“It is important for me to emphasize that the only ones who determine who the prime minister will be are Israeli voters. That is the essence of democracy,” Prime Minister Netanyahu recently said.

That is what’s at stake here.

Fake news and fake cases have been used by the media and by political operatives to mask a real coup.

How do you win an election when voters won’t vote for you? You lie, cheat, and smear. And when that doesn’t work, it’s time to roll out secret investigations, midnight raids, and politically motivated trials.

What’s at stake in America and Israel is whether voters or unelected officials run the country.


The unelected officials have launched show trial coups. And the voters are responding by rejecting their credibility. While the media trumpets the coup’s accusations of “bribery” and “corruption”, and accuses Netanyahu and his supporters of “inciting” against the ‘branja’ of the judges, lawyers, and assorted special interests, public confidence in this political lefty mafia is at an incredible all-time low.

In a Globes poll, 44% on the Right expressed low confidence in the judiciary while 55% on the Left had high confidence in the judiciary. Only 23% on the Right had high confidence in the judiciary. 43% of Israelis overall had low confidence in the police and only 18% of Israelis really trusted the police. What explains these numbers? The next question found that 45% of Israelis believed that there was a high degree of selective prosecution. Only 15% believed that selective prosecutions were a non-issue.

The media claims that Netanyahu is “inciting” against the judiciary. But he’s just saying what everyone knows. The system is corrupt. And it abuses its powers to go after the targets of its corruption.

Right-wing Israelis didn’t turn on the system just because it went after Netanyahu. The system has always been biased against them because they’re outsiders. Even if you aren’t living in a town designated a settlement or an outpost, even if you aren’t Orthodox, a Russian immigrant, or anything except a secular Ashkenazi whose grandparents came at the right time, living in the right part of Tel Aviv, if you aren’t voting for lefty parties, then you lack the political connections to navigate business and simple everyday problems, from getting the power turned on to dealing with a parking dispute.

Every Israeli knows this is true.

The Right began its dominance of Israeli politics because most of the country loathes the corrupt system that the old socialists put into place to maintain control of the people and the country. They don’t just loathe it in the abstract ideological sense, but because they have to deal with it day in and day out.

They just don’t believe that there’s an alternative to the system. That’s what the indictment is about.

The indictment is based on the system’s expectation that it can take down Netanyahu and the Right. Or, as Caroline Glick recently put it, the opposition "stands on two planks – destroying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and eternalizing the regime of Israel’s unelected bureaucrats."

And Netanyahu is making clear that it’s either him or the bureaucrats.

The actual case or cases against Prime Minister Netanyahu, as against President Trump, are a joke. They depend on media leaks, intimidation by political operatives within law enforcement and the judiciary, and a lot of hand-wringing about the moral downfall of the nation with very little evidence.

Case 2000 and Case 4000, the centerpieces of the coup against Netanyahu, both claim that the Israeli leader undertook to support certain policies in exchange for favorable media coverage.

As Caroline Glick noted in an important talk at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend, “nobody ever heard of the concept that positive media coverage could be considered a bribe because in no country on the face of the planet is positive coverage considered a bribe because if positive coverage is considered a bribe, then journalism as a point of fact is a criminal enterprise.”

If the media providing positive coverage of politicians who support their agenda is a crime, every single politician and media boss would be in jail. That’s the selective prosecution part. And, as with Trump, not only is the prosecution selective, but it invents new crimes in the process of selecting them.

Both Netanyahu and Trump stand accused of usurping the media’s function. The media is supposed to spread fake news on social media. The media is supposed to investigate its political opponents. And the media is supposed to decide which politicians get positive or negative coverage for its own reasons.

Both Case 2000 and 4000 really indict Netanyahu and his wife for complaining about the media.

The rest of the blanks in the indictment were filled in with the assumption that when things went well for the heads of the two media companies at the center of the case, it was not only Netanyahu’s doing, but part of a quid pro quo in exchange for positive media coverage.

The obvious question that the average Israeli asks at that point is, “What positive media coverage?”

The indictment fails to document this positive coverage because that would require evidence. And evidence is the one thing that this otherwise exemplary farce of a document is tragically lacking.

The lead on the English site of Yediot Aharonot, one of two media entities that Netanyahu allegedly aided in exchange for positive coverage, is an editorial that declares, “Netanyahu is out of tricks.”

This isn’t a new development in response to the indictment. It’s typical of the positive media coverage that Netanyahu has enjoyed for quite a few years in which commentators and reporters debate whether he should be shot and then thrown into the river, or thrown into the river first and then shot afterward.

But beyond the absurdity of treating positive media coverage as a bribe or the reality that this alleged bribe that was never delivered, is that there’s no actual linkage between what the media tycoons wanted and any of the non-existent positive media coverage of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Instead the indictment is filled with claims about what both sides knew, understood, and assumed, without actually proving it. That’s not a case. It’s a set of theories about what a case might look like.

For there to be a bribe, there needs to be evidence of an arrangement and an exchange.

And that doesn’t exist in this case. The indictment makes it clear that there’s no actual evidence beyond the compelled testimony of browbeaten associates facing legal and personal problems on other fronts. Israelis have long since learned to discount the testimony provided by such state’s evidence. Giving formerly respectable people a choice between going to prison on other charges or telling the court anything it wants to hear is not a process that will produce witnesses with any credibility.

In the Trump era, Americans are learning to distrust these same tactics in political investigations in which men like Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen or Michael Flynn are dragged through the system on any convenient pretext in the hope that they can provide legal backing for a politically motivated campaign.

The hole has been filled by hysterical media coverage inventing connections that don’t actually appear in the case and can’t actually be proven. But they don’t need to be. If everything goes according to plan, then the Likud will either lose or be forced to sacrifice Netanyahu, and once Netanyahu is isolated, he can be bled with legal expenses until he accepts a plea bargain. Lefties will be back in power, directly or indirectly, and the Right will be crippled. And the terrorists will celebrate from Gaza to Beirut.

Like the Mueller investigation, this is a political gambit meant to be played out in the media. If the facts of the case face actual legal scrutiny, then the house of cards will collapse. They don’t expect it to.

The enemies of democracy expect the voters to be the weak point that will allow them to win.

The Mueller investigation was meant to flip Republican voters and legislators. It failed. The Netanyahu indictment is meant to flip Likud party members and voters. If that fails, then the indictment goes the way of Russiagate. The real test of representative government is whether the people will resist the inevitable plots by unelected officials to rob them of their representation under various pretexts.

In Israel, as in Europe, the Left and the Right have very different definitions of democracy. To the Left, democracy means the political norms of social democracy. That is why the Left will often describe losing an election as a “threat to democracy”. Leftists operate under Louis XIV's motto, "L'etat c'est moi." And their updated version, "la démocratie c'est moi." A democratic election that “moi” lose is undemocratic.

The coups in America and Israel are a deeper struggle between elected and unelected officials, between open and closed systems, between freedom and tyranny, and between media power and people power.

A coup either ends with the defeat of the people or the plotters.

There are similar struggles being waged across the world, from Hong Kong to Tehran, from London to Jerusalem to Washington D.C. They are struggles between the power of authority and of the people. In all their different languages and under their different flags, they ask whether people will choose their own governments or whether they will be chosen for them by the authorities who really run things.

As Netanyahu said, this comes down to the question of who determines who will run the country.

Will it be the voters or the lawyers?

Angela Peoples first became famous when she was photographed at a post-inauguration anti-Trump rally holding a sloppily hand-lettered sign reading, ”Don’t forget: White Women Voted for Trump.”

Peoples’ expression is surly. She’s sucking on a lollipop while her white baseball cap seems to say something about “killing people”. Her giant hoop earrings dangle listlessly. Behind her stand a trio of white women in pink genital hats, all smiles and selfies, with the Capitol Hill building behind them.

The racist sign tapped into a meme shaming white women as gender traitors. Peoples, a veteran lefty activist, parlayed that internet fame into a New York Times op-ed arguing that white women couldn’t be trusted. “White women are not unified in opposition to Trumpism and can’t be counted on to fight it. Instead, it’s the identity, experience and leadership of black women that we must look to,” she urged.

Her message was, "we need you to get out of the way and follow our lead." And "would-be candidates" were told to "step aside and make space for more black women."

That was two years ago.

Now Black Womxn For, an ad hoc coalition run by Peoples, has endorsed a white woman.



Or, as NBC News declares, "Warren wins 2020 backing of influential group of black women". How influential is the Womxn “collective” of Netroots activists in the black community? Not very. A more accurate headline would be, “Warren wins 2020 backing of hastily thrown together lefty group.”

But Warren responded to the endorsement by declaring enthusiastically that, "Black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy."

Who knew our country really was run by the 1%? Or the 0.00001%.

Despite Warren’s assertion, none of the Womxn leaders seem to be especially “trans” or “gender non-conforming”. Some are lesbians. That’s about as far as the “Womxn” thing seems willing to take it.

What the “Womxn” lack in “trans” and “nonbinary” people, they make up for in bigots.

Senator Elizabeth Warren not only welcomed the support of Peoples, who had spent years bashing white women, but also Charlene Carruthers, an anti-Israel activist, formerly of Color of Change, who sits on the board of the Women's March, which has its own notorious anti-Semitism problem.

Carruthers has tweeted approvingly about Louis Farrakhan, accused Israel of “apartheid”, and endorsed BDS. She led an anti-Israel delegation to Israel and accused the Jewish State of a “massacre” in Gaza.

Carruthers appears to have tweeted a selection of Farrakhan quotes, including, "Integrating the Bedroom not the Boardroom." This is a familiar Farrakhan quote which opposes interracial marriage as a "hypocritical trick" by white people while urging a separatist black country.

This separatist black nation probably won’t be run by Elizabeth Warren. Or will it?

Warren's new endorsee also claimed that, "Minister Farrakhan is speaking the truth about HIV/AIDS." It's not clear exactly what exactly she's referring to, but the Nation of Islam hate group leader has claimed that AIDS is a government bioweapon aimed at black people. People associated with the Nation of Islam have also claimed that Jewish doctors were injecting the virus into black babies.

This is Senator Warren’s idea of “the backbone of our democracy”.

Other members of the "steering committee" of Black Womxn For include Rukia Lumbumba, the sister of Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who boasted that he would make Jackson, Mississippi into the "most radical city on the planet", Carmen Berkeley, the Managing Director for the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Nicole Carty of Occupy Wall Street, and a number of other veterans of lefty activist groups.

Also known as the octopus in the swamp.

And Anoa Changa, who ran into controversy over her appearances on Russia's Sputnik. When Elizabeth Warren accuses President Trump of being in bed with the Russians, she can look at her own endorsees.

But what’s really behind this endorsement?

Peoples has gone from bashing white women to fighting for one while using the language of black nationalism. As director of Black Womxn For, Peoples and her group claimed that "a Warren victory ensures an environment in which Black community leaders can better and more easily usher in those long-overdue societal transformations that move us closer to the Liberation that we know is possible."

By that they mean, "Black Liberation". And by "Black Liberation", they mean appointing "Black women, especially trans and immigrant women, Black men, Indigenous people, people of color and disabled people" to government positions. Some of whom will presumably be affiliated with BWF.

“Liberation” will be brought to you by political sinecures and the spoils system. "She is a woman who is willing to learn, open to new ideas, and ready to be held accountable by us," the endorsement reads.

In two years, Peoples has gone from demanding that white women follow black women to rejecting a black woman, Senator Kamala Harris, and endorsing a white woman, Warren, while pretending that the power relationship is with her, rather than with Warren. Even Peoples’ racism and black nationalism proved to be transactional. Or rather, what they had always been, a façade for the usual lefty politics.

Black Womxn For is described as a project of ‘The South’ which is run by Peoples. What’s ‘The South’? It’s apparently a brand. There are few references to it online. There’s a YouTube channel with 8 subscribers whose video about Peoples (which has 1,038 views) begins with the assertion that the “most beautiful people in the world” are “black people”. Unless they’re Cherokee academics offering you a job.

In the interview, Peoples, who is modestly wearing a t-shirt with her own picture on it, castigates “white women’s racism”, claims that an “overwhelming majority of white women voted for Donald Trump”, and then defines that overwhelming majority as being 53%. There are no comments.

Peoples is also listed as the “founder” and “lead strategist” of MsPeoples. It has no internet presence.

How desperate is Warren for black support that she and her allies were trumpeting this nonsense?

Meanwhile the likely reason why Peoples threw her support behind Warren is a detail hidden in her bio. Peoples was a policy analyst for Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and had been working there nearly since its creation, back when the failed agency was Warren’s “baby”.

Peoples has thrown her support behind Warren, whose agency she worked at, in exchange for government jobs provided through input by Black Womxn For through Warren’s transition team.

Truly, the age of “Liberation” is upon us.

Who else backs this mighty endorsement of Warren? According to the endorsement, it was based on "hundreds of survey responses from self-identified progressive Black women and GNC/NB folks."

Hundreds.

If they’re self-identified black women, was Rachel Dolezal allowed to participate?

Senator Warren is desperate for black voters. They’re Biden’s base. If the Democrat base were entirely white, Warren would already have the nomination locked up. To stop Biden, she needs to make a serious dent among his black supporters, but is so unable to connect with them that her campaign is touting an endorsement from her home base of Netroots activists as if it were an achievement.

And she’s willing to ignore as much bigotry as it takes to win the support of her new base of bigots.

Senator Bernie Sanders lives in a $476,000 colonial in Burlington VT. The house in New North End is one of three homes that he and his wife own. Burlington VT is 85% white and less than 5% black. Unlike the Old North End, which is diverse, the New North End has an older and more conservative population. The average household income is $80,000, and a number of the elected officials have been Republicans.

Despite Bernie’s socialist image, he chose to live in a white conservative suburban neighborhood where lefties are only slowly beginning to make inroads as younger couples start to move into the area.

Bernie's vacation place in North Hero, Vermont, by Lake Champlain, is over 97% white and only 0.25% black. His 1890 rowhouse in Washington D.C.’s Stanton Park is in a somewhat more diverse area.

Why invest in a home so close to Capitol Hill? Because Bernie expects to be in the Senate for life.



Senator Elizabeth Warren lives in a $3.5 million Victorian home a few blocks from Harvard Square built in 1890. Cambridge is 82% white and Asian, and 10% black. Half the population has an MA or a PhD.

Neighborhood Nine or Radcliffe, where Warren lives, is even whiter than Cambridge in general.

Her home is a four-hour drive away from Bernie’s. And it’s a long way from the foreclosed Oklahoma homes that she was buying and flipping to make a profit.

Once Warren arrived in Washington D.C., she also quickly bought into the real estate market, expecting to stay around for a while. Her $800,000 condo in Penn Quarter puts her close to the National Mall and has an 8% African-American population in a city that is otherwise some 47% black.

And then there’s Joe Biden. Or, as he likes to call himself, “Middle Class Joe”.

One of Middle-Class Joe’s earliest homes was a 1723 estate sprawling over three acres formerly owned by a member of the Du Pont family. His current four acre spread in Greenville is in an area that is 85% white and less than 5% black. That’s the home he owns. In reality, Biden lives in McLean, in a $6 million miniature version of the White House with crystal chandeliers, a home theater, and parking for 20 cars.

The McLean area of Virginia is 71% white and less than 2% black.

Finally, Biden has a $3 million six-bedroom vacation home in Rehoboth Beach with a view of the Atlantic Ocean, 3 indoor fireplaces, and a dog shower. Rehoboth Beach boasts 7 black residents. That’s not a percentage. It’s 7 black people. (But that’s still more black people than are supporting Buttigieg.)

For all their ideological battles, there’s a cozy New England inbreeding to the top three Democrats in the race. All three candidates live within driving distance of each other. Even if some of the drives might be longer. They’re all savvy real estate investors, even if they inveigh against capitalism and the free market, whose net worth was boosted by buying, selling, and even flipping houses at the right time.

The Democrats are an urban and coastal political party, but their ruling class is less fond of big cities. While their political machines may control major cities, their actual elites live in smaller upper-class bicoastal communities with vacation homes that take them even further away from those they rule.

While a quarter of Democrat primary voters are black, Sanders, Warren, and Biden live in areas that are far less diverse than the party they are competing to represent. And in a primary season that has seen a debate about busing, it’s very clear that diversity is a policy they advocate, not a reality that they live.

“I am really concerned about the growing segregation — once again — the resegregation of communities all over this country," Bernie Sanders claimed. And suggested that, "Busing is one tool."

"I’m already on record on busing and using busing as a way to help communities that are diversifying,” Warren has said more ambiguously.

But does Bernie living in places that are less than 5% or 0.25% black make him a segregationist?

That’s what the Democrat front-runners who live in New England enclaves with few black people, insist.

Warren’s journey took her from Oklahoma City to Houston, fairly diverse cities, to White Meadow Lake, New Jersey. While she taught at Rutgers Law School in Newark, a majority black city, she lived in an 89% white and less than 2% black community. Even as she grew politically radicalized, migrating from the GOP to the Democrats and then their farthest leftiest fringe, Warren ran away from diversity.

Bernie Sanders grew up in Brooklyn, a borough that is 1/3rd white and 1/3rd black, which he traded in for Vermont. His old Midwood neighborhood still has a Jewish population, but the Orthodox Jews and Russian immigrants who live there tend to be conservative and are unlikely to vote for the socialist.

If Bernie was concerned about segregation, why didn’t he return to Brooklyn, instead of Vermont?

Warren and Bernie’s journey was not toward diversity, but away from it. Their idea of a good life involved finding New England enclaves far from the more diverse places they had come from.

There’s no way to know if these choices were racially deliberate or coincidental. But that’s not a benefit of the doubt that either of them are willing to extend, either in rhetoric or in policy, to ordinary people.

Sanders and Warren are quick to accuse other people of racism, but their own life choices suggest that what they really wanted out of life was to live out a 19th century American lifestyle in New England.

With as little diversity as they could manage.

That’s their choice and it’s also their hypocrisy.

The Democrat leadership isn’t just out of touch with the country, but with their own voters. Sanders, Biden, and Warren represent the hypocrisy of a party divided between middle class suburbanites and urban voters. The leadership, Warren, Sanders, and Biden live in comfortable wealthy enclaves far from the misery that the political machines they head inflict on the inner cities they occasionally visit.

These uncomfortable questions are evaded with heavy doses of class warfare and identity politics.

Warren and Sanders, who are millionaires, rant about the super-rich while buying six figure homes, they denounce white supremacy while living in areas that are whiter than anything in Jim Crow territory.

And Joe Biden somehow commands the black vote while living in a place that is less than 2% black and vacationing in a place with a grand total of 7 black people. That’s the Democrat’s idea of diversity.

There’s something deeply wrong with the race-baiting of the Democrats and of their hypocrisy about it.

Democrat policies are destructive, but their hypocrisy is also corrosive. In an election where candidates pretend to be authentic by becoming more radical, their hypocrisy reveals their contempt for voters.

Their commitment to diversity is made on someone else’s behalf and at someone else’s expense.

Biden, Sanders, and Warren preach diversity. But if you want to see what they really believe, go look at where they live.

This isn’t terrorism. It’s a war. And it’s going on every day in Sweden.

Sweden is reeling from a wave of shootings and bombings with 268 shootings just this year so far. And that's in a country of 10 million people which has crime numbers on par with some American cities.

"Sweden may have the answer to America's gun problem," Vox declared in 2016. Or maybe not.

These shootings aren't being carried out with handguns, but with AK-47s. The weapon so often used as a boogeyman by gun control advocates, but rarely featured in everyday gun violence, is a staple of Sweden’s gang war scene. Along with hand grenades and other explosives rarely seen in America.

A call by the police last year asking gang members to turn in their grenades worked as well as expected.



There have been 187 bomb attacks this year. In just 1 week in August, there were three major bombings. Much of the violence is concentrated in Malmo which experienced 58 bombings in 2017.

Malmo has a sizable immigrant and Muslim population. And it’s a center of gang violence.

Swedish authorities and its media rarely discuss or name the perpetrators, but the latest shooting left Jaffar Ibrahim, a 15-year-old boy, dead. Jaffar was shot in a Malmo pizzeria and had been part of a family of Syrian refugees who migrated to Sweden in 2016. Services for him were held in a mosque.

The shooting attack was preceded by a car bombing which was used as a diversion.

The media cited as a precedent the shooting death of Ahmed Obaid, a 16-year-old, a few years ago. This isn’t unusual as 9 out of 10 shooters are foreign immigrants or the children of foreign immigrants.

But Muslim gang violence in Sweden isn’t just its problem anymore.

Bombings took off in Copenhagen with explosions outside a police station and a tax office over the summer. The targets were political and the bombs weren’t fireworks or hand grenades, but commercial explosives used for demolitions. The suspects turned out to be criminals who had entered from Sweden.

The violence was probably related to gang wars involving the Brothas, Loyal to Familia and other splinter gangs. Despite the gang names, the actual gang members have names like Osman and Omar.

While Muslim gangs operating out of Malmo appear to be pushing into Copenhagen, likely fronts and splinter groups of the Hells Angels, Muslim gangs out of Copenhagen, like the Black Cobras, are pushing into Malmo. To the Muslim gangs, Sweden and Denmark are just territories to seize and control.

That’s the same attitude that has brought Muslim gang members into ISIS.

Omar El-Hussein, a “Palestinian” Jordanian migrant criminal, who attempted to murder Mohammed cartoonist Lars Vilks before attacking a bar mitzvah at the Great Synagogue, had come through the ranks of the Brothas, building up a long criminal record, before finally joining ISIS.

After the attack, a journalist interviewed fellow Brothas gang members, Ahmed and Abdur Ramadan. “Those who depict our prophet, we’ll blow them up,” they declared.

The reference to bombings isn’t accidental.

Muslim gang leaders have reportedly taken the lead in joining ISIS. And their interest in explosives isn’t purely about gang violence. The bombing attacks on a police station and tax office weren’t gang rivalries. Despite the denials by the authorities, they have all the classic hallmarks of terrorism.

Denmark has reacted to the terror traffic from Sweden by imposing border controls on bridge crossings.

And while that might help slow the rate at which weapons flow into the country and bodies pile up, the real problem isn’t coming in from Sweden, but from Morocco, Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan, and Somalia.

Europe’s open infrastructure, its rejection of national and regional borders, has worsened the problem. From the mass flow of migrants from Muslim countries to the ease with which Muslim gang members move between European countries, the lack of border security has made the conquest of Europe easy.

The growing linkages between Muslim gangs across national borders is a warning of worse to come.

The main components of Islamic militias, like the ones that tore apart Syria and Libya, were gangs. Islamist forces like these are often made up of gangs with grandiose names. The Copenhagen gangs are still associated with international gangs and use their names, but eventually they will go Islamic.

And then it won’t be the Hells Angels anymore. It’ll be the Islamic State of something or other.

That’s a reality that Swedish authorities are deliberately ignoring.

A government site insists that immigrants are no more likely to be criminals than anyone else. "In a study from 2013, researchers at Stockholm University showed that the main difference in terms of criminal activity between immigrants and others in the population in Sweden was due to differences in the socioeconomic conditions in which they grew up," it argues.

As if Swedes, including the researchers of Stockholm University, are only refraining from picking up AK-47s and throwing hand grenades because of their socioeconomic conditions. The moment they lose their lucrative research grants, they too will be setting off bombs and fighting over the drug trade.

But nonsense like this sounds reassuring because it suggests that the solution to Islamic violence is social welfare. That’s a comforting message for socialists for whom social welfare is the answer to everything.

Social welfare has been tried. Muslim immigrants are so deep in the social welfare system that they often never leave it. The gang members and ISIS terrorists are the welfare system’s children.

While the same old lies keep being told, the bombs keep going off and the bullets keep flying.

Whether or not the Swedish authorities can successfully keep feeding their population the same lies about the magic of integration, Denmark and Norway don’t want Sweden’s problems coming home.

But while Sweden’s insistence that it is a “humanitarian superpower” because of the volume of migrants it has taken in has obviously worsened the problem, no European country is immune from the threat.

The gangs in Sweden and Denmark disregard national borders and governments. They’ve bombed police cars and police stations because they believe that they are the law. They don’t care which government is in power or what its policies might be. They are the only authorities in their particular no-go zones.

And while it’s fashionable to deny that no-go zones exist, the bombings amply testify otherwise.

While the debate goes on about the thin line between terrorism and gang violence, the authorities are deploying the familiar toolkit of counterterrorism measures, including eavesdropping, to fight the war.

And when bombs go off and AK-47 fire is heard in broad daylight, does it matter what kind of war it is?

Bernie Sanders would like us to be more like Sweden. That means a frightened citizenry, bullets and bombs going off in the streets, while our taxes go to fund social welfare programs for our killers.

America can’t be more like Sweden. Not even Sweden is going to be able to be like Sweden anymore.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the latest star of the Democrat effort to undo the 2016 election, is still at work on the National Security Council. While Trump supporters on the NSC like Rich Higgins and Ezra Cohen-Watnick were forced out, Vindman won't be. NSC staffers who criticized Obama holdovers or sought to expose their misbehavior are gone, but Vindman is still there while undermining Trump.

And that’s the SNAFU of things on the NSC.

The National Security Council has been ground zero in the campaign against President Trump from the beginning. General Flynn’s appointment as National Security Advisor had touched the third rail because the NSC had been used to coordinate anti-Trump operations in the Susan Rice era.



The NSC doesn’t answer to Congress. Its members are meant to advise the president. (Except when they’re actually working for a previous president.) They command the implements of foreign policy, traditionally the weakest element in domestic politics, but not when they start treating their domestic political opponents as agents of a foreign state. And the size of the NSC has gotten out of control.

Under Obama, the NSC staff hit 400 people. That’s up from a dozen during its Cold War origins.

And it’s the staff that’s the problem.

The NSC was born in the Truman era, not as a byzantine government bureaucracy full of endless departments and hundreds of staffers, but as a means for key foreign policy and national defense figures to coordinate, develop options and then present them to the President of the United States.

People like Vindman or Fiona Hill were never supposed to be there.

In the 1947 National Security Act, the Council was to consist of the Secretary of State, the Defense Secretary, the heads of the branches of the military, and various strategic services and agencies, who would meet at sessions presided over by the President.

There was also to be a staff "headed by a civilian executive secretary".

What started out as a formal kitchen cabinet turned into a monster. And that didn’t exactly take decades. The NSC staff was at 50 people under George H.W. Bush. It hit 400 under Obama.

That’s an eightfold increase from Bush I and a threefold increase from his predecessor, Bush II.

The NSC’s permanent members were there to advise the president. The staff were there to support the work of the permanent members. And then the staff became the permanent members while the presidential appointees ended up being forced out or even worse for running afoul of them.

President Trump’s move to prune back the NSC is worth doing. But reorganizations of the NSC have been carried out before. Bureaucracy is the urban weed of Washington D.C. And even when it’s occasionally pruned, it always grows back. The only solution is to pull it up by the roots.

The National Security Council needs to go.

The NSC was meant to be a forum in which the heads of existing agencies would coordinate foreign policy and national security options. Instead, the NSC’s staff tends to set the foreign policy. What was once a support structure turned into a think tank and a policy shop. And then its very own deep state.

The very worst example of this was Ben Rhodes, an aspiring novelist who evolved from a speechwriter to deputy national security adviser for communications, and, in that capacity ran our foreign policy. War and diplomacy weren’t run by the cabinet members accountable to Congress, but by political operatives.

The NSC had become a state within a state, a rogue organization reporting directly to Barack Obama.

This wasn’t Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex or the deep state, it was something worse. It allowed a gaggle of political operatives to take control of national defense and intelligence, and retool them to spy on political opponents, to manufacture cases against them, and then to act as moles within future administrations with the aim of subverting them and perpetuating their old political agendas.

The NSC violates constitutional checks and balances. It undermines the rule of law. Its current function is an absurd perversion of the simple and straightforward purposes that it was meant to serve.

A coordinating body for national security and foreign policy may be a good idea. But the NSC isn’t it.

What would we do without the NSC? Agencies and departments would actually formulate policies internally and cabinet members would offer them to the president instead of the NSC acting as a rogue policy shop with the National Security Advisor competing with the cabinet members he is meant to be coordinating with. That would cut out some of the infighting and increase congressional accountability.

But that’s a 1980s argument. The 2019 argument is that the NSC is a threat to America.

Old NSC scandals involved its people overriding and sidelining the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, and determining and implementing policy on their own. Those scandals of departmental infighting seem almost nostalgic now that NSC personnel are working to actively oust a sitting president.

The NSC staff isn’t just undermining cabinet heads, it has become a rogue political organization.

It needs to go.

That’s not something that might be achievable right now, but it should become a Republican goal. The Flynn case and the latest impeachment bid are warnings that the NSC has become a toxic organization.

Traditionally, Republicans have been proponents of the NSC. Eisenhower and Nixon had expanded the NSC, while Kennedy and Carter had contracted it. But that pattern began to shift with the Clinton era, and fundamentally altered under Obama. The current NSC is a creature of the Clinton and Obama eras.

But the Obama administration only completed the corruption of an organization that had lost its way.

Abolishing the NSC will, in some ways, be a policy victory for the Left. But the Left has shown that it can do far more damage with the NSC, than without it, and that makes it too dangerous to exist

The NSC was meant to counter problems like the military-industrial complex or the deep state by organizing their functions and putting them more directly under the control of the White House. That plan worked so well under Obama, that White House political operatives used the NSC to take control of intelligence, the military, and law enforcement, and weaponized them against Republicans.

The central principle of politics is that proximity is power. The NSC was only meant to coordinate. Its staff were only meant to support. But the very act of creating an organization that would advise the president also made the position irresistible to men like Kissinger and Brzezinski who used it as a means of accumulating vast amounts of unchecked power. And after the National Security Advisor’s power had been rolled back, it was the anonymous staffers who picked it up and ended up in the driver’s seat.

Then it was just a simple matter of blowing up the staff and padding their ranks with political operatives.

Suddenly, the NSC was no longer overthrowing foreign governments, but our own government. And previously unknown NSC staffers in a byzantine organizational chart had become key figures in the war.

And, these days, it’s not a war on foreign enemies, it’s a war against President Trump and his voters.

A civil war.

The current crisis shows that we can’t have both the NSC as well as free and open elections.

A free country can’t afford the hybrid Democrat think-tank and pretorian guard that the NSC has become. It’s time to dismantle it, declassify and release all NSC activities involving the domestic political opposition, and go back to the way foreign policy and national security were run for over 200 years.

Either that or abolish elections and put the NSC in charge of running the country.

Senator Kamala Harris polled at 3% in last month's Quinnipiac poll. That must make the San Fran and Hollywood donors who stuffed $11.6 million in her pantsuit pockets this quarter feel good about giving to charity.

A quarter of Iowa Democrat caucusgoers have a negative opinion of Harris. That’s up minus eleven points since June. So, Harris is making weekly trips to Iowa while claiming that she’s going to move there. Not even Democrats are stupid enough to believe that she’s going to leave her Brentwood mansion to move to a place where the temperatures are currently hovering around the low thirties.

And her Iowa stump speech is now all about accusing anyone who doesn’t vote for her of racism.

In her speeches, Harris claims that "electability", the question of whether a candidate polling 3% nationwide can beat President Trump, is the "elephant in the room---but actually more accurately, the donkey in the room."

There's a donkey in the room all-right. Or maybe it's a jackass.

"It's been coming up in connection to my campaign: is America ready for that? Are they ready for a woman of color to be President of the United States?" Harris insists.

When Harris tried this line in an Axios on HBO interview, a baffled Margaret Talev asked, "America was ready for a black man to be President of the United States.”

And, in response, Harris spent 30 seconds spewing inane gibberish.

But who are the sexist pigs who aren’t ready for a woman to be President of the United States?

Senator Harris polls at 5% among men and only 2% among women. Either women aren’t ready for a female president. Or women just don’t like Kamala.

And where’s the outpouring of support from black voters?

Black voters aren’t as stingy with their support for Kamala as white voters. While only 3% of white voters support Harris, a whopping 4% of black voters are ready to choose her as their candidate.

Maybe that 1% difference can be explained by racism?

But that doesn’t explain why 20% of black voters rate her unfavorably.

Maybe the 96% of black voters and 98% of women who aren’t backing Kamala just aren’t “ready for a woman of color to be President of the United States.”

Or, and this is a stunning idea, maybe they aren’t ready for Kamala Harris. Or Kamala Harris isn’t ready.

But, instead of blaming herself, Senator Kamala Devi Harris is blaming America. The vast majority of it which isn’t supporting her. And there’s only one possible reason they aren’t supporting her. Racism.

Harris began her campaign ascendancy by accusing Joe Biden of racism. It’s only fitting that she’s wrapping it up by implying that her lack of support isn’t her fault, but the fault of an intolerant nation.

Electability, a problem caused by her own poor poll numbers, is really a sign of racial unreadiness.

In Iowa, Senator Harris claimed that the question of whether voters were ready for a "woman of color" is "a conversation that's come up in every single time in every election that I've---now, here's the operative word---won."

Kamala’s opponent in the 2016 Senate race was Loretta Sanchez, a fellow Democrat and “woman of color”. The two questions voters faced in that election was how California had turned into a one-party state, and whether to vote for the “woman of color” who had said racist things about the Vietnamese or the “woman of color” who had slept her way to the top courtesy of one of the state’s crookedest Dems.

Since Kamala raised $15 million and spent $14 million, while Sanchez had about $4 million, it was easy.

But, just as Kamala launched her bid with a revisionist history of growing in the segregated South, in Berkeley, her revisionist history of her 2016 election, has her fighting racist white male intolerance.

It’s pathetic.

This time around, she raised over $36 million, and spent $25 million of it, to poll at 3%. But that’s after an initial surge of enthusiasm that saw her break fundraising records and make it to the first tier.

What happened? Kamala opened her mouth. Her unfavourability ratings now routinely poll in the negative forties. It’s not just the shameless race-baiting. It’s also her utter inauthenticity.

Trying to pretend that she’s polling at 3% because Obama voters aren’t ready to vote for black people, and women aren’t prepared to vote for women, and black people aren’t willing to vote for black people, is exactly the reason why even Democrats hate her. Voters have gotten tired of the lies, the flip-flopping, and the constant racial appeals as if she had come out of a ghetto in Detroit, Newark or Chicago, instead of being a privileged woman who grew up with her Indian scientist mother in Canada.

Kamala Harris bet her entire campaign on racial identity politics. She assumed that she could break off Joe Biden’s black support and combine that with white lefties yearning for another Obama.

None of her bets paid off. Nor did the bets of the donors who lost $36 million on her campaign.

Instead of laying out a vision, the former socialite relied on the personal charm that made her a hit among San Francisco’s wealthy lefties. But the transparent phoniness that won over her old social set hasn’t translated well to a national stage. And her constant transformations, pretending that she’s about to move to Iowa, and then complaining that Iowans are racist, just make it obvious how fake she is.

But no matter how badly Kamala fails, she can always blame it on racism.

This is a problem and it’s a bigger than Willie Brown’s former mistress playing her last race card. Kamala Harris blaming racism, instead of her bad decisions, means that she never has to take any responsibility. Instead, somehow, the entire country is to blame for not being “ready” for her historic candidacy.

That’s a disgusting smear of millions of people, Democrats, Republicans, men and women, white people and black people. It cynically uses race and gender to divide the country while obscuring the actual problems of racism. And it shields perpetrators of racial divisiveness like her from accountability.

Kamala Harris can never fail. Her failures are America’s failures. The worse she fails; the worse America must be. Instead of leaving the race having learned something, she stumbles to the exit, having learned nothing except that even if shameless racial huckstering can’t win a half-Indian politician from Brentwood the election, it can deflect attention from how she squandered her lead, alienated her voters, and wasted tens of millions of dollars of other people’s money to poll at 3%.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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