90 Miles From Tyranny

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Anger About Slaughter Of 300 Christians Is Now "Far Right"

3 of the Most Telling Failures of Socialism

Some conservatives may be discouraged by the latest surveys confirming that nearly one-half of millennials are receptive to living under socialism and regard capitalism as a captive of greed. In fact, they present us with a golden opportunity to educate all Americans about the manifold failures of socialism and the miraculous advances the world has made under free enterprise.

For example, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson revealed at a Heritage Foundation event that between 2000 and 2012, “the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by 50%.” That is, “the poor in the world are getting rich at a rate that is absolutely unparalleled in all of human history.”

Heritage’s 2019 Index of Economic Freedom reported that the greatest advances came in African and Asian countries (such as Botswana and Taiwan) that limited rather than expanded the role of government. More than 100 countries, many of them with less developed or emerging economies, showed marked advances in economic growth and individual prosperity.

Such good news is seldom reported by the mainstream media, Peterson said, because of the technological revolution that’s occurring in every form of media. All the broadcast networks, leading newspapers, and magazines exist in a shrinking market with dwindling margins of profit. To attract attention they are turning to an old journalism axiom: “If it bleeds, it leads.”

The news media obsess over the latest school shooting and bloody street riot. And yet, Peterson pointed out, the rates of violent crime in the United States and in most places “have plummeted in the last 50 years.”

The U.S. is now safer than it has been since the early 1960s, but the reporting of violent crime in America has materially increased as the mainstream media, in pursuit of ratings and revenue, have highlighted the dark side of society.

Conservatives must step forward to tell the truth about capitalism: the better life it has brought to billions of people, the diversity and freedom of choice it celebrates, the individual responsibility it encourages, the continuing miracle of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” its rejection of government planning that always leads to dictatorship.

Which brings us to the urgent task of exposing the chimera that socialism is just another political system. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and their fellow socialists carefully omit any mention of the principles laid down by Karl Marx, the founding father of Socialism, such as the abolition of private property and the centralization of the means of production and of decision-making. But make no mistake: There are radical socialists waiting in the wings to promote these extreme initiatives.

It’s up to us to tell the truth. Socialists promise a classless society but create the prison camps of the Gulag and the Isle of Pines. They assure peace but engage in wars of national liberation. They abolish private property but depend upon the underground economy. They stamp out religion but worship Big Brother. They bring down corrupt dictators but institute a dictatorship of the Party.

Here are some of the most telling failures of socialism:

One, socialism has never succeeded anywhere, including the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union, the National Socialism of Nazi Germany, the Maoism of Communist China, the Chavez-Maduro socialism of Venezuela. It has never come close to anywhere near Marx’s ideal of a classless society.

Two, Marx has been wrong about nearly everything he predicted. The nation-state has not withered away. Capitalism didn’t break down as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Workers haven’t become revolutionaries but capitalists. The middle class hasn’t disappeared; indeed, it has expanded exponentially around the world (see the above about the sharp decline in global poverty). Marx’s attempt to use Hegel to create a “scientific socialism” has been an abject failure.

Three, socialism denies the existence of an essential human trait—human nature. Marx borrowed from the Enlightenment to declare that...

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: The Trump administration should create an omnipresent “Office of the Inspector General” and hire Tom Fitton and Judicial Watch to run it.

They’d find so much corruption, and in record time, that no other oversight apparatus would be necessary.

Once again, the JW president has struck gold in his never-ending quest to get to the very bottom of what appears to be a bottomless pit of Obama-era corruption: Seems like our 44th president was not only well aware of Hillary Clinton’s criminal mishandling of highly classified emails, but he helped her cover it up.

As PJ Media‘s Debra Heine reported:

A former top FBI official has admitted under oath that a repository of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email records was obtained by the Obama White House and housed in the Executive Office of the President.

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch recently coaxed the admission out of the former assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, Bill Priestap, as part of a court-ordered discovery regarding Clinton’s unauthorized email server.

According to a JW press release:

U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides, as well as Priestap, to be deposed or answer writer questions under oath. The court ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”

Priestap was asked by Judicial Watch to identify representatives of Hillary Clinton, her former staff, and government agencies from which “email repositories were obtained.” Priestap responded with the following non-exhaustive list:

Bryan Pagliano

Cheryl Mills

Executive Office of the President [Emphasis added]

Heather Samuelson

Jacob Sullivan

Justin Cooper

United States Department of State

United States Secret Service

Williams & Connolly LLP

So in other words, critics of the FBI’s and State Department’s earlier claims that they ‘couldn’t locate’ all of Clinton’s emails were right all along: They were spread over several government entities, at a bare minimum.

Priestap also testified that 48,982 emails were reviewed as a result of a warrant for Clinton email account information from the laptop of Anthony Weiner, who was married to top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, JW noted further.

All of Priestap’s responses are documented here.

“Priestap…is serving as assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division and helped oversee both the Clinton email and the 2016 presidential campaign investigations,” the press release states. “Priestap testified in a separate lawsuit that Clinton was the subject of a grand jury investigation related to her BlackBerry email accounts.”

Priestap was Peter Strzok’s boss, by the way.

“This astonishing confirmation, made under oath by...

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Girls With Guns

Buy Guns.
Buy Ammo.
Practice, practice, practice.

The Leftist Media Hard At Work:

5 Year Old Boy Thrown Off Mall Of America 3rd Floor By One Of Obama's and Ilhan Omar's Somali Muslims

Muslim Immigrant Stabs Two at Mall of America in Minnesota

Muslim Teen pleads guilty to plotting mass-murder terror attack at Texas mall

A Jihad Grows in Florida

Minnesota: Christian Pastor Arrested at Mall of America Faces Hearing and Trial After Talking to Muslims

The US Election System Is Broken On Purpose....

More Broward County Ballots Found!

Broward County Creates Ballots Almost As Fast As President Trump Creates Jobs!

7 Glaring Omissions In The Mueller Report That Kill Its Credibility

While there is much within the Mueller report that suggests skepticism was well-founded, what is perhaps most probative is what the report omitted.

Robert Mueller’s special counsel was presented to the American public as unimpeachable. From its beginning, a distinct minority in politics and media, including several Federalist writers, were skeptical, citing the special counsel’s past prosecutorial abuses, the past alleged misconduct of its pivotal investigators, and the team’s peculiar partisan makeup.

Once in action, its seemingly limitless powers, heavy-handed usage of such powers, and more questionable if not dubious indictments, far removed from “collusion,” seemed to confirm our worst fears. While there is much within the Mueller report that further suggests this skepticism was well-founded, what is perhaps most probative is what the report omitted.

The following are seven of the most glaring omissions from the collusion section of the redacted Mueller report—since collusion, not obstruction, was the theory from which the investigation stemmed.

1. No Attempt to Grapple with the Investigation’s Troubling Underpinnings

Russiagate in many ways appears to be the fruit of a poisonous tree of epic proportions. Allegations of a treasonous Russian conspiracy led to beyond novel legal theories, including the ludicrous invocation of the Logan Act, pervasive unmasking, spying on a presidential campaign by a political adversary based in part on a salacious and unverified dossier gleaned from sketchy Russian sources by a foreign agent and paid for by an opposition campaign, chicanerous circularity in the warrants backing the spying, the use of informants to perhaps entrap campaign members, a deluge of leaks (some of which were illegal), and much else.

We can layer on top of these malevolent acts the biases, ethical infractions, outright criminality, and clear double standards applied by law enforcement figures common to the Trump-Russia and Hillary Clinton emails investigations.

The collusion section of the Mueller special counsel report barely addresses any of the foregoing. How could such an investigation have any credibility without dealing with any, if not all of these issues?

2. No Discussion of Whether the Special Counsel’s Appointment Was Legitimate

From the special counsel’s inception, former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy and others have harped on a single fundamental question: Was the special counsel appointed in accordance with Department of Justice (DOJ) regulations?

A special counsel must be appointed based on a criminal investigation. The Mueller special counsel stemmed from a counterintelligence investigation. A special counsel’s scope must be tailored to “a specific factual statement of the matter to be investigated.” The Mueller special counsel order did not seem to adhere to this standard, and in practice, its scope was virtually unlimited.

The Mueller report does not even attempt to address this basic challenge to its legitimacy. Nor does it deal with the arguable conflicts of interest and improper actions taken by those associated with its creation, including former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, former FBI director James Comey, and the man overseeing the special counsel, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—who, as Sean Davis points out, was a participant, witness, and perhaps target of the investigation himself.

3. No Discussion of Special Counsel’s Perceived Bias

The appearance of conflict based upon the composition of the special counsel team is striking. To highlight the affiliations of just a few members: Andrew Weissmann attended Hillary Clinton’s election night 2016 party and cheered on Obama DOJ holdover and former acting attorney general Sally Yates’ defying of a directive from President Trump.

Jeannie Rhee represented Hillary Clinton in a lawsuit regarding her private emails, as well as the Clinton Foundation, and previously served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama administration. Aaron Zebley defended former Hillary Clinton staffer Justin Cooper, who installed her infamous private email server.

Democrats with deep ties to the administration under which the Russia investigations commenced, as well as Donald Trump’s presidential opponent, predominated in the special counsel’s office. Meanwhile, Mueller, as former FBI director, was a creature of the political establishment, and the institutions from which the investigations sprung. That his report does not grapple with any of the misconduct of the high-ranking individuals behind those investigations in and of itself raises questions.

One would think Mueller would have at least sought to create the appearance of neutrality among the investigators, especially given the anti-Trump biases exposed in the investigations preceding it. Yet Mueller did not, nor did he apparently feel it necessary to address this issue in his report. In fact, he fails even to discuss the circumstances surrounding the removal from his team of its most outspoken Trump hater known to the public, fired FBI agent Peter Strzok.

4. Skating Over the Papadopoulos Predicate for the Collusion Investigations

The Mueller report asserts that the investigation into collusion began when a foreign official (presumably unnamed former Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer) told the FBI that Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos conveyed to him that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton that could help the Trump campaign. There is not even an attempt to grapple with the theory that Papadopoulos was set up, based on sketchy approaches from U.S. government informants and foreign counterparts who...