THE FOUNDATION
“[N]o mound of parchment can be so formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.” —George Washington, draft of first Inaugural Address, 1789
TOP RIGHT HOOKS
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And even though the smoke is billowing out of the Clinton Foundation, the State Department says it won’t dig further into Hillary Clinton’s actions as secretary of state. “The State Department has not and does not intend to initiate a formal review, or to make a retroactive judgment about items that were not submitted during Secretary Clinton’s tenure,” spokesman Jeff Rathke said. State has the most information on Clinton’s actions — more than Congress — because she dumped 30,000 of her emails on the department before wiping her private hard drive clean. But it refuses to look deeper or give the emails to someone who will.
It’s common sense to be suspicious of the Clinton Foundation, given the kinds of reports coming out about the “charity.” According to the book “Clinton Cash” by Peter Schweizer, at least four members of the Clinton Foundation board were charged with financial crimes, including fraud and bribery. As for the uranium deal the State Department approved under Clinton’s leadership (the one that gave Russia control over much of the U.S.’s uranium reserves) the Kazakh official who helped broker the deal is serving a 14-year sentence for making corrupt uranium deals with foreign governments. Furthermore, the Clinton Foundation is unlikely to disappear if Clinton becomes president. After all, what’s first swinger Bill to do?
The six Baltimore police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray filed a motion Friday to dismiss the charges. “Rarely in the history of any criminal case has a prosecutor so directly maintained so many conflicts of interest,” the motion read. “Rarer still are instances where such clear conflict exists and a prosecutor steadfastly refuses to recuse him or herself. … This motion is being filed at this junction because the Defendants have grave concerns about the charging decisions which will be made in the near future and their ability to receive due process of the law.”
When State Attorney Marilyn Mosby charged the officers with everything from false imprisonment to second degree depraved heart murder, she told the people protesting police brutality, “I heard your call.” In doing so, she implied that she ignored her duty to uphold the law in favor of mob “justice.” Furthermore, the conflicts of interest are thick and damning. First, Mosby is married to the city councilman who represents the district where Gray was arrested and where the rioting was the worst. Second, the attorney for the Gray family is considered a mentor to Mosby. The charges from Mosby’s office were slapped together and fired off in such a shoddy manner that Mosby mistakenly accused two people who only shared the names of two of the officers. More…
Sometimes cops protect and serve, and sometimes they need to be protected and served. A rookie Oklahoma City police officer found that to be true while pursuing a robbery suspect on foot. After becoming separated from his partner, Officer Adam Eller struggled with one of the suspects, who snatched Eller’s baton and beat him with it. An armed citizen came to the rescue, however, drawing his firearm, warning the assailant to stop, and holding him until police backup arrived. Eller likely owes his life to this good guy with a gun.
Two Hattiesburg, Mississippi, officers weren’t so fortunate. Officers Benjamin Deen, 34 with a wife and two kids, and Liquori Tate, a 25-year-old rookie, were conducting what they thought was a routine traffic stop when the vehicle occupants opened fire, wounding the officers. Both later died at a local hospital, the first deaths for the Hattiesburg Police in three decades.
We note these cases together for two reasons: First, the assailants in both cases were black, while two of the three officers were white. Profiling doesn’t happen without reason. Second, black lives matter, but so do police lives. Officers are human and capable of doing wrong, but they put their lives on the line for their communities, too.
FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
By Arnold Ahlert
For decades, progressives have embraced radical egalitarianism, a concept demanding the elimination of all differences in sex, race and class, and all the “inequality” such differences inevitably produce. Freedom and individuality would be completely crushed in the attempt to equalize outcomes, irrespective of vast differences in talent, ambition, physical attributes, etc. But leftists consider that a reasonable tradeoff to achieve their dream socialist utopia. They completely ignore the historical wreckage and the millions of deaths that have accompanied every attempt to make such concepts as sloth and ambition, or talent and a lack thereof, completely interchangeable in every “workers' paradise” where it was attempted.
Enter the latest promoters of egalitarian insanity: University of Warwick professor Adam Swift and his partner, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Harry Brighouse. In an article published by the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC), Swift and Brighouse bemoan the inequality that arises from the difference between good parents and bad ones. In 2014, their musings produced a book, “Family Values: The Ethics of Family-Child Relationships,” in which the duo attempt toexplain “why a child’s interest in autonomy severely limits parents' right to shape their children’s values, and why parents have no fundamental right to confer wealth or advantage on their children.”
Speaking with the ABC, Swift reveals his infatuation with equality of outcome. “I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families,” he declares. He was especially concerned with unequal outcomes that attend families who live in better surroundings, whose children go to better schools, and whose parents get more involved with their children’s activities.
Swift’s solution to such an “intractable” problem? “One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family,” he posits. “If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.”
Perhaps the social justice problem might be better served by eliminating crackpot philosophers. Yet even Swift recognizes the impracticality of family elimination. “Nearly everyone who has thought about this would conclude that it is a really bad idea to be raised by state institutions, unless something has gone wrong,” he concedes. Nonetheless, he still feels compelled to single out certain “undesirable” variables that contribute to the disparities between families he and Brighouse find problematic. “Private schooling cannot be justified by appeal to these familial relationship goods,” Swift insists. “It’s just not the case that in order for a family to realize these intimate, loving, authoritative, affectionate, love-based relationships you need to be able to send your child to an elite private school.”
He has even greater disdain for … bedtime stories. “The evidence shows that the difference between those who get bedtime stories and those who don’t — the difference in their life chances — is bigger than the difference between those who get elite private schooling and those that don’t,” Swift complains. And while he remains adamant about the elimination of private schools, he realizes eliminating bedtime stories is a bridge too far, admitting, “We could prevent elite private schooling without any real hit to healthy family relationships, whereas if we say that you can’t read bedtime stories to your kids because it’s not fair that some kids get them and others don’t, then that would be too big a hit at the core of family life.”
Still he offers a caveat. “I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children,” he says, though he argues, “I think they should have that thought occasionally.” In other words, one should feel a certain amount of guilt for being a better parent than someone else.
What to make of such “forward” thinking? Reminding people what animates it — and why it is doomed to fail. The urge to make everyone equal in every way possible is nothing new, nor is the historical wreckage of gulags, re-education camps, purges and wholesale slaughter that has arisen out of every attempt to do so. Yet in their monumental hubris, progressives look at what inevitably produces the equality of misery, and reach only one conclusion: Such failure occurred because the wrong people were in charge.
And therein lies the ultimate contradiction: There is no such thing as radical egalitarianism with people in charge. Maintaining such a society would be impossible absent an army of enforcers cracking down on anyone daring to be better than anyone else. The egalitarians have always insisted such an army would be needed only on a temporary basis. But history has demonstratedthat an inner circle of party apparatchiks keeping everyone else in line has invariably rewarded itself quite richly for engaging in such “noble” efforts, even as they have never made the effort to disband.
And why is equality of misery inevitable? Because the elimination of incentives that produce inequality — of excellence — ensures everyone will do the barest minimum to maintain their place in the unalterable status quo required by their overlords.
“Swift and Brighouse are philosophically inching their way to a novel accommodation for a weathered institution ever more in need of a rationale for existing,” the ABC article states. No, they are not. They are attempting to undermine the foremost “weathered institution” that stands between Liberty and tyranny. And no amount of pseudo-intellectualism that attends such “inching” should obscure reality: These two and their philosophical soul mates are monsters.
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OPINION IN BRIEF
Jeff Jacoby: “There was a time when [Hillary] Clinton purported to reject … gender-based appeals. ‘I am not running as a woman,’ she told voters during her last campaign for president. Now she plays it up for all it’s worth. ‘Don’t you someday want to see a woman president of the United States of America?’ she pointedly asked attendees at an EMILY’s List gala. … Of all the qualifications to seek in a US president, few could be more irrelevant to the job than sex organs. Whether the leader of the free world is equipped with the anatomical parts of a male or of a female is of infinitely less significance than whether that leader is equipped with integrity and sound judgment, with respect for facts and loyalty to the Constitution. … Reducing an electoral choice to a physical characteristic trivializes self-government and the responsibilities of citizenship. Of course voters are free to cast ballots for any reason they like, including feel-good symbolism or sentimental tokenism. But no one should imagine that there is honor in voting for Clinton because she’s a woman. Wasn’t the whole point of feminism, after all, that woman are more than biology?”
SHORT CUTS
Insight: “To be young in my generation was to feel that your future had been mortgaged out from under you, and that’s a tragic mistake we must never allow our leaders to make again.” —The Gipper
The BIG Lie: “We’ve got to be relentless in our efforts to support small businesses [that] are creating jobs and helping to grow the economy. And that’s been the purpose behind many of the policies I’ve fought for as president. I’ve cut taxes for small businesses more than a dozen times.” —Barack Obama, taking credit for someone else’s work again, despite raising taxes on small businesses in a big way
Race bait: “As potentially the first African-American first lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations, conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. … [F]eelings [of racial inferiority] are real. They’re rooted in decades of structural challenges that have made too many folks feel frustrated and invisible, and those feelings are playing out in communities like Baltimore and Ferguson and so many others across this country.” —Michelle Obama
Demo-gogues: “If elected president, I will have a litmus test in terms of my nominee to be a Supreme Court justice. That nominee will say that we are all going to overturn this disastrous Supreme Court decision on Citizens United, because that decision is undermining American democracy. I do not believe that billionaires should be able to buy politicians.” —Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders
Non Compos Mentis: “This year, we will spend a collective $2.4 billion to buy Mom flowers. … But while giving flowers may seem like a good way to show how much you love your mom, it’s a terrible idea if you care about Mother Earth.” —The Washington Post’s Jennifer Grayson
Late-night humor: “According to a new poll, 48% of Americans believe that Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy. Then Hillary said, ‘Actually I just made that poll up.’” —Jimmy Fallon
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis!
Managing Editor Nate Jackson
Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of Liberty, and for their families.
