I’m a Jew. Feel Free to Wish Me a ‘Merry Christmas,’ America!

What’s it like to be an American Jew at Christmas? There are as many answers to that as there are American Jews. GQ’s Julia Ioffe, for example, wants you to stop wishing her a merry Christmas. After tweeting that she didn’t want to explain why, she took to The Washington Post to write that it’s “lonely to be reminded a thousand times every winter that the dominant American cultural event occurs without me.”

It’s true that Christmas is the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to American holidays. It’s also true that if you’re Jewish, Christmas is always somebody else’s holiday. But beyond that, I view the season rather differently, because of my own family’s history and because of who I am.

My mother’s parents were German-Jewish immigrants. In their tiny German hometowns, they were among the very few Jews. So, every year, my Jewish ancestors gathered for dinner on Christmas day. They weren’t Christmas dinners as much as they were opportunities for community. This way, Jewish families didn’t feel isolated while the Christian majority observed Christmas. . .

I accept that as a Jew, I am a religious outsider by definition (anywhere other than Israel). However, I don’t feel alone, because I am surrounded by a warm Jewish community and a tolerant larger society. This country’s vibrant tradition of religious liberty means that I can choose to attend synagogue, eat kosher food, and give my children a Jewish education. I also don’t feel excluded as an American. I love celebrating the 4th of July and Thanksgiving, for example, and I’m always happy to attend a good Super Bowl party.

Still, I see the Christmas season — in spite of its clearly Christian core — as remarkably inclusive in this country. When strangers wish me a merry Christmas, I take it as a kindness. Someone, who likely celebrates the holiday themselves, is sharing their joy with me. As a Jew who knows what she believes, I feel happy for my Christian friends and neighbors, as they prepare to celebrate the most special holiday on their religious calendar. (Read more from “I’m a Jew. Feel Free to Wish Me a ‘Merry Christmas,’ America!” HERE)

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The Decision to Withdraw From Syria Is ‘Absolutely Shocking’

LevinTV host Mark Levin began his radio show Wednesday evening reacting to President Trump’s decision to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria.

Calling the decision “absolutely shocking,” Levin explained the geopolitical dynamics of the civil war in Syria.

“There are Christian populations. There are Yazidi populations. There are our allies, the Kurds, who have fought shoulder to shoulder with us. The Russians have sought to take over Syria and control that region of the world. Iran is using Syria to build military bases and military roads to heavily arm Hezbollah, one of the largest terrorist groups on the face of the earth.”

He continued:

“Turkey. Erdogan is a genocidal dictator, an Islamic fascist, who murders journalists, imprisons journalists. … He too has designs on Syria, and he wishes to wipe out completely our allies, the Kurds.”

Levin praised President Trump for his multipronged, aggressive strategy against the Iranian regime, noting that Tehran, as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, has its eyes set on expansion. “We must protect the Christians, the Yazidis, our allies the Kurds; we must not permit, as the president himself has said, Iran [to build] its caliphate.”

“So when the president today announced, in Obama-like fashion, unilateral, immediate withdrawal of 2,000 American special forces, I was shocked,” Levin added.

Listen:

(For more from the author of “The Decision to Withdraw From Syria Is ‘Absolutely Shocking'” please click HERE)

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Do Democrats Have a White Man Problem?

In an interview with CNN’s Van Jones this weekend, Democratic Sen. Kristen Gillibrand was asked if it was a problem that a recent poll shows three white men are leading for the 2020 presidential nomination. Her answer, which grabbed headlines, was a blunt “Yes,” and drew a laugh from Jones.

Gillibrand explained her answer a bit, but only in very broad terms. She talked about the importance of Barack Obama’s first black presidency, then said, ““I aspire for our country to recognize the beauty of our diversity in some point in the future and I hope some day we have a woman president.” . . .

There’s also the fact that the last time the Democrats nominated a white man was in 2004. Granted, all the ones before that were white men, but over the past two decades it’s been a different set. Democrats elected a record number of women into office in 2018 and are handing the gavel back to the first woman to be speaker of the House. So is it really a problem that the three leaders for the nomination are white men?

There are two basic ways to address this question. The first is electoral, and the second is ideological. From the point of view of pure voting math, there are good arguments for and against a white male candidate. Proponents would say that it could help in Trump’s forgotten America. Detractors would argue that today’s Democratic Party must mirror the Obama coalition and pump up minority turnout. . .

That leaves the ideological problem as the one that is truly at issue here. It isn’t merely symbolic. Sure, somebody not white or male polling over 10 percent would be the kind of PR win Democrats got with the photos of their wave of new female legislators. But for many Democrats, apparently including Gillibrand, equal representation on the basis of race and sex really does go beyond campaign narrative and is a driving principle of the party itself. (Read more from “Do Democrats Have a White Man Problem?” HERE)

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The Real Tragedy of Human-Caused Climate Change Theories Is Not Environmental

MSNBC anchor Katy Tur read an article in the New Yorker about the devastating effect California’s wildfires have had due to climate change and proclaimed,

I read that New Yorker article today, and I thought, “Gosh, how pointless is my life and how pointless are the decisions that I’m making on a day-to-day basis, when we are not focused on climate change every day, when it’s not leading every one of our newscasts?”

That’s not funny and not to be ridiculed. It’s sad. It’s sad because it appears she has been trained to say that ridiculous thing through deceit and pressure.

People opposed to the theory of anthropogenic global warming often say that the climate change theorist is an idiot, a nut, or a useful pawn in the worldwide attempt to convince Americans to give up their wealth. They think, “What about the facts that are everywhere that disprove their theory?” “What about the fact that a theory isn’t a fact?” “What about the attempt to silence people as ‘deniers’ of a theory?” “What about the other side of the argument?” But there is no other side to the question according to the theorists. To me, it is a scary thing to understand that people have been convinced of a theory so completely that the angry mob demands that you embrace it as fact, shattering the very point of a theory in the first place.

Heck, the pope is convinced. He’s not only convinced, but he’s got Catholic churches all over the world preaching climate change from the pulpit as if it were fact. That’s a scary thing when you realize it’s not a fact. After all, if the answer to climate change is high taxation of the American people, you’d think of it as it should be thought of, extortion of the production of wealth from a nation built for the freedom of the individual. It is a man-destroying idea. It is an idea put forth solely to demand tyranny.

Tur’s lament that we just aren’t doing enough about the climate and that it makes her life pointless is the result of a coordinated tax-the-rich political scheme. It’s not fact.

Anthropogenic global warming has been debunked, yet this MSNBC television employee believes her life is pointless unless we all just give up more of our freedoms and our wealth and work for free, because somehow more money given to government will change the climate.

One can infer that Tur feels that her life would have more meaning if she reported on climate change more. In her trained mind, perhaps that would raise awareness of the subject and maybe move the mobs to demand higher taxation and economic stagnation. Then and only then would her life have meaning.

Katy recently told the world she’s pregnant with her first child. With leading climate alarmists stating that bringing a child into this world will only burden the rest of us when dealing with climate change, I’d like Katy to know that many of us welcome the fact that she is bringing a child into this world, even though she just described it as pointless. I would suggest that her feelings of pointlessness and alarm are products of deceit and that she will find purpose in the thrilling and overwhelming love of a child.

And when that child grows up and goes out into the world to work, we do not wish the product of his labor be taken away and given to the iron fist of government. We do not wish that he be subject to tyranny because of a coordinated lie. We do not want him to have to experience the type of shaming that trains people to repeat lies as facts or to have his life made harder by the imposition of a theory as a fact.

Instead, we would encourage him to question authority, faulty arguments, and theories held up as fact and arm himself with knowledge, wisdom; and history; to grab hold of life and get as much out of it as his open mind can produce. (For more from the author of “The Real Tragedy of Human-Caused Climate Change Theories Is Not Environmental” please click HERE)

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The Perfectly Legal Corruption No One Cares About

The buzz this week in the news was all about corruption. OK, it was about one very specific type of corruption – the President paying women to not go public with allegations of affairs they say happened 12 years ago. But this is Washington, DC, sex scandals are only the tip of the corruption iceberg. Only, unlike anything involving Donald Trump, most of them are perfectly legal and the media has little to no interest in reporting on them. . .

There have been more than 260 settlements costing more than $17 million, paid for by you and me, so our elected Members for Congress can avoid being held responsible for things they’re now clutching their pearls over the President having done with his own money.

But as sleazy as that is, there’s something worse, something much more corrupt happening every election cycle. And, since Congress is the body that sets the rules, it’s perfectly legal.

Two reports this week showed how Members of Congress, safe Members who have had no risk of losing their reelection bids, shoveled money to members of their families for “work” they do for their campaigns. . .

People who face no real challenge on Election Day still raise a lot of money too. Some of it is for commercials to remind people to vote, some is passed around to other campaigns to raise the stature and influence of the Member, and some is used to pay staffers for a campaign that is, for all intents and purposes, unnecessary and non-existent. (Read more from “The Perfectly Legal Corruption No One Cares About” HERE)

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Old Socialists Should Exit the Stage — and Take the Ignorant Young Socialists With Them

Old socialist John Dingell has a plan, after serving almost 60 years in Congress and handing his seat to his second wife. He claims that the people no longer trust the government and the Constitution has become a problem.

The Atlantic recently published some excerpts from Dingell’s book, “The Dean: The Best Seat in the House.”

In December 1958, almost exactly three years after I entered the House of Representatives, the first American National Election Study, initiated by the University of Michigan, found that 73 percent of Americans trusted the federal government “to do the right thing almost always or most of the time.” As of December 2017, the same study, now conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, found that this number had plummeted to just 18 percent.

Isn’t it funny how socialists never seem to think that they might be the problem? In fact, I defy you to find a socialist who will accept any fault for how his governance turns out. It’s a huge personality and ideological flaw for all communist wannabes.

Simply stated, for each of the 59 years Dingell served in Congress, confidence in the institution fell almost one percent, for a total of 55 percent according to Dingell’s own research. Seems quite instructive right there, yet Dingell doesn’t see it.

Nope, instead Dingell says that the Constitution has to be rethought. It was the same constitution in the 1950s as it is today, yet according to the socialists operating in the highest reaches of our government, it must be the reason so few people have confidence in government.

But John Dingell voted year after year for every leftist cause from the 1950s through 2014, and he claims we have to change the Constitution or we’ll never be able to keep our republic. So he suggests we abolish the Senate, get rid of the Electoral College, and only use public funds for elections. If we do all that, he believes minority factions will no longer stand in the way of legislation, and the America he wishes to see will finally prevail.

It’s a blueprint for mob rule, and it makes leftists salivate. Remember, Dingell famously said that the Obamacare mandate was necessary to “control the people.”

Abolish the Senate, Dingell holds, is a great “slogan” and a great and noble cause. After all, why should ill-populated Wyoming have two senators and over-populated California have two? Dingell says that the arrangement causes minorities to circumvent the will of the majority.

The socialist Democrats spend all their time gathering minorities for their majority, claiming all the while that the “people united will never be defeated,” only to cut minority representation and usher in iron-fisted government.

But what Dingell is truly suggesting is the loss of states’ rights. In this, he not only attacks Article I of the Constitution, but also the Bill of Rights. Dingell and his band of socialists hate that it was the states that created the federal government and it’s the states that check its power.

Rather than abolish the Senate, we should repeal the 17th Amendment, which changed the Constitution to prescribe electing senators by popular vote instead of by state legislatures. The closest representatives of the people housed in each state legislature are more apt to reflect the will of the electorate than senators who come home once every six years seeking support.

Dingell also wants to be rid of the Electoral College, like every socialist, to silence the voices of the minority.

In order for socialism to take hold, no matter what anybody says, whether Dingell or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the minority must be silenced. Never forget that. It plays out on social media, where leftists own the platforms: They silence the minority. It will play out in our nation unless government is taken back by the people who are uniquely qualified to govern themselves.

The only way this nation has a future is with open-minded defenders of the Constitution and the Founding of this nation. The future of an America to be proud of rejects socialism and communism and the power of the federal government. The future of America guided by divine Providence champions God-given freedoms and rejects the iron-fisted government that the socialists need to thrive.

Sixty years of striving toward a socialist nation and failing to clinch it have inspired John Dingell to simultaneously give lip service to our Founding while attacking its very core. He may exit the stage and take his ignorant young re-warmed leftovers like Ocasio-Cortez with him. (For more from the author of “Old Socialists Should Exit the Stage — and Take the Ignorant Young Socialists With Them” please click HERE)

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Top Reasons You Should Own an AR-15

1. Being armed is your right and may be your civic duty.

On the one hand, for defense against common criminals, handguns can have advantages over the other two basic types of firearms: rifles and shotguns. Within and away from the home, a handgun carried in a holster is always within reach. Also, a handgun is more easily wielded with one hand, while the other hand dials 911; opens or closes a door; pulls, pushes, or carries someone to safety; or is injured. . .

2. The AR-15 is the most useful firearm with which to defend against ‘every species of criminal usurpation’ because, first and foremost, it is a rifle.

One day, new technologies in “arms”—“weapons of offense, or armour of defence,” according to a popular Founding-era dictionary—will be introduced, and we should object to the rationale the Supreme Court has established for upholding laws that would prohibit people from owning them. However, for the present, rifles are the type of firearm most useful for the entire range of defensive applications, which, in addition to defense against common criminals, includes the three historic purposes of the militia: repelling invasions, suppressing insurrections, and defeating tyranny, the latter the threat the Framers had in mind when they adopted the Second Amendment. . .

Over the last 55 years, the AR-15 has been improved more often and in more ways than the M16 and M4, and today it is the most versatile semi-automatic rifle in history. It is more accurate and, properly maintained, more reliable than the supposedly ultra-reliable AK-47 and the legendary M1 “Garand,” which, during World War II, Gen. George S. Patton called “the greatest battle implement ever devised.” Furthermore, some AR-15s exceed military specifications for the M16 and M4 in terms of accuracy and quality controls related to durability and reliability. (Read more from “Top Reasons You Should Own an AR-15” HERE)

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Roberts and Kavanaugh Prove the Myth of the ‘Conservative’ Supreme Court

This year at the Supreme Court has been extremely boring so far. If we didn’t have lawless hyperactive lower courts engaging in a daily constitutional convention, that would actually be a good thing, as the judiciary should be a boring place with no input into political issues, which should be left up to the political branches. John Jay hated the court because it didn’t get to throw its weight around in politics. Unfortunately, with lower courts permanently altering the trajectory of our politics, culture, sovereignty, and even national security, the passivity of the Roberts court is a recipe for judicial hell.

Once we agree to legitimize judicial supremacy, we have lost our nation, regardless of the orientation of the Supreme Court. That was on full display at the high court on Monday. In a new trend where several members of the “conservative wing” of the court allow very consequential bad lower court rulings to stand, Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh refused to hear an appeal on the issue of forcing states to fund Planned Parenthood.

Five federal circuit courts created a right for Planned Parenthood to obtain state funding or for private citizens to sue the state for not giving them access to any provider they choose through Medicaid. Never mind that some of these same circuits believe an individual doesn’t have a Second Amendment right. They now believe there is a private right to sue states over termination of Medicaid contracts in federal court, a power never granted to them by Congress.

The sheer fact that the Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and even Fifth Circuits signed on to this insane idea demonstrates, as I’ve long warned, that almost all of the circuits are irremediably broken, and even two terms of Trump’s presidency will only change the margins. The Eighth Circuit was the only appeals court that sided with the state (Arkansas, in this case) against abortion funding. Such a circuit split on a vital issue concerning state powers would normally have triggered a review from the Supreme Court upon appeal. Yet on Monday, in the appeal from the Fifth and Tenth circuits, the Supreme Court denied certiorari to the states of Louisiana and Kansas respectively. Only Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito would have heard the case. It takes four justices to grant cert.

Thomas wrote an impassioned dissent from the denial of cert because this is a dangerous trend we are seeing from his colleagues. We are seeing it with immigration, public prayer, global warming cases, and election law, where lower courts are either violating precedent or all sorts of legal norms, and Roberts and one or two others of the conservative wing join with the Left to allow the lower court insanity to continue.

Until recently, Roberts hid behind the fact that there weren’t any circuit splits in many contentious cases. After all, the Left shops its cases so effectively that it often wins every time. But now we are seeing, as with the public prayer case, that even when there is a circuit split, Roberts is going out of his way to avoid ruling on these cases. The problem is, as Thomas notes, this allows the lower courts to permanently alter the political trajectory of state governments.

Not only are the lawsuits themselves a financial burden on the States, but the looming potential for complex litigation inevitably will dissuade state officials from making decisions that they believe to be in the public interest. State officials are not even safe doing nothing, as the cause of action recognized by the majority rule may enable Medicaid recipients to challenge the failure to list particular providers, not just the removal of former providers.

Thus, anything conservatives ever want to accomplish, even if they win elections, is essentially dead on arrival because of lower court judges allowed to reign supreme. The legal profession erroneously believes that lower courts can grant standing to anyone so they can babysit the other branches on clear political questions, yet the Supreme Court refuses to babysit their own quite inferior courts.

Even when the Supreme Court is forced to take up a case and overturn it, it never does so categorically, as Thomas does. This allows the lower courts and their allies to come back for more and shut down our sovereignty, election law, and fiscal and cultural decisions in 100 other ways.

Absent wholesale judicial reform, if we continue to legitimize judicial supremacy, even with “the right sort of judges,” we should just abolish the other two branches and the state governments in favor of the robed masters. (For more from the author of “Roberts and Kavanaugh Prove the Myth of the ‘Conservative’ Supreme Court” please click HERE)

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Ocasio-Cortez Thinks Green Policies Will Create ‘Economic Justice.’ She Should Take a Look at Paris

Incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., thinks that her climate policy agenda will bring more “justice” to disadvantaged communities. The yellow vest riots in France tell another story.

At Monday’s “Climate Change Town Hall” organized by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Ocasio-Cortez called the push for new environmental policies “the civil rights movement of our generation.”

She also said that fighting climate change is “the mechanism through which we can really deliver justice to communities that have been underserved.”

“We have injustices in this country. Those injustices are concentrated in frontline communities and indigenous, black and brown communities,” she said. “They’re the ones that experience the greatest depths of this injustice.”

“We can use the transition to 100 percent renewable energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America,” Ocasio-Cortez also said.

Ah yes. That’s what struggling families and communities really need right now: Solar panels and electric cars.

Perhaps Ocasio-Cortez should take a look at what’s going on in France right now, where similar attempts to curb fossil fuel consumption to address climate change have led to violent riots all over Paris that have killed several people.

There, political leaders have been forced to postpone a proposed carbon tax and new emissions regulations that sparked the riots. The tax and regulations were meant to encourage people to swap out their diesel-powered vehicles for more eco-friendly modes of transportation.

Fuel taxes in France are already estimated to be 64 percent for unleaded gasoline and 59 percent for diesel. Currently, diesel costs around $6.50 per gallon in France, and the tax hike would have driven that price even higher.

As a New York Times report explains, while wealthier urbanites were fine with the proposal, it drew ire from those who have trouble making ends meet in rural areas and suburbs.

French PM Edouard Phillippe agreed with this assessment, saying that the anger in the streets came from “hard-working France, which has a hard time making ends meet.”

“This anger has its source in a profound injustice,” Phillippe added. “That of not being able to live decently from the fruit of one’s labor.”

It’s a simple reality: When government steps in with environmental regulations and new taxes on necessities, it gets a lot harder for regular folks to fill up their gas tanks, keep their families warm in the winter, and keep food on the table.

And where exactly is the “justice” in that? (For more from the author of “Ocasio-Cortez Thinks Green Policies Will Create ‘Economic Justice.’ She Should Take a Look at Paris” please click HERE)

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Progressives Do Want Religion: Compulsory Progressivism

So much for progressivism’s obsession with “thou shall not judge.” Good. Because it was always a scam anyway. The plan was always to judge, and to judge harshly. But just as the devil needed to go undercover in the Garden of Eden with his own “did God really say?” deception, progressives needed deceptions like tolerance and diversity for as long as it took to eat away at truth like water against a rock. Then, when the time was right, the throne could be usurped for good in broad daylight.

The final act of that play is upon us now. We need not guess at it. Men and women like Apple CEO Tim Cook are taking to their pulpits with a megaphone and promising the great unwashed their own version of “thus sayeth the Lord.”

Cook used the occasion of the Anti-Defamation League’s first-ever “Courage Against Hate” award to preach:

“We only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division, and violence: You have no place on our platforms,” Cook said. “You have no home here.”

“If we can’t be clear on moral questions like these, then we’ve got big problems,” Cook continued. “I believe the most sacred thing that each of us is given is our judgment, our morality, our own innate desire to separate right from wrong. Choosing to set that responsibility aside at a moment of trial is a sin.”

Morality. Sacred. Right. Wrong. Sin. These are words and concepts traditionally associated with a place called church. Which brings us to another part of the great progressive scam. Separation of church and state was never their aim, either. They want the state to be the church.

But unlike the one true church, which has largely forgotten its charge of excommunication for those who insist on confusing the light with the darkness, the progressive church excels at casting out those who refuse to bend the knee to the idols du jour. Judgment is its jam.

This is ultimately an argument of what it means to be human, and when competing definitions strain against one another to the extent that they are now, it also becomes an argument about our very right to exist in public at all if we don’t bow to a counterfeit god.

Will we be leaven, or will we be lepers? We ignore at our peril the unforgiving gospel of priest, prophet, and king Cook, whose definition of morality is 180 degrees different from the real Gospel’s. Nothing less than a total hijacking of the created, redemptive, and sanctifying order is well under way. That’s why it looks like a church. Because it is one.

When the White Witch thought she killed Aslan in “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” she shaved his mane and turned it into a crown to wear as she mercilessly mowed down all those who continued to oppose her in Aslan’s name. In killing him, she also desperately wanted to be him.

“Desperate” is the operative word there. No such replacement of the true king of heaven and earth can ever appear to be anything but desperate in its definitions and defenses, which is why the defense of progressivism will be ruthless to its core. How else are you going to defend definitions that are ever careening toward the insane? Only ruthlessly.

Reason and science and all the other fronts won’t get you there. There will be religion, and the progressive religion will be compulsory.

Be baptized in it, or be bulldozed. (For more from the author of “Progressives Do Want Religion: Compulsory Progressivism” please click HERE)

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