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After receiving criticism, both from North Korea and the American media, on his warning of “fire and fury” from earlier this week, President Trump doubled down on his commitment to stand up to them. — Jenna Suchyta
by GregC
Audio Player
After receiving criticism, both from North Korea and the American media, on his warning of “fire and fury” from earlier this week, President Trump doubled down on his commitment to stand up to them. — Jenna Suchyta
by GregC
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America applaud Guam Gov. Eddie Calvo for pointing out that nuclear threats from North Korea are no big news for the tiny island, and that Americans there should go about their business as they would on any other day. However, Jim and Greg still have some reservations about the idea of North Korea firing missiles designed to land just 20 miles off Guam’s shores. And they throw up their hands in reaction to a new survey showing that more than half of Republicans would support postponing the 2020 elections if President Trump wanted to assure that only eligible voters took part. They are exasperated both at the response and for pollsters asking a worthless hypothetical question in the first place.
by GregC
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Trump are publicly exchanging barbs about what is reasonable to expect the Congress to accomplish, and longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie says the the frustration is ure to boil over into the 2018 primary season.
The back-and-forth started on Monday, when Sen. McConnell told a Rotary Club audience that the GOP Congress is getting hammered by its base for accomplishing little because Trump has set aggressive expectations.
“Part of the reason I think that the storyline is that we haven’t done much is because, in part, the president and others have set these early timelines about things need to be done by a certain point,” said McConnell.
“Our new president, of course, has not been in this line of work before, and I think had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the Democratic process,” he added.
Wednesday afternoon, Trump pushed back via Twitter.
“Senator Mitch McConnell said I had “excessive expectations,” but I don’t think so. After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?,” tweeted Trump.
Some in the Washington media circle characterize the dispute as signs of a Republican civil war or at least dysfunction. Viguerie slightly disagrees.
“There’s probably not a lot of love lost between President Trump and Sen. Mitch McConnell. But the reality is they have to get along,” said Viguerie.
But Viguerie is quick to point out that the sharp divisions that emerged within the GOP in 2016 are still there. He says GOP base voters will hold Republicans responsible for not repealing Obamacare after passing bills to do so in the Obama years, and he says Americans won’t care much about the specifics of why it didn’t happen.
He further asserts that even after seven years of vowing repeal, the GOP was still caught flat-footed in 2017 when the opportunity to do it came about.
“I suspect the number one reason is they didn’t think they’d be in the White House. I think most of the Republicans from Washington felt that Hillary would win the election and, truth be told, a high percentage of them probably preferred Hillary Clinton to President Trump,” said Viguerie.
As a result, he suggests many Republicans are actively guarding the status quo.
“Quite frankly, they’re terrified that he may really follow through on his promise to drain the swamp and pour salt over it so that nothing will ever grow there again,” said Viguerie.
“President Trump and candidate Trump campaigned strongly against the Washington establishment. He called for draining of the swamp. If anybody could be considered the mayor of the swamp, it would be Sen. Mitch McConnell,” said Viguerie.
And Viguerie says the fissures exposed during the 2016 GOP primary season will emerge again soon.
“This is a battle that is going to be taken into the 2018 primaries, where lots of Republicans are going to run against Sen. McConnell and the Washington establishment. This is probably just the first few, early shots of a big battle between the establishment and the president,” said Viguerie.
He says that friction could imperil some important pieces of legislation throughout the rest of this Congress but that it would be wrong to declare this a do-nothing Congress. Viguerie says judicial confirmations alone, from the Supreme Court to the appellate and district benches, will make a huge impact on America’s future.
And he says Republicans and conservatives can breathe easier over one other key factor.
“There will be many bad things that won’t happen because Hillary is not president,” said Viguerie.
A funny thing just happened on the way to this 2018 showdown, however. While pro-Trump Republicans Roy Moore and Mo Brooks are challenging appointed GOP Sen. Luther Strange in this month’s Alabama primary in the race to fill the term of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Strange just won Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement.
“Senator Luther Strange has done a great job representing the people of the Great State of Alabama. He has my complete and total endorsement!” tweeted Trump on Tuesday.
Viguerie says grassroots conservatives should not read too much into that.
“He does need to have Mitch McConnell’s support and that of the Senate Republican leaders. To go against an incumbent senator, even though he was appointed, would probably be a bridge too far,” said Viguerie.
But he says those special circumstances should not dampen expectations for a fierce intraparty fight in 2018. Republican are defending just eight of the 33 races on the ballot, but Viguerie says there will be spirited fights to determine the nominations in many of those states.
“This unrest at the grassroots that Trump so successfully connected with and tied into in this last presidential election is just building steam. We have a disruption that’s going on in American politics and I think we haven’t seen anything yet,” said Viguerie.
And Viguerie says that means tensions will only rise among the GOP factions over the next year.
“Not at all. I think whatever unrest, distrust, disconnection between the grassroots Republican voters and their leaders is going to do nothing but grow. The failure of the Republicans to repeal Obamacare just adds gasoline to that fire,” said Viguerie.
by GregC
Secretary of Defense James Mattis followed President Trump’s lead, backing the president’s comments with more tough rhetoric aimed at North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-Un. In light of the recent news about North Korean nuclear capabilities and possible plans to strike Guam, Gen. Mattis urged North Korea, for its own sake, to think twice. — Jenna Suchyta
by GregC
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America focus on North Korea today, in light of the recent news that the isolated nation now has the technology to put a nuclear warhead inside one of its missiles and is now threatening a strike on Guam. With such a development, Jim says, we may have to begin looking at the the possibility of accepting North Korea as a nuclear power, Jim and Greg discuss the unpalatable downsides to that. They examine the statements President Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson regarding North Korea, as Trump promises “fury and fire” and Tillerson says that’s the only language that Kim Jong-Un understands. Jim also delves into the history of the past three presidential administrations and their failures to keep North Korea fee of nukes.
by GregC
Organized labor leaders are licking their wounds after workers at a Mississippi Nissan plant overwhelmingly voted to reject unionization and maintain a direct relationship with their employers, and that’s view that’s becoming more and more attractive to employees in Right to Work states.
By the lopsided vote of 2,244-1,307, Nissan employees resisted the high-dollar effort by the United Auto Workers, or UAW, to become the voice for all workers at the facility. And while labor officials are protesting the vote, Right to Work activists are cheering a major win.
“I don’t know that the UAW ever made a case for why joining the union and having the union have monopoly control over all these workers’ situations and their contract and everything else was a good deal for the workers in Mississippi,” said Patrick Semmens, vice president for public information at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
He says the UAW leaders seemed to focus mainly on why unionization would be good for them.
“It was very clear why the UAW, from an organizational standpoint, wanted a victory in the South in a Right to Work state to show that they can organize a plant that wasn’t part of the traditional Big Three (of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler),” said Semmens.
“The fact that that’s in the institutional interest of the UAW from their headquarters in Detroit doesn’t do much for workers in Canton, Mississippi, where they see these jobs as far better than any of the other options in their community,” added Semmens.
In the end, the UAW lost the vote by more 25 percent despite spending huge amounts of money and bringing in pro-union figures to help make the sale.
“We don’t know exactly how much they spent on Nissan but I would not be surprised if it’s seven figures. They’ve been working there for years. They flew down Bernie Sanders and Danny Glover just in the past couple of weeks. This is an all-out, full court press but obviously they didn’t make the case to workers, who ultimately voted against the UAW,” said Semmens.
And what would be the impact if the workers did choose to unionize?
“If this vote had gone the other way, the UAW would have been installed as the monopoly bargaining representative. That means they represent every single worker, not just those who voted ‘yes’ but all of them, including those who don’t want anything to do with the union and think they’d be better off representing themselves,” said Semmens.
“A worker’s freedom is being taken away, where they’re told you can no longer go into your boss and say, ‘Hey, maybe I have an idea for how to make things work better,’ or ‘Here’s a problem I have. I’d like to work to find a solution.’ Instead, you have to go through the union as an intermediary between the worker and management,” said Semmens.
Semmens points out that UAW membership, which is now a bit more than 400,000, is a about a quarter of what it was a few decades ago. And he says it’s not because of a lack of jobs in the auto industry. He admits times are tougher for the Big Three, but that’s only part of the story.
“In the Right to Work states, we’ve seen a booming auto industry: Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen, all these foreign-based automakers are creating massive investment and tens of thousands of jobs,” said Semmens.
However, the results in Canton are not official. That’s because the UAW accuses Nissan of pressuring workers to reject unionizing and the National Labor Relations Board is now investigating the issue. Semmens says the overwhelming vote should put an end to the protest but he acknowledges that the process has to play out.
“It’s certainly true that this is not completely over yet, but obviously the margin of victory for those who opposed the UAW in Mississippi is pretty substantial. It’s certainly going to make it more difficult for union organizers to get this election overturned,” said Semmens.
Semmens also finds the accusations against Nissan curious given what he says are frequent heavy-handed tactics from the unions themselves in these votes. He says a recent ordeal when workers tried to get rid of their UAW affiliation in neighboring Alabama is a good example.
“It took them five votes because the UAW kept overturning the vote to actually vote out and remove the UAW. In one case, they even got the vote overturned because a worker from another facility owned by the same company came and told the workers, and this was totally truthful, factual information, that he made more money than workers under the UAW contract,” said Semmens.
Semmens says the UAW would be smart to encourage voluntary unionization, but he says the thirst for power inside big labor makes that impossible.
“Unfortunately, organized labor as a whole, and the UAW as one of the major unions, has embraced the idea that what they need is more government power to compel workers to be part of the union, to make it easier to organize workers and that sort of thing,” said Semmens.
“So they’ve focused far too much on getting the government to give them power over workers and over companies instead of actually convincing workers that joining voluntarily would be a good decision for them and that paying dues might actually be a good use of their money,” said Semmens.
by GregC
North Korea has created a nuclear warhead that could fit inside its missiles, a possible precursor to more nuclear-tipped warheads in the future. President Trump says of the troubling news that “North Korea… will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” — Jenna Suchyta
by GregC
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America welcome the news that over a million Americans left the food stamp rolls in the first few months of the Trump administration and discuss new state work requirements and immigration law enforcement as contributing factors to this continuing decrease in government dependence. They’re also exasperated as Google fires an engineer for writing an internal memo criticizing Google for a diversity culture that is not at all diverse and makes people feel as though they’ll get fired if they say anything that doesn’t square with corporate ideology. And they get a kick out of Spike Lee scheduling a “United We Stand for Colin Kaepernick” protest outside of NFL headquarters later this month.
by GregC
Best-selling author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza says American liberals are guilty of peddling the falsehood that fascism was a creation of the political right rather than the left and engage in fascistic ideas and methods today, all while claiming to be fighting the ideology thought to be buried in the ashes of World War II.
This is what D’Souza refers to in the title of his new book, “The Big Lie:Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left.” In an interview, the conservative scholar says we see this concept espoused every day in our political environment.
“Since Trump’s election, we’ve heard ad nauseum that Trump is a fascist, the Republicans are neo-Nazis party. The underlying idea here is that fascism and Nazism are a phenomenon of the right, that they’re somehow right wing. This goes way beyond Trump. This has been argued by progressives ever since World War II. I’m showing that this is actually the big lie,” said D’Souza.
“It isn’t just that Trump is not a fascist. It’s much deeper than that. Fascism and Nazism have always been on the left,” he said.
Comparisons of American political figures and ideas to Nazi Germany and even Adolf Hitler are increasingly commonplace on social media and beyond. So why D’Souza going there?
First, he says, many Americans use those terms with zero context.
“It is true that the use of the word Nazi or the Hitler comparison has been absurdly misused, and it’s partly because people don’t know what those words even mean,” he said.
When it comes to the history of fascism, D’Souza says it’s pretty clear where those nefarious figures thought they were lining up politically.
“(Italian dictator Benito) Mussolini was a lifelong socialist. He was the most famous Marxist in Italy when he created the fascist party and became the first leader of a fascist regime. Hitler’s party, of course, was called national socialism. Hitler changed the name of the German Workers Party to reflect that. These guys were firmly on the left. They were seen by their critics as on the left,” said D’Souza.
“It’s only after World War II that the big lie set in and fascism was somehow cunningly moved into the right-wing column so it could be promiscuously used against Republicans and conservatives,” said he added.
So how did this happen in the wake of World War II? D’Souza says fascism became forever synonymous with the Holocaust and became “completely morally discredited.” He says that’s when the revisionists got to work.
“Anti-fascism, in a sense, became the only morally reputable way to go. The left realized that and the moment they realized that, the progressives who were coming to power in academia and the media, they covered up the long, cozy relationship between the Democratic Party and the left on one hand and the fascists and the Nazis on the other,” said D’Souza.
“Then they basically said, ‘From now on, we’re going to be the anti-fascists. We’re still going to believe what we did. We’re going to act like we did. We’re going to pursue some of the same thuggish tactics that we’ve been using all along, but we will now use the moral credentials of anti-fascism so we can get away with it. We’ll act like we’re fighting Hitler in the 1930’s,'” said D’Souza.
And it’s that mentality that he believes is at work among the American left when it comes to the president.
“That’s how they act with Trump. Trump is supposed to be the new Hitler. These guys think that any tactics are justified in order to get rid of him,” said D’Souza.
Besides fascists being far to the left politically, D’Souza says Democrats use the same tactics of transference = accusing their opponents of the heinous things they’re actually doing. In Nazi Germany, he says Hitler accused the Jews of desiring world domination when it was really Hitler’s ambition.
“This is exactly what the left does in America. In my last book, ‘Hillary’s America,’ I show how they do it with the race card. The Democratic Party has been the party of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow and the Klan. But somehow they blame the Republican Party for being the racist party,” said D’Souza.
“And similarly with fascism, it is the left that has had the actual ugly history of fascism. It was the left that was in bed with Mussolini in the ’20s and Hitler in the ’30s. Yet, these are the guys today who turn around and say, ‘Oh Trump. He’s a fascist. The GOP, that’s the party of fascism. This is pure transference. This is the classic use of the big lie in exactly the way that Hitler used it,” said D’Souza.
D’Souza points out that “the big lie” was a term used by Hitler, not to secretly admit his own tactics but for the empty charge he aimed at the Jews and other adversaries. He says we see it today in the Antifa rioters who shut down conservative speech in the name of fighting fascism.
“They wear masks. They cover their heads. They carry bike locks and baseball bats as weapons. They threaten, they intimidate, they use violence. These are the exact equivalent of Mussolini’s Blackshirts of the ’20s or Hitler’s Brownshirts of the ’30s, with the only difference being that the old fascists called themselves fascists, whereas the new fascists call themselves anti-fascists,” he said.
But while there may be a few messaging techniques in common, surely that’s where the parallels between the Democrats and fascists end, right?
Not at all, says D’Souza.
“Hitler himself admired the extermination of the American Indians by the Jacksonian Democrats in the 19th century. So in a sense, what Hitler is saying is that the Democrats did the first genocide. I’m going to do sort of the second one,” said D’Souza.
He also says racial and ethnic wedge politics are another common bond.
“Second of all, the deep history of racism that characterized the Nazi regime, of course in the Nazi case it was anti-semitism, but it mirrors the deep history of racism in the Democratic Party,” said D’Souza.
He says the Democrats’ transference on race is a narrative even high-profile Republicans are buying hook, line, and sinker.
“There’s a poor guy, Ken Mehlman, the (former) head of the Republican National Committee, who was traipsing from one black church to another, apologizing for the Republican Party’s history of racism. This poor fool doesn’t know that the Republican Party actually has no such history. It’s the party of emancipation, shutting down the Klan, fighting against segregation,” he added.
“He had bought into the big lie. He was so dumb that he actually didn’t know his own party’s history. So if you don’t have the knowledge, you’re not going to be able to fight back,” said D’Souza.
Not only do D’Souza’s critics dismiss any connections between the Democratic Party and the Third Reich, they repeatedly slam his characterization of the Democrats as the party of racism. They say slavery and Jim Crow are discarded policies from a party that has undergone a major shift over the past 50-60 years and that Democrats have been the champions of minorities and the poor for more than a half-century.
D’Souza says things there are still more similarities between the Democrats and the fascists than the left wants to admit, starting with their view of government.
“Let’s look at the fascism in the Democratic Party right now. First of all, the Democrats today remain the party of the centralized state. When Obama and Hillary and Bernie Sanders talk about increasing government control over all these sectors of the economy, this is actually classically fascist,” said D’Souza.
While right-leaning critics often describe Democrats and their policies as socialist, D’Souza says fascist is actually a more accurate label.
It’s not even really socialist because in socialist countries the government nationalizes an industry. We still have private hospitals. We have private health insurance companies. It’s just that the government tells them what to do. This notion of state-directed capitalism, this is the essential economic meaning of fascism,” said D’Souza.
In his book, D’Souza also decries the inability of conservatives to compete as broadly as the left in the battle of ideas. He says it’s time for the right to engage all of our culture, just has the left has done for generations.
“Republicans fight in one corner of the battlefield, electoral politics, and the left is making the long march through academia, the media, the whole entertainment world, including the world of comedy and including Hollywood,” said D’Souza.
He says pulling the strings on the media is another tactic used effectively by the fascists.
“Hitler said he understood that the media was the most important place to be to not only define what you stand for but get your message out. One of the first things the Nazis did when they came to power was that they made sure the media, the press, the German film industry and entertainment industry were all brought into line with Nazi ideology,” said D’Souza.
He says we’re seeing something similar in our pop culture today, only it goes by a different name.
“For the left in America today, we have political correctness, but political correctness reflects the success of the left in using its enormous power in media, in entertainment, and in Hollywood, and in academia, to enforce it’s own narrow ideology,” said D’Souza.
by GregC
Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America like the new sanctions approved against North Korea, and they really like to see China, Russia, and other countries cooperating in this effort to rein in the isolated nation. They rip the New York Times for suggesting Vice President Mike Pence is planning to run for president in 2020 if President Trump does not, all because Pence is doing a lot of fundraising events — and they enjoy a little Kasich-bashing as the same Times article conjectures about Ohio Gov. John Kasich launching a primary challenge to Trump. And they react to Dunkin’ Donuts blaming a confusing store layout for an employee’s refusal to serve two NYPD officers in Brooklyn.