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August 2018

The time has come to teach the political class a lesson: I’m back fighting for a real Brexit Nigel Farage

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/08/17/time-has-come-teach-political-class-lessonim-back-fighting-real/

It is now beyond doubt that the political class in Westminster and many of their media allies do not accept the EU referendum result. They refuse to acknowledge the wishes of the majority of those who took part in that historic plebiscite of 2016 by voting to leave the European Union. As far as I’m concerned, this is the worst case of Stockholm syndrome ever recorded.

It is equally clear to me that, unless challenged, these anti-democrats will succeed in frustrating the result. Whatever they may claim publicly, this is their ultimate objective. They think nothing of betraying the citizens of Britain.

For months now we have heard the same argument from this bunch: “Leave voters did not know what they were voting for.” The implication is that Brexiteers are stupid and should submit to the superior view of our betters.

Well, I’ve had enough of their lies, deceit and treachery. The time has come to teach them a lesson – one that they will never forget.

The 17.4 million people who voted for Brexit did so because they wanted an independent United Kingdom. They wanted to live in a country that makes its own laws and is in charge of its future. They did not want to be governed by the unaccountable bully boys in Brussels.

A vital part of making this decision was based upon a tangible instinct to leave the single market. Yet under Theresa May’s fraudulent Chequers plan, the people have instead been offered a form of regulatory alignment. What is more, nothing will be done to take back control of our borders, our fishing rights or our ability to be a global trader for many years to come. Theresa the Appeaser has produced a set of ideas that are nothing more than a cowardly sell-out.

With all this in mind, now is the time for action.

Since the referendum result was declared, almost the entire Brexit debate has been conducted within the divided parties which inhabit the Westminster bubble. There has been virtually no input from the people at all apart from at the 2017 general election – an event when both major political parties were unashamedly dishonest with the electorate in their manifestos.

To make matters worse, we are subjected to a daily stream of negative media stories about Brexit in an attempt to beat us into submission. The latest example of this was the British Medical Association suggesting that a No Deal Brexit would lead to huge numbers of people dying.

Peter Smith Thinking Left, Thinking Right

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/07/thinking-left-thinking-right/

Studies purporting to establish why conservatives and so-called progressives think they way they do have been all the rage of late, with brain scans and the like alleged to have established that political orientation is influenced as much by biology as reason. An interesting notion, it is well worth a closer look.

According to lots of politico-psychological studies, conservatives are less open-minded or, alternatively speaking, more closed-minded or dogmatic than progressives. As a conservative (full disclosure), am I a stick-in-the-mud? It is difficult to say because I’m trying to assess it and might not be best positioned to form an objective view. I have some conservative friends. I tend to think that they have, shall we say, settled views. Is this evidence of conservative closed-mindedness? Well, it’s a small sample. I also have a small sample of progressive friends. I tend to think they too have settled views. In fact, I find that everyone I know has mostly settled views. To look at it the other way: how many people have you met who have changed their minds on any profound political question? Not many, I bet.

I will switch interchangeably between using the terms “right” and “conservative” and “left” and “progressive”. Of course, the postmodern leftists of today are not the cloth-cap socialists of yesteryear fighting for workers’ rights. They have evolved, certainly since Saul Alinsky wrote his Rules for Radicals in 1973. My progressive friends, all of an age, are not a close match with my dad and his union mates. Though I sometimes think they haven’t spotted the profound change in the ideology to which they cling.

Swedish Nationalist Party Predicted to Make Huge Gains Next Month By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/trending/predicted-huge-gains-for-swedish-nationalist-party/

The national Sweden Democrats are predicted to become the largest political party in the country following elections on September 9.

Their only problem is that none of the socialist parties that have ruled Sweden for more than 100 years will work with them. The situation is similar to what it is for other nationalist, eurosceptic parties in Germany, France, Holland, and other Western countries. The people support the nationalist agenda but other politicians refuse to have anything to do with them.

There is no doubt that the roots of the Sweden Democrats can be found in the far right. Nazi flags and uniforms were a common sight at party rallies 20 years ago.

But those days are mostly gone. The Sweden Democrats’ anti-immigration, anti-EU agenda resonates with millions of ordinary people and recent events have angered millions of citizens who fear that the 165,000 refugees who’ve settled in the country are refusing to integrate.

NBC News:

Tobias Andersson agrees. At 22, the leader of the party’s youth wing will likely become a lawmaker next month. Andersson joined the Sweden Democrats at 16, attracted by its tough stance on criminal justice.

But he becomes most animated when discussing immigration, which he said is “bad in every way possible.”

Immigration aside, the party wants to limit abortion and increase defense spending. It opposes Sweden’s membership in the European Union and has expressed skepticism about man-made climate change.

Fight Against ‘Toxic Masculinity’ Costs $90K Annually at UO By Toni Airaksinen

https://pjmedia.com/trending/at-the-university-of-oregon-fight-against-toxic-masculinity-costs-90k-a-year/

The University of Oregon Men’s Center recently revamped its mission to start fighting “toxic masculinity,” now a monumental effort that will cost the student body nearly $90,000 this upcoming school year alone.

Founded in 2002, the Men’s Center initially served as a hangout for men to learn about healthy living and nutrition. But in early February, the Men’s Center was taken over by a young woman who announced that it would be overhauled to focus on social justice.

“We are working towards the radical idea of a socially just world. For far too long men have been absent from the discussion of social equality,” reads a February 2018 announcement. “Our focus is to use social justice… to reconstruct what we know masculinity to be.”

Now, the Men’s Center organizes events exclusively to fight “toxic masculinity.”

According to their website, toxic masculinity includes “outbursts of anger, emotional repression… when men engage in catcalling, physical touch without consent, and even just very obviously looking a woman up and down.”

Since it was initially founded by students, the Men’s Center runs as a student club. Even so, it is essentially a para-administrative operation with a full-time staff member and an exclusive office space in the school’s Student Center.

Of course, because the Men’s Center is still technically a club, it is funded by mandatory student fees. According to the recently approved 2018-2019 Budget Book, a copy of which was obtained by PJ Media, the Men’s Center is slated to cost students $89,910 next year.

For comparison, the Jewish Student Union will cost students $4,100 next year, the Jam Squad is earmarked $275, and the Geology Club will get $8,150. PJ Media asked UO why the Men’s Center was approved for such an unusually high amount, but received no response.

In a Coptic Monastery, Murder Most Foul By Michael Walsh

https://pjmedia.com/faith/in-a-coptic-monastery-murder-most-foul/

The death of Bishop Epiphanius, the abbot of the fourth century Monastery of St. Macarius, last month has set off an ecclesiastical murder mystery worthy of a Dan Brown novel. More than a simple whodunit, the case has exposed simmering tensions of a theological, if not personal, nature in an influential corner of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

A scholar of ancient manuscripts with a frizzy beard typical of Orthodox clerics, Bishop Epiphanius, 64, was found at dawn on July 29, lying in a pool of blood outside his monastic cell. Injuries to his skull indicated he had been hit on the head with a blunt object, possibly a pipe, the police said.

The intrigue deepened days later when the Coptic authorities defrocked a younger monk, Isaiah, who had clashed with the bishop in the weeks before his death. Soon after that, another monk, Faltaous, 33, slashed his wrists and tried to throw himself from a four-story building. Faltaous was hospitalized and treated for his injuries. On Aug. 11, Egyptian prosecutors said Isaiah had been charged with the murder of Bishop Epiphanius after confessing to the crime. Two days later they said that they had detained Faltaous for questioning.

Beyond that, not much more is known. The police have sealed off the monastery to interview 150 people, including staff members, monks and bishops. The Coptic patriarch, Pope Tawadros II, has issued orders apparently aimed at tightening discipline among the country’s 2,000 monks.

New admissions to the monasteries have been suspended for a year; monks require permission to travel outside; and they have been given a month to close their Facebook and Twitter accounts. “In the light of what has happened, we need to give the monks their space and let them return to a focus on monastic life,” said Archbishop Angaelos of London, a prominent Coptic leader, speaking by phone. “They do not need social media accounts.”

JStreet Withdraws Endorsement After Palestinian Candidate for Congress Pushes One-State Solution By Bridget Johnson

https://pjmedia.com/election/jstreet-withdraws-endorsement-after-palestinian-candidate-for-congress-pushes-one-state-solution/

In a first for the organization, JStreet withdrew its midterm election endorsement of a former Michigan state legislator poised to become the first Palestinian-American member of Congress after Rashida Tlaib said she wants a one-state solution in the Middle East.

Tlaib, running to fill the seat vacated by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), is all but a lock for Dems, as Republicans didn’t put forth a candidate. She would be one of the first Muslim women to serve in Congress, and perhaps the first depending on how other Muslim women candidates fare in their races.

A socialist Dem in the mold of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Tlaib is running on a platform to abolish ICE, provide Medicare to all and establish a $15 hourly minimum wage. New York congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaigned for Tlaib.

JStreet, the most prominent progressive organization among Capitol Hill Israel-related lobbying groups, had stated on their website that Tlaib supported a two-state solution — Israel and Palestine, side by side — and “supports all current aid to Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”

Some Palestinian activists criticized Tlaib, and she recently stated that the solution “has to be one state” because “separate but equal does not work.” That one state would mean all Palestinians being absorbed into Israel, including with right of return.

Tlaib also supported BDS activists who try to punish Israel with boycotts and sanctions, and told Britain’s Channel 4 that she is “absolutely” in favor of cutting U.S. military aid to Israel “if it has something to do with inequality and not access to people having justice.”

“For me, U.S. aid should be leverage,” she added. “I will be using my position in Congress so that no country, not one, should be able to get aid from the U.S. when they still promote that kind of injustice.”

JStreet said in a statement today that “after closely consulting with Rashida Tlaib’s campaign to clarify her most current views on various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we have come to the unfortunate conclusion that a significant divergence in perspectives requires JStreetPAC to withdraw our endorsement of her candidacy.”

Identity Politics Are Rapidly Destroying The Value Of College Degrees Too often, college is merely a signal to show bare minimum competence to employers. Is that signal still valuable as college becomes more about indoctrination and delayed adulthood?By Liz Wolfe

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/16/identity-politics-rapidly-destroying-value-college-degrees/

I attended the College of William and Mary from fall 2014 until winter 2016, during the arguable height of social justice outrage. The infamous University of Missouri protests happened soon after I started school, where professor Melissa Click threatened a student journalist with physical violence.

At Yale, the Christakises were protested for arguing against over-coddling administrators telling students what they should not wear for Halloween. The Rolling Stone story, “A Rape on Campus” that was later found fraudulent came out during my first year of school. It’s not for these reasons alone that college was futile, but the leftist insanity that perpetually surrounded me certainly played a part.

This spring was set to be my graduation from college. Had I not sped things up and graduated in two years, instead of four, I would have walked across the stage, taken pictures with my family, and graduated with $40,000 in debt. I wouldn’t have been able to earn editing and writing experience (like bylines at The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Reason, and The Houston Chronicle). I recommend the same path to other young conservatives — escape debt and leftist indoctrination, if you can. Choose work experience, trade school, or a fast-tracked route through college instead.
College Often Isn’t Worth Your Time and Money

Elite colleges aren’t designed for critical thinking or open inquiry anymore. According to Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post, “A fifth of undergrads now say it’s acceptable to use physical force to silence a speaker who makes ‘offensive and hurtful statements.’”

The same survey indicates that about four in every ten students believes the First Amendment does not allow “hate speech.” Meanwhile, even at elite colleges like the liberal arts school Pomona, nearly 90 percent of students say their campus climate chills speech because they fear saying things others might find offensive.

ELECTIONS ARE COMING:Headwinds Facing GOP Might Not Be So Strong By Adele Malpass

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/08/18/headwinds_facing_gop_might_not_be_so_strong_137835.html

With 80 days to go before the midterm elections, the conventional wisdom is that the Republicans will be hard-pressed to hold their majority in the House. The generic ballot is against them, Donald Trump’s job approval rating isn’t where Republicans would like it to be, and midterms are historically difficult for the incumbent president’s party anyway.

However, all the wind is not in Republicans’ faces. There are countervailing trends at work, too, including these eight:

Critics of the president may still be underestimating the strength of the Trump movement, as they did in 2016. Trump rallies are still standing room only, with lines out the door. The GOP is fully behind the president, whose his approval rating is about 85 percent among his base. Most of the candidates he’s endorsed in primaries have won. Moreover, his support has boosted voter turnout.

Trump is a stronger candidate than he was in 2016. One of the most important predictors of a midterm election is a president’s popularity. On Election Day in 2016, Trump’s approval to disapproval differential was 21 points and today it is nine points according to the RCP polling average. In other words, despite the pummeling he takes in the press, Donald Trump is more popular today than he was on Election Day 2016.

With a shove from progressives with 2020 presidential ambitions, most notably Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Party has veered left in the 2018 season primary season. Universal health care, free college tuition, and a guaranteed basic income may play well in some Democratic primaries. But there’s little evidence that this is what independent voters are looking for, and independents are the key voting bloc in competitive races in swing districts.

Revoking Brennan’s Security Clearance: The Right Thing, Even if for the Wrong Reason By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/john-brennan-security-clearance-revocation-justified/

It’s right because he is irresponsible and untrustworthy and has politicized intelligence.

I do not share my friend David French’s theoretical constitutional concerns about the president’s revocation of security clearances — at least when it comes to former government officials who become media commentators and have no demonstrable need for a security clearance. Like David and many other analysts, though, I think it’s a big mistake to politicize the revocation of security clearances.

Still, I am even less of a fan of the politicization of intelligence itself. And that justifies the revocation of former CIA director John Brennan’s clearance.

As is often the case with President Trump, the right thing has been done here for the wrong reason, namely, for vengeance against a political critic who is always zealous and often unhinged. That a decision amounts to political payback does not necessarily make it wrong on the merits, but its in-your-face pettiness is counterproductive, undermining its justification.

Brennan’s tweets about Trump are objectively outrageous. To compare, I think some of former CIA director Mike Hayden’s tweets are ill-advised — particularly this one, comparing Trump’s border-enforcement policy to Nazi concentration camps. But General Hayden is making anti-Trump political arguments, not intimating that he has knowledge of Trump corruption based on his (Hayden’s) privileged access to intelligence information (which he may or may not still have — I haven’t asked him). Hayden is absolutely entitled to speak out in that vein. Generally, he is a voice of reason even when one disagrees with him, and — let’s be real here — even his edgier tweets are pretty tame compared to the president’s.

Brennan, by contrast, speaks out in a nod-and-a-wink manner, the undercurrent of which is that if he could only tell you the secrets he knows, you’d demand Trump’s impeachment forthwith. (See, e.g., tweets here, here, and here.) Indeed, “undercurrent” is probably the wrong word: Brennan, after all, has expressly asserted that our “treasonous” president is “wholly in the pocket of Putin” and has “exceed[ed] the threshold of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.’”

Such demagoguery would be beneath any former CIA director, but it is especially indecorous in Brennan’s situation. There are ongoing investigations and trials. Brennan’s own role in the investigation of the Trump campaign is currently under scrutiny, along with such questions as whether the Obama administration put the nation’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of the Clinton campaign, and why an unverified dossier (a Clinton-campaign opposition-research project) was presented to the FISA court in order to obtain surveillance warrants against an American citizen. Until these probes have run their course, Brennan should resist the urge to comment, especially in ways that implicate his knowledge of classified matters. (So should the president, but that’s another story.)

Quite apart from the ongoing investigations, there is considerable evidence that intelligence was rampantly politicized on Brennan’s watch as CIA director and, before that, Obama’s homeland-security adviser. For example, Obama-administration national-security officials deceptively downplayed weapons threats posed by Syria, Iran, and North Korea. As The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes notes, Brennan directed the CIA to keep under wraps the vast majority of documents seized in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani compound, precisely because that information put the lie to Obama-administration narratives about a “decimated” al-Qaeda, the moderation of Iran, and general counterterrorism success. (Since this week’s craze is the Trump administration’s use of non-disclosure agreements, we should add Hayes’s reporting that Brennan’s CIA presented NDAs to survivors of the Benghazi terrorist attack — at a memorial service for those killed during the siege — in order to silence them while the Obama administration’s indefensible performance was being investigated.) In 2015, over 50 intelligence analysts complained that their reports on ISIS and al-Qaeda were being altered by senior officials in order to support misleading Obama-administration storylines. Brennan himself was instrumental in the administration’s submission to the demands of Islamist organizations that information about sharia-supremacist ideology be purged from the training of security officials.

That last decision flowed logically from Brennan’s absurd insistence that the Islamic concept of “jihad” refers merely to a “holy struggle” to “purify oneself or one’s community” (see my 2010 column, here). It’s as if there were no other conceivable interpretation of a tenet that, as the late, great Bernard Lewis observed, is doctrinally rooted in the imperative of forcible conquest — which is exactly how millions and millions of fundamentalist Muslims, including those who threaten the United States, understand it. Airbrushing sharia-supremacist ideology in order to appease an administration’s Islamist allies may be fit work for political consultants; it ill suits a director of central intelligence.

Brennan, moreover, has proved himself irresponsible and untrustworthy. In 2014, when it first surfaced that his CIA had hacked into the computer system of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff investigating the agency’s enhanced-interrogation program, Brennan indignantly denied the allegation. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” he insisted. “I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.”

Of course, it was the truth. An inspector-general probe established that the hacking had, in fact, occurred. And not just that; as the New York Times reported, CIA officials who were involved in spying on the Senate committee maintained that their actions “were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan.” Brennan eventually apologized to senior committee senators. Then he handpicked an “accountability board” to investigate the matter. As I’m sure you’ll be stunned to learn, Brennan used the pendency of the accountability board’s examination as a pretext to avoid answering Congress’s questions; then the board dutifully whitewashed the matter, recommending that no one be disciplined.

The yanking of Brennan’s security clearance is not only warranted, it is way overdue.

Yet, by singling out the former CIA director, in unconcealed retribution for his anti-Trump political diatribes, the president undermines the legitimacy of his decision. This is important. Let’s put Brennan aside. There are 5.1 million people in this country with security clearances. That is insane. It is undoubtedly true that too much information in government is classified. Still, a great deal of it constitutes defense secrets that are classified because they need to be. If we’ve learned anything from the Snowden debacle, it is that we are extremely vulnerable because intelligence access has been given to people who don’t need it and/or shouldn’t have it.

There are obviously a few high-level security positions in our government, as well as positions in highly sensitive ongoing security operations, in which it makes sense for officials to maintain their clearances when they leave government service. These former government officials are a vital resource. They have knowledge of top-secret intelligence that factors heavily into policy-making and decision-making and that is unavailable to other advisers. Obviously, we want CIA director Gina Haspel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, or National Security Adviser John Bolton to be able to tap into the wisdom of, say, Jim Woolsey, George Tenet, Bob Gates, or Leon Panetta. It is a great asset to the country to have that storehouse of institutional memory and sound judgment.

This, however, is the exception. For the overwhelming majority of officials, the presumption should be that security clearances lapse when they leave their government jobs. Intelligence access is a “need to know” proposition; upon exiting, a now-former official no longer needs to know. While I am skeptical, I am willing to assume for argument’s sake — as did the D.C. Circuit in Palmieri v. United States, the case David French cites — that a current government official or contractor may have some cognizable liberty interest in not having his security clearance arbitrarily revoked. I don’t, however, see any reason why a former official has any more right of access to the government’s defense secrets than to the desk in the office he has vacated.

As my own experience attests, this should not be a big deal. Because I worked on national-security cases in the Justice Department, I had a high security clearance. When I left, it lapsed — which was fine: They didn’t need me to have it anymore. Months later, I was asked to be a consultant regarding some war-on-terror legal issues confronting the Defense Department. To do the job, I needed my clearance back . . . and it took them just a few days to restore it. This was sensible: I had been subjected to searching background checks to get and maintain the clearance while I was a prosecutor, so it was not like they had to start from scratch; yet, before renewing my access, the government had an opportunity to assess whether I had previously adhered to the rules for handling classified information and whether any red flags had arisen since I left the Justice Department.

That is how it should be: When you leave, you lose your clearance, not as a penalty but because you don’t need it for official duties. (Being a better-credentialed and thus better-compensated cable-TV pundit is not an official duty.) If the government needs to consult you because of some unique experience you had as a national-security official, it should take very little time to reestablish the clearance. If complications arise that make it impossible to renew the clearance quickly, that may be a sign that it should not be renewed, and that the government should consult someone else.

Several weeks back, when it was first suggested that the president might start pulling the clearances of his political critics, I suggested in some interviews that paring back clearances government-wide was a good idea. I thought the president should convene an advisory panel of current and former national-security officials held in esteem on both sides of the aisle (there are many such people). They could then recommend standards for withdrawing clearances, from both former officials and others (such as non-government contractors), if the government does not need them to have access to classified information. Presumably, Brennan and many others would have fallen into the “no need to know” category. Their clearances could then have been pulled, along with many other former officials. The process would be a necessary housecleaning, not a partisan spat.

I wish the president did not so thrive on political vendettas. As a matter of objective fact, John Brennan should not have a security clearance. Does turning objective fact into good policy always have to look like Romper Room?

An Iranian Dream: “Why Can’t I Dance?” by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12847/iran-dancing-crime

To people in the West, it may seem impossible for dancing to become a crime. But as sharia laws get imposed, before you know it, any innocent act of “fun” can suddenly become a crime.

Maedeh Hojabri posted video clips of herself dancing on Instagram. For this “crime,” the 19-year-old woman was arrested, jailed without due process and without an opportunity to defend herself, and publicly shamed with a televised confession of her “crime.”

Who will the morality police come for next?

A Muslim mother in the sharia-ruled country of Iran, was talking about her 10-year-old daughter: “She asked me, ‘Why can’t I dance? We dance because we are happy. How can being happy be wrong? Why is dancing a crime?'” She spoke about the confusion in her daughter’s eyes. “It is a question I don’t know how to answer.”

Her daughter’s life had changed, she said, when she heard that a 19-year-old woman named Maedeh Hojabri had become the target of the Iran’s Islamist “morality” police. Her crime? Posting video clips of herself dancing on popular worldwide social media sites, like Instagram. The consequences for an act like that are severe. As has happened to other young women who posted video clips of themselves dancing, Hojabri was arrested, jailed without due process and without an opportunity to defend herself, and publicly shamed with a televised confession of her “crime.”

Hojabri’s dancing videos on Instagram made her a popular figure on Instagram in Iran, and gained her hundreds of thousands of followers on the social media platform. Imagine, if she were living in the West, how she would be treated. She would likely have been considered talented, have had opportunities thrown at her, been invited on popular shows and be sponsored for radio and television programs.