Political Cancer

Republicans Are Preparing To Impeach Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein

If this happens, it could change everything. Even more than Peter Strzok, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is a perfect example of a deep state operative. No matter who we have sent to Washington, our government agencies have always been dominated by deep state operatives such as Rosenstein, and up until recently the American people have seemed powerless to do anything about it. But now there is a ray of hope. Peter Strzok’s nearly 10 hour grilling in front of Congress on Thursday was definitely a step in the right direction, and on Friday we learned that conservatives are preparing to begin impeachment proceedings against Rosenstein. In fact, Politico is reporting that Mark Meadows actually had the impeachment document on the House floor at the exact moment that Rosenstein announced indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officials for hacking the Democratic National Committee…

House conservatives are preparing a new push to oust Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, according to three conservative Capitol Hill sources — putting the finishing touches on an impeachment filing even as Rosenstein announced the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for interfering in the 2016 election.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, in fact, had the impeachment document on the floor of the House at the very moment that Rosenstein spoke to reporters and TV cameras Friday.

This kind of high drama is very rare in the halls of Congress, and even though it didn’t happen on Friday, the impeachment document reportedly could be filed “as soon as Monday”…

Conservative sources say they could file the impeachment document as soon as Monday, as Meadows and Freedom Caucus founder Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) look to build Republican support in the House. One source cautioned, however, that the timing was still fluid.

Wow.

So why are Republicans so upset with Rosenstein?

For one thing, they feel like he has continually stonewalled their investigation into corruption at the FBI, and that is definitely a very serious matter.

Secondly, Rosenstein is ultimately where “the buck stops” when it comes to the Mueller investigation. The following comes from the Hill…

Rosenstein has long been a target for Republicans who are frustrated over special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into election meddling by Russia and possible collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign. He is overseeing the probe after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, and some argue that he’s the only person with the legal authority to fire Mueller.

If Rosenstein were to be impeached, that would almost certainly mean the end of the Mueller investigation, and Democrats would go absolutely ballistic.

But in order for any of this to happen, conservatives are going to have to get the support of Paul Ryan, and Politico is reporting that Ryan has “clearly been uncomfortable with the notion of going after Rosenstein…

But House GOP leaders like Speaker Paul Ryan have clearly been uncomfortable with the notion of going after Rosenstein. It’s unlikely that will change anytime soon, especially so soon after the latest indictments. Ryan’s office was not immediately available for comment.

Without Ryan’s support, there is no way that there will be enough votes for impeachment, and so he is the key.

And the clock is ticking, because the November mid-term elections are rapidly approaching.

Traditionally, the opposition party has always done extremely well during the first mid-term election of a new presidency, and signs continue to emerge that we will see a similar pattern this time around.

For example, Democrats now hold a gigantic 12 million voter registration lead in states that require party affiliation. The following comes from the Washington Examiner…

Democrats hold a massive voter lead in states that require party registration, a gap of 12 million that could be key to whether the party takes control of the House and Senate in the fall midterm congressional elections, according to a new analysis.

Overall, 40 percent of voters in 31 party registration states are Democrats, 29 percent are Republicans, and 28 percent are independents, according to a new report of July numbers from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. The states include several with key battles over House seats such as California, New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

The lead is significant, said Rhodes Cook’s analysis in Center Director Larry Sabato’s “Crystal Ball” newsletter, because in the past presidential election the majority party in 24 of the 31 states won, especially among Republican states.

I know that a lot of you may not want to hear this, but voter registration numbers are very, very important.

Yes, Republicans could still potentially win in states where the voter registration numbers are very much against them, but at this point the left has far more passion and energy than we do.

As noted in the excerpt above, the party that held the voter registration lead ended up winning in 24 out of 31 states in 2016.

That is a winning percentage of more than 77 percent.

Yes, the Senate map is favorable for Republicans in 2018. It will be a lot more difficult for Democrats to take the Senate than it will be for them to take the House, but if the Democrats take either body there will be absolute gridlock in D.C. leading into the 2020 election. The Trump agenda will be dead in the water, the Republican agenda will be dead in the water, and next to nothing will get accomplished.

The Republicans have had two years to accomplish everything that they wanted to do, and they have completely fumbled the football.

It would be nice if they could at least impeach a deep state operative such as Rosenstein, but with swamp creature Paul Ryan still in charge, that is going to be quite a challenge.

Michael Snyder is a nationally syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is publisher of The Most Important News and the author of four books including The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters.

Would This Have Happened Under President Hillary? Holiday Retail Sales Soar Compare To Last Year

We are nearly a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, and the economic numbers continue to look quite good. On Monday, we learned that U.S. retail sales during the holiday season are projected to be way up compared to 2016. Yes, there are all sorts of economic red flags popping up all over the place, and I write about them regularly. And without a doubt, 2017 has been one of the worst years for brick and mortar retail stores in a very long time. But when something good happens we should acknowledge that too, and many are giving President Trump credit for the fact that retail sales are projected to be up 4.9 percent this holiday season compared to last year…

Despite thousands of store closings this year, Americans supplied a final flurry of spending to give retailers their best holiday season sales since 2011, figures released Tuesday show.

U.S. year-end holiday retail sales rose 4.9% compared to the same period last year, a welcome gift to U.S. retailers amid new signs of consumer confidence.

Of course this doesn’t mean that things have completely turned around for the retail industry. We still absolutely shattered the all-time record for store closings in a single year, and the final number is going to be somewhere right around 7,000. The following comes from CNBC…

A larger-than-average slew of retail bankruptcies and stores being shuttered rocked the industry this year, making headlines and dragging even some of the better-performing companies such as Home Depot, TJ Maxx and Costco down with the dismal news.

So far in 2017, 6,985 store closure announcements have been made, according to a tracker from FGRT (formerly Fung Global Retail & Technology). That’s up more than 200 percent from a year ago, based on the firm’s findings.

More specifically, the number of store closings is up 229 percent compared to last year.

So yes, we are still very much in the midst of a “retail apocalypse”.

And actually, earlier this month we got news that Toys R US has filed for bankruptcy protection and could soon close as many as 200 stores…

It’s hardly fun and games for the toy industry this holiday season with the bankruptcy of Toys ‘R’ Us hurting the fortunes of toymakers Mattel (MAT) and Hasbro (HAS). The sector’s prospects aren’t expected to improve anytime soon.

Toys ‘R’ Us, which filed for bankruptcy in September, is now said to be considering closing as many as 200 U.S. stores, roughly 21 percent of its brick-and-mortar locations, because of lackluster sales.

The fact that retail sales are up so much during this holiday season may slow the retail apocalypse, but it certainly will not end it.

We have got so much work to do to turn the economy around, but at least we have taken a few small steps in the right direction. The recent tax bill that Congress passed was one of those small steps, but there is still so, so much more that needs to be accomplished.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

41 Million Americans Are Living In Poverty This Christmas

Even though the stock market continues to set new record high after new record high, poverty is exploding all over America. It is being reported that 41 million people are living in poverty at this moment, and 9 million of them do not receive a single penny of income from anyone. Once you have been unemployed for long enough, you don’t qualify for unemployment payments any longer, and once you are on the street there is nowhere for other governments programs to send a check to. I have previously discussed the rising epidemic of homelessness in our nation, but most people don’t want to think about that sort of a thing these days. Even though New York City has the most homeless since the Great Depression, and even though homelessness in Los Angeles is at an all-time record high, most people want to pretend that everything is just fine.

Well, the truth is that everything is not just fine.

A reporter from the Guardian recently traveled with a special UN envoy to some of the most impoverished areas of the United States. His report is extremely eye-opening, and I wanted to share a short excerpt from his story. This portion of his article is about a 41-year-old woman named Ressy Finley who is desperately trying to stay alive on the mean streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles…

Ressy Finley, 41, was busy sterilizing the white bucket she uses to slop out in her tent in which she has lived on and off for more than a decade. She keeps her living area, a mass of worn mattresses and blankets and a few motley possessions, as clean as she can in a losing battle against rats and cockroaches. She also endures waves of bed bugs, and has large welts on her shoulder to prove it.

She receives no formal income, and what she makes on recycling bottles and cans is no way enough to afford the average rents of $1,400 a month for a tiny one-bedroom. A friend brings her food every couple of days, the rest of the time she relies on nearby missions.

She cried twice in the course of our short conversation, once when she recalled how her infant son was taken from her arms by social workers because of her drug habit (he is now 14; she has never seen him again). The second time was when she alluded to the sexual abuse that set her as a child on the path towards drugs and homelessness.

Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency because the number of homeless is rising so rapidly, and so have nine other cities along the west coast. For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “As America Gives Thanks, Homelessness Continues To Set New Records In Major Cities All Over The Nation”.

The sad thing is that there are more than a million homes sitting empty in America right now. As economic opportunities have dried up, many communities in the middle part of the nation are becoming “ghost towns”, and it is getting worse with each passing day…

There are nearly 1.4 million vacant residential properties across the country — abandoned, not for sale, mostly unoccupied homes. With vacant properties comprising as much as 30% of residential properties, some neighborhoods are starting to feel like ghost towns.

Many believe that the answer to the decline of the middle class and the growth of poverty is even more socialism.

But if you want to see where that road leads, just look at what is happening in Venezuela. People are eating cats and dogs, and just today there were a whole bunch of mainstream news articles about how children are literally starving to death.

No, the real answer is to do what made our economy so great in the first place. Between 1872 and 1913, we didn’t have an income tax or a central bank, and it was the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history.

What we have today is not free market capitalism. We have gone very far down the road toward government-controlled socialism, and it has created a giant mess.

If we want to have a healthy middle class again, we need to have a society that promotes entrepreneurs and the creation of small businesses. Today we are literally choking the financial life out of entrepreneurs and small businesses, and when I am elected to Congress I am going to fight as hard as I can to change that.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

As America Gives Thanks, Homelessness Continues To Set New Records In Major Cities All Over The Nation

If the economy is doing just fine, then why is homelessness at levels not seen “since the Great Depression” in major cities all over the country? If the U.S. economy was actually in good shape, we would expect that the number of people that are homeless would be going down or at least stabilizing. Instead, we have a growing national crisis on our hands. In fact, within the past two years “at least 10 cities or municipal regions in California, Oregon and Washington” have declared a state of emergency because the number of homeless is growing so rapidly.

Things are particularly bad in southern California, and this year the Midnight Mission will literally be feeding a small army of people that have nowhere to sleep at night…

Thanksgiving meals will be served to thousands of homeless and near-homeless individuals today on Skid Row and in Pasadena and Canoga Park amid calls for donations and volunteers for the rest of the year.

The Midnight Mission will serve Thanksgiving brunch to nearly 2,500 homeless and near-homeless men, women and children, according to Georgia Berkovich, its director of public affairs.

Overall, the Midnight Mission serves more than a million meals a year, and Berkovich says that homelessness hasn’t been this bad in southern California “since the Great Depression”…

Berkovich said the group has been serving nearly 1 million meals a year each year since 2013.

“We haven’t seen numbers like this since the Great Depression,” she said.

And of course the official numbers confirm what Berkovich is claiming. According to an article published earlier this year, the number of homeless people living in Los Angeles County has never been higher…

The number of homeless people in Los Angeles has jumped to a new record, as city officials grapple with a humanitarian crisis of proportions remarkable for a modern American metropolis.

Municipal leaders said that a recent count over several nights found 55,188 homeless people living in a survey region comprising most of Los Angeles County, up more than 25% from last year.

If the California economy is truly doing well, then why is this happening?

We see the same thing happening when we look at the east coast. Just check out these numbers from New York City…

In recent years the number of homeless people has grown. Whereas rents increased by 18% between 2005 and 2015, incomes rose by 5%. When Rudy Giuliani entered City Hall in 1994, 24,000 people lived in shelters. About 31,000 lived in them when Mike Bloomberg became mayor in 2002. When Bill de Blasio entered City Hall in 2014, 51,500 did. The number of homeless people now in shelters is around 63,000.

For New York, this is the highest that the homeless population has been since the Great Depression, and city leaders are trying to come up with a solution.

Meanwhile, things are so bad in Seattle that “400 unauthorized tent camps” have popped up…

Housing prices are soaring here thanks to the tech industry, but the boom comes with a consequence: A surge in homelessness marked by 400 unauthorized tent camps in parks, under bridges, on freeway medians and along busy sidewalks. The liberal city is trying to figure out what to do.

Are you noticing a theme?

Homelessness is at epidemic levels all over the U.S., and this crisis is getting worse with each passing day. Some communities are trying to care for their growing homeless populations, but others are simply trying to force them to go somewhere else. They are doing this by essentially making it illegal to be homeless. In some cities it is now a crime to engage in “public camping”, to “block a walkway” or to create any sort of “temporary structure for human habitation”. These laws specifically target the homeless, and they are very cruel.

Many of us tend to picture the homeless as mostly lazy older men that don’t want to work and that instead want to drink or do drugs all day.

But the truth is that women and children make up a significant percentage of the homeless. In fact, the number of homeless children in our country has increased by about 60 percent since the end of the last recession.

And there are thousands upon thousands of military veterans that are homeless. For example, a 34-year-old man named Johnny that served in the Marine Corps recently used his last 20 dollars to buy fuel for a woman that had run out of gas and was stranded along I-95 in Miami…

Pulled over on the side of I-95, McClure, 27, was approached by a homeless man named Johnny. She was apprehensive at first, but Johnny told her to get back into her car and to lock the doors while he walked to get her help. He went to a nearby gas station, used his last $20 fill a can and brought it back to fill up her car.

Grateful, but without a dollar to repay him, McClure promised she would come back with something.

In the weeks since, she’s returned to the spot along I-95 where Johnny stays with cash, snacks and Wawa gift cards. Each time she’s stopped by with her boyfriend, Mark D’Amico, they’ve learned a bit more about Johnny’s story, and become humbled by his gratitude.

Deciding that they wanted to do even more for Johnny, they started a GoFundMe page for him and have since raised approximately $250,000.

So it looks like there is going to be a happy ending to Johnny’s story, but the truth is that more people are falling into homelessness with each passing day.

If things are this bad now, how much worse will they become as the economy really starts slowing down? Already, we have shattered the all-time yearly record for retail store closings, and we still have more than a month to go. The following is from a CNN article entitled “Is This The Last Black Friday?”…

A record number of store closures — 6,735 — have already been announced this year. That’s more than triple the tally for 2016, according to Fung Global Retail and Technology, a retail think tank.

And there have been 620 bankruptcies in the sector so far this year, according to BankruptcyData.com, up 31% from the same period last year. Prominent names such as Toys R Us, Gymboree, Payless Shoes and RadioShack have all filed this year, and Sears Holdings (SHLD), which owns both the iconic Sears and Kmart chains, has warned there is “substantial doubt” it can remain in business.

Sadly, analysts are projecting that the number of store closings could be as high as 9,000 next year.

Yes, there are some areas of the country that are doing well right now, but there are many others that are not.

Let us always remember to have compassion on those that are struggling, because someday we may be the ones that end up needing some help.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Rush Limbaugh And Ann Coulter Are Right – America Is On The Verge Of Widespread Chaos And Civil Unrest

Things will never be the same in America from this moment forward.  When 66-year-old James Hodgkinson attempted to gun down as many Republican members of Congress as possible at a baseball field in Virginia, he permanently shattered the notion that we could go back to the way that things used to be in this country.  At one time, Republicans and Democrats may have strongly disagreed with one another over the issues, but there was always a certain code of civility that everyone understood and respected.  But now that is long gone, and if our politicians and the big media outlets continue to fuel the rising hatred in this country, it won’t be too long before we are dealing with widespread chaos and civil unrest from coast to coast.

Most of the anger and frustration that we are currently witnessing is being fueled by the left.  On his radio show yesterday, Rush Limbaugh accused the left of openly promoting violence…

“I have been worried for quite a while about the cumulative effect or impact of this constant anti-Trump hysteria everywhere in mainstream media: New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC,” Limbaugh told listeners.

“It’s hysteria. It’s lies. It’s things that are completely manufactured about Trump personally, about Trump and Russia, about climate change, about any number of things.

“I have been very concerned about what all of this is doing to the average, base Democrat voter. I have sensed them getting more and more fringe and imbalanced, and the evidence for it is everywhere in the things that they tweet. They openly promote violence, and advocate some of the most despicable things happening to their political enemies.”

Someone like James Hodgkinson is not produced in a vacuum.  There has been a steady pattern of threats and violence against Republicans since the election, and all that Hodgkinson did was take things to the next level.  Breitbart has put out an article entitled “15 Times Celebrities Envisioned Violence Against Trump and the GOP”, and WND published an even longer list entitled “20 times violence threatened, used, in wake of Dems’ political collapse”.  When celebrities, politicians and media personalities constantly use language that is seething with hatred, it shouldn’t surprise us when their followers engage in violent acts.

I have warned many times in the past about the civil unrest that is coming, and now many of my fellow conservative commentators are sounding the alarm as well.  For example, in the aftermath of the attack in Virginia radio host Michael Savage made the following chilling statement to his audience: “We are at a boiling point. There’s going to be a civil war.”

No American should ever want to see such a thing happen, but the left just keeps getting more and more radical.  And even Hillary Clinton recently stated that she has joined “the Resistance”.  The following comes from Ann Coulter…

Recently, Hillary announced her steadfast opposition to the winning candidate using a military term, saying she’d joined the “Resistance.”

Imagine if Trump lost and then announced that he’d joined the “RESISTANCE.” He’d be accused of trying to activate right-wing militias. Every dyspeptic glance at an immigrant would be reported as fascistic violence.

But the media seem blithely unaware that the anti-Trump “Resistance” has been accompanied by nonstop militaristic violence from liberals.

In recent weeks, I have heard from so many people all over the nation that are extremely excited about the possibility of me running for Congress.  But anyone that is considering running for public office these days has to consider the fact that they will become potential targets for violence.  For example, just recently one very sick individual actually threatened to hang Utah Representative Jason Chaffetz…

“I feel very safe and secure at the Capitol,” Chaffetz said Wednesday. “We work in a fortress with literally thousands of people to protect us, but once we leave the Capitol, it’s a whole different equation.”

Chaffetz wants U.S. marshals to be charged with assessing threats against members of Congress and securing them in more high-profile and widely attended events.

Chaffetz was the focus of a March death threat in which a Florida man vowed in a voicemail to “hunt your a– down, wrap a rope around your neck and hang you from a lamppost,” according to court records.

Could you imagine if your wife found that voicemail before you did?

But this is what the left is becoming.  Because they don’t have any sort of a positive message to offer, they have to resort to threats, intimidation and violence.  I have been writing about this quite a bit lately, and it turns out that Rush Limbaugh very much feels the same way…

They don’t have an agenda that’s optimistic and upbeat that they can run on, and they don’t dare be honest about their real agenda. So all they can do is to continue to do what they’ve been doing, and it’s not healthy, it’s not uplifting, it’s not inspiring. It isn’t representative or reflective of any of the traditional American values that for so long have united us. A sense of optimism, a sense of can-do, a sense of unity, a sense of nationhood. All of these things are under assault.

If the left continues to go down this path, the anger and the frustration are going to continue to grow, and eventually cities all over America are going to burn.  This is the kind of a scenario that I laid out in The Beginning Of The End, and now it is actually starting to play out right in front of us.

Today, this nation is more divided than it has ever been in my entire lifetime, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.  In fact, I expect even more anger and even more hatred as the divisions deepen.

Without each passing year, the left moves even farther to the left.  It has gotten to the point where many on the far left actually refer to Hillary Clinton as a “moderate”, which is funny because at one time she was a cutting edge liberal.

On the right, there is an emerging movement to return to the values and the principles that this country was founded upon.  So if the left doesn’t like current Republican leadership, then they really aren’t going to like the hardcore constitutional conservatives that are going to start replacing them.

We are in a battle for the soul of our nation, and the future of America is literally at stake.

It is a battle that we cannot afford to lose, because if the left wins there literally will be no viable future for our country at all.

Democrats Are Already Using The Shooting Of Steve Scalise To Call For More Gun Control

The left never lets a good crisis go to waste.  Within hours of the shooting of U.S. Representative Steve Scalise and other Republicans at a baseball field in Virginia, top Democrats were already calling for more gun control.  Of course the shooter, 66-year-old James Hodgkinson, is from a state that already has some of the toughest gun laws in the entire nation.  And the largest city in Illinois, Chicago, is plagued by rampant gun violence on a daily basis.  Alternatively, crime rates tend to be very low where rates of gun ownership are very high.  Up here in north Idaho, anyone that would dare to break into homes at night would have a very, very short criminal career.  Gun owners are the number one crime deterrent, but liberals still don’t understand this.

Every time an Islamic terrorist or a crazed leftist starts shooting people, the left immediately pounces on it as an excuse to start promoting gun control again.  For example, just consider what Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe had to say just hours after the shooting…

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) advocated for stricter gun laws on Thursday after Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and several others were shot on a baseball field in the Washington suburb of Alexandria, Va.

“I think we need to do more to protect all of our citizens,” McAuliffe said at a press conference. “I have long advocated — this is not what today is about — but there are too many guns on the streets. We lose 93 million Americans a day to gun violence. I have long talked about this. Background checks and shutting down gun show loopholes, and that’s not for today’s discussion, but it’s not just about politicians. We worry about this every day for all of our citizens.”

Of course this is complete nonsense, but the truly frightening thing about this is that McAuliffe is very, very seriously thinking of running for president.  In fact, from what I hear it is a near certainty that “Bill Clinton’s best friend” will run in 2020 if Hillary Clinton does not.

If many liberals had their way, even the police would be disarmed.  But if the Capitol Hill police at that baseball field had not been armed on Wednesday, there would have been nobody to stop James Hodgkinson from killing one member of Congress after another…

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., described the chaotic scene to Fox News: “We were like sitting ducks.”

“Without the Capitol Hill police it would have been a massacre,” Paul said, calling the scene “sort of a killing field.”

In fact, Senator Paul believes that “nobody would have survived” if the Capitol Hill Police had not been there to shoot back…

“I can tell you, that I think with absolute certainty, nobody would have survived without the Capitol Hill Police. They saved everybody’s life. Incredibly brave and deserve everyone’s praise, because, with this guy, who knows what his — how heavily armed he was, but nobody else had a weapon. So, he was just killing everyone — he would have. … They deserve our gratitude for saving — it would have been a massacre without them.”

It could have easily been the worst tragedy in the history of the United States Congress.  Even with such a quick response by the Capitol Hill Police, Representative Mo Brooks says that Hodgkinson still got off “50-100 shots”…

“Behind third base, I see a rifle…I hear Steve Scalise over near 2nd base scream,” Brooks said. “…While all of this is going on, Steve Scalise our whip was lying on the ground near the second base position crawling into right field, leaving a trail of blood.”

Brooks said the gunman was using the dugout as cover and estimated the assailant got off 50-100 shots during the attack on the 15-25 people gathered at the field.

And of course this is far from an isolated incident.  In an article earlier today, I noted the string of violent attacks on Republican members of Congress in recent months.  The threats, violence and intimidation coming from the left are steadily getting worse, and I strongly believe that security for members of Congress needs to be greatly strengthened.  In the past, we mainly had to be concerned about security for the President, the Vice-President and a handful of other really high profile targets, but now every single member of Congress is a potential target.

I also believe that all members of Congress should be allowed to be armed no matter where they travel.  Alternatively, a Secret Service detail could be assigned to each one, but that would be quite expensive.  What is clear is that the limited security that we have gotten away with in the past for members of Congress simply is not going to work any longer.

James Hodgkinson fully intended to kill every single Republican member of Congress on that baseball field.  So if there is anyone out there that disagrees with me, I would ask you to carefully consider this eyewitness account from Representative Mike Bishop…

As we were standing here this morning, a gunman walked up to the fence line and just began to shoot. I was standing at home plate and he was in the third base line. He had a rifle that was clearly meant for the job of taking people out, multiple casualties, and he had several rounds of magazines that he kept unloading and reloading it. Firing it.

The only reason—the only reason—why any of us walked out of this thing: By the grace of God, one of the folks here had a weapon to fire back and give us a moment to find cover. Because we were inside the backstop and if we didn’t have that cover by a brave person who stood up and took a shot themselves, we would not have gotten out of there and every one of us would have been hit. Every single one of us.

The bad guys are always going to be able to find weapons, and more gun control is never going to be the answer.

In this case, I am so very thankful for the guns that were at that baseball field, because they saved a lot of lives today.

We Want A Government So Small That We Can Barely See It

We need to fundamentally redefine the relationship between government and the people in this country.  Today, we have become so accustomed to big government that most of us can’t even imagine another way of doing things.  And I am not just talking about the federal government either.  Even in a red state like Idaho, the state government has become a sprawling bureaucracy that requires 3.5 billion dollars a year to keep going.  And all over the country many local governments are “supersized” as well.  But this isn’t the way that our Founding Fathers intended for things to work.  They intended to create a society where government is very limited and where liberty and freedom are maximized.

Back in 2015, U.S. Senator Rand Paul made headlines all over the country when he tweeted that he wanted “a government so small I can barely see it!”

In my opinion, we need 99 more senators that see things the exact same way.

The reason why we want the federal government to be so limited is because there is an inverse correlation between the size of government and the level of freedom and liberty that we are able to enjoy.  In other words, every time government gets bigger, we lose more freedom and liberty.  And when government becomes the center of virtually everything (like in North Korea), the result is nightmarish tyranny.

We have been trained to believe that government should be working to solve all of our problems, but the truth is that much of the time government is the problem.

Those that are constantly advocating big government solutions to everything are actually promoting an anti-liberty agenda.  If we can get people to start understanding this, it will result in an enormous political shift in this country.

We need to start having more conversations about the proper role of government in our society.  Government does have a role, but that role should be very limited.  I really like how Idaho State Representative Karey Hanks made this point just recently…

What is the “proper function” of government? It is debated on TV, social media and election campaigns. Many people don’t care much, as long as they have gas in the car, a paycheck, food to eat and a little spare time. Life is good! How many people actually take the time to vote in any given election?

Laws were established by our Founding Fathers to preserve freedom–not restrict it. They believed laws should be enacted only to protect against physical harm, theft and involuntary bondage. Government should not be a means of compelling citizens to perform acts of charity against their will—“redistribution of wealth” in current terminology.

“Redistribution of wealth” is one of my pet peeves.  The federal government should not be taking trillions of dollars away from some Americans and giving that money to other Americans.

But that is precisely what is happening, and if our Founding Fathers could see what is happening today they would be rolling over in their graves.

Of course the centerpiece of the system is the income tax.  In 1913, a very basic income tax was introduced and most Americans were taxed at a rate of only one percent.  But of course once the progressives get their feet in the door they are never satisfied, and so our tax system has just gotten bigger and more complicated with each passing year.

According to Forbes, Congress has made more than a change a day to the tax code since 2001, and at this point it is nearly four million words long…

How complicated? Since 2001, Congress has made nearly 5,000 changes to the Tax Code. That’s more than a change per day. The Tax Code is now about four million words, nearly as long as seven versions of War and Peace or the novel version of Les Miserables and just under four times the number of words in all of the Harry Potter books put together.

Americans spend approximately six billion hours complying with the tax code every year.

That breaks down to 8,758 lifetimes spent on taxes every 12 months.

How much better would our society be if the American people could spend all of that time on more productive matters?

If I run for Congress, and if I end up winning, one of my long-term goals will be to completely eliminate the income tax.  But we will need a lot more liberty-minded people to win seats in Congress in order for that to happen, and so I am encouraging as many as possible to consider running in 2018.

We also need to dramatically reduce the red tape that is absolutely killing entrepreneurs and small businesses all over the nation.

And it isn’t just the federal government that is doing this.  Sometimes it is state and local governments that are the worst offenders, and I want to share one example with you from right here in Idaho…

Miranda Hale, Nadia Saakyan and Micalah Howard are three innovative women who launched a mobile makeup-application business that fits today’s busy lifestyles. The trio came up with an original idea: Bring the make-up studio to help brides feel just a little more beautiful on their special day, no matter the location.

Yet, senseless state regulations ruined the trio’s dream. Idaho rules don’t allow the three to apply makeup anywhere outside of a licensed and inspected beauty salon.

This regulation, and hundreds more like it, were not built for the modern economy. Outdated regulations stifle innovation and kill jobs.

This is the sort of thing that I would expect to see in California, but unfortunately it is happening right here in my state.

If we sit back and do nothing, then nothing is going to change.  The reason why we have so many rules and regulations is because control freaks tend to be greatly attracted to the world of politics.  And once they get into positions of power, they love to lord it over the rest of us and impose as many rules and regulations as they possibly can.

It is time for those of us that believe in constitutional values to rise up and take our country back.  It won’t be easy, but if we want this nation to have any sort of a future at all we have no choice but to act.

‘Julius Caesar’, Antifa And Kathy Griffin All Show That The Left Has Absolutely No Positive Message To Offer

The endgame of the radical left is a nation filled with hatred, anger and violence.  Is this really a message that the American people are going to embrace?  For decades, Democrats have been getting a tremendous amount of mileage out of “divide and conquer” tactics.  In other words, they get one group of people to support them by pointing a finger of accusation at another group.  Just recently, I published an article entitled “A List Of 100 Things That Liberals Hate About America”, and I could have easily doubled or tripled that list.  The left specializes in hate, and the presidency of Donald Trump has been like throwing red meat to a bunch of sharks that are in a feeding frenzy.  Lacking any kind of a positive message to share, the left is in the process of self-destructing as they show the entire world how intellectually and morally bankrupt they truly are.

The New York theater group that is producing a twisted version of “Julius Caesar” in which a character that is dressed up just like Donald Trump is viciously assassinated is a perfect example of what I am talking about.  The following comes from Piers Morgan…

The play portrays Caesar as a tempestuous, petulant blond-haired businessman in an expensive business suit with an American pin flag and over-long ties who takes baths in a gold bathtub.

His wife Calpurnia has an Eastern European accent and wears designer clothes.

So, it’s Donald Trump.

It ends with Caesar/Trump being brutally murdered by Roman senators who fear he has become too power hungry.

Only in this case, the assassins are all women and minorities, two groups that Trump has been accused of marginalising.

By the end of the assassination scene, Trump’s shirt is absolutely soaked with blood, and it is quite obvious that the producers intended to create a spectacle that is as gruesome as they could possibly get away with.

But instead of reacting to this play with horror, many on the left are absolutely gushing over it.  For instance, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria actually called it “a masterpiece”.

And despite all of the public outrage that we have seen in recent days, Time Warner, the New York Times and the New York City government plan to continue funding the production.

Even more alarming than “Julius Caesar” is the relentless campaign of violence and intimidation being waged by Antifa.  They are supposed to be “anti-fascists”, but instead they employ many of the exact same tactics and methods that hardcore fascists used all the way back in the 1930s.  If these radical leftists ultimately have their way in our society, free speech will become a thing of the past.  The following comes from a National Review article…

Lately, Antifa have emerged as the militant fringe of #TheResistance against Donald Trump — who, they maintain, is a fascist, ushering into power a fascist regime. In Washington, D.C., Antifa spent the morning of Inauguration Day lighting trash cans on fire, throwing rocks and bottles at police officers, setting ablaze a limousine, and tossing chunks of pavement through the windows of several businesses. On February 1, Antifa set fires and stormed buildings at the University of California–Berkeley to prevent an appearance by Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. (They succeeded.) In April, they threatened violence if Ann Coulter spoke on the campus; when the university and local law enforcement refused to find a secure location for her to speak, she withdrew, saying the situation was too dangerous.

In the end, these radicals are doing us a tremendous favor.  As the left shows us what they are really all about, the American people are going to be so revulsed by what they see that they will look elsewhere for answers.

So when Kathy Griffin posed for her now infamous photograph with “Donald Trump’s severed head”, she did a tremendous amount of damage to her own political movement.

At first she issued a seemingly heartfelt apology, which was the right thing to do, but shortly thereafter she held an absolutely shameful press conference in which she blamed Trump for ruining her life…

In a news conference on Friday, Griffin’s attorney Lisa Bloom accused Trump and his family of “using their power to target her.”

“If you don’t stand up, you get run over,” Griffin said. “What’s happening to me has never happened in this great country. A sitting president of the U.S. … is personally trying to ruin my life forever.”

Bloom said the comedian was contacted by the U.S. Secret Service and said she has retained a criminal lawyer.

“As a result of the first family bullying her, she has been vilified, getting death threats, fired from multiple jobs and had multiple events canceled,” Bloom said.

But of course it wasn’t Trump that ruined her life.

She did that all on her own.

The reason why the left resorts to anger, hate, threats and violence is because they do not have the ammunition to win in the marketplace of ideas.

To the left, more government is the answer to just about every problem.  But there is an inverse relationship between government and liberty.  The bigger government becomes, the less liberty we have.  Every new rule, regulation or law restricts our ability to live our own lives as we see fit in some way, and our founders intended for the federal government to be greatly limited because they wanted a nation where freedom and liberty would be maximized.

So the message of the left is fundamentally an anti-liberty message.

But it is really hard to win over voters with an anti-liberty message, and so that is why leftist politicians have to resort to “divide and conquer” and other tactics that distract voters from the real issues.

And unfortunately, those of us on the right have not always had a clear message because our party has been dominated for way too long by “big government Republicans”.  It has been really hard to communicate a pro-liberty message when so many top Republicans have been responsible for growing the size of government on the federal, state and local levels over the past several decades.

In just a few weeks, I am going to release a new book with an exceedingly positive message for America.  When it is ready, you will be able to find it on my author page.  Yes, we are facing immense challenges as a nation due to decades of incredibly foolish decisions, but that doesn’t mean that we should throw in the towel.

What we really need is a new American awakening.  We need to rediscover the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and our other founding documents.  And we also need to rediscover the values and the principles that this nation was founded upon.

If we will embrace those values and those principles, we will have a chance to become “the land of the free” once again.

But if we continue to embrace the values that the left is trying to impose upon all of us, our future is going to be exceedingly bleak indeed.

They Want To Make The Rest Of The Country Just Like California

If millions are leaving California because life there is so horrible, then why would those same people want to try to make their new communities more like the state that they just left?  About five million people have migrated out of the state of California over the past decade, and most of them are leaving for very good reasons.  The number one destination for ex-Californians is Texas, and this has caused the state to move a little bit to the left politically.  For example, Trump beat Clinton by only about 9 percent in Texas back in November.  It is getting to the point where many people in Texas are starting to resent anyone with a California license plate, because there are so many ex-Californians that would like to turn Texas into another version of their home state.

Similar things are happening here in Idaho.  It seems like half the people that my wife and I meet are transplants from California, and some of them are exceptionally good people.  Like my wife and I, a large number of them decided to move here because they wanted to find some place where they could live free.   Needless to say, north Idaho seems like paradise to many that have just escaped the nightmare of living “the California Dream”.

But there are others that move up here from “the golden state” that are absolutely determined to impose their leftist values on all the rest of us.  But if those values were such a failure in California, then why in the world would you want to bring them here?

It has been estimated that over a quarter of all new Idaho residents come from California.  If they are coming here to embrace our way of life that is wonderful, but if they are coming here to try to change us that is another thing entirely.

In many ways north Idaho is very similar to northern California before it was completely spoiled.  Not too long ago, KQED interviewed one ex-Californian that said that the wooded mountains here remind her of “the California she knew in the 1970s”…

When Adrien Koch retired last summer from her job with FEMA in the Bay Area, she and her husband resettled in the wooded mountains of north Idaho. They had visited only a few months before on a vacation but had quickly fallen in love. For Koch, Idaho reminded her of the California she knew in the 1970s.

“It’s kind of like a better time that’s gone by,” Koch says. “It’s a much slower pace, [and] people are more down to earth here.”

And fortunately, Koch is one of those ex-Californians that loves north Idaho just the way that it is…

“I immediately tell people, especially if they’re not from California, I am not one of those people who want to change Idaho,” Koch says. “I love it the way it is, that’s why we’re here.”

But of course there are others that come here with the intention of making their new home much more “progressive”.  Fortunately, the number of crazy leftists is still fairly limited at this point.  Hillary Clinton only received 27.5 percent of the vote in Idaho last November, and so this is not going to become a blue state any time soon.

I just don’t understand why anyone would want to move to Texas or Idaho or anywhere else and try to make it more like California.  Just consider the following…

-California has the highest state income tax rates in the entire country.

-California has been ranked as the absolute worst state for business for 12 consecutive years.

-Los Angeles has the worst traffic on the entire planet, and San Francisco is not too far behind.

-Thanks to unchecked illegal immigration and sanctuary cities that are allowed to flout the law without consequence, gang activity and crime are growing problems in the state.

And of course the state legislature just continues to pass one insane law after another.  The one that requires farmers “to cut methane emissions from dairy cows” by 40 percent by 2030 is one of my favorites…

In yet another attack on California businesses, yesterday Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill (SB 1383) that requires the state to cut methane emissions from dairy cows and other animals by 40% by 2030.  The bill is yet another massive blow to the agricultural industry in the state of California that has already suffered from the Governor’s passage of a $15 minimum wage and a recent bill that makes California literally the only state in the entire country to provide overtime pay to seasonal agricultural workers after working 40 hours per week or 8 hours per day (see “California Just Passed A $1.7 Billion Tax On The Whole Country That No One Noticed“).

According to a statement from Western United Dairymen CEO, Anja Raudabaugh, California’s Air Resources Board wants to regulate animal methane emissions even though it admits there is no known method for achieving the the type of reduction sought by SB 1383.

And just recently, a group of California state legislators decided that it would be a grand idea to try to push through a single-payer healthcare system that would cost taxpayers 400 billion dollars a year…

With Obamacare under assault in Washington by Republicans who see it as a broken system that hamstrings people with high premiums and inadequate access to medical care, Atkins and Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, are pushing a bill through the state Legislature that would replace Obamacare with a government-run system.

Everyone would be covered, including undocumented immigrants. Under the proposal, there would be no need for insurance companies; no more monthly premiums or out-of-pocket costs for doctor visits and prescriptions.

The authors haven’t said exactly how they’d pay the projected cost of $400 billion a year, although they acknowledge it would use existing health care money in addition to new taxes.

If you follow my work on a regular basis, you know that political correctness is one of my pet peeves, and California has become the epicenter of political correctness in our nation today.  Things have gotten so bad in the state that it is now considered to be a “mircoaggression” for professors in the University of California system to tell their students that “America is the land of opportunity” because it might offend someone.

When I was a young adult, I once dreamed of living right along the coast in California, but I couldn’t imagine living there now.

That once great state has become a symbol of everything that is wrong with America, and instead of making the rest of the country more like California, what we actually need to do is to make California much more like the rest of the country.

Baltimore Has Become A Rotting, Decaying War Zone As A Raging Opioid Epidemic Eats Away At The City Like Cancer

It is hard to believe that Baltimore was once one of the greatest cities in the entire world. Unlike nearby Washington D.C., Baltimore is a blue collar city that is home to some of the hardest working people in America. When I was in high school, my brother and I were huge fans of the Baltimore Orioles, and once in a while our parents would drive us from our home in Virginia all the way up to Baltimore to see them play. As an adult, I spent a number of years living near D.C., and I would take frequent trips up to Baltimore. To say that the city is in a state of decline would be a major understatement. Everywhere you look there are abandoned buildings and homes, and as you drive through some of the worst areas you can actually see drug addicts just lying in the streets. Just like so many other communities all over this country, decades of liberal policies have taken a brutal toll, and now the city is just a rotting, decaying shell of the glorious metropolis that it once was.

There are some sections of Baltimore that you simply do not go into once the sun goes down. And actually it isn’t a very good idea to go into those areas during the day either. The crime in the city has gotten so bad that authorities have actually formally requested help from the federal government…

According to The Baltimore Sun Newspaper, the city has logged in 118 homicides today with the projection of >400 murders for year’s end. It’s so bad here that Baltimore’s Mayor has asked the Federal Government for help in attempt to regain control. Even the police union sounds the alarm of an officer shortage leading to decrease in patrols. All of this is occurring as the Baltimore population declines, nearing a 100-year low, U.S. Census says.

Through the end of April, Baltimore was on pace for the highest murder rate in the history of the city.

Yes, you read that correctly.

The primary factor fueling all of this violence is an opioid epidemic that is completely and totally out of control…

The opioid epidemic is the quiet killer that has been leaving a trail of bodies on the streets of Baltimore.

“The individuals that are putting these drugs on our street, they’re killing people on our street,” said deputy commissioner Dean Palmere of the Baltimore Police Department.

Drug overdoses is expected to have killed 2,000 people statewide in 2016 and more than 800 in Baltimore alone.

“There are more people dying from overdose here in Baltimore City, than there are dying of homicide,” said Baltimore City health commissioner Dr. Leana Wen in February.

That last paragraph amazed me when I first read it.

Even though Baltimore is on pace for the highest murder rate in the city’s history, more people are actually dying from drug overdoses.

And now police in the city are warning of a new opioid that is reportedly “100 times more potent than heroin”. It is called Carfentanyl, and it can kill people almost instantly.

I would like to share with you a short YouTube film put out by Alastair Williamson just a few days ago entitled “The Baltimore Experience”. No matter how much I write, I could never communicate the devastation in the city quite like this little video does…

Did you see the part near the end where Williamson stops to offer a bottle of water to a man that is just lying in the street?

Hopefully that particular man is not on anything, but it is quite common to see people lying around like zombies in cities where an opioid epidemic is raging. These are very cruel drugs, and they will utterly consume you if you allow them to.

The more drugs that come in, the worse the violence gets, and within the past 24 hours we have seen four more senseless murders in Baltimore…

Two men were shot and killed Tuesday morning in west Baltimore, police said. Officers responded at 5:52 a.m. to the shooting on the 2800 block of Lanvale Street.

Police said officers found the victims in and around a vehicle. Both had been shot in the head and were declared dead at the scene, police said.

A 35-year-old man was fatally shot Monday evening in southeast Baltimore, police said.

The victim, identified as Charles Gatuthu, 35, was shot in the head and body at about 7:45 p.m. in the 6100 block of Boston Street. He was taken to Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital, where he died.

A 25-year-old was shot and killed Monday afternoon in west Baltimore, police said.

Of course Baltimore is far from alone. On Monday, I wrote about how Chicago is becoming a gang-infested wasteland, and on Tuesday we got news of Chicago’s 200th homicide so far in 2017.

And an official bulletin went out to all members of the Chicago police on Monday warning them about the “high-powered weapons” that gangs are now using to kill people…

Chicago police issued a bulletin Monday warning its officers about gangs armed with high-powered weapons, after three people were shot to death over the weekend – including two attending a memorial for the earlier victim.

Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the three people who were killed in the shootings Sunday were all members of the same street gang.

Sometimes it is hard to believe that this is still America.

The precious people that are getting hooked on these drugs and that are committing these murders were once innocent little boys and girls. Somewhere along the way they were led down the wrong path, and this is happening on a massive scale all over the nation.

So what should we do?

What we need are some real solutions. We need to restore the principles and the values that this nation was founded upon, and we need people that are willing to step forward and take this nation in a different direction.

On Thursday, I am scheduled to be a guest on the Alex Jones radio show, and I am going to share some news that is going to absolutely shock a lot of people.

Trust me, you are definitely going to want to tune in, because you are not going to want to miss this.

(Originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog)

It Is Becoming Illegal To Be Homeless In America As Houston, Dallas And Dozens Of Other Cities Pass Draconian Laws

Should we make homelessness against the law and simply throw all homeless people into prison so that we don’t have to deal with them? Incredibly, this is actually starting to happen in dozens of major cities all across the United States. It may be difficult to believe, but in many large urban areas today, if you are found guilty of “public camping” you can be taken directly to jail. In some cities, activities such as “blocking a walkway” or creating any sort of “temporary structure for human habitation” are also considered to be serious crimes. And there are some communities that have even made it illegal to feed the homeless without an official permit. Unfortunately, as the U.S. economy continues to slow down the number of homeless people will continue to grow, and so this is a crisis that is only going to grow in size and scope.

Of course the goal of many of these laws is to get the homeless to go somewhere else. But as these laws start to multiply all across the nation, pretty soon there won’t be too many places left where it is actually legal to be homeless.

One city that is being highly criticized for passing extremely draconian laws is Houston. In that city it is actually illegal for the homeless to use any sort of material to shield themselves from the wind, the rain and the cold…

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner is taking a similar approach—his anti-encampment ordinance makes it illegal to use “fabric, metal, cardboard, or other materials as a tent or temporary structure for human habitation.” This ensures that the Houstonian homeless are vulnerable not just to the elements, but also to the constant threat of the police. Officials cite one of the most common justifications for crackdowns on the homeless: neighborhood safety (a more socially acceptable way of talking about the not-in-my-backyard mentality).

With all of the other problems that we are facing as a nation, it stuns me that there are politicians that would spend their time dreaming up such sick and twisted laws.

According to one news report, the homeless in Houston are now officially banned from doing all of the following things…

1. They can’t block a sidewalk, stand in a roadway median or block a building doorway. (AKA they can’t panhandle).

2. They also can’t do any of these things — blocking walkways — under state law that already existed.

3. They can’t sleep in tents, boxes or any other makeshift shelter on public property.

4. They also can’t have heating devices.

5. They can’t carry around belongings that take up space more than three feet long, three feet wide, three feet tall.

6. People can’t spontaneously feed more than five homeless people without a permit.

If I was a homeless person in Houston, I would definitely be looking to get out of there.

But where are they going to go?

Things are almost as bad in Dallas. In fact, it is being reported that the police in Dallas “issued over 11,000 citations for sleeping in public from January 2012 to November 2015.”

When you break that number down, it comes to 323 citations per month.

Of course some people have tried to challenge these types of laws in court, but most of the challenges have been unsuccessful. For example, just check out what recently happened in Denver…

Three people who were contesting Denver’s urban-camping ban were found guilty on Wednesday, April 5, at the Lindsey-Flanigan courthouse. The defendants — Jerry Burton, Randy Russell and Terese Howard — were determined to have unlawfully camped on November 28, 2016, and to have interfered with police operations at one location. All three were sentenced with court-ordered probation for one year and between twenty and forty hours of community service.

The case challenged Denver’s unauthorized-camping ordinance, which has been divisive ever since Denver City Council approved it in 2012.

Since the courts are generally upholding these laws, this has just emboldened more communities to adopt anti-homelessness ordinances. According to one report, dozens of major cities have now passed such laws…

City-wide bans on public camping (PDF) have increased by 69 percent throughout the United States. What used to be seen as an annoyance is now prohibited, forcing fines or jail time on those who certainly can’t afford it. The only nationwide nonprofit devoted to studying this, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, has been tracking these changes since 2006. Their findings? There are a scary number of laws passed that ironically make it costly to be homeless.

For example, in 33 of the 100 U.S. cities they studied, it’s illegal to publicly camp. In 18, it’s illegal to sleep in public. Panhandling is illegal in 27 cities.

In 39 cities, it’s illegal to live in vehicles.

As I have warned repeatedly, we are seeing hearts grow cold all around us. Instead of doing everything that they can to try to help those in need, communities are trying to make them go some place else, and those that try to feed and help the homeless are being harshly penalized.

Sadly, all of this comes at a time when homelessness is on the rise all over America. In a previous article I pointed out that in New York City the number of homeless people recently hit a brand new all-time high, and things have gotten so bad in Los Angeles that the L.A. City Council has formally requested that Governor Jerry Brown declare a state of emergency.

We tend to think of the homeless as bearded old men with drinking problems, but the truth is that many of the homeless are children.

In fact, the number of homeless children in the United States has risen by about 60 percent since the end of the last recession.

If this is how we are going to treat some of the most vulnerable members of our society while things are still relatively stable, how are we going to be treating one another when the economy completely collapses?

(Originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog)

Broken America

Is this the beginning of the end for the United States of America? It has been said that a house divided against itself will surely fall, and today we live in a shattered union. In all my years, I have never seen so much strife, discord, bitterness and resentment in this country. Everyone can see what is happening, but nobody can seem to stop it. Politically, you have got tens of millions of people trying to pull America one way, and you have got tens of millions of people trying to pull it the exact opposite way. As I discussed in a previous article, the term “civil war” is now being thrown around by some pundits even though nobody has started shooting yet. We are a deeply divided and broken nation, and if we don’t find a way to fix things America will not survive.

Every survey and opinion poll that has been taken recently backs up what I am saying. For example, a Gallup survey that was conducted after the election in November found that an all-time record high 77 percent of all Americans believe that “the nation is divided on the most important values”…

Seventy-seven percent of Americans, a new high, believe the nation is divided on the most important values, while 21% believe it is united and in agreement. Over the past 20+ years, the public has tended to perceive the nation as being more divided than united, apart from two surveys conducted shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

So how do you fix this?

Nobody can force half the population to suddenly change their views on the most important issues of the day.

Earlier today, I wrote an article about how America is becoming a “politically-correct madhouse“, and there really is no compromising with the forces of political correctness. Either you get in line or you are the enemy.

Once upon a time the values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution by our founders united us, but today about half the country has completely rejected those values.

Those that would like to restore our constitutional values find themselves diametrically opposed to the agenda that progressives are trying to shove down our throats, and personally I don’t see much room for compromise between the two sides.

Given enough time, one side would ultimately vanquish the other side, but I don’t know if America has enough time left for that to happen.

There were some that had been hoping that our new president would unite the country, but you can throw that idea right out the window. According to numbers from Public Policy Polling, nearly half the nation already wants him to be impeached…

On our first poll of his Presidency voters were evenly divided on Trump, with 44% approving of him and 44% also disapproving. Now his approval rating is 43%, while his disapproval has gone all the way up to 53%. If voters could choose they’d rather have both Barack Obama (52/44) or Hillary Clinton (49/45) instead of Trump.

Just three weeks into his administration, voters are already evenly divided on the issue of impeaching Trump with 46% in favor and 46% opposed.

The political divisions in this nation are just going to grow worse and worse.

But just because we vehemently disagree with someone politically does not mean that we should hate that person.

I know that it can be infuriating to see some politician get up and start spouting off ideas that would be extremely damaging to this country. But if we choose to hate our political “enemies”, we become part of the problem.

It is easy to love someone that agrees with you about most things. The real challenge is finding a way to love those that believe things that you may find truly repulsive.

That doesn’t mean that you have to agree with what they believe. I am not saying that at all. You can disagree very strongly with someone and still love that person.

Unfortunately, the hearts of most people have grown cold in America. As hatred, anger and frustration continue to grow, it is only a matter of time before we start seeing outbursts of violence. Rioting, looting and civil unrest are going to become commonplace in communities all over the U.S., and eventually some of our major cities will burn. In my latest book I warned that the “thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted will disappear”, and thousands upon thousands of Americans that can see this coming are already fleeing the big cities.

What particularly disturbs me is when I see people that are supposed to be on the same side fighting each other.

If you are around someone long enough, eventually they are going to do or say something to offend you. None of us is going to agree 100 percent on everything, and it is a horrible shame to allow one disagreement to ruin what should be a great relationship.

If you do not learn to forgive, every relationship that you ever have in your life will ultimately fail, because everyone is going to let you down at some point.

And you may think that you are making the other person pay a price by refusing to forgive, but the truth is that you will be the one that will end up suffering. Even medical science has found that there are health benefits to forgiving and that unforgiveness can actually help bring on serious illnesses. The following comes from the official website of Johns Hopkins Medicine…

Whether it’s a simple spat with your spouse or long-held resentment toward a family member or friend, unresolved conflict can go deeper than you may realize—it may be affecting your physical health. The good news: Studies have found that the act of forgiveness can reap huge rewards for your health, lowering the risk of heart attack; improving cholesterol levels and sleep; and reducing pain, blood pressure, and levels of anxiety, depression and stress. And research points to an increase in the forgiveness-health connection as you age.

“There is an enormous physical burden to being hurt and disappointed,” says Karen Swartz, M.D., director of the Mood Disorders Adult Consultation Clinic at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Chronic anger puts you into a fight-or-flight mode, which results in numerous changes in heart rate, blood pressure and immune response. Those changes, then, increase the risk of depression, heart disease and diabetes, among other conditions. Forgiveness, however, calms stress levels, leading to improved health.

There are people that are reading this article that need to pick up the phone right now and apologize to someone that they have been refusing to forgive.

Yes, without a doubt that would be difficult.  But you might just be surprised how much grace a little humility can unleash.

You may not be able to fix our broken nation, but you certainly can fix the broken relationships in your own life.

And if millions of Americans decided to choose love and forgiveness rather than hatred, anger, bitterness and resentment, it would most definitely have a transformative effect on the entire country.

I would like to close with some very wise words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

(Originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog)

12 Signs That America Has Become A Politically-Correct Madhouse

What in the world has happened to the United States?  We are rapidly getting to the point where political correctness is in danger of becoming our national religion.  Of course most people would not even call it a “religion”, but for most Americans this unwritten set of rules shapes everything that they think, do and say.  Many had been hoping that the spell of political correctness would be broken by the election of Donald Trump, but that obviously has not happened.  The forces of political correctness still have a stranglehold on our education system, on all forms of entertainment, on our legal system, and on most of the politicians in both political parties.

The unwritten rules of political correctness are shifting and changing all the time, and if you don’t keep up with them the penalties can be extremely severe.

If you do or say the wrong thing at the wrong time, you could lose your friends, you could lose your job, and you could potentially even lose your reputation.

In fact, there have been numerous people over the past year that have been publicly crucified in the court of public opinion for doing or saying something that was not politically-correct.

And with each passing day, the forces of political correctness take a little bit more ground.  The following are 12 signs that America has become a politically-correct madhouse…

#1 According to Time Magazine, a book entitled “Santa’s Husband” will be released on October 10th by a major U.S. publisher that depicts Santa as “a gay man in an interracial relationship”.

#2 A middle school in North Hollywood is facing substantial budget cuts because they have too many non-minority students…

Outrage has grown at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, as the school faces layoffs and increased class sizes due to a law limiting funds for schools with a higher white student body.

The Los Angeles Unified School District provides more funding for schools where the white population is below 30 percent.

In a letter to parents, the district noted the highly regarded middle school had been above the percentage for the past couple years.

#3 According to Michael Moore, historians will mark “March 28, 2017, as the day the extinction of human life on earth began” because Donald Trump has rolled back Obama’s climate change regulations.

#4 One of my readers just sent me a photo that his 16-year-old son took at school.  It is a photo of a slide that was being projected on to a large screen at the front of his classroom that contained this message: “Polls show that young people today are more accepting of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people than ever before.  Why do you think that is?”

#5 An elementary school in California has banned the game of “tag” because it is too dangerous.

#6 At one high school in Iowa, students were recently denounced as “racists” for dressing up in red, white and blue for a basketball game.

#7 In North Carolina, as early as the first grade a “gender unicorn” is being used to teach children “about sexual orientation and gender identity“…

Just last year in our home city of Charlotte, North Carolina, the Charlotte Mecklenburg School System used the “gender unicorn” to teach students—as young as first grade—all about sexual orientation and gender identity. This cute, little, fury animal was used to promote the idea that sexual orientation asks the question, “Who do you go to bed with?” while gender identity asks the question, “Who do you go to bed as?” And these can be fluid, of course. Kids can change whenever and however they want.

#8 According to Dr. Michael Brown, bathroom scales have been taken out of the gym at one college campus for a very strange reason: “Administrators at Carleton University have removed the bathroom scales from the campus gym, claiming that ‘being fixated on weight’ does not ‘have any positive affect [sic] on your health.'”

#9 A Christian university in Minnesota has told professors “to stop using terms such as ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ because they are too masculine“.

#10 Snickers bars will soon be sold in rainbow wrappers “as part of a pro-LGBT ad campaign“.

#11 A 32-year-old man will now compete in international volleyball events as a transgender woman, and may end up qualifying for the Olympics as a female athlete…

The now 32-year old says volleyball has been the constant in a life full of changes. In January, she was just approved by USA Volleyball to compete as a woman. Before that, she was required to play in the men’s division at all USAV sanctioned events.

USAV requires transgender women to undergo hormone replacement therapy consistently for at least one year — with proper documentation — and they also have to change their identification, like passports and birth certificates, to female. Before, some organizations, including the Olympics, would require trans athletes to have sex reassignment surgery.

#12 Planned Parenthood has killed millions of children, but nobody from that organization ever seems to get into trouble with the law.  Instead, two activists that exposed the fact that Planned Parenthood is auctioning off baby parts to the highest bidder have been charged with 15 felonies in the state of California.

In this type of environment, people like me are becoming dinosaurs.  If you follow my work on a regular basis, you know that I am not afraid to do or say things that might offend some people.

Of course I am not actually trying to offend anyone, but I won’t let the forces of political correctness dictate what I can or cannot say about a particular topic.

Ultimately, political correctness is a tool that progressives use to silence the opposition.

They want to make it a crime to think or say anything that they might find offensive, and to a substantial degree it is working.

Our founders intended for us to permanently have a right to free speech, but now we have moved into a time when saying the wrong thing can get you brutally persecuted.

I would like to be optimistic that we can start to roll back the forces of political correctness, but as I noted at the beginning of this article, they have control of our schools, our courts, our entertainment and most of our political leaders.

But of course we can never give up the fight, because if they win life in America will ultimately become a complete and total nightmare.

16 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Live In California

It has been said that “as California goes, so goes the nation”. That is why it is such a shame what is happening to that once great state. At one time, California seemed to be the epicenter of the American Dream. Featuring some of the most beautiful natural landscapes in the entire world, the gorgeous weather and booming economy of the state inspired people from all over the world to move to the state. But now people are moving out of the state by the millions, because life in California has literally become a nightmare for so many people.

I certainly don’t have anything against the state personally. My brother and sister were both born there, and I spent a number of my childhood years in stunning northern California. When I was younger I would sometimes dream of getting a place on the coast eventually, but for reasons I will discuss below I no longer think that would be advisable.

In fact, if I was living in California today I would be immediately looking for a way to move out of the state unless I specifically felt called to stay. The following are 16 reasons why you shouldn’t live in California…

#1 The entire California coastline is part of the “Ring of Fire” seismic zone that roughly encircles the Pacific Ocean. The San Andreas Fault has been described as a “time bomb“, and at some point there will be a catastrophic earthquake that absolutely devastates the entire region. In fact, a study that was just released says that a “major earthquake” on the San Andreas Fault “is way overdue” …

A recently published study reveals new evidence that a major earthquake is way overdue on a 100 mile stretch of the San Andreas Fault from the Antelope Valley to the Tejon Pass and beyond.

Researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey released the results of the years-long study warning a major earthquake could strike soon.

#2 Out of all 50 states, the state of California has been ranked as the worst state for business for 12 years in a row…

In what is sounding like a broken record, California once again ranked dead last in Chief Executive magazine’s annual Best and Worst States for Business survey of CEOs – as it has all 12 years the survey has been conducted. Texas, meanwhile, earned the top spot for the 12th straight year.

Among the survey’s subcategories, the 513 CEOs from across the nation ranked California 50th in taxation and regulation, 35th in workforce quality and 26th in living environment, which includes cost of living, the education system and state and local attitudes toward business. Notably, California placed worst among the nine states in the Western region in all three categories.

#3 California has the highest state income tax rates in the entire nation. For many Americans, the difference between what you would have to pay if you lived in California and what you would have to pay if you lived in Texas could literally buy a car every single year.

#4 The state government in Sacramento seems to go a little bit more insane with each passing session. This time around, they are talking about going to a single-payer healthcare system for the entire state that would cost California taxpayers 40 billion dollars a year…

On Friday, State Senator Ricardo Lara introduced legislation that would transition California’s healthcare into a single-payer system. (RELATED: Read what a retired colonel said about the real purpose of Obamacare). The system would be very similar to the healthcare system currently in place in Canada and would cost California taxpayers roughly $40 billion for the first year alone. Given the poor economic climate California has already created for itself, this will no doubt be just one more burden on the people of California, and one step closer towards total bankruptcy.

Micah Weinberg, the president of the Economic Institute at the Bay Area Council, raised concerns over the financial consequences of the proposed legislation. “Where are they going to come up with the $40 billion?” he asked. He went on to suggest that adopting a state level single-payer system is “just not feasible to do as a state.”

#5 The traffic in the major cities just keeps getting worse and worse. According to USA Today, Los Angeles now has the worst traffic in the entire world, and San Francisco is not far behind.

#6 A lot of money is being made in Silicon Valley these days (at least for now), but poverty is also exploding in the state. In desperation, homeless people are banding together to create large tent cities all over the state, and the L.A. City Council recently asked Governor Jerry Brown “to declare homelessness a statewide emergency“.

#7 Thanks to unchecked illegal immigration, crime is on the rise in many California cities. The drug war that has been raging for years in Mexico is increasingly spilling over the border, and many families have moved out of the state for this reason alone.

#8 California is one of the most litigious states in the entire nation. According to the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, the “lawsuit climate” in California is ranked 47th out of all 50 states.

#9 Every year wildfires and mudslides wreak havoc in the state. Erosion is particularly bad along the coast, and I have previously written about how some portions of the California coastline are literally falling into the ocean.

#10 California has some of the most ridiculous housing prices in the entire country. Due to a lack of affordable housing rents have soared to wild extremes in San Francisco, where one poor engineer was actually paying $1,400 a month to live in a closet.

#11 All over the state, key infrastructure is literally falling to pieces. Governor Jerry Brown recently issued a list of key projects that needed to be done as soon as possible, and the total price tag for that list was 100 billion dollars. Of course that list didn’t even include the Oroville Dam, and we all saw what happened there.

#12 Radiation from the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster continues to cross the ocean and wash up along the California coastline. The impact of this crisis on the health of those living along the west coast could potentially be felt for generations.

#13 Illegal drug use in the state is on the rise again, and emergency rooms are being flooded by heroin overdose victims.

#14 On top of everything else, it is being reported that Russia is “quietly ‘seeding’ the U.S. shoreline with nuclear ‘mole’ missiles”. The following comes from retired colonel and former Russian defense ministry spokesman Viktor Baranetz…

“What are these mysterious ‘asymmetrical responses’ that our politicians and generals speak about so often? Maybe it’s a myth or a pretty turn of phrase? No! Our asymmetrical response is nuclear warheads that can modify their course and height so that no computer can calculate their trajectory. Or, for example, the Americans are deploying their tanks, airplanes and special forces battalions along the Russian border. And we are quietly ‘seeding’ the U.S. shoreline with nuclear ‘mole’ missiles (they dig themselves in and ‘sleep’ until they are given the command)[…]

“Oh, it seems I’ve said too much. I should hold my tongue.”

Hopefully what Baranetz is claiming is not accurate, because if it is even partly true the implications are absolutely staggering.

#15 North Korea is a major nuclear threat as well. It is being reported that the North Koreans are developing an ICBM that could potentially reach the west coast of the United States…

Defense officials have warned that North Korea is on the brink of producing an ICBM that could target the United States. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced in January during his New Year’s address that Pyongyang had “entered the final stage of preparations to test-launch” an ICBM that could reach parts of the United States.

#16 Someday a very large earthquake will produce a major tsunami on the west coast. According to the Los Angeles Times, one study found that a magnitude 9.0 earthquake along the Cascadia fault could potentially produce a massive tsunami that would “wash away coastal towns”…

If a 9.0 earthquake were to strike along California’s sparsely populated North Coast, it would have a catastrophic ripple effect.

A giant tsunami created by the quake would wash away coastal towns, destroy U.S. 101 and cause $70 billion in damage over a large swath of the Pacific coast. More than 100 bridges would be lost, power lines toppled and coastal towns isolated. Residents would have as few as 15 minutes notice to flee to higher ground, and as many as 10,000 would perish.

Scientists last year published this grim scenario for a massive rupture along the Cascadia fault system, which runs 700 miles off shore from Northern California to Vancouver Island.

Over the past decade, approximately five million people have moved away from California.

After reading this article, perhaps you have a better understanding why so many people are getting out while they still can.

To me, one of the greatest concerns is the rise in seismic activity that we are seeing all over the world. In my latest book I express my belief that the United States will be greatly affected by this increase in seismic activity, and California is going to get hit harder than just about anywhere else.

Once again, I don’t have anything against California or the people that live there. It is such a beautiful place, and it once held so much promise.

Unfortunately that promise has been shattered, and there is a mass exodus out of the state as families flee the horrific nightmare that California is in the process of becoming.

(Originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog)

Every ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ In America Has Just Been Vindicated…

Yes, the government can use your phone, your computer and even potentially your television to spy on what you are doing inside your own home.  On Tuesday, Wikileaks released thousands of documents that prove what virtually every “conspiracy theorist” in America has been saying for years about government spying.  And I don’t even like to use the term “conspiracy theorist” much, because the truth is that most “conspiracy theorists” are simply citizen journalists that are attempting to expose things that the mainstream media doesn’t want to talk about.  And one of the things that the mainstream media has always been hesitant to address is the unconstitutional surveillance that U.S. intelligence agencies systematically conduct on their own citizens.

But now the mainstream media is being forced to talk about government surveillance because Wikileaks has just exposed it for all the world to see.  According to Wikileaks, the CIA has been secretly running “its ‘own NSA’ with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified”.  It is known as the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, and it has produced “more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other ‘weaponized’ malware”.  In fact, the computer or phone that you are reading this article on may be infected with one of their programs right now.

The documents that were released by Wikileaks show that government spooks can remotely take control of Apple iPhones, Google Android phones, Microsoft Windows operating systems and Samsung smart televisions, and once in control of those devices they can use them to spy on their owners.

The ironic thing is that while Barack Obama and members of Congress have been accusing Russia of conducting cyberattacks, the truth is that U.S. intelligence agencies have been perhaps the biggest offenders of all.

This is an absolutely massive scandal, and I truly hope that it gets the attention that it deserves in the days ahead.  The following is a portion of the press release that Wikileaks issued on Tuesday…

Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

“Year Zero” introduces the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.

Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency’s hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA’s hacking capacities.

By the end of 2016, the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware. Such is the scale of the CIA’s undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook.

After learning about this, you may never look at your smart TV the same way again.

In fact, according to the documents that Wikileaks has given us the CIA can even use your smart TV to spy on you when it appears to be turned off…

A program dubbed “Weeping Angel” after an episode of the popular British TV science fiction series “Dr. Who,” can set a Samsung smart TV into a fake “off” mode to fool the consumer into thinking the TV isn’t recording room sounds when it still is. The conversations are then sent out via the user’s server. The program was developed in conjunction with MI5, the British FBI equivalent of a domestic counterintelligence and security agency, according to the WikiLeaks documents.

And if your phone has been infected by the CIA, they can remotely turn on the camera and microphone whenever they want and use the phone as a GPS locator to track you wherever you go.  The following comes from USA Today…

CIA-created malware can penetrate and then control the operating systems for both Android and iPhone phones, allege the documents. This software would allow the agency to see the user’s location, copy and transmit audio and text from the phone and covertly turn on the phone’s camera and microphone and then send the resulting images or sound files to the agency.

Just two days ago I wrote a major article warning that the government has the capability to do these sorts of things.

This stuff is really going on, and it needs to stop now.  I warned about some of this advanced “Big Brother technology” in my apocalyptic novel “The Beginning Of The End“, and many of us have been screaming about what U.S. intelligence agencies have been doing for years and years.  Now that President Trump is extremely upset that the government was spying on him, let us hope that he steps up to the plate and puts an end to this unconstitutional surveillance for good.

In the documents that Wikileaks has just released there is even discussion about the CIA potentially being able to infect a vehicle control system.  Presumably the goal would be to remotely take control of a vehicle and either spy on the occupants or kill them by driving into an obstacle at very high speed.

And if you can believe it, the CIA has also been developing ways to make it look like a cyberattack that they conducted actually came from the Russians.  The following comes from an article by Jerome Corsi…

The Wikileaks “Vault 7” drop of CIA cyber-warfare documents contains the startling revelation that the CIA, under a project identified as “Umbrage,” maintained a substantial library of Russian cyber-attack techniques “stolen” from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.

Of course when it comes to violations of privacy, the NSA is even worse than the CIA.

The NSA systematically collects all forms of digital communication and stores them in a giant data center out in Utah.  So nothing that you do on a digital device is ever truly private.  If you don’t believe the article that I posted the other day, perhaps you will believe a 36 year veteran of the NSA named William Binney…

President Donald Trump is “absolutely right” to claim he was wiretapped and monitored, a former NSA official claimed Monday, adding that the administration risks falling victim to further leaks if it continues to run afoul of the intelligence community.

“I think the president is absolutely right. His phone calls, everything he did electronically, was being monitored,” Bill Binney, a 36-year veteran of the National Security Agency who resigned in protest from the organization in 2001, told Fox Business on Monday. Everyone’s conversations are being monitored and stored, Binney said.

Did you catch that last sentence?

Binney knows very well that all of our conversations are systematically being monitored and stored because he helped build the systems that do it.

Now that all of this is out in the open, America has two choices.

We can end this unconstitutional surveillance and go back to being a nation that respects privacy, or we can allow it to continue and keep heading down the road toward becoming a “Big Brother” surveillance society far worse than anything that George Orwell ever warned about.

Is The Left Trying To Start A Civil War?

An army of subversives is attempting to undermine the Trump administration from within the government, and at the same time a whole host of prominent leftist leaders are fueling the flames of hate against Trump and are promoting riots, civil uprisings and in some cases even violence.  And of course the mainstream media is a more than willing accomplice, because pretty much everyone that works in the mainstream media absolutely hates Donald Trump.  On a fundamental level, the United States is more divided today than it has been in any of our lifetimes, and the radical left is treating the presidency of Donald Trump as if it was the end of the world.  We are seeing terms such as “Nazi”, “racist” and “dictator” thrown around very casually, but people need to understand that words really matter.  When subversives on the left use such inflammatory language, there is a very real danger that they could actually spark a violent insurrection against the United States government.

Just think about this for a moment.  If a “Nazi” had really become the president of the United States, what would the appropriate response be?

When the left calls Donald Trump and his supporters “Nazis” and “racists”, they are suggesting that people should act accordingly, and that is extremely dangerous.

Yesterday, I wrote about how the “deep state” is attempting to destroy the Trump administration from the inside, but meanwhile others are trying to spark an uprising from the outside.

Something that former Obama Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently said is extremely disturbing.  She recorded a video message in which she suggested that in the struggle against Donald Trump there is going to be blood in the streets and some people are going to have to die…

“I know that this is a time of great fear and uncertainty for so many people,” Lynch says. “I know it’s a time of concern for people, who see our rights being assailed, being trampled on and even being rolled back. I know that this is difficult, but I remind you that this has never been easy. We have always had to work to move this country forward to achieve the great ideals of our Founding Fathers.”

“It has been people, individuals who have banded together, ordinary people who simply saw what needed to be done and came together and supported those ideals who have made the difference. They’ve marched, they’ve bled and yes, some of them died. This is hard. Every good thing is. We have done this before. We can do this again.”

Remember, this is not just some passionate young leftist radical saying these things.

This woman was the Attorney General of the United States not too long ago.  For her to make statements such as these is irresponsible to the extreme.  If you have not seen this video yet, you can find it on YouTube right here.

The mainstream media is also working very hard to fuel the flames of hate.  MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinksi made headlines all over the world when she declared that Trump’s presidency “is fake and failed”, and she followed that up by boldly declaring that we are now “at a low point in American history”…

“We are at a low point in American history and I don’t know how anybody can defend this president, even if it’s their job. Like you’ve got to have a job after this. You’ve got to look in the mirror after this. Sarah Huckabee or whoever is speaking out next. You have to look in the mirror and think about this country after this is over. You need to think of the end game here, because there isn’t one at the rate we are going.”

A video clip of her saying this can be found here, and to be honest it is really unprecedented in all of American history for journalists to be attacking the president of the United States in this manner.

When people hear this stuff about a “fake president” that is “racist” and “fascist” over and over again, it is only a matter of time before people start to act out in violent ways.

For example, just consider what happened in Berkeley on Saturday…

At a park in Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco, protesters from both sides struck one another over the head with wooden sticks and Trump supporters fired pepper spray as police in riot gear stood at a distance.

Some in the pro-Trump crowd, holding American flags, faced off against black-clad opponents. An elderly Trump supporter was struck in the head and kicked on the ground.

And it is being reported that anti-Trump protesters in Minnesota set off fireworks in the state capitol building over the weekend…

Five people attending a counter-protest against President Donald Trump were arrested in Minnesota over the weekend after police said they allegedly set off fireworks inside the state capitol building.

A St. Paul police spokesman confirmed to TheBlaze that five people “who allegedly lit fireworks in the capitol building and fled on foot” were arrested Saturday. He said they are charged with riot 2, which is a felony.

We need to take incidents like this very seriously, because often a civil war can be started by incidents that may seem quite small at the time.  For instance, when the protests started becoming violent against President Assad in Syria back in 2011, who would have dreamed that it would ultimately spark a civil war that would kill more than half a million people and that would still be raging six years later?…

In March of 2011, Syrian protesters marched on Damascus following the arrest of a 14-year-old boy who had written a cryptic threat to Bashar al-Assad in graffiti.

Within three short months of those initial protests, 1,000 civilians (among them students, liberal activists, and human rights advocates) and 150 soldiers and policemen had been killed, and thousands were detained. Within a year, the Damascus Securities Exchange had plummeted 40%, and within five, the total kill count reached upwards of 600,000.

Many believe that a civil war has already started in America.

Americans may not be shooting at each other yet, but without a doubt we are in a battle for the soul of this nation.  The following comes from an excellent article by Dennis Prager…

It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth: America is currently fighting its second Civil War.

In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War.

David Kupelian, the author of “The Snapping Of The American Mind“, is also concerned that we are in a life or death struggle for the future of our culture…

Compared with the shining and vibrant nation it once was, today’s America has become a different country: deeply and angrily divided, unable to deal with crises foreign or domestic, the world’s greatest debtor nation with 50 million people on food stamps, rampant divorce and family breakdown, unprecedented sexual anarchy with 110 million with STDs, almost 60 million abusing alcohol and 70 million taking mood-altering drugs. On so many levels, America is becoming ever more “bizarro” – diametrically opposed to logic and common sense.

In the end, either the right or the left is going to completely defeat the other side, because both sides are attempting to take this country in completely opposite directions.  When you examine the core values on the right and the left, you quickly come to the realization that there is not much room for compromise.  One side will ultimately emerge victorious, and the values of the other side will be vanquished.  Here is more from Dennis Prager…

How are those of us who oppose left-wing nihilism – there is no other word for an ideology that holds Western civilization and America’s core values in contempt – supposed to unite with “educators” who instruct elementary school teachers to cease calling their students “boys” and “girls” because that implies gender identity? With English departments that don’t require reading Shakespeare in order to receive a degree in English? With those who regard virtually every war America has fought as imperialist and immoral? With those who regard the free market as a form of oppression? With those who want the state to control as much of American life as possible? With those who repeatedly tell America and its black minority that the greatest problems afflicting black Americans are caused by white racism, “white privilege” and “systemic racism”? With those who think that the nuclear family ideal is inherently misogynistic and homophobic? With those who hold that Israel is the villain in the Middle East? With those who claim that the term “Islamic terrorist” is an expression of religious bigotry?

This is why the radical left hates Donald Trump so much.

He represents everything that they have been taught to hate, and he stands in the way of the future that they have always been envisioning.

We are in a fight for the soul of America, and the fate of this nation literally hangs in the balance.

Unfortunately, there is also the possibility that this conflict could end up destroying this country no matter which side ultimately wins.  It has been said that a house divided against itself will surely fall, and America is a very bitterly divided house at this moment in time.

Government Spooks Can Use The Mic And Camera On Trump’s Phone Even When He Thinks It Is Turned Off

After reading this article you might not ever view your electronic devices the same way again. Last year, Hollywood released a biographical political thriller based on the life of Edward Snowden that had one particularly creepy scene. In that scene, a government spook used a program to remotely activate the microphone and camera on a laptop, and by doing so he was able to watch a woman as she got undressed. Sadly, as you will see below, this kind of thing is happening constantly. Any digital device can potentially be accessed and used to spy on you even if it appears to be turned off. And this is why Donald Trump needs to be so careful right now, because the intelligence community wants to take him down and they can literally use any digital device in his possession to try to gather dirt on him. We have a “deep state” that is absolutely obsessed with watching, tracking and monitoring the American people, and something desperately needs to be done about this unconstitutional surveillance. Now that Trump has become greatly upset about how the government was tapping into his phone calls, maybe something will finally get accomplished.

In an article that I just published on The Most Important News, I talked about the NSA’s brand new two billion dollar data storage facility in Utah that can store up to five zettabytes of data. Secret “electronic monitoring rooms” embedded within the facilities of major communications companies across the United States send an endless flow of digital information to this facility, and most Americans have no idea that this is even happening. The following comes from Wired…

Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits.

Whistleblowers have come forward again and again to warn us about what was happening, but they have largely been ignored. One of the most prominent whistleblowers was former NSA employee William Binney…

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there.

Can you imagine recording 320 million phone calls a day?

And that was at the beginning of the program – I can’t even imagine what the number must be these days.

But even if you aren’t using your phone government spooks can still potentially be listening to you. The following comes from a CNN article entitled “How the NSA can ‘turn on’ your phone remotely“…

Government spies can set up their own miniature cell network tower. Your phone automatically connects to it. Now, that tower’s radio waves send a command to your phone’s antennae: the baseband chip. That tells your phone to fake any shutdown and stay on.

A smart hack won’t keep your phone running at 100%, though. Spies could keep your phone on standby and just use the microphone — or send pings announcing your location.

John Pirc, who did cybersecurity research at the CIA, said these methods — and others, like physically bugging devices — let the U.S. hijack and reawaken terrorists’ phones.

Unfortunately, these tactics are not just used against “terrorists”.

The truth is that these tactics are employed against anyone that the NSA is interested in, and in fact they could be listening to you right now.

Thanks to Edward Snowden, we have learned quite a bit about how the NSA takes over digital devices…

The latest story from the Edward Snowden leaks yesterday drives home that the NSA and its spy partners possess specialized tools for doing exactly that. According to The Intercept, the NSA uses a plug-in called GUMFISH to take over cameras on infected machines and snap photos.

Another NSA plug-in called CAPTIVATEDAUDIENCE hijacks the microphone on targeted computers to record conversations.

Intelligence agencies have been turning computers into listening devices for at least a decade, as evidenced by the Flame spy tool uncovered by Kaspersky Lab in 2012, which had the ability to surreptitiously turn on webcams and microphones and perform a host of other espionage operations.

So what can you do to prevent this from happening?

If you have external webcams and microphones, you can unplug them when they are not in use.

If you have a built-in camera, some have suggested covering the camera with a sticker.

And of course pulling out the battery entirely will prevent someone from taking over your phone when you are not using it.

But at the end of the day, it is going to be really hard to keep government spooks out of your electronic devices completely. They have become extremely sophisticated at using these devices to get what they want, and they will literally go after just about anyone.

For example, just consider what they did to former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson. In her recent book, she details a campaign of digital harassment that sounds like something out of a spy novel. The following comes from the Washington Post…

The breaches on Attkisson’s computer, says this source, are coming from a “sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the National Security Agency (NSA).” Attkisson learns from “Number One” that one intrusion was launched from the WiFi at a Ritz Carlton Hotel and the “intruders discovered my Skype account handle, stole the password, activated the audio, and made heavy use of it, presumably as a listening tool.”

To round out the revelations of “Number One,” he informs Attkisson that he’d found three classified documents deep inside her operating system, such that she’d never know they were even there. “Why? To frame me?” Attkisson asks in the book.

If they can do all of that to Sharyl Attkisson, they can do it to Donald Trump too.

Trump needs to understand that the deep state is trying to destroy him, and that everything that he says and does is being monitored.

So until Trump can completely clean house at all of our intelligence agencies, he is going to have to be extremely careful 24 hours a day.

And let us hope that Trump is ultimately victorious in his struggle against the deep state, because the future of this nation is literally hanging in the balance.

(Originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog)

Of Course Big Brother Was Spying On Trump’s Calls – The Shocking Truth Is That They Spy On All Of Our Calls

The mainstream media is all in an uproar over Donald Trump’s claim that Barack Obama personally ordered the phones in Trump Tower to be “wiretapped” just before the election.   But nobody should really be surprised that the government was listening to Donald Trump’s phone calls.  After all, the truth is that they systematically collect the content of all forms of digital communication, and this has been going on for many years.  During Obama’s presidency, nobody really got too upset when it was revealed that the Obama administration was spying on friendly foreign leaders (including Angela Merkel), nobody got too upset when it was revealed that the Obama administration was spying on journalists, and nobody got too upset when it was revealed that the NSA was grabbing baby photos and nude selfies off of the Internet.  But now that Trump has gotten extremely angry because the government was listening to his calls, maybe something will finally be done about all of this unconstitutional surveillance.

Before I discuss how the government is systematically monitoring all of us, first let’s talk about Trump.  Back on January 11th, the Guardian reported that before the election the FBI applied for a warrant two separate times to monitor the communications of members of Trump’s political team…

The Guardian has learned that the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus. According to one report, the FBI was finally granted a warrant in October, but that has not been confirmed, and it is not clear whether any warrant led to a full investigation.

The warrant was needed to get access to the digital communications of those individuals and to use those communications in a criminal investigation.  As is the case with all other Americans, the digital communications of those individuals were already being gathered on a systematic basis, and the FBI wanted to dig in to those communications to see if anything illegal was going on.

For more evidence that the FBI was looking into the digital communications of members of Trump’s team, you can check out an excellent interview with Mark Levin on Fox News right here…

Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey made headlines all over the country on Sunday when he admitted that it was probably true that there was ongoing surveillance of Trump and his team…

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Sunday said that President Trump is likely correct that there was surveillance on Trump Tower for intelligence purposes, but incorrect in accusing former President Barack Obama of ordering the wiretapping.

“I think he’s right in that there was surveillance and that it was conducted at the behest of the attorney general — at the Justice Department,” Mukasey told ABC’s “This Week.”

But once again, it is vital to understand that nothing special was done to any of their phones.  The truth is that government spooks can listen to any of our phones any time that they would like, and in a classified briefing to Congress the NSA even admitted “that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls“…

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Most Americans simply do not realize that the content of every single call that they make is recorded and stored indefinitely.  Once in a while this even gets mentioned on the mainstream news.  For example, the following is a from a transcript of an exchange that took place when Erin Burnett of CNN interviewed former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente…

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.

When asked about this systematic collection of material, the former chief technology officer of the CIA once made the following statement: “We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever.”

So you should never do anything on the phone or on the Internet that you would not want to be made public.

And no, I am not exaggerating whatsoever.

If you doubt what I am saying, just consider the following example…

And the NSA would never abuse its awesome surveillance power, right? Wrong. In 2008, NSA workers told ABC News that they routinely eavesdropped on phone sex between troops serving overseas and their loved ones in America. They listened in on both satellite phone calls and calls from the phone banks in Iraq’s Green Zone where soldiers call home. Former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk described how a coworker would say, “Hey, check this out… there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out.” Faulk explained they would gossip about the best calls during breaks. “It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy.’”

Every intimate conversation that you have ever had on the telephone in recent years is stored in a government server somewhere.

And the same thing is true regarding pretty much everything that you have done on the Internet in recent years.  According to the Washington Post, the federal government is “tapping directly into the central servers” of nine top Internet companies…

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who knew about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

So don’t do anything on the Internet that you would not like the government to see, because they are watching.

Many of the very large technology companies that are involved in this data collection effort are probably very familiar to you.  Here is more from the article quoted above…

The technology companies, which participate knowingly in PRISM operations, include most of the dominant global players of Silicon Valley. They are listed on a roster that bears their logos in order of entry into the program: “Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.”

And as I mentioned above, the government is systematically scooping up and recording baby photos, selfies, medical records and a whole host of other data without our permission.  The following comes from CNN…

Heaps of baby photos, fitness selfies, medical records and resumes are among thousands of private communications scooped up and stored by NSA spy programs.

That’s according to new disclosures based on documents Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor, gave to The Washington Post — disclosures that show just how easy it is for Americans’ private conversations to be swept into the spy agency’s traps.

Snowden provided the Post with what it said were 160,000 intercepted conversations, including e-mails, instant messages, photographs, social network posts and other documents. The trove included messages exchanged from 2009 through 2012, and some were hundreds of pages long.

To store this vast amount of information, the NSA has constructed the largest data center on the entire planet in Utah.

It has about a million square feet of storage space, it cost approximately two billion dollars to construct, and it takes about 40 million dollars a year to pay the energy bill for this ridiculously oversized facility.

And according to Fox News, this data center has the capability of storing 5 zettabytes of data…

The NSA says the Utah Data Center is a facility for the intelligence community that will have a major focus on cyber security. The agency will neither confirm nor deny specifics. Some published reports suggest it could hold 5 zettabytes of data. (Just one zettabyte is the equivalent of about 62 billion stacked iPhones 5′s– that stretches past the moon.

Sadly, they aren’t exactly respectful of our data once they have gathered it.  It has been reported that “nude photographs picked up of people in ‘sexually compromising’ situations are routinely passed around“, and it has also been reported that the NSA even has the ability to remotely activate the cameras and microphones on your digital devices.

We have become a “Big Brother society” where literally nobody is safe from government surveillance.

One survey that was conducted by Pew Research found that 64 percent of all investigative journalists believe that the government is spying on them.  And in her book entitled “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington“, former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson claimed that she actually has evidence that government spooks remotely activated her personal computer numerous times, monitored her keystrokes and even buried incriminating documents on her hard drive.

For years this kind of unconstitutional surveillance has been talked about, but no action has ever been taken to try to stop it.

But now that the president of the United States himself has been a victim, perhaps something will finally be done.

Valerie Jarrett Has Moved Into Obama’s Anti-Trump Command Center To Aid In The Effort To Sabotage The President

Never before have we seen a previous president and his team openly attempt to sabotage the next president, but that is precisely what is happening.  Traditionally, most ex-presidents have chosen to move far away from Washington, but Barack Obama decided to purchase a home less than two miles from the White House, and many of his former staff members are either working directly with him or are working for his political organization Organizing for Action.  And of particular concern is the fact that Valerie Jarrett has actually moved into Obama’s five million dollar home, which many are referring to as Obama’s “anti-Trump command center”.  For eight years the Obamas wouldn’t even sneeze without consulting Valerie Jarrett first, and needless to say Jarrett has not moved in to help them pick out wallpaper and drapes.  Jarrett is a hardcore political operative, and she has reportedly convinced Obama that he needs to lead the fight against Trump.

And when I say “fight against Trump”, I don’t just mean trying to block his agenda from getting through Congress.

What I mean is that Barack Obama actually intends to try to remove Trump from the White House.  The following comes from the Daily Mail…

Barack Obama is turning his new home in the posh Kalorama section of the nation’s capital – just two miles away from the White House – into the nerve center of the mounting insurgency against his successor, President Donald J. Trump.

Obama’s goal, according to a close family friend, is to oust Trump from the presidency either by forcing his resignation or through his impeachment.

And Obama is being aided in his political crusade by his longtime consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, who has moved into the 8,200-square-foot, $5.3-million Kaloroma mansion with the former president and Michelle Obama, long time best friends.

From this anti-Trump nerve center, the Obamas and Valerie Jarrett will be directing an army of more than 30,000 activists that are committed to an organization known as Organizing for Action.  If you read my previous article about this “army of activists”, you already know that Organizing for Action grew out of the Obama presidential campaigns, and at this point it claims to have 250 chapters around the nation.

But of course Barack Obama does not exactly plan to just sit on the sidelines and let others do the work.  Former Attorney General Eric Holder says that Barack Obama is rested and “ready to roll“…

“It’s coming. He’s coming,” Holder said, speaking to reporters at a briefing for the new group. “And he’s ready to roll.”

Throughout, Holder said, Obama “will be a more visible part of the effort.”

Holder also predicted that the usual pattern of the party in the White House losing state legislative seats in off-year elections would hold next year, but “I expect we’ll see that on steroids with President Trump.”

Ever since Trump won the election in November, Barack Obama and his team have been quietly working against him.

Even while Obama was all smiles in public, members of his administration were working feverishly to spread information that would undermine the incoming president.  For example, just check out what the New York Times has just reported…

In the Obama administration’s last days, some White House officials scrambled to spread information about Russian efforts to undermine the presidential election — and about possible contacts between associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump and Russians — across the government. Former American officials say they had two aims: to ensure that such meddling isn’t duplicated in future American or European elections, and to leave a clear trail of intelligence for government investigators.

American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials — and others close to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — and associates of President-elect Trump, according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in discussing classified intelligence.

If you have ever wondered where all of these “leaks” are coming from, the truth is that they are coming from people inside the government that are still loyal to Obama.

Earlier today, the Washington Post ran a story with this alarming headline: “The Trump presidency can’t seem to escape Russia’s shadow“.  The reason why Trump and his team are continually plagued by this stuff is because of the internal sabotage that is being conducted against them.

And of course the mainstream media will just eat up any anti-Trump morsel that they can possibly get their hands on.  Most in the mainstream media absolutely hate Trump, and so they are quite eager to aid in sabotaging him any way that they can.  Here is another example of sabotage that occurred not too long ago…

White House officials believe Obama administration employees attempted to sabotage President Trump by releasing an incomplete memo suggesting that Trump’s travel ban focusing on seven Muslim-majority countries contradicts government intelligence.

The Associated Press reported on Friday that a leaked Department of Homeland Security document indicated that filtering immigrants by citizenship would not likely prevent terrorists from entering the United States.

Almost every day it seems like something new comes out, and this kind of political warfare is not going to lead anywhere good.

At this point, there is very little chance that most of the country will unite behind the new president, and Obama and his team are going to continue to try to cause strife, discord and disruption any way that they can.

And any time street protests break out against Trump, Obama and his leftist allies are going to do their best to fuel the fire.  Eventually this could result in the kind of widespread civil unrest that I portrayed in my apocalyptic novel “The Beginning Of The End“, but Obama and his allies don’t seem to be very concerned about the long-term damage that they are doing to this country.

Instead, they seem to be absolutely obsessed with doing whatever is necessary to destroy Donald Trump.

A lot of people were hoping that the political nastiness would end once the campaign was over, but instead it appears set to go to a whole new level.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any way that this is going to end well…

Why is the GOP just sitting around on repealing Obamacare after winning the impossible?

How many times have Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare in the last six years? Twenty, 30, 40 times?  MSNBC claims it’s around 62. In 2015, Congress actually put a repeal bill on President Obama’s desk.And now that Republicans control every lever of power in the legislative process, suddenly the task to repeal has become monumental. Not so when the GOP was in the minority.

It is not easy to name a member of Congress — or any GOP elected official — who has not run on repealing Obamacare. Certainly every House Republican worth his or her salt is already on record voting for a full repeal — that is, back when there was no danger of those bills seeing daylight. As one member recently phrased it: “We’re playing with live rounds this time.”

(Read the rest of the story here…)

Why Mainstream Media Websites Are Censoring & Removing Comment Sections

News that Google has developed a new AI system that “identifies abusive comments” to clamp down on “hate speech” reminds us why mainstream media websites are censoring and removing comment sections altogether – because studies show they have more influence over the opinion of the reader than the article itself.

Google’s new tool, Perspective, works by comparing comments left on news websites to comments left on Wikipedia and the New York Times that were deemed “toxic” by a team of human reviewers.

The only criteria given for what constitutes a “toxic” comment is that it causes someone to leave a conversation. Obviously, this could also include someone who lost a debate or who is merely offended or triggered by another comment.

With trust in mainstream media plummeting, the real goal behind the censorship and in some cases entire removal of comment sections is to manipulate public opinion.

As the Daily Tech revealed, Popular Science admitted that the decision to pull its comment section was in order to preach a “scientific doctrine” on global warming without being challenged.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

 

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski: Controlling ‘Exactly What People Think’ Is ‘Our Job’

(By Chris Menahan of InformationLiberation.com) MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski said on Morning Joe Wednesday controlling “exactly what people think” is “our job.”

Evidently, she viewed this as a dig against Donald Trump.

Here’s how the exchange went down via NewsBusters:

NY TIMES REPORTER YAMICHE ALCINDOR: [I] should say that when I think about the numbers and I I think about where Donald Trump is standing right now he’s in some ways keeping his promise. He campaigned on this issue of hard line immigration and then he turned around and did all of these executive orders and we are now reporting that there will be probably one coming out soon and he’s revamping it. He is really someone got on stage and told you exactly what is he going to do and did it. I think a lot of people in Washington and a lot of I think, intellectuals are saying, like, what is going on? This feels so uncertain. But for Trump supporters, even some of the people who are skeptical of him, he is looking like he is getting stuff done.

SCARBOROUGH: Exactly, that’s exactly what I hear. What Yamiche just said is what I hear from all the Trump supporters I talk to who were Trump voters are still Trump supporters. They go, ‘Yeah you guys are going crazy, he’s doing–what are you so surprised about? He is doing exactly what he said he is going to do.’

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Well, I think that the dangerous edges here are that he is trying to undermine the media and trying to make up his own facts and could be while unemployment and the economy worsens he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think. And that is–that is our job.

Wow, she really showed him!

“Hey Trump, it’s our job to make up facts to control people’s minds, not yours, pig!”

NewsBusters reports: “Scarborough went on to say that Trump was beginning to sound like ‘Mussolini or Lennon’ after his advisor Steven Miller ‘basically’ said that Trump had ‘absolute power’ and ‘shall not be questioned.'”

If You Admit That You Are A Trump Supporter, It May Cost You Your Job

Many liberals that are still extremely bitter about the outcome of the election are taking out their frustrations on Trump supporters all over the country.  And in some cases, employees are actually being “reassigned”, fired or asked to leave their jobs if they openly admit their support for President Trump.  This kind of political discrimination is not supposed to be happening in our workplaces, but it is happening.  Many leftists that are in positions of authority around the nation are using that authority to punish people that voted for Donald Trump.  So if you voted for Trump and your boss didn’t, you might want to keep your political views to yourself at your workplace if you want to keep your job.

And sharing your political opinions on Facebook is not necessarily safe either.  Just ask an elementary school teacher in Collier County, Florida that was just “reassigned” to administrative duties for a pro-Trump Facebook post…

Parkside Elementary School computer lab instructor Veronica Fleming linked to a Chicago Tribune story about the nationwide protest and offered her take on the situation.

“The funny part about immigrants staying home is the rest of us who pay for them are here at work like we’ve always been. Looks like less mouths to feed today. Have fun while you still can. So glad to hear about massive deportation. Let’s make America great again. Thanks Donald Trump!”

Collier County Public Schools spokesman Greg Turchetta told the Naples Daily News Fleming’s post didn’t sit well with parents of students at Parkside Elementary, 96 percent of which are minorities.

Fleming’s post may have been insensitive, but there was nothing illegal about it.

Unfortunately, we live in an environment where a single statement on social media can cost you your entire career.  Almost the exact same thing happened to another teacher who posted a message to Facebook encouraging people to “report illegal aliens”…

A Facebook post attributed to a Prosser teacher voiced support for boycotting Thursday’s A Day Without Immigrants protests and provided information on how to contact the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to “report illegal aliens.”

“They will need to know names, locations (either work place or residence) and any other specific information you can provide,” the post said.

“If this offended you in anyway (sic) do me a favor and unfriend my American ass!!!” the post said.

Reached by phone Friday evening, Prosser Superintendent Ray Tolcacher did not identify the teacher, but confirmed the wording of that post was the same that led to the teacher being placed on administrative leave.

Once again, this post was definitely insensitive, but there was nothing in it that should have caused her employer to take this sort of action.

The last time I checked, coming into the country illegally was against the law.

Sadly, we have become a completely lawless nation, and those that stand up and say something about the lawlessness are now regarded as the bad guys.

In the tech world, things can be particularly brutal for Trump supporters.  For example, the owner of one online marketing company has said that he will no longer do any business with anyone that voted for Trump, and he says that any of his employees that cast a vote for Trump should “leave our firm”…

In one case, Matthew Blanchfield of the New Mexico online marketing company 1st In SEO announced he is canceling all client accounts belonging to Republicans and Trump voters.

“America has elected Donald Trump, a racist, sexist fascist, to be our next president,” Blanchfield wrote in a Nov. 11 letter posted on the company website. “1st In SEO will no longer do business with any person that is a registered Republican or supports Donald Trump. 1st In SEO will also not do business with business interests that support either the Republican Party or Donald Trump. …

“If you are a Republican, voted for Donald Trump or support Donald Trump in any manner, you are not welcome at 1st In SEO, and we ask that you leave our firm.”

Let’s hope that 1st In SEO goes out of business very soon.

But that bitter business owner is certainly far from alone in the tech world.  In a case from Silicon Valley, just casually mentioning that he voted for Trump got one poor guy fired…

Team talking about politics, not paying close attention to why, working as an SWE, one asks who I voted, I said trump without paying attention to why, he got up & called me racist, led to domino effect calling me sexist, anti-semetic, team gathered around screaming, got fired.

In my entire lifetime, I have never seen so much anger and bitterness after an election.

Just look at what happened after Melania Trump recited the Lord’s Prayer at a rally in Florida last weekend.  People went absolutely nuts.  Based on how leftists were reacting, you would have thought that she had just burned the entire place down.

At this point, just about anything that Donald Trump or his family does is wrong in the eyes of his enemies, and they are going to oppose him any way that they can.

Many businesses have already cut ties with the Trumps, and liberal organizations all over American have announced boycotts of his products.  But of course success is one of the best forms of revenge, and a boycott of Ivanka Trump’s perfume was not enough to keep it from surging to the number one position on Amazon…

Ivanka Trump Eau de Parfum Spray For Women ($34 for a 3.4-ounce bottle) was No. 1 on Amazon’s list of bestselling fragrances and perfume for at least the sixth consecutive day. One reviewer wrote: “I normally buy this at Nordstrom. But now that I heard they will not carry it anymore, I was happy to find it on Amazon.” (Radha Beauty Aromatherapy was at No. 2 on Amazon’s list.) The recent success of Ivanka Trump’s perfume on Amazon, particularly after her products were dropped from other stores, suggests the “resistance economy” to boycott products associated with the family of President Trump can help a brand as well as hurt it.

The bottom line to all of this is that we are a deeply, deeply divided country, and many liberals truly believe that they are doing the right thing when they take out their frustrations on Trump supporters.

So if you work in a politically hostile environment or you have a politically hostile boss, you may want to use wisdom about where and when you share your political views.

Of course I am not saying that you should be completely silent about what you believe.  Anyone that follows my work on a regular basis knows that I am extremely opinionated.

It is just that we live in very troubled times, and we need to act with wisdom in all that we do.

Virginia governor vetoes bill to defund Planned Parenthood

Virginia’s Democratic governor on Tuesday vetoed a bill from the GOP-majority state legislature that would have defunded Planned Parenthood.

“It’s time that our General Assembly understands that we have a responsibility to protect the rights and dignity of women,” Gov. Terry McAuliffe said at a press conference.

“Without access to reproductive care and the freedom to exercise choice, women are denied the choice to make deeply personal health decisions.”

(Read the rest of the story here…)

Globalist John McCain declares war on Donald Trump and his tens of millions of supporters

Fresh off of attacking President Trump and his supporters at a globalist security conference in Germany, John McCain is at it again, this time revealing what amounts to a declaration of war against both Trump and his tens of millions of supporters in a wide-ranging interview with the liberal New York Magazine.

The interview laughably starts with transparent nonsense by claiming that the infamous neocon “agonizes” over taking on a president who literally stands directly against everything McCain has worked for his entire political career.

McCain goes on to attack Trump and his supporters in a variety of different ways including the admittedly botched roll-out of the travel ban(thanks Priebus), his speech to the CIA, and supposed views on torture. (Keep in mind Trump has put people in power who have publicly stated that they are against the use of torture)

Shockingly, McCain actually claims that the admitted deep state disinformation concerning the election and Russia is actually more serious than terror attacks that killed dozens of Americans.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

Russian Bank Docs Show How Putin Laundered Money to Hillary & Podesta

Congress may want to examine concrete evidence showing Russian President Vladimir Putin paying Hillary Clinton and John Podesta for a long time before the mainstream media goes even more overboard trying to fabricate a tie between Putin and President Donald Trump.

The money trail hunt begins with a document Infowars has obtained from the Russian Central Bank “Registry of Significant Control,” known generally as the “RSC Registry.”

This document traces the ownership of Metcombank, a relatively small Russian-domiciled bank located in the Russian Ural Mountains, to ownership by Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian billionaire with close ties to Putin.

As we shall see this document provides evidence of the circuitous path the Russian government has been using since Hillary Clinton was secretary of state to make large financial payments to John Podesta and to the Clinton Foundation.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

Lawmakers to Request Probe of $418M Arms Sale to Kenya on Obama’s Last Day

A group of lawmakers is planning to request a congressional investigation of a $418 million U.S. weapons sale to Kenya approved by the Obama administration on its last day in office.

The sale, approved by the State Department and privately notified to Congress on January 19, would allow Kenya to buy 14 weaponized crop-duster-like planes — including two trainer planes and services, for missions against terrorist group al-Shabaab.

The deal was publicly announced the Monday after Trump’s inauguration.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

Congressional Republicans Are Failing To Advance Trump’s Agenda

On February 8, 2017, Matt Drudge tweeted, “No Obamacare repeal, tax cuts!” and “Republican party should be sued for fraud. NO discussion of tax cuts now.” Drudge was spot on.

This week, Sen. Rand Paul (my former boss, it should be pointed out) stormed out of a meeting with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan when he heard talk of keeping Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion intact and creating tax credits. Paul worried these tax credits would be a Republican-created entitlement program.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

‘Allahu Akbar’ Becomes A Rallying Call As Leftists Join Forces With Radical Muslims To Fight Trump All Across America

An “unholy alliance” between anti-Trump leftists and radical Muslims is beginning to emerge all over America.  President Trump’s recent executive order that restricted immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries is bringing a very strange mixture of people out to street protests.  On the one hand you have hardcore Muslims that are chanting “Allahu Akbar” and that believe that Islamic law will someday prevail over the U.S. Constitution, and on the other hand you have radical leftists marching right next to them that are protesting for “women’s rights”, “gay rights” and “civil rights”.  The ironic thing about all of this is that if the radical Muslims have their way, the leftists will either convert to Islam someday or will be completely destroyed.  But for now they need one another, and so a very odd marriage of convenience has taken place.

Later on in this article I want to discuss the very unusual “I Am Muslim Too” protest that just took place in Times Square in New York City, but first I want to talk about what happened when the Nation of Islam held their annual meeting in Detroit over the weekend.  It is being reported that thousands of people in the audience were enthusiastically chanting “Allahu Akbar” as Louis Farrakhan made his way to the stage, and Farrakhan made it abundantly clear to those assembled that he plans to oppose Trump every step of the way…

“I’m here to talk to all of you who are shaking in your boots” over Trump being president, Farrakhan said. Imitating a person who’s worried about Trump, Farrakhan said: “What are we going to do, the president is bad. He’s the president and he don’t like black people. He don’t like Mexicans. He don’t like Muslims.”

Farrakhan then said: “Maybe so. Who cares? We don’t give a damn what he likes or what he doesn’t like.

“Have no fear … the future is ours. Time for the liberation of our people.”

Perhaps it is not much of a surprise for thunderous chants of “Allahu Akbar” to be heard at a Nation of Islam conference, but you definitely wouldn’t expect to hear the same thing in Times Square in New York City.

But that is precisely what happened on Sunday.  According to the Daily Caller, an Islamic call to prayer during the “I Am Muslim Too” protest included the familiar phrase…

Sunday’s anti-Trump rally in New York City featured a Muslim “Allahu Akbar” call to prayer and comparisons between President Trump and Adolf Hitler.

Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons organized the protest meant to declare “Today, I am a Muslim, too,” and protest Trump’s travel ban on some majority-Muslim countries.

Simmons said in an open letter, “My friends, both Muslims and Jews, are saying there are so many comparisons between your rap and Hitler’s, and I cannot disagree with them, Donald.”

This protest attracted a large number of non-Muslim leftists, and when the Muslim call to prayer began the entire crowd became very, very quiet.  If you have not seen footage of this yet, you can find it on YouTube right here…

On the one hand you can understand that they were trying to be respectful, but on the other hand one can’t help but imagine how the leftists would have responded if Christian prayers had started to come through the loudspeakers.

This protest was just the latest example of how the radical left and radical Muslims are coming together for a common purpose even though their worldviews are diametrically opposed to one another.  In Islam, a separation between religion and government in unthinkable, and so ultimately you would think that for leftists radical Islam would be considered to be their worst nightmare.  But instead, many of them embrace radical Islam because they think that it makes them look “tolerant”.  The following comes from Paul Joseph Watson…

The clip shows left-wing protesters in hushed reverence as they listen to the call to prayer in Times Square while some hold up images of artist Shepard Fairey’s design of a woman in an American flag hijab.

“Allahu Akbar” means “God is great” or “Allah is greater” in Arabic, but it’s better known to westerners as a slogan routinely shouted by jihadists as they massacre innocent people during terrorist attacks.

The event included a speech by Linda Sansour, a Muslim activist and Hamas sympathizer who advocates for Sharia law – a brutal Islamist doctrine that completely disenfranchises women.

This is a pattern that we have seen for quite some time now.  A month ago at the inauguration of Trump, some of the protesters were reportedly displaying ISIS flags and beheading videos in an attempt to freak out Trump supporters.

The radical left and radical Islamists are proudly working together right now because they have a common enemy in Donald Trump.

But would the radical left actually want sharia law to be introduced in this country?

Unfortunately, many among the radical left are completely uneducated about Islam and sharia law.  In this very disturbing YouTube video by Mark Dice, a number of leftists actually indicate that they would be in favor of sharia law being implemented even though they appear to have no understanding of what that would actually mean…

When you watch videos like that one, it is easy to wonder what the future of our nation is going to look like with a public that is so incredibly uninformed.

If you ever have any doubts about how evil radical Islam truly is, just sit down and listen to author Brigitte Gabriel for about five minutes.  She goes around the country telling people how radical Islam absolutely destroyed her home country of Lebanon.  Decades ago Lebanon was one of the most peaceful, stable and prosperous nations in the entire Middle East, but then the radical Islamists moved in and turned it into a war-torn hellhole.

And the truth is that this happens wherever the radical Islamists go.  Just look at Sweden.  At one time Sweden had one of the lowest crime rates in Europe, but now rioting and looting are breaking out everywhere and Malmo has become the most dangerous city in all of western Europe.

So the radical left may want to be very careful, because the people that they are cozying up to right now believe that someday they are going to be able to completely destroy our way of life.

MUST SEE: They Did It Again: CNN Shuts Down Interview When Guest Mentions “Fake News”

(By Mac Slavo of SHTFPlan.com) Earlier this month Senator Bernie Sanders joined CNN’s Erin Burnett for an interview and was abruptly cut-off after he made a joke about the network disseminating fake news. CNN and their mainstream media support group immediately went into crisis response mode, issuing statements countering the claims, but the video clearly showed that Sanders lost audio within seconds of making his joke.

In case you missed it, here’s that video:

While CNN denied cutting the Senator off because of the “fake news” comment, it appears that this is a trigger word for the network, especially now that President Trump has cleared up his recent comments calling out anchor Jim Acosta. According to Trump, CNN has now been upgraded (or downgraded?) to “very fake news”.

In the latest fake news CNN controversy we see the network, once again, terminate an interview after the “F word” was mentioned.

Lemon interrupted to shut down Dennard’s use of the term “fake news,” minutes before the show ended.

“Fake news is when you put out a story to intentionally deceive someone and you know that it is wrong,” he said.

“This story that we’re doing right now is not to intentionally deceive anyone. We are simply talking about the cost to keep a president safe,” he continued.

“Please stop it with that stupid talking point, that it is a fake news story. If you don’t want to participate in the news stories on this network, then don’t come on and participate. But don’t call them fake because you don’t agree with them. Go on.”

Dennard insisted that “this is a fake news story,” after which Lemon ended the segment altogether. (The Hill)

 

Now Democrats call Obama’s shadow government ‘The Devil’

This political Gettysburg pits the Democratic Party base against the Obama machine called Organizing for Action, or OFA, the community-organizing army left over from the former president’s election campaigns.

How bitter is the battle?

Two Democratic operatives recently called OFA “The Devil.”

When former President Obama issued a call to arms to his OFA troops in order to protect his legacy, particularly Obamacare, Stephen Handwerk, executive director of the Louisiana Democratic Party, wrote in a private email to fellow party leaders, “This is some GRADE A Bulls–t right here.”

(Read the rest of the story here…)

Reddit Censors Pro-Trump Content in New Crackdown

Reddit is banning the vast majority of pro-Donald Trump posts from appearing on its “most popular” page frequented by new users.

The online discussion site announced it was clamping down on what would appear as “popular” by showing visitors only popular posts from handpicked categories, which would apparently exclude anything from pro-Trump subreddits.

In fact, a graph reveals that Reddit administrators are actively filtering out posts from The_Donald subreddit from appearing in /r/popular; if the filter represented just an algorithm based on what users filtered out themselves, one would expect more posts filtered from r/politics.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

Thousands chant ‘Allahu Akbar’ for Farrakhan in Detroit

During his appearance at Joe Louis Arena, Farrakhan denounced Jews and told them they are not God’s “chosen” people.

“I want to disabuse the Jews today of the false claim that you are the chosen of God — that Israel or Palestine belongs to you,” he said.

“I want to disabuse you of that. I’m going to tell you about your future. You that think you have power to frighten and dominate the peoples of the world. I’m here to announce the end of your time,” Farrakhan said, slamming his hand on the podium.

(Read the rest of the story here…)

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