served honorably, even heroically, in our armed forces. I feel compassion for those who are struggling with same-sex attractions, and for those who may believe that identifying with their urges is a neat antidote to guilt. But some things are too important to be entrusted to people who don’t share our consensus of values, who don’t agree [with] what’s most important. Top Secret security clearances should be out of the question.

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Democrats Are Puppets of Left-Wing Extremist Groups

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The radicalization of Democrats is tied to the influence of left-wing extremist organizations that are creating a toxic political environment. Instead of seeking comprise with President Trump on issues important to Americans, such as border security, Democrats are bowing to the demands of left-wing activists on anything at all connected to the president.

The effort by Democrats to seize President Trump’s past tax and business records is directly tied to the work of left-wing activists. In January, three left-wing activist groups pushed House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., to get President Trump’s tax records from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). According to The Hill, groups Tax March, Stand Up America, and Indivisible sent a letter urging Neal to take action and included language Neal could use to request the president’s tax returns.

Apparently, Neal was moving too slow for the activist groups, so they targeted Democrat members of the Ways and Means Committee in March to urge them to get the chairman to request President Trump’s tax returns from the IRS.

Finally, Neal yielded to the pressure, and on April 3, he requested the past six years of the president’s personal and business tax returns. Neal’s request leverages unique power granted to the Ways and Means Committee to request tax documents from individuals.

Democrats’ response to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia collusion during the 2016 presidential election correlates with demands from left-wing activists.

Stand Up America, a progressive activist group formed after the 2016 election, centers its efforts to fight President Trump “on exposing Trump’s criminal enterprise and standing up to his administration’s corruption.” Stand Up America is demanding that Congress investigate President Trump for “profiting from the presidency and hiding his financial entanglements with foreign governments, including Russia.”

The organization was ready to launch nationwide protests if President Trump fired Mueller but recently shifted gears to demand the release of the entire Mueller report. Joining with other activist groups, Stand Up America participated in a “National Day of Action” because Attorney General William Barr failed to release the full report to Congress.

The website TrumpIsNotAboveTheLaw.org was used to organize the protest, and its plan for congressional action includes hearings to investigate “the Russia scandals and Trump’s abuse of power and obstruction of justice.”

House Democrats’ actions correlate with the activists demands. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., is demanding an unredacted version of the Mueller report and is willing to go to court to get it. Nadler is also using the power of his committee to initiate an investigation of President Trump that focuses on three areas: obstruction of justice, public corruption, and abuse of power.

Nadler launched his investigation by requesting documents from 81 individuals and organizations.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is ignoring Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report and promises to conduct a counterintelligence investigation involving Russia and the Trump 2016 campaign.

Schiff is also planning to investigate whether financial interests of President Trump are influencing his decisions — one of the issues highlighted by Stand Up America.

Going further, left-wing activists are targeting current and former administration officials. In a clear attempt to punish those willing to work for President Trump, the website “Trump Administration Separation” was set up by Restore Public Trust.

The website incorporates an open letter to American CEOs urging them “not to hire for employment, contract for consulting, or seat on their boards” individuals involved in “the Trump administration’s family separation policy.”

The website lists the names and news summaries of the roles in immigration policy of almost thirty individuals from the White House and various government agencies. The letter to CEOs closes with a threatening sentence, “We will be watching,” and was signed by about forty groups, including the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is parroting the idea of punishing individuals associated with the Trump administration. On Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez commented on a New York Times commentary urging that former Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen be denied employment because of her association with former administration officials.

Referring to Nielsen, Ocasio-Cortez said, “Awarding her a lucrative deal or prestigious post is to legitimize+celebrate that abuse.”

With such a high degree of hostility, Democrats are reluctant to make any compromise regarding border security out of fear of left-wing activist backlash. Today’s Democrats are not leaders but puppets that dance on the string pulled by extremist activists. (For more from the author of “Democrats Are Puppets of Left-Wing Extremist Groups” please click HERE)

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Deter, Defend, Demagnetize: 10 Ideas for Trump to Stop the Illegal Mass Migration

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What should be done about the crisis at our border?

To be clear, if the administration continues to concede that forum-shopped judges can issue universal injunctions on border security, no matter the precedent, justiciability, or issues of standing, then there is quite literally nothing the administration can do. By definition, anything that will effectively shut down this flow will be challenged in a specifically liberal court, and the Supreme Court will take forever to overturn it.

The administration must assert, as an independent branch of government, that universal injunctions issued by courts are unconstitutional, as suggested by Justice Clarence Thomas. At the very least, such an opinion issued by the attorney general will force the Supreme Court to finally confront this vital question, not just on our border, but on the very question of what the judicial power is.

Once the administration is willing to do this, here are a mixture of policies that are completely within the president’s powers, both inherent and delegated, to deter this particular wave of illegal immigration, defend against the cartels exacerbating it, and demagnetize the incentives for them to come here.

Deter

1) A complete shutoff of immigration processing (but not commerce) at our land border: The president should assert his unquestionable authority to deny entry to anyone seeking entry without existing valid documents, including those “seeking” asylum. He should announce that all processing of any asylum claims is suspended for at least six months. It would require holding the line against the first wave of migrants in the pipeline by turning them back. Those who manage to get in or refuse to depart, the administration should hold in tent cities while offering them the option to voluntarily depart at any moment. But admission into the country will be closed off, pursuant to the president’s inherent and delegated authority. Concurrently, the president should launch a media campaign in Central America announcing the shutoff and stating that no immigration status can be obtained at our land border without having applied at our embassies. President Obama launched such a campaign in 2014. President Clinton launched a similar campaign with the Haitian migrants in 1993 and agreed to process their asylum claims only in Haiti.

2) Tent cities plus rocket docket: The construction of tent cities, pursuant to DHS’ existing mass migration emergency plan, would likely be necessary to partially enforce (1), but could also work as a standalone idea, without a full shutoff. If the administration doesn’t want to completely shut down the process, it could house the very next wave of migrants in tent cities and then immediately transfer immigration judges and deputize other officials into adjudications in order to rapidly dispense with the bogus claims in less than seven days, as was done in 1989. This is actually required by law anyway, and holding them in tent cities will ensure they are not released, but also make it possible to fulfill the Flores settlement requirement of a 20-day limit.

3) Have Border Patrol immediately screen out invalid claims of credible fear: The best way to ensure that asylum law is properly and expeditiously interpreted is to have border agents immediately screen out, and most often reject, credible fear claims the minute the claimants step foot on our soil. This will begin the seven-day clock for them to expend their appeals and allow us to hold them even under the Flores limit.

4) End the Flores settlement: Contrary to public perception and even assertions by this administration, the law does not require DHS to release children within 20 days. The law actually mandates detention of all those making credible fear claims and places no time limit or exception on children. It comes from Flores, which is not even a court opinion, but a settlement. The administration has the ability to vitiate this settlement and started the process of doing so last September. It should enact a new rule to hold family units together. The 45-day comment period has long passed, and it’s a mystery why the administration has not promulgated the rule yet. Even if it fears lawsuits on this issue, idea (1) would still override Flores, and idea (2) would make it moot, because they wouldn’t need to be held longer.

Defend

5) Designate the Mexican cartels as terrorists: In addition to helping streamline the flow of illegal immigration, the cartels pose a general threat to this country that needed to be dealt with years ago. Now would be a good time to signal that we are serious about attacking them. Designating them as terrorists, a move Trump can make unilaterally, will open up numerous DOD and intelligence resources to harness against the cartels. It will also bolster the political case for using the military. The military can work to eradicate the cartel’s lookout scouts, who operate on our soil. This will not only defend against criminals and drug traffickers, it will disrupt their system of directing flows of migrants into strategic locations.

6) Operation Hold the Line: The president should deploy the military to enforce our sovereignty. This could work in tandem with enforcing a complete shutoff by having enough manpower to hold the line at the border and not allow anyone to enter. Deployment of the military will also help with the other part of this crisis; namely, how the cartels and smugglers are bringing in criminals, gangs, drugs, and special interest aliens while Border Patrol is completely overwhelmed. This is using the military to hold the line on our border and not allow caravans in and to deter and defend against cartels. That is literally the quintessential purpose of having a military.

7) Deputize numerous federal officers as immigration officers: Trump should recruit as many law enforcement agents into the immigration enforcement business as possible to buttress the work of both Border Patrol and ICE. He can deputize all park rangers and Bureau of Land Management agents (or any federal officer who wears a badge) into securing the border and enforcing immigration laws. The president also has the power (8 U.S.C. § 1103(a)(10)) to deputize local law enforcement, with the permission of local authorities, to “to perform or exercise any of the powers, privileges, or duties” of immigration enforcement in the event that the attorney general determines that there is “an actual or imminent mass influx of aliens.”

Demagnetize

8) Stop all remittances to Mexico and Central America: Even with more families coming than ever before, a large portion of them are still adult males coming to work and send back money. They just bring a child with them as their token border pass. According to Pew, Mexican nationals sent home $30 billion in 2017, while migrants from the three Central American countries in the Northern Triangle sent back roughly $17 billion. While a large chunk of the Mexican remittances could also be from legal immigrants, the lion’s share of the Central American remittances are from illegal immigrants. Blocking those transfers would choke off the biggest incentive to come here from Central America. It would also further pressure Mexico into cooperating and would cut off the flow of some of the drug trafficking revenue. While a tax on remittances would require a new law by Congress, there is no reason why the Treasury Department could not write a rule blocking illegal aliens from wiring those funds.

9) Prioritize the deportation of Central American families with final deportation orders. There are over one million illegal aliens with final deportation orders who still have not been deported. In particular, there are 644,000 from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. There are no signs that we are deporting them. While ICE usually prioritizes the deportations of those with prior criminal records, it would be worthwhile to focus for the next few months on deporting Central American families, regardless of their criminal records, in order to send the message to their friends and relatives thinking of making the trip that catch-and-release does not last forever.

10) Have IRS clamp down on illegal employment and identity theft: Choking off the ability of illegal immigrants to work in America is the lynchpin to demagnetizing our border. While Trump cannot unilaterally mandate E-Verify, he can direct the IRS to stop accepting tax identification numbers used by illegal aliens to file for refundable tax credits. Moreover, Trump can have the DHS, the IRS, and the SSA work together to flag anomalies with Social Security cards for employment and tax filing. The IRS and the SSA should constantly share information with DHS so they can inform the employer that the employee has engaged in identity theft and is an illegal immigrant. Also inform local law enforcement and the victim immediately. Then Trump should require ICE to immediately apprehend them.

Collectively, this would serve to deter both the migrants and the cartels. While some will complain about diverting resources from other federal functions, there is no greater emergency now than what is going on at the border. History has shown that the signal is sent very quickly if we are no longer giving amnesty. Moreover, it will create a bottleneck in Mexico and finally force Mexico’s government to deal with the problem. This is the model Hungary used to spur neighboring countries, such as Serbia, Croatia, and Romania, into action in deterring the Middle East migration in 2014. Unlike in previous years, these migrants are not their own, and Mexicans don’t want them remaining in their country. They have been recalcitrant only because we fail to secure our own border and they knew they could get away with steering them into our territory.

At some point, the administration will need to build the political will, policy arguments, and legal case for a mixture of these policies. Otherwise we quite literally will not have a border at all. (For more from the author of “Deter, Defend, Demagnetize: 10 Ideas for Trump to Stop the Illegal Mass Migration” please click HERE)

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The Crisis in Christian Giving

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I have been listening to Christian radio since I returned from the Army with a wife and two young daughters over 40 years ago. Some of the preachers have died off and been replaced, and one host was apparently deposed by his protege, but one thing has never changed: all the programs ask for money at some point during their half hour on air.

I don’t have a problem with that. The laborer is worthy of his hire. It’s not cheap to produce and broadcast a daily radio program, and you can’t expect the technicians or the on-air talent to work for free. They, too, have their families to support.

Several of the affiliated organizations provide important services off-air, and printed materials. These must be staffed and funded. I view it as Biblical philanthropy, money well spent.

Sometimes you can contribute out of your abundance, and sometimes it’s a sacrifice. You sure hope they’re spending it as promised. In the television niche, there have been too many scandals in which charities and ministries didn’t.

Donations to Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Praise the Lord (PTL) ministry, for example, supported their extravagant lifestyle, underwrote some catastrophic business ventures, and paid hush money to at least one young woman who accused Jim of sexually imposing himself on her.

And so it was a great reassurance when Christian psychologist James Dobson invited guests onto an episode of his daily Focus on the Family radio broadcast to describe the newly created Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA).

Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability

About 150 founding Evangelical nonprofits, congregations, denominations, schools and ministries committed in 1979 to seven bedrock standards of accountability, including doctrine, transparency, board governance, fundraising, financial audits, compensation and arms-length business transactions.

Like the Better Business Bureau, however, the ECFA is powerless against non-members. It is a private voluntary association, not a government enforcement agency or regulator.

Feed the Children

Feed the Children (FTC), best known for its heart-wrenching television fundraisers depicting listless, starving African children, was not a member.

Feed the Children loaned $950,000 to its president Larry Jones’s son 20 years ago to start a business. That business went broke and defaulted on the loan. It was a public scandal, and Jones’s son left the charity.

But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. The younger Jones ended up on the payroll of Affiliated Media Group. Without a vote of the board, and without competitive bids, Larry Jones signed a television buying agreement that paid Affiliated between $35 million and $40 million per year.

According to board minutes admitted as evidence in federal court, “there has been a less than satisfactory accounting by Affiliated of the true cost of the television time.”

All this escaped public notice earlier because the charity didn’t separately identify the payments to Affiliated on the required IRS form that is subject to public inspection.

Although the son was no longer an employee, he still had a Feed the Children credit card and used the charity’s offices, equipment, vehicles and storage space, according to the American Institute of Philanthropy’s CharityWatch.

Board minutes indicated he used about 17,405 square feet to store his pontoon boat, Sea-Doo personal watercraft and other personal items. Feed the Children paid for electrical work done at young Jones’s home, and for a garage door that he had installed. He later reimbursed the charity.

For two or three years, Jones’s son oversaw a large call center in Elkhart, Indiana for him. During that time, men from a separate company systematically looted the call center of electronic components and sold them for cash in nearby towns. Feed the Children board minutes noted that the company’s only listed contact was Larry Jones.

Compromising the Watchdogs

Watchdogs were not difficult to compromise. For years, the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance granted Feed the Children its “Wise Giving Seal” for a $15,000 annual fee.

Marcus Owens, Wise Giving Alliance treasurer, was the former director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division. Jones hired Owens to help him attempt the ouster of the charity’s board of director, to replace them with hand-picked directors personally loyal to him.

MinistryWatch gave Feed the Children a four-star overall efficiency rating and a five-star resource allocation rating. Charity Navigator gave its highest rating to Feed the Children, and vouched that it was “one of those charities that has their financial health in order.”

Secular Journalists Expose the Plunder

The fawning monitors took Feed the Children statements at face value until the Daily Oklahoman newspaper and CBS television news broke stories of financial plunder. It was a scandal not only for Feed the Children, but for the watchdogs who should have sounded the alarm much sooner.

There were abundant indications that something was rotten at the charity. Two years earlier, it was spending less than a quarter of its cash budget on program services. Nearly two thirds of each dollar contributed to the charity went to fundraising costs instead of children.

Only CharityWatch at the American Institute of Philanthropy was critical of Jones before the media exposed the larceny. ECFA was untouched by the scandal since Feed the Children was not an ECFA member.

Even at the squeaky-clean ECFA, though, changes were brewing that would later de-emphasize vigilance and verification.

I remember the ECFA Standards Review Committee emerging from a quarterly meeting over 20 years ago to announce the suspension of Gospel Rescue Mission for using misleading stories and false statistics in its fundraising appeals. It’s difficult to imagine ECFA doing that now.

ECFA Paralyzed, Complicit

The Evangelicals’ accountability organization appears to have turned the process over to its lawyers, and that inevitably means playing defense, not offense. Priority number one becomes to avoid “buying a lawsuit,” to avoid legal liability for ECFA itself.

That dethrones the previous ambition to protect Christians who ought to be able to contribute to Evangelical nonprofits with confidence. Nowadays, ECFA does not comment on the compliance of member charities, but treats it as a private matter between the ECFA and the charity.

Nothing gets disclosed to the public unless and until the charity is suspended or expelled. And the accused charity is a dues-paying, fee-paying client. How could that policy not lead to abuses?

Mars Hill Leadership Plays Fast and Loose

Missions-minded donors are especially vulnerable to opaque accounting. ECFA member Mars Hill Church asked for and received donations to fund church-planting in Ethiopia and India, but tapped those millions for U.S. operations after domestic contributions fell off.

It was an obvious violation of ECFA standards, but ECFA took no action against the Seattle church. That church no longer exists, due in part to its lack of accountability.

Smash and Grab at Harvest Bible Church

Last month, ECFA suspended the membership of Chicago-area Harvest Bible Chapel for violating four of seven “standards of responsible stewardship.”

But once again, ECFA acted with apparent reluctance, only after the evangelical World magazine ran freelance writer Julie Roys’s account of the church’s “ongoing pattern of relational and financial abuse, lack of transparency and outright deception.”

Founding pastor James MacDonald admitted taking over $300,000 per year from a separately funded church-planting network to balance the books at his home church, where he was extravagant.

He also wrote a $50,000 check to his friend Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll in 2017. It was first drawn on the church-planting account, then reimbursed from the church’s account. That became public, and still ECFA took no action against Harvest Bible Chapel, and imposed no heightened reporting requirements.

Limp Auditing by Leadership’s “BFF”

Last year, the church’s leaders accused their computer technology chief of embezzling $270,000 beginning in 2017.

The church’s financials are audited annually by CapinCrouse, a certified public accountant and consulting firm described in Wondering Eagle blog as Evangelical nonprofits’ BFF (“best friends forever”). But how did somebody embezzle more than a quarter million dollars over two fiscal years without the auditor or ECFA noticing?

“The fact that ECFA didn’t discover these violations is bad enough,” Julie Roys wrote in her eponymous blog. “But the fact that the group failed to act even after I reported these glaring violations is inexcusable.”

Closing the Barn Door, Tardy Again

ECFA finally suspended Harvest Bible Church last month after Roys reported that MacDonald had used church money to fund Florida vacations, African safaris and other luxury purchases. The Elephant’s Debt blog reported the suspension in an article entitled “ECFA Closes Barn Door Years After the Horses Ran Out.”

It appears that we can’t count on the diligence and integrity of auditors and voluntary accountability organizations anymore. Financial statements may or may not reflect the true state of affairs. From Oklahoma City to Seattle to Chicago, too many of them have been compromised by their clients.

Alternatives to Corrupted Self-Regulation

We can’t just stop giving. And so the conscientious Christian benefactor will have to cast wide nets, examine multiple rating and review publications, keep an ear to the ground, and read between the lines. Be skeptical. Be very skeptical.

The good news is that Christian bloggers and journalists have stepped up to the plate, as have secular journalists.
It’s a shame when we have to rely on antagonistic government regulators or secular journalists to keep us honest. But that’s what happens when we outsource our integrity.

We’ve got to confront strong and manipulative personalities within the church and church-affiliated organizations when they resist transparency and accountability. If we don’t, then it’s our own fault when the government and the mainstream media intrude.

I hope Christian university faculties and theorists will recognize the crisis in philanthropy and accountability. They have a strong incentive, after all, to imagine, devise and advocate accountability reforms that can refresh confidence in the financial integrity of institutions that depend on the generosity of believers.

Like churches, missions and charities, they’re going to see their resources dry up if donors stop believing in their faithful stewardship.

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We Can Keep the Ports Open to Commerce, Secure Our Borders, and Eat Our Avocados Too

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There is a difference between shutting down the border for commerce and suspending all immigration at our border.

The good news is that the media are finally admitting that the president has the authority to close the border. The bad news is that they are obfuscating the distinction between shutting off the entire border for commerce and suspending immigration requests at the border. The Trump administration would be wise to push back against it immediately and clarify this distinction.

The media is in full meltdown mode over Trump’s threat to “shut down” the border, as they predict doom and gloom for our economy, loss of jobs, and loss of revenue. We might even face an avocado shortage, according to the New York Times! Imagine that.

Never mind that the cost of one year’s border flow could add up to at least $150 billion for taxpayers.

Never mind the fact that Border Patrol is completely shut down and is basically a conveyor belt to complete the criminal conspiracy of evil smugglers rather than deter it.

Never mind the countless migrants are coming in with dangerous diseases because, according to CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan. large numbers of them “may have never seen a doctor, received immunizations, or lived in sanitary conditions.”

Never mind the fact that our schools will be flooded with unassimilable illegal immigrants creating fiscal and cultural problems, as well as a breeding ground for transnational gang recruitment, when the laws on the books were designed to protect Americans from this very outcome.

Never mind that while the status quo continues, the worst criminal alien murderers and rapists who were deported are now re-enering through the frontier without any agents to challenge them.

But how ’bout those avocados?!

The media is missing the point about the president’s inherent and delegated authority to deny entry at the border and the most prudent way to use it. Through statute and case law, the president’s 212(f) authority overrides all other immigration processes, including asylum requests, but it’s important to remember that it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. It’s not an on-or-off circuit breaker on the operation of our border. There are modules on that switch that the president can engage to strategically address the current situation.

Let’s again review the language of the relevant statute, 8 U.S.C. §1182(f):

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. (Emphasis added.)

Even if the rest of the general operating statutes were broken (they are not), this statute alone supplies the president with all the authority he needs to deal with such an urgent and devastating crisis, at least in the relative short run. If members of Congress were to get together and craft a new law with the intent of giving the president more power to shut down what is happening today, they could not conceivably have written anything strong than this existing law, which has been in place, in some form, since 1893, particularly to keep out those with diseases.

The law is saying that the president can shut down all migration or any type of migration, while leaving others in place. He can shut down migration at our land border and airports or one without the other. He can shut down immigration requests at the border or non-immigration requests, such as admission for commerce or travel on temporary visas or border-crossing passes. He can direct the requests to some parts of the border. He can restrict them to applying for asylum outside our country or at any other specific location. He may do so for one week, one month, or one year.

Any limitation on this power stemming from political disagreement is a policy question, not a legal question. It’s hard to deny that the president is justified in determining this mass migration event is detrimental to our interests (as well as to the health of many migrants), but if Democrats disagree with that decision, they have the power of the purse in Congress, and they have the ballot box to check him. Trump will stand for re-election; a federal judge, such as Jon Tigar, will not. As Justice Clarence Thomas said in Trump v. Hawaii, “Section 1182(f) does not set forth any judicially enforceable limits that constrain the President. … Nor could it, since the President has inherent authority to exclude aliens from the country.”

The Supreme Court already ruled on this in 1993, and Chief Justice John Roberts made it clear that there are no limits. “By its terms, §1182(f) exudes deference to the President in every clause,” wrote Roberts in the majority opinion in Trump v. Hawaii. “It entrusts to the President the decisions whether and when to suspend entry, whose entry to suspend, for how long, and on what conditions. It thus vests the President with ‘ample power’ to impose entry restrictions in addition to those elsewhere enumerated in the INA. Sale, 509 U. S., at 187. (Emphasis added.)

Remember, Roberts wrote this in the context of an order by the president on visas from certain countries when there were clearly no new facts on the ground making this particular order urgent at that time and in that way. What is going on at our land border today, on the other hand, is an emergency, unprecedented and uncharted in all respects, and it’s getting worse by the day.

So, case closed. If the administration is going to allow any district judge to engage in civil disobedience against sovereignty, law, statute, the Constitution, rules of standing, and even fresh Supreme Court case law, then we have no country. Now is the time for the president to make his stand.

While there is some utility to the president threatening to shut off commerce for a day or two to leverage both the Mexican government and Congress into action, it would be better policy and savvier politics to simply suspend all immigration requests at the border while leaving open non-immigrant travel with proper documentation.

So, what happens if they show up anyway? Either send them back across the Rio Grande River or start holding the newest wave in tent cities while allowing them to voluntarily depart. But either way, we should be closed for business and not allow entry into our country and certainly not process any immigration requests until the crisis has abated.

Some might fear that this order would shut off claims for legitimate asylees as well, but the reality is that under the status quo, the system is already shut down and legitimate asylees cannot obtain real asylum status because of the mass migration and fraud. They can hitch a ride with catch-and-release but are stuck without any path to permanent status. Any commonsense balancing of equities both for the American people and for legitimate asylees would be to proclaim a temporary suspension of all immigration requests at land borders and route them to embassies. Once this is done for a few days, those further down in Mexico and Central America will stop coming, as was the case in 1989.

The only people who will lose from this in the long run are the evil Mexican cartels that exploit women and children as commodities and earn billions of dollars to poison us with more fentanyl and meth and bring in more criminals and gang members to distribute the poison.

And you know what else? We can keep the ports open to commerce, have our secure borders, and eat our avocados too. (For more from the author of “We Can Keep the Ports Open to Commerce, Secure Our Borders, and Eat Our Avocados Too” please click HERE)

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If a Judge Ordered Trump to Resign, Would That Be the Law?

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Gone are the days when we were ruled by nine unelected black robes. That is old-fashioned. The Millennial version of post-constitutionalism is that a liberal group can get any of the 670 district judges in one of the 94 district courts to rule on any abstract public policy – be it fiscal, social, cultural, national security, border – and that is regarded by the political class as “law.” That includes even when Obama himself violated the law and invented a policy that never existed since George Washington. Trump is now compelled to allow Obama’s policies to rule as a third term. Who needs a constitutional amendment to expand the terms of Democrat presidencies when you have the courts?

Obama’s presidency binds us forever

Late Friday night, a district judge in Alaska ruled that Trump must continue Obama’s moratorium on drilling permits in the Arctic Outer Continental Shelf. Sadly, it’s not even newsworthy when a judge mandates that Trump continue Obama’s discretionary and often lawless executive orders. And of course, the Republican Party treats it as a legitimate order and continues to peddle the myth that judges have such power. But this particular order was jarringly, absurdly transparent in giving away the game of the legal profession.

“The wording of President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates that he intended them to extend indefinitely, and therefore be revocable only by an act of Congress,” wrote Judge Sharon Gleason, an Obama appointee, about Obama’s decision to permanently lock up 98 percent of the Arctic Outer Continental Shelf from drilling. Read that carefully again, and you will see what I’ve been warning for the past few years. Now that even conservatives have conceded that district judges can abstractly “veto” public policy up to and including simple executive decisions to reverse the executive decisions of the past administration, it’s as if they have crowned Obama president forever. So long as a Democrat president desires his policies to remain permanent, well, permanent they must remain. In the words of Gleason, Trump’s decision to merely restore the permitting process in place before Obama is “unlawful” and “exceeded his authority” because he is bound by the discretionary and often lawless policies of his predecessor.

So what if Trump announces a shutdown of all cross-border migration this week, and a judge tells the next Democrat president, “Of course you must continue it. Don’t you know that President Trump indicated he meant it to stand indefinitely?”

Once again, I ask fellow conservatives, at what point is the power grab of lower court judicial supremacy a bridge too far? We always push back against the other branches of government when they abuse their power. Why not the judiciary, the weakest branch?

Courts don’t have power to control public policy. They can grant relief to legitimate plaintiffs with standing before the court to protect individual rights. If environmental groups, about 10 in this case, decide to complain about a public policy they disagree with, a court ultimately lacks any concrete constitutional authority to tip the scales of politics to that political group. If plaintiffs with an individualized and concrete injury are seeking personal exemptions from a mandate, a court may grant that to them. But if they are seeking judicial orders on other people’s rights or privileges under the law, in this case, a process of issuing drilling permits, that involves separate (and stronger) branches of government. A court simply has no power to mandate policy changes like that, much less a lower court, much less when the policy was clearly invented by a previous president.

The illegal injunction issued by Sharon Gleason comes on the heels of another injunction issued by an Obama judge to lock up 300,000 acres of drilling in Wyoming. Again, in that case, the court said that Trump cannot hand out drilling permits without using Obama’s criteria for an environmental assessment, which takes into account the effects of undefined “climate change,” a policy that never existed before Obama invented it without legislation.

The increase in oil and natural gas output has been America’s own Hanukkah oil miracle and has largely fueled economic growth and also bolstered our diplomatic prowess over Russia and Arab countries who use oil to intimidate the West. Yet we risk losing all this progress because of illegal injunctions from forum-shopped judges who seek to anoint Obama president forever.

Judges have stolen marriage, life, election law, borders, sovereignty, health care. Now they are coming for oil and gas, the lifeblood of our economy. With the flick of the pen, we are told that random environmental groups can lock up 27 billion barrels of oil even though the federal government and the state of Alaska are OK with the permitting process. “As a result, the previous three withdrawals issued on January 27, 2015, and December 20, 2016 will remain in full force and effect unless and until revoked by Congress,” wrote Queen Gleason in her 32-page order.

Earlier in the day, the same district judge blocked the construction of a vital road connecting the Alaska Peninsula communities of King Cove and Cold Bay to a local all-weather airport. This is a vital job of government supported by the local communities, the state, and the federal government to protect the communities from emergency events. But a single federal district judge can grant standing to random agitation groups and issue a “veto” the Constitution never authorized.

It’s time to move beyond simply ‘appointing better judges’

Everyone keeps asking me what is to be done about runaway judges. But at some point, the question answers itself. When judges so blatantly violate rules of standing, reading of statute, constitutional construction, and the powers of other branches, the real question is why the other branches obsequiously enable their power grab. Our Founders purposely gave courts no enforcement mechanism or power of the purse precisely so other branches could push back when they abuse their powers, the same way judges can push back when other branches abuse their powers by adjudicating individual cases under the law.

Unfortunately, nobody in Congress or in the administration is even pushing to shadowbox the courts. Later this week, the Senate will invoke the nuclear option to truncate the debate time required in order to successfully confirm a judicial nominee. But that’s missing the point. The majority of the vacancies are filling seats left open by more conservative judges. While it is certainly important to take the confirmation opportunities that exist, this will not solve the judicial crisis, assuming we continue to accede to the premise that any forum-shopped district judge can shut down our nation, no matter how absurd his ruling is. If a single district judge has more power than anyone in the executive and legislative branches put together, we have no country left.

This injunction, like most others, will now go to, of course, the Ninth Circuit. It will take months if not years to get this vital policy to the Supreme Court. Then, the SCOTUS justices are very reluctant to take up the appeal, so we are governed by illegal universal injunctions of lower courts indefinitely. Last year, the Supreme Court took up fewer cases than at any time since the Civil War, while lower courts are hearing a record number of cases. Even when they do take up the appeal, Roberts and Kavanaugh ensure that the opinion is not written categorically enough to preclude the next round of litigation, so the Left comes back to the same forum-shopped courts to get a second injunction on the policy from a slightly different angle.

The power of the courts to engage in judicial review over agency regulatory policy comes from Sections 701-706 of the Administrative Procedure Act. Congress must revise 5 U.S.C. § 702 to raise the threshold for injury-in-fact, causation, and redressability for third-party groups suing for non-economic or phony economic grievances. Eco groups should never have standing in court to simply oppose policies they disagree with when agencies are following the letter of the law.

Yes, the time has come for Republicans to stop using 100 percent of their political capital on confirming judges, thereby raising the legitimacy of judicial supremacy even more. It’s time they use their capital to narrow the scope of rules of standing, justiciability, and jurisdiction of the courts so that we can actually keep political questions within the sphere of those who stand for election. (For more from the author of “If a Judge Ordered Trump to Resign, Would That Be the Law?” please click HERE)

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Sorry, Uncle Joe, They No Longer Serve Your Kind Here

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You can’t teach an old dog woke tricks. But when you try, it’s hilarious.

On this farcical occasion, I’m talking about probable Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden, who is clearly a man out of time. In recently attempting to reassure the intersectionality identity cult about his role as Senate Judiciary chairman during 1991’s Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Supreme Court hearings, Biden went to the “it’s a white man’s culture” card.

Settle down, hip-hop. You aren’t cutting your next rap album. You’re from Delaware.

Then there are questions like how the product of this so-called white man’s culture could lead to results like the black Clarence Thomas even being appointed to the court at all, and then yet another black guy Biden may know named Barack Obama being elected as president of the United States.

Does Biden remember that? I think he was Obama’s vice president for eight years or something.

And more than anything, the most pathetic thing about all of this is that Biden still looks at his party and thinks he has a place in it as standard-bearer. Come on, man. Bernie Sanders is more socialist than you. Kamala Harris is more black than you. Beto is more beta than you. Elizabeth Warren is more Native American than you. Amy Klobuchar is more woman than you. Pete Buttigieg is more gay than you. Cory Booker is more Spartacus than you.

And Uncle Joe is whiter and more male than them all. Basically he’s John Kasich without being the son of a mailman.

Don’t just take my conservative word for it, though. While CNN’s most accurate actual reporter may be the broken clock on its wall – thank you, Babylon Bee – one of its most progressive political propagandists is none other than Joan Walsh. And she thinks that if Biden really wants to change white man’s culture so much, then “don’t run.”

Not much gray area for you to navigate there, Joe. You are persona non grata. Don’t know if you’ve looked in the mirror lately, and by Walsh’s usual standards, she’s being as gentle as she can be with you, but you’re the paleface of white privilege. Sucks to be you.

Because unless you are willing to be a useful idiot who knows when to shut your hole and stick to your role as everyone else gets their intersectionality on, there is really nothing left for you to do in today’s Democrat party. Everyone must be made to care in this cultural jihad, Joe. Even you.

A few months ago, I was somewhat bullish on Biden’s general election chances. High name ID, likable to the average American, and he comes from a time when sharing a country with people like me wasn’t considered a nonstarter in the Democrat Party. But that was before the opening months of the Democrat presidential primary produced the following long train of abuses and usurpations:

1. Get rid of what little border security we have, because it’s not fair to the illegals to endure hardship to come to America.

2. Get rid of insurance companies so government can control your health care instead.

3. Kill ’em all (infanticide).

4. Christians can’t serve in public office.

5. The party of anti-Semitism.

6. The Green New Deal that proves it’s not about carbon emissions, it’s about Marxism.

7. Joining the Covington Catholic lynch mob.

I could continue, but by now that’s enough to tell us this — Biden is this cycle’s Jeb Bush, a candidate running for the nomination of a party that has passed him by. But if Jeb’s cardinal sin was an uncomfortable lack of self-awareness, Biden’s is the exact opposite. He’s too self-aware of his own inadequacies. Thus his pander-a-thon is a sign of weakness, not strength.

Sorry, Uncle Joe, they no longer serve your kind here. (For more from the author of “Sorry, Uncle Joe, They No Longer Serve Your Kind Here” please click HERE)

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Yep, It’s Official: America Is a Christian Nation

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U.S. Supreme Court stated in the 1892 case of Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, written by Justice David Josiah Brewer (143 U.S. 457-458, 465-471, 36 L ed 226): “This is a religious people. This is historically true. From the discovery of this continent to the present hour, there is a single voice making this affirmation. The commission to Christopher Columbus … (recited) that ‘it is hoped that by God’s assistance some of the continents and islands in the ocean will be discovered.’ … The first colonial grant made to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1584 … and the grant authorizing him to enact statutes for the government of the proposed colony provided ‘that they be not against the true Christian faith.’ … The first charter of Virginia, granted by King James I in 1606 … commenced the grant in these words: ‘… in propagating of Christian Religion to such People as yet live in Darkness. …’ Language of similar import may be found in the subsequent charters of that colony … in 1609 and 1611; and the same is true of the various charters granted to the other colonies. In language more or less emphatic is the establishment of the Christian religion declared to be one of the purposes of the grant. The celebrated compact made by the Pilgrims in the Mayflower, 1620, recites: ‘Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith … a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia.’

“The fundamental orders of Connecticut, under which a provisional government was instituted in 1638-1639, commence with this declaration: ‘… And well knowing where a people are gathered together the word of God requires that to maintain the peace and union … there should be an orderly and decent government established according to God … to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus which we now profess … of the said gospel is now practiced amongst us.’ In the charter of privileges granted by William Penn to the province of Pennsylvania, in 1701, it is recited: ‘… no people can be truly happy, though under the greatest enjoyment of civil liberties, if abridged of … their religious profession and worship. …’ Coming nearer to the present time, the Declaration of Independence recognizes the presence of the Divine in human affairs in these words: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. … appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions. … And for the support of this Declaration, with firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.’ … These declarations … reaffirm that this is a religious nation.” . . .

Justice Brewer concluded: “While the separation of church and state is often affirmed, there is nowhere a repudiation of Christianity as one of the institutions as well as benedictions of society. In short, there is no charter or constitution that is either infidel, agnostic, or anti-Christian. Wherever there is a declaration in favor of any religion it is of the Christian. … I could show how largely our laws and customs are based upon the laws of Moses and the teachings of Christ; how constantly the Bible is appealed to as the guide of life and the authority in question of morals.” (Read more from “Yep, It’s Official: America Is a Christian Nation” HERE)

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Constitution Forced Mueller’s Hand

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The Mueller Report is complete, and Donald Trump has been absolved of collusion with the Russians.

Mueller stopped short of saying that his investigation exonerated the president. However, if I were suspected of something, if my antagonists publicly predicted I would “die in jail,” and if I were investigated for 675 days, and they raided my personal lawyer and read everything on his hard disk, and leaned on my closest associates to incriminate me, and then had to admit the evidence didn’t support a legal accusation, much less a conviction, I would feel exonerated.

If I were one of the people who falsely accused a man on a daily basis, I would feel great shame and contrition now. But this is not in the Democrats’ repertoire. They merely shift their innuendo to Mueller, accusing him of a betrayal.

MSNBC Democrat Chris Matthews was scandalized that Mueller never interrogated the president. But nobody accused of a crime in America, since the ratification of the Bill of Rights, has been obligated to give testimony against himself. After some initial bluster, the president wisely decided not to match wits with head-hunting prosecutors.

Perhaps he respected his attorneys’ advice. Or maybe he saw for himself the landscape littered with the bleached skeletons of defendants who were a little too cavalier about about the Fifth Amendment. The fact that you are innocent doesn’t mean you have nothing to fear from testifying under oath, or interrogation by prosecutors.

His first National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, was convicted of lying to the FBI. The interview was so casual that Flynn had no legal counsel present, and the FBI agents didn’t give the usual warning about penalties for lying. He was not under oath. But from the moment he lied about an arcane United Nations matter, the prosecutors owned him.

The sentencing judge, who apparently wasn’t paying very close attention, berated him in court for representing a foreign country’s interests while serving in the White House. But Flynn’s contract with that country ended the previous year, before Trump appointed him National Security Adviser.

The judge stunned onlookers when he used the term “treason,” an embarrassing misstatement for a federal judge who ought to be familiar with the elements of the only crime that is defined in the U.S. Constitution. It can only be surmised that the judge believed Flynn guilty of much greater crimes than the prosecutors accused him of. This is the risk you run when you agree to casual interviews with the FBI.

The granddaddy of all perjury traps may have been in the Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial. Libby was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. He was accused of exposing a clandestine CIA agent’s cover.

A journalist testified that Libby had told her a State Department civilian overseas was in fact a CIA agent. She later wrote in her memoir that it was a misunderstanding, and that she may have helped convict an innocent man. A senior State Department official later admitted it was he who blew the CIA agent’s cover.

But Libby was convicted of making false statements to investigators, perjury in the grand jury, and obstruction of justice in an attempt to impede the investigation. It ruined his life. All he needed to do was to refuse to talk to people who wanted him to rot in jail.

The downside of the Fifth Amendment is that criminals can use it to frustrate investigations and avoid conviction. Government officials in the IRS and EPA have used it to prevent legislative oversight. But it’s a price that the Founders were willing to pay. It’s a firewall against tyrannical prosecution and wanton harassment.

In this case, it has helped force investigators to stick to the subject. Despite winning several confessions to unrelated crimes such as lying on loan applications, the investigation has been forced back onto the central question: did the President, or did he not, collude with the Russians to interfere in our elections?

There would be no cleverly designed perjury traps for Trump, no rabbits pulled from a hat. The investigation was forced back on track. And it was a successful investigation. We have our answer.

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The Sick Dehumanization of Trump Supporters

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If you want firsthand experience of what it’s like to be discriminated against, all you have to do is put on a MAGA hat and walk down the street.

At best, you’ll get some dirty glares. You might be denied service, à la 1960s lunch counters. You might get your hat knocked off. At worst, you’ll get blamed for your own son’s death. That is what happened to BlazeTV host Eric Bolling while he was minding his own business recently at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C.

This pathetic excuse of a human being came up to Bolling and said, “Eric Bolling’s son killed himself because he was embarrassed by his dad,” according to the host. Eric’s son, Eric Chase Bolling, died in 2017 from an accidental drug overdose.

Video captured a man who appeared gleeful, even proud of what had just occurred. That is because Trump supporters are viewed by leftists as subhuman beings whose very existence makes them justifiable targets for physical or verbal assault.

At the time, Eric was hanging out with Hayden Williams, another Trump supporter who was recently punched in the face by an unhinged leftist at UC Berkeley due to his support for the president.

See the pattern? What’s worse is that these leftists pretend to be civil rights warriors while subjecting people to the same kind of disgusting, discriminatory behavior Republicans fought to end in the 1960s.

It used to be that discrimination was fast becoming a thing of the past. It would only pop up when shameless race-hustlers tried to make excuses for belligerent criminals like OJ while knowing full well race had nothing to do with it. When liberals tried to paint attacks on Obama’s Marxism as racist, I used to remind them, “I’m a black guy who grew up in the ’90s and I have never been discriminated against a day in my life. It’s not about Obama’s skin color. It’s about his crappy ideas!” But I can no longer say I’ve never been discriminated against, not because of my skin color but because of my political views. Then, of course, leftists try to turn it into a race issue by calling me racist names like “house n*gger” and “Uncle Tom” for having the wrong political views.

Nevertheless, because of these views, I can now say I know what it feels like to be persecuted. Recently, I went to order from a food truck with my friend Joel Patrick. Joel is a black Trump supporter who wears his support for the president not just on his sleeve, but on his head and his chest too, and we were essentially denied service. We waited for roughly 20 minutes while being completely ignored by everyone working there. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt by assuming they were just busy, but the minute we walked away because they took an eternity to even acknowledge our existence, they gladly greeted the next customer who wasn’t in MAGA gear with prompt and friendly service.

If my grandmother were still alive, we would have been able to bond over how it feels to be denied service by Democrats.

I am fortunate that being denied service is the worst that’s happened to me, because, as Eric Bolling can attest, it could be a lot worse. Every week, it seems, there’s a new video of someone being harassed or assaulted because they dared to wear a MAGA hat out of the house.

Most notably, the Covington Catholic High School students were not just harassed, they were smeared by the national press. They were slandered by the media. They were sent death threats. People said they would bomb their school. All because they expressed support of the president.

Maddie Mueller (no relation to the man who sadly couldn’t deliver this weekend) is fighting her school because the administration actually tried to ban her from wearing a MAGA hat on campus. Gunnar Johansson’s family is trying to get to the bottom of what happened when his MAGA hat was yanked off of his head by a school bus aide. Logan Jones was suspended for wearing a MAGA sweatshirt and holding a Trump flag. A woman in Massachusetts was arrested for allegedly assaulting Bryton Turner, a man who dared to wear a MAGA hat to a Mexican restaurant. Even our elders aren’t spared. Just last month, an 81-year-old man was attacked for wearing his MAGA hat, and a 19-year-old was arrested for the assault.

What is happening here? It’s an epidemic. You cannot walk out of your house and be safe if you support the president. These leftists justify their actions by saying those who wear a MAGA hat may as well be members of the KKK. But it is actually those assaulting people in the streets and verbally tormenting them who more closely resemble the Klan.

History will not be kind to those who tried to take America several decades back into the past. And it will treat them particularly harshly because of the shockingly divisive hatred the Left is using to do it, all while shamelessly claiming the mantle of tolerance. (For more from the author of “The Sick Dehumanization of Trump Supporters” please click HERE)

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