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Thursday, November 1,2018
All Gave Some~Some Gave All
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Armed Migrants in Caravan Opened Fire on Mexican Cops, Say Authorities
AP30 Oct 2018
Mexican authorities arrested two Hondurans who allegedly shot at federal police officers escorting the migrant caravan across the southern state of Chiapas. The attack follows shortly after government warnings about Molotov cocktail attacks around a second caravan near the border with Guatemala.
The attack took place near Ignacio Zaragoza, Chiapas, when members of Mexico’s Federal Police were escorting the migrant caravan as part of “Operativo Caminante” or “Operation Walker” across the southern border state. According to Mexico’s Interior Secretariat, two men identified only as 22-year-old “Jerson” and 17-year-old “Carlos” spotted the group of police officers guarding the caravan and began firing at them.
The attackers’ pistol jammed, allowing police officers to arrest them without any injuries. Federal authorities seized a .380 caliber Glock with nine rounds still in the magazine.
The attack came soon after Mexican authorities issued a warning about migrants in Guatemala who were preparing Molotov cocktails and acquiring firearms to use against police officers in their attempts to break through the border to Mexico. Over the weekend, several clashes occurred where migrants threw rocks and used various makeshift weapons against border security forces.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at Iortiz@breitbart.com.
Brandon Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and Stephen K. Bannon. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.
MSNBC Complains Pro-Life Ted Cruz is Beating Pro-Abortion Beto O’Rourke Despite Lavish Media Attention
On his 3:00 p.m. ET hour show on Monday, MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi eagerly touted the “real possibility” that Texas Democratic Congressman Beto O’Rourke “could win a shocking upset next Tuesday” against incumbent Republican Senator Ted Cruz. However, in the segment that followed, the host worried that all the “national attention” O’Rourke was receiving from the media wasn’t translating into votes.
“O’Rourke has received a lot of national attention because of his charismatic campaign style. But it’s not clear if that national charisma can translate into Texas votes,” Velshi fretted. He then acknowledge the Democrat consistently running behind Cruz: “The latest Real Clear Politics average shows Cruz up by nearly seven points and a source with knowledge of the Cruz campaign’s internal polling tells NBC News the Senator’s lead is in the low double digits.”
Reporting live from a just-ended O’Rourke campaign event in Lubbok, Texas, correspondent Garrett Haake admitted that it was “one of the reddest parts of the state,” but gushed over how students at nearby Texas Tech were “fired up about Beto O’Rourke” and “screaming at the top of their lungs for the Congressman from El Paso” in the rally that had just concluded.
Despite all the excitement, Haake joined in Velshi’s concern that it wouldn’t be enough come Election Day: “It is the Beto Paradox. There is all this energy around this candidate, he is raising a ton of money, but when we see the polls, it doesn’t translate.”
After playing a clip of O’Rourke dismissing the polls showing him losing and playing up the early vote totals, Haake pointed out that most early voters in the state were Republicans:
And, Ali, he’s not wrong about the early vote, it really has been extraordinary in Texas. More than three million Texans have already cast their ballots….It’s a huge, huge number of these early votes. Now, that being said, the majority of those votes being passed are being cast by Republicans.
The reporter then parroted spin from the O’Rourke campaign that many GOP voters may have actually cast ballots in support of the Democratic candidate:
The reporter then parroted spin from the O’Rourke campaign that many GOP voters may have actually cast ballots in support of the Democratic candidate:
What people around Texas will tell you, and what Beto supporters will tell you, is there are a lot of Republicans in their midst. Folks who, for a long time, maybe identified themselves with George Bush or with Rick Perry or with Mitt Romney, but who don’t see themselves in Donald Trump’s Republican party and who are willing to vote for Beto.
Wrapping up his report, Haake announced: “So all of that is a long way of saying we are still trying to solve this puzzle of how that energy will translate into votes. And we’re going to be watching this one right down to the wire, Ali.”
Velshi agreed: “Yeah, I suspect we will be a week and a day from now still trying to solve that puzzle. But we have you there trying to give us clues, so thank you, Garrett.”
When a Democrat is predictably losing in a red state, MSNBC treats it as a “paradox” or “puzzle” that must be solved. Perhaps Texas voters simply think a radically pro-abortion, anti-gun politician doesn’t reflect their values.
LifeNews.com Note: Kyle Drennen is an MRC News Analyst and a graduate of Providence College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Political Science. This was originally posted on the Media Research Center blog NewsBusters.
Watching ‘Gosnell’ Shattered My Agnosticism On Abortion
Watching ‘Gosnell’ Shattered My Agnosticism On Abortion
The new movie reminds us that we need moral courage when dealing with the harsh realities of abortion and that the question of when life begins remains unsettled for many Americans.
By Adam Mill
By Adam Mill
If you haven’t seen the movie “Gosnell,” it is required viewing for Americans like me who avoided the abortion issue because I lacked the moral courage to really think about it and form my own opinion. The movie works very hard to avoid smothering an important philosophical question with scenes of gore. In fact, it depicts real and nuanced questions that go well beyond our abortion debate that seems stuck in impasse.
“Gosnell” is not about an abortion doctor committing “murder” by aborting fetuses––the movie is about a doctor killing delivered babies who breathe, move, and sometimes even cry before abortionist Kermit Gosnell used a pair of scissors to “snip” their spinal cord. Be outraged and shocked by that. But hold your outrage long enough to confront how Gosnell defends his actions, because that’s the real crux of the issue.
The Horrifying Truth of the Gosnell Case
Gosnell had assistants prepare his patients by inducing labor. Sometimes he would arrive too late to complete the abortion before the fetus became a living, breathing, crying baby. The government charged him with murder because he nevertheless “completed” his procedures on such babies.
Gosnell’s defense at trial was to point to the arbitrary legal line between what he did and what the law sanctioned. His attorney argued that even if he had followed proper procedures in a sterile clinic using the most advanced medical equipment to terminate pregnancies, the fundamental moral character of what he was doing wouldn’t change.
Although Gosnell’s technique sometimes resulted in birthing the child before terminating it, he argued that, from a medical point of view, it’s sometimes more dangerous to the woman to do the procedure while the child is still inside the woman. So, to Gosnell’s way of thinking, birthing the baby sometimes improves abortion’s health outcome for the mother.
You might now be tempted to stop reading this as you retreat into a pre-formed position on abortion. Don’t. This is the moral no-man’s land that hasn’t been rationally discussed since the political screaming started in the early 1970s, during the oral arguments for Roe v. Wade. At the end of Gosnell’s procedure, he considers it a success if the woman is no longer pregnant and there is no baby. Is it really murder outside the womb, but legal when a doctor completes the procedure inside?
Tell yourself what you need to hear, Gosnell might say. He assumes correctly that most of us lack the moral courage to hold him accountable. Inside the womb, the procedure is legal so long as the fetus has not advanced to an arbitrary stage of development. So who decides if a fetus is too advanced to abort? “I do,” Gosnell responded.
Is that the right answer? Should an individual doctor be drawing the critical line between legal abortion and murder? Is this moral question better settled in the Supreme Court? Surely it’s not up to non-doctors and non-judges to intervene on the question of if and when the termination of a pregnancy crosses the line from helping a woman with an unwanted pregnancy into murder.
After seeing Gosnell sneer at the line, I see the urgency of public participation in the question. If it is left up to the advocates for unfettered abortion rights, would there be any line at all?
Recently, we’ve heard people speaking out against political violence with assurance that the ballot box is the proper place to resolve our great conflicts in the United States. Yet the Roe v. Wade decision seems to have permanently excluded abortion from the normal political process in which moral judgments can be debated, tested, and evolved according to the state of medical science and public morality. This is, in part, why the Kavanaugh confirmation process was so ugly.
Impulses to influence the debate manifest in such detestable ways in the absence of a democratic process. Are we satisfied with the outcome when judges establish an immutable moral distinction between abortion and murder? If you answered “Yes,” I ask that you watch the movie to listen to how Gosnell drew that line.
What Counts as Murder In Our Legal System?
Civilization has wrestled with the question of defining murder since the beginning. Is physician-assisted suicide murder? Is it murder to withhold care at a nursing home? When can murder be excused based on insanity or mental incompetence, as we have termed it? What about self-defense? What about failing to warn or assist another who is in danger?
The nuances of the exceptions and exclusions to murder laws are resolved in the legislatures of our 50 states by elected representatives after taking input from scientists, doctors, clergy, and stakeholders within the community. Unfortunately, “Gosnell” shattered my sheltered agnosticism over abortion. When the sounds of crying baby can be heard in an abortion clinic, I am forced to admit that abortion stalks the edges of the definition of murder.
Where will the line between abortion and murder be drawn if we leave it to bumper stickers and profit-seeking doctors like Gosnell to draw that line? We employ representative democracy to pass the laws that define what is murder, and we have an urgent responsibility to participate in the same process to define what is not.
As noted by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her dissent in Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health, Inc., the original rationale for Roe v. Wade rested upon the state of medical science at the time of the decision. Modern science, she opined, has made the trimester or “three-stage” approach the court adopted in Roe a “completely unworkable method of accommodating the conflicting personal rights and compelling state interests that are involved in the abortion context.”
O’Connor further noted that improvements in the safety of later-term abortions, combined with advancements in the care of premature babies, have “blurred” the bright moral line originally set forth in Roe. The moral question of abortion, she wrote, requires that the state “continuously and conscientiously study contemporary medical and scientific literature in order” to maintain the balance between the woman’s interests in choice and the state’s interest in protecting life.
The court, she reasoned, was not the right place to be constantly re-calibrating this balance when it lacks “the resources available to those bodies entrusted with making legislative choices,” nor is the Supreme Court, “competent to make these inquiries and to revise these standards every time the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) or similar group revises its views about what is and what is not appropriate medical procedure in this area.”
O’Connor further noted, “Medical technology is changing, and this change will necessitate [the Supreme Court’s] continued functioning as the Nation’s ex officio medical board, with powers to approve or disapprove medical and operative practices and standards throughout the United States.”
The Abortion Debate Has Been Unable To Evolve
The biggest problem with the abortion debate is that it stopped being a debate a long time ago. If abortion is to be legal in any form, Americans must know that the line separating abortion from murder is in the right place and is being vigorously policed. As O’Connor pointed out, a 46-year-old decision by now-dead justices is the wrong way to draw a line that should have evolved with the state of science and public morality.
So again, who decides if a fetus is too advanced to abort? A nurse in Gosnell’s clinic reported feeling a newborn tug on her finger before the doctor “completed” the procedure. We can and should agree that abortionists should not be making that distinction, and that there has to be a line.
No matter how zealous an advocate for reproductive rights you might be, you have to agree on a line. The line needs to be established according to the best science and moral judgments as expressed by the great engine of compromise of our democracy.
It’s time to set aside Roe and return the question to the moral accountability of the democratic process. Abortion rights advocates should refrain from refusing to acknowledge or accommodate any discussion or update to this line, because Gosnell proved one thing beyond refutation: at some point it’s not abortion, it’s murder.
Adam Mill works in Kansas City, Missouri as an attorney specializing in labor and employment and public administration law. He frequently posts to millstreetgazette.blogspot.com. Adam graduated from the University of Kansas and has been admitted to practice in Kansas and Missouri.
There she goes again. Pocahontas Warren may have violated ethics laws by fundraising off her opposition to Kavanaugh
Adam Mill works in Kansas City, Missouri as an attorney specializing in labor and employment and public administration law. He frequently posts to millstreetgazette.blogspot.com. Adam graduated from the University of Kansas and has been admitted to practice in Kansas and Missouri.
There she goes again. Pocahontas Warren may have violated ethics laws by fundraising off her opposition to Kavanaugh
by Ben Baird
Not only did Senate Democrats attempt to destroy a qualified Supreme Court candidate by dredging up bogus allegations of sexual assault, but at least two prominent Democrats sought to cash in on the political circus.
Sens. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) face allegations of vote-buying after sending out fundraising emails asking for donations to support their upcoming votes against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Hot water
The Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT) has asked the Senate ethics committee to investigate these emails to determine if Harris and Warren ran afoul of Senate Ethics rules prohibiting the promise of political action in exchange for donations. Although it is perfectly legal to solicit for donations which are tied to political causes, FACT, a government watchdog, insists that asking for contributions quid pro quo is not permitted.
“This is a clear violation of the Senate Ethics rules which safeguard against the appearance or actuality of elected officials ‘cashing in’ on their official position for political purposes,” said Kendra Arnold, executive director of FACT.
Warren, whose ancestral claims have been the subject of social media satire since she claimed minority status at Harvard Law School, sent out an email saying she would attempt to delay Kavanaugh’s nomination. However, she may have erred by asking for campaign contributions to support her 2018 re-election bid in the same email.
Like her colleague from New England, Harris also asked for funds while promising to fight the president’s pick for the high court. She detailed her role as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and reminded her constituents of her opposition to the Supreme Court nominee.
Rotten to the core
Warren has called the Trump administration the most “nakedly corrupt” in U.S. history and has called the dismal state of Washington politics “a crisis of faith.” The Democratic senator introduced anti-corruption legislation in August that was meant to reform government lobbying and force lawmakers to divest their business interests before entering office.
Warren admitted that the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act which bears her name would force legislators to change their ways — “including me,” she admitted.
“Our country has responded to deep corruption with bold action before,” she told reporters at the time, although no one from the media could have guessed that she was potentially talking about her own lawlessness.
Warren’s anti-corruption legislation never really stood a chance of succeeding, and even Warren acknowledged that members of her own party might be opposed to her extreme measures. However, Warren was likely just padding her resumé ahead of a 2020 presidential bid.
Slanted language
Harris, too, is eyeing the presidency and is expected to throw her hat in the ring with a growing crowd of Democratic candidates. However, Harris has her own history of barely legal corruption during her term as California’s attorney general.
For instance, when tasked with summarizing ballot measures, Harris’s office used heavily biased language to unduly influence Californians and convince them to vote a certain way. “Were she chief counsel for a corporation that behaved this horribly, Kamala Harris would be pilloried, and correctly so,” wrote CalWatchdog’s Chris Reed.
Whether Warren and Harris are punished for violating campaign finance laws is yet to be seen.
The New York Times Botches America’s History With The Gun
You can oppose the Second Amendment if you like, but you can’t rewrite history.
By David Harsanyi
The New York Times Botches America’s History With The Gun You can oppose the Second Amendment if you like, but you can’t rewrite history.
By David Harsanyi
Over the past 50 years, a wide-ranging, well-funded political, cultural, and legal revisionism effort has been undertaken to erase much of the United States’ history and culture of the gun and the Second Amendment. The New York Times’s Nick Kristof’s recent column, “It’s Time To Talk About The NRA” (because no one’s been talking about them!) is a good example of this trend.
I’ll ignore Kristof’s partisan contentions about firearm violence, gun control, and the National Rifle Association’s lobbying, fundraising and scoring—much of it highly debatable—to point out three of the misleading historical assertions he embraces.
First, Kristof makes the claim that contemporary firearm advocates, in an effort to “reinterpret” the Second Amendment, had “expanded the gun-buying constituency by reframing the purpose of firearms from hunting to personal security.” As even a cursory reading of the Founders and American leaders through the 19th century can attest, this is untrue.
The predominant philosophical concern driving the creation of the Second Amendment was protection from domestic or foreign tyranny, or protection of personal property and life. As John Adams explained (quoting legal authority William Blackstone) when defending a British soldier who had fired into an American mob in 1770, self-defense was “the primary canon in the law of nature.”
In my book “First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History with the Gun,” I detail how this ideal was widely embraced by the Founding generation. The right to defend your property, life and liberty girds the entire American project. Not a single Founder ever challenged the notion of individual firearm ownership. Most celebrated it. Individual ownership of firearms was so omnipresent in colonial days—and beyond—that Americans saw no more need to debate its existence. Debates over the Second Amendment involved a disagreement over who should control the militia: state or federal government.
Second, the idea that “Gun control laws were ubiquitous” in the 19th century is the work of politically motivated historians who cobble together every minor local restriction they can find in an attempt to create the impression that gun control was the norm. If this were true, Kristof wouldn’t need to jump to 1879 to offer his first specific case.
Visitors to Wichita, Kan., had to check their revolvers at police headquarters. As for Dodge City, a symbol of the Wild West, a photo shows a sign on main street in 1879 warning: “The Carrying of Fire Arms Strictly Prohibited.”
This talking point has been trotted out for years because it’s the closest thing anyone can find to resemble gun control in the Old West — a picture. But we don’t even know how rigidly the law was enforced, for how long, or if ever. We certainly don’t know that the guns were dropped off at “police headquarters.”
Dodge City-type ordinances—and those of some other towns—typically applied to the areas north of the “deadline,” which was the railroad tracks and a kind of red-light district. By 1879, Dodge City had nearly 20 businesses licensed to sell liquor and many whorehouses teeming with intoxicated young men. It was reasonable that these businesses wouldn’t want armed men with revolvers packed into their establishments.
However, the men voluntarily abandoned their weapons in exchange for entertainment and drink—just as they do today when entering establishments that prohibit the carrying of firearms. Those weapons were handed back to them when they were done. Not in their wildest imaginations would they have entertained the notion of asking the government for permission—getting a license or undergoing a background check—to own a firearm.
In the rest of the city, as with almost every city in the West, guns were allowed, and people walked around with them freely and openly. They bought them freely and openly. Even children could buy them. A man could buy a Colt or Remington or Winchester, and he could buy as many as he liked without anyone taking notice.
The fact is that in the 19th century there were no statewide or territory-wide gun control laws for citizens, and certainly no federal laws. Nor was there a single case challenging the idea of the individual right of gun ownership. Guns were romanticized in the literature and art, and the era’s greatest engineers designed and sold them. All the while, American leaders continued to praise the Second Amendment as a bulwark against tyranny.
Those who praised this right, incidentally, include numerous post-Civil War civil rights activists, who offered particularly powerful arguments for the importance of the Second Amendment. Most gun-control regulations that did exist, after all, were used for subjugating blacks and Indians.
From the Old West, we jump to the 20th century, about which Kristof says:
In the 1920s and 1930s, the N.R.A. favored tighter gun laws, and its president, Karl Frederick, said that the carrying of weapons ‘should be sharply restricted and only under license.’ In 1934, the United States helped pioneer modern gun laws with the National Firearms Act, with the blessings of the N.R.A., and came close to banning handguns. As recently as the 1960s, the N.R.A. supported — more grudgingly — some limits on guns.
The United States never came close, or even entertained, the idea of banning “all handguns.” I have no idea what Kristof is referring to, since he offers no citation for this claim. The National Firearms Act of 1934, of course, didn’t ban any specific category of gun. The National Firearms Act of 1938 didn’t ban any specific gun, either. In fact, the NRA—still a hobbyist group at the time—only supported the legislation, which allowed for regulating shotguns’ barrel length and instituted a tax on some fully automatic weapons, when Congress dropped a proposal to create a registry of fingerprints.
The first time any kind of gun ban was instituted regarding a category of weapon occurred in 1986, when the sale of fully automatic weapons was highly restricted.
The story of the NRA’s dramatic radicalization by a minority is another favorite yarn of anti-Second Amendment advocates—a misleading half-truth that is also largely irrelevant. It’s true that the NRA was not predominantly political, since there was no need for such an organization in a nation where no one had seriously attempted to inhibit the ability of law-abiding citizens to own guns.
By the time the Gun Control Act of 1968 was proposed—a law that established a system for federally licensed gun dealers and set some restrictions on certain classes of firearms—the NRA was more involved. It successfully opposed the most invasive elements of that legislation: namely, a mandated federal registry for guns and licensing for all gun carriers. That’s the kind of legislation gun control advocates want today.
It was after this time that a slew of regulations were enacted that made it increasingly difficult for law-abiding people in crime-ridden urban areas to own a gun. The NRA went through an internal debate about its future. When in 1971 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms shot and paralyzed longtime NRA member Kenyon Ballew in a Washington suburb—it claimed Ballew was suspected of possessing illegal weapons (none were found)—many co-members saw it as a portent that government agencies would abuse gun control laws to target peaceful Americans.
So the organization had to make a choice. It could remain a predominately hunting, marksmanship, and safety group, or it could embrace the growing activist wing and push back against emerging regulations. By the mid-1970s it seemed as if the organization had made that choice when it ejected around 70 of the most vociferous gun rights advocates. In 1976 the NRA board decided to move the organization headquarters from Washington to Colorado.
At the 1977 NRA convention in Cincinnati, there was something of a coup as the politically minded advocates wrested the organization away from the apolitical wing. Many of today’s gun control advocates like to point to the “Cincinnati revolt” as the moment when a small group of radicals took over the movement, undermining true gun owners, who weren’t interested in politics. But the shift was merely a reflection of a growing inclination among gun owners at the time to protect themselves.
The NRA was best-positioned organization to take the lead on gun issues. If the NRA didn’t do it, there would have been another advocacy group—and many emerged during these years—that would have taken its place. The fact that the NRA hadn’t initially involved itself in politics didn’t mean most gun owners disagreed with its new positioning or that it had reinvented or tried to re-engineer the Second Amendment. Hardly. From the time of the 1977 “revolt” to 1983, in fact, the NRA more than doubled its membership. And membership rose even further in the subsequent years.
You can oppose the Second Amendment if you like. You can demonize the NRA if you want. But you can’t rewrite history to comport with your political positions.
David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of the new book, First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Follow him on Twitter.
Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Reagan, and Trump — All American Nationalists
Hulton Archive,Remember the media-stoked controversy over Donald Trump declaring that he was a “nationalist”? Sample headline in USA Today: “‘I am a nationalist’: Trump’s embrace of controversial label sparks uproar.” That uproar might seem hard to recall now, because it was all the way back on … October 23.It was the day before the October 24 uproar about the steroid-crazed male stripper who sent unexploded—and apparently unexplodable—bombs to various Democratic offices. And it was also before the horrendous tragedy in Pittsburgh on October 27, when an anti-Semitic psycho shot and killed 11 worshipers at a synagogue.
It might seem challenging to put a larger political spin on the lonely acts of kooks and evildoers, but the establishment media is up to the challenge—especially if it involves dinging Donald Trump. Indeed, the media’s latest storyline is that Trump’s “violent rhetoric” is to blame. Here, for example, is a headline from The Guardian: “Donald Trump’s rhetoric has stoked antisemitism and hatred, experts warn.” (You know that the media really means to make a point when they cite “experts.”)
In the face of such a determined media onslaught, the thoughtful words of the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, went almost unheard. Speaking on the scene of the Pittsburgh massacre, Dermer told CNN, “I have never seen a stronger statement” than the one that President Trump issued in the wake of the shooting. This only makes sense: After all, Trump’s daughter Ivanka is Jewish, along with his son-in-law, and three of this grandchildren. But since he was so “off message,” you can bet that CNN won’t be inviting him back anytime soon.
Still, even if the “nationalism” controversy is two controversies ago, it’s not going to go away. It’ll linger as a media talking point, and, who knows, perhaps it will become one more article of impeachment next year if the Democrats win back the U.S. House of Representatives on November 6.
So it’s worth pausing over this word, “nationalism,” to see why it puts the left in such a tizzy.
We can start with CNN’s tremendously Trump-hating “reporter,” Jim Acosta, who declared on October 23 that the President was using “nationalism” as a way of “dog whistling” to “white nationalists.” And that night, Acosta’s CNN colleague, Don Lemon, was quick to agree; as he said, the word is “loaded with nativist and racial undertones.”
Interestingly, that same day, October 23, NBC’s Peter Alexander used almost the exact same language as Lemon; Alexander accused Trump of using a word redolent with “undertones that are not just racial but xenophobic.” (You know, the similarity in their words is almost enough to make Virgil think that Lemon and Alexander were reading from the same talking points!)
Then there was The San Diego Union-Tribune, which printed a cartoon showing Trump getting a Sieg Heil salute.
As for establishment media-style Deep Analysis of the nationalism question, we might turn to Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post’s comically anti-conservative “conservative,” who opined of three possible explanations for Trump’s use of the word. The first explanation, she wrote, “has us believe that Trump is an empty-headed dolt who has no idea what he is saying.” The second, she added: “Trump supposedly is smart enough to know what ‘nationalist’ means, but he is falsely associating himself with the term.” And third, “He knows exactly what it means, his base knows exactly what he means and he knows the strongest bond with followers is xenophobia. Immigration and bogus issues such as the caravan are his go-to topics when he needs to juice up his followers.” Okay, got that? If we are to believe Rubin, we have a choice: Trump is a dope, a liar, or a Nazi-ish true believer. And let’s remember: Rubin is the Post’s idea of a conservative; the Post’s liberalswere even rougher.
For his part, Trump has been saying nationalistic-sounding things for years, even decades. For instance, way back on September 2, 1987, he took out full-page ads in three newspapers to criticize foreign economic relationships that were unfair to the U.S. (If that’s not consistency, what is?)
And of course, since then, Trump has made the same nationalist points a million times; as he said during the 2016 presidential campaign, “Americanism, not globalism, will be our credo.” And what was the shorthand for his campaign? Oh yeah, Make America Great Again.
So if Trump actually used the word “nationalism” for the first time on October 23, it wasn’t as if his nationalist, patriotic, pro-American sentiments had somehow been hidden. What’s really weird is that the media likes to pretend that all of a sudden “nationalism” is a big deal.
Come to think of it, what’s wrong with “nationalism,” anyway? The word wasn’t in common use in the 18th century, when George Washington was alive, and yet the patriotism of the Father of our Country was on constant display. In fact, he even found occasion to celebrate America’s victory in the Revolutionary War—with a toast to the new nation. As he proclaimed in his General Orders of April 18, 1783, “An extra ration of liquor to be issued to every man tomorrow, to drink Perpetual Peace, Independence & Happiness to the United States of America.”
George Washington in October 1789, declining to accept terms, after the siege of Yorktown, from British General Charles Cornwallis (left), whose subsequent surrender ended the American War of Independence. (Three Lions/Getty Images)
Indeed, just two years ago, Edward J. Larson, a law professor at Pepperdine University, released a book—published by the University of Virginia Press, not exactly a right-wing outfit—entitled, George Washington, Nationalist.
In the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln never hesitated to link himself to the core articles of Americanism: “Let us readopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it the practices and policy which harmonize with it,” he said in 1856.
Five years later, in his first Inaugural Address, Lincoln launched into an ode to this country that still brings a tear to the eye: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Abraham Lincoln’s first inauguration, at the still unfinished U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on March 4, 1861. Lincoln is standing under the wood canopy. This is believed to be the first U.S. inauguration ever photographed. (Wikimedia Commons)
By the 20th century, “nationalism” was in common usage. And so in his famous speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, on August 31, 1910, former president Theodore Roosevelt had to stipulate that he was talking about a “New Nationalism.” As he put it, “We work in a spirit of broad and far-reaching nationalism where we work for what concerns our people as a whole. We are all Americans. Our common interests are as broad as the continent. I speak to you here in Kansas exactly as I would speak in New York or Georgia, for the most vital problems are those which affect us all alike.”
Theodore Roosevelt in Osawatomie, Kansas, on August 31, 1910, where he delivered his “New Nationalism” speech. (Kansas Historical Society)
TR’s words, we might add, gave shape to the robust national ethos that enabled America to win World Wars I and II, as well as the Cold War.
Later in the 20th century, TR’s cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was also an unabashed nationalist. As Harvard professor Samuel Beer wrote in 1979: “Franklin Roosevelt’s first inaugural address on March 4, 1933, could have been entitled ‘the new nationalism’ as fittingly as any utterance of his cousin Theodore, who first gave currency to the expression. None of the main points in that famous speech can be summarized without reference to the nation. No other thematic term faintly rivals it in emphasis.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivering his first inaugural address on March 4, 1933. (Keystone/Getty Images)
As with TR, FDR actively proclaimed that Americans would pull together as a nation, in hard times and good, in pursuit of national goals.
And then there’s Ronald Reagan. In an election eve address on November 3, 1980, the Gipper told a national TV audience that American visitors to our civic shrines in Washington, D.C., “do not come as white or black, red or yellow; they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still a shining city on a hill.”
The next day, Reagan won the presidency in a landslide.
Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, wave to supporters on election night, November 4, 1980, after his landslide victory. (AP Photo)
So we can see: Nationalism and patriotism have been fully a part of our national conversation for more than two centuries. And if pride in the nation seemed a little out of fashion in the Obama years, well, those years are now behind us. Today we have Trump, and nationalism is back. And yet the establishment media, which doesn’t like this president, also doesn’t like that word.
Yet the rest of us can observe that nationalism is strong because it is, well, natural. It grows out of people’s natural desire to be in families, teams, and communities. Thus the nation-state is simply family, team, and community writ large.
We might also observe that the nation-state must be writ large enough such that the nation, and its people, can survive in a dangerous world. The U.S. never would have defeated the Kaiser, or Hitler, or the Soviet Union, if we had not been united and strong. Similarly, today, we won’t be able to defeat Jihadism or Globalism if we aren’t united.
President Trump at the rally in Houston, Texas, on October 22, 2018, where he declared, “I am a nationalist.” (Loren Elliott/Getty Images)
So hurrah for Trump for saying the word “nationalism.” Even more, hurrah for the nation, for being so strong. And so perhaps we should all obey General Washington’s order, and “drink Perpetual Peace, Independence & Happiness to the United States of America.”
Yes, a celebration of American nationalism will annoy the media, and there’s some fun in that. But the main reason we celebrate Americanism is because we love our fellow Americans—even reporters.
And we want no harm to come to any of them.
G’ day…Ciao…
Helen and Moe Lauzier
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