On Monday I was honored to speak on the main stage in Cleveland and address millions of Americans about the future of America and the youth of this country.
It was a tremendous honor and I hope you will take a moment to see what I said:
I was honored to be the youngest speaker of this year’s convention: http://www.dailywire.com/news/7598/youngest-rnc-speaker-we-are-party-youth-and-pardes-seleh For decades far-left groups have dominated the areas outside of conventions with protests and radicals starving attention.
For the past couple of days we sent our most talented and articulate spokespeople into the streets to argue for capitalism and limited government!
We have received countless interviews and news articles about Turning Point USA!
One of our best leaders, Gunnar Thorderson, made some people at MSNBC very upset when our “Socialism Sucks” sign kept popping up on TV.
We are in the streets fighting for freedom and liberty every single day. Most groups wouldn’t dare roll up their sleeves and go into hostile territory and challenge the leftist status quo.
Our student leaders fight the tough battles and win every single day.
Keep an eye on your TV for our leaders and activists as things really begin to heat up tonight. You can rest assured, that the Turning Point USA team will be there in full force.
Thank you so much for your continued support.
Best,
Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk
Founder & Executive Director
Turning Point USA
**The views reflected in the hyperlinked video are those of Charlie Kirk, personally, not reflecting of Turning Point USA. Turning Point USA is a nonprofit and therefore does not engage in political campaigns or elections. His remarks were expressed solely on a personal basis and those opinions are his own.**
PLAINFIELD, IL — A small plane crashed into a home in the middle of a densely populated Plainfield-Joliet subdivision Thursday, killing the pilot and setting a house and its surrounding yard ablaze but somehow causing no injuries on the ground, authorities said.
The house was occupied by a woman and her dog, but both made it out unharmed, according to a report from the Chicago Tribune.
Joliet Fire Department Battalion Chief John Stachelski confirmed that the pilot of the plane has died but was unable to say if more people were on board.
A spokesperson at the Joliet Fire Department said the crash occurred at Chestnut Hill Road and Bedford Drive in the Brighton Lakes subdivision, which has a Plainfield mailing address but is under the jurisdiction of the Joliet Fire and Police Department. Units are working on the scene.
Joliet Fire Department Battalion Chief Jeff Carey said no residents inside the home were injured at the time of the crash.
“They did a search of it, and nobody was inside,” Carey said.
“It sounds like it broke up in a few different pieces,” Carey said of the plane. “There was different debris from [Route] 59 and Theodore [Street] all the way to house. It sounds like it might have lost a piece and then came down.”
Stachelski said it appears the house fire was not from the plane striking it, but that is still under investigation.
Firefighters arrived on the scene shortly after 11 a.m. Thursday and cleared the area at around 2:30 p.m. Only fire investigators are now there, he said.
The Joliet Police Department is asking residents to stay away from the crash site.
“At approximately 11:15, a small plane went down in the area of Theodore and Brighton,” Joliet police said on Facebook. “Please seek alternative routes near Rt. 59 and Theodore, and Theodore and River Rd while the crash is investigated.”
FAA Spokesman Tony Molinaro said the plane was a small aircraft, but the type is unknown at this time. It is also unknown where the plane was heading and from where it took off.
“The FAA has sent a team to the crash site in Plainfield to determine the type of aircraft and to begin an investigation,” Molinaro said in an email to Patch. “The FAA will gather information and pass it to the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board], which is the agency that will lead the investigation and will determine the probable cause of the accident.”
Plainfield resident Mike Maksimik said there was a storm cloud overhead and it was just starting to rain when the crash occurred.
“The plane appeared to move right out of the storm cloud,” Maksimik wrote on Facebook. “It’s a gamble whether it was a lightning strike on the plane that killed (its) engine, but there was a definite crash of thunder before the actual boom from the explosion.”
Maksimik told Patch the actual site of the crash is 1812 Hampton Court.
“The plane missed my house and the trees (and) went over the pond and crashed,” he told Patch.
His brother, Andrew Maksimik, said he was fishing at the time of the crash.
“I thought it was lightning or thunder,” he told Patch, “but it was this airplane flying overhead very low. It sounded like he was trying to restart his motor. It was coming down so fast.”
The plane skimmed the house, hit the ground and exploded, Maksimik said.
“I could feel the heat of it,” he said.
Maksimik said the crash point was on the sidewalk and that the explosion was probably what ignited the home.
“It wasn’t damaged on the roof or anything. It was probably 20 feet away from the home. The flames were so wide they ignited the plastic siding of the home,” he said.
Maksimik is a Dyre, Indiana, resident but was in the area visiting. Sign up for the Patch newsletter
Plainfield is around 38 miles southwest of Chicago.
I can’t imagine a policy more irrelevant to the problems facing our society than bathroom privileges for transgender students. The bottom half of American society is collapsing. Voters are revolting against establishment candidates, casting doubt on the economic and cultural consensus that has predominated over the last generation. And the Obama administration presses for transgender rights? This is amazing, but not surprising given the history of post-sixties liberalism.
When I was a child, my home state, Maryland, was dominated by the postwar Democratic party: white ethnic working-class voters, educated progressives in Baltimore and its suburbs, and white segregationists who still saw the party of Woodrow Wilson as their natural home. In 1966, segregationist and gubernatorial candidate George Mahoney leveraged racial animus to triumph in a bitter Democratic party primary. But times were changing, and Republican Spiro Agnew won in the general election, attracting educated progressives and helped by more than 70 percent of the black vote.
That election was the beginning of major shifts in the electorate. Riots, protests, and the general atmosphere of collapse in the late sixties unsettled working-class white voters. White flight from Baltimore and other cities accelerated, and Richard Nixon’s “law and order” rhetoric resonated with the new suburbanites who had once been reliable voters in urban machines. Meanwhile, the Democratic party renounced its segregationist past and evolved into a coalition of African-American voters, white working-class voters who remained loyal to memories of FDR, white retirees dependent on Social Security, and college-educated liberals—a pattern repeated elsewhere throughout the country.
That coalition took a while to solidify, but it made sense. It retained the pro-labor emphasis of the old left, while giving play to some conservative social themes such as tough-on-crime stances that satisfied white working- and middle-class voters. It provided patronage to African Americans, whose leaders had superseded bosses of the old white ethnic urban political machine in cities like Baltimore. And it took up enough of the cultural causes and rhetoric of the new left to satisfy college-educated liberals.
But the wheels of change kept turning. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan moved the white working class into the Republican fold. But at the same time, the children of the white men who worked at places like Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point outside Baltimore were going to college. As a result, the pool of educated white liberals grew, adding votes to the Democratic coalition. And not just votes, but money and cultural power.
By the time we get to Obama, the Democratic party had become home to the richest and most well-educated Americans. Close to 70 percent of professionals voted for him in 2008, as did a majority of those making $200,000 or more per year. There are more Democrats than Republicans currently representing the hundred richest congressional districts. The successful people in today’s global economy, a mostly white cohort that makes up 20 to 25 percent of the population, are more likely to be Democrats than Republicans. The party of FDR is no longer the little guy’s party. It now advances the economic and cultural interests of post-Protestant WASPs, a consolidated cultural identity that, although populated mostly by white Americans, includes others who share their elite status.
At the same time that the successful upper end of society was coming to lean Democratic, another dynamic was at work on the other end. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act dramatically increased immigration from Latin America and Asia, populating America with new vulnerable constituencies. Over time, this provided a ready population to slot into the role of the downtrodden, allowing the Democratic party to sustain a sense of itself as the defender of the weak.
These recent immigrants and children of immigrants have been replacing the Reagan Democrats, giving the Democratic party electoral muscle to support its post-Protestant WASP leadership. But there is a difference. The white working and middle class in the FDR and LBJ coalitions vied for control of American culture and politics. Immigrant populations, by contrast, enter the Democratic party coalition on the same terms as African Americans. They are clients in a millet system, benefiting from liberal patronage. Add gay people, single women, and anyone who feels himself an “outsider,” and the basic structure of today’s Democratic party comes into view. Its policy priorities are dominated by a large cohort of well-educated, well-off, mostly white liberals who justify their ascendancy with promises to promote and protect those who feel “excluded” or “marginalized.”
In this coalition, gay rights become particularly important. Environmentalism energizes upper middle-class liberals, for example, but can often run counter to the interests of those lower on the social ladder. Banning fracking won’t energize Latino or African-American voters. Gay rights, by contrast, function as an upper-middle-class liberal issue that nevertheless resonates throughout the Democratic coalition. Led by well-educated, mostly white liberals, LGBT organizations, like feminist ones and pro-abortion ones, are strongly tilted toward the problems facing successful and well-off gays and lesbians. But the civil rights rhetoric of ending discrimination and promoting inclusion matches concerns among African Americans, Hispanics, and other voter blocs that feel marginalized as well. This makes gay rights the perfect focal point for Democrats. The movement has a well-off, well-educated constituency whose goals pose no threat to the economic and cultural ascendancy of post-Protestant WASPs—and at the same time promotes a solidarity in marginality that keeps the Democratic coalition unified and motivated. The problem, of course, is that a solidarity-in-marginality coalition capable of commanding electoral majorities has an increasingly hard time maintaining its plausibility. How long can a coalition that wins elections and exercises power pose as the party of the marginalized? At some point, political success undermines the urgency of a rainbow coalition. The tensions between the One Percent focus of feminism and the LGBT movements and the interests of immigrants and African Americans becomes more visible, to say nothing of the disconnect between the base of the Democratic party from the economic and cultural interests of those who fund and run it.
To motivate their voter base, liberals have invested a great deal in identifying ever-new patterns of discrimination. Notions such as “microaggression” and “intersectionality” reflect second-wave (or is it third-wave?) liberation politics. They gain currency because of the law of political supply and demand. The twenty-first-century Democratic solidarity-in-marginality coalition is held together by anxieties about exclusion and domination by the “other,” which is to say by Republican voters. This creates a strong political demand for narratives of oppression, which liberal intellectuals are happy to supply.
This dynamic operates most visibly at our universities, where well-off, mostly white liberals—the post-Protestant WASPs—rule. The legitimacy of this elite depends upon its commitment to “include” the “excluded.” It goes without saying that an Ivy League administrator must manage the optics very carefully to sustain “marginality” among the talented students who have gained admission. “Microaggression” and other key terms in the ever-evolving scholasticism of discrimination thus play very useful roles. They renew the threats of discrimination and exclusion, and this reinforces the power of liberal elites. Their institutional ascendancy is necessary to protect and provide patronage to the “excluded.” I’m quite certain that if political correctness succeeds in suppressing “microaggressions,” we’ll soon hear about “nano-aggressions.” The logic of solidarity in marginality requires oppression, and solidarity in marginality is necessary in order to sustain liberal power.
Outside our universities, life is less theoretical and the rhetoric more demotic. The standard approach has been to renew solidarity in marginality by demonizing conservatives as racists, xenophobes, and “haters.” To maintain loyalty, the Democratic party incites anxiety about discrimination and exclusion. A form of reverse race-baiting, perhaps best thought of as bigot-baiting, has become crucial for sustaining the Democratic coalition, which is why we hear so much about “hate” these days. At the recent gay pride parade in New York, a few weeks after the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, marchers held aloft an avenue-wide banner that read, “Republican Hate Kills!”
It’s important to remember a first law of politics for solidarity in marginality: Political success makes it harder and harder to sustain solidarity in marginality, and this leads to bigot-baiting. We’ve seen an increase of harsh denunciations, not in spite of progressive victories on issues like gay marriage, but because of them. When Obama became president, a superficial observer might have concluded that the election of a black man to the nation’s highest office would diminish the political currency of anti-racist rhetoric. But this ignores the symbolic needs of the Democratic party. Black Lives Matter and redoubled attacks on discrimination are demanded by racial progress. Solidarity in marginality needs to be renewed, especially when the marginal gain access to power.
This pattern of rhetorical escalation because ofprogress in the fight against discrimination is also evident in characterizations of Trump voters as racists and bigots. Leon Wieseltier says of them, “They kindle, in the myopia of their pain, to racism and nativism and xenophobia and misogyny and homophobia and anti-Semitism.” No mainstream figure talked this way when I was young—and when these descriptions were much more plausible. Incendiary, denunciatory rhetoric was characteristic of a marginal figure like George Wallace, who spoke of “sissy-britches welfare people” and called civil-rights protesters “anarchists.”
It’s commonplace now for liberals to talk this way. This is not because America has become more racially, ethnically, religiously, or sexually divided. All the indicators suggest otherwise. It’s because the Democratic party depends on a constant bombardment of denunciation to gin up fear. That someone as intelligent as Wieseltier participates in bigot-baiting in such blatant ways indicates how indispensable it has become for maintaining liberal power.
It’s in this context that transgender bathroom access becomes an issue of national import for the Obama administration. Progressives need “haters,” and flushing them out so they can be politically useful targets of denunciation requires advancing the front lines of the culture wars. The ideology of transgenderism provides a near perfect combination. It so completely contradicts common sense and any worldview tethered to reality that resistance is guaranteed. Moreover, the cause of transgender “rights” focuses on confused and troubled children and adults, individuals whose condition makes them by definition marginal. The disordered nature of their emotional lives makes them vulnerable as well. They’re ready-made victims of an oppressive conservatism, an ideal focus for another round of bigot-baiting. Denouncing the “haters” who resist transgender ideology plays to fears of exclusion and discrimination that keep the rainbow coalition together.
The Republican party establishment recognizes this dynamic, which is why many conservative leaders have been urging retreat from the culture war. In their view, religious conservatives should reposition themselves as victims of a progressive dogmatism that threatens religious liberty. This strategy makes some sense, drawing as it does on liberalism’s own rhetoric of oppression and victimhood. But it misjudges the political realities of our time. Today’s rich-oriented liberalism can only maintain power through the support of voters united in fear of discrimination and marginality—black Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, single women, gays and lesbians, and others who worry they don’t fit into what they imagine to be the “mainstream” (which hardly exists anymore). As a consequence, every retreat on the cultural front will be followed by renewed progressive attacks designed to generate politically useful “hate.” Religious liberty is redescribed as the “right to discriminate.” Here again the LGBT movement plays an especially important role. Its agenda collides with traditional religious convictions about God, creation, nature, and morality, guaranteeing the ongoing culture war that has become so essential for post-Protestant WASPs to maintain power.
Transgender activists zealously advance their cause, and they do so with the support of establishment liberals. Their activist zealotry is a political asset, not a liability. They provoke the resistance that can be described as “hate.” Even if the Republican party succeeds in organizing retreats from controversial cultural and moral issues, there’s always a Westboro Baptist Church or some other marginal group to become poster children for the enduring, supposedly powerful forces of discrimination and oppression. As we’ve seen in the aftermath of the Orlando atrocity, even a terrorist attack motivated by Islamist ideology can be transformed into an assault made possible by traditional Christianity, or even the mere existence of political conservatives. “Republican Hate Kills.” And the anti-establishment electorate that’s getting behind Donald Trump gets transformed into racists, xenophobes, homophobes, and anti-Semites.
Bigot-baiting. It’s not going to end soon, no matter what we say or do. The ever-shriller denunciations directed our way stem from the rhetorical needs of the Democratic party. Its leadership knows that its power, like the power of George Wallace and others in an earlier era, depends on an atmosphere of fear, in this case a fear of discrimination, exclusion, and oppression, a fear that Bull Connor has been resurrected. This need explains why the ideologies of multiculturalism postulate that Western culture itself is based on oppression. The threat must be infinite and everlasting.
The present crusade for transgender bathroom privileges in high schools, like so much of the progressive agenda in recent years, is not about civil rights. It’s about renewing the symbolism of oppression and finding the “haters” that rich, mostly white liberals need to sustain their political power.
Neuhaus, the Liberal
The most recent issue of National Affairs (summer 2016) features an essay about our founder, “The Liberalism of Richard John Neuhaus.” The author, Matthew Rose, currently director and senior fellow at the Berkeley Institute, was a junior fellow at First Things and worked with Neuhaus. Reading the essay, I was struck by the continuity of Neuhaus’s thought. I hope the same continuity characterizes First Things.
Rose cites a 1990 contribution Neuhaus made to a Christian Century series, “How My Mind Has Changed.” That was the year First Things got going. Already well known as a Christian neoconservative, Neuhaus had shifted from left to right in the 1970s and was active in bringing the newly powerful Christian right into conversation with a range of conservative intellectuals. But in that article, he denied any fundamental changes in his outlook. He recalled that while in seminary, he formed lasting convictions. He would be “in descending order of importance, religiously orthodox, culturally conservative, politically liberal, and economically pragmatic.” To this personal “quadrilateral” he remained loyal, even as the world around him changed, forcing him to change in order to stay true to his principles.
Does First Things remain loyal as well? It’s best to begin with the least important: economic pragmatism. Neuhaus didn’t treat free-market capitalism as the fundamental imperative. Like many of his generation, he came to see that socialism, while theoretically the morally superior option, at least in some accounts, in fact concentrates power in the hands of a few, suppresses freedom, and leads to economic stagnation. Without a free economy, it’s hard to sustain a free society, much less a prosperous one. But he didn’t suppose that market deregulation and the free flow of capital and labor would cure all social ills and automatically promote the well-being of most citizens.
By the time First Things was founded, Neuhaus belonged to the “two cheers for capitalism” camp. (Irving Kristol coined the phrase to describe Pope John Paul II’s endorsement of free markets in his encyclical most friendly to capitalism, Centesimus Annus.) In our first year of publication, Neuhaus ran an article by Paul Johnson on the moral inadequacy of capitalism as society’s sole organizing principle, another by Amy Sherman on why Christians concerned about the economic development of poor nations should acknowledge the success of market-oriented models, and still another by Christopher Lasch arguing that in contemporary American politics, cultural conservatives are mismatched with free-market proponents whose ideals of economic freedom undermine stable communities. First Things remains economically pragmatic. When the magazine was launched, half the world was coming out from underneath the suffocating blanket of “actually existing socialism.” We were rightfully optimistic. Eastern Europe is today both prosperous and free. China and India have seen remarkable growth, lifting millions out of abject poverty. But it’s now 2016 and we face the problems of capitalism’s excesses, even its successes, not socialism’s deadening effects. Man is fallen, and our bondage to sin leads to a profoundly distorted ambition for wealth, not just for the luxury it brings, but the power as well. There are no self-regulating, self-correcting economic systems. Free enterprise may provide more safeguards against tyranny than any other system, but it too needs to be checked by our collective judgments about what best serves the common good. There was no party line on economics when First Things was founded, and that remains the case.
Which brings us to politics and Neuhaus’s liberalism. As Rose explains, Neuhaus was a great proponent of what he liked to call “the American experiment.” In his view, our free, democratic society is an open-ended project. We continue in an unbroken conversation—sometimes a bitter debate—about how to structure our common life, both formally with laws and informally through civic norms and a shared moral consensus. We don’t know the end point of this experiment in freedom. We can’t foretell what political arrangements or policies will best promote human dignity. This means we need to remain open to new ideas, new voices, and new possibilities.
I want to remain true to that kind of liberalism, one based in humility about our political judgments. When it comes to taxation, distribution of resources, campaign finance, constitutional interpretation, and many other matters of political importance, we’re conservative, by and large, as was Neuhaus during his years as editor-in-chief. But we know we hold our positions about matters of politics and public policy in a conversation rather than as non-negotiable principles. That makesFirst Things liberal in the very precise sense of enjoying a precious liberty. We enjoy the freedom to entertain different arguments about how to order public life, which is why we can be generally conservative (by today’s standards) while publishing Hadley Arkes against constitutional originalism, Patrick Deneen against corporate power, and David Bentley Hart against capitalism (among other things). Like the Church and synagogue, First Things can be ideologically diverse precisely because we don’t treat politics as the first thing.
Not everything, however, can be a matter of open-ended conversation. Rose reports that Neuhaus was influenced by Walter Lippmann’s 1955 book, The Public Philosophy. The great liberal commentator argued that core liberal commitments to majority rule, free speech, and private property require an underlying moral consensus. Without such a consensus, the free and open conversation about public life turns into a contest for power rather than a means to realize a higher vision. This marks the death of liberalism. Absent objective moral truths, rights become political and thus can be redefined—or defined away.
Here Neuhaus could be quite fierce, as I hope First Thingsremains. It is the very opposite of liberal to imagine that a court, however supreme, can suspend an innocent human being’s right to life. Neuhaus died before that same court got around to redefining marriage, but his response would be the same. When a court can take hold of a primordial institution and remake it at will, nothing is safe from the tyranny of those in power. They can just as well redefine what it means to be a father, mother, or child. Or what it means to be a man or woman. What, exactly, are those indispensable moral truths that provide the stable basis for the ongoing conversation about public life that characterizes a genuinely liberal society? Lippmann argued for natural law, as do many who continue to play an important role inFirst Things. Neuhaus opted for a more rhetorical and less metaphysical approach. He liked to point to Martin Luther King’s winsome combination of a biblically inspired vision of justice and appeals to America’s founding ideals of equality. The moral consensus that grounds our liberal culture is covenantal, he argued. What this means, exactly, he never defined, but instead illustrated in the many efforts he made to connect his own Christian convictions to his political judgments, often in the pages he filled at the end of every issue. He was both sure that moral truth has objective reality and willing to entertain a variety of explanations of that reality.
We remain metaphysical realists without plunking down for any one approach. We know that our choices are not self-validating. A culture of freedom serves human dignity when freedom serves moral truth. But we’re aware that our philosophical and theological tradition is itself a debate about what moral truth is and how we know it. First Thingsreflects the ongoing effort by many authors to speak religiously, morally, and publically, not according to a specific formula or in accord with agreed-upon metaphysical and theological principles.
With his usual genius for quotable formulations, Neuhaus liked to reiterate a version of the following: “Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion.” He was convinced that an ideological secularism (as opposed to a political secularism) undermines liberalism and over the long haul cannot sustain a free society. True liberalism requires acknowledging the transcendent authority of God.
Whose God? That’s a theological debate Neuhaus thought worth having. What does God command? Another debate. How does one reason from divine imperatives to public philosophies? Again, Neuhaus ran a magazine in which we could offer different answers. With so many open questions, was Neuhaus a closet relativist? No, he was a modern man aware of the open-ended character of our most important arguments about transcendence, authority, and how to organize our common life in a pluralistic society—which is to say he was a genuine liberal. And he recognized that those open questions are fruitful rather than futile only insofar as we are united in our efforts to tether our answers to something greater, something higher.
The religious impulse acknowledges and serves the divine. Neuhaus’s intuition was that this impulse anchors liberalism’s greatest achievements. I’m from a younger generation. Irving Kristol said of his generation that a neoconservative was a liberal mugged by reality. I’m conservative because I was mugged by liberals rather than reality. Many of us have felt the illiberalism of secular liberalism. This can tempt us to adopt anti-liberal and anti-modern stances. I certainly am tempted. But when I’m honest with myself, I recognize that I too am a modern man. I recognize the fact that in our pluralistic society, many questions are open, and I cherish aspects of the culture of freedom our age has encouraged. All the more reason to emphasize the upward thrust of transcendence and its commanding power. True liberality in the conversation that is public life requires a spirit of humility before God, which is quite different from a humility that stems from relativism or the conviction that there are not moral truths to be loyal to. It also requires a willingness to be surprised, even to the point of being converted. There are surely some special people who come by these qualities naturally. But for most of us, they are nurtured by the life of faith.
We often hear of open-mindedness. It’s not a bad quality. But the more important quality is serious-mindedness. Neuhaus was right in his most important intuition as a cultural critic and political commentator. Depth of conviction sustains a free society, not diversity, pluralism, tolerance, and respect for rights. They are fruits of liberalism, not its source.
Heather MacDonald has been writing about the Obama administration’s war on cops for several years, and she has a new book out on the subject. It is not accidental or happenstance that police are being assassinated in large numbers now in cities across the country. A radical anti-police movement Black Lives Mater, has been honored and feted by this White House and applauded by the liberal press as if it is Martin Luther King’s modern civil rights movement. . BLM,and its administration and media flacks, have relied on phony statistics to argue police regularly shoot innocent unarmed blacks. This is nonsense. The real numbers revealed by a Harvard professor last week show that blacks are not shot by police disproportionately to their numbers.
> The number of unarmed blacks shot by police annually is maybe a few more than two dozen. Many of those, like Michael Brown, are hardly innocent victims. Brown robbed a convenience store, grabbed the store owner and threatened him, assaulted a police officer, punched him and reached for his gun and then charged the officer. Hands up, don’t shoot? Hardly. Brown was responsible for his own death.
> Our president saw fit to talk about police bigotry while in Europe after two shootings by police. At the memorial service for five Dallas police officers, much of his talk was to tell cops they were bigoted.
> When does the President ever discuss a police shooting of someone who is not black, which is the great majority of police shootings? He does not, because these incidents do not assist him in further radicalizing blacks, getting them out on the streets, and insuring they are fired up to vote.
> We always hear about black parents having the talk with their kids. It is 40 times more likely a black will be shot by another black in the neighborhood than by a policeman. In Chicago, it is about 200 times more likely. Cops are not the problem in the black community. They would be the solution (as they were in New York where Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, and their police commissioners probably saved over 10,000 black lives over the years by their extraordinary effort to tackle the crime problem). But when the community is agitated to see cops as the enemy, the police only come in after the crime is committed, not before. So you get Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago and other places now experiencing the Ferguson effect- rapidly rising violent crime rates..
Letter to the Editor by John Sobel
The Fire Spreads
Three cops dead in Baton Rouge, and the analogies to the 1960s deepen.
Perhaps it will turn out that the latest assassination of police officers, this time in Baton Rouge, is unrelated to the hatred fomented by the Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps the gunmen were members of militia groups aggrieved by federal overreach, say. But the overwhelming odds are that this most recent assault on law and order, taking the lives of three officers and wounding at least three more, is the direct outcome of the political and media frenzy that followed the police shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, less than two weeks ago. That frenzy further amplified the dangerously false narrative that racist police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today.
President Barack Obama bears direct responsibility for the lethal spread of that narrative. In a speech from Poland just hours before five officers were assassinated in Dallas on July 7, Obama misled the nation about policing and race, charging officers nationwide with preying on blacks because of the color of their skin. Obama rolled out a litany of junk statistics to prove that the criminal justice system is racist. Blacks were arrested at twice the rate of whites, he complained, and get sentences almost 10 percent longer than whites for the same crime. Missing from Obama’s address was any mention of the massive racial differences in criminal offending and criminal records that fully account for arrest rates and sentence lengths. (Blacks, for example, commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at about 11 to 12 times the rate of whites alone.) Instead, Obama chalked up the disparities to “biases, some conscious and unconscious that have to be rooted out . . . across our criminal justice system.”
Then five Dallas officers were gunned down out of race hatred and cop hatred. Did Obama shelve his incendiary rhetoric and express his unqualified support for law enforcement? No, he doubled down, insulting law enforcement yet again even as it was grieving for its fallen comrades. In a memorial service for the Dallas officers, Obama rebuked all of America for its “bigotry,” but paid special attention to alleged police bigotry:
When African-Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment, when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently. So that if you’re black, you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested; more likely to get longer sentences; more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime. When mothers and fathers raised their kids right, and have the talk about how to respond if stopped by a police officer—yes, sir; no, sir—but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door; still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy.
When all this takes place, more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.
The irresponsible zealotry of this rebuke was stunning. Obama was fully on notice that the hatred of cops was reaching homicidal levels. And yet his commitment to prosecuting his crusade against phantom police racism trumped considerations of prudence and safety, on the one hand, and decent respect for the fallen, on the other. Of course, Obama also uttered the mandatory praise for officers who “do an incredibly hard and dangerous job fairly and professionally,” and he warned against “paint[ing] all police as biased, or bigoted.” This was self-indulgent hypocrisy. A passing denunciation of stereotyping hardly compensates for the insane accusation that black parents rightly fear that any time “their child walks out the door,” that child could be killed by a cop.
It is possible that the Dallas killers and the Baton Rouge killers had not heard Obama’s most recent speeches on criminal-justice racism, or even the many that preceded them. But even if the cop murderers had not encountered Obama’s exact words, the influence of his rhetoric on the hatred in the streets is absolute. Obama’s imprimatur on the Black Lives Matter demagoguery gives it enormous additional thrust and legitimacy, echoing throughout public discourse into the most isolated corners of the inner city.
The media bear equal responsibility for the ongoing carnage. The press immediately slotted the shootings of Sterling and Castile into the racist-cop paradigm, though the facts about what the officers saw and whether the victims were in fact reaching for their guns were unknown. The New York Times went into cop-calumny overdrive, with an editorial entitled “When Will the Killing Stop?” and a series of back-to-back op-eds decrying the brutal oppression of blacks in America. One of those op-eds, by an assistant professor at Purdue University, bemoaned that blacks were up against a world “where too many people have their fingers on the triggers of guns aimed directly at black people.” The professor was presumably not referring to the thugs who shot a three-year-old boy in Chicago on Father’s Day this year, leaving him paralyzed for life, or who shot a five-year-old girl, a seven-year-old boy, and an 11-year-old boy in Chicago on the Fourth of July. She was probably also not referring to Le’Vonte King Jason, a two-year-old boy killed on July 8 in Minneapolis, a few miles away and two days after Philando Castile was shot by police during a traffic stop. Jason was in a car driven by his father that was peppered with bullets in a drive-by shooting; the gunfire hit his 15-month-old sister as well. Except for a local columnist, the press ignored Jason’s funeral, in contrast to the media scrum that inundated Castile’s funeral on the same day.
Even before this latest attack on the police, officers across the country have been reeling under the prejudice directed against them. A police trainer meeting with officers on July 7, hours before the Dallas carnage, reported to me that the cops were “out of their minds that the default [in the Castile and Sterling shootings] is racism, without one iota of fact.” Officers have already been backing off of proactive policing under the constant charge that they are racist for making pedestrian stops and enforcing public-order laws in black neighborhoods. In June, I spoke with police officers in Dallas about the 75 percent increase in homicides the city has experienced this year. The officers chalked it up to de-policing. “Officers are now leery of doing their job,” a cop who runs warrants in the high-crime Five Points area told me. “Why make stops in the first place?” This summer of blue bloodshed will deter officers from discretionary policing even more. Expect violent crime, already on the rise since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in summer 2014, to spike further.
Between the Dallas assassinations and today’s, officers have been shot at and ambushed in Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. Authorities have been circumspect in identifying the reasons behind those shootings—unlike the alacrity with which racial motives are assigned to cops when they shoot someone in the line of duty— and the incidents have been brushed under the rug. But we are quickly reaching the worst days of the nightmare 1960s, when it seemed that the very foundation of society was breaking apart. The difference between the 1960s and today is that the hatred of law enforcement and of whites is being stoked by the highest reaches of the establishment. Universities sometimes seem like little else than factories of desperately ginned-up racial grievance. That the cop killer in Dallas and apparently in Baton Rouge as well came out of the military is an indication that the happy talk about how the military is an engine of racial reconciliation is naïve. The country has been pretending that the main source of racism today comes from whites. Anyone who has spent time in the inner city and even more middle-class black precincts—such as college campuses—knows differently.
It may be too late to stop this fire from spreading. But Obama has one more chance to try to put it out. He failed that opportunity in his remarks hours after the Baton Rouge carnage, delivering instead an anodyne call to heal “our divisions” and discard “inflammatory rhetoric thrown around to advance an agenda.” Implication: Blame for “inflammatory rhetoric” is equally shared by those who attack cops and those who defend them. Sorry, Mr. President, those who tell the truth about crime and policing are not part of the problem and they bear no responsibility for the massacre of cops. The killing of cops is furthered exclusively by those peddling a false narrative that cops harbor lethal bias toward blacks. Obama should call for the Black Lives Matter movement to fold its tent—and he himself should start telling the truth about inner-city crime.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the New York Times bestseller The War on Cops.
Illinois state Rep. Bill Mitchell, R-Forsyth, repeatedly slammed a three-year extension of the state’s Expanded All Kids program that was passed in the Illinois House in April. While arguing against the bill, Mitchell claimed that All Kids has spent a fortune on covering illegal immigrants with taxpayer dollars.
“The latest (All Kids) audit said, over the last six years, the state of Illinois spent about $320 million on illegal immigrants,” he said in April.
All Kids is a health insurance program run by the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services that offers comprehensive health care to thousands of children in the state. Expanded All Kids is the portion of the program that covers poor families and undocumented children.
As of the 2013-14 fiscal year, the program had a total enrollment of 52,075 children under the age of 19, of which 30,441 were classified as undocumented.
All Kids has faced criticism over the years for its coverage of undocumented immigrants as well as for allegedly being more expensive and providing less coverage than originally anticipated.
We decided to investigate Mitchell’s claim about health care spending on undocumented immigrants. Looking at the numbers
Mitchell’s claim is based on several audits of All Kids conducted by William Holland, the Illinois auditor general at the time. The latest available report was released in February 2016 and covers health care costs up until 2014; there is no data available for fiscal year 2015.
Mitchell’s office told PolitiFact that his comment was referring to the amount of money spent between 2009 and 2014.
A press release provided by the office stated that, “none of these costs were matched by the federal government. Illinois taxpayers paid the entire cost for these non-citizens.”
We examined the audit reports to break down the costs of health care associated with undocumented children in Illinois each year.
The total costs of health care during the time period add up to approximately $319.6 million, which matches Mitchell’s claim.
The audit reports also list the costs of services by each category. For example, in the 2013-14 fiscal year, dental services cost $12 million, or around 17 percent of that year’s total costs.
We reached out to the Auditor General’s office and to All Kids for information on how much was spent on undocumented children for each category of health care. We’ll add this information if we obtain it.
The All Kids program confirmed the accuracy of the figures in an email, but did not offer comments on Mitchell’s claim.
How do the yearly costs of health care for undocumented children fit into the overall state budget?
The 2014 Illinois budget was $67 billion. The General Revenue Fund, the part of the budget that contains discretionary spending, was approximately $31 billion. The amount of money spent on undocumented children through the Expanded All Kids program translates to roughly .136 percent of discretionary spending for that year. Are there hidden benefits to the program?
One question worth exploring is if granting health insurance to undocumented children carries any hidden economic benefits that Rep. Mitchell didn’t account for in his claim.
The health care and immigration experts we interviewed said that health care programs often partly pay for themselves over long periods of time.
First, the children receive direct benefits from being covered, such as decreased mortality and a higher chance of attending college.
Additionally, the state may receive long-term economic benefits. A recent preliminary studyconcluded that, “the government will recoup 56 cents of each dollar spent on childhood Medicaid by the time these children reach age 60.” However, this study was conducted on the federal level, and doesn’t specifically examine undocumented children.
Matt Notowidigdo, associate professor of economics at Northwestern University, told us that hospitals in Illinois often already cover the uninsured without receiving compensation, and may actually benefit from Expanded All Kids.
“If undocumented immigrants already consume a lot of health care in our hospitals but often don’t pay for that care, then one can view this program as helping out hospitals financially,” he said in an email.
It’s hard to use this research to judge Mitchell’s claim because of how specific and small the Expanded All Kids program is. We found no research directly discussing any economic benefits that Illinois would receive from the program. Our ruling
Mitchell claimed that the state of Illinois spent $320 million on health care for illegal immigrants over the past six years.
The state’s independent audit reports on the All Kids program from 2009 to 2014 support his claim. There’s no direct evidence or research that shows Mitchell failed to mention any important unseen benefits of the program that would significantly change the context of his argument.
We rate this claim True.
CLEVELAND — In what is becoming a depressingly regular occurrence in the Obama era, police officers were murdered by a black militant in a shootout in Baton Rouge on Sunday, apparently in revenge for the recent police-involved death of black career criminal Alton Sterling outside a Baton Rouge food store.
At time of writing, three police officers had succumbed to the injuries they suffered in Louisiana’s capital city. Another three were wounded.
Of course, murdering police officers has long been encouraged by activists with the Marxist, anti-American, revolutionary Black Lives Matter cult, with the support of the activist Left and financing from speculator George Soros. A year ago Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who openly advocates the mass murder of whites, called for “10,000 fearless men” to “rise up and kill those who kill us.” Like many radicals, Farrakhan mischaracterizes Black Lives Matter as a rising civil rights movement.
President Barack Hussein Obama, who a decade ago promoted inter-racial warfare in Kenya, has long tried to provoke civil unrest here in the U.S. with his hateful anti-cop rhetoric and his relentless demonization of opponents. His goal is fundamental transformation of the United States. A Red diaper baby who identifiesviolence-espousing communist Frantz Fanon as an intellectual influence, he has also steadfastly refused to condemn Black Lives Matter. In fact Obama has lavished attention on the movement’s leaders and invited them to the White House over and over again.
The Baton Rouge attack came 10 days after a black militant murdered five Dallas area police officers, the deadliest attack on U.S. law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001.
A few days later Obama flew to Dallas and attended a memorial service at which he lectured the dead officers’ relatives about how racist and brutal police officers are. The very next day Obama hosted leaders of Black Lives Matter, whose members urge the murder of cops, at the White House.
The Baton Rouge attack came 12 days after local police killed homeless recidivist Sterling during an altercation. Sterling, who had reportedly threatened a passer-by with a gun, violently resisted arrest and tried to grab a policeman’s gun.
The shooter in Baton Rouge was killed by police following an exchange of gunfire outside a fitness center. He has been identified as Gavin Eugene Long, who claimed to have been a member of Nation of Islam. He also reportedly turned 29 yesterday.
Long was honorably discharged from the U.S. Marines in 2010. A fervent racist, he ranted against “crackers,” the Daily Caller reports.
Long, who also used the name Cosmo Ausar Setepenra, talked about the Dallas massacre and recent police shootings of black men in social media posts, according to Heavy. “Violence is not THE answer (its [sic] a answer), but at what point do you stand up so that your people dont [sic] become the Native Americans…EXTINCT?,” he tweeted July 13.
Referring to the death of Alton Sterling, he said, “If I would have been there with Alton — clap,” Long said in a July 14 video. In the video he also discussed black liberation theology and said he wrote a book.
“I wrote it for my dark-skinned brothers,” he said of the book.
“If you look at all the rebels like Black Panthers, Huey P. Newton, Malcolm X … Elijah Muhammad, they was light-skinned. But we know how hard y’all got it.”
In another video, Long justified his fellow ex-soldier and black militant Micah X. Johnson’s killing of cops in Dallas. “It’s justice, you know what I’m saying,” Long said.
Long may also have telegraphed his plans in a cryptic Twitter post early Sunday morning. He wrote, “Just [because] you wake up every morning doesn’t mean that you’re living. And just [because] you shed your physical body doesn’t mean that you’re dead.”
The officers Long killed are Brad Garafola, 45, Matthew Gerald, 41, and Montrell Jackson, 32.
Jackson, a black man, had poignantly sounded a note of despair in a Facebook post July 8, three days after Sterling’s death at the hands of police and as racial tensions ramped up in Baton Rouge and across the nation.
“I’m tired physically and emotionally. Disappointed in some family, friends, and officers for some reckless comments but hey what’s in your heart is in your heart. I still love you all because hate takes too much energy but I definitely won’t be looking at you the same. … I swear to God I love this city but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat. I’ve experienced so much in my short life and these last 3 days have tested me to the core. When people you know begin to question your integrity you realize they don’t really know you at all.”
President Obama commented on the killings but he seemed strange, playing against type. He sounded like a president who actually cared about his countrymen.
“These attacks are the work of cowards who speak for no one. They right no wrongs. They advance no causes. The officers in Baton Rouge; the officers in Dallas – they were our fellow Americans, part of our community, part of our country, with people who loved and needed them, and who need us now – all of us – to be at our best.”
Finally Obama sounded kind of presidential. But anyone who follows Obama knows it won’t last. He’ll undercut these remarks with cheap agitprop soon as he lectures Americans and especially cops on how racist they are.
Oh wait! He already did.
Breitbart reported yesterday that the Obama White House formally denied a petition with 141,444 signatures gathered in just 10 days to “formally recognize Black Lives Matter as a terrorist organization,” a designation this writer proposed in a recent FrontPage article.
The government doesn’t designate domestic terrorist organizations, was the official weaselly reply from those who process the petitions.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump wasted no time correctly blaming Obama for the climate of racial hatred and violence.
“We grieve for the officers killed in Baton Rouge today,” Trump wrote on Facebook. “How many more law enforcement and people have to die because of a lack of leadership in our country? We demand law and order.”
We can only hope President Obama will have the basic personal decency to stay away from memorial services for the slain Baton Rouge officers. They don’t need our Marxist president rubbing more of his cop-hating filth in their faces.
But no one has ever accused Obama of putting decency above politics.
Meanwhile, Obama’s ideological soulmates from Black Lives Matter showed up at a protest in Cleveland on Saturday near the Republican National Convention that officially convenes today.
Speakers included New Black Panther Party leader Malik Zulu Shabazz and Cornel West, a tenured militant black pseudo-intellectual. Shabazz called Trump “an uncouth racist,” adding Hillary Clinton “isn’t that much better.” Clinton will “just kill you nicely.”
At a Sunday event West called Trump a “neo-fascist catastrophe.”
Black militancy will play a huge role at the Democrats’ nominating convention that starts a week from today in Philadelphia. It will reportedly be headlined by the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown (respectively, Sybrina Fulton and Lezley McSpadden), two young black thugs killed by white men in self-defense.
This makes sense. After all, the Democratic National Committee has expressly endorsed Black Lives Matter.
Politics Tonight Kicks Off RNC Coverage with Hughes
As the Republican National Convention kicked off, IOP Co-Founder Pat Hughes joined Paul Lisnek on CLTV’s Politics Tonight to discuss one of the most controversial candidates and contentious conventions in recent history.
This confrontation has been a long time coming, and a longer time deserved.
Sheriff David Clarke appears on set with Don Lemon who cuts off the feed and sends the show to commercial because he doesn’t like the pushback.
When they come back from commercial, Clarke doesn’t let up. Notice how Don Lemon demands a civil conversation then doesn’t let Clarke finish a sentence. Watch Video
As day turns into night, the young mother’s routine proceeds as usual. Her husband, who works the evening shift as a police officer, left home hours earlier, leaving it to her to prepare dinner and feed the children, then see to it that they are bathed and put to bed. These things are done, and it’s almost nine o’clock. She has a little time to relax and watch some television.
Near the television set are family photographs, some featuring her husband in his uniform: this one on his police academy graduation day; another of the two of them, younger and still childless; others of him and the kids as they grow. She occasionally may glance at the pictures as she watches television, but only rarely does she pause to consider what that uniform means and the danger it signifies. She has done so more often lately, but she has shared this only with her closest friends, not with her husband. She trusts—for she must trust—that he will go off to work in the afternoon and come home sometime after midnight, often to rise early the next day to appear in court. It sometimes seems to her that she is a single mother. Her friends sometimes ask if she worries. Not often, she tells them. Yes, it can be difficult at times, but this is who, and what, she married.
She knows her husband is working downtown tonight, where a Black Lives Matter protest is being held. These events can be emotionally fraught, he has told her, but he and his coworkers are well prepared and expect no trouble. He has sent her a few texts, letting her know that things have gone smoothly and are winding down. She turns on the news to see it for herself.
And then it happens.
Suddenly on her television is a report from downtown. She recognizes the streets and the buildings, but the scene is one of chaos. Sirens are wailing, people are screaming, protesters and police officers are running—the protesters in one direction, the police in the other. The first reports are sketchy, but what’s clear is that people have been shot.
Her first impulse is to reach for the phone and call her husband, but she quickly reconsiders. He will be busy dealing with this. He won’t be able to answer the call. And when he doesn’t, she will worry all the more. She opts to send a text instead. How to word it? She considers, “Are you okay?” This is the question she most immediately needs answered. But no, she doesn’t want to convey her worry. She wants her husband to remain focused on his work, not on her. She settles on “Watching the news. Call when you can.” She doesn’t include “I love you,” as she might otherwise, for to do so in this moment would suggest the desperation in her yearning for contact. No, best to keep it simple, just a routine request for an update, as she has made of him a number of times before.
Clutching the phone as she continues to watch the news, she hopes to hear it ring with a call from him or chime with a text. Neither comes. She edges closer to the television, straining to see if her husband is among the officers running or taking cover behind a building or a police car. Is that him? Or that one? She can’t be sure. And then comes the news that police officers have been shot. She says a prayer that it isn’t her husband, then feels a pang of guilt that in doing so she is praying that it’s someone else’s.
She is friends with some of the wives of her husband’s coworkers. Should she call or text one of them? She decides against it. What would it mean if her friends have already heard from their husbands while she hasn’t?
She looks at her phone. Maybe the battery is drained. Maybe she was so distracted by the television that she missed his call or his text. But, no, the phone is working; he has neither called nor texted. She is thrilled at last to hear the phone ring, but the elation is dashed into dread when she sees the call has come from an unfamiliar number. Her hand trembles as she answers and puts the phone to her ear.
The caller is a police sergeant from her husband’s station, a man she has met but doesn’t know well. Her husband has been hurt, he tells her. He apologizes for not being able to say more and tells her an officer will be there shortly to take her and her children to the hospital. And now, with a million thoughts racing through her head, she must wake the children and get them dressed.
“Daddy needs us,” she says as she nudges them awake, trying to sound calm, trying not to alarm them, trying not to let on that what she has always feared has now happened. She hears a siren in the distance, and it gets closer and closer. It cuts off a block or two away. The children are dressed. There’s a knock at the door.
She opens the door to reveal an officer in uniform, one just like her husband’s. She knows some of her husband’s coworkers, but not this one, who like her is trying to be calm, but also like her, isn’t fooling anyone. She stops to think of what she should bring, deciding only on some toys and blankets for the kids—it may be a long night. They all walk to the police car at the curb, but before getting in her motherly instincts are aroused: she asks the officer about car seats for the children.
There isn’t time for car seats, he tells her. She can ride in front with him and the children can ride in the back. But this she won’t allow. She will not have her kids back there on the cold hard plastic seat separated from her by the car’s partition. She climbs into the back with them and they all huddle together—seatbelts be damned—as the officer speeds off toward the hospital.
Between the noise of the wailing siren and the hindrance of the partition, conversation with the officer is all but impossible. He can offer no more information than the sergeant did on the phone, save for the fact that several police officers have been shot, and that he is only one of many who have been dispatched all over town—and beyond—to bring family members to the hospital.
The ride is interminably long, but at last the officer slows the car and cuts the siren. The woman holds her children even more tightly as the hospital comes into view.
She has visited this hospital before, but never seen it like this. Police cars are parked here and there for as far as she can see, and there are dozens of officers near the entrance to the emergency room, some holding rifles and posted up like sentries expecting an attack. The officers are gathered in small knots talking among themselves, but they all fall silent and step to one side or another to clear a path to the doors as the woman and her children step from the car. The officer who drove them now escorts them through the doors.
Once inside, she sees more officers lining the walls and trying to stay out of the way as doctors, nurses, and technicians move from here to there and back again. The emergency room is in a state of barely controlled frenzy. There are several people—other police officers, the woman realizes—being attended to at once. Looking around further, she sees there are others like her mixed in among the police and the medical staff: women, some with children in tow, waiting for news of their own loved ones. “Where is my husband?” she asks.
She is told he has already gone upstairs to surgery, and she doesn’t know whether to interpret this as a good sign or a bad one. She is now joined by others, including a social worker from the hospital staff, a chaplain from the police department, and a few police officers who are friends with her husband. Some of them were off duty tonight, but they have rushed into town to contribute what they can. They usher her into an elevator and up to a private lounge outside the operating rooms. She is told that the paramedics, the doctors, and the nurses—every last person who has had a hand in her husband’s care—is the best, and that everything that can be done for him will be. She appreciates their words, but she just wants to know: How is he, and when can I see him?
She can’t fully express the dread she feels, for her children are with her and she must be strong for them. They are tired, of course, so she uses the blankets she has brought and fashions makeshift beds for them on the waiting room’s couches, then tucks them in and watches them fall asleep. Their world, she fears, will be much different when they wake. Now there is only one chair available in the room, which she offers to the people surrounding her. They decline, so she sits down to wait. And wait, and wait, and wait.
Periodically, members of the entourage step out of the room to answer phone calls. She tries to read their faces when they return. Do they know something they can’t tell her? Word comes that the suspect has been killed, but she finds no solace in this even as she sees that the officers in the room do.
Then comes a soft knock on the door. When it opens, she can see a doctor dressed in surgical scrubs outside in the hallway. She knows this man’s next words will save her or crush her, so she steps out of the room so her children won’t hear what is about to be said. The doctor’s expression tells her at once that the news is not good. In that moment, she actually feels sympathy for him, for she knows he is pained by the news he brings. But bring it he must, so he tells her that he is very sorry, they did everything they could, but they couldn’t save her husband.
She doesn’t want to cry in front of her children, so instead she sinks into a chair in the hallway, where the chaplain places a hand on her shoulder and the others huddle loosely around her. She is surrounded by people, but in this moment she is alone. She sobs until she can sob no more. When she stops, someone asks about her children: Should they be woken up?
“No,” she says. “Let them sleep.” And while they sleep, she must think of a way to tell them that their father is dead.
Fox News is reporting that the FBI has confirmed to Senator Charles Grassley that SHillary Clinton defense attorney James Comey – who doubles as the director of the FBI — forced agents investigating the Witch from Chappaqua to sign a special non-disclosure agreement.
From Fox:
A July 1 letter sent by a senior deputy to FBI Director James Comey to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, detailed the restrictions on agents. The letter, reviewed by Fox News, confirmed agents signed a “Case Briefing Acknowledgement” which says the disclosure of information is “strictly prohibited” without prior approval, and those who sign are subject to lie detector tests.
“The purpose of this form is to maintain an official record of persons knowledgeable of a highly sensitive Federal Bureau of Investigation counterintelligence investigation,” the agreement attached to the Grassley letter reads, “….I (FBI agent) also understand that, due to the nature and sensitivity of this investigation, compliance with these restrictions may be subject to verification by polygraph examination.”
The measures show the extent to which the bureau has gone to keep additional details of the politically sensitive case from going public. While Comey has provided some information on why the FBI did not opt to pursue charges, Attorney General Loretta Lynch repeatedly ducked questions on specifics of the case at a House hearing Tuesday.
The acknowledgement came months after Grassley first sent a letter to Comey after an tipster informed Grassley’s office of the requirement.
The most corrupt woman in the history of U.S. politics, we have since learned from Comey, was at best too ignorant to know how to protect state secrets and was reckless and careless in sharing classified information with people outside the State Department – like longtime Clinton crony Sidney Blumenthal – but because she is part of the protected class there are no repercussions. But she did not “intend” to be careless or stupid,” Comey said.
SHillary’s interview with FBI agents were not recorded or even transcribed, nor did Comey – who made the call not to prosecute her – participate in the interview. He ostensibly made the decision not to recommend prosecution only a couple of hours after the interviews were completed.
Yet the investigating agents, under penalty of prison, are forced to sign an agreement that at first appeared to supersede whistleblower protections forbidding them from leaking (i.e., revealing criminal conduct they found that Comey shoved down the memory hole) evidence they uncovered: evidence that no doubt would show the Witch’s criminality and Comey’s complicity in the cover-up.
Any rational, thinking person knows that the fix was in from the start. And beyond the “careless” handling of top secret information, there is ample evidence that the Witch perjured herself.
But the fix was in from the beginning. There are rules for the “Big People.” There are different rules for the “Little People.” And then there is the fact that there are no rules that apply to the Clintons.
That means there is no rule of law in America.