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What did Reagan say? Tim Naftali, the former head of the Nixon Presidential Library, recounted it in The Atlantic: “The day after the United Nations voted to recognize the People’s Republic of China, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan phoned President Richard Nixon at the White House and vented his frustration at the delegates who had sided against the United States. ‘Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,’ Reagan said. ‘Yeah,’ Nixon interjected. Reagan forged ahead with his complaint: ‘To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!’ Nixon gave a huge laugh.”

Reagan was human. We all say things — in public and/or in private — that we wish we hadn’t, or that we hope other people never hear. Reagan’s comment was ugly venting of frustration about how China was undermining U.S. interests in Africa. It was an unguarded moment dealing with very real policy problems.

That is not to defend the comment; only to say that it did not define Reagan or permeate what he did.

As Naftali insinuated, however, this was the “Aha — we knew it!” moment leftists have been waiting for. “The 40th president has not left as dramatic a record of his private thoughts. Reagan’s racism appears to be documented only once on the Nixon tapes, and never in his own diaries.” One rude, angry outburst is not even in the category of a “dramatic record,” and the assumptive assertion about “Reagan’s racism” is completely unfounded and mendacious.

Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, agrees. “If I had read his words as a quotation, and not heard them, I’d have said they were fabricated,” she wrote. “That he would never say such things. Because I never heard anything like that from him. In fact, when I was growing up, bigotry and racism were addressed in my family by making it clear that these were toxic and sinister beliefs that should always be called out and shunned.”

Moreover, Reagan’s actual record as president reflected no racism whatsoever — despite leftist attempts to rewrite history. Reagan signed the law making Martin Luther King Jr.‘s birthday a national holiday, for heaven’s sake.

Which brings us to the perfect hypocritical example of the Left’s smear effort: CNN featured the above linked article about “echoes” of racism. In it, Peniel Joseph asserts, “Reagan’s racial politics proved to be both substantive and symbolic.” This “monkeys” comment was just part of the whole, ugly story, Joseph says, as he accuses Reagan of the “trickle-down economics” that “devastated poor black and brown communities.”

Well, who is Peniel Joseph? The founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

Do you know who was a racist president? Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ advocated his “Great Society” programs by saying that such income redistribution to blacks would “have those n—gers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” That racism was the substantive strategy behind the policy he pushed — the same policy that has blacks 60 years later stuck on urban poverty plantations. It wasn’t Reagan’s free-market, low-tax policies that hurt blacks. It was and remains Democrat efforts to use blacks as pawns in a gambit for political power. And to blame Reagan for rampant racism based on one distasteful remark is an assault on his legacy of Liberty that we cannot allow to stand unchallenged.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/64701?mailing_id=4459&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4459&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

However, in this era of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Democrat concern for constitutionality is no longer even feigned. But they would have done well to listen to Brown, who argued, “It sets a ‘slippery slope’ precedent. Today we require tax returns, but what would be next? Five years of health records? A certified birth certificate? High school report cards? And will these requirements vary depending on which political party is in power? A qualified candidate’s ability to appear on the ballot is fundamental to our democratic system. For that reason, I hesitate to start down a road that well might lead to an ever escalating set of differing state requirements for presidential candidates.”

Brown’s argument is a cogent one. What stops Texas, Georgia, or Florida from coming up with their own laws clearly aimed at suppressing the ability of a Democrat presidential candidate from getting his or her name on the ballot?

There appear to be two motives behind this move. The first is to once again highlight the long-running Democrat complaint that Trump has not released his long-form tax returns. That’s an action most modern presidential candidates have willingly taken, but one the Constitution does not require.

Secondly, it’s a move to rig the election, though not in a manner to prevent Trump from winning in California, as he has almost no chance of doing so. Rather, the real target of this nefarious calculation is the Electoral College. scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, and in some sense that was entirely due to California. She won the national popular vote by 2.8 million, but she won California by more than 4.2 million votes, almost doubling Trump’s vote total in the state.

With this latest law, California Democrats hope that barring Trump’s name from the ballot it will increase the disparity between the national popular-vote totals and the electoral-vote tally should Trump once again win the 2020 election via winning the Electoral College. Should this occur, and assuming fewer Trump voters would write his name in, they will then have more fodder against the Electoral College by pointing to an even bigger popular-vote disparity.

Clearly, however, this law is ripe for legal action. Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh stated, “The Constitution is clear on the qualifications for someone to serve as president and states cannot add additional requirements on their own. The bill also violates the 1st Amendment right of association since California can’t tell political parties which candidates their members can or cannot vote for in a primary election.” It would seem the one-party oligarchs in California disagree.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/64676?mailing_id=4455&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4455&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Do law-abiding American citizens still have the right to gather peacefully to discuss their ideas without fear of government censorship and retribution?

In my adopted hometown of Colorado Springs, the answer is “No” if you believe in strict border control or question whether the U.S. can survive as a nation-state. The answer is “No” if you wish to meet with others to express concern about the unsustainability of current U.S. immigration policy. The answer is “No” if you dare to speak unvarnished truths about the deleterious security and economic impacts of illegal immigrants, Third World and sharia-promoting Muslim refugees, temporary guest workers, chain migration beneficiaries, diversity visa lottery winners, and legions of unassimilated and unvetted visitors and other visa holders from around the world.

In spring 2017, award-winning journalist and former Hoover Institution media fellow Peter Brimelow and his educational nonprofit VDARE reserved the Cheyenne Mountain Resort for a conference on immigration and sovereignty issues. A local far-left gadfly who bragged about wearing her “pink pussy hat while driving (her) Prius” launched an online petition condemning Brimelow’s organization as a “hate group.” The petition threatened both the resort and the mayor, bellowing that “the residents of Colorado Springs will not support businesses that profit from hate groups and will not re-elect politicians hospitable to those hate groups!”

What exactly is “hateful” about VDARE’s work? You can visit VDARE.com and read their wide variety of news and opinions yourself. My syndicated column, published in the Colorado Springs Gazette and hundreds of other mainstream newspapers over the past 25 years, is also published by VDARE. So is Ann Coulter’s and Pat Buchanan’s. VDARE hosts a vital and honest discussion of an “America First” immigration policy, long considered third rail by the establishments in both parties before President Donald Trump embraced it and won the White House. Of course, I don’t agree with everything published on the site; neither do I agree with everything published on every op-ed page that has published my column. VDARE has never advocated violence or any illegal activity. The group counts foreign nationals, immigrants and members of racial and ethnic minorities among its strongest supporters, donors and contributors.

In mid-August 2017, obviously spooked by the violent outcome in Charlottesville, Virginia, where “alt right” protesters and violence-provoking antifa agitators clashed as local police refused to intervene as a result of a disastrous stand-down order, Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers issued a chilling statement regarding the planned VDARE conference. While paying lip service to “freedom of speech,” Suthers rather unsubtly used his executive authority as the city’s top elected official to pressure local businesses against engaging with VDARE, its speakers and its supporters.

“I would encourage local businesses to be attentive to the types of events they accept and the groups that they invite to our great city,” Suthers warned. “The City of Colorado Springs will not provide any support or resources to this event, and does not condone hate speech in any fashion.”

This is the kind of feckless virtue-signaling you expect from Democratic mayors attacking Chick-fil-A over its founders’ commitment to traditional values. Here’s what’s truly pathetic: All it took for GOP Mayor Suthers to fold was one ambitious Democratic pot-stirrer and a few thousand crisis-exploiting petitioners on the internet (who knows how many of them were actually from Colorado Springs) echoing the talking points of the Southern Poverty Law Center smear machine — which has made a fortune calling everyone from Ben Carson to Ayaan Hirsi Ali to Brigitte Gabriel to Jeanine Pirro to VDARE to yours truly to Trump an agent of “hate.” (Never mind that the unhinged SPLC has paid out millions in defamation settlements, faces an onslaught of new lawsuits, and is crumbling internally amid employee accusations of sexual harassment and racial discrimination.)

Immediately after the mayor’s ominous decree, the Cheyenne Mountain Resort canceled VDARE’s contract. The liberal heckler’s veto won. The Republican mayor, a purported constitutional conservative, blithely threw the First Amendment under the bus.

VDARE is fighting back against what Brimelow calls the “Totalitarian Left” (and its surrender-ist GOP enablers). Colorado conservative lawyer Randy Corporon, who represents the group in its civil rights lawsuit against the city, told me: “Mayor John Suthers’ statement made clear that Colorado Springs would not provide police protection to VDARE’s lawful gathering in a private facility because of his disagreement with the participants’ views. His statement led Cheyenne Mountain Resort to cancel VDARE’s long-contracted event in spite of significant lost profit and cash damages paid to VDARE by the resort. Meanwhile, violent, disruptive protest groups like antifa receive police protections as they threaten, injure and maim.”

“I accepted this case,” Corporon said, “in order to expose the hypocrisy and in an effort to determine whether these precious First Amendment rights now only apply to groups and ideas favored by government.”

Unfortunately, Suthers’ discriminatory crusade against immigration hawks is being subsidized by Colorado Springs taxpayers left in the dark about the threat their own mayor poses to the essential freedom of assembly. Who needs antifa with free speech-squelching tyrants bullying patriots from inside the halls of power?  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/64630?mailing_id=4451&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4451&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Although the numbers represent a tiny fraction of our overall military population and don’t reflect the honorable service of the vast majority of today’s Patriots in uniform, they are significant enough and the incidents frequent enough to raise concern about how deep the rot goes and whether it’s a leading or lagging indicator for our broader society. Fortunately, military leadership, like the Marine Corps’ new Commandant, General David Berger, are emphasizing tighter standards and accountability in their formations.

The military has long been seen as a sort of kiln for American society — a place where individuals were tested, hardened, and provided with the skills and experience to serve in leadership roles in the private sector and government. The Marine Corps in particular has traditionally seen its role in transforming ordinary young men and women into contributing citizens as one of its primary tasks.

Legendary Lieutenant General Victor “Brute” Krulak put it this way: “The third thing they believe about the Marines is that our Corps is downright good for … our country; that the Marines are masters of a form of unfailing alchemy which converts un-oriented youths into proud, self-reliant stable citizens — citizens into whose hands the nation’s affairs may safely be entrusted.”

His son, General Charles Krulak, the 31st Commandant, echoed this sentiment nearly four decades later, stating, “For over 221 years our Corps has done two things for this great Nation. We make Marines, and we win battles.”

Last week’s headlines suggest that Marine leaders have their work cut out for them if they aspire to maintain those ideals. General Berger’s Commandant’s Planning Guidance, which was released earlier this month, addresses it head on: “Demanding superior performance and enforcing high standards should not be viewed as draconian, but rather, should be expected by professionals. We will not accept mediocrity within the force and, above all, must seek to remove those from within our ranks who are adversely impacting the overall readiness of our force.”

The Camp Pendleton Marines were arrested in conjunction with a battalion formation, where the alleged offenders were called up front by their sergeant major and hauled off by NCIS — a move that undoubtedly had visibility well up the chain of command and that sends a clear signal that commanders are ready and willing to put Berger’s guidance into action.

That guidance is in sharp contrast to commentators, both military and civilian, who reflexively defend or discount the disciplinary and moral failures by service members and label any effort to hold perpetrators accountable as political correctness or careerism. While the military has its share of self-interested individuals and the military justice system occasionally gets things wrong (much like its civilian counterpart), those instances are the exception rather than the norm. Those commentators make their own contribution to the decline in good order and discipline and do a disservice to those who serve honorably when they make excuses for actions like those we have seen recently.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/64627?mailing_id=4451&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4451&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Jamestown was founded in 1607 after King James I granted a charter to the Virginia Company of London. The goal was to gain a foothold in North America where the Spanish and the French were already establishing colonies and trade routes. Trouble with the natives, inability to adapt to the climate and prepare for winters, and poor management of available resources drove Jamestown to the brink of failure. Disease and starvation thinned the ranks considerably, but the British government and the Virginia Company were intent on making their investment work.

They set upon the idea of establishing a local government that would be more responsive to the colonists without making them totally reliant on the mother country, which was several weeks away by ship. Voters in each of Jamestown’s four provinces and seven plantations elected two burgesses to represent them. Along with these 22 assembly members were six additional members chosen by the company. They met for the first time on July 30, 1619.

That we have the opportunity to recognize 400 years of uninterrupted representative government is an impressive feat that should be honored by every lover of Liberty. But the modern Democrat Party, which does not fall under that category, is making a mockery of these monumental proceedings by pushing its own agenda.

Several Virginia Democrats recently railed against President Donald Trump attending the anniversary proceedings. Why? According to a statement by state Democrat leaders, “The current President does not represent the values that we would celebrate at the 400th anniversary of the oldest democratic body in the western world.” They have threatened to boycott any events at which Trump is present. Former Democrat Gov. Terry McAuliffe further clarified their whine with, “Racists and white nationalists have no place in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

First, Jamestown was not a democracy (conservatives need to take back that word), and second, by boycotting, Democrats are inadvertently keeping the actual racists from attending. Score another one for Trump.

The hypocrisy of this stance by Virginia Democrats is enough to stain one’s cheeks with tears. None of these people have boycotted any Jamestown events with Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam or Attorney General Mark Herring, both of whom have admitted to wearing blackface in the past. These admissions would have cost both men their jobs were it not for the fact that they would have been replaced by Republicans. When that became evident, the scandal melted away and the Dems silenced their guns. Northam or Herring went on with their jobs as if nothing had happened. This fight provides insight into the rationale of the Left, which is that all Republicans are racists, and all racists are Republicans. No one else fits this description.

It was Northam who extended the invitation to Trump in the first place almost a full year ago. But that fact, like Northam and Herring’s own racism, at least as defined by Democrats, is conveniently absent from this latest row involving the president. Inviting the president of the United States to such event should be standard procedure, and should the president attend, then the event should take place free from the current politics of the moment.

Democrats are not capable of divorcing politics from their duty as elected officials. They also don’t really have any respect for the country or its republican institutions, which is why they are willing to potentially slander the Jamestown proceedings for their own political gain, short term though it may be.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/64600?mailing_id=4449&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4449&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

The fact is, Russia did try to interfere in our elections, but it seems to have been primarily to stir the pot and to gin up and/or exacerbate the mutual hostility between Americans of differing political views that has become a hallmark of politics today. In that, Moscow’s operation succeeded — at least as far as 2016 and 2018 go.

Not that Russia isn’t paying a price. Georgia and the Ukraine have received the FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile, for starters, making Russian aggression against them a more costly proposition. But the military aid is missing the big move — Trump’s support of natural-gas production and exports.

However, the Mueller probe raised myriad more questions as it tried to find answers. Those questions deserve to be answered. The fact is that the FBI’s counterintelligence powers were turned on a presidential campaign of a political party not in power in the United States. With no evidence of wrongdoing on Trump’s part vis-à-vis Russia emerging from that FBI investigation, in effect, Americans of a different political persuasion than the president in office at the time were spied on by their own government.

To say Americans deserve answers as to how we got to that point is putting it mildly. Had even half of this been done to the “Gitmo Bar” lawyers defending Guantanamo terrorists, we would never be hearing the end of it from The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, etc. Keep in mind that the Gitmo Bar was giving al-Qaida access to our legal system to the detriment of efforts to keep this country safe. Hanoi Jane’s ack-ack gun photo-op is chicken feed compared to that.

Furthermore, this was done by an administration on whose watch the IRS harassed other political opponents of the president in power. Furthermore, as the FBI was unleashed on political opponents of the Democrat Party before, during, and after the 2016 election, we have also seen other stirrings — the John Doe investigations,  scumbag-Andrew Cuomo’s abuses against the NRA, and musings of turning RICO on opponents of the leftist environmental agenda. While one such thing could be an honest mistake and two such things becomes a suspicious coincidence, five such instances of the exercise of government power against opponents of the Left is more than adequate circumstantial evidence that something rotten is going on.

But there isn’t just circumstantial evidence. We also have the texts between the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, which made the infamous reference to an “insurance policy” in case Trump won. The contexts of the texts are comparable to the Mark Fuhrman tapes of O.J. Simpson fame in terms of raising reasonable doubt about the fairness of the investigation.

Worse, those who are supposed to be watchdogs are instead going along. Does anyone think that illicit lovebirds in the CIA exchanging texts about an “insurance policy” to protect enhanced interrogations should Barack scumbag/liar-nObama win the presidency in 2008 would get the same treatment from the press that Strzok and Page are getting now? Would an FBI counterintelligence investigation of the Gitmo Bar have been celebrated by the same outlets celebrating the likes of Strzok and Page?

If America still stands for equal justice under the law, then there must be a reckoning for the Mueller probe. If there isn’t, then many on the Right will assume the same posture articulated by Donny Deutsch on MSNBC, and with no small degree of justification. America can survive honest mistakes, but it cannot survive double standards of justice. We need answers and accountability on Mueller and Spygate, and soon.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/64601?mailing_id=4449&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4449&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body