Last week, Democrats held their first true presidential debate. With the field winnowed down to 10 candidates — three of them actual contenders for the nomination — only one moment truly stood out. That moment came not from Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders but from a candidate desperate for attention: Beto O&#8217;Rourke.
O&#8217;Rourke ran in 2018 for a Senate seat in Texas and lost in shockingly narrow fashion to incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. But his persona at the time was more Biden than Bernie: He ran as a unifying quasi-moderate, an Obama-esque figure determined to bring Americans together. In the early going of the presidential race, Beto was figured to be a prime contender: An April poll showed him in a solid third place. But he&#8217;s faded dramatically; now the once-media darling is polling below 3%.
So O&#8217;Rourke has refashioned himself into a woke warrior. He&#8217;s declared that he wants to forcibly remove guns from law-abiding Americans (&#8220;Hell, yes, we&#8217;re going to take your AR-15&#8221;), that President Trump is a &#8220;white supremacist&#8221; posing a &#8220;mortal threat to people of color&#8221; and that the time has come for race reparations. Most dramatically, O&#8217;Rourke has refashioned his vision of American history. In this debate, he laid out his retelling of the American story, saying: &#8220;Racism in America is endemic. It is foundational. We can mark the creation of this country not at the Fourth of July, 1776, but Aug. 20, 1619, when the first kidnapped African was brought to this country against his will and in bondage, and as a slave built the greatness and the success and the wealth that neither he nor his descendants would ever be able to fully participate in and enjoy.&#8221;
This version of history is cribbed from &#8220;The 1619 Project&#8221; by The New York Times, a retelling of American history as a story rooted in white supremacy — not colored by or affected by white supremacy but rooted in it. Capitalism, criminal justice, lack of universal health care, traffic patterns, Donald Trump&#8217;s election — all of it, according to &#8220;The 1619 Project,&#8221; is fundamentally based on America&#8217;s legacy of slavery and racial discrimination.
That perspective on American history, in turn, is merely warmed over Howard Zinn. Zinn, the Marxist author of &#8220;A People&#8217;s History of the United States,&#8221; sought to recast America&#8217;s story as a story of hideous ugliness covered with the hypocritical facade of goodness. Never mind that &#8220;A People&#8217;s History&#8221; is, in fact, rotten history — factually inaccurate, wildly disjoined from a more comprehensive examination of time and place, near plagiarized from the work of better leftist historians. Zinn&#8217;s history has now infused the teaching of American history in high schools and colleges across the country.
But that historical retelling is at odds with the better, truer story of America: the story of a nation founded on eternally good and true principles, principles only fully realized for many Americans at the cost of blood and sweat and death. Ex-slave Frederick Douglass&#8217;s take on American history remains the most honest, as well as the most visionary. While acknowledging that to the American slave, Independence Day represents &#8220;more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,&#8221; Douglass recognized that the Constitution is a &#8220;glorious liberty document,&#8221; the Declaration of Independence a charter of &#8220;saving principles.&#8221;
American history is our common history. O&#8217;Rourke&#8217;s pathetic rewriting of American history is designed not to unify us as a nation but to divide us — to call us away from the unifying principles that lie at the foundation of America, in favor of divisive principles of tribal partisanship. We must recognize the evils of American history — that is part of our common story. In fact, our quest to rid ourselves of those evils is our common story. But if we wish to survive as a nation, we must also recognize that the story of America lies in the constant purification of our actions to align with our founding principles, not oppose them.

O&#8217;Rourke debate

SHAPIRO: The Alternative History Of The United States

Ben Shapiro

Beto O'Rourke

New York Times

Patriotism

United States

During an interview with CNN&#8217;s Ariane de Vogue on Tuesday, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch refused to get political and bash President Donald Trump, despite de Vogue&#8217;s persistent baiting.
Though de Vogue was interviewing Mr. Gorsuch on the release of his new book &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/s?k=neil+gorsuch+book&amp;gclid=EAIaIQobChMI8tjGksTJ5AIVwrTtCh0AzwbMEAAYASAAEgIQSvD_BwE&amp;hvadid=318579972164&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvlocphy=9005653&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvpos=1t1&amp;hvqmt=e&amp;hvrand=6808399844587619681&amp;hvtargid=kwd-603576764137&amp;hydadcr=22536_9636733&amp;tag=googhydr-20&amp;ref=pd_sl_6skdn67yyb_e">A Republic If You Can Keep It</a>,&#8221; a large portion of the interview was predictably spent searching for a sound bite to pin against President Trump.
<blockquote>Last fall, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a very rare statement because the president of the President of the United States was attacking judges. And the president doubled-down afterwords, and <a href="https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1065346909362143232?lang=en">said</a>, &#8220;Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have &#8216;Obama judges,&#8217; and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.&#8221; Do the attacks on those judges threaten the rule of law?</blockquote>
Gorsuch bucked the politics and emphasized how strong the rule of law is in the United States, which he later referred to as a &#8220;wonder&#8221; and the &#8220;envy of the world.&#8221;
&#8220;What I say to that is, the rule of law in this country is strong — strong and stable. And we are very fortunate. We shouldn&#8217;t forget how fortunate we are. And we shouldn&#8217;t forget how fortunate we are, we should take care with what we have. It&#8217;s a great inheritance. And I would say to anybody who questions what a wonderful inheritance we have in our courts and the rule of law in this country: Go spend six weeks in a court in another country, of your choice, and come back and tell me what you think about our courts in this country.&#8221;
&#8220;And what would you say to somebody who attacks judges,&#8221; de Vogue pressed, again referencing President Trump. &#8220;And also, what does that do for the safety of judges? … I think that these attacks are important. Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently said these are age-old, but judges can&#8217;t defend themselves.&#8221;
&#8220;Well, I think I&#8217;m doing a pretty good job of it now with you in explaining, I hope, the role of law, the role of judges in our country, and why I think we have something very special that we forget, at our risk,&#8221; Gorsuch continued. &#8220;Is it easy to take for granted? Is it easy to forget what a gift we have? Of course it is. I hear young people, for example, say, &#8216;I&#8217;m a citizen of the world.'&#8221;
&#8220;Do we have our problems? Of course,&#8221; Gorsuch said later in the interview as he continued to reject the political questioning. &#8220;We are enormously blessed and lucky,&#8221; he noted.
&#8220;The rule of law in this country is one of the wonders of the world,&#8221; he told de Vogue. &#8220;Step back and look at the forest.&#8221;
The Supreme Court justice went on to marvel that the highest court only hears some 70 cases a year — a paltry amount, in the grand scheme of the entire federal judicial docket.
&#8220;The stability of our law, the predictability of our law, the uniformity of our law is a wonder of the world and it&#8217;s an envy of the world,&#8221; he said, adding: &#8220;I&#8217;m hugely optimistic about the rule of law.&#8221;
WATCH:
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Justice Neil Gorsuch

WATCH: CNN Reporter Tries To Get Justice Gorsuch To Bash Trump. His Response Is Perfect.

Donald Trump

Media Bias

Neil Gorsuch

Supreme Court

Seemingly every year, some prominent conservative goes out of his way to contemptuously mock the U.S.-recognized federal holiday known as Labor Day. The general rationale for such scorn is that Labor Day came into being and, to some extent, still exists to glorify and harken us back to the once-dominant labor movements of yore. Labor Day, the narrative goes, was a capitalism-undermining governmental fabrication that bestowed unnecessary social capital and legitimacy upon the restive, and oftentimes outright violent, unionized forces of the proletariat.
It is true that sometimes, shibboleths and outmoded orthodoxies require <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49750/hammer-national-conservatism-conference-josh-hammer">fresh, innovative thinking</a>. But it is also the case that the general conservative disdain for Labor Day is not a particularly good example of that. This &#8220;holiday&#8221; deserves all the derision it can possibly receive.
Simply put, Labor Day is indeed an anti-capitalism, anti-economic growth federal &#8220;holiday&#8221; born out of the ashes of the late 19th century&#8217;s societally ruinous labor movement. It is a manifestly stupid socialist &#8220;holiday&#8221; and conservatives are wholly justified to make fun of it.
While the precise origins of how Labor Day came to be recognized as a federal holiday in 1894 are subject to historical debate, it is uncontested that various cogs of Big Labor served as the driving force. According to one version of the history, Central Labor Union (CLU) Secretary Matthew Maguire first proposed the federalization of the holiday after the CLU successfully held a pan-organizational parade of labor organizations in New York City on September 5, 1882. According to a different version of the history, American Federation of Labor Vice President P.J. McGuire initially proposed the federalized holiday to the CLU as a means of publicly demonstrating and flaunting Big Labor&#8217;s institutional might.
But the Haymarket massacre of 1886 threw a wrench into Big Labor&#8217;s self-aggrandizing plot. On May 4, 1886, radical leftist anarchist forces disrupted a pro-worker labor rally in Chicago by throwing a bomb at local police. Seven police officers and four civilians paid the ultimate price, and eight committed leftist anarchists were ultimately convicted of conspiracy. Indeed, Grover Cleveland&#8217;s initial 1887 decision to campaign on a September-based Labor Day, as well as his ultimate 1894 presidential decision to sign the holiday into law, were both based on a conscientious awareness that allowing the holiday to be celebrated in May — in accordance with the venerable European tradition known as May Day — risked the perception of positively commemorating the violent, radical leftist anarchy of the Haymarket massacre.
In a nutshell, then, Labor Day was born out of violence and Big Labor intimidation. Chris Pandolfo, writing at Conservative Review two years ago, <a href="https://www.conservativereview.com/news/happy-labor-day-a-holiday-born-in-violence/">elaborated</a> upon how even President Cleveland&#8217;s ultimate signing of the holiday into law was itself a final act of gross capitulation toward the insubordinate socialist rabble-rousers of the labor movement:
<blockquote>When the Panic of 1893 hit, several workers were laid off from the Pullman Car Company, while the rest suffered an average of a one-fourth wage cut. Eventually, the downtrodden and livid workers organized a strike, and to their aid quickly came the American Railway Union (ARU) and its socialist leader, Eugene V. Debs. Debs helped orchestrate a national boycott of trains carrying Pullman cars.
The strike lasted three months, from May 11 to July 11, 1894. When replacement workers (&#8220;strikebreakers&#8221;) were called in to cross the picket line, violence erupted. Riots, the pillaging of railway cars, and property destruction ensued.
But it was the interruption of postal mail delivery that really brought the strike to the federal government’s attention. President Cleveland declared the strike a federal crime — insisting that the strikers were prohibiting the government from carrying out its constitutional responsibility for mail delivery. Soon after, 14,000 federal and state troops were called upon to break up the strike.
By the strike’s end, as many as 30 people had been killed. In Chicago, lawless strikers took advantage of the violence to &#8220;rob, burn, and plunder,&#8221; leading to an estimated $80 million in property damages. Debs and the leaders of the ARU were jailed and the union dissolved.
With the nation roiling and the 1894 midterm elections approaching, Cleveland’s administration sought a way to appease the labor movement. Thus came Labor Day. The legislation was expedited through Congress and signed by the president on June 28, 1894, in the midst of the Pullman strike.</blockquote>
By all means, conservatives, enjoy your day off work. Enjoy your end of summer sales. Enjoy your barbecues and picnics. Enjoy your final day showcasing the sartorial delight that is seersucker before our fashion overlords deem the fabric verboten tomorrow.
But while you are enjoying yourselves today, do be aware of Labor Day&#8217;s wretched, leftist, socialist, anarchist origins. And do not hesitate to mock this remarkably silly &#8220;holiday&#8221; as much as your heart desires.

Construction Workers

HAMMER: Labor Day Is A Stupid Socialist ‘Holiday’ And Conservatives Are Right To Bash It

Communism

Economy

Socialism

On Wednesday, CNN aired a segment in which a CNN British correspondent patronized that the rest of the world, including countries with massive murder problems such as Mexico and Venezuela, feels “anger and bewilderment” at how America deals with guns.
Nick Paton Walsh repeatedly condescended to the United States, with statements such as, “The U.S. has been here many times before. And so has the rest of the world watching on,” and “The reality is this is an American malaise with only American solutions. And which the rest of the world simply looks on in disbelief.”
As <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/mark-finkelstein/2019/08/07/guns-cnn-suggests-us-should-learn-mexico-and-other-countries">Newsbusters</a> noted, the segment, hosted by CNN hosts John Berman and Erica Hill, also showed New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern pontificating, “To be honest with you, I do not understand the United States.”
The transcript of the exchange via Newsbusters is below:
<blockquote>Hill: As America grapples with the mass shootings here in Dayton and in El Paso, some countries are issuing travel warnings for those planning to visit the U.S. CNN&#8217;s Nick Paton Walsh explains.
Nick Paton Walsh: The grief here is local. And agonizing.
Juan Martinez: [school superintendent of an El Paso-area district]: Not our children! Please don’t! Not one more.
Walsh: For the anger and bewilderment has slowly turned global. The U.S. has been here many times before. And so has the rest of the world watching on. Bewildered by the all-too-familiar debate about gun control, and the U.S. paralyzed by politics. Elsewhere, in their moment of violent tragedy, the answer seemed clear.
Jacinda Arden: Australia experienced a massacre and changed their laws. New Zealand had its experience and changed its laws. To be honest with you, I do not understand the United States.
Walsh: But the Mexican president went a step further. It’s time for American leaders to take action, he said.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador [through translator]: The U.S. needs to control the indiscriminate sale of weapons. I say this with all due respect. It is not our intention to meddle in the internal matters of any country, but, yes, the matter should be reviewed.
Walsh: The suspected El Paso shooter was a 21-year-old, apparently fueled by hatred of immigrants and hispanics. It&#8217;s prompted some Latin American countries to update their travel warnings. Venezuela is urging its citizens to postpone their plans or exercise caution. And Uruguay is warning travelers of, quote, &#8220;the growing indiscriminate violence in the U.S.&#8221;
The reality is this is an American malaise with only American solutions. And which the rest of the world simply looks on in disbelief . . . An extraordinary disconnect to how Americans don’t seem able to address politically this key issue. Americans you speak to feel the same frankly about the European view of their right to bear arms and the Second Amendment. They say it’s part of life. But really, so much shock, I think, felt globally over the past week. John.
Berman: Nick Paton Walsh, so you say there’s a cognitive dissonance. How could this possibly happen, is what we hear from around the world.</blockquote>
Video below:
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WATCH: CNN Patronizes America About Guns: The World ‘Looks On In Disbelief’

Guns

The leftist ingrates at Salon have decided to &#8220;celebrate&#8221; Independence Day — which is celebrated on July 4th for the sole reason that our beautiful republic&#8217;s Declaration of Independence was ratified on that day in Philadelphia in 1776 — today in a rather peculiar manner. In what can only be described as a dissemination of the most stereotypically woke of all stereotypically woke takes, the Salon dullards today tweeted: &#8220;Despite its positive impact on history, the #DeclarationOfIndependence was also a product of its time—and bears some of the shortcomings of its era, including racism, sexism and prejudice against #NativeAmericans.&#8221;
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">Despite its positive impact on history, the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/DeclarationOfIndependence?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#DeclarationOfIndependence</a> was also a product of its time—and bears some of the shortcomings of its era, including racism, sexism and prejudice against <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NativeAmericans?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#NativeAmericans</a><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/4thofJuly?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#4thofJuly</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/IndependenceDay?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#IndependenceDay</a><a href="https://t.co/W3Hz8NO0n5">https://t.co/W3Hz8NO0n5</a>
— Salon (@Salon) <a href="https://twitter.com/Salon/status/1146766310036168704?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 4, 2019</a></blockquote>
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The accompanying <a href="https://www.salon.com/2019/07/04/fourth-of-julys-ugly-truth-exposed-the-declaration-of-independence-is-sexist-racist-and-prejudice/">piece</a>, courtesy of an obscure Ph.D. named Matthew Rozsa, concludes that America&#8217;s Founding Fathers &#8220;were fallible human beings, and some of their flaws had terrible consequences for people who were not fortunate enough to be born into privileged groups.&#8221;
Suffice it to say that such a &#8220;celebration&#8221; of the Declaration of Independence is a far cry from how John Adams described his vision for future annual celebrations in a July 1776 letter to his wife Abigail: &#8220;I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.&#8221;
But Matthew Rozsa and Salon are not merely profoundly ungrateful. They are not merely flipping a proverbial middle finger to the epistolary legacy of John Adams. They are also affirmatively wrong to muddle and belittle the genius that was Thomas Jefferson&#8217;s drafted Declaration of Independence, and it is important to understand why.
Chattel slavery was the original sin of the American republic, and one would be an inveterate fool to deny that obvious truth. The continuation of slavery from the colonial era through the early decades of the constitutional republic represented a brutal compromise of annunciated principle for the sake of maintaining a fragile unity of disaggregated and often self-interested states.
But what Salon misses — and what leftists routinely miss — is that America&#8217;s original sin of chattel slavery was just that: A compromise of principle. Slavery was not in any way a tenet of the American Founding; it was an institution manifestly athwart the Founding. The sagacity of the Declaration, in fact, was that it actually laid the seeds — the very codified foundation — for the eventual eradication of that most horrific of compromises of principle.
For the greatest statesman in the history of the republic, Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration was precisely the tool he needed to latch onto in order to finally bring the American republic in conformity with its Founding-era principles. For Lincoln, the Declaration was paramount to understanding America — the Constitution, in fact, <a href="https://online.hillsdale.edu/document.doc?id=279">was to Lincoln</a> merely an encompassing &#8220;frame of silver&#8221; for the Declaration&#8217;s underlying &#8220;apple of gold.&#8221; Lincoln spoke eloquently of that Founding-era creed — what he called the &#8220;political revolution of &#8217;76&#8221; — all throughout his adult life, including during his <a href="http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/temperance.htm">famous 1842 speech</a> to the Springfield Washington Temperance Society: &#8220;Of our political revolution of &#8217;76, we all are justly proud. It has given us a degree of political freedom, far exceeding that of any other nation of the earth. In it the world has found a solution of the long mooted problem, as to the capability of man to govern himself. In it was the germ which has vegetated, and still is to grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind.&#8221;
It is thus the Declaration — the &#8220;apple of gold&#8221; — that provided the Great Emancipator with the moral and intellectual sustenance he needed to &#8220;grow and expand &#8230; the universal liberty of mankind&#8221; insofar as that growth and expansion meant the eradication of America&#8217;s original sin. And the eradication of that original sin, following the bloody horror of the Civil War, tangibly took the eventual form of modifying the Constitution — the &#8220;frame of silver&#8221; — via the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. For Lincoln, none of this would have been possible had it not been for the <a href="https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/03/lincoln-americas-founders-iron-men-2/">&#8220;electric cord&#8221;</a> of the Declaration — which &#8220;links &#8230; patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.&#8221;
But perhaps no one <a href="https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/03/coolidge-declaration-men-created-equal-final-2/">said it better than President Calvin Coolidge</a> on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration&#8217;s ratification, in 1926:
<blockquote>About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.</blockquote>
It is a great paradox of modern &#8220;progressivism&#8221; — the likes of which is embodied by Salon&#8217;s self-hating screed published today — that such insipid idiocy is, in the Coolidge formulation, not &#8220;progress&#8221; at all. It is &#8220;reactionary.&#8221;

HAMMER: Salon Attacks The Declaration Of Independence. Here’s Why They’re So Wrong.

American History

Declaration of Independence

Leftism

Salon

Slavery

Thomas Jefferson

On Tuesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan discusses a new video released by The New York Times which claims that the United States is not great, and what that means for the other political side of the aisle. Video and partial transcript below.
The New York Times, this morning, the former newspaper, ran a video op-ed called something like &#8220;Stop telling me America is great&#8221;, and they ran this thing. It&#8217;s very well-made. It&#8217;s very clever and it puts forward the idea that this whole concept of America being great is ridiculous. Here&#8217;s a cut.
<blockquote>Video: &#8220;America, the greatest country on earth. A narrative packed and sold to tiny patriots. Reinforced by every cartoon, movie, cheeseburger and mattress sale. A mythology so entrenched our most beloved personalities urges never to question it. &#8211; Don&#8217;t let anyone ever tell you that this country isn&#8217;t great. This right now is the greatest country on earth. Greatest country God ever gave. We&#8217;re the greatest country in the world. America is the greatest country in the world. &#8211; But what if we did question it?”</blockquote>
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It&#8217;s a really dishonest video in a lot of ways. First of all, the entire setup in which children are being taught, all the pictures of the children are from the &#8217;50s. So, the idea that children are being taught this is a great country is kind of garbage. The fact that they put Michelle Obama and then they put Sean Hannity say oh it&#8217;s bad, both on the left and the right, that they&#8217;re saying it&#8217;s a great country. We know that the Obamas did nothing but apologize for this country. We didn&#8217;t forget that Michelle Obama said the first time she was ever proud of her country was the day her husband happened to get elected. So, we know it&#8217;s really only one side. They go on afterwards, I&#8217;m not going to play the whole thing, but they talk about all the ways they think America is not great and some of the stuff they say is fair, but a lot of it is questionable.
So, they use our high poverty rates without mentioning the fact that poverty in America is wealth anywhere else because of wealth transfers. The problem we have here is not that people don&#8217;t have enough money because they can get enough wealth transfer so that people living in poverty today are living at a fairly high level compared to other countries if you&#8217;ve ever been to another country with the exception of Democrat cities where people are homeless. That&#8217;s the kind of poverty that is widespread in a lot of other countries. We&#8217;ll talk about the high mortality rate among infants without mentioning the fact that we try to save a lot more infants who have been born so early that they would die in any other country. So you know the statistics are questionable but I don&#8217;t think that there is any question that this is not the country that it was. That is the fact and is the reason Trump is so popular with his slogan &#8220;Make America Great Again,&#8221; the idea that something has been lost.
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I think after eight years of listening to Obama apologize for this country, after eight years of listening to news people, like Katie Couric, who said she was uncomfortable when she saw somebody wearing an American flag pin. Questioning if it wasn&#8217;t going too far, when we were supposed to wonder why Al-Qaeda disliked us, instead of just bombing them into the Stone Age. I mean why should we wonder why animals like al-Qaeda dislike us?
They dislike us because we&#8217;re better than they are and we&#8217;re free. That&#8217;s why they dislike it. And it goes on to talk about how we&#8217;re not free. I mean it really is a dishonest video but still, I can&#8217;t help feeling that everybody senses that this is not the country that it was, and something was lost and a lot of the people in the left say oh that&#8217;s because you&#8217;re a racist. You want to go back to those days of Jim Crow and go back to the days when women were stuck in the house and all this stuff but that&#8217;s nonsense. That&#8217;s absolutely absurd.
What people want is to go back to the days when people were proud of their country when their children were taught to be proud of their country. And yes, now we understand that people were left out. Let&#8217;s include them too. I don&#8217;t think anybody is against that. I think the problem is that we&#8217;ve lost some sense of pride.
You know Gallup has a poll out that says as Americans prepare to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday, their pride in the U.S. has hit its lowest point since Gallup&#8217;s first measurement in 2001. While 70 percent of U.S. adults overall say they are proud to be Americans, this includes fewer than half who are extremely proud. Marking the second consecutive year that this reading is below the majority level, it&#8217;s only really a two percent decline which is kind of meaningless. Still, people were extremely proud of America. The last time that number really spiked was after 9/11 when people suddenly realized, &#8220;Oh yeah good country.&#8221; But when you read more closely into this Gallup poll, it&#8217;s the Democrats who weren&#8217;t proud. The latest overall declines in patriotism are largely driven by Democrats whose self-reported pride has historically been lower and has fluctuated more than Republicans.
Democrats latest 22 percent &#8220;extreme pride&#8221; reading is the group&#8217;s lowest in Gallup&#8217;s 19 years of measurement and is half of what it was several months before Donald Trump&#8217;s 2016 election victory. So they&#8217;re happy when they&#8217;re winning. They&#8217;re not happy when they&#8217;re losing, which is not true of the Republicans, who remained very proud even during Barack Obama. Republicans have remained extremely proud of their country, and the latest 76 percent reading is just 10 points below the high recorded in 2003. Even when Barack Obama was in office, Republicans&#8217; extreme pride never fell below 68 percent. And that&#8217;s really telling to me; it&#8217;s really telling that when the Democrats lose, they lose their pride.
In other words, they&#8217;re only proud like Michelle Obama. They&#8217;re only proud of a country they run, and they cannot see that there might be another way whereas Republicans are proud of the structure that the friends of the founding right. They understand that the founding is still in place even if they lose an election the fact that there&#8217;s an election, the fact that it works the way it&#8217;s supposed to work, the fact that we transfer power peacefully, that people are still constrained by the Constitution. Obama less than any other president I can think of but still you know was constrained to some degree by the Constitution and by the separation of powers and by the courts who gave him a record number of 9-0 defeats in the Supreme Court because he overreached on his executive powers.
So we remain proud because we feel the system is in place, whereas we know when the Democrats lose, it&#8217;s suddenly all we&#8217;ve got to get rid of the system, we got to stack the Supreme Court, we got to get rid of the electoral college, because they are only proud of this country when they win. And that is the difference between somebody who&#8217;s proud of the founding, who&#8217;s a friend of the founding, and someone who is just proud of himself and think he&#8217;s his own glorious compassion and virtue is going to transform the world into something it has never been ever. And that is the difference.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/show/andrew-klavan-show&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1562248239664000&amp;usg=AFQjCNHt5J2KejNIZKMc168c9fbTx1Wt2Q">Watch more of The Andrew Klavan Show here</a>.
<a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt%3D2&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1562248239664000&amp;usg=AFQjCNF-TAjcpeUfjB1FjkvZxTvAB9Lugw">Listen to more of The Andrew Klavan Show on iTunes here.</a>

KLAVAN: When Dems Lose Elections, They Lose Pride In America

Andrew Klavan

Barack Obama

Conservatism

Democratic Party

Michelle Obama

There is almost nothing to say about the fact that Nike <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/49067/nike-pulls-american-flag-sneaker-after-complaint-emily-zanotti">recalled a patriotic American flag shoe</a> after Colin Kaepernick complained. It is so self-evidently absurd and disgraceful — such a cowardly surrender to political correctness — that analysis is rendered moot.
Kaepernick reportedly felt that the flag — a Betsy Ross flag from the American Revolution — somehow represents slavery. Of course, if the American flag represents slavery, then every flag of every country 200 years old or over also represents slavery. Slavery was a universally accepted institution all across the world for thousands of years. The only thing unique about American slavery is that we practiced it for such a comparatively short amount of time. Egypt had slavery for 3,000 years. We had it for 90. These are facts that have apparently escaped Kaepernick&#8217;s notice.
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The one notable, though far from surprising, aspect of this story is how it finally exposes the truth behind Kaepernick&#8217;s kneeling stunt. We were told for years that the kneelers were not protesting the flag — or the country or the national anthem, for that matter. A viral <a href="https://twitter.com/kdreamcatchers/status/999781373958410240?lang=en">tweet</a> with over 300,000 likes summed up this defense: &#8220;Rosa Parks was not protesting the bus. Gandhi was not protesting the food. The colonists were not protesting tea. Players are not protesting the flag or the anthem. They are protesting injustice.&#8221;
Many in the media, <a href="https://www.upworthy.com/no-players-arent-protesting-the-anthem-fox-news-shep-smith-explains-perfectly">including Shep Smith</a> at Fox News, also made this claim. The NFL players themselves repeatedly <a href="https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/seahawks/seahawks-receiver-doug-baldwin-message-is-about-fighting-inequality-not-protesting-the-flag-our-country/">declared</a> that they were not protesting the flag, despite appearing to do exactly that. LeBron James, one of the highest-profile defenders of the anthem protests, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/lebron-james-trump-protests-press-conference-2017-9">tried to put a patriotic spin on it</a>: &#8220;We know this is the greatest country in the world — it&#8217;s the land of the free. But we still have problems just like everybody else. And when we have those problems, we have to figure out a way how we come together and be as great as we can be as a people.&#8221;
Kaepernick, who started it all, <a href="https://www.nbcsports.com/chicago/chicago-bears/49ers-qb-colin-kaepernick-anthem-protest-about-change-not-just-police-violence">said</a> that he was trying to call attention to &#8220;police violence&#8221; and &#8220;systematic oppression.&#8221; He and his fellow kneelers always insisted that this was not about the flag itself. Well, in case anyone was ever fooled by all of the misdirection, the truth should now be clear: It was indeed about the flag. It was always about the flag.
Colin Kaepernick does not like this country. That much is clear, by now. He is rich and famous and free — all things that he would not be if he lived in any number of other countries around the globe — but his privilege has made him bitter to his core. And he is free to be bitter. He is free to hate the United States and its flag and all it stands for. But he should be honest about where he really stands (or kneels) on the issue.

WALSH: We Were Told That Kaepernick Was Protesting Police Brutality, Not The Flag. Now The Truth Has Finally Come Out.

Colin Kaepernick

Nike

Protest

Last month, United States women&#8217;s national soccer team captain Megan Rapinoe told <a href="https://sports.yahoo.com/megan-rapinoe-is-a-walking-protest-162416461.html">Yahoo Sports</a>, &#8220;I&#8217;ll probably never put my hand over my heart&#8221; for the national anthem ever again.
At Tuesday&#8217;s World Cup match against Thailand, Rapinoe kept her word. The openly gay forward refused to put her hand over her heart and sing along to the national anthem, which was apparently a &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47169/us-womens-soccer-co-captain-ill-probably-never-hank-berrien">F you</a>&#8221; to &#8220;sexist,&#8221; &#8220;racist,&#8221; and &#8220;small-minded&#8221; President Donald Trump.
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American football player Megan Rapinoe refuses to sing the national anthem as a &amp; # 39; F You to Trump &amp; # 39; <a href="https://t.co/Loj79r5TXZ">https://t.co/Loj79r5TXZ</a> <a href="https://t.co/Yl9J8wvA27">pic.twitter.com/Yl9J8wvA27</a>
&#8212; XpressNews (@xpressnewsasia) <a href="https://twitter.com/xpressnewsasia/status/1138606516733456384?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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During the Yahoo! Sports <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47169/us-womens-soccer-co-captain-ill-probably-never-hank-berrien">interview</a>, Rapinoe proudly dubbed herself &#8220;a walking protest when it comes to the Trump administration&#8221; because of &#8220;everything&#8221; she &#8220;stands for,&#8221; hinting at her sexuality.
&#8220;I feel like it&#8217;s kind of defiance in and of itself to just be who I am and wear the jersey, and represent it. Because I&#8217;m as talented as I am, I get to be here, you don&#8217;t get to tell me if I can be here or not,&#8221; she said.
&#8220;So it&#8217;s kind of a good &#8216;F you&#8217; to any sort of inequality or bad sentiments that the [Trump] administration might have towards people who don&#8217;t look exactly like him. Which, God help us if we all looked like him. Scary. Really scary. Ahh, disturbing,&#8221; added the soccer star.
The Internet was not pleased with Rapinoe&#8217;s move &#8212; viewing the protest as not a knock against Trump, but a hit against those who&#8217;ve selflessly sacrificed for her freedoms to, for example, protest the national anthem. In other words, Rapinoe&#8217;s American privilege was lost on her due to her blind hatred for Trump.
Here are some of the reactions following Rapinoe&#8217;s protest:
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Spineless act for publicity. Didn&#8217;t feel strongly enough to quit the team &amp;not represent the US. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/snoozefest?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#snoozefest</a> 
US soccer star Megan Rapinoe stays true to her word: Doesn&#8217;t sing national anthem before Thailand match | Fox News <a href="https://t.co/WokjAlULgz">https://t.co/WokjAlULgz</a>
&#8212; Amber Smith (@AmberSmithUSA) <a href="https://twitter.com/AmberSmithUSA/status/1138632908493791232?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Nice win ladies. Don&#8217;t tell me how this ends up. I don&#8217;t care. Not watching. <a href="https://t.co/ofJ8DJAgp8">https://t.co/ofJ8DJAgp8</a>
&#8212; Robert J. O&#8217;Neill (@mchooyah) <a href="https://twitter.com/mchooyah/status/1138571527547432961?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 11, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Someone should tell <a href="https://twitter.com/mPinoe?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@mPinoe</a> that people actually give a shit about the NFL. And they got crushed.
&#8212; Robert J. O&#8217;Neill (@mchooyah) <a href="https://twitter.com/mchooyah/status/1138576976007049216?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 11, 2019</a></blockquote>
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After we all looked back last week on the incredible sacrifices and loss of life suffered on D-Day and remembered the American heroes who made victory possible while marking the 75th Anniversary&#8212; the timing of this move seems incredibly callous.
<a href="https://t.co/lrUwSVlYQr">https://t.co/lrUwSVlYQr</a>
&#8212; Kari Lake Fox 10 (@KariLakeFox10) <a href="https://twitter.com/KariLakeFox10/status/1138695861284696065?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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So you protest a president by dishonoring yourself and the entire nation? Statists hate America: Megan Rapinoe: My national anthem protests are an &#8216;F you&#8217; to Trump administration <a href="https://t.co/RB6rIDOulR">https://t.co/RB6rIDOulR</a>
&#8212; Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) <a href="https://twitter.com/ChrisLoesch/status/1138847184030449664?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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You <a href="https://twitter.com/mPinoe?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@mPinoe</a> play for Team USA, not team You. <a href="https://twitter.com/USWNT?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@USWNT</a> <a href="https://t.co/TAfyMP64Xg">https://t.co/TAfyMP64Xg</a>
&#8212; Andrew Wilkow (@WilkowMajority) <a href="https://twitter.com/WilkowMajority/status/1138577339539845120?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 11, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Megan Rapinoe needs to be booted for her lack of patriotism. Why play for a country you hate, smh. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/USWNT?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#USWNT</a>
&#8212; Big Dawg (@Moutdaman1) <a href="https://twitter.com/Moutdaman1/status/1138522427930152961?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 11, 2019</a></blockquote>
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so weird to have a scowl while your national anthem, the one that gave you the freedom to pretty much actually PLAY in this game <a href="https://twitter.com/mPinoe?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@mPinoe</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/USWNT?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#USWNT</a>
&#8212; Swami (@SwamiG8R) <a href="https://twitter.com/SwamiG8R/status/1138520352202661894?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 11, 2019</a></blockquote>
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The only obnoxious moment the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/USWNT?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#USWNT</a> has is each game when Rapinoe looks like she hates the country that made her a star during the national anthem. She disrespects a nation and her team to stick it to one guy who temporarily holds an office. Crazy.
&#8212; Eric Goranson (@EricAlan) <a href="https://twitter.com/EricAlan/status/1138898240982663168?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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I love that people are so outraged at the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/USWNT?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#USWNT</a> for scoring too many goals and/or excessively celebrating. The real travesty is the mockery made of our country, its national anthem, and those that defend it. Hands over hearts; basic respect for the flag and our country.
&#8212; Mike MacGregor (@mikeymac0908) <a href="https://twitter.com/mikeymac0908/status/1138847020851109890?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Megan Rapinoe said that she would probably never sing the national anthem again before a game as a sort of protest against the president.
Your disrespectful to those who gave all to keep our freedom &amp; America safe.
Disrespectful liberal!! <a href="https://t.co/Cyecjf7WOk">https://t.co/Cyecjf7WOk</a>
&#8212; RICK MAGA (@barmore27) <a href="https://twitter.com/barmore27/status/1138776493549588480?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2019</a></blockquote>
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Another spoiled one that has no actual understanding or appreciation of what they have here, or what is takes to keep it. They can always go live in that perfect other country. Oh, that&#8217;s right, there is no such a thing as a perfect other country. <a href="https://t.co/JsEol8yMhD">https://t.co/JsEol8yMhD</a>
&#8212; Lee Culhane (@CulhaneLee) <a href="https://twitter.com/CulhaneLee/status/1138557526197383171?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 11, 2019</a></blockquote>
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As previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/47169/us-womens-soccer-co-captain-ill-probably-never-hank-berrien">reported</a> by The Daily Wire, Rapinoe began kneeling during the anthem in 2016. &#8220;I know what it means to look at the flag and not have it protect all of your liberties,&#8221; the athlete claimed at the time.
Rapinoe was forced to drop the kneeling act after the United States Soccer Federation responded with a policy requiring the national team to &#8220;stand respectfully.&#8221;
&#8220;Our national anthem is an opportunity &#8230; to reflect upon the liberties and freedom we all appreciate in this country. As part of the privilege to represent your country, we have an expectation that our players and coaches will stand and honor our flag while the national anthem is played,&#8221; a <a href="https://twitter.com/JohnDHalloran/status/776607393098661889">statement</a> from the organization said.
Despite publicly praising the United States and acknowledging that she will &#8220;respect&#8221; the standing policy, Rapinoe bashed the bylaw in May, telling Yahoo! Sports: &#8220;Using this blanketed patriotism as a defense against what the protest actually is was pretty cowardly. I think the NFL does it. I felt like the statement from U.S. Soccer, and then the rule they made without ever talking to me, that was the same as what the NFL was doing &#8212; just to not have the conversation, to try to just stop me from doing what I&#8217;m doing instead of at least having a conversation, and trying to figure out a [solution] that makes sense for everyone.&#8221;

Megan Rapinoe Slammed After Ignoring National Anthem As ‘F You’ To Trump

Soccer

On Monday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Michael Knowles Show,&#8221; the host explains why the &#8216;queen of sin,&#8217; pride, has become a virtue in our culture and why that is a bad thing. 
Why is it called &#8220;pride?&#8221; It&#8217;s because the Left has a far bigger agenda than sexual tolerance. Sex is just the way &#8230; because we all love sex and we think about sex all the time and it&#8217;s a good way to pull people in and attract people. I think, at this point, homosexuality is totally tangential to Pride Month. Now it&#8217;s about gender, it&#8217;s about sexual identity, and there aren&#8217;t just two genders, there are 56 different genders. There is also a sexual pride, a fat pride, a skinny pride, there are all kinds of pride.
What is pride? Pride is excessive love of one&#8217;s own excellence. Pride is the opposite of humility. If pride is the queen of all sin, humility is the queen of the virtues and they&#8217;re exactly the opposite. Vice and virtue, sin and virtue, are the opposite and pride and humility are exact opposites.
We know that humility is the beginning of all wisdom. We know this from Scripture. We know this just from our own experience. Proud people come off like idiots. When you meet a proud person, no matter how popular they are, no matter how many credentials they have, they seem like idiots. And when you meet a humble person, even if he has no education, even if he&#8217;s from a humble station in life, they often come off as very wise.
In a healthy culture, we approach serious questions with humility. Serious people approach questions with humility. So instead of &#8220;pride&#8221; parades, if we had a humble culture, and people who have differing sexual preferences wanted to be more accepted, they might have a parade that was called the, &#8220;Please Don&#8217;t Ostracize Me For My Sexual Preferences or Sexual Behavior Parade.&#8221; Humility would be the recognition that we are all very flawed people, which is certainly the case.
Every single person that you have ever met is a very flawed person. Pride is the opposite; pride is the fantasy that we&#8217;re all perfect and that is what is being embraced and pushed by the Left. The leftist agenda is to suggest that human nature is perfectible, and we&#8217;re on our way to Progress &#8212; that&#8217;s what progress with a capital P means. And so, progressives see the utopia and they see perfect human nature and we&#8217;re just marching there, we&#8217;re so close, so just give us a little bit more money and a little bit more power.
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We have a culture that values the self above all other things. So, in a good culture, you have selflessness. You have people doing acts of charity for each other and you have people sacrificing for each other, for their children, for future generations. But in our culture, we don&#8217;t have selflessness.
We&#8217;re about to have the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of storming Normandy. That was an act of selflessness for the country. That&#8217;s unimaginable today. What we have today are parades celebrating the self. We have self-love and we have self-care. We have selfishness.
Selflessness is replaced by selfishness and humility is replaced by pride. It is a horrible thing. No matter your sexual preferences, no matter your sexual views, no matter your religious views, no matter your moral views, pride is terrible.
It will ruin society and it will ruin your life. If you live in a proud way if you think you&#8217;re so great and everyone else is just kind of shorting you and cheating you, and you&#8217;ve got a big chip on your shoulder, and everyone&#8217;s worse than you are, and you&#8217;re so much better than everyone else, you&#8217;re going to have a terrible life. Do not be proud. You have no reason to be proud, you should be humble. We should have humility parades.

KNOWLES: The Problem With Pride

Gay Rights

LGBT

Trump Administration

According to The Times of Israel, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif &#8212; who was the Islamic Republic&#8217;s top diplomat during the negotiation of President Barack Obama&#8217;s signature Iran nuclear <strike>capitulation</strike> deal &#8212; is accusing recently <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/45789/all-3-major-israeli-tv-channels-declare-netanyahu-hank-berrien">re-elected</a> Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, along with the Mohammed bin Salman-led government of Saudi Arabia, of instigating an American war with Iran.
Per <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/zarif-accuses-netanyahu-and-saudis-of-trying-to-provoke-us-into-war-with-iran/">The Times of Israel</a>:
<blockquote>
Iran&#8217;s top diplomat said Wednesday U.S. President Donald Trump&#8217;s aim &#8220;is to bring us to our knees to talk&#8221; &#8212; but national security adviser John Bolton and key US allies in the Mideast want &#8220;regime change at the very least&#8221; and the &#8220;disintegration of Iran.&#8221;
Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said he doubts Trump wants conflict because the president ran on a campaign promise &#8220;not to waste another $7 trillion in our region in order to make the situation only worse.&#8221;
But Zarif said what he called &#8220;the B team&#8221; &#8212; Bolton, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia&#8217;s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed &#8212; is trying &#8220;to push Iran to take action&#8221; as a pretext for &#8220;crazy&#8221; and &#8220;adventurous&#8221; U.S. actions.
</blockquote>
The comments come as the United States recently ended all remaining oil waivers for Iranian crude exports and therefore tightened sanctions even further on the Iranian mullocracy. The Daily Wire&#8217;s Kassy Dillon <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/46296/trump-administration-seeks-stop-all-countries-kassy-dillon">reported</a> earlier this week:
<blockquote>
On Monday, the Trump administration announced that the U.S. would increase its pressure on Iran by cracking down on countries that import Iranian oil. 
Last year, the Trump administration provided sanction waivers to several countries that purchased oil from Iran. But on Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States would not renew the waivers after they expire on May 2.
&#8220;Almost one year ago, after withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, President Trump implemented the strongest pressure campaign in history against the Islamic Republic of Iran. The goal remains simple: to deprive the outlaw regime of the funds it has used to destabilize the Middle East for four decades and incentivize Iran to behave like a normal country.&#8221;
</blockquote>
The Times of Israel also notes Iran&#8217;s response to Trump&#8217;s further upping of sanctions on the world&#8217;s number one terror-exporting regime. &#8220;Iran reiterated its long-running threat to close the Strait of Hormuz if it&#8217;s prevented from using the crucial waterway in the Persian Gulf through which about a third of all oil traded at sea passes,&#8221; the outlet noted. &#8220;The U.S. Navy has in the past accused Iranian patrol boats of harassing American warships in the waterway.&#8221;
Iran frequently threatens the Jewish state of Israel with existential elimination. But Shiite Iran and Saudi Arabia, which is the iconic center of the Sunni Arab world, also have a longstanding fierce regional rivalry of their own. Iran and Saudi Arabia engage in frequent proxy conflicts against one another, such as the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/44687/course-tlaib-omar-serve-shills-irans-bloody-war-josh-hammer">current civil war</a> in Saudi Arabia&#8217;s neighboring country of Yemen. After the 2015 signing of the Iran nuclear deal, many Sunni Arab states &#8212; such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates &#8212; have extensively warmed their military and intelligence-sharing relations with Israel, due to their mutual arch-foe of an empowered Iran.

Top Iranian Minister Says Israel And Saudis Are Trying To Goad U.S. And Iran Into War

Foreign Policy

Iran

Israel

Saudi Arabia

Those who would claim that U.S. sanctions led to Venezuela&#8217;s downfall would do well to check their facts before speaking.
On Thursday&#8217;s episode of BBC One&#8217;s &#8220;This Week,&#8221; host Andrew Neil took former English politician Ken Livingstone to task for suggesting the U.S. is responsible for the chaos in Venezuela. Livingstone had suggested that U.S. sanctions on Venezuela&#8217;s state-owned oil firm cost the country &#8220;11 billion pounds a year.&#8221;
&#8220;Now, that&#8217;s an important impact on their economy,&#8221; Livingstone said.
Neil responded by asking when the U.S. oil sanctions were imposed, to which Livingstone responded: &#8220;I can&#8217;t remember when it started.&#8221;
Neil cut him off and told him that the sanctions were imposed &#8220;this week.&#8221; Livingstone tried to push back and say this was just the &#8220;latest&#8221; round of sanctions, but Neil wasn&#8217;t having any of it.
&#8220;No, no. Until then there have been no oil sanctions on Venezuela. Indeed, the United States, until this week, was Venezuela&#8217;s biggest importer &#8211; exporter &#8211; of oil. The 600,000 barrels of oil a day were exported from Venezuela to America. There have been no oil sanctions,&#8221; Neil said.
Livingstone tried to counter this by saying the U.S. has imposed sanctions on Venezuela like they have on Cuba and Nicaragua, but when pressed by Neil, couldn&#8217;t name what those sanctions allegedly were.
&#8220;The Venezuelan economy has shrunk by 50% in five years, what U.S. sanctions caused that?&#8221; Neil asked.
&#8220;Well, in the first place, it was the collapse of the oil price. That was damaging,&#8221; Livingstone said.
Neil pointed out that the oil price drop wasn&#8217;t a sanction. Livingstone again tried to blame U.S. sanctions and was again asked: &#8220;What were they?&#8221; Livingstone didn&#8217;t know.
Neil pushed back by noting the first sanctions against Venezuela came in 2015 under President Barack Obama, and were aimed &#8220;solely at regime members suspected of corruption and human rights abuses.&#8221;
&#8220;That was all. Their assets were frozen. That cannot bring down an economy nor create hyperinflation,&#8221; Neil said. &#8220;So, I ask you again, what U.S. sanctions have caused this collapse in the economy?&#8221;
Livingstone at this point tried to claim that U.S. sanctions are &#8220;illegal under international law,&#8221; again avoiding Neil&#8217;s question.
Livingstone resorted to saying the information he has was from the Venezuelan ambassador, who said the oil sanctions &#8211; which have been in effect for one week &#8211; were costing the country &#8220;$11 billion a year.&#8221;
&#8220;There was not a single trading sanction on Venezuela,&#8221; Neil responded. &#8220;You could export or import anything other than arms. There were no restrictions. Under this same time, Venezuela got $80 billion in loans from China and Russia. So, why did the economy collapse?&#8221;
Livingstone, yet again, blamed the collapse of oil prices and U.S. sanctions, which he can&#8217;t name, for the rapid decline of the country.
Livingstone suggested Neil was wrong about how long U.S. sanctions have been in place against Venezuela. The Congressional Research Service <a href="https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/IF10715.pdf">has a report</a> about these sanctions that was updated on February 1. It stated that sanctions have been used &#8220;for more than a decade,&#8221; so Neil is wrong when he says the first sanctions came in 2015. But, the sanctions were directed at specific individuals for drugs, terrorism, sex trafficking, and other human rights abuses. The sanctions did not target the Venezuelan economy and could not account for the rapid decline.
Watch the full interview below:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
This clip of <a href="https://twitter.com/afneil?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@afneil</a> demolishing Ken Livingstone&#8217;s argument that socialist Venezuela&#8217;s woes were caused by &#8216;US sanctions&#8217; is utterly delicious. <a href="https://t.co/wSGKUCWWzl">pic.twitter.com/wSGKUCWWzl</a>
&#8212; Caleb Bond (@TheCalebBond) <a href="https://twitter.com/TheCalebBond/status/1091326743292534785?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 1, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>

WATCH: British Journalist DESTROYS Argument That U.S. Sanctions, Not Socialism, Hurt Venezuela

Venezuela

On Thursday, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Representative Francis Rooney (R-FL) <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/1/actions">introduced</a> a joint resolution to amend the Constitution of the United States. The proposed amendment would place term limits on elected officials in the Senate and House.
The text of S.J.Res.1 reads:
<blockquote>
SECTION 1. No person who has served three terms as a Representative shall be eligible for election to the House of Representatives. For purposes of this section, the election of a person to fill a vacancy in the House of Representatives shall be included as one term in determining the number of terms that such person has served as a Representative if the person fills the vacancy for more than one year.
SECTION 2. No person who has served two terms as a Senator shall be eligible for election or appointment to the Senate. For purposes of this section, the election or appointment of a person to fill a vacancy in the Senate shall be included as one term in determining the number of terms that such person has served as a Senator if the person fills the vacancy for more than three years.
SECTION 3. No term beginning before the date of the ratification of this article shall be taken into account in determining eligibility for election or appointment under this article.
</blockquote>
The bill, which is co-sponsored by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Marco Rubio (R-FL), was introduced and &#8220;read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary,&#8221; according to the official <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/1/cosponsors">website</a> for the United States Congress.
In a press release, Cruz <a href="https://www.cruz.senate.gov/?p=press_release&amp;id=4245">stated</a>:
<blockquote>
For too long, members of Congress have abused their power and ignored the will of the American people. Term limits on members of Congress offer a solution to the brokenness we see in Washington, D.C. It is long past time for Congress to hold itself accountable. I urge my colleagues to submit this constitutional amendment to the states for speedy ratification.
</blockquote>
This isn&#8217;t the first time Cruz has proposed term limits. In January 2017, the senator introduced a joint resolution <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/2/text">identical</a> to the one he proposed on Thursday, and it was referred to Judiciary Committee.
At the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Cruz said the following about term limits:
<blockquote>
This election was the American people saying, &#8220;Enough already with the corruption in Washington.&#8221; It&#8217;s both parties. It&#8217;s Democrats and Republicans who have been here too long, who have become captured by this city &#8230; what&#8217;s amazing is the support for this, it cuts across, in this polarized time, you get supermajorities of Republicans, of Democrats, of independents, who all say, &#8220;Throw the bums out,&#8221; and we ought to listen.
</blockquote>
Cruz later added that he wants the American people to &#8220;hold us accountable.&#8221;
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="385" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/g2NweFmUz3E" width="720"></iframe></div>
The idea of term limits isn&#8217;t a new one, nor is it one about which everyone agrees. There are those who believe that elections serve as a type of term limit, and that if the American people are no longer satisfied with a particular politician, they can and will vote them out.
Perhaps the most recent example of vote-based term limiting is the <a href="https://ballotpedia.org/Claire_McCaskill">defeat</a> of former Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) in the 2018 midterm elections.
McCaskill took on Republican incumbent James Talent in the 2006 midterm election, and won. In 2012, she routed Republican challenger Todd Akin. After serving two terms in the United States Senate, McCaskill lost her seat to Republican Josh Hawley by more than five percentage points.
That said, term limits have been applied in the past. In 1947 &#8212; approximately two and a half years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected for a fourth term &#8212; Congress <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amendments/amendment-xxii">introduced</a> what would later become the 22nd Amendment, which places a two-term limit on presidents. The Amendment was ratified in February 1951.
The idea of term limits is also popular among the American people. In 2013, a <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/159881/americans-call-term-limits-end-electoral-college.aspx">Gallup</a> survey showed that 75% of Americans would vote in favor of a congressional term limit law. In 2016, a <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/october_2016/more_voters_than_ever_want_term_limits_for_congress">Rasmussen</a> survey showed similar results, with 74% of &#8220;likely U.S. voters&#8221; favoring term limits.
When The Daily Wire spoke with Rep. Rooney, he noted that there are numerous &#8220;tangential benefits&#8221; to a term limit amendment. He also stated that the advantages of the incumbent, including but not limited to name recognition, can sometimes make it difficult to use voting as an effective means of limiting the time an elected official spends in office:
<blockquote>
There are a lot of advantages to the incumbency that make it more difficult. People become more skilled at building up their name ID, which is kind of like a capital asset. For a politician, name ID is like owning an oil well. It becomes harder and harder for people to lose under those circumstances.
Plus, I think [term limits] would be a predestined foreshortening of career; it would change the tenor of public service in Washington. It would mean that the special interests would limit their investment in these people, and these people would have to limit their investment in the special interests, and be looking down the road to the future. [They] wouldn&#8217;t have time to build up these long, cozy ties with their favorite lobbyist.
</blockquote>
As for potential Democratic support for the joint resolution, Rooney stated that although former Rep. Beto O&#8217;Rourke &#8220;was the only Democrat member of the term limits caucus last time,&#8221; it&#8217;s possible that elected term limit advocates &#8220;can recruit some more support now.&#8221;
In order to <a href="https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution">pass</a> an amendment to the Constitution, two-thirds of the House and Senate must approve, and then it must be ratified by 38 state legislatures (three-fourths of all states). If passed and ratified, it would become the 28th Amendment.

Sen. Ted Cruz And Rep. Francis Rooney Introduce ‘Term Limits’ Amendment

Congress

Marco Rubio

Mike Lee

Republican Party

Ted Cruz

In a move that is motivated by everything political and nothing factual, the United States has been listed among the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, according to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/united-states-added-list-most-dangerous-countries-journalists-first-time-n949676?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma">NBC News</a>.
In its <a href="https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/worldwilde_round-up.pdf">annual report</a>, the free-press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders lists the United States among countries like Mexico, India, Syria, India, and Afghanistan for being one of the most dangerous for journalists based on the number who died in the U.S. in 2018. Not one of the deaths they listed, however, had anything to do with the U.S. government. Four of the six deaths listed stemmed from the Capital Gazette shooting (performed by a crazed lunatic who had a beef with the newspaper); the other two were killed while covering a storm in North Carolina.
&#8220;The United States joined the ranks of the world&#8217;s deadliest countries for the media this year, with a total of six journalists killed,&#8221; the group reports. &#8220;Four journalists were among the five employees of the Capital Gazette, a local newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, who .were killed on 28 June when a man walked in and opened fire with a shotgun. He had been harassing the newspaper for six years on Twitter about a 2011 article that named him. It was the deadliest attack on a media outlet in the US in modern history. Two other journalists, a local TV anchor and cameraman, were killed by a falling tree while covering Subtropical Storm Alberto&#8217;s extreme weather in North Carolina in May.&#8221;
Though Reporters Without Borders does not explicitly state it, the media has incessantly blamed President Trump&#8217;s rhetoric toward the media for the Capital Gazette shooting this past summer.
&#8220;We won&#8217;t forget being called an enemy of the people,&#8221; the Capital Gazette <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/32536/capital-gazette-editorial-we-wont-forget-being-paul-bois">editorial staff said following the shooting</a>. &#8220;No, we won&#8217;t forget that. Because exposing evil, shining light on wrongs and fighting injustice is what we do.&#8221;
&#8220;Our community has rallied around us to show they understand who we are, and that we are not the enemy of the people,&#8221; it continued. &#8220;We are your neighbors, your friends. We are you.&#8221;
Of course, all of these deaths are tragic, but Reporters Without Borders lists them among journalists who have been killed either by the hands of local officials or organized crime. While the group notes that it distinguishes &#8220;between journalists who were deliberately targeted and those who were killed while reporting in the field,&#8221; it nevertheless lumps the United States among some strange bedfellows. Here is how the group describes the situation in Mexico, for instance:
<blockquote>
In Mexico, which has many press freedom predators, journalists who cover stories related to political corruption (especially at the local level) and organized crime are often the targets of intimidation and attacks or execution-style murder. Because of the widespread corruption, impunity reigns and is reaching unprecedented levels, feeding the vicious cycle of violence. The protection provided to journalists who have been threatened is very often insufficient and ineffective.
</blockquote>
The stories of journalists being killed in Mexico include the likes of website editor Rubén Pat, who was gunned down on the street after he requested urgent protection following the murder of a reporter in his employment. Another reporter, Mario Leonel Gómez Sánchez, was killed by gunmen on a motorcycle &#8220;the day after members of the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists announced that the government was yet again cutting back funding for protection.&#8221;
Listing the United States as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists seems like an underhanded smack at President Trump for his standoffish nature against what he describes as the &#8220;fake news media&#8221; and for his keeping the status-quo with Saudi Arabia following the murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.

Oh, Please: U.S. Added To List Of Most Dangerous Countries For Journalists

Journalism

In PragerU&#8217;s latest video, &#8220;Why Does America Spend So Much on Israel,&#8221; retired U.S. General Chuck Wald explains why America needs to support Israel, despite the incessant criticism of Israel from the left.
&#8220;Why do we spend so much money on Israel?&#8221; asks Gen. Wald.
&#8220;The truth is we don&#8217;t spend enough. We should spend more. And for purely selfish reasons,&#8221; he explains. &#8220;Every dollar we spend on Israel is a dollar spent, in effect, in our own defense. As a value proposition, it&#8217;s all in America&#8217;s favor.&#8221;
Before he gets into his explanation focusing on America&#8217;s national security, Gen. Wald notes that he &#8220;can easily defend why America supports Israel on moral grounds alone.&#8221;
&#8220;I&#8217;ve been there on numerous occasions,&#8221; says the retired general. &#8220;It&#8217;s a good and decent country. Given the neighborhood it lives in, I find that both remarkable and admirable. But I will make this argument solely on the basis of America&#8217;s security.&#8221;
The alliance between the United States and Israel is unique in part because, unlike other nations, America does not have troops based there. &#8220;This is because Israel takes care of itself,&#8221; he says. 
General Wald makes the case for shoring up our support for Israel by increasing financial aid and &#8220;enhanc[ing] our alliance with Israel&#8221; because there is no specific defense treaty signed with the Middle Eastern nation. 
&#8220;Why is this so important?&#8221; he asks. &#8220;Because it will send a loud strategic signal to Israel&#8217;s enemies that if you mess with Israel, you mess with us.&#8221;
He continues: &#8220;Israel is not going to ask us for troops. But we should be giving them anything else they need: intelligence, weapons technology and other vital information. And we know this is a two-way street. Israel gives a lot in return.&#8221;
Video and transcript below:
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<blockquote>
Why do we spend so much money on Israel?
Over my decades of military service, as the Deputy Commander of United States European Command and now as a security advisor, I&#8217;ve often heard people make this complaint.
The truth is we don&#8217;t spend enough. We should spend more. And for purely selfish reasons.
Every dollar we spend on Israel is a dollar spent, in effect, in our own defense. As a value proposition, it&#8217;s all in America&#8217;s favor.
Let me explain, but before I do let me say this:
I can easily defend why America supports Israel on moral grounds alone.
I&#8217;ve been there on numerous occasions. It&#8217;s a good and decent country. Given the neighborhood it lives in, I find that both remarkable and admirable.
But I will make this argument solely on the basis of America&#8217;s security.
Our partnership with Israel is unique.
Unlike most of our current treaty alliances &#8212; say with South Korea &#8212; our ties with Jerusalem are not premised on American troops serving as tripwires on Israel&#8217;s frontlines.
This is because Israel takes care of itself.
America, for good reason, remains wary of any further military engagement in the Middle East. And this only strengthens the case for giving Israel the tools it needs to defend its borders.
Here are three things we can do &#8211; again, all in our own self-interest.
First, the United States should front load its financial commitment to Israel.
We have agreed to provide Israel $38 billion in defense assistance over ten years. That&#8217;s a big number, but it&#8217;s also a great deal &#8211; for America.
In addition to giving Israel the financial wherewithal to purchase the weapons it needs, it also benefits the American economy. Under the agreement, Israel must spend these funds on U.S. products. And it&#8217;s happy to do so. Without adding a cent to the total, the United States should &#8220;front-load&#8221; this assistance to reflect the changing strategic situation in the Middle East, specifically the rising danger presented by Iran and its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas.
An accelerated timetable would allow Israel to acquire critical capabilities like more F-35 air attack squadrons, more air refueling tankers and more precision munitions. It will need this hardware to defend itself and American interests against these persistent, and growing, threats.
Second, the United States should enhance our alliance with Israel.
It may surprise you to know that the United States does not have a defense treaty with this essential ally &#8211; lots of agreements, but no treaty.
We should.
Why is this so important? Because it will send a loud strategic signal to Israel&#8217;s enemies that if you mess with Israel, you mess with us.
Israel is not going to ask us for troops. But we should be giving them anything else they need &#8211; intelligence, weapons technology and other vital information. And we know this is a two-way street. Israel gives a lot in return.
Which leads me to the third point.
The United States and Israel should build on their already close collaboration in research and development. Israel is one of the most high-tech economies in the world. American investors understand this. More venture capital is spent per capita in Israel than in any other country. Nine out of the ten largest companies have R&amp;D facilities there. This is in a country of just 8 million people.
When we sell them military gear, they adapt it to their own special needs. The American military, in turn, benefits from these innovations, especially in the area of desert warfare. Indeed, President Obama&#8217;s Defense Secretary Ashton Carter made this point. &#8220;There&#8217;s no question that American lives have been saved by Israeli technology.&#8221;
There are many cutting-edge projects we can work on together, such as directed-energy weapons. This new form of cannon emits highly-focused energy to neutralize targets. Such weapons will be needed to counter the spread of cheap, deadly and plentiful mortars and drones from Iran and other bad actors.
All this explains why I find it so infuriating to see Americans, especially young Americans, support anti-Israel groups like BDS &#8211; Boycott, Divest, Sanction &#8211;that want to weaken and destroy Israel. Putting aside the perverse logic of these groups &#8211; that we should punish a free and open democracy &#8211; it&#8217;s self-destructive.
Israel is on the front line of terror.
They, not us, are within missile range of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. To the extent these enemies of freedom are held in check, they are held in check by Israel. And, they ask from us not one US soldier &#8211; only for military aid, which they spend on American defense products to help defend American interests.
We should give them that aid without reservation. Sure, it costs us treasure. But it saves us blood. Our blood.
It&#8217;s also the right thing to do.
I&#8217;m General Chuck Wald, United States Air Force, for Prager University.
</blockquote>

PragerU: Why Does America Spend So Much On Israel?

Dennis Prager

Israel Defense Forces (IDF)

Middle East

Prager University

The United States has a rich history of men and women who helped mold the nation into what it has become. In Prager University&#8217;s new video, &#8220;<a href="https://www.prageru.com/videos/hamilton-man-who-invented-america">Hamilton: The Man Who Invented America</a>,&#8221; lawyer, writer, and historian Joseph Tartakovsky discusses Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and his impact on America. 
&#8220;It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Alexander Hamilton invented the United States of America,&#8221; Tartakovsky explains. &#8220;George Washington was the guiding star; Thomas Jefferson, the visionary; and Benjamin Franklin, the sage. But Hamilton was the pragmatist, the man who got it done. This most self-made of self-made men took a country with no past and planned its future.&#8221;
Tartakovsky explaines that, unlike many other Founding Fathers who grew up in &#8220;tidy New England villages or cosseted on baronial Virginia estates,&#8221; Hamilton grew up on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean, but it was not a paradise. Abandoned and orphaned as a teenager, Hamilton became an abolitionist after observing the brutal realities of the slave trade on the island. 
&#8220;He soon took a job as clerk for a local merchant,&#8221; Tartakovsky says. &#8220;Before long, he was running the business&#8212;coordinating shipments of mules and codfish, calculating currency exchanges, and advising sea captains on how to deal with pirates. It was an unmatchable apprenticeship in trade, credit, and commerce.&#8221;
He moved to New York to attend Columbia University in 1773, but soon joined the Continental Army to fight in the American War of Independence. Gaining the trust of General George Washington, he quickly became a trusted staff officer. 
His true impact would come after the war, when the newly elected President Washington appointed him to the cabinet. 
&#8220;Washington named Hamilton, still only 34, to be the first Secretary of the Treasury.&#8221; Tartakovsky continues, &#8220;He served in the post for almost six years. His task was nothing short of Herculean: put the country, drowning in war debt and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, on a sound financial footing. He succeeded, and in doing so set the course for America to become the world&#8217;s most prosperous nation.&#8221;
Video and transcript below:
<div>
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<blockquote>
It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that Alexander Hamilton invented the United States of America.
George Washington was the guiding star; Thomas Jefferson, the visionary; and Benjamin Franklin, the sage. But Hamilton was the pragmatist, the man who got it done.
This most self-made of self-made men took a country with no past and planned its future.
He was born on January 11, 1755 on the island of Nevis. This was not the Caribbean of your cruise fantasy&#8212;quite the contrary. As Ron Chernow writes in his biography of Hamilton, &#8220;While other founding fathers were reared in tidy New England villages or cosseted on baronial Virginia estates, [Hamilton] grew up in a tropical hellhole&#8230;&#8221;
Sugar plantation slave auctions were a regular feature of island life. The spectacle&#8212;buyers swinging branding irons as they surveyed the human &#8220;merchandise&#8221;&#8212;made a permanent impression on Hamilton: He was a fierce abolitionist his entire life.
Abandoned by his father at an early age, his mother died of yellow fever when he was 14, leaving the teenage boy destitute. A local judge had to buy him shoes so that he could attend her funeral.
He soon took a job as clerk for a local merchant. Before long, he was running the business&#8212;coordinating shipments of mules and codfish, calculating currency exchanges, and advising sea captains on how to deal with pirates. It was an unmatchable apprenticeship in trade, credit, and commerce.
In 1773, he arrived in New York to attend King&#8217;s College, the forerunner of today&#8217;s Columbia University. Swept up in the revolutionary fervor of his adopted country, he dropped out to join the Continental Army.
He quickly came to the attention of George Washington, who made him a staff officer. The sonless Washington called the fatherless Hamilton &#8220;my boy.&#8221; Fellow officers later remembered &#8220;Call Colonel Hamilton&#8221; as Washington&#8217;s instinctive utterance when important news arrived.
As Washington&#8217;s trusted aide, he was involved in every aspect of running the war, including actual fighting, where he distinguished himself on multiple occasions. But more than anything, it was his dealings with the weak and indecisive Continental Congress that shaped his political views.
The problem with the Congress, in Hamilton&#8217;s view, was that too few members took the idea of nationhood seriously. They quarreled over their narrow interests rather than uniting over the national interest.
As the war was winding down, Hamilton laid out the choice before the country in a widely read six-part essay. We could become a &#8220;noble and magnificent&#8221; federal republic, he wrote, &#8220;closely linked in the pursuit of a common interest&#8230;&#8221; or we could stumble ahead as a &#8220;number of petty states, with the appearance only of union&#8230;&#8221;
It was clear where Hamilton stood.
The speed by which the United States became a unified nation with a cohesive federal government is largely a result of his tireless efforts before, during, and after the Constitutional Convention.
Washington named Hamilton, still only 34, to be the first Secretary of the Treasury. He served in the post for almost six years. His task was nothing short of Herculean: put the country, drowning in war debt and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, on a sound financial footing.
He succeeded, and in doing so set the course for America to become the world&#8217;s most prosperous nation.
Historian Leonard White writes that Hamilton was not only the &#8220;greatest administrative genius of his generation&#8230;&#8221; but &#8220;one of the great administrators of all time.&#8221;
There&#8217;s no telling what Hamilton might have achieved had he lived a longer life. Instead, he died one of the most pointless deaths in American history. As hard as it is to fathom today, he was killed in a duel with the Vice President of the United States, Aaron Burr, a man with whom he had a long and bitter political feud.
Hamilton fired his pistol harmlessly into the air. He never intended to kill Burr. To Hamilton, it was an affair of honor. But to Burr, it was something else. The Vice President took careful aim, shot and mortally wounded his rival, who spent some 30 hours in agony before succumbing. Hamilton was 49.
Hamilton lived in a time when the great danger to the national project was a government that was too weak. We live in a time when many believe that the great danger to the nation is from a national government grown too strong.
The ideal, Hamilton would have told us, is somewhere in between. But perhaps America will have to wait for another Hamilton to achieve that happy medium.
I&#8217;m Joseph Tartakovsky, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, for Prager University.
</blockquote>
</div>

PragerU: Hamilton: The Man Who Invented America

Making History

Glenn Beck, bestselling author and founder of The Blaze, has proven himself fearless throughout his lengthy career.
In his new book, &#8220;<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Addicted-Outrage-Thinking-Recovering-Country/dp/1476798869&#8203;">Addicted To Outrage: How Thinking Like A Recovering Addict Can Heal The Country</a>,&#8221; Beck offers solutions for our bitterly divided nation.
The book opens with an examination of outrage, and an explanation as to why it&#8217;s become so addictive. The partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats, and an irrational fear of the other side, Beck writes, has created spectacular levels of political isolation.
&#8220;Our capacity for outrage has reached the point of the ridiculous,&#8221; Becks notes in the opening chapter.
In a call to unity, Beck implores Americans to stop screaming over issues that keep us separated, and instead focus on what binds us together. Partisan division has kept our attention focused on trivialities, which has blinded us to greater common threats, like an increasingly digitized world, according to Beck.
Throughout his career, Beck has sought to offer solutions rather than simply complain about problems. Much like his prior works, &#8220;Addicted To Outrage&#8221; is thorough, hopeful, and full of wisdom. It provides a roadmap to fix our broken way of thinking.
When I was in college, I experienced the same outrage that Beck discusses in his book, and it was driving me to the Left. Before too long, I was allowing myself to be pulled into a victim mentality, placing blame on others for my own problems. Someone gave me a copy of Beck&#8217;s &#8220;An Inconvenient Book,&#8221; and my eyes were opened. I realized that I needed to take personal responsibility, which allowed me to put my own chaos in order. &#8220;Addicted to Outrage&#8221; is imbued with the same thoughtfulness that has become a hallmark of Glenn Beck&#8217;s writing.
For more information, check out the video below in which Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro speaks with Glenn Beck about the issues raised in his new book, and a whole lot more:
<div class="embed video fluid-video"><iframe allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" height="385" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/x51LwFXdPdA" width="720"></iframe></div>

Book Review: &#8216;Addicted To Outrage&#8217; By Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck

Science

Technology

The 17-year-old Palestinian terrorist who killed an American-Israeli father of four deliberately targeted him because he was an American, according to a new report from <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/witness-says-ari-fulds-killer-deliberately-targeted-an-american/">The Times Of Israel</a>. Khalil Jabarin, who stabbed 43-year-old Ari Fuld, a native of Queens, New York, in the back, mortally wounding him, had reportedly repeatedly asked people if they spoke English before his attack.
Hila Peretz, a woman who worked in a local falafel store at the Gush Etzion Junction shopping mall and was targeted by the killer after he stabbed Fuld, said she had served the killer a falafel. She recalled, &#8220;After he came inside and ordered his falafel, he asked me two separate times if I spoke English. I told him &#8216;no,&#8217; and asked him what it was that he wanted.&#8221;
Peretz added that Jabarin did not respond. She said she believed Jabarin was trying to discern who was an American. Peretz stated, &#8220;It was not as if he didn&#8217;t speak Hebrew and had been asking to speak English so he could make his order. We carried out our conversation in Hebrew. There were other people in the area that he could have targeted first, but he chose Ari. But them he didn&#8217;t target, he must have wanted an American.&#8221;
Peretz said earlier this week that she witnessed Jabarin &#8220;pull out this big knife that was glimmering in the sun, and plunged it into [Ari].&#8221; She said Jabarin chased her brandishing the knife as she fled and shouted &#8220;terrorist.&#8221; Peretz told Israel&#8217;s Channel 10 TV news, &#8220;The terrorist was right behind me. I started running down the stairs but he jumped to try to get in front of me. The man that was killed really saved my life.&#8221;
Security camera footage shows Jabarin waiting behind Fuld for nearly a minute while Fuld greeted several people. It also shows that after Fuld had been mortally wounded, with blood pouring down his back, he chased and shot Jabarin as the murderer chased after Peretz. Another civilian also shot Jabarin, who was lightly wounded; Jabarin is being treated in an Israeli hospital.
On Friday morning, after visiting Ari Fuld&#8217;s grave, the Fuld family, saying they wanted to &#8220;continue in Ari&#8217;s way,&#8221; returned to the scene of the murder. His father Yonah said simply, &#8220;We have grown and will continue to grow as a result of what has happened, and we will choose life. We have learned great spiritual strengths from Ari&#8217;s life and death, and despite our private pain, we are filled with pride at Ari&#8217;s heroism and the way he chose to end his life.&#8221;
Fuld&#8217;s daughter Tamar echoed, &#8220;Dad would have wanted to show the world that this pride (of his) continues and is now part of us.&#8221;

Report: Palestinian Terrorist Who Killed Israeli Father Wanted To Make Sure He Murdered An American

Murder

Palestinians

Renowned British historian Andrew Roberts hosts the latest PragerU video, &#8220;<a href="http://www.prageru.com/videos/what-was-cold-war">What Was The Cold War?</a>,&#8221; in which he discusses the decades-long conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, which never came to &#8220;direct blows&#8221; but did have many victims.
&#8220;From the end of World War II, the United States and its Western European allies were involved in a nearly half-century long, titanic struggle with the Soviet Union known as &#8216;the Cold War,'&#8221; Roberts explains. &#8220;It was cold only in the sense that the Russians and the Americans never came to direct blows.&#8221;
He continues: &#8220;There were, to be sure, many morally complex moments during this long struggle, but the Cold War was, at its core, as clear a conflict of good versus evil as World War II had been. Just like that war, the Cold War was a death match between the forces representing freedom and the forces representing totalitarianism.&#8221;
Roberts suggested that because &#8220;hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions,&#8221; died, the Cold War could be accurately described as &#8220;the Third World War.&#8221; He goes on to describe the actions the Soviet Union took that escalated the Cold War and how the nations of the West sought to contain the spread of Leftism. 
You can watch the video below:
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PragerU: What Was The Cold War?

England

Russia

United Kingdom

On Wednesday, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) released the latest installment of the &#8220;Factual Feminist&#8221; featuring Christina Hoffman Sommers. The topic of the video is a recent survey conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in which the United States is listed as the 10th most dangerous country for women.
Following her introduction, Sommers notes that the Thomson Reuters survey was &#8220;based on responses from 548 experts on women&#8217;s issues who were asked to list the world&#8217;s most dangerous countries for women.&#8221;
Categories of danger include: &#8220;Lack of access to health care, vulnerability to human trafficking, discrimination, sexual violence, [and] backwards customs.&#8221;
The survey places India atop the list of &#8220;most dangerous countries for women,&#8221; while the United States lands at number ten. In the category of &#8220;sexual violence,&#8221; the United States is ranked third.
Sommers scoffs at these findings, as well as the fact that numerous media outlets reported them uncritically. While the U.S. isn&#8217;t perfect, Sommers notes that &#8220;women across the globe are plagued by acid attacks, child marriage, forced veilings, stonings, female infanticide, female genital mutilation (FGM).&#8221; These things are essentially non-existent in America.
Instead of feelings, Sommers cites actual data. The World Policy Analysis Center shows that multiple countries, including Libya, Angola, Kuwait, Bahrain, Syria, Iraq, and the Philippines allow men to &#8220;escape punishment&#8221; for rape by &#8220;marrying their victims.&#8221;
Sommers proceeds to cite even more data showing that while the U.S. can always improve, &#8220;by any reasonable measure, American women are among the safest, freest, healthiest, best educated, and opportunity-rich women in the world.&#8221;
&#8220;Why pretend otherwise?&#8221; she asks.
Sommers also questions the reasoning behind Thomson Reuters giving their alleged experts complete anonymity.
She concludes by claiming that the &#8220;survey is a travesty that lacks transparency and credibility, and it conveys misinformation which only encourages cynicism about journalism and fuels charges of fake news.&#8221;
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The Daily Wire had the opportunity to speak with Christina Hoff Sommers about this survey. The following is our exchange:
<blockquote>
DW: Why do you think Thomson Reuters would want to hide their methodology, and provide anonymity to the individuals they surveyed?
SOMMERS: I have no idea. The methodology is completely baffling. If you look at the fine print, they say something like: &#8220;We had a team of international experts and data scientists who helped us craft this survey.&#8221; It&#8217;s hard to believe that one of the experts didn&#8217;t tell Thomson Reuters that the survey has no value.
Why they did the study is a mystery, but I think that they just hoped people wouldn&#8217;t focus on details about methods &#8211; and, you know, they were right. Most journalists didn&#8217;t. I stopped counting the number of news organizations that published the findings as if they were based on serious research.
CBS, CNN, Fortune &#8211; they reported on the survey uncritically. All over Twitter, people linked to the stories and shared their outrage on how &#8220;The U.S. is one of the top ten most dangerous countries for women.&#8221; That is patently ridiculous. Yet so many seemed to take it seriously. There has always been a small group of activists who believe American women are living in a state of siege &#8211; a nightmarish &#8220;Handmaid&#8217;s Tale.&#8221; That group seems to be growing.
DW: What could possibly be the reason Thomson Reuters would release a survey that&#8217;s so obviously ridiculous?
SOMMERS: Well, rank ordering countries, if it&#8217;s done well, can be useful. That&#8217;s why the State Department, the World Health Organization, and various human rights groups do it &#8211; because it&#8217;s a useful tool for developing policies, directing resources, and encouraging countries to do better. But their methods are transparent, and you can review them and criticize them. That&#8217;s not the case with the Thomson Reuters survey.
You would think if you designed a survey to tell you something significant about women&#8217;s safety around the world, you would realize something was amiss when it ranks the U.S. as one of the worst places on earth. Such a paradoxical finding should have sent them back to the drawing board, but it didn&#8217;t. They ran with the finding.
The CEO of Thomson Reuters Foundation, Monique Villa, appeared on Indian television, and kept insisting that her perception poll was a critical complement to statistics. She said it provides a &#8220;snapshot&#8221; of the opinions of the world&#8217;s leading experts on women. I would say it provides a snapshot of experts totally out of touch with reality.
DW: What is the danger of releasing a survey like this &#8211; one that favors opinion over data, but presents itself as data-driven?
SOMMERS: There&#8217;s so much wrong with it. First of all, it gives people a distorted picture of reality. Secondly, it adds to cynicism about social science research. It also fuels the idea that the media promotes &#8220;fake news.&#8221; Finally, women around the world at risk for violence deserve better than this. They need solid research, not dysfunctional polls.
DW: Do think focusing on perception over reality is becoming a trend in mass-released public surveys?
SOMMERS: I have seen a lot of biased research from advocacy groups like the American Association of University Women. It has a long history of producing dubious studies that always supports the narrative of short-changed women and girls. The AAUW manufactured an alleged &#8220;self-esteem crisis&#8221; among girls in the 1990s. They also produced a study that made it seem like American girls were the have-nots in our schools. The exact opposite was true. It&#8217;s boys, not girls, who are on the wrong side of the education gender gap in the United States. But the media went along with the AAUW.
There is a lot of bogus research about women out there. Gender scholars don&#8217;t face the same sort of critical review as other researchers. Much of what we think we know about women and education &#8211; the pay gap, the alleged &#8220;rape culture&#8221; &#8211; is based on politically driven advocacy research. So when I saw this Thomson Reuters study &#8211; I worried that it was part of that effort.
DW: How can a survey like this cause harm, either in terms of political policy in the United States or in terms of social perception?
SOMMERS: It lends support to conspiracy theories about the patriarchy &#8211; you don&#8217;t typically see such studies coming from mainstream organizations like Thomson Reuters. Such research comes from activist gender scholars or women&#8217;s groups. But here is a respected media organization suggesting the United States is a failed state where women are concerned &#8211; worse than Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea.
It&#8217;s not to say there aren&#8217;t areas in which we fail, but overall, American women are among the safest and most free women in the world.
Some people are going to believe the survey, and that&#8217;s worrisome; others are going to know it&#8217;s absurd, and that&#8217;s not good either. Reuters has a good name in journalism. Readers trust it. Next to every byline, there&#8217;s a link to its corporate &#8220;trust principles.&#8221; These obligate all Reuters employees to act with integrity and free of bias. How do those principles square with this disingenuous survey?
</blockquote>
The Daily Wire would like to thank Christina Hoff Sommers for taking the time to speak with us.

The Daily Wire Speaks With ‘Factual Feminist’ Christina Hoff Sommers About The Widely-Covered Survey Claiming The United States Is Among The ‘Most Dangerous Countries For Women’

Social Justice

Should Puerto Rico become the 51st state in the union? A movement is growing for the territory to become a fully-represented member of the United States, which has significant financial and electoral implications.
Accuracy In Media Executive Director <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/30191/media-watchdog-group-creates-new-rating-system-jacob-airey">Gus Portela</a> also serves as senior council to the National Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce. As a native of the Caribbean island, he has written extensively on the <a href="https://townhall.com/columnists/gusportela/2018/07/29/statehood-would-be-an-economic-boon-for-puerto-rico-n2504391">topic</a>. The following is an interview with Mr. Portela in which he shares his thoughts on Puerto Rico becoming a state, the issues involved in the significant move, and the benefits as a whole to both the island and to the United States.
DW: Puerto Rican statehood has been an issue that has been debated back and forth for a few years now, but has not garnered serious attention. In your perspective, why should Puerto Rico become the 51st state?
GP: I would argue that since the hurricanes last year, it has gained more traction more than ever before. Prior to that, Americans knew about Puerto Rico, but didn&#8217;t know enough to form an opinion on statehood. 
Since the hurricanes, more people know about it and know more about the situation in the region. Puerto Rico&#8217;s status is still looming in that it has been afforded a lot of independence, but is also part of the United States, but not quite a state. 
I believe that now is a good time for the movement toward statehood to grow. 
To get into statehood, as in what are the benefits, it doesn&#8217;t just benefit Puerto Rico, but also the United States as well. The citizens are American, by birth, and giving them statehood would certainly help them. 
As for the whole country, it helps the bottom line. There&#8217;s an estimate that came up by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that Puerto Rico would bring in an extra seven to ten billion dollars to the U.S. Treasury&#8217;s bottom line. 
That is a huge amount of new taxpayer money for the United States. 
Another benefit is that an open Puerto Rico would attract new investors that would help spur economic activity. In my opinion, that would also help lift the island out of poverty. 
Just to touch on that, about 41% of the populace lives at the poverty line. The unemployment is astronomically higher than actual states at about 10%. 
Competition, as far as business, would truly benefit Puerto Rico, especially with its unique location [which] would attract businesses and create new jobs, causing the unemployment rate to drop.
Those are perfect reasons economically why Puerto Rico should become a state. 
DW: My understanding is that Puerto Ricans can vote in certain federal elections, they pay taxes to the U.S. government, and they can serve in the military. Is that all correct?
GP: That is all true. 
DW: It seems like they are already citizens just without an official status. 
GP: Yes, the Jones Act of 1917 gave Puerto Ricans citizenship. 
DW: Just to play devil&#8217;s advocate for a moment, there is an argument by those who oppose statehood that because the poverty rate is so high that Puerto Rico could become a welfare state. What are your thoughts on that criticism?
GP: I completely disagree with that. I think that the new investments coming from businesses would really counter the amount of people who are on welfare. The new economic growth would move people out of welfare lines, if you will.
With the amount of investments and the natural advantage it has as a Caribbean island, this allows it to have access to more imports and exports in general as a state that could spur economic activity. 
DW: Where do the inhabitants of Puerto Rico stand on the issue of statehood?
GP: It has been interesting. Over the last 50 years, there have been a number of different referendums and each time more Puerto Ricans support statehood. It started with a very narrow victory for the current status. The second time, that narrow victory became even narrower. Finally, 2012 saw over 60% of the population vote for statehood. In the 2017 referendum, it received over 90% support, though a group of status quo supporters did try to boycott the referendum, which could have skewed the results slightly. Even with that, the majority still supported the referendum.
DW: Puerto Rico&#8217;s status is officially known as an unorganized territory. Do you think that the transition from that status to statehood will be smooth?
GP: The biggest question on both sides of the debate is about the debt that the island has. How would the United States manage it? Since it is not a state, it does not have the benefit of filing chapter nine bankruptcy or giving them the ability to restructure their debt to make payments on them. That being said, they recently negotiated a deal to help them with their debt through their oversight committee to help them make payments on it. In my mind, this negates the debt issue and gives them more flexibility on the issue on whether the United States would have to absorb it or not. 
DW: Any final thoughts?
GP: When it comes to Puerto Rico, hurricane relief is still a big deal. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association just released their forecast for 2018 and it shows the hurricane season will be a little tougher. 
There is a huge need for relief, especially with the possibility of a worse season. 
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<div>To find out more about Puerto Rico and how you can help out with the relief effort, visit National Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce&#8217;s <a href="https://www.nprchamber.org/">website</a>.</div>

Should Puerto Rico Become A State? One Expert Has The Answer.

Free Trade

Puerto Rico

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