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Image source – TED Talks, https://www.ted.com/talks/arthur_brooks_a_conservative_s_plea_let_s_work_together

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Independent Women’s Forum
by Charlotte Hays
3/15/2018

Excerpt:

Arthur C. Brooks, who is in his tenth year as president of the American Enterprise Institute, has asked the board to begin a search for a successor. Brooks announces this in a must-read piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Reflecting on Gresham’s law, that bad money drives out good money, Brooks says something similar is happening in the world of ideas. Here is a nugget:

[W]hat worries me most today—not for AEI, but for America—is that the competition of ideas is under attack. Many would rather shut down debate than participate in it. Politicians from both parties try to discredit their opponents with name-calling and ad hominem attacks. On too many college campuses, people with the “wrong” viewpoints and ideas are unwelcome. Much of the mass media has become polarized, meaning readers and viewers on the right and left are never challenged in their conviction that the other side is made up of knaves and fools.

Americans must commit to stand athwart this trend. That doesn’t mean advocating mushy moderation or abandoning strong policy positions. My AEI colleagues are warriors for democratic capitalism, here and all around the world. But we also fight for respectful debate and repudiate the holy war of derision on both left and right, which makes dialogue increasingly untenable.

Part of this stance is pragmatic—no one has ever been insulted into agreement. Further, we need opposing viewpoints to challenge our own. If we’re wrong, the best way to learn it is through challenges from our friends on the other side of the issue.

More important, this is a moral concern. A couple of years ago I was giving a speech at a large conservative event, and I said that while my own views are center-right, I have no reason to believe progressives are stupid or evil. An audience member countered, “You’re wrong: They are stupid and evil.” This bothered me because the person was insulting many of my family and friends. You probably love someone with whom you disagree politically.

Another threat to the world of ideas is arguably even more insidious: mediocrity through trivialization, largely from misuse of new media. To understand this, remember Gresham’s law: “Bad money drives out good.” If one form of currency is inherently more valuable than another in circulation, the better one will be hoarded and thus disappear.

Brooks says that today we see “a kind of intellectual Gresham’s law.” Brooks sees this in famous academics’ tweeting insults at each other and journalists’ letting it all hang out on social media.

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View the complete post including links at:

http://iwf.org/blog/2806055/Think-Tank-Head:-Competition-of-Ideas-Is-Under-Attack

Image source: https://www.pinterest.com/explore/obamacare-meme/

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American Thinker
by Rick Logis
3/15/2018

Excerpt:

Why do those who criticize Donald Trump for not being a “traditional” president fawn over President Obama not being a “traditional” post-presidential citizen?

I would say Michelle and Barack Obama are back in the news, but they’ve never left the news since the 22nd Amendment mercifully exiled them from the Oval Office last year.  When President Clinton took the oath of office in 1992, President George H.W. Bush went away.  When President George W. Bush assumed power in 2000, President Clinton went away (until the prospect of being the first gentleman came a-knockin’).  When President Obama placed his hand on President Lincoln’s Bible in 2008, President Bush went away.

When President Trump made his miraculous win constitutionally official last year, President Obama went away, back to Chicago, to administer the death and destruction left in the wake of 30,000 consecutive days of Democrat rule over the Windy City.

Just kidding: Obama moved into a $5-million D.C. mansion – but only after the wall surrounding the 8,000-square-foot mansion was completely erected.  Oh, and Obama’s former senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, moved in with the Obamas, which is just bizarrely weird.  It’s like ‘House of Cards’ meets ‘Three’s Company’; rumor has it that Val makes a mean Belgian waffle with an Iranian secret touch.

View the complete article including links and comments at:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/03/why_wont_barack_obama_go_away.html

Image credit: Jim Watson / AFP / Getty

Breitbart / Big-Government
by Joel B. Pollak
3/14/2018

Excerpt:

Thousands of students “walked out” of classrooms at schools across the country on Wednesday to protest for new gun control legislation in the wake of last month’s mass shooting at Marjory Stonemason Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

The mainstream media are celebrating the “walkout” as an authentic expression of outrage that demands a response from political leaders. But it is not, and there are at least five lies they are telling you about it.

Lie #1: The “walkout” is being staged by students. 

In most schools, especially elementary schools, the walkout is being organized by teachers, administrators, and liberal parents. Nationwide, the walkout is being coordinated by the Women’s March, an anti-Trump organization that has a soft spot for radical antisemites like Louis Farrakhan. Big media companies, especially CNN, have been publicizing the protest.

Students are involved, but not in charge.

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View the complete article including images, links and comments at:

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/03/14/five-lies-student-walkout-gun-control/

Image source: Son of Liberty — http://sol1776.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-toilet-war.html

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American Thinker
by Anthony J. DeBlasi
3/14/2018

Excerpts:

As an American, as a veteran, I worry about what America has become.  I keep asking, “Is this what millions of heroes – civilian and military – struggled, sacrificed, fought, and died for?”

Where to begin with the disturbing changes?  People glued to portable screens for hours, oblivious to the real world around them; entertainment that qualifies as trash; public school education that leaves students weak in math and science, partially illiterate, and grossly ignorant of  American and world history; women who fault men for being men; confused men and women destroying their bodies and minds with “sex change” procedures; mothers comfortable with having their children murdered when they are about to be born; unhinged kids shooting classmates at school…

America slipped farther from sanity and morality than I could have imagined when I waved red flags in the 1980s and ’90s in newsletters.  Culture warriors and alert Americans sensed a distinct danger to our country long before today’s virulent attacks from the left in media, education, and government.

Perhaps most disturbing to those of us awake is what was happening to our country as a country.  I was especially troubled when I heard President George H.W. Bush mouth the words “New World Order” (more) – his eyes aglow with anticipation – and wondered how an American president could allow the turning of America over to a one-world government.  Who in our government would oppose such a radical and dangerous idea?

Members of Congress?  Decade after decade, Tweedledee Democrats and Tweedledum Republicans (aka the Uniparty) have been pretending to serve the American people while tweaking America into a socialist state, ready to shed borders and smooth the way to a world under amoral mismanagement.

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The Executive Branch?  Under Obama, it seemed more likely than ever that we could lose our country to the dictatorship of globalists.  Behind his rhetorical façade of benevolence, our 44th president acted as though the time was ripe to implement an idea of one-world governance conned into politics by early 20th-century Marxists at the end of World War I (1918).  The idea, however tweaked for the times, was and still is – phrased plainly – to have men smarter than everyone else use whatever means, including democracy, to establish global government in a world with no borders and no ideologies in conflict with theirs.  Obama, a willing player in the scheme to establish global governance, would use techniques from Rules for Radicals to take down America while pretending to make it better than ever.  A student of Saul Alinsky (author of  Rules for Radicals), Obama did his darnedest to push America off its track.

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I leave it to the reader what place Obama earned in the history of America.  His list of accomplishments includes stoking the fires of racial hatred, saddling Americans with burdensome laws and penalties, allowing terrorists to enter the country, defying the rule of law, enfeebling the military, meddling with sexual reality and morality…

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View the complete article including links and comments at:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/03/better_days_ahead.html

US President Donald Trump inspects border wall prototypes in San Diego, California on March 13, 2018. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

The San Diego Union-Tribune
by Louis Gomez, Contact Reporter
3/13/3018

View the complete article including images, videos and links at:

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/sd-president-trump-visit-to-san-diego-live-updates-20180312-htmlstory.html

Patrick J. Buchanan — Official Website
by Patrick J. Buchanan
3/13/2018

Excerpt:

Robert Bartley, the late editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, was a free trade zealot who for decades championed a five-word amendment to the Constitution: “There shall be open borders.”

Bartley accepted what the erasure of America’s borders and an endless influx or foreign peoples and goods would mean for his country.

Said Bartley, “I think the nation-state is finished.”

His vision and ideology had a long pedigree.

This free trade, open borders cult first flowered in 18th-century Britain. The St. Paul of this post-Christian faith was Richard Cobden, who mesmerized elites with the grandeur of his vision and the power of his rhetoric.

In Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Jan. 15, 1846, the crowd was so immense the seats had to be removed. There, Cobden thundered:

“I look farther; I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe — drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonisms of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.”

Britain converted to this utopian faith and threw open her markets to the world. Across the Atlantic, however, another system, that would be known as the “American System,” had been embraced.

The second bill signed by President Washington was the Tariff Act of 1789. Said the Founding Father of his country in his first address to Congress: “A free people … should promote such manufactures as tend to make them independent on others for essential, particularly military supplies.”

In his 1791 “Report on Manufactures,” Alexander Hamilton wrote, “Every nation ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These comprise the means of subsistence, habitat, clothing and defence.”

This was wisdom born of experience.

At Yorktown, Americans had to rely on French muskets and ships to win their independence. They were determined to erect a system that would end our reliance on Europe for the necessities of our national life, and establish new bonds of mutual dependency — among Americans.

Britain’s folly became manifest in World War I, as a self-reliant America stayed out, while selling to an import-dependent England the food, supplies and arms she needed to survive but could not produce.

America’s own first major steps toward free trade, open borders and globalism came with JFK’s Trade Expansion Act and LBJ’s Immigration Act of 1965.

By the end of the Cold War, however, a reaction had set in, and a great awakening begun. U.S. trade deficits in goods were surging into the hundreds of billions, and more than a million legal and illegal immigrants were flooding in yearly, visibly altering the character of the country.

Americans were coming to realize that free trade was gutting the nation’s manufacturing base and open borders meant losing the country in which they grew up. And on this earth there is no greater loss.

The new resistance of Western man to the globalist agenda is now everywhere manifest.

We see it in Trump’s hostility to NAFTA, his tariffs, his border wall.

We see it in England’s declaration of independence from the EU in Brexit. We see it in the political triumphs of Polish, Hungarian and Czech nationalists, in anti-EU parties rising across Europe, in the secessionist movements in Scotland and Catalonia and Ukraine, and in the admiration for Russian nationalist Vladimir Putin.

Europeans have begun to see themselves as indigenous peoples whose Old Continent is mortally imperiled by the hundreds of millions of invaders wading across the Med and desperate come and occupy their homelands.

Who owns the future? Who will decide the fate of the West?

The problem of the internationalists is that the vision they have on offer — a world of free trade, open borders and global government — are constructs of the mind that do not engage the heart.

Men will fight for family, faith and country. But how many will lay down their lives for pluralism and diversity?

Who will fight and die for the Eurozone and EU?

On Aug. 4, 1914, the anti-militarist German Social Democrats, the oldest and greatest socialist party in Europe, voted the credits needed for the Kaiser to wage war on France and Russia. With the German army on the march, the German socialists were Germans first.

Patriotism trumps ideology.

In “Present at the Creation,” Dean Acheson wrote of the postwar world and institutions born in the years he served FDR and Truman in the Department of State: The U.N., IMF, World Bank, Marshall Plan, and with the split between East and West, NATO.

We are present now at the end of all that.

And our transnational elites have a seemingly insoluble problem.

To rising millions in the West, the open borders and free trade globalism they cherish and champion is not a glorious future, but an existential threat to the sovereignty, independence and identity of the countries they love. And they will not go gentle into that good night.

View the complete article including image and links at:

http://buchanan.org/blog/globalists-nationalists-who-owns-the-future-128880

Image source: Puppet String News, FBI docs reveal US Antifa members met with ISIS at G20 to kill Trump –– https://www.puppetstringnews.com/blog/fbi-docs-reveal-us-antifa-members-met-with-isis-at-g20-to-kill-trump

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Gateway Pundit
by Assistant Editor
3/12/2018

What Really Happened in Vegas on October 1st? Was ISIS involved?

By Wayne Allyn Root

Excerpt:

The Vegas Massacre is clearly the new “JFK Murder Conspiracy” updated for the 21st century. The whole story stinks to high heaven. It’s rancid. Clearly, our own government, FBI and Las Vegas police are involved in some sort of cover-up. The question is- what are they covering up?

Las Vegas is my home. I have the top radio talk show in this town. Many dozens of Vegas residents have gotten in touch with me to give me their take on the Vegas Massacre. Included in that group has been MGM employees, top MGM executives, survivors of the worst mass shooting in US history, as well as law enforcement and retired homicide detectives. From my own gut instincts, investigation and these interviews with key players, I’ve pieced together this story. It’s not a pretty picture.

Like any good detective, I have lots of working theories. A good detective doesn’t rule anything out. Maybe it really is as simple and clean as “Stephen Paddock did it, case closed.” But there are way too many unanswered questions, problems and mysteries with that storyline.

View the complete article including images, links and comments at:

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/03/wayne-allyn-root-vegas-massacre-expose-really-happened/

https://youtu.be/4glysfmgOC0

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TRUE PUNDIT
by Investigative Bureau
3/12/2018

Excerpt:

The “official” narrative you’ve been fed by the FBI and Las Vegas officials about the massacre at Mandalay Bay that claimed 58 lives is purely fiction, a polished story contrived to cover up the disturbing facts surrounding the worst mass shooting ever in the United States, according the FBI insiders and high-ranking officials.

And now, after months of corporate-infused spin by MGM Resorts and outright lies from officials in the FBI and the Las Vegas Metro Police Department, agents and intelligence officials are spilling the beans about what really happened on and before the Oct. 1 massacre.

“It’s a script that was written after the shooting to rewrite what really happened,” one FBI agent said. “The investigation is an entirely different story that we are not allowed to talk about. If we do and get caught, we get fired and probably charged (criminally).”

But why the cover up?

The answer to that is perhaps even more complicated than the revelations surrounding the shooting, which can only be explained as shocking and troubling to everyday Americans not connected to enforcement community and political machine that has become today’s FBI. While few if any bright Americans believed the official back story of the supposed Stephen Paddock rampage, the truth — it turns out — is even more bizarre than fiction here.

In fact, it’s downright frightening.

The FBI maintains that Stephen Paddock — the reported lone gunman — was a man and his motive for killing dozens and injuring over 500 people still has not been pinpointed. Those assertions are simply untrue, FBI officials confirm. Lies. In the coming weeks, True Pundit will detail various parts of its investigation into the shooting and more importantly, paint a detailed portrait of the events leading to the shooting and Paddock’s likely accomplices and associates.

The major, shocking revelations include:

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View the complete article including image and links at:

https://truepundit.com/fbi-insiders-blow-whistle-massive-las-vegas-cover-agents-told-not-investigate-key-evidence-including-isis-terror-link-mandalay-bay-massacre/