Nixon and His Nemesis

Friends, this week's Newsmaker Show is a humdinger.  We cover New York's new law granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, as well as the bugaboo of "foreign interference" in U.S. elections.  In addition, historically, Brian and I talk about the origins of the Republican Party, the hopelessness of Japan's situation in the Pacific theater in World War II, the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and the trials and tribulations of Richard Nixon.  Don't miss it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMDPzdEhRbg&feature=youtu.be

The "Sanctuary" Myth

Friends, today I bring you an excellent article on the liberal myths about "sanctuary cities", written by a man who's in the trenches and knows the issue well.  The Left's refusal to enforce our immigration laws, even on dangerous criminals, is frankly an abomination, and a threat to the safety of every American -- and not just Americans, but other illegal immigrants as well!  For Democrats and liberals, the exigencies of ideology override common sense and even self-preservation.  For shame!

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/thomas-homan-ice-illegal-immigrants-border-crisis-sanctuary-cities

Reality Bites, Leftist-Style

Friends, today I bring you some great articles.  The first one is strongly tempting me to write my own article about the issue.  The British, it seems, are banning advertisements than include "harmful gender stereotypes".  This is a gross affront to free speech, of course, but we can also assume that, as always, it will be PC leftists who will decide what's "harmful".  Remember, to them, the notion of racism against whites, or sexism against men, is a non sequitor.  They happily enable hate and discrimination, in fact, when the targets are people they don't like.  We also face the very real possibility that true stereotypes -- like that of the male scientist, or the female nurse -- will become impermissible in Britain, and soon in America too.  There are very real differences in how male and female brains work, mind you, that explain why some of these stereotypes are partly true...which is why the Left may eventually need to ban any acknowledgement of reality itself.  Don't put it past them.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/the-uk-just-banned-harmful-gender-stereotypes-in-advertising/ar-AACSKgm

The next article is a fascinating and very insightful look at the latest bout of irrationality among leftist environmentalists -- their crusade against plastic bags.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-sorry-banning-plastic-bags-wont-save-our-planet/

Finally, this is a great piece about how Democrats plan to win a "demographic victory" over Republicans and conservatives.  A massive surge in the numbers of Latino voters is indeed the preferred liberal recipe for a "permanent majority" in U.S. politics.  It isn't racist to point this out...and it isn't racist to question the political desirability of a demographic transformation either.

https://townhall.com/columnists/scottmorefield/2019/06/17/democrats-weaponize-race-and-immigration-in-their-quest-for-a-permanent-democratic-majority-n2548307

It's Not That I Want To Make The F-35 Angry, You Understand...

Friends, no one loves the U.S. military more than I do, but while it excels in almost every sphere, let's be honest -- value for money isn't its strong suit.  My latest article is about the House Democrats' recent decision to purchase more F-35 fighters in the coming budget year than the Pentagon requested.  Think about that.  We're spending $750 billion/year on defense, and the Democrats believe it's a good idea to buy some spare stealth fighters.  You know -- for a rainy day.  And they pair decisions like these with endless sanctimonious lectures on fiscal prudence!  Now that takes moxie, doesn't it?

https://townhall.com/columnists/nicholaswaddy/2019/06/13/democrats-love-the-f35-almost-as-much-as-they-love-hypocrisy-n2548182

And here are two very provocative articles on what might happen in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.  One concerns how the Democrats might seek to subvert an electoral college loss by manipulating the electors themselves.  The other concerns how conservatives might "resist" if the Democrats win in 2020.  Frankly, I find it mostly fanciful, since conservatives would never be allowed to behave in the lawless way that liberals now do, and conservatives wouldn't likely be inclined to "resistance" anyway, given their fondness for order and discipline.  My prediction, should the Dems win in 2020, would be not a successful conservative resistance movement, but the Left's exploitation of fears of a "right-wing revolution" to enforce even stricter liberal control over our lives.  But let's hope we never have to find out.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/13/stealing-the-2020-election-how-it-could-happen/

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/13/a-conservative-resistance/

The Age of Rage

Friends, today I bring you two thought-provoking articles, courtesy of American Greatness.  The first deals with the question of why American and Western voters more generally are so angry these days, and why they seem to be turning against the elites.  I agree with almost everything Hanson says, BUT I also find the degree of rage and self-pity among voters puzzling, in the sense that, objectively and materially, middle class Western peoples have frankly never had it so good.  Incomes are up, the cost of many consumer goods is down, we have close to full employment, the social safety net is relatively generous, and crime is low, by the standards of recent decades.  These are factors that Hanson doesn't consider.  My take?  Yes, we have plenty of reasons to be dissatisfied with our elites, but we don't have much reason at all to be angry and deeply unhappy with our lives.  But perception is everything, and facts count for little.  The people who tell us what to think clearly benefit from cultivating extreme emotional responses in their audience, and boy do they seem to have elevated that to a fine art!!!

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/12/why-are-the-western-middle-classes-so-angry/

The second article is about impeachment, and again I agree with almost all of it.  Impeachment would be a travesty and an albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party and the Left.  I beg to differ with Mr. Bardmesser is one critical respect, though.  He says that the result of an impeachment vote in the full House is a foregone conclusion.  I'm not so sure.  I believe that many swing district Democrats would hesitate to vote to impeach the President.  Granted, they might, simply to appease their liberal base, but they would risk angering moderate and independent voters in the process, and how can they win reelection without those votes?  I believe there won't, in fact, be an official impeachment inquiry, at least not one that ever leaves the House Judiciary Committee, because the Democratic leadership doesn't want to take the risks I've just outlined.  And remember -- if and when John Durham starts charging Democrats and liberals with crimes related to the Trump-Russia hoax, any impeachment inquiry against Trump will have to compete for the public's attention with trials of prominent left-wing figures.  If I were the Dems, I would investigate Trump like crazy, and I might talk about impeachment, but I wouldn't actually try it.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/12/impeachment-is-the-greatest-campaign-strategy-for-trump/

The Gipper Gives It To Gorby Good!

Friends, this week's Newsmaker Show  is a tour de force (as usual).  Brian and I cover President Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech in Berlin in 1987, Germany's Blitzkrieg campaign against France in 1940, the legacy of George H.W. Bush, plus the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1994-95. In terms of current events, we talk about John Dean's anticlimactic appearance before the House Judiciary Committee -- to bash Trump, of course -- and the struggles of the Biden campaign.  We also discuss AOC's plans to run for the U.S. Senate.  Don't miss it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTxWzmzouDc&feature=youtu.be

Has Uncle Joe Lost His Way?

Friends, my latest article considers the travails of the Biden campaign, which seems to be foundering on the rocks of left-wing extremism and intolerance.  See if you agree...

Joe Biden: The Bloom is Off the Rose

Poor Sleepy Joe. He just can't catch a break. 

Recently he abandoned his decades-long support of the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortions, in favor of a more fashionably pro-choice, anti-baby stance. A no-brainer, right? Throw some red meat to the left-wing party faithful and reap the inevitable rewards...

Only this time it didn't work. Once the grassroots got a taste of Biden's red meat, they promptly bit the hand that fed them. They rejected Biden's progressive overture as inauthentic, and they questioned why he hadn't been 100% pro-abortion all along.

Biden's problem is two-fold. First, he's essentially a moderate, and he's undeniably an elderly white male. The Democratic Party of 2019 doesn't cotton to any of these descriptors. Moderates are now castigated on the Left as sellouts, as enablers of corporate greed, reactionary social policies, and possibly even Trumpism. To the left-wing zealots, a moderate is someone who doesn't automatically spit in the face of all Trump voters, gun owners, churchgoers, and other “deplorables” — and to fail to despise these villains with sufficient fervor is to be complicit in their (imagined) crimes. 

 

Modern leftists demand total and unthinking submission to progressive values and to the left-wing agenda, along with the ostracism of all dissenters. Even under the best of circumstances, an elderly white male would be a contemptible figure to this crowd, but, if he fails to check every box in terms of ideology, he is most assuredly doomed.

Although Biden can't become any less old or white, he could theoretically become less male. That would be a start, in leftist eyes, but we can safely assume that Biden, at age 76, is too set in his ways to take the leap into transgenderism. 

That leaves only one alternative: in lieu of changing his identity, Biden must ditch at least a portion of his moderation. By migrating to the left, he can theoretically appease the Sanders-Warren wing of his party and rally more progressives to his side. But it's not so easy.

Not only do today's left-wingers demand total conformity with their radical views and agenda — they are also relentlessly historically-minded. That is to say, they consider it good sport to rifle through a person's past statements, past relationships, or past political positions and decisions, to try to root out any deviation from current progressive standards. This is why statues are being toppled willy-nilly on college campuses and in city parks across the nation — liberals can't abide the celebration, or even the normalization, of anyone who doesn't tow the line politically (the whole line, mind you). Being dead for centuries is no excuse. In Biden's case, being nearly dead elicits no sympathy either.

Simply put, liberals are out for blood, and even an act of abject submission or contrition, performed under duress or too late in the day, is liable to be rebuffed. Mercy is simply not a virtue that left-wingers recognize. This makes it hard for the Bidens of this world to migrate leftwards, when liberals are apt to see this as mere pandering and as a sign of weakness. Their haughty, dismissive reaction to Biden's abandonment of the Hyde Amendment proves as much. “Too little, too late” is their refrain.

So what is the lesson here for Biden? It may be that 2020 is just not his year. Biden was a useful source of legitimation and avuncular affection for the progressive superhero, Barack Obama, but those days are in the past. Biden's relevance in the age of #MeToo-ism, identity politics, intersectionality, gender fluidity, and “democratic socialism” is highly questionable. 

Biden's easiest path to the Democratic nomination was always along the lines of a coronation. By simply grinning away and becoming a somewhat more pallid, skeletal version of his old, charming self, while the progressive wing of the Democratic Party formed a circular firing squad and destroyed itself, Biden might have walked into the Democratic convention relatively unscathed and as the nominee by acclimation. The latest polls in Iowa, however, indicate that Biden's appeal is already waning, and the hard-left is gaining on him. And this is before any of the other two dozen candidates for the Democratic nomination have even fired a broadside in Biden's direction. No, if Biden can't keep his head above water even in this, the friendliest and mildest stage of the nominating contest, he won't do well at all in the no-holds-barred phase that is sure to come.

Poor Sleepy Joe. He just can't catch a break. He missed the presidential boat in 1988 and in 2008, and he seems destined to miss it again, and for the last time, in 2020.

Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears weekly on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480.

And here's the American Greatness version:

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/17/the-bloom-is-off-joe-bidens-rose/ 

On the Left, Socialism is the New Capitalism (and Sometimes It Can Be Hard to Tell the Difference)

Friends, as always, Margaret Thatcher shows us the way.  She understood the power of free markets, and the stultification of socialism and central planning.  The Left, however, is not incapable of subtlety.  Sometimes they present their essentially statist, socialist agenda in competitive, capitalist terms.  In other words, they make room for private enterprise...so long as the government and an omniscient bureaucracy get to make all the key decisions.

Check out my latest article, which showcases an example of how the Left uses capitalist rhetoric to advance their own narrow, and fundamentally anti-capitalist, agenda.  Oh, and they aren't averse to making a few bucks along the way either.  That needn't surprise you -- there was never a more stratified, acquisitive society than that of Stalinist Russia!

https://townhall.com/columnists/nicholaswaddy/2019/06/09/forget-big-oil-and-big-tech--now-liberals-are-going-afterbig-paper-n2547806

And once you've admired that gem of wisdom, please read this article too.  It's an excellent analysis of the grossly irresponsible claims made by Democrats (like Stacey Abrams) that Republicans are "stealing" elections.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/stacey-abrams-stolen-election-myth-endures-democratic-party/

How A Virtual Leftist Mob Came to Dominate Social Media

Friends, you've just got to read this article, which exposes the slapdash, biased manner in which the tech titans are policing free speech.  The same rank intolerance that governs academia is increasingly prevailing in social media as well.  Conservatives should be more than outraged -- they should be petrified, because when we lose our ability to share ideas, we lose any hope of competing with the Left for both political and cultural power.  The stakes could not be higher!

https://spectator.us/steven-crowder-carlos-maza-playground/

1989: It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

Friends, don't miss this week's Newsmaker Show with me and Brian O'Neil.  There's a bumper crop of historical analysis, including the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the legacy of President Ronald Reagan, the D-Day landings in Normandy, the Six Day War in the Middle East, the ending of the gold standard in the U.S. in 1933, China's role in WWII, and the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations by China's PLA.  In terms of current events, we cover President Trump's highly successful visit to the United Kingdom, and the Left's attempts to disrupt and discredit it.  We also explore liberals' tendency to see themselves as intellectually superior.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLIB2gI3b2Y&feature=youtu.be