Defeating A Real Nuclear Threat

by Newt Gingrich: In 2014, during the Syrian civil war, ISIS occupied a site in the Syrian desert which once held a nuclear weapons facility. It reportedly had been built for the Syrians with North Korean help. If that reactor had been there, ISIS might have had a capability to inflict terrifyingly massive casualties.

However, seven years earlier, in September 2007, Israel launched a secret air attack against this obscure site in the Syrian desert called Deir es-Zoir. The reactor building was called al-Kibar.

Without that Israeli destruction of this Syrian-North Korean project, the world possibly would have had to deal with a nuclear armed ISIS and become a much more dangerous place.

The amazing story of how the Israelis discovered the secret site, figured out it was a nuclear reactor, connected the North Koreans to the project, and then decided to destroy it is a non-fiction story worthy of Daniel Silva’s great novels.

Yaakov Katz, editor in chief of the Jerusalem Post, has spent years pulling together the Israeli, American, Syrian, and North Korean pieces of this amazing story. His book, Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power is one of the most compelling stories I have read in a long time.

The Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, had picked a remote, obscure, and unnoticed part of the Syrian desert to set up a bold (and illegal) project with the help of North Koreans. To this day we do not know if the North Koreans were building a reactor for the Syrians or if the Syrians were allowing the North Koreans to build a reactor for themselves with the payment to Syria being a few nuclear bombs once the reactor was up and running.

This was a remarkable decision by Assad and by the North Koreans. After the American invasion of Iraq and the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s decision to turn over his entire nuclear program (which was much bigger and further along than either the Americans or the Israelis had expected) Assad was running a real risk by building a secret program.

The North Koreans were in the middle of the Six Power talks about disarming their own nuclear program, and yet here they were breaking the most fundamental rule about nuclear weapons –they were helping another country develop a secret program.

Because the Israelis had been shocked by the degree to which they had been ignorant of the Libyan nuclear program, they began reviewing all of their intelligence about nuclear activities – especially in Syria and Iran.

The key breakthrough came when the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission visited Vienna. In an operation worthy of a Silva or Ian Fleming novel, Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, entered his hotel room, downloaded the contents of his laptop, and planted a bug to monitor it.

For people who wonder about security measures, this is a useful tale. It turned out the Syrian physicist had been taking pictures of the building at al-Kibar – including a picture with the North Korean physicist who was helping with their nuclear weapons program.

From the minute the image surfaced Israel faced a crisis.

Israeli doctrine was to never again accept the risk of a holocaust in which millions of Jews could die. When the Iraqis built a nuclear facility near Baghdad, Israel bombed it in 1981. Then Prime Minister Menachem Begin explained to the world that Israel would never accept an enemy possessing a nuclear weapon. They would always preemptively destroy it. This became known as the Begin Doctrine.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert knew he would have to destroy the Syrian reactor before it went online and began creating radioactive material. However, he also knew he had to convince the United States that it was a nuclear facility and therefore unacceptable. He actually hoped that maybe the Americans would decide to destroy it.

The portions of the book that describe the dance in Washington are as fascinating as the scenes in Israel.

President George W. Bush is sympathetic but faced with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he was hesitant about taking on a third Muslim country. The American national security establishment was split between those who wanted to pursue diplomacy and those who believed, in the end, the reactor had to be destroyed before it became operational. Only Vice President Cheney had intuited for years that there was a North Korean-Syrian relationship, and only Cheney was adamant about the need to destroy it.

Katz has an enormous range of sources and has written a remarkable story.

Anyone interested in national security in an increasingly dangerous world would learn a lot by reading this extraordinary book.
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Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) is a former Georgia Congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House. He co-authored and was the chief architect of the "Contract with America" and a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections. He is noted speaker and writer. This commentary was shared via Gingrich Productions.

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Trump Administration, Other Pro-Gun Heavyweights Lend Support on Pending Supreme Court Case

by NRA-ILA: As NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris W. Cox reported in March, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken up a challenge by an NRA state affiliate to a New York City gun control scheme that effectively prohibits lawfully licensed handgun owners from leaving the city with their own firearms. The plaintiffs in the case have raised a number of objections to the regime, the foremost of which is that it violates the Second Amendment. The case is New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. New York City.

Given the uniquely oppressive and bizarre nature of the challenged restrictions, many observers believe the real question in the case isn’t whether New York City will lose but on what grounds and how badly. The City itself, in fact, recently made a desperate attempt to avoid a ruling on its laws by claiming to the court that it was in the process of revising the regulations to address the issues raised in the case. The court rejected that gambit, and proceedings in the case have continued, with a number of stakeholders filing friend of the court (amicus curiae) briefs this week to help inform the justices’ deliberations.

Chief among them was none other than the Trump administration, with the Department of Justice (DOJ) filing a brief in support of the plaintiffs. The DOJ offered two possible bases for finding New York City’s regulations unconstitutional, including that the “transport ban infringes the right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.”

The government’s brief offers the most detailed account to date of how the Trump administration views the Second Amendment. Critically, it makes clear that the Second Amendment does not end at the property line of one’s own home.

“The Second Amendment guarantees both the right to ‘keep’ and the right to ‘bear’ firearms,” the brief states. “Read naturally, the right to ‘bear’ firearms includes the right to transport firearms outside the home; otherwise, the right to ‘bear’ would add nothing to the right to ‘keep.’”

The administration also seeks to establish a method for resolving future cases that is faithful to the Supreme Court’s opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, which has been largely ignored by lower courts. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision being challenged in the New York City case, like many other lower court Second Amendment decisions before it, used a judicial balancing test that Heller specifically rejected to uphold the disputed gun control measures.

The government’s brief, on the other hand, urges the court to “look first to the text of the Second Amendment, the history of the right to keep and bear arms before ratification, and the tradition of gun regulation after ratification” to judge the validity of a gun control law.

Applying this test to New York City’s travel ban, it states:

Few laws in the history of our Nation, or even in contemporary times, have come close to such a sweeping prohibition on the transportation of arms. And on some of the rare occasions in the 19th and 20th centuries when state and local governments have adopted such prohibitions, state courts have struck them down. That is enough to establish that the transport ban is unconstitutional.

Also filing in support of the plaintiffs was a coalition of pro-gun states led by Louisiana and including Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgie, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia. Like the DOJ’s brief, the states’ brief urges the Supreme Court to use text, history, and tradition to find that New York City’s travel ban violates the Second and Fourteenth Amendment.

Alternatively, the states’ brief argues, if the court should adopt the Second Circuit’s approach to applying a tiered level of scrutiny, it should subject the law to a rigorously applied heighted scrutiny. “New York City could not possibly meet such scrutiny here,” the brief concludes.

One hundred and twenty pro-gun members of Congress, led by Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.), urged the court to rule in favor of the plaintiffs as well. Emphasizing that “[t]he Second Amendment enshrines the fundamental right of citizens to protect themselves from violence and tyranny,” the congressional brief joined the chorus criticizing the dismissive treatment the Second Amendment has received in the lower courts.

“This case,” according to that brief, “is a quintessential example of how courts of appeals have treated the right to keep and bear arms as a second-class right by not reviewing regulations infringing on the right with any meaningful scrutiny.” It then argues that whether the court applies text, history, or tradition or a suitably stringent level of scrutiny, the challenged New York City regime must fail.

The NRA weighed in on the case with an amicus brief of our own. That brief amplifies the arguments of the government, the states, and the pro-gun members of Congress. It points out that “[i[n the decade since [Heller] was handed down, most lower federal courts have openly flouted [the Supreme Court’s] instructions” on how to resolve Second Amendment cases.

It goes on to state that “because Respondents’ transport ban restricts both the right to keep and to bear arms, and because it is unsupported by any even remotely analogous restriction historically accepted by the People as consistent with the Second Amendment, this Court should strike it down categorically, like in Heller, without resorting to the interest-balancing ‘tiers of scrutiny.’”

Tellingly, even certain well-known gun control groups – including theGiffords Law Center and the Brady Campaign – filed briefs that made no attempt to argue that New York City’s travel ban survives Second Amendment scrutiny. Rather, their briefs merely urge the court to rule narrowly in the case and in a way that preserves ample leeway for states and localities to continue to regulate firearms.

This case illustrates what the legacy media and other anti-gun interests are hoping gun owners ignore: that the election of President Trump, his appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the work of the National Rifle Association all continue to play a vital role in preserving the right to keep and bear arms.
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NRA-ILA article.

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ICYMI: A National Gun Registry Is Now on the Ballot for 2020

by Frank Miniter: The presidential contenders screaming for the attention of Democrat primary voters are actually telling us what they really think.

Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) is the latest. Like the rest, he wants so-called “universal” background checks, a ban on “assault weapons” (meaning whatever they can stuff into that ever-expansive political definition of popular semiautomatic firearms) and a ban on standard-capacity magazines. Booker also now says he wants to establish a federal registry of guns and gun owners. If Booker has his way, Americans who want to exercise their Second Amendment rights would have to apply to Washington, D.C., for permission—and not just once, but every five years. Gun owners also would have to tell the federal government all about the guns they own. It is an Orwellian idea of Big Brother control that has consequences we now are seeing playing out in Venezuela.

In the past (from Al Gore’s embarrassing loss of his home state and with it the presidency in 2000 after he made attacking the Second Amendment a campaign plank to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run), Democrats seeking the presidency cloaked their views on the Second Amendment in rhetoric claiming they respected American constitutional rights, but just wanted to enact “common-sense” reforms.

No more.

Now Booker thinks America should be a “may-issue” nation for all of your guns.

If that sounds like a worst-case scenario, realize Booker also argues that the federal government’s “terror watch list”—a secret government black list—should be used to disarm “suspicious” Americans without due process. Who would he find suspicious? Maybe NRA members? He has said “we are gonna bring a fight like the NRA has never seen.”

Even when considered from a practical perspective, gun registries have failed again and again. Most recently in Canada, where the costs were astronomical and many people were practicing civil-disobedience by either not complying or purposely giving false information to government officials. And that’s in Canada. In the United States, there are over 100 million gun owners who own about half a billion firearms.

As if to sound reasonable, Booker argues that a driver’s license demonstrates a person’s eligibility and proficiency to drive a car and so “a gun license demonstrates that a person is eligible and can meet certain safety and training standards necessary to own a gun.”

This is once again the time to point out that legally speaking driving is a privilege whereas the right to own and carry a gun is a right specifically protected in the U.S. Bill of Rights.

The Mexico Gun Myth Resurfaces
A recent article titled “Mexico’s Gun Problem” at Kpbs.org is worth addressing mostly because it relies on long-debunked myths as our nation grapples with a surge of illegal immigration.

Its author, Jean Guerrero, obviously didn’t even sniff around outside of the mainstream media’s echo chamber for all the facts. This “journalist” makes the mistake TheWall Street Journalpolitical columnist Barton Swaim said “captures what ails present-day American liberalism. Its defining characteristic is a labored ignorance of the other side. Liberals frequently neither know nor care to learn what nonliberals think. Their own views predominate in the universities and media; why bother considering lesser ones?”

Guerrero blames “American guns, bullets and grenades” for Mexico’s homicide problem. He notes that “[m]ore than 33,000 people were murdered in Mexico last year, an all-time high.” Guerrero then says “nearly all” of the guns recovered at crime scenes and otherwise grabbed by the authorities are “American-made: AK-47s, AR-15s, Glocks and more.”

Guerrero explains that “Mexico has only one gun store. It’s controlled by the army in Mexico City. The gun laws for civilians are strict, with six-month background checks and a federal registry keeping track of every weapon. Person to person firearm sales is prohibited. Calibers are restricted to .380 or less….”

This is where anyone paying attention would point out that Mexico is obviously another place showcasing the failures of gun control. The criminals have guns, but the law-abiding find it very difficult and costly to arm and defend themselves from the criminal gangs who prey on them. Instead of solving their problem with freedom, Mexico is creating a populace of victims.

Guerrero doesn’t point this out, however; instead, he blames American freedom for Mexico’s homicide rate.

The thing is, the numbers he is citing have long since been debunked. Back during the Obama administration’s scandal over Operation Fast and Furious, a gun-running operation in which the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told gun-store owners to let known bad guys buy and then transport thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels, the facts came out.

Guerrero writes that “About 70 percent of the 15,316 weapons submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) by Mexican authorities nationwide in 2017 were traceable to the U.S.”

In 2008, when the media reported that 90 percent of the firearms recovered in Mexico came from the United States, some looked deeper at this number and found that actually less than 12 percent of the guns Mexico seized in 2008 likely came from the U.S. According to statistics from Mexico, in 2008 approximately 30,000 firearms were seized from criminals in Mexico. Of these, 7,200 (24 percent) were submitted to the ATF for tracing because Mexican authorities thought it possible these firearms were from the U.S. since they had U.S.-mandated serial numbers as well as the firearm’s make and model on them. Of the 7,200 firearms submitted for tracing, about 4,000 could be traced by the ATF—of which roughly 3,480 came from the U.S.

Even those statistics might be inflated because research has shown that some of these same firearms were submitted to the ATF multiple times by Mexican authorities.

Instead of quibbling over these inflated statistics, wouldn’t it be better for more people in the media to call for Mexico to give its citizens their own Second Amendment?

Most-Revealing Anti-Freedom Quote of the Week
“The biggest thing in the proposal is a national gun licensing program, which would force Americans to apply for 5-year gun licenses before obtaining a firearm. The process would include fingerprinting, an interview, gun safety courses and a federal background check.” –Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said in a statement announcing his anti-gun proposal.

Pro-Freedom Quote of the Week
“In a 1968 Fifth Amendment case, Haynes v. United States, the Supreme Court held 7–1 that convicted felons cannot not be punished for failing to register their illegally owned firearms on the grounds that such punishment would constitute self-incrimination. What, one has to ask, is to be the purpose of a registry that is legally permitted to ensnare only the virtuous?” –An editorial at National Review pointing out how unconstitutional, un-American and impractical is Sen. Cory Booker’s call for a gun-owner registry.
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Frank Miniter is the author of The New York Times bestseller The Ultimate Man’s Survival Guide—Recovering the Lost Art of Manhood. He is also the author of This Will Make a Man of You and The Future of the Gun. He is a contributor to Forbes and writes for many publication including the NRA's America's First Freedom.

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Tags: Frank Minter, America's 1st Freedom, ICYMI,: A National Gun Registry, Is Now on the Ballot, for 2020 To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Immigration & Assimilation, Pelosi Condemns, Inadequate Answers, 2020 Update

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: Immigration & Assimilation
The White House has released a fact sheet on President Trump's new immigration reform plan.

But there is one aspect of his proposal that isn't getting the coverage it deserves. President Trump wants our immigration policies to do a much better job of assimilating immigrants, of "Americanizing" new citizens. Here's some of what the president said yesterday:

"Throughout our history, we have proudly welcomed newcomers to our shores. Out of many people, from many places, we have forged one people and one nation under God, and we're very proud of it. We share the same home, we share the same destiny, and we pledge allegiance to the same, great American flag. . .

"To promote integration, assimilation, and national unity, future immigrants will be required to learn English and to pass a civics exam prior to admission. Through these steps, we will deliver an immigration system that respects, and even strengthens, our culture, our traditions, and our values. . .

"American citizenship is the most precious gift our nation has to offer. When we swear in new citizens, we do more than give them a permit; we give them a history, a heritage, a home, and a future of limitless possibilities and potential.

"Our nation used to pride ourselves on this capacity: our unique ability to instill the spirit of America into any human heart, into any human being. . . It's time to restore our national unity and reaffirm our national purpose. It is time to rebuild our country for all Americans."

I couldn't agree more! We should be proud of our country and proud of our values.

Being an American means something. It should mean something to the people who want to come here. And as I have long argued, we should know a lot more about the people coming here. We should not be importing more hatred and anti-Semitism into the country.

Requiring immigrants to learn English, learn our history, understand our system of government and share our values is not unreasonable. It's just common sense.

Pelosi Condemns
The president put a serious proposal on the table, which polls very well with the American people. But I had not gotten back to my car after leaving the White House yesterday before progressives on Capitol Hill had declared the plan dead on arrival.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi condemned the president's immigration plan, declaring, "To say that this plan's application criteria are 'merit-based' is the height of condescension." Maxine Waters denounced the president's plan, saying that parts of it were "very racist." (See next item.)

There's a narrative I am hearing among some conservatives that the only reason Democrats won't consider Trump's plan because they don't want to give the president a legislative victory heading into the 2020 campaign. There is certainly some truth to that.

But here's the problem with that analysis: It suggests that if we had a progressive president, Democrats would support securing the border, stopping the massive influx of illegal immigration and increasing funding for ICE and the Border Patrol.

Does any conservative really believe that? The reason some Democrats once supported border security is because they felt then that they couldn't get away with saying what they really believed. This is a vastly different time.

Kristen Gillibrand has apologized for her past moderate views on immigration.

Beto O'Rourke wants to tear down what few border walls we have now.

Here's what Rep. Ilhan Omar said yesterday:

"We need to abolish ICE, and end all inhumane deportation and detention programs. We need to fight back against the criminalization of immigrants and those crossing the border."

Joe Biden said recently that we have an obligation to provide free healthcare to anyone, including illegal aliens. And it's part of the left's "Medicare for All" plan.

This isn't just a matter of political strategy. This is a struggle between two completely different worldviews.

The left is all in on open borders because they believe it is to their political benefit to do so. They have regularly reminded us that they believe the great heartland of America is "deplorable and irredeemable," clinging bitterly to their "guns and religion."

Crisis On Our Streets
There is a crisis on the border and there's a crisis on our streets. The left is ignoring both.

The vicious gang MS-13 has claimed yet another victim right here in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. A 14 year-old girl was brutally murdered by other teenagers. The victim was hacked with a machete and beaten with a baseball bat.

As is often the case, the young victim was Hispanic. MS-13, a Latin American gang, preys on other Hispanics because the gang concentrates in other parts of the country where there are large populations of immigrants.

It is beyond absurd to suggest that securing the border and shutting down illegal alien gangs is racism. Perhaps Maxine Waters should visit the families of Jamiel Shaw, Jr., or Ronil Singh to get the perspective of other minorities who have been devastated by open borders and illegal immigration.

Inadequate Answers
I am pleased to report that Attorney General William Barr is pushing hard and demanding answers from the deep state. In an interview with Fox News, Barr said the following:

"I've been trying to get answers to the questions, and I've found that a lot of the answers have been inadequate and some of the explanations I've gotten don't hang together, in a sense I have more questions today than when I first started. . .

"People have to find out what the government was doing during that period. If we're worried about foreign influence, for the very same reason we should be worried about whether government officials abuse their power and put their thumb on the scale."

Barr's comments come as former deep state officials have started pointing fingers and redirecting blame. That's a good sign that Barr is starting to smoke the rats out!

2020 Update
As one late night comedian said this week, "Yet another Democrat has forced their way into the 2020 clown car." Actually, two Democrats have joined the race since our last update -- Montana Gov. Steve Bullock and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Polling continues to show that the Democrat primary remains a Biden/Sanders contest. The latest poll finds Biden and Sanders are the only candidates earning double-digit support.
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Gary Bauer (@GaryLBauer)  is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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Tags: Gary Bauer, Campaign for Working Families, Immigration & Assimilation, Pelosi Condemns, Inadequate Answers, 2020 Update To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Will 'Whiteshift' Save America From Ethnic Strife?

Michael Barone

by Michael Barone: If you've been paying any attention at all to journalism in recent years -- maybe not a good idea, but if you have -- you surely have noticed those stories predicting, often with a certain relish, that the United States is about to become a majority-minority country.

Such predictions, as the Obama administration Census Bureau director noted in 2014, "made demographic change look like a zero-sum game that white Americans were losing." Such fears contributed to Donald Trump's election in 2016. No one wants to vote for the side that seems to be saying, "Hurry up and die."

But are those trends so inevitable? Not necessarily, writes political scientist Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian who teaches in Britain and is of Jewish, Chinese and Latino ancestry. His most recent book is called "Whiteshift," which he defines as "the mixture of many non-whites into the white group through voluntary assimilation."

As he points out, something like this has happened before. A hundred years ago, Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish immigrants pouring into Ellis Island were considered to be of different "races" by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites.

Half a century ago, their descendants were regarded as still culturally and politically distinctive in Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's description of New York ethnic groups in "Beyond the Melting Pot." A "balanced" ticket in those days had to include Irish, Italian and Jewish candidates.

Today, all these groups are lumped together as "whites," even though there are still perceptible, though muted, differences in political attitudes and perspectives between those with different ancestries.

One might go even further back in history. American political culture and institutions have their roots, as the late political scientist Samuel Huntington argued in "Who Are We?", in England, which, in the 17th century, welcomed Jews and Huguenots; tolerated Catholics and Quakers; nurtured representative government; and protected individual rights, unlike almost all other European polities.

That's a template for an expandable polity, one that gives us and other Anglosphere nations a useful model as we experience ethnic change.

In the short run, things can seem rocky. Kaufmann argues that a majority ethnicity facing minority status can respond in four ways, and is likely to do so successively over time.

The first way is to fight, to shut off immigration and bar asylum seekers, as Hungary and Poland have done, or just to enforce existing immigration laws. President Trump's call for a "beautiful wall" is shorthand for the latter course, even if he hasn't managed to follow through.

Another alternative is to repress opposition to change. Democrats' knee-jerk opposition to Trump's measures, almost indistinguishable intellectually from an open-borders policy, is an example. "Cosmopolitanism and what I term ethno-traditional nationalism are both valid worldviews," he writes, "but ... imposing either on the entire population is a recipe for discontent."

Instead we should let the two other responses go forward. One is flight, and indeed in Britain as well as America, young families flee multiethnic central cities for mostly white suburbs, while rural and small-town folks (doing surprisingly well in the Trump economy) tend to stay in place.

The fourth response is what he thinks will be decisive in the long run (50 to 80 years), intermarriage, which "promises to erode the rising diversity which underlies our current malaise." He notes that Hispanic-white intermarriage rates are high. And it's been a championship season for part-Asian Americans from Tiger Woods to (as blogger Steve Sailer points out) "Jeopardy!" whiz James Holzhauer.

Intermarriage rates for American blacks remain considerably lower, which raises -- in my mind, at least -- the question of whether people of Hispanic or Asian "race" should have been giving the panoply of racial quotas and preferences accorded blacks by the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

Yes, you can find limited examples of systematic racial discrimination against Latinos near the southern border in the past. And, yes, there was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Theodore Roosevelt's blocking Japanese inflow to Hawaii in 1907.

But Hispanics never experienced slavery here or anything like the legally and violently enforced segregation of blacks in the Old South. And the only invidious discrimination Asians have suffered in the last half-century, so far as I can discern, is at the hands of Ivy League and other selective college admissions officers.

Will Kaufmann's optimistic "whiteshift" scenario ever happen? The current political brouhaha is discouraging, but our history provides grounds for cautious optimism.
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Michael Barone is a Senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel  and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics Shared by Rasmussen Reports.

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Who Wants This War with Iran?

by Patrick Buchanan: Outside a few precincts, America has no enthusiasm for a new Mideast war, no stomach for any occupation of Iran.

Speaking on state TV of the prospect of a war in the Gulf, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei seemed to dismiss the idea.

“There won’t be any war. … We don’t seek a war, and (the Americans) don’t either. They know it’s not in their interests.”

The ayatollah’s analysis — a war is in neither nation’s interest — is correct. Consider the consequences of a war with the United States for his own country.

Iran’s hundreds of swift boats and handful of submarines would be sunk. Its ports would be mined or blockaded. Oil exports and oil revenue would halt. Air fields and missile bases would be bombed. The Iranian economy would crash. Iran would need years to recover.

And though Iran’s nuclear sites are under constant observation and regular inspection, they would be destroyed.

Tehran knows this, which is why, despite 40 years of hostility, Iran has never sought war with the “Great Satan” and does not want this war to which we seem to be edging closer every day.

What would such a war mean for the United States?

It would not bring about “regime change” or bring down Iran’s government that survived eight years of ground war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

If we wish to impose a regime more to our liking in Tehran, we will have to do it the way we did it with Germany and Japan after 1945, or with Iraq in 2003. We would have to invade and occupy Iran.

But in World War II, we had 12 million men under arms. And unlike Iraq in 2003, which is one-third the size and population of Iran, we do not have the hundreds of thousands of troops to call up and send to the Gulf.

Nor would Americans support such an invasion, as President Donald Trump knows from his 2016 campaign. Outside a few precincts, America has no enthusiasm for a new Mideast war, no stomach for any occupation of Iran.

Moreover, war with Iran would involve firefights in the Gulf that would cause at least a temporary shutdown in oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — and a worldwide recession.

How would that help the world? Or Trump in 2020?

How many allies would we have in such a war?

Spain has pulled its lone frigate out of John Bolton’s flotilla headed for the Gulf. Britain, France and Germany are staying with the nuclear pact, continuing to trade with Iran, throwing ice water on our intelligence reports that Iran is preparing to attack us.

Turkey regards Iran as a cultural and economic partner. Russia was a de facto ally in Syria’s civil war. China continues to buy Iranian oil. India just hosted Iran’s foreign minister.

So, again, Cicero’s question: “Cui bono?”

Who really wants this war? How did we reach this precipice?

A year ago, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a MacArthurian ultimatum, making 12 demands on the Tehran regime.

Iran must abandon all its allies in the Middle East — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza — pull all forces under Iranian command out of Syria, and then disarm all its Shiite militia in Iraq.

Iran must halt all enrichment of uranium, swear never to produce plutonium, shut down its heavy water reactor, open up its military bases to inspection to prove it never had a secret nuclear program and stop testing missiles. And unless she submits, Iran will be strangled with sanctions.

Pompeo’s speech at the Heritage Foundation read like the terms of some conquering Caesar dictating to some defeated tribe in Gaul, though we had yet to fight and win the war, usually a precondition for dictating terms.

Iran’s response was to disregard Pompeo’s demands.

And crushing U.S. sanctions were imposed, to brutal effect.

Yet, as one looks again at the places where Pompeo ordered Iran out — Lebanon, Yemen, Gaza, Syria, Iraq — no vital interest of ours was imperiled by any Iranian presence.

The people who have a problem with Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon are the Israelis whose occupations spawned those movements.

As for Yemen, the Houthis overthrew a Saudi puppet.

Syria’s Bashar Assad never threatened us, though we armed rebels to overthrow him. In Iraq, Iranian-backed Shiite militia helped us to defend Baghdad from the southerly advance of ISIS, which had taken Mosul.

Who wants us to plunge back into the Middle East, to fight a new and wider war than the ones we fought already this century in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen?

Answer: Pompeo and Bolton, Bibi Netanyahu, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Sunni kings, princes, emirs, sultans and the other assorted Jeffersonian democrats on the south shore of the Persian Gulf.

And lest we forget, the never-Trumpers and neocons in exile nursing their bruised egos, whose idea of sweet revenge is a U.S. return to the Mideast in a war with Iran, which then brings an end to the Trump presidency.
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Patrick Buchanan (@PatrickBuchanan) is currently a blogger, conservative columnist, political analyst, chairman of The American Cause foundation and an editor of The American Conservative. He has been a senior adviser to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.

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Elizabeth Warren's Plan for Free College Tuition Would Punish Hard Work, Increase National Debt

Steven Greenhut

by Steven Greenhut: Americans are paying more than ever for car loans. Why shouldn't the government bail those out too? For the same reason eliminating student loans would be a bad idea.

Americans need a car in our road-dependent society, but the cost of the average vehicle has soared into the mid-30s. Payments are pushing $600 a month, leaving many people strapped to afford housing, food and other necessities. The simple answer is for the feds to pay off their car loans and provide free vehicles to everyone who wants one.

Before you hit send on your angry email, realize that I'm making this modest proposal with my tongue planted in my cheek and just for illustrative purposes. Sometimes it takes an absurd idea to illustrate the stupidity of a serious one. These days, Democratic presidential candidates are touting their plans to forgive most student debt and to provide wannabe college students with "free" tuition. They appear to be completely serious about it.

Former students crushed by loan debt might find the idea appealing. It also sounds great to families with teenagers who are approaching their college years. Recent surveys show broad public support for the plan floated by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), who has vowed to cancel student loan debt up to $50,000 for lower-income students and tax billionaires to fund the $1.25 trillion cost for making tuition at public universities complimentary.

But this column isn't about debt spending, which is a huge problem but one that makes the public's eyes glaze over. In March, the federal government racked up the largest monthly budget deficit in history ($234 billion) and federal debt levels have soared to $22 trillion. Most of us can't fathom a trillion, which might explain our society's collective shrug even as we are busy spending our grandchildren's inheritance.

Instead, this column is about the unforeseen consequences of doing morally hazardous things. If the government wiped away Americans' car-loan debt, it would reward people who spent 70-large on one of those leather-clad monster trucks with a pickup bed used mainly for trips to Ikea. It would punish people who had more impulse control, squirreled away savings, and chose to get around in a 12-year old Civic or the Metro bus.

The Warren plan would hike demand for vehicles, which would first lead to shortages and then to rising prices. If other people are paying, why save up or shop on Craigslist for a beater? Inflation is a problem mainly in industries where there are third-party payers (insurers or government), such as health care. We don't comparison shop for that colonoscopy.

As usual, political leaders are great at pinpointing a serious problem, and then coming up with solutions that will make it even worse. Student debt levels have hit $1.5 trillion. Analysts have warned of a student debt bubble. I agree with writer Robert Farrington, who noted in Forbes that it's unlikely to pop: "In the housing crisis, if a borrower struggles to pay their mortgage, the bank can foreclose on their house." But banks can't repossess a college education, so it becomes a years-long drag on household spending and the economy.

Easy student loans and vast amounts of state and federal subsidies have turned into a funding spigot for public and private universities, which—and this should be no surprise—have not always spent the money wisely. The free-flowing cash caused universities to create Byzantine administrative bureaucracies. Check out the size of the University of California's Office of the President.

It enabled them to construct new departments specializing in potentially interesting but questionable pursuits revolving around race, gender and sexuality. I'm skeptical that many people would pop for a $200,000 degree on the sociology of surfing or oppression studies if they were paying from their own bank account. Fortunately, Walmart always seems to be hiring.

In the 1990s, universities went on a spending binge just as government started expanding its student-aid programs. They built luxury dormitories and fancy student centers. Texas Tech built an enormous leisure pool with a centerpiece 645-foot-long "lazy river," as The Atlantic reported last year. Money is fungible, and such unfathomable binges are the result of flowing government cash and students who pay their tuition on the installment plan.

Free college only will exacerbate these problems. It will crowd out serious students—and seriousness is best measured by people willing to invest in their own future plans—and discourage people from choosing cost-effective strategies such as community college or pursuing a skilled trade or vocational field. As a parent, I understand the predicament that students face. They need to find a way to pay for tuition, but the best public-policy solution is to put a damper on the subsidies that fuel the inflation, not dump more cash on the fire.

Americans can't see the absurdity of giving away free stuff when we're talking about education, which is why I decided to discuss the price of cars. So what kind of SUV will you and your neighbors buy if taxpayers are paying the freight?
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Steven Greenhut (@StevenGreenhut ‏) is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Article Shared by Reason published by the Reason Foundation, a nonprofit education and research organization.

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Gaming a Newly Rigged System

by Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: Education is important. I want my young adult offspring to get into a great college or university.

Sadly, my bribery fund is empty.

Must she, then, rely only upon working hard for good grades and preparing for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)?

No. There is a workaround: find a way to improve our family’s Adversity Score.

“The College Board plans to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT,” The Wall Street Journal reports, “to try to capture their social and economic background, jumping into the debate raging over race and class in college admissions.”

This year 50 universities, including Yale, used these scores; next year, 150 will do so. Students are assessed on 15 not fully disclosed factors, things such as the level of crime and poverty in one’s high school and neighborhood, “the educational level of the parents,” and “family stability.”

“An adversity score of 50 is average,” notes the Journal. “Anything above it designates hardship, below it privilege.”

Hmmm, how to climb (or descend) the “Overall Disadvantage Index”? What sacrifices to make?

My wife and I could divorce. Coming from a single parent household would improve our daughter’s opportunities in higher education.

We won’t sink her chances by upgrading our own educations. That’s obvious.

And crime-free homeschools certainly place kids at a distinct disadvantage in being disadvantaged. I guess we could move to a more dangerous neighborhood.

Heck — what am I thinking?! — we can stay put and just commit crimes ourselves. Show some entrepreneurial initiative! Don’t be dependent on others, for heaven sake! Be the change we wish to see in our world.

On that one, though, I better check my exuberance with my wife . . . if our divorce hasn’t yet been finalized.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Paul Jacob (@Common_Sense_PJ ) is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.

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Democrats Unhinged Over Alabama's Abortion Bill

David Limbaugh

by David Limbaugh: Alabama’s mostly Republican lawmakers and governor passed a strong abortion ban this week, and liberals are fit to be tied.

“Today, I signed into law the Alabama Human Life Protection Act, a bill that was approved by overwhelming majorities in both chambers of the legislature,” said Gov. Kay Ivey. “To the bill’s many supporters, this legislation stands as a powerful testament to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious and that every life is a sacred gift from God.”

In today’s secular culture, the governor’s invocation of God is almost as bold as signing the bill into law. But it’s gratifying that some public officials are willing to observe that respect for life is fundamentally a spiritual issue.
I’m sure many leftists are horrified at the reference to God, but they have their hands full hyperventilating over the strictness of the law itself, and so, they will probably let this slide for now. The bill prohibits abortion except when the life of the mother is in jeopardy or the unborn child has a “lethal anomaly.” The bill makes it a felony for doctors to perform or attempt to perform an abortion.

In her statement, Ivey acknowledged that the law might not be constitutional under the Supreme Court’s notorious 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in all 50 states. But she noted that the bill’s sponsors hope the bill will prompt the court to revisit this issue.

Not to be unduly pessimistic, but frankly, I’m not sure why Democrats are so exercised. Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh have both expressed their abiding respect for longstanding Supreme Court precedent, apparently even if, like Roe, its rationale was manufactured out of whole cloth. The court’s decision was not only egregious in substance — inventing a constitutional right to abortion out of imaginary language in the Constitution creatively referred to as “emanations” and “penumbras”; its effect on society was just as bad.

Before the decision, the issue of abortion was the prerogative of the individual states, determined democratically by their duly elected representatives. The court’s fiat was not only erroneous on its face; it tyrannically divested the authority of the states. This federal judicial travesty sparked national acrimony over abortion. Judicial tyranny, where it occurs, is just as bad as executive despotism.

Here we are almost 50 years later, and the court still hasn’t overturned Roe. But when any of the sovereign states dares to pass a law outside Roe’s parameters, liberals become unhinged, huffing hysterically about the state’s audacity to deviate from the court’s ruling.

Yet every day, liberals around the nation enact measures they know violate existing constitutional precedent with the undisguised intent that they serve as test cases and that courts, under relentless pressure from their activism, will change the law. When liberals do it, it’s noble activism; when conservatives do it, it’s anarchy.

The Guardian, for example, framed the Alabama law in racial and gender terms. Why not? That’s what liberals do. It’s almost all they know anymore. “These 25 Republicans — all white men — just voted to ban abortion in Alabama,” the headline reads. The law, according to the article, “will disproportionately affect black and poor women, because they are more likely to seek abortions, and less likely to have resources to obtain an abortion out-of-state.”

Not once did the article allude to the only innocent party in the equation: the unborn baby. Nor did it mention that America’s abominably liberal abortion laws result in the grossly disproportionate killing of innocent black babies. Pro-life leaders in the black community have said that “the most dangerous place for an African-American is in the womb” and that abortion “is the most institutionalized form of racism” in America.

Planned Parenthood, the left’s favorite abortion factory, was outraged at the bill. “Today is a dark day for women in Alabama and across the country,” said Staci Fox, CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast. “Banning abortion is horrible … We will take this to court and ensure abortion remains safe and legal and accessible in the state of Alabama.” She forgot “profitable.”

Democratic leaders were seemingly in a competition over who could condemn the law most harshly. Hillary Clinton said it is an example of “appalling attacks on women’s lives and fundamental freedoms.” We can safely infer that she was not factoring in the female babies’ lives the law would protect. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said the “ban is dangerous and exceptionally cruel.” She did not comment on whether the law is cruel to the unborn babies. Warren and Sen. Kamala Harris both noted that the law is an attack on Roe v. Wade.

Yes, that’s kind of the point, and Alabama’s Republicans are admitting it. Isn’t it about time the court revisited Roe in earnest? What these Democrats don’t say is that their best hope of preserving existing abortion law is for the court to affirm its lawless 1973 decision, either through some newly created legal fiction or in almost-idolatrous fidelity to long-standing but screamingly bad precedent.

As I say, I doubt the court, even as currently constituted, will overrule Roe outright, but it would be a glorious day for America, and for God’s innocent unborn babies, if it were to do so.
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David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book is "Jesus is Risen: Paul and the Early Church." Follow him on Twitter& @davidlimbaugh and his website at davidlimbaugh.com.

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True Grit . . .

. . . After over 2 years of investigation and over 2800 subpoenas, Nadler wants to keep the destroy-Trump dream alive with even more subpoenas, but Trump says no more.

Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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Trump Immigration Plan Secures Border ...

...Emphasizes Merit, Limits Chain Migration And Puts America First

by Robert Romano: President Donald Trump on May 16 unveiled his immigration reform plan that would secure the border, place an emphasis on merit-based migration and limit family chain migration.

These changes are long overdue and come after more than 50 years since immigration has been meaningfully addressed by Congress.

On border security, Trump proposed using customs and border fees to create, in the President’s words, a “permanent and self-sustaining border security trust fund” that in the future could be used to make improvements and expand the wall, without the need for Congress to get involved with annual appropriations.

This would deal with normal wear and tear on border barriers that have gone into disrepair and give an administration the flexibility needed to react quickly when the drug cartels and gangs shift the routes they are pursuing to smuggle heroin and other drugs across the U.S. border.

Trump said, “Everyone agrees that the physical infrastructure on the border and the ports of entry is gravely underfunded and woefully inadequate.”

The President also reported on progress being made to build the wall by the Army Corps of Engineers, saying, “we should have close to 400 miles built by the end of next year, and probably even more than that. It’s going up very rapidly.”

On human trafficking, the President proposed addressing current law and the Flores decision that incentivizes children to be smuggled into the U.S., saying, “Current law and federal court rulings encourage criminal organizations to smuggle children across the border. The tragic result is that 65 percent of all border-crossers this year were either minors or adults traveling with minors. Our plan will change the law to stop the flood of child smuggling and to humanely reunite unaccompanied children with their families back home — and rapidly. “

Trump also promised to rein in bogus asylum claims. According to Justice Department data through 2016, up to 43 percent of asylum seekers depending on the year never make their court appearances after they are released, with tens of thousands simply disappearing into the woodwork every year. In 2016 alone, 34,193 cases were completed in abstentia and ordered to be deported because the alien had not shown up in court.

In addition, only about 10 percent of those whose credible fear claims are initially granted are actually given asylum, according to the White House.

An order from Attorney General William Barr to immigration judges addresses that in part by blocking some of those making asylum claims from being released on bond while their proceedings are ongoing.

Said Trump of the problem, “legitimate asylum seekers are being displaced by those lodging frivolous claims — these are frivolous claims — to gain admission into our country… My plan expedites relief for legitimate asylum seekers by screening out the meritless claims.”

Trump also said that it was time to restrict the family chain migration system and shift towards a merit-based system depending on the economic needs of the nation. Trump noted of the 1.1 million new permanent legal residents admitted every year, “Currently, 66 percent of legal immigrants come here on the basis of random chance. They’re admitted solely because they have a relative in the United States. And it doesn’t really matter who that relative is. Another 21 percent of immigrants are issued either by random lottery, or because they are fortunate enough to be selected for humanitarian relief.”

In other words, about 87 percent of those coming to the U.S. are not based on economic needs but upon familial relations or luck of the draw, and only 12 percent explicitly come for work. Trump proposes increasing work-based immigration from 12 percent to 57 percent and reducing familial immigration to just immediate families and visa lotteries commensurately.

Trump underscored the problem that we are turning away doctors and other highly educated persons because they choose to follow the law, and the law provides no room for them to stay: “Under the senseless rules of the current system, we’re not able to give preference to a doctor, a researcher, a student who graduated number one in his class from the finest colleges in the world — anybody… Some of the most skilled students at our world-class universities are going back home because they have no relatives to sponsor them here in the United States.”

The plan met with support by Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning, who said, “The framework laid out by the President today is a smart way forward and it is important that Democrats support it and securing the border in a humane way, build a merit-based system and move away from family chain migration. Any attempts to add amnesty or other poison pill provisions would be an admission that Democrats are unwilling to work on basic issues of common ground on securing the border, reforming our broken system and treating immigrants humanely.”

In other words, the President’s plan puts America first — and it’s about time.
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Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government

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Trump’s ‘Infrastructure’ Plan Versus Obama’s ‘Stimulus’: Part II

Larry Elder

by Larry Elder: My previous column objected to President Donald Trump and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s, D-N.Y., proposed $2 trillion “infrastructure” spending. As with President Barack Obama’s “stimulus,” the Trump-Schumer plan violates the concept of federalism and bails out states that spend irresponsibly, guaranteeing a future of continued irresponsible behavior by state and local governments.

But several of my column’s readers insisted that Trump — a builder and shrewd negotiator — plans to spend more efficiently and effectively than Obama did under his $787 billion so-called stimulus plan. Respected lawyer and columnist John Hinderaker, for example, wrote: “I disagree: Obama’s faux stimulus consisted largely of support for state governments so they could keep union employees on the payroll. Very little of the ‘stimulus’ involved construction projects. Trump, at least, is actually talking about building, repairing and maintaining infrastructure.”

The at-least-Trump-will-spend-it-better argument ignores federalism — the federal principle of government holding that states are responsible for state projects — and increases the incentive for states to engage in financial irresponsibility, knowing they can depend on the federal government.

Also, unlike Obama’s stimulus, Trump proposes public-private projects. California’s mostly mothballed “bullet train” project, having spent $5.4 billion since 2008, serves as a recent example of a lot of “public” but no “private.” After delays, cost overruns and the lack of the anticipated private money, the state’s new Democratic governor is now sharply curtailing its goals.

Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution outlines the federal government’s limited and specific duties, powers and obligations. Not found is the power, responsibility or expectation to build, renovate, expand or manage state and local projects. At one time, Presidents actually adhered to this constitutional principle of federal restraint.

President James Monroe, our 5th President, cast his only veto when Congress passed a bill authorizing money to expand the Cumberland Road. Even though the expansion stood to benefit Virginia, Monroe’s home state, he said the project violated the principle of federalism, under which the federal government lacks the authority to spend money on state projects.

According to Monroe’s biography on the University of Virginia’s americanpresident.org: “Although Monroe personally supported the idea of internal improvements, he balked at the federal government’s role in the American System being proposed by Congressmen Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun. They wanted a series of federally financed projects designed to improve and update the nation’s roads, bridges and canals. Monroe worried, however, that federal payments for such internal improvements would expand even further the power of the federal government at the sake of state power. Where would the limits be drawn?”

Columnist and economist Walter Williams notes that several other presidents agreed:

President James Madison, our 4th President, who is regarded as the father of the Constitution, blasted Congress in 1792 for appropriating money for French refugees. Madison wrote, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

President Franklin Pierce, our 14th President, vetoed a bill in 1854 that aided the mentally ill, arguing, “I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity.” He added that to approve such spending “would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.”

President Grover Cleveland was our 22nd and 24th President. In 1887, he vetoed an appropriation to help counties in Texas that were suffering from drought. Cleveland said: “I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds. … I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.”

In a recent trip to St. Louis, my Uber driver glowered at the city’s professional football stadium, financed by state and local taxpayers. The stadium had attracted the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams. But the Rams left St. Louis once their 20-year commitment ended and returned to Los Angeles. My driver claimed that the Rams, after moving to St. Louis, never completely relocated their LA corporate headquarters there. “So, that,” said the driver, “was the team’s plan all along. Come here, grab the money and get back to LA.” Who knows?

The point is this: Federal stimulus/infrastructure projects encourage poorly thought-through or vanity projects such as the stadium in St. Louis. What else could have and should have been done with that money? These are valid questions whether one calls it “infrastructure spending” or “stimulus.”
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Larry Elder (@larryelder) is a best-selling author and radio talk-show host, an American lawyer, writer and radio and television personality who is also known as the "Sage From South Central." To find out more about Larry Elder. Visit his website at LarryElder.com for list of other articles.

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Tags: Larry Elder, commentary, Trump’s ‘Infrastructure’ Plan, Versus Obama’s ‘Stimulus’, Part II
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Americans Paid for the Internet, We Deserve Free Speech On It

by Daniel Greenfield: But, it’s a private company.”

It’s a familiar argument. Bring up the problem of Google, Facebook and Twitter suppressing conservative speech and many conservatives will retort that it’s a free market. The big dot com monopolies created their own companies, didn’t they? And we wouldn’t want government regulation of business.

In a FOX Business editorial, Iain Murray writes that breaking up dot coms like Google would be "a repudiation of conservative principles". He argues that "Twitter is a private company" and that "there is no positive right to free speech on Twitter or any other private venue."

“The same goes for the president’s attacks on Google and the complaints of conservative censorship," Diane Katz writes at the Heritage Institute. "These private enterprises are not obligated to abide any sort of partisan fairness doctrine."

The talking point that Google, Facebook and Twitter are private companies that can discriminate as they please on their private platforms, and that the First Amendment doesn’t apply, is in the air everywhere.

But it overlooks two very simple facts.

The driving force behind the censorship of conservatives isn’t a handful of tech tycoons. It’s elected officials. Senator Kamala Harris offered an example of that in a recent speech where she declared that she would "hold social media platforms accountable" if they contained "hate" or "misinformation".

“Misinformation” is a well-known euphemism among Democrats and the media for conservative political content. It was originally known as “fake news” before President Trump hijacked the term to refer to the media. The recent Poynter list of “unreliable” sites was stacked with conservative sites. Lists like these aren’t hypothetical. Poynter runs the International Fact Checking Network which had been empowered by Facebook and other sites to deplatform conservative content through its ‘fact checks’.

All of this got underway in response to claims by Hillary Clinton and her allies that “fake news” had cost her the election and represented a grave attack on our democracy. The call was quickly taken up by Democrats in the House and the Senate. It’s been commented on supportively by powerful Clinton allies in the tech industry, like Eric Schmidt, the former chairman of Google.

Dot coms like Facebook are cracking down on conservatives as an explicit response to pressure from elected government officials. That’s not the voluntary behavior of private companies. When Facebook deletes conservatives in response to threats of regulatory action from Senate Democrats, its censors are acting as government agents while engaging in viewpoint discrimination.

Free market conservatives can argue that Facebook should have the right to discriminate against conservatives. But do they really want to argue that Senate Democrats should have the right to compel private companies to censor conservatives?

What’s the difference between that and a totalitarian state?

It might, arguably, be legal for your landlord to kick you out of your house because he doesn’t like the fact that you’re a Republican. But is it legal for him to do so on orders from Senator Kamala Harris?

Defending abusive behavior like that is a desecration of the free market.

The second fact is that the internet is not the work of a handful of aspiring entrepreneurs who built it out of thin air using nothing but their talent, brains and nimble fingers.

The internet was the work of DARPA. That stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is part of the Department of Defense. DARPA had funded the creation of the core technologies that made the internet possible. The origins of the internet go back to DARPA's Arpanet.

Nor did the story end once the internet had entered every home.

Where did Google come from? "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," the original paper by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the co-founders of Google, reveals support from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and even NASA.

Harvard’s computer science department, where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg learned to play with the toys that turned him into a billionaire, has also wallowed in DARPA cash. Not to mention funds from a variety of other DOD and Federal science agencies.

Taxpayer sank a fortune into developing a public marketplace where ideas are exchanged, and political advocacy and economic activity takes place. That marketplace doesn’t belong to Google, Amazon or Facebook. And when those monopolies take a stranglehold on the marketplace, squeezing out conservatives from being able to participate, they’re undermining our rights and freedoms.

"A right of free correspondence between citizen and citizen on their joint interests, whether public or private and under whatsoever laws these interests arise (to wit: of the State, of Congress, of France, Spain, or Turkey), is a natural right," Thomas Jefferson argued.

There should be a high barrier for any company seeking to interfere with the marketplace of ideas in which the right of free correspondence is practiced.

Critics of regulating dot com monopolies have made valid points.

Regulating Google or Facebook as a public utility is dangerous. And their argument that giving government the power to control content on these platforms would backfire is sensible.

Any solution to the problem should not be based on expanding government control.

But there are two answers.

First, companies that engage in viewpoint discrimination in response to government pressure are acting as government agents. When a pattern of viewpoint discrimination manifests itself on the platform controlled by a monopoly, a civil rights investigation should examine what role government officials played in instigating the suppression of a particular point of view.

Liberals have abandoned the Public Forum Doctrine, once a popular ACLU theme, while embracing censorship. But if the Doctrine could apply to a shopping mall, it certainly applies to the internet.

In Packingham v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court's decision found that, "A fundamental principle of the First Amendment is that all persons have access to places where they can speak and listen."

The Packingham case dealt with government interference, but when monopolies silence conservatives on behalf of government actors, they are fulfilling the same role as an ISP that suspends a customer in response to a law.

When dot com monopolies get so big that being banned from their platforms effectively neutralizes political activity, press activity and political speech, then they’re public forums.

Second, rights are threatened by any sufficiently large organization or entity, not just government. Government has traditionally been the most powerful such organization, but the natural rights that our country was founded on are equally immune to every organization. Governments, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, exist as part of a social contract to secure these rights for its citizens.

Government secures these rights, first and foremost, against itself. (Our system effectively exists to answer the question of who watches the watchers.) But it also secures them against foreign powers, a crisis that the Declaration of Independence was written to meet, and against domestic organizations, criminal or political, whether it’s the Communist Party or ISIS, that seek to rob Americans of their rights.

A country in which freedom of speech effectively did not exist, even though it remained a technical right, would not be America. A government that allowed such a thing would have no right to exist.

Only a government whose citizens enjoy the rights of free men legally justifies is existence.

If a private company took control of all the roads and closed them to conservatives every Election Day, elections would become a mockery and the resulting government would be an illegitimate tyranny.

That’s the crisis that conservatives face with the internet.

Protecting freedom of speech does not abandon conservative principles, it secures them. There are no conservative principles without freedom of speech. A free market nation without freedom of speech isn’t a conservative country. It’s an oligarchy. That’s the state of affairs on the internet.

Conservatives should beware of blindly enlisting in leftist efforts to take regulatory control of companies like Facebook. The result would be a deeper and more pervasive form of censorship than exists today. But neither should they imagine that the ‘free market side of history’ will automatically fix the problem.

As the internet has devolved from its origins in academia to a set of handheld devices controlled by one of two companies, and then to a set of smart assistants controlled by one of two companies, it has become far less open. Even if Google were to lose its monopoly, Silicon Valley hosts a politicized workforce which allies with the media to compel any rising new company to toe the same line.

And if that fails, there are always House and Senate hearings and harder laws coming out of Europe.

We have an existing useful toolset to draw on, from anti-trust laws to civil rights investigations to the Public Forum Doctrine. This will be a challenging process, but we must remember through it all, that we have a right to freedom of speech on the internet. Our tax dollars, invested over generations, built this system. It does not belong to the Left. Or, for that matter, the Right. It belongs to all of us.
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Daniel Greenfield (@Sultanknish) is Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an investigative journalist and writer focusing on radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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