6 Things to Know About the Mayor of Minneapolis

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey becomes emotional
Thursday during a press conference.

by Rachel del Guidice: Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey became a fixture of Americans’ TV screens after a man’s video-recorded death in the custody of city police. Frey has clashed verbally with President Donald Trump in the wake of protests and riots following the incident.

George Floyd, 46, died Monday evening after a police officer pressed a knee into Floyd’s neck as he lay on the pavement and refused to stop after Floyd begged him to, saying he was unable to breathe.

While many peacefully protested how Floyd died, others rioted across the city, looting stores and setting fires to buildings and cars Wednesday night. That same night, a shop owner reportedly shot a person he thought was a looter. Late Thursday night, rioters broke into and set fire to the 3rd Precinct police station, which police had abandoned.

Derek Chauvin, the officer seen kneeling on Floyd’s neck, was arrested and charged Friday with third-degree murder and manslaughter. Many commentators have said race is an issue in the incident because Chauvin is white and Floyd was black.

The Minneapolis Police Department fired Chauvin and three other officers Tuesday.

Here are six things to know about Frey, 38, who was elected mayor as a candidate of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.

1. He’s Fighting With Trump
In the wee hours Friday, Trump called out Frey on Twitter, writing:I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right. …Frey responded during a press conference Friday, The Hill reported, telling reporters: “Let me say this, weakness is refusing to take responsibility for your own actions. Weakness is pointing your finger at somebody else during a time of crisis. Donald Trump knows nothing about the strength of Minneapolis.”

Frey added: “We are strong as hell. Is this a difficult time period? Yes, but you better be damned sure that we’re going to get through this.”

2. He Is Pleading for Peace
Amid the rioting and looting, Frey called for peace Thursday.

“I believe in Minneapolis,” he said. “I love Minneapolis.”

“And in believing in our city, we must believe we can be better than we have been,” the mayor said. “We must confront our shortcomings with both humility and hope. We must restore the peace so we can do this hard work together.”

3. He Used to Be on City Council
Frey, elected to a four-year term as mayor on Nov. 7, 2017, ran under the banner of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He took office Jan. 2, 2018.

Ken Martin, party chairman, said in a formal statement that month that Frey “is a passionate progressive who has a proven ability to build consensus and get things done for the people of Minneapolis.”

Martin said that “from fighting for social justice to supporting small businesses, Frey will use his position as mayor to build on the progress he made on City Council.”

Frey was elected to a four-year term on the Minneapolis City Council in 2013.

4. He Was a ‘Ready or Hot’ Model for Planned Parenthood
Frey agreed to appear as a model for a Planned Parenthood fashion event called “Ready or Hot.”

Ready or Hot is “a radically inclusive fashion show that celebrates the beauty of every person, regardless of size, shape, age, gender, or race,” according to Planned Parenthood’s website.

The nation’s largest abortion provider said models for the fashion show “are community change-makers and everyday champions who support Planned Parenthood and are fiercely committed to the fight for reproductive rights.”

Frey, who is Jewish, has spoken publicly about his support of Planned Parenthood, tweeting in March 2018: “Planned Parenthood provides impt healthcare services in MPLS & MN to countless women and men—including myself. And yes, all their patients should have access to that care free from intimidation, just like I do. Proud to #StandWithPP & those they serve.”

5. He Declared ‘Abortion Provider Appreciation Day’
The Hill reported that the March 10 marking of Abortion Provider Appreciation Day “comes exactly 27 years after the death of Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider who was fatally shot by a man outside his clinic in Florida in 1993.”

Frey told CBS Minnesota on March 10: “Every day, abortion providers like Whole Woman’s Health deliver high quality care in the face of harassment and threats to abortion access at the federal and local levels.”

“I’m proud to recognize today as Abortion Provider Appreciation Day to celebrate Whole Woman’s Health as an essential part of our community,” Frey said.

Frey married in 2010 and divorced in early 2014. He remarried in 2016.

6. He Supports Voting by Mail
Frey seconded an April 13 tweet by former first lady Michelle Obama calling for expanded mail-in voting.

“No American should have to choose between making their voice heard and staying safe,” Obama said in the tweet. “Expanding access to #VoteByMail, online voter registration and early voting are critical steps for this moment—they’re also long overdue.”

That same day, Frey retweeted Obama and added: “What @MichelleObama said.”

Eleven days later, on April 24, Frey tweeted: “Expand vote by mail.”

Ken McIntyre contributed to this report.
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Rachel del Guidice  (@LRacheldG)  is a congressional reporter for The Daily Signal.

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Who Will Have the Next Revolution?

by Tom Balek: We see news of protests on a daily basis now, from every corner of the world

Hong Kong has erupted in street protests over the Chinese Communist Party’s aggressive push to strip the “autonomous” region of its freedoms guaranteed under the 1997 agreement when the UK gave clear title to the CCP.

Protestors continue to march in Venezuela, demanding the ouster of dictator Nicolas Maduro after suffering through years of economic devastation and loss of personal rights.

Ethnic attacks in Mali and DR Congo have inflamed citizens to the boiling point. In the Middle East civil unrest in several nations including Yemen, Syria and Libya have become a fact of daily life.

And in the US this week, riots have erupted in several cities over the police killing of a black man during an arrest in Minneapolis. This follows weeks of protests at state capitals by conservative activists who oppose the government’s coronavirus-inspired economic shutdowns. America is polarized, with every news development devolving into a red / blue showdown. There doesn’t seem to be even an inch of middle ground in our political turf-war. The very structure of our constitutional government is in play as lines of authority continue to break down. The separation of powers as defined in the constitution is taking a beating as rogue judges attempt to override executive and legislative authority, while corruption runs rampant and unpunished.

Tensions between the ruling class and the governed simmer all over the world. We know that civil unrest can lead to civil war or bloody revolution, and the results can lead to positive change or down the highway to hell.

The world is now averse to hot wars, but in the USA we openly hope for revolutions in Iran, Venezuela, Syria and China that lead to regime change. Do they wish the same for us? The US has shown a proclivity to get involved in foreign civil wars in the past, with less-than-stellar results. And we are seeing our adversaries brazenly meddling in our domestic affairs lately.

Could we be the first in line for civil war or revolution? Will we soon be watching bloodshed in Hong Kong or Tehran? Or will they be cheering while watching ours?
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Tom Balek (@TomBalek) is a fellow conservative activist, blogger, musician and contributes to the ARRA News Service. Tom resides in South Carolina and seeks to educate those too busy with their work and families to notice how close to the precipice our economy has come. He blogs at Rockin' On the Right Side

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Reopen America Now!

by Lloyd Marcus: Sunday, Memorial Day weekend, was a beautiful sunny day. Mary and I left our West Virginia home to make the 40-mile trek to Walmart and Home Depot in Virginia. We drove past a Virginia megachurch which usually has state cops directing traffic for the congregation. The parking lot was empty with a large “closed” sign. Meanwhile, Walmart and Home Depot parking lots were packed.

Around 50% of shoppers wore masks. Absurdly, I saw toddlers wearing masks, which were particularly annoying. Professor Dolores J. Cahill, PhD is a highly credentialed and respected Immunologist and Molecular Biologist. Prof. Cahill, world-renowned Dr. Russel Blaylock, Dr. Judy Mikovits, and countless other scientists around the world say wearing masks is dangerous.

At Home Depot, not only did the young woman who mixed my paint wear a mask, she spoke to me from behind a Plexiglas window. Stopping for gas at a tiny West Virginia convenience store, a masked staffer stood guard at the door restricting the number of customers allowed inside. The two checkout clerks worked from behind newly installed glass walls; both wore masks. Dollar General had strips of duck tape six feet apart on the sidewalk to ensure that patrons social distanced outside.

Health experts’ predictions of catastrophic deaths were wrong. Over 98% of people who get coronavirus recover. And yet, in just a few months, fear and political exploitation have taken us from a booming economy to living in a nightmare apocalyptic sci-fi movie. Americans are suffering Great Depression levels of unemployment, overstressed food banks, skyrocketing suicides, and Democrats urinating on the Constitution, declaring themselves our supreme dictators. Observing all the extreme restrictions and precautions, I thought, “Dear Lord, we are experiencing nationwide hysteria.”

My skin crawls whenever I hear fake news media and Democrats on TV scolding and branding Americans selfish for desiring to reopen their businesses to serve the public and feed their families.

Always believing themselves smarter than God, wicked Democrats are actually advocating that we social distance from now on. God built us to withstand viruses. And yet, these arrogant knuckleheads say humans must never again interact the way they have since the beginning of time. Every day, I ask myself, “What on earth is wrong with these people?”

Back in April when Trump announced plans to reopen America, I noticed that Democrat and a few RINO governors immediately tripled down on their crazy edicts such as ordering all shoppers to wear masks. Their wicked game plan is to stop America from reopening and convince voters that Trump is deadly.

Despite Trump being proven innocent, Democrats continue promoting the lie that Trump stole the presidency via collusion with Russia. They impeached him, falsely accusing him of making illegal demands in a phone call with the president of Ukraine. These illegal schemes along with others have failed to end Trump’s presidency. Using the coronavirus lock-down to destroy the American economy is Democrats’ and fake news medias’ last hope of removing this pro-Christian, America-first Neanderthal from the Oval Office.

Always believing themselves smarter than God, wicked Democrats are actually advocating that we social distance from now on. God built us to withstand viruses. And yet, these arrogant knuckleheads say humans must never again interact the way they have since the beginning of time. Every day, I ask myself, “What on earth is wrong with these people?”

Back in April when Trump announced plans to reopen America, I noticed that Democrat and a few RINO governors immediately tripled down on their crazy edicts such as ordering all shoppers to wear masks. Their wicked game plan is to stop America from reopening and convince voters that Trump is deadly.

Despite Trump being proven innocent, Democrats continue promoting the lie that Trump stole the presidency via collusion with Russia. They impeached him, falsely accusing him of making illegal demands in a phone call with the president of Ukraine. These illegal schemes along with others have failed to end Trump’s presidency. Using the coronavirus lock-down to destroy the American economy is Democrats’ and fake news medias’ last hope of removing this pro-Christian, America-first Neanderthal from the Oval Office.

Therefore, these months leading to the November election are going to be a battle like you have never seen before. If you think Democrats and fake news media have behaved badly thus far, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

In June, Mary and I will leave our almost-Heaven West Virginia home, flying to the West Coast to tour with the Conservative Campaign Committee on their “Operation Restore America” initiative.

A guy sent me an email saying both political parties are corrupt. While that may be true, we cannot stop fighting to turn our country around. God miraculously gave us President Trump. Realizing that the Israelites prevailed in battle when Moses’ hands were in the air, Aaron and Hur held up Moses’ arms. We must hold up Trump’s arms to make America great again, again.

America recently celebrated Memorial Day. It would be a devastating slap in the face to the brave men and women who died for our freedom to allow Democrats and fake news media to transform us into a socialist/communist nation.

Unfortunately, fake news media has so successfully filled some conservatives with fear of coronavirus that they accept Democrats repealing our constitutional liberties. Incredibly, they want this unnecessary lock-down which is literally destroying our country to continue.

Folks, those of us who love freedom and America must be the adults in the room, firmly demanding that this insane lockdown end immediately. God is on our side.
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Lloyd Marcus (@LloydMarcus) is an "Unhyphenated American" and an internationally renowned conservative columnist, singer/songwriter and author. He Chairs of the Conservative Campaign Committee Political Action Committee. He is a prominent voice of the American Tea Party movement and the singer/songwriter of the ”American Tea Party Anthem.” Marcus has been on Fox News, CNN, PJTV and the ARRA News Service.

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No Peace, No Justice

. . . Minnesota Business owners get a worse deal from the press than the rioters and the looters in Minneapolis.

Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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Tags: AF Branco, Editorial Cartoon, No Peace, No Justice, Minnesota Business owners. get a worse deal. from the press, rioters, looters, Minneapolis. To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Minneapolis Maelstrom, Confronting Communist China

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer: Minneapolis Maelstrom
By now, you have likely seen the terrible Memorial Day video of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of a black man and ignoring his pleas for help, killing him. The video is disturbing, and everyone should be troubled by it. Our hearts and prayers are with the Floyd family.

Today, Officer Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged with third degree murder. Here are some additional points to consider.

• Understandably and appropriately, there were demonstrations in Minneapolis after the video of Floyd's arrest became public. That is what should happen in a free society where people have the right to speak out against injustice.
• Sadly, the legitimate demonstrations were hijacked by criminal and radical elements in Minneapolis, of which there are many. The city is a hotbed of anarchist groups and radical Islamic groups. There is a huge problem with Somali gangs. Extremists with a "hate America agenda" are exploiting this terrible incident in order to bring down civil order.
• As one media outlet put it, the rioters were so outraged by police brutality that they stole air fryers and clothing. They attacked a school. They also attacked a disabled woman in a wheelchair, claiming she "deserved it." Is this "justice"? I don't think it is a stretch to suggest that very few of the looters and rioters care a whit about George Floyd or the injustice that was done to him.
• In America's cities and urban centers, it is extremely important for state and local officials to be responsible and not stoke the fires that could lead to more violence. The far-left leadership of Minneapolis has done the exact opposite. Mayor Frey immediately gave it a racial narrative, tweeting about a "white officer pressing his knee into a black man's neck." I am not defending the officer's conduct, but we have no idea whether race played any role in the incident.
• When rioting and looting broke out on the first night, it was clear that police had been ordered to stand down. Meanwhile, others have thrown rhetorical gasoline on the flames. Colin Kaepernick seemingly called for vigilante justice, tweeting that "revolting was the only logical reaction." No it's not! He added that "cries for peace" will "land on deaf ears."
• Not to be outdone, rapper Ice Cube tweeted, "How long will we go for Blue on Black Crime before we strike back?" How many more innocent deaths would satisfy Cube and Kaepernick? That's not what Martin Luther King, Jr. sacrificed his life for.
• When authorities in St. Paul offered to send police reinforcements to Minneapolis, left-wing members of the St. Paul city council said they would stop even one officer from going to Minneapolis. Last night, the rioting spread to St. Paul.
• Governor Walz called out the National Guard yesterday, but last night's rioting was worse. How can that be? When the mob attacked the Third Precinct police headquarters, the mayor ordered police to abandon the precinct. The building was burned.
• More than 170 businesses all over the area, many minority owned, have been ransacked and destroyed. Just a few weeks ago, if you opened your business against the state's stay at home order, you were arrested. But if you burn a business, you're called a "protestor."
• This passive strategy was the same misguided policy that was used in Baltimore several years ago. It did not end the rioting quickly enough, and only guaranteed that businesses would be hesitant to invest in Baltimore. By the way, Mayor Frey is now asking the protestors to >practice social distancing and to wear masks.
• Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett blamed President Trump's rhetoric and repeated the vile Charlottesville lie. What is happening in Minneapolis has nothing to do with Donald Trump. The president said he was "shocked" by the video. He ordered the FBI and Justice Department to expedite its investigation of Floyd's death.
• As I have noted, Minneapolis is a Democrat city from top to bottom. It's not "MAGA country." If there is systematic racism in Minneapolis, the city's progressive leaders have a lot to answer for.
• Riots also broke out in Louisville, Kentucky, last night, another Democrat stronghold, over an unrelated incident that occurred weeks ago, just as the Covid pandemic erupted.
• For the record, there is no pandemic of racist police shootings. Research shows that "white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians." But the media seem to only focus on certain incidents that fit the progressive anti-police, anti-America narrative.
• Also for the record, President Trump led efforts to reform the criminal justice system, giving second chances to many minorities in prison like Alice Marie Johnson.
• President Trump urged Mayor Frey to get control of the situation and protect the city's residents. He later tweeted, "These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won't let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. . . when the looting starts, the shooting starts." Twitter put a warning label on the president's tweet saying it "glorified violence." The president is trying to stop the violence, like the man who was shot in Minneapolis or the seven people shot in Louisville. By the way, Kaepernick's tweet that seemed to threaten violence didn't get a warning.
• At a press conference today, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison told protestors not to confuse the National Guard, who a week ago were administering Covid tests, with the Minneapolis police, which he implied was an "occupying military force." So while supposedly trying to calm things down, Ellison disparaged the very police officers who are putting their lives on the line trying to regain control of the streets.
• Ellison also took issue with President Trump for calling the rioters and looters "thugs." The liberal black mayor of Baltimore called rioters "thugs," and had to apologize. Even Barack Obama has used the word "thugs."
• Ellison's criticism tells you everything you need to know about what bedevils Minneapolis. When you can't make a judgment about violence and lawlessness, you're getting right to the heart of why there are problems in America's urban areas. These thugs are burning businesses, robbing banks and, at least in one case, attacked a disabled woman. These are barbaric actions! They aren't Boy Scouts, folks.
• If you're looking for someone's whose rhetoric may be responsible for this violence, look no further than Rep. Ilhan Omar. Much of this violence is taking place in her district. While Omar is calling for calm now, like Ellison she has repeatedly trashed America as racist and evil.
• And just when you think we have reached peak progressive insanity, along comes Michael Moore, who tweeted this gem: "Good citizens burning down the evil police precinct in MN after all police were out & safe. . . Police HQ must be demolished by the city tomorrow as a show of contrition to black America."

Confronting Communist China
Moments ago, President Trump announced that the United States was formally withdrawing from the World Health Organization, due to the organization's malfeasance in helping China to cover up the danger from Covid-19 and for refusing to make any serious reforms.

The president also said that the United States will take steps to end Hong Kong's preferential trade treatment as a result of Beijing "smothering Hong Kong's freedom" in violation of its treaty obligations.

Trump said that the administration would suspend visas to Chinese students and researchers who have been identified as potential security risks. And he is also ordering administration officials to ensure that Chinese companies traded on American financial markets are fully transparent, an important step to protect U.S. investors.
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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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Minneapolis Burning Is No Justice for George

. . . The grossly destructive rage on display has nothing to do with rectifying a wrong.

by Douglas Andrews: When rioters burned South Central Los Angeles to the ground in 1992, they at least had the decency to wait for due process to run its course. No such luck, however, with the looters, anarchists, arsonists, thugs, and imported agitators currently running roughshod over South Minneapolis.

Thankfully, Minnesota’s largest city has so far been spared the death and destruction that visited LA nearly three decades ago. But things are far from quiet in the wake of George Floyd’s deeply disturbing death at the hands of four Minneapolis cops Monday night.

How bad is it? As the Associated Press reports, “Cheering protesters torched a Minneapolis police station Thursday that the department was forced to abandon as three days of violent protests spread to nearby St. Paul and angry demonstrations flared across the U.S.”

It’s a sad sign of the times that our law-enforcement personnel and institutions are now the target of lawless behavior rather than a reliable force for putting it down. And it’s another sad sign that our mainstream media no longer refers to rioters as “rioters.” Instead, they opt for the more genteel “protesters.” As George Orwell himself put it, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

Speaking of murder, we should focus for a moment on the cause of all this — namely, the indefensible actions of one Minneapolis cop and three cops-turned-bystanders. As Fox News reports, “Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer caught on camera kneeling on the neck of George Floyd as he gasped for air, has been the subject of 10 conduct complaints and three police shootings that led to no disciplinary action during his 19 years on the job.”

Suffice it to say that Chauvin’s record seems troubling enough without the help of Trump-deranged social-media sickos who couldn’t wait to begin circulating a fake photo of a man who looked like Chauvin wearing a “Make Whites Great Again” hat.

As for the lack of disciplinary action meted out against Chauvin over the years, it may well be that he conducted himself lawfully in every instance. Or it may be that the state’s top prosecutor was simply incompetent, or lacked sufficient fortitude, or both. That prosecutor’s name? Minnesota Senator and former Democrat presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar, who’s rumored to be on the short (and getting shorter) list of Joe Biden’s potential running mates.

Biden has, of course, pledged to put a woman on the ticket — which would likely disqualify Reverend Al Sharpton, the race-baiting agitator of Tawana Brawley and Freddie’s Fashion Mart infamy who showed up in Minneapolis yesterday to foment a nationwide “We Can’t Breathe” movement.

Somehow lost on Sharpton (and the mainstream media) amid all the strife in Minneapolis, however, are the killing fields of Southside Chicago, which saw its deadliest Memorial Day weekend since 2015, and bloody Baltimore, which weighed in with seven shooting deaths of its own.

It’s understandable that, for the moment, Minneapolis is sucking all the oxygen out of press rooms around the country. But there’s still much to be said about the misplaced priorities of the Left, about the failure of Democrat leadership in our nation’s urban areas, and about the runaway death tolls in cities with the strictest gun-control laws in the land.

Perhaps it’s nothing that we haven’t already been saying for years.
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Douglas Andrews writes for the Patriot Post.

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George Soros Christians

by Mario Murillo: I want to show you a nasty comment someone posted concerning one of my blogs: “I honestly don’t understand how God-fearing Christians can defend this repugnant, amoral, adulterous, whoremonger, toddler of a President. Jesus fed the hungry, healed the sick, told His followers not to judge. And Trump’s cruelty knows no bounds. Locate your moral compass. It’s failing you right now.”

Let me point out how hypocritical it is for this person to say Jesus’ followers are “not to judge,” while this person proceeds to judge, condemn, and speak evil of the leader of our nation!

Here’s another nasty comment, “Total lies. Any real Christian would not support the evils and sins of this current President. Mario, you and your Fake ministry are all about the money, the root of the devil. You have sold your soul.”

These two comments were written by people who are infiltrators, who go on social media and pose as Christians. The reason they are doing this, is because the church is slowly and finally awakening. More and more believers including Black Americans and Hispanics are realizing that God has put Donald Trump in power for this very hour.

I promise you, those who made these comments are not believers, but infiltrators, who know some church lingo. Their goal is to rattle impressionable Christians. Don’t buy it! The Left is struggling to gain support among Christians. That is why they have resorted to these tactics. Their chief narrative is to bring up President Trump’s past.

Recently, I had a message passed on to me from a pastor. The note was from a concerned woman who eloquently, (a little too eloquently), described how dismayed she was by the lack of love among Trump supporters, and she added that the people of God had been fooled for following such a wicked leader. I don’t have space or time to show you how subtle and deceptive her message was. It shook some who read it.

Later, it was revealed that she was not a believer at all, but an activist from a local Islamic and Leftist consortium. She and others were being trained to insinuate their way into churches and social media, in order to spread anti-Trump lies.

It’s obvious that this is one of many attempts at creating distraction. They are trying to distract the church away from the nation-killing evil that is at the door. If we let voices like these fool us by shaming our faith, it spells doom for America. Trump, like him or hate him, is virtually the last firewall against the Satan inspired villainous policies of the Left.

Another even more subtle approach of these posers is to spread apathy by telling believers that political involvement shows they are guilty of not trusting God. Some of these deceivers say, “It’s all in God’s hands. Don’t interfere in His work”

Don’t believe them! And don’t you say you believe it is all in God’s hands while at the same time you oppose the solution He has sent. Trump isn’t our pastor, don’t ask him to do the job of the church. He is the wrecking ball sent to destroy those ideas that promote hatred for God, Israel, you, and your children.

Just look at the headlines. The Democrat controlled House voted to remove the phrase, “so help me God” from the oath taken by those sworn in to testify. New York legalized killing an unborn child right up to the moment of birth. Kamala Harris, presidential candidate for the Democrat Party, said she would abolish all private health insurance. According to Kaiser, that would wipe out coverage for 49% of Americans…not to mention throwing 500,000 people out of work. Ms. Harris, along with Corey Booker and every single Democrat candidate, also hates your God given right to defend yourself, and would abolish the Second Amendment of the Constitution, leaving an unarmed populace at the mercy of criminals and an all-powerful government. And by the way, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, “The world is going to end in 12 years.”

The enemy doesn’t want you to see the disaster that is right now at our door. Satan wants you to fixate on Trump’s past so he can destroy your children’s future. The demonic engine that drives the Left, hides the Socialist world they want for your children and grandchildren.

They don’t want you to see how their Marxist-socialism will tax us into oblivion. Most of all, they don’t want you to see that they are everything they claim they are against.

Here’s how lies become truth: you call in “experts.” You speak your lie with a straight face. Devoid of facts, you command the audience to believe you. This is all easier when the media never challenges anything you say.

Trump is the racist? Take a deep breath and prepare for what history is going to conclude about many things in our time. They will say the events that excluded whites on campus were racist. That terms like ‘white privilege’—like any other categorical statement that includes a color—is itself racist. They will ask how a nation that elected a black man to its highest office for 8 eight years can be accused of being “systemically racist.”

By the way, this charge of racism is coming to you from the Party that owned all the slaves and that started the Klu Klux Klan.

History will ask the same thing about hate and violence. An agitated feminist told a black man to take off his MAGA hat “because it makes us fearful.” That’s a statement in search of a fact. You don’t see roving gangs of youth donning MAGA hats and assaulting people in the streets. What you do see is violent Antifa thugs wearing masks and assaulting those who wear those hats.

In fact, you see Nick Sandmann and the young men from Covington High school terrorized and falsely accused because they wore MAGA hats. The lives of these boys have been changed forever. They have been vilified. Their families have received death threats. They’ve been forced to hire an attorney to protect themselves from further slander. The Left is having a veritable field day of violence… and you are worried about Trump’s past?

Ponder the breathtaking hypocrisy and cruelty of Mueller and Comey. How they blatantly ignored the mountain of evidence of treason and obstruction against Hillary Clinton, but nit-pick trivia about Trump and the Russians. The crimes they claim Trump did—but that the Mueller Report proves he didn’t do—are the very ones Hillary did do. It is absolutely mindboggling!

Future thinkers will scratch their head at Leftists who excoriated Trump falsely and accused him of separating children from their parents at our borders, even as these evil liars celebrate that new law I mentioned above that allows a woman to dismember her child in the womb, and even kill her baby at the point of birth.

Questions burn in me:

The noise, smoke and mirrors of today’s propaganda machine, amazes me on so many levels. The Democrat Party’s hard left turn promises massive new spending. All the free stuff they intend to force on you will bankrupt a nation already drowning in massive debt. When the beast starts eating, do you really believe only the rich will be taxed? Your children will give up most of what they earn to the socialist machine that will hand it over to those who earn nothing. Why wouldn’t we try to stop this?

They know robots will soon replace millions of jobs. Why are they anxious to open our borders to millions of unskilled laborers? Is it because they need more potential Democrat voters?

In Iran, they just hung a person for being homosexual, but in the Leftist universe it is the Christians, not the radical Muslims, are the real moral bigots. And you worry about standing with Trump?

I could go on forever, and no doubt you could throw in some real zingers I have overlooked. But I need to get to the point I wish to make: you need to take a look at the Left—they can destroy America—and if they are allowed to go on unopposed, they will. What do you think Trump is trying to stop?

We must not look the other way and ignore the doom the Left spells for all we hold sacred. Don’t ignore the changes that have occurred in this man since he began running for President. Most of all don’t let infiltrators posing as Christians dredge up Trump’s past. It is evident to many who knew him that he is not the same man. Don’t join those who hate him—continue to pray for him! (1 Tim. 2:2).

Your children’s future is far more important than Trump’s past.
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Mario Murillo is an evangelist Mario Murillo, minister, blogger.

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College Finances

by Kerby Anderson: Many colleges in America face a bleak financial future. They may have survived campus riots and protests in the past, but they may not weather the financial challenges they will face starting this fall.

The virus pandemic has already altered university education, and that trend is likely to continue for the near future. College campuses are empty as more and more students are learning over the Internet. When colleges open again, will all of the 20 million college students return to the campus? A sizable number of those students may decide to take a year off rather than pay nearly $50,000 a year to take a limited number of classes online. Some colleges have indicated that they might not open in the fall.

Either or both of those scenarios could spell financial disaster for colleges. Charles Fain Lehman explains in a recent column that universities have four sources of income: tuition, public funding, on-campus fees, and endowments. Tuition income drops when students decide to take a break from college. Fewer students impact on-campus fees like housing and food service. And financially strapped states may not be able to provide as much public funding for colleges.

A few select universities will benefit from the generous endowments they have put away. Those funds are not equally distributed. One expert estimated that half of the value of all college endowments is held by just 3 percent of the schools.

Small liberal arts colleges might not have survived even without the current economic downturn. This will merely accelerate their departure. But even the state schools will face an uncertain future. If these colleges experience a 20 to 30 percent drop in revenue, many of them will face a financial crisis. We will see a significant change in the college landscape over the next few years.
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Kerby Anderson @KerbyAnderson) is an author, lecturer, visiting professor and radio host and contributor on nationally syndicated Point of View and the "Probe" radio programs.

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FBI Document That Started Russia Investigation Shows . . .

. . . It Was Always An Investigation Of Trump, Not Russia

by Robert Romano: The originating document of the supposed Russia investigation by former FBI agent Peter Strzok, dated July 31, 2016, shows that the investigation was always about investigating then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and his campaign, not Russia.

The document, heavily redacted, was obtained by Judicial Watch via a Freedom of Information Act request.

It alleged that the Russian government “had been seeking prominent members of the Donald Trump campaign in which to engage to prepare for potential post-election relations should Trump be elected U.S. President. One of the people identified was George Papadopolous (although public media sources provide a spelling of Papadopoulos), who was believed to be one of Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisers.”

The hook was Papadopoulos, but not to look into Russia. In his final tweet before heading to prison on a false statement process crime, Papadopoulos on Nov. 26, 2018 posted on Twitter, “Still can’t believe the day I am going to a federal prison camp, mainstream media says am going for my Russia contacts. I have never met a single Russian official in my life. I have, however, met many western intel sources — Joseph Mifsud — who people still call ‘Russian.’ Facts. USA…”

Here, Papadopoulos was alleging that Mifsud — and everyone who he introduced Papadopoulos to — were not Russian officials but “decoys” orchestrated by Western intelligence agencies.

So, was it a sting operation?

According to the statement of offense by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, in March 2016 and while in Italy, Papadopoulos met Mifsud, based in London who “claimed to have substantial connections with Russian government officials.” Soon, Papadopoulos was introduced to Vladimir Putin’s “niece” — Putin has no niece — to supposedly set up a meeting between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

On April 26, 2016, Papadopoulos was told by Mifsud, per Mueller, that “the Russians had obtained ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Clinton. The Professor told defendant Papadopoulos, as defendant Papadopoulos later described to the FBI, that ‘They [the Russians] have dirt on her’; ‘the Russians had emails of Clinton’; ‘they have thousands of emails.’”

Papadopoulos has since said he thought the emails were not DNC or John Podesta emails that appeared on Wikileaks, but from Hillary Clinton’s private server. That is, that it was possible Russia had hacked the Clinton server. No emails were ever delivered to Papadopoulos.

Here’s the thing. In Mueller’s own filings, he never said that Papadopoulos’ contacts were Russian intelligence operatives. All statements included qualifiers.

Mifsud, according to Mueller, “claimed to have substantial connections with Russian government officials.” On Putin’s “niece,” Papadopoulos “believed that she had connections to Russian government officials…” Or, Papadopoulos was introduced to “an individual in Moscow … who told defendant Papadopoulos he had connections to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

Nowhere does the statement of offense by Mueller does he definitively confirm these contacts actually had the Russian connections they were purporting. Yet, on July 31, Strzok was convinced that the Russians were “seeking prominent members of the Donald Trump campaign in which to engage to prepare for potential post-election relations should Trump be elected U.S. President.”

This makes what really happened with Papadopoulos front and center in determining if the Trump-Russia investigation ever was about investigating Russia. Based on what we’ve seen so far, it looks like it was an attempt to frame Trump for crimes he never committed. That’s Soviet-style banana republic show trials, not America.
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Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.

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It's Not Up To Big Tech to Decide What's True

by Daniel Greenfield: Facebook, Twitter, and Google have all engaged in political censorship. But Twitter went into the lion's den by stuffing Dem talking points into a Trump tweet under the guise of a fact check. (That is essentially what fact checks are, authorization for Democrat media outlets and partners to determine what can be said and what the facts are.) Facebook's Zuckerberg took pains to distinguish himself from Twitter's Dorsey.

Unlike Dorsey, Zuckerberg has been careful to reach out to conservatives, which doesn't change his politics a whit, but he understands that he's riding the tiger, with Democrats pressing for a Facebook crackdown for not censoring conservatives, and Republicans pushing for a crackdown on Facebook for doing so. I'm not a fan of Zuckerberg, as some of my recent articles make clear, but he's also in an impossible situation.

Facebook has looked for some sort of ambiguous middle ground, with a bit of fact checking, without giving them too much power, creating a censorship supreme court full of lefties, but throwing in one conservative, all the while making it unclear how much power who really has.

But Facebook has a business strategy. Twitter is a trainwreck that happened to become popular and is the disease of American politics. Jack Dorsey made a point of virtue signaling over political ads, getting deeper into bed with lefties, while having no consistent program. Zuckerberg pursues a strategic ambiguity, while Dorsey is just incompetent. That made the events which triggered the White House's 230 draft order inevitable. But it was always inevitable anyway. Too few Big Tech companies have too much power, no limits, and lots of political pressure.

And that takes us back to the whole platform question.

Congress made a mistake with Section 230 and needs to fix it. But the CDA of which 230 was just one of many numbers was long since trashed by judges. The old services, like Compuserve, were platforms. The rise of all-encompassing 'bulletin boards' like Facebook have posed a new challenge. So has Google's effective total control over internet search.

Platforms can take down content that fails to meet clear guidelines and is applied objectively. For example, they can remove nudity. The standards for that are pretty clear. They can remove death threats, offers to sell drugs, child and animal abuse, etc.. There can be complexities in that regard, but it's quite possible to define standards.

Removing things that aren't true isn't the business of platforms. Zuckerberg is correct in that, even if he doesn't really live by it. Outsourcing the job of determining truth to partisan fact checkers just makes the behavior of Big Tech platforms more damning. There's really no way to have truly objective fact checking of political speech in our society. And no one has tried to make that happen. Nor is such an effort healthy anyway.

The public square is for debates about what's true.

When Big Tech starts trying to determine that, there's no debate, no speech, and no public square. Just one point of view.

Platforms which start censoring political speech based on a partisan 'fact checking' agenda are acting as publishers. All the pearl clutching about protecting standards comes down to platforms acting as publishers. If Twitter or Facebook don't want to have "bad information" on their sites that they don't agree with, they're publishers and they should own that status.

Beyond the immediate need to break up Google, Facebook, Amazon, the Big Tech monopolies, all the debate over Section 230 makes it all the more obvious that we need to update our legal understanding of platforms to what the internet looks like today, not during the Clinton era.
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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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Plague in a Time of Partisanship

Michael Barone

by Michael Barone: America faces a contagious infection: partisanship. Consider the responses to a poll question about treating the COVID-19 virus with the long-approved and widely used drug hydroxychloroquine.

A Morning Consult poll shows 52% of Republicans supporting the drug and 16% against. At the same time and in the same country, 56% of Democrats opposed it, and 13% were in favor.

You can be reasonably sure that 99% of these respondents had never heard of COVID-19 and/or hydroxychloroquine on New Year's Day 2020.

Their opinions are obviously responses to President Donald Trump's statements that the drug might be useful in treating the virus. There's evidence for and against that but no definitive scientific consensus. Nonetheless, two-thirds of Americans have formed strongly held opinions.

Partisan views are perhaps strengthened because there's a correlation between the impact of the virus and voting behavior. COVID-19 infections and deaths have been concentrated in heavily Democratic million-plus metro areas. Its greatest incidence, by far, has been in the overwhelmingly Democratic New York City metro area. It's had little incidence, apart from in nursing homes, prisons and meatpacking plants, outside these large metro areas, and most of the outer areas voted heavily for Donald Trump.

That coincidence has pushed some partisans into positions at odds with what have been taken as their basic inclinations. Social scientists have long claimed, on the basis of dubious research, that political liberals are more open to new experiences and political conservatives more risk-averse. But it's Democratic governors, by and large, who have imposed restrictive lockdowns and leaned against what they regard as overly risky reopenings.

In doing so, they've taken a narrow, one-dimensional view of risk: that people might die or be seriously injured by COVID-19. They've tended to ignore the public health risks of continuing lockdowns, which include "deaths of despair" from depression and suicide, and cancers and cardiac conditions left undetected because of canceled tests and procedures.

Democrats defending continued lockdowns like to say they're valuing lives over dollars. Or, as the headline over a Paul Krugman column in The New York Times puts it, "How Many Will Die for the Dow?"

But as Krugman surely knows, the Dow has been recovering pretty smartly lately, and there's a large overlap between stock owners and those who have been able to work at home and continue drawing salary checks. They tend to be affluent college graduates, a group that has been increasingly Democratic and anti-Trump.

Those whose jobs and paychecks have suddenly disappeared tend to be blue-collar and service workers. They were starting to see above-average income gains during the Trump years, only to have these gains instantly wiped out. Historically, they were a Democratic constituency. Now they're seen as "deplorables" trending Republican. They may have noticed that risks from the virus are lower than predicted (except for the elderly) and less than the health and economic costs of continued lockdowns.

There's a symmetry between the partisan differences in opinion on the COVID-19 virus and the partisan differences in perception of Trump's supposed collusion with Russia.

Recent declassifications and the government's confession of error in the Michael Flynn case have made it clear that leading members of former President Barack Obama's administration violated longstanding norms by deploying intelligence and law enforcement agencies against the Trump campaign and to undermine the Trump administration.

The pretexts for these actions -- unverified allegations in the Steele dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign, supposedly suspicious behavior by minor Trump campaign aides Carter Page and George Papadopoulos -- now seem pathetically weak. Former special counsel Robert Mueller's partisan prosecutor team, with unlimited funds and a cooperative press, uncovered no evidence. "They found nothing," Trump recently and with uncharacteristic accuracy told interviewer Sharyl Attkisson. "No collusion."

Democrats complain with justice that Trump often violates longstanding norms of political behavior. But it's increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that leading members of the Obama administration, and perhaps Obama himself, abandoned the norm of legitimizing the peaceful and orderly transition of power, which goes back to John Adams in 1801 and was followed, grudgingly but faithfully, by Richard Nixon in 1960 and Al Gore in 2000.

The collapse of the Russia-collusion charge seems to have made little impression on partisan opinion. Republican voters never gave it significant credence. Pulitzer prizes were lavished on New York Times and Washington Post reporters for their credulous coverage. Meanwhile, Democrats still make barbed comments and lame jokes about how Russia stole the 2016 election, and partisanship infects legitimate debate about how to deal with a virus whose character and behavior is only beginning to be understood.
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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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A Fatal Failing of Establishment Elites

by Patrick Buchanan: Biden’s gaffe and Burchard’s slur have this in common: Both manifest a measure of condescension toward a large bloc of voters. Hillary Clinton did something similar in 2016…

In his half-century in national politics, Joe Biden has committed more than his fair share of gaffes. Wednesday, he confused Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1941, with D-Day, June 6, 1944.

The more serious recent gaffe, a beaut, came at the close of a recent contentious interview with black activist Charlamagne tha God.

A miffed Biden signed off, saying, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

Biden was saying that no self-respecting black American would vote for Trump over him this November. Indeed, any such individual would have been labeled in the 1960s with the slur Uncle Tom.

As Biden put it, if you’re for Trump, “you ain’t black.”

Recognizing the damage he may have done with his own and his party’s most loyal constituency, which might object to being taken for granted as knee-jerk Democratic voters, Biden’s staff put in a hasty call to a gathering of the U.S. Black Chamber of Commerce.

There, Biden burbled full apologies: “I would never take the African American community for granted. … I shouldn’t have been such a wise guy. … No one should have to vote for any party based on their race or religion or background.” He had just been kidding.

Now, as a gaffe, this was not of the magnitude of James G. Blaine’s failure to object when a friendly Presbyterian pastor, Rev. Sam Burchard, rose to disparage the New York Irish Blaine had been courting as being “the Party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”

In 1884, that slur soured Catholics on Blaine, helping to cost him New York’s state’s electoral votes and the White House. Thanks to Burchard, Grover Cleveland would become the only Democrat to win the presidency in the half-century between 1860 and 1912.

Biden’s gaffe and Burchard’s slur have this in common: Both manifest a measure of condescension toward a large bloc of voters.

Hillary Clinton did something similar in 2016.

At a closed-door gathering of contributors, she volunteered, to their amusement, that half of all Trump’s voters belong in a “basket of deplorables” for being “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.”

Their pathologies are part of their character, Clinton was saying. And while many were “irredeemable,” fortunately, they are “not America.”

During the 2008 Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama was guilty of the same elitist condescension when he told a San Francisco gathering of gay right advocates why he was not doing well in the Keystone State:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them.

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Hard times have curdled the character of these folks, Obama was saying, turning them into bigots and Bible-and-gun nuts.

The people of whom he was speaking would deliver Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and the nation to Donald Trump in 2016.

As for Biden’s remark, “No one should have to vote for any party based on their race or religion or background,” it is surely true.

But while not mandatory to support someone of the same race, ethnicity gender or faith, it is naive to deny that identity and tribalism are realities in the politics of this nation.

Was it not the possibility that he could become the first Catholic president why JFK won four of five Catholic votes in 1960?

Was the 95-4 thumping of John McCain by Obama among African Americans not due to the fact that Obama was the first African American nominated by a major party?

Much of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign focused on “shattering the glass ceiling.” Did not Clinton see her gender as a primary political asset in winning “the women’s vote”?

And, what, other than a naked appeal to gender, was behind Biden’s declaration during the primaries that, in picking a running mate, he would exclude all white men, indeed, all men, and select a woman? And what, other than an appeal to black and female voters was behind Biden’s pledge to name a black woman to the Supreme Court?

Biden is now under pressure to choose not only a woman, but a woman of color, an African American, such as Sen. Kamala Harris of California or Georgia activist Stacey Abrams as his running mate.

It tells us something about where American politics is going that, to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency, Biden, a white male vice president, like all his predecessors, has now ruled out any white man in selecting his own vice president.

Biden’s message to Middle America:

This may have been your country, but no more. Get used to it. Which might explain why Trump did so well with white men in 2016.
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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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A Man in Full - Dan Crenshaw’s Inspiring Story

by Bruce Bawer: I guess I became aware of Dan Crenshaw, the freshman congressman from Texas, when most other Americans did. Three days before the 2018 election, Saturday Night Live aired a “Weekend Update” segment on which cast member Pete Davidson mocked a few House candidates. Among them was Crenshaw, whom Davidson described as looking “like a hitman in a porno” – the purported joke being that Crenshaw wears an eyepatch. Davidson tagged his jest by saying: “I’m sorry, I know he lost his eye in a war…or whatever.”

Indeed, Crenshaw was a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan, where, on June 15, 2012, a Taliban bomb severely damaged both of his eyes. Although doctors expected him to be totally blind, surgeons at Walter Reed managed – miraculously – to save his left eye.

Davidson’s tin-eared dig at Crenshaw made headlines around the world – that’s why I heard about it (I haven’t watched SNL in years) – and sparked outrage. There were calls for him to be fired. But Crenshaw didn’t join in the pile-on. Instead, on the following Saturday, after he’d won his election, Crenshaw appeared on SNL, graciously accepted an apology from Davidson, and read a few gags at Davidson’s expense.

That display of class and good humor was impressive. During the year and a half since, Crenshaw has become a familiar face on cable news, and he’s been consistently impressive there, too – articulate, unflappable, and very, very smart. Hence I expected Crenshaw’s new book, Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage to be a worthwhile read.

It is. But it’s more than that. It’s a serious, intelligent meditation on a culture in which victimhood is so highly prized that we’ve made an art out of taking offense – discovering racism and sexism everywhere, waging campaigns of personal destruction on the slightest of pretexts, and perpetrating ridiculous hoaxes à la Jussie Smollett. In such a climate, it was only to be expected that after Pete Davidson told that dumb joke, there would be calls for his head.

Not that Davidson was ever in any real danger of losing his job. After all, Crenshaw’s a Republican. Generally, you can get away with insulting, and even libeling, somebody on the right. But offend the left and your career may be over. Indeed, as Crenshaw points out, not long after his cozy SNL appearance, a newly hired SNL cast member turned out to have used supposedly offensive terms about Asians and gays on a comedy podcast, and NBC kicked him promptly and unceremoniously to the curb.

In any event, one thing’s clear: for many leftists, easily triggered outrage is a virtue. Crenshaw recalls seeing a group of protesters outside of the Capitol with signs reading “Stay Outraged.” About what? Anything and everything, apparently. Another time, inside the same building, three of his House colleagues “held aloft a T-shirt that said, IF YOU’RE NOT OUTRAGED THEN YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION.”

Crenshaw doesn’t like any of this. In his view, when millions of Americans are capable of being devastated (or are willing to pretend to be devastated) by some offhand remark, and are, moreover, prepared to go nuclear on those who’ve offended them, that’s not good for any of the parties involved, and it’s not good for America, either. Crenshaw approvingly quotes Thomas Sowell’s observation that “we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”

And almost none of that complaining makes sense, anyway, given that, as Crenshaw points out, we live in “the best time to be alive, period.” Of course, even more absurd is that the people who have it best of all tend to be the touchiest. Crenshaw reminds us that “students at Oxford University voted to replace clapping with ‘jazz hands’ because clapping could, in their words, trigger anxiety.’”

How can this be? Crenshaw’s answer: “today’s society…is swelling with the wrong role models.” Not a new observation, needless to say, but Crenshaw’s approach to the topic – and to the question of whom young Americans should look up to – is fresh, smart, and incisive. Citing sources that range from Dostoevsky, Seneca, Jung, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius to the movie Patton, the cable series Game of Thrones, and not least (well, yes, actually least) the teen sitcom Saved by the Bell, Crenshaw makes an argument, as Tom Wolfe did in his novel A Man in Full, for the inestimable civilizational value of Stoicism, the third-century B.C. philosophical school that exalts reason, self-control, and fatalism. “Our culture,” Crenshaw writes, “has begun to confuse passion with substance, reward the loudest and angriest voices, and thus incentivize behavior wholly at odds with Stoic wisdom.”

To be sure, Crenshaw readily admits that he himself is capable of getting unreasonably worked up about minor irritations, such as bad Wi-Fi on airplanes. But when this happens, he says, he recalls his ancestor Sarah Howard, who at age sixteen crossed the frontier on foot with the goal of settling in Texas – a weeks-long ordeal during which “she had a run-in with Comanches that resulted in the death of her husband,” then experienced the deaths, “in similar circumstances,” of her second husband and infant child, and finally underwent an Indian captivity from which she “miraculously escaped.” Crenshaw adds: “And here I am, complaining about the Wi-Fi.”

It’s all, he says, about putting things into perspective: “A healthy sense of perspective is an antidote to outrage. It is an antidote to self-pity, despair, and weakness.”

Another woman who helped give Crenshaw a sense of perspective was his mother, who, after a painful five-year struggle with breast cancer, died when he was ten – a torment she faced throughout “with endurance, grace, and optimism.” In the difficult days after his bomb injury, he thought of his mother: “I wasn’t about to let some cheap-ass IED in the ancient killing fields of Afghanistan render me unworthy of her memory.”

For good measure, Crenshaw also holds up as role models the local interpreters whom he calls “the unsung heroes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They often suffer threats and ostracism for their willingness to endure the battlefield alongside us. Their motivation isn’t money; there isn’t enough money to make it worthwhile facing down insurgents who know where you and your family live. They are idealists. They work and risk death because they believe in our common cause of freedom.”

How did Crenshaw end up as a Navy SEAL? At thirteen he read Rogue Warrior (1992), the autobiography of Dick Marcinko, founder of SEAL Team SIX, and, just like that, decided to become a SEAL. He never wavered in his pursuit of that objective, although the road was hard. Along the way, he put together a pretty impressive résumé. Before joining the Navy, he studied international relations and physics (!) at Tufts University; after losing his eye – and thus his Navy career (he’s still palpably angry at the military brass for jettisoning him) – he earned a master’s at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

No, this is no ordinary politician – and no ordinary political autobiography, either. I confess that un-Stoic tears filled my eyes several times while reading it. Yes, I was moved by Crenshaw’s account of his mother’s fortitude and by his own grit in the face of his eye injury. But I was also moved by the idea that the United States Congress – a body crammed with fools and scoundrels – has at least one member who’s served his country as bravely and selflessly as Crenshaw has done and who possesses the hard-won wisdom and decency of character to write a book like this.

Many of us who consider Donald Trump a vitally necessary world-historical figure have wondered where to turn after his eight years are up. We’ve worried that it will be a case of après lui, le déluge. Could Crenshaw – whose career I find myself following with growing interest, respect, and admiration – fill Trump’s shoes? Increasingly, the idea seems appealing. So far I, for one, can see few other satisfactory candidates.
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Bruce Bauer is a Shillman Fellow at David Horowitz Freedom Center and writes for FrontPage Mag.

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Tags: Bruce Bauer, FrontPage Mag, A Man in Full, Dan Crenshaw, Inspiring Story To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!