Cruz rips GOP Senate leadership

Cruz attacks GOP Senate leadership
By Kate Scanlon
Reprinted with permission of The Daily Signal

In a speech Thursday on the Senate floor, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, sharply criticized the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, a budget deal between former House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama.

Cruz said the deal is yet another example of the failure of the “so-called Republican majority” to deliver on their promises to the American people.

“Now, if someone is an effective Democratic leader, you would expect them to be able to pass legislation when a majority of Democrats supported it and a majority of Republicans opposed it,” Cruz said. “Indeed, if you’re a partisan Democrat, that would be almost the definition of an effective Democratic leader.”

“Nineteen times in the last ten months this so-called Republican majority has passed legislation, has had a vote succeed where a majority of Democrats supported it and a majority of Republicans opposed it,” Cruz added.

Cruz said that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., “has proven to be a very effective Democratic leader.”

“Is this not a curious state of affairs? Why is a Republican majority leader fighting to accomplish the priorities of the Democratic minority?”

Cruz said that while Sen. Harry Reid, D- Nev., was senate majority leader, a “flawed” budget agreement was negotiated that “increased spending by $63 billion over two years.”

“What does it say to you that a supposedly Republican majority of the United States Senate negotiates a bigger spending bill than Harry Reid and the Democrats?” Cruz asked.

The budget deal “was not cooked up overnight,” Cruz argued.

“This wasn’t a slapdash on a post-it note last night,” Cruz said. “This represents days or weeks or months of negotiations. This represents the [Washington] cartel in all of its glory because this is the combined work product of John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid.”

“The entire time Republican leaders have been promising, ‘We’re going to do something on the budget. We’re going to rein in the president,’ they have been in the back room negotiating to fund every single thing Obama did,” he said.

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Putin behind Obama’s ‘major shift’ in Syria?

The significance of Obama’s move to deploy American troops to help fight ISIS in Syria

By Josh Siegel

Reprinted with permission of The Daily Signal

For the first time, President Barack Obama will deploy a small ground force to Syria to assist the fight against ISIS terrorists there.

Though the White House is describing the move as an expansion of their current strategy to help local Syrian Arab and Kurdish forces fight ISIS, experts say the decision to send less than 50 American Special Operations forces to northern Syria represents a shift for Obama, who has said he will not put American combat boots in the country.

The U.S. currently has more than 3,300 troops in Iraq to protect American facilities and to coordinate the airstrike campaign against ISIS, also known as the Islamic State or ISIL, both inside Iraq and Syria. America has bombed ISIS targets in Syria since September 2014.

In a sign of how the White House hopes to portray the latest development as an enhancement of current strategy against ISIS in Syria, rather than a new shift in the war, Obama did not make public comments on Friday.

Instead, the White House deployed its press secretary, Josh Earnest, who said Obama’s decision is to “further intensify an element of our strategy already making an impact” and that the mission of U.S. troops is not to “lead the charge to take a hill” but to provide “some training, advising and assistance to moderate forces fighting ISIL.”

“It’s a dangerous place and they are at risk; there is no denying that,” Earnest said of the U.S. troops’ mission in Syria. “[But] these forces do not have a combat mission. The fact is our strategy hasn’t changed.”

Some experts are not so sure.

“It’s a fairly major shift to put boots on the ground in Syria,” said Michael O’Hanlon, director of research for the foreign policy program at Brookings Institution, in an interview with The Daily Signal.

“Yet in a broader sense, we have boots on the ground in lots of countries in service to the broader war on terror, so perhaps in that more regional sense it’s not a huge change. But for Syria itself, it is a very big change.”

The Obama administration is describing the more aggressive military action as not a game-changer, but as a supportive move that they hope will lead to a diplomatic and political solution to the broader four-and-a-half year Syrian war.

“The president has been quite clear that there is no military solution,” Earnest said of the Syrian war. “There is a political one.”

Secretary of State John Kerry is currently convening a meeting of diplomats in Vienna to discuss the Syrian conflict. Russia, which recently began an air campaign against rebel groups in Syria, invited Iran to participate in those talks, at the acceptance of Obama and Kerry.

Russia has said its role in Syria is to fight ISIS and other rebel groups, but U.S. officials say the Kremlin’s real mission is to to prop up President Bashar al-Assad.

Earnest tried to downplay the timing of its enhanced military role in Syria to the actions of Russia and Iran, which both support Assad.

O’Hanlon believes Obama’s shift is at least somewhat related to Russia’s aggression in Syria.

“I think it’s a combination of the failure of the broader strategy in Iraq over the last year, the challenges of creating the so-called safe zone in the north of Syria, the refugee crisis, the Russian intervention, and thus, the overall sense that we can’t pretend we’re on a successful or promising track any longer and can’t claim that the war will burn itself out without us,” O’Hanlon said.

One expert predicts Russian airstrikes in Syria could at least make the mission more difficult for the U.S. special operations forces who will now be serving there.

Until now, the U.S., like Russia, has deployed its military resources in Syria from the air.

“This will add to the already complex deconfliction problems we have,” said Steve Bucci, a foreign and national security policy expert at The Heritage Foundation. “Before it was air and air. Now it’s air and ground and that makes it that much harder.”

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Overcoming anger and blame to become a man

The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson

By Paul Bremmer

Marquis still remembers the moment he met the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson.

He was attending a gathering in Los Angeles at the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, or BOND, of which Peterson is the founder and president.

Marquis was 19 or 20 at the time, and he looked like many other young urban African-Americans: dreadlocks, a big necklace, gold grills in his mouth, and earrings in his ears.

In the midst of a crowd, Peterson introduced himself to Marquis and started chatting. Peterson noted the young man’s earrings and asked if he was trying to attract men.

Marquis was taken aback that this man whom he had just met would ask such an abrasive question. But then Peterson explained himself: Earrings were something women wore to beautify themselves and attract men. They did not belong on a man’s ears.

“I’ve always been a guy that once I hear the truth, regardless of how it sounds or whatever, I accept it no matter what,” Marquis recalled during a recent interview with Peterson on the latter’s radio show. “When you said that … it was an immediate respect earner. You got my attention when you came at me like that.”

So Marquis took out his earrings and “threw them down the street,” as he put it. That was at least 10 years ago, and he has not worn any earrings since. At some point – he can’t remember when – he also cut off his dreadlocks.

Marquis was on “The Jesse Lee Peterson Radio Show” to talk about how Peterson and BOND had helped him become a man by overcoming the anger and blame that had plagued his life. In fact, Peterson recently wrote a book, “The Antidote,” that aims to help other troubled black people like Marquis turn their lives around as well.

For Marquis, the changed physical appearance was one part of the turnaround, but perhaps the more important part was the improvement in Marquis’ relationship with his parents, who divorced before Marquis had entered his teenage years.

“I remember it being confusing, because it was almost like you have to pick a side,” he said. “I remember feeling a little confused emotionally about which parent to live with and who was to blame for them splitting up.”

Young Marquis wanted to live with his father, but his dad drove trucks and was not home often, so the boy went to live with his mother instead.

Growing up without his father, Marquis felt pressure to be the man of the house. His mother had to work hard to take care of Marquis and his two younger brothers, and the strain of single motherhood affected her patience.

Oftentimes, when his mother made him angry, Marquis would turn to her and fume, “I want to go with my dad. I want my dad!” He was only able to see his dad every other weekend.

Marquis felt angry at not being able to control his own life. He claims he dealt with the anger through sex. But then he went to BOND and met Peterson, who also writes a WND column, and the reverend helped him find the inner strength to forgive his parents.

Marquis said the first step toward forgiveness was realizing anger was holding him in an iron grip.

When asked how he was able to forgive his parents, he replied: “By simply just realizing that I had the anger, first, and what it was doing to me, how it was controlling me, how it was causing me to make choices that I didn’t want to make, consistently, over and over again. There would be things that I wouldn’t want to do, but the anger would just control me and make me do it.”

One night while finishing up work with his cousin, Felix, Marquis vowed to confront his mother as soon as he got home and tell her he forgave her. When he got home, his mother was in bed, but Marquis walked up to her anyway and said he wanted to talk.

He told her he forgave her for the way her weaknesses had affected his life – one such weakness being the many boyfriends she brought in and out of her life after the divorce. Marquis’ candidness opened the floodgates to a frank, heart-to-heart talk with his mother. He was amazed that his mother’s feelings were not hurt; rather, she apologized, saying she never knew how she had affected him negatively.

Marquis said after that talk, he never looked at his mother the same way again. Previously, he had been afraid to say certain things to his mother, partly out of respect and partly out of a fear of hurting her feelings. After the talk, he still respected his mother, but he didn’t let hurt feelings get in the way of telling her the truth.

“I’m completely honest with her about whatever, and it’s changed our relationship,” he told Peterson. “It’s almost like I became a man in her eyes and she became like a sister, daughter, and a mother all in one.”

When Marquis confronted his father, it did not go so well. One day, after giving his father a haircut, he took the older man aside and said he forgave him for the way his weaknesses had affected young Marquis.

The father demanded to know what specifically Marquis was forgiving him for, so Marquis went into details, but his father made excuses for everything. Marquis assured his dad he wasn’t asking him to explain his actions, but the conversation devolved into a dispute, with his dad trying to justify everything he had done.

Marquis said he and his father still have unresolved issues.

“He never really moved on from the conversation,” Marquis said. “It was always kind of like he was continuously trying to prove himself after the conversation – you know, just trying to revalidate that fatherhood respect or whatever, just assuming it was lost.”

Marquis said at times his father feels like a brother, or sometimes even a son, but he still loves and respects his father as a father. And he still forgives him. And the forgiveness has set him free from anger.

Now that Marquis is free from anger, he says he has learned the importance of being “a man,” not “the man.”

“When I was angry … no matter what the situation was, I was constantly trying to prove myself as far as trying to be ‘the man.’ Everything I did, my ego was so much into it. … It was an ego, anger-driven trying to do the best and be the best, just to compensate for that void that I had within because I had anger.

“But I realized, once I had seen my anger, life just became so simple. … I realized that being a man is more than enough. It was way more than trying to be ‘the man’ could ever be.”

Marquis has been married now for four years, and he says marriage life is great. But he claims the best thing about marriage is the commitment he made to God.

“When I went to the altar, He was my priority,” Marquis said. “I was doing it to be right, because of righteousness. I just wanted to get my life lined up with God, so because of that commitment and union with Him, it’s been the best thing I ever could have done, besides forgiving.”

In fact, Marquis says that because he loves God, he loves his wife.

“It’s impossible to love anybody without loving God first,” he declared.

Marquis says his life today is great. He used to be frustrated by challenges that came his way, but he has learned to trust God.

“Now when a challenge comes, I just wait,” he said. “I don’t even try to figure it out or nothing. I just know that it’s here for a reason.”

Peterson was glad his one-time student had learned that important lesson.

“I always tell people, do not put up any resistance against challenges because God is working everything out for you,” the reverend said. “But if you fight against it, then you’re on your own.”

 

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Despite evidence, Ferguson cop still called ‘racist’

Michael Brown

Bestselling author Jack Cashill is back with his most timely book yet, “Scarlet Letters: The Ever-Increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism Exposed.”

And Cashill, a WND columnist, is pulling no punches over what he calls the unholy rise of progressive neo-puritanism.

As in old school puritanism, worshipers achieve a sense of moral worth simply by designating themselves among “the elect” – no good works required.

To validate that status, they heap abuse upon the sinner lest they be thought indifferent to the sin, he says.

Rather than simply cataloging the neo-puritan assaults on reason and liberty, “Scarlet Letters” illustrates how the progressive movement has come to mimic a religion in its structure but not at all in its spirit while profiling brave individuals such as Clarence Thomas, Aayan Hirsi Ali, Camille Paglia and many lesser known truth-tellers who have dared to take a stand against this inquisition.

Released by WND Books, “Scarlet Letters” shows in detail how an allegedly “liberal” movement has become what can only be described as bizarrely punitive and inquisitional.

Exclusively at WND, you can read here the second chapter of “Scarlet Letters”:

“The Scarlet R: Racist”

By Jack Cashill

Katherine Ann Porter had been duped, badly. In her memoir, The Never-Ending Wrong, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the execution of convicted murderers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Porter told how this came to be. As the anarchists’ final hours ticked down, Porter had been standing vigil with other artists and writers in Boston. Ever the innocent liberal, Porter approached her group leader, a “fanatical little woman” and a dogmatic Communist, and expressed her hope that Sacco and Vanzetti could still be saved. The response of this female comrade is noteworthy largely for its candor: “Saved . . . who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?”

This was 1927, just five years after Margaret Sanger predicted “ignominious punishments for the capitalists,” and already the scarlet R for racism was replacing the scarlet C for classism as the most grievous affront to American progressives. To this day, it remains so. As their predecessors did with Sacco and Vanzetti, neo-puritans today falsify narratives and manufacture outrage, inevitably in pursuit of some goal. That goal might be as grubby as enriching a race hustler or as grand as turning a presidential election, but rarely is it about justice, and always there is someone to accuse.

THE RACIST, REPRESSIVE CAPITALIST STATE

Nearly a century after Sacco and Vanzetti’s demise, crowds stood vigil outside the Ferguson, Missouri, police station, waiting to hear whether a grand jury would indict Officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of black eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. In the crowd were many protestors as naïve as Porter had been. Also in the crowd were leftist agitators eager to see Wilson go uncharged. After all, what earthly good would Wilson do them in jail?

The Soviets called the practice “framing” – that is, taking a small kernel of truth and rewriting the history of a person or an event around it. In Ferguson, that small kernel was the testimony of Brown’s partner in crime, Dorian Johnson. Immediately after the shooting, Johnson told all who would listen that Brown raised his hands to surrender before
Wilson shot him dead in a Ferguson street. The story could not withstand the least bit of scrutiny.

“It seems hard to come to any other conclusion,” the Washington Post finally conceded some months later, “than that Dorian Johnson’s version is simply made up.” The Department of Justice eventually came to the same conclusion. “There is no evidence upon which prosecutors can rely to disprove Wilson’s stated subjective belief that he feared for his safety,” read its March 2015 report. In fact, Brown attacked Wilson in his car and then charged him when told to stop. For the agitators, however, Johnson’s kernel trumped Wilson’s testimony, the corroborating testimony of a half dozen black eyewitnesses, the forensic evidence, and the cautious judgment of a multiracial grand jury. Even while Brown’s body lay sprawled on Canfield Drive, activists were rehearsing his neighbors in the “Hands up, don’t shoot” gesture. With the help of an obliging media, this thoroughly corrupt iconography swept the world.

The seeds of Ferguson were planted ninety years earlier when Joseph Stalin took control of the Soviet apparatus. More of a realist than Lenin, Stalin had no delusions that either the international propaganda arm of the Communist Party, the Comintern, or the fledgling Communist Party in America could inspire a workers’ revolution in America. He focused his American efforts instead, wrote author Stephen Koch, “on discrediting American politics and culture and assisting the growth of Soviet power elsewhere.” For the Soviet experiment to prevail, the American experiment had to yield. The world had to see America through fresh, unblinking eyes, not as the great melting pot, but as a simmering stew of racism and xenophobia.

In 1925 the Comintern found just the victims of American injustice Stalin was looking for in Sacco and Vanzetti, a pair of Italian anarchists justly convicted of murdering an Italian American payroll clerk five years earlier. While their capital murder case worked its way through the appeals process in the Massachusetts courts, the Comintern ginned up a worldwide frenzy around the fate of the convicted killers. “Spontaneous” protests sprang up seemingly everywhere. Europe’s great squares – in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin – filled with sobbing, shouting protestors, declaiming the innocence of the immigrant martyrs and denouncing the vile injustice of their persecutors.

The reaction to the Ferguson grand jury decision was eerily similar. Despite Wilson’s transparent innocence, hundreds gathered outside the American embassy in London with signs proclaiming “No justice, no peace” and “Solidarity with Ferguson.” In Berlin, protestors waved signs that read, “Ferguson is everywhere.” In Ferguson, outsiders took to the streets, chanting red standards like, “The only solution is a communist revolution,” and, “Turn your guns around and shoot the bosses down!” In Oakland, California, meanwhile, angry mobs shut down the freeways, chanting, “Indict, convict, send these killer cops to jail!” Whereas once the international left contented itself with claiming the guilty innocent, neo-puritans were prepared to claim the innocent guilty, a darker turn altogether.

For progressive activists, Officer Wilson’s innocence mattered no more than did Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt. Nearly seventy years after the pair’s execution, a California attorney stumbled upon some letters that Upton Sinclair, the esteemed socialist author of The Jungle, wrote in 1927, the year the pair was executed. The letters showed Sinclair knew the duo to be guilty even before he published Boston, his epic novel about the case. One letter from Sinclair to his attorney, John Beardsley, told of how Sinclair had met with Fred Moore, the anarchists’ attorney, in a Denver motel room.

Moore “sent me into a panic,” wrote Sinclair. “Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth. . . . He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.” As Sinclair made clear in this and other letters, he went ahead and wrote his book about the convicted anarchists as though they were innocent. “My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe,” Sinclair confided to a friend that same year, “I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book.” Sinclair finished the book, and the myth lived on. The fact that America was successfully “framed” as a nation that casually executed innocent shoemakers and fish peddlers because of their ethnicity did not trouble Sinclair enough to come clean.

Comparably, no amount of solid evidence in the Michael Brown shooting would spare Wilson his scarlet R. “Whatever the Grand Jury decides,” CUNY professor of history Deirdre Owens tweeted, “the people have indicted Darren Wilson and the racist, repressive capitalist state he represents.” Or, as Chauncey DeVega wrote on AlterNet, “The absurd, unfathomable, and fantastical story which Wilson spun out of the whole cloth in order to justify killing an unarmed black teenager combines the deepest and ugliest white supremacist stereotypes and fantasies about black folks’ humanity.”

For all the competition, the scarlet R for racism remains the most damning and enduring letter in the neo-puritan catalog. This is so because progressives routinely trace racism to what Barack Obama, among many others, has called “this nation’s original sin of slavery.” Although slavery has been a feature of almost every economy in almost every era of human history, only America positioned itself as the land of the free and the home of the brave while tolerating it. To reconcile its stated principles with its reality, the nation endured a brutal civil war. That war effectively ended slavery in America, but a century of Jim Crow and a half century of retelling horror stories undid the exculpatory value of the war’s human sacrifice. The result was a lingering sense of guilt, especially among those who shaped public opinion. In turn, their repeated professions of the nation’s past sins led to a broad questioning by the young and alienated of America’s founding principles.

Sensing an opportunity amid this loss of moral authority, progressives chipped away at those principles and challenged standards on any number of fronts – family, faith, love, marriage, language, literature, education, entertainment. For all their moral relativism, however, progressives more than held the line in one area. America, observed Shelby Steele, became “puritanical rather than relativistic around racism.” Progressives may have abandoned Christian content, Joseph Bottum argued in an insightful 2014 essay, “The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas,” but they carried forward the spiritual infrastructure of Christianity. “How else can we understand the religious fervor with which white privilege is preached these days,” wrote Bottum, “the spiritual urgency with which its proponents describe a universal inherited guilt they must seek out behind even its cleverest masks?” From the neo-puritan perspective, one wrong word, one off-color joke, one garbled explanation stripped away the surface bonhomie and showed the racist, satanic soul beneath.

Click here for your copy of “Scarlet Letters.”

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Stunning warning: War coming to Europe

With millions of Muslim migrants pouring into Europe, some experts are warning the continent faces a future of revolution, civil war or surrender to Islamic rule.

Author, WND columnist and anti-Shariah campaigner Pamela Geller thinks it is already too late. Asked if she thought it would come to civil war in Europe, Geller told WND, “Yes, I do.”

She’s not alone.

“If the European political establishment maintains its stranglehold on power, it seems unavoidable that Islam will continue to build a political presence that will ultimately lead to Muslim uprisings and a European reaction outside of accepted political channels,” said G.M. Davis.

Davis, a Stanford Ph.D. and the author of “House of War: Islam’s Jihad Against the World,” believes the only way the problem could be solved peacefully is through “an effective anti-Islamic political movement” taking shape in Europe “within a generation.”

The situation in Europe already seems to be spiraling out of control. Austrians are stocking up on weapons, and intelligence analysts warn of an imminent terrorist attack in the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, European governments are cracking down on their own populations, even as tens of thousands of Muslim men are marching through the countryside like an invading army.

Davis argues if mainstream political forces are not able to quell the continuous influx of Muslim migrants into Europe, “grassroots organizations” will take up the “defense of Europe.”

He told WND: “They would be acting in defiance of their respective governments, which could spark wholesale abandonment of those governments by their populations. We saw this in Communist Eastern Europe in 1989-91 with the key difference being that violence would be very much widespread [this time].”

Diana West, a WND columnist and the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization,” says the real enemy Europeans face isn’t invading Muslims. It’s their own governments.

She explains: “These governments have rejected their own most basic responsibilities to safeguard and perpetuate their own peoples, religions, native cultures, law, public safety, homelands – everything except the One World ‘multicultural’ (read: non-Western) ideology. It’s staggering to behold this overt rush to abandon sovereignty and everything else for globalist prerogatives. Their template, Marxist in origin, is perhaps best described as ‘forced diversity.’”

West charges states such as Germany and Sweden are “in effect overthrowing their own peoples.”

However, she believes civil war is unlikely, because Western governments have too many repressive tools at their disposal.

“These are already surveillance states bristling with mechanisms of coercion and enforcement,” she observed. “I am afraid, ultimately, capitulation is more likely to be the more common reaction in nations already hosting growing and new Islamic blocs.”

West chronicled how the “subversive Marxist conditioning of so many past decades” have prepared Europeans for life in a post-Western society. Although some Germans have even been evicted to make room for refugees and terrible costs have been imposed on native Europeans, West summarizes their reactions as “docile overall, helpless.”

She believes Europeans are “very upset, but not full of any of the kind of fire that you might expect – or hope for.”

The relative passivity is a product of Europe’s bloody history and Christian religious background, she said.

“The natural tendencies of Christian and post-Christian Europeans are peaceable; the sorts of ideologies that led to such copious bloodshed during the last hundred years hold little appeal, which is one of the reasons that it is so hard for Europeans today to face the reality that they are under attack again by such an ideology,” Davis stated.

“The situation with Islam that seems to be unfolding suggests what happened with the rise of communism and Nazism: because no one wants to face the possibility of having to use force to suppress such an ideology – and force is an undeniable possibility – then no one will recognize the nature of the problem itself.”

The result is a Europe essentially doomed to inaction by its own democratic practices until it is too late.

Davis grimly observed, “Any defense of Europe will have to be democratic in the sense of being popular, but it seems increasingly unlikely that such a defense can be mounted within established political channels or be peaceful.”

Geller believes European elites have all but made it illegal for Europeans to oppose their own dispossession.

“[Opponents to Muslim migration] would have used peaceful and democratic means, and still would, but those means are increasingly closed off to them by the elites,” she told WND.

The battle lines for future struggles in Europe are already being drawn, both in neighborhoods and between nations. Davis argues Muslims are already creating communities that operate as autonomous zones separate from the larger European society.

He told WND: “Already we have seen a tendency throughout Europe for Islamic communities to dominate certain urban areas and to apply pressure to the native inhabitants to move away. Muslims are hardly the first immigrant group to do this, and there are divisions within Muslim communities themselves, but the complicating factor is invariably the political nature of Islam itself, which understands its mission to rule territory for Allah and subordinate all other legal, religious, and social norms.”

The result could be outright military conflict with the cities of Europe itself.

“As Muslim communities grow and become more politically established, they will attract more Muslims from elsewhere and push away more natives, thus encouraging a cycle of separation and division,” said Davis.

“I believe, in time, this is likely to degenerate into some form of civil war. Where the battle lines will ultimately be drawn is anyone’s guess, but at this point it looks as though they will run through many of Europe’s urban centers.”

However, some nations are still trying to avoid the problem of mass immigration entirely. The unofficial leader of this movement is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whom Geller describes as one of the few European leaders acting appropriately.

“He is right in holding the line,” she said.

West echoes the praise.

“Orban has, to date, been able to reject or deflect with great success this mainly Muslim, mainly male, mainly non-’refugee’ invasion and reassert his nation’s sovereignty, Christian roots and Western soul,” West said. “For this he is widely and loudly excoriated as a ‘xenophobe’ and ‘populist,’ but what he really is is a patriot. Fences work. Western civilization is worth defending. Seems very reflexive, but in our times, this is ‘outlier’ stuff.”

West also sees some hope in other European nations with the rise of what she calls “brave, mature political parties on the right who do speak for the survival of what we should probably start thinking about as the indigenous cultures of Europe.”

She also sees victories in Hungary, Poland and other Eastern European states by forces hostile to the European Union as a “revolution against the dictatorial central control of the EU and Germany.”

However, West still believes the overall outlook is grim.

“Powerful Germany has done everything to trigger, prolong and ‘normalize’ this invasion, all in perfect accord with the unelected, unaccountable European Union bosses,” West said. “And happy democratic talk aside, the anti-democratic or even totalitarian forces in Europe are much stronger. In most cases, they rule or their opposition is weak.”

In the long term, she observes, demographics are destiny.

“With the ongoing inflow of tens of thousands of mainly Muslim men every week, political mechanisms of change to reverse this migration become less efficient, even in the best case scenario.”

Geller believes “some” Europeans will fight back. West says she is more “despairing” of the situation. And if there is not resistance, the end result is a totalitarian, Islamic Europe combining the worst elements of leftism and Shariah law.

“Given the way Islam has always functioned, ‘forced diversity’ is just a stage along the way to complete Islamization,” she warned. “We are advancing along a continuum of convergence by which the Free World ultimately disappears into a collectivist, totalitarian superstructure ruling over masses of people no longer capable of self-government.”

 

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Cruz: Justice Kennedy compares own ruling to Nazi Germany

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy

In a recent town hall meeting where citizens had the opportunity to pose questions to Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, he basically compared the judiciary in modern America with that of Nazi Germany.

Kennedy, the swing vote in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in June to create “same-sex marriage,” was asked about Kentucky county Clerk Kim Davis, who was jailed for nearly a week by U.S. District Judge David Bunning after the Supreme Court’s marriage ruling when she refused Bunning’s order to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couple in violation of her faith.

At the meeting, a young man took the microphone and asked the following of Kennedy:

You claim new insights into the nature of marriage require states to issue marriage licenses in accord with this alternative version of marriage. And I can understand a similar case, probably more attractive to those of us who think that rational norms guide the exercise of sexual autonomy like they do economic autonomy, that would be that new insights into the nature of human life require states to take steps to stop abortions.

My question would be, in either of these cases, would you say that there are any state or federal officials with authority to act according to her own judgment of the truth of new insights or of the soundness of the court’s constitutional interpretation, or would it be illegal for any federal official or state official to act according to the old understanding of life and the Constitution that she still judges to be the truth of the matter?

Justice Kennedy replied:

If I could rephrase it in a fair way, what is the duty of a public official if he or she cannot in good conscience, and consistent with their own personal and religious beliefs, enforce a law they think is morally corrupt?

How many judges do you think resigned in the Third Reich? Three. Great respect, it seems to me, has to be given to people who resign rather than do something they think is morally wrong, in order to make a point. However, the rule of law is that, as a public official and performing your legal duties, you are bound to enforce the law. It’s difficult sometimes to see whether or not what you’re doing is transgressing your own personal philosophies – this requires considerable introspection. It’s a fair question that officials can and should ask themselves. But certainly in an offhand comment, it would be difficult for me to say that people are free to ignore a decision of the Supreme Court. Lincoln went through this in the Dred Scott case. These are difficult moral questions.

On his Facebook page, Ted Cruz posted the video and made the following observation:

When a Supreme Court justice compares his own lawless rulings to the draconian oppression of the Nazis – and says that Christians should resign from public office if they will not surrender to his imperious decrees – that really says it all. Those are his words, not mine. Justice Kennedy is holding up the Nazis as exemplars for the current Supreme Court.

I, for one, would rather stand with heroes like Bonhoeffer, than the tyrants who inflicted unspeakable evil. And the persecution of Christians – in Iran, China, or America – is simply wrong.

As WND reported, Justice Kennedy would resign if he followed his own instructions to others, according to Liberty Counsel, the national religious-rights law firm representing Davis.

In a prepared statement, Liberty Counsel said the message was clear: “Government officials who disagree with him and his four other colleagues regarding their newly invented and groundless marriage opinion ought to resign.”

However, the real question, the organization said, should be, “What is the law and what happens when justices violate their oath to interpret the Constitution?”

A WND request for comment from Kennedy did not generate a response.

Mat Staver, the chairman of Liberty Counsel, said unjust laws “should be resisted.”

“Religious freedom and conscience should be protected. Justices or judges who disregard the Constitution and impose their own will should resign,” he said.

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Checklist: Progressives on schedule with goals

Remove prayer from schools? Check.

Forbid Christmas and Easter events in schools? Check.

Gun registration and eventual confiscation? Pending.

Free speech fades to where the media only tell the government’s side? Too close to “check” for comfort.

Pastors fearful of addressing serious moral and political issues because of government intimidation? See answer immediately above.

These were the circumstances that developed in Nazi Germany in the mid-to-late 1930s.

According to pastor Carl Gallups, they also are looming like a storm cloud across America.

“This is what Americans are beginning to see,” Gallups said in a recent appearance on CTN’s “It’s Time with Herman & Sharron.” “We see these similarities. We know that we don’t live under government decree to persecute us like other Christians do, but we see the progression, or digression.”

Christian believers, who are increasingly under assault in today’s world, said Gallups, need to prepare for the worst.

Gallups, an author, talk-radio host and former law enforcement officer, lays out several ideas on how to prepare in his latest book, “Be Thou Prepared.”

However, the pastor wants people to know it’s not just some crazy prepper guide.

“I’m not some wild-eyed prepper dressed in camouflage, eating grubs, hiding under a log in the woods,” Gallups said.

Rather, he said, he drew on his 40 years of experience in ministry and law enforcement, where he had to regularly deal with tragedy and trauma in other people’s lives. Many people have asked him what to prepare for and how to prepare, so he put it all into a book.

See the interview:

Some people live in areas where they need to always be prepared for a hurricane or tornado, Gallups said. But now there are dangers unrelated to the weather that are confronting Americans all over.

For example, he cited a porous southern border and FBI confirmation that there are ISIS cells in all 50 states.

One particularly troubling scenario, according to the pastor, is an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, used as a weapon of mass destruction.

A nuclear weapon that harnesses the power of a high-energy EMP could be detonated in the sky above a country and shut down all electronic equipment on the ground below. That includes cars, computers, phones, radios and television – essentially the whole power grid.

Such an emergency, Gallups noted, would create a massive panic and cause ordinary Americans to do things they might not otherwise do.

He said: “Your sweet little next-door neighbor can turn into a killer if, all of a sudden, they don’t have food and water, all of a sudden if they think, ‘I’m going to die.’”

Therefore, it’s good to be prepared not just for yourself, but for others around you, too. Gallups explained to hosts Herman and Sharron Bailey that being prepared is not a selfish act.

“The reason I tell people to be prepared, guys, is not so that we can horde up something and go hide,” he said. “If we’re taken care of, if our families are taken care of … when disaster strikes, guess what? You’re then free to minister to the world around you in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Gallups and Herman Bailey both pointed out many Americans assume no major disaster will ever strike their country. But that is selfish thinking, according to Gallups, because it ignores the major disasters currently inflicting the rest of the world, particularly Christians in other lands.

In fact, considering the rampant persecution of Christians in North Korea, China and the Middle East, Gallups believes the world is already in a period of tribulation.

“I’m not saying that the Great Tribulation that will last seven years has necessarily begun, but I am saying we are in tribulation,” he said. “This world is in desperate tribulation.”

Americans may not realize that fact, Gallups acknowledged, because they are still able to live mostly comfortable lives. But Americans should not let their First World comfort blind them to the troubles around the world.

“I tell people just because Starbucks is open and an NFL game was on television last night doesn’t mean all is right with the world, and America needs to wake up,” Gallups declared.

The pastor said Christians often refuse to prepare, telling him they will simply rely on faith to get through any disasters that come. Gallups replies it’s important to have faith, but the Scriptures also tell believers to prepare. Besides, preparation is an essential part of everyday life.

“Do you have insurance?” Gallups said he asks people who won’t prepare. “Do you have a spare tire in your trunk? Do you buckle your kids in before you take off on a trip? Do you brush your teeth? Do you have an alarm system? Do you lock your doors?

“What are you doing? Our whole life is a life of preparation. Preparation for what? For the possibility of something going wrong.”

Some Christians, in addition to failing to prepare, don’t want to get involved in the world around them. Gallups said that, too, is a huge mistake.

“That’s a cancer; that’s a blight upon the churches,” Gallups admonished. “Pastors say it, Christians say it, and I say to them, you must be. You’ve got to stay engaged.

“God called us, Jesus said, ‘You’re the salt, you’re the light.’ Well, guess what? To sprinkle salt, you’re getting involved. To shine the light, you’re getting involved. I tell my congregation all the time: The darker it gets, turn your light up. Stay engaged. Never grow weary of doing good. We have been raised up for such a time as this.”

 

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Nation gone progressive? Don’t count on it, author says

By Paul Bremmer

For Americans who oppose “same-sex marriage,” it can be hard to look at the future with much optimism. After all, the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013 and two years later ruled same-sex marriage is a constitutional right.

What’s more, same-sex marriage is more popular in the younger generation, with Pew Research Center finding 70 percent of millennials support same-sex marriage, including 58 percent of millennial Republicans.

But Michael Brown, an author, talk-radio host and president of FIRE School of Ministry, says traditional marriage advocates should not lose hope, because America has been in similar situations before.

In April 1966, the cover of Time magazine asked: “Is God Dead?” It was in the midst of the counterculture revolution of the 1960s, when many young Americans rebelled against the traditional values of their parents.

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But only five years later, in June 1971, another Time cover teased a story on “The Jesus Revolution.” A spiritual movement had risen up among the rebellious young generation, with many of the hippies and druggies becoming born-again Christians.

Brown, who was one of those young born-again Christians, believes it shows the power of God to effect societal change.

“Factor in the God factor: God can turn the tide overnight in America,” he said.

If God could raise a spiritual revival out of a group of secular, rebellious young people, asks Brown, then why can’t He turn the tide against “gay marriage”? Brown urges Americans to never count God out. The seventh principle in his new book,  “Outlasting the Gay Revolution,” is “Factor in the God factor.”

The “God factor” in America was at work long before the 1960s, noted Brown. In the 1790s, when the U.S. was in its infancy, Christianity appeared to be dying in the nation. Only 5 to 10 percent of the adult population were church members. Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Episcopalians and Congregationalists were all struggling to attract new members and retain existing ones.

“Did you know after the Revolutionary War in the late 1700s that things were absolutely miserable on some of our campuses in America?” Brown, a WND columnist, asked. “Campuses that were founded as Christian campuses had a couple hundred students, and they could not find a single professing Christian among them.

“Another campus, the handful of Christian students would meet in secret and keep their meetings in code, because they didn’t want anyone to know about it.

“What happened? Awakening came.”

Indeed, the Second Great Awakening surfaced in the early 1800s, and hundreds of thousands of Americans turned back to Jesus. Churches in the East filled up again, and many new congregations were formed in the western part of the country as well.

However, by the mid-1850s, “immorality, violent crime, spiritualism, corruption and atheism were on the rise” once again, according to Brown. American churches were becoming more internalized. Then in 1857, a large prayer movement began in New York City and spread around the country. This revival, sometimes called the Third Great Awakening, resulted in a more compassionate society focused on curing social ills.

Brown noted the revival brought with it a massive cultural change: The United States abolished slavery only a few years after it began.

He believes a similar religious revival could change the culture by bringing traditional marriage back into favor. He pointed out just how quickly gay marriage has become accepted in America. As recently as 1990, fewer than a third of Americans condoned same-sex marriage.

In 1996, a Democrat president, Bill Clinton, signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, and then-Sen. Joe Biden voted for it. Even in 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were still saying marriage was between a man and a woman.

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While attitudes changed quickly, Brown doesn’t believe gay marriage will be accepted forever just because the Supreme Court looks favorably on it now.

He noted that when the court ruled on Roe v. Wade in 1973, it hardly ended the abortion debate in favor of the pro-abortion side.

Instead, the pro-life movement rose up and still fights for the rights of unborn babies. And millennials are embracing the pro-life position, with polling data showing 59 percent of young Americans think abortion is morally wrong.

Brown also takes heart when he sees the Christian populations in Africa and Latin America soaring. It gives him hope that God has big things in store for America, too.

“We must factor in the God factor,” Brown emphasized. “This is not just a sociological issue. This is not just a political issue. This is not just a demographic issue. This is also a spiritual issue. If we God’s people will humble ourselves, turn away from sin in our own lives and begin to cry out, who knows what could happen next?”

 

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Ronald Reagan’s no-holds-barred … faith

Former President Ronald Reagan

The inspiring speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. are not new. Neither are the words of the Declaration of Independence, the Psalms of the Bible, the Magna Carta or the Gettysburg Address.

But they are worth recalling, now and then, anyway.

Such appear to be the words of President Ronald Reagan, in a viral video in which he states his faith in the Bible, and his belief that America should be following its instructions.

The video, posted online at YouTube, too, is embedded here. It’s been viewed millions of times, and counting.

It’s a tribute to the president who attended Bel Air Presbyterian church in California after he left the Oval Office, created by the church.

Those who uploaded commented, “Unfortunately the war against the evil of liberalism is still alive and well, and we fight it even at Bel Air Presbyterian.”

Timeless bestsellers from “The Faith of Ronald Reagan” and “Hand of Providence: The Strong and Quiet Faith of Ronald Reagan” to the Ronald Reagan poster saying “I want YOU to fight socialism” are available now at the WND Superstore.

Reagan said, “The morality and values such faith implies are deeply embedded in our national character. Our country embraces those principles by design and we abandon them at our peril.”

He continued, “My experience in this office I hold has only deepened the belief I’ve held for many years: within the covers of that single book are all the answers to all the problems that face us today if we’d only read and believe.”

He joked about people praying for him, confirming that he has felt the power of intercessionary prayer.

He noted that when a questioner “got a busy signal” while praying, it was “just me in there ahead of him.”

As president, he said, “I think I understand how Abraham Lincoln felt when he said, ‘I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I have nowhere else to go.’”

He clarified the idea that the government must throw out and disaffiliate from any Christian act or statement:

“I realize it’s fashionable in some circles to believe that no one in government should encourage others to read the Bible. We’re told we’ll violate the constitutional separation of church and state established by the Founding Fathers in the First Amendment,” he said.

“The First Amendment was not written to protect people and their laws from religious values; it was written to protect those values from government tyranny.”

The real question Americans should ask, he said, is not whether “God is on our side,” but “Are we on His side?”

He often quoted Scripture, and said it is the hunger for “God’s good news” that gives Americans a way to triumph over hate.

This nation, he said, “was set apart in a very special way. Our forebears came not for gold, but mainly in search of God, and the freedom to worship in their own way.”

Timeless bestsellers from “The Faith of Ronald Reagan” and “Hand of Providence: The Strong and Quiet Faith of Ronald Reagan” to the Ronald Reagan poster saying “I want YOU to fight socialism” are available now at the WND Superstore.

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IRS target: ‘Justice in their hands is a mockery’

 

On Friday, the Justice Department announced it was closing its investigation of former IRS official Lois Lerner and would not be filing any charges, chalking up the scandal instead to mismanagement.

However, the head of one of the grassroots organizations that endured unwarranted scrutiny by the IRS says the decision is simply more proof of a “lawless administration” that is making a “mockery” of justice.

On Friday, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik, sent a letter for House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and ranking Democrat John Conyers. It stated:

“Our investigation uncovered substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia, leading to the belief by many tax-exempt applicants that the IRS targeted then based on their political viewpoints. But poor management is not a crime.

“We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other in appropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution. We found no evidence that any official involved in the handling of tax-exempt applications or IRS leadership attempted to obstruct justice.

“Based on the evidence developed in this investigation and the recommendation of experienced career prosecutors and supervising attorneys at the Department, we are closing our investigation and will not seek any criminal charges.”

True the Vote is one group that endured years of IRS harassment over its application for tax-exempt status. Its president, Catherine Englebrecht, is disgusted but not surprised by the Justice Department’s announcement.

“This is a lawless administration,” she said in an interview with WND and Radio America. “They write the rules and then play by those if they choose to follow. It is certainly not a surprise at all that they’ve chosen to try to wipe the slate clean of the IRS scandal, as they have so many other scandals. They don’t look to police themselves. They’re not interested in the better interests of their fellow countrymen. They’re interested in the survival of their party.”

According to Englebrecht, the refusal to prosecute is not only a slap in the face to her group and many others but to American justice at large.

“Justice in their hands is a mockery,” she said. “This is an arrogant and corrupt administration that holds no justice for the American people. It is my great hope and prayer that the American people will reassert themselves, through their vote, to take back the reins of this country.”

Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with True the Vote President Catherine Englebrecht:

Englebrecht also blasted the logic expressed by Kadzik, saying not only were crimes committed, but there is a mountain of evidence proving it that Obama’s Justice Department ignored.

“I bet our organization alone submitted 500 documents or more that show clearly this was far more than ‘mismanagement,’” she said. “This was not only intentional targeting in an attempt to silence what they perceived to be a political threat, but, beyond that, there was collusion between the IRS and other branches of government. We have the documentation that proves it all.”

In the specific case of True the Vote, Englebrecht said there was obvious collusion between two critical figures in this scandal.

“The IRS was working closely with select Democrat congressmen, particularly in my instance Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who sought and received from Lois Lerner information, that when I requested it myself about me, came back redacted,” she said. “So I can’t get the information that Lois and Elijah shared, but somehow that’s all excusable.”

She said other documentation proves the Justice Department was in on the collusion as well.

“Absolutely. The Department of Justice, those are the attorneys that are defending the IRS in court. The thought that they would be the ones to head up an investigation makes a mockery of the process,” said Englebrecht, who argued that the obvious decision should have been to appoint a special counsel to investigate that case, but the Obama administration wanted no part of that.

“A special prosecutor should have been assigned to this at the outset, and there is only one reason why that didn’t occur,” she said. “They didn’t want the answers. If you don’t want the answers, you engineer the system to not ask the questions. That’s exactly what we’ve seen play out.”

Is this the end of the scandal? Englebrecht says no.

True the Vote is taking the IRS to court, but suffered an early setback when a federal judge ruled True the Vote did get approved as a tax-exempt organization, and getting to the bottom of the controversy would be impossible since Lerner’s emails had been destroyed. Since then, many emails have been recovered, and Englebrecht hopes that fact will reinvigorate her legal options.

“That gave us an avenue for appeal,” she said. “We are anxiously awaiting being heard by the court, hopefully in the first few months of 2016.”

Englebrecht said this entire ordeal has been miserable. She said the greatest lesson learned is that she was right to speak out as the IRS closed in because the more she spoke the less power the federal government had to intimidate her.

She said the administration may think it has covered its tracks, but she is confident the American people will have the last word.

“I think they are discounting too heavily that Americans will forget,” Englebrecht said. “I think Americans have had enough, and I think that’s going to be reflected next November.”

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‘Gays’ demand secular non-Irish St. Patrick’s parade

(Crisis Magazine) Twenty-five years ago, a small group of activists charged the New York City Saint Patrick’s Day Parade with being a public gesture of pure homophobia. They built their case around the allegedly bigoted “Catholic character.” The trial was held before the judges of the left-leaning secular media.

A jury composed of the general public yawned, wondering why a 250-year-old civic and religious institution needed to become a battlefield in the culture wars. The activists found this lack of popular support impossible to fathom. Enraged, they determined to do more than just march up Fifth Avenue. They sought to humiliate their enemies, including the parade’s organizers, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the Catholic Church herself.

Then the unexpected: the committee responsible for sponsoring and staging the parade stopped defending itself against the worst of the charges. The case has now moved to the penalty phase.

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