ActRight

Full David Brock confidential memo on fighting Donald Trump obtained by the Washington Free Beacon at the Jan. 19-21, 2017, 'Democracy Matters' Florida donor retreat at Turnberry Isle Resort in Aventura, Fla.

Post-truth politics, alternative facts, fake news: how disdainfully the phrases drop from leftist lips. As the liberal writer Wes Williams puts it, Right-wing media use 'alternative facts' on an almost daily basis. In fact, all human beings subconsciously seek out data that sustain their prejudices. We see what we want to see, even in the most literal sense: In tests where words are slowly illuminated on a screen, we see the nice words before the ugly ones. Think of any contentious situation — for example, a white police officer shooting an unarmed black man. Most people's responses will be subliminally influenced by what they expect. If they start from the proposition that cops are good people doing a hard job, they will likely conclude that the case is one of justifiable self-defense, or at the very least of excusable error. If their assumption is that the police prop up a racist system, they will probably think the cop was guilty.

The NY Times reports on Clinton's war leadership don't go far enough. Hillary's disaster in Libya should haunt her

President Trump is scheduled to announce his nominee for the vacant US Supreme Court seat Thursday. There should be no illusions about the confirmation battle that will follow. No matter what Senat…

‘You can’t unlearn,” Ann McElhinney insists, referring to what she and her husband, Phelim McAleer, refer to in the subtitle of their new book, Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer. In April 2013, the Irish-born investigative journalists focused their attention on the Kermit Gosnell trial going on in Philadelphia, about the abortions performed at the clinic now known by those who didn’t look away as a “house of horrors.” The evidence prosecutors showed in court was grisly. As McElhinney has put it: “The humanity in all the pictures is unmistakable, the pictures of the babies that were shown as evidence in the Gosnell trial were first-, second-, and third-trimester babies, in all their innocence and perfection.” Coinciding with the 44th anniversary in January of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, Gosnell, their book, is a precursor to a movie they’ve completed production work on. Starring Dean Cain (formerly Superman on the primetime Lois & Clark), the movie is still in need of a distributor. You can imagine how popular such a sell would be in Hollywood — whose stars most recently took the stage in the so-called women’s marches to protest Donald Trump as president and to insist on continued taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. McElhinney’s interest in the trial was not ideological. She wasn’t pro-life, and she’s quick to tell you that she “never trusted or liked pro-life activists.” And she really didn’t like being shown images of abortions. “If the anti-abortion position was so strong, it should be able to argue without resorting to emotionally manipulating its audience with fraudulent horror pictures,” she has written. But Gosnell changed things for McElhinney. “I got an education on abortion because of researching and investigating this story,” she tells me. In the case of Gosnell, she has focused not only on the unborn who died and the infants born alive and then killed, but also on “two vulnerable women” who died there, one a young African American and one a refugee, she points out, adding: Hundreds of African-American babies were born alive and then murdered. Where is the outrage for those black lives that matter? Progressive Pennsylvania with all of its government agencies couldn’t have cared less. Where’s the outrage for that? Gosnell’s clinic was the epitome of what Pope Francis refers to as a “throwaway society.” People cast aside, treated shoddily, because they are poor and desperate and no one cares to pay attention. It can be easier and more ideologically convenient to look away. So many times when pro-life legislation aims at regulating abortion clinics, it’s not a stealth strategy to make abortion illegal law by law; rather these are often attempts to exercise some oversight and ensure that women are not being forced into an abortion, psychologically coerced by circumstances and a culture that seems to point toward abortion, even expecting or preferring it in certain circumstances. McElhinney and McAleer are the first journalists to visit Gosnell in prison, and McElhinney says that interviewing him has shed light not only on him but also on the culture of the abortion business: Gosnell can justify anything and does. He’s very greedy, and that comes across, and he likes power, and it’s a powerful, wealthy industry. I can always see#..#the babies he killed. But it’s also a privilege to know them, to witness for their lives. It’s what journalism is all about or at least what it should be about: to speak for the powerless who cannot speak for themselves. In this case, that is as true as it gets. Those children deserved journalists to tell their stories. They were betrayed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and so many others. When I ask McElhinney to point to something encouraging she encountered, she names Detective Jim Wood. He is a “a public servant doing all he can every day to bring justice to defend and to protect,” she says. “That he exists makes me hopeful.” Gosnell’s clinic was the epitome of what Pope Francis refers to as a ‘throwaway society.’ About the movie, McElhinney notes that they have to independently distribute it. She asks: “Investors please be in touch, the movie needs to come out this year. Audiences who have seen it say it’s the best movie ever made about abortion.” When asked for her advice to the media on abortion and any — God have mercy — future Gosnells, she says: Just be honest stop being ideological and report the news, even when it makes a lie of their personal beliefs. Do your job, tell the story, and keep your opinions for the opinion pages. . . . Everyone needs to read the book. People think they know what goes on. I thought I knew. The details are important: what Gosnell did, how he got away with it. The government and the media “betrayed” their responsibilities in the face of “this massive case of mass murder for political reasons.” Never again, she says, must be the response. — Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and an editor-at-large of National Review. Sign up for her weekly NRI newsletter here. This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.

Editor’s Note: The following article is an excerpt from Anthony Esolen’s new book Out of the Ashes. Any dispassionate observer must conclude that higher education in the United States, and in many other Western nations, is in a bad way. I am not talking about troubles that are easily remedied or errors that require adjustment and reform. I am talking about whether higher education as the West has known it for eight hundred years is any longer possible. The frieze beneath the rotunda of the state house at Providence, the city where my college is located, proclaims, in the words of Tacitus, the happiness of the times when a man “may think what he will and speak what he thinks.” This may still be true of men sitting at a diner or a bar, drinking beer and arguing about politics. Rational argument and freedom of thought, like the exercise of religion, has retreated into the realm of the private. You may still think what you will, so long as you keep it to yourself. You may not think or speak freely in our political assemblies, our newspapers, and our colleges. Here the reader may supply plenty of anecdotes about professors, insufficiently “liberal,” who have been driven from their jobs or burdened with legal troubles because they violated the new iron etiquette that governs the public sphere. My favorite, if such it may be called, involved an instructor of composition at the University of Winnipeg who remarked, near the end of a semester, that the most important work that most women do will be to raise their children well. For that remark — which would have struck sensible people alive three cultural minutes ago, both men and women, as a bland truism — the instructor was relieved of his duties forthwith, barred from his office, and forbidden even to administer his final exam. People who say that such events are rare and therefore not to be taken too seriously are either fools or liars. A thousand public lynchings are expensive and tiresome. Two or three will intimidate your enemies very nicely and save you the sweat and the struggle against your conscience. That is especially true if the victim is powerful and visible, as was Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard who opined that the difference between the numbers of men and women pursuing the natural sciences at the highest level might be due rather to predilection and intellectual inclination than to sexism. Again we are dealing with a bland truism; but the long knives came out, and Summers was dispatched. This etiquette is related to the cry for “safe spaces,” as college students, a majority of them female, demand to be protected from ideas and utterances that somehow, as they claim, deny their very existence or would cast doubt upon what they claim are their incontestable experiences as members of some historically underprivileged group. Their critics laugh at them and say that such students, “snowflakes,” want to lock our colleges into an orthodoxy that is unenlightened and medieval. These critics are wrong in their diagnosis and inaccurate in their criticism. It is also something of a mistake to point at the students and laugh at them for being weaklings. The students hold the hammer, and they know it. Yes, it is true that mere teenage boys in decades past — lads who stormed the bluffs of Normandy, sailed on ships cutting through the ice of the Northwest Passage, and slashed their way with explorers through the fever swamps and forests of Borneo — would not be preoccupied with hurtful words, and that a “trigger warning” in those days was the clutch of a rifle being loaded. But in our world of inversions, power is granted to people who claim that they have no power and who resent the greatness of their own forebears. They do not seek “safety.” They seek to destroy. The strong man is bound and gagged, and the pistol is pointed at his head — the seat of reason itself. In such a world, it is insufficient to say that higher education suffers. Except in the most technical of disciplines, and perhaps even in those, the very possibility of higher education comes to an abrupt halt. If a professor must negotiate an emotional and verbal and political mine field before he opens his mouth, then he is no professor any longer. He is a servile functionary, no matter his title and no matter how well he is paid. He instructs his students not in freedom but in his own servility. That many of the students demand this servility of him and of themselves makes their capitulation all the worse. The colleges have not abandoned moral considerations utterly. Relativism is an unstable equilibrium — imagine a pyramid upside down, placed delicately upon its apex. It might make you break out into a cold sweat to stand in its shade. The question is not whether some moral vision will prevail, but which moral vision. The colleges are thus committed to a moral inversion. High and noble virtues, especially those that require moral courage, are mocked: gallantry in wartime, sexual purity, scrupulous honesty and plain dealing, piety, and the willingness to subject your thoughts, experiences, and most treasured beliefs to the searching scrutiny of reason. What is valued then? Debauchery, perversion, contempt for your supposedly benighted ancestors, lazy agnosticism, easy and costless pacifism, political maneuvering, and an enforcement of a new orthodoxy that in denying rational analysis seeks to render itself immune to criticism. You sink yourself in debt to discover that your sons and daughters have been severed from their faith, their morals, and their reason. Whorehouses and mental wards would be much cheaper. They might well be healthier, too. — Anthony Esolen is a professor at Providence College and author of Out of the Ashes. 

Co-founder of the Muslim Reform Movement shares her view

What's holding the Arab world back? Why, by nearly every measure, are Muslim nations so far behind the West economically, culturally and scientifically? Bret...

In the electoral strongholds for Trump, residents seemed unmoved over the outrage flashing across their television screens.

Editor’s Note: The following article is an excerpt from Anthony Esolen’s new book Out of the Ashes. Any dispassionate observer must conclude that higher education in the United States, and in many other Western nations, is in a bad way. I am not talking about troubles that are easily remedied or errors that require adjustment and reform. I am talking about whether higher education as the West has known it for eight hundred years is any longer possible. The frieze beneath the rotunda of the state house at Providence, the city where my college is located, proclaims, in the words of Tacitus, the happiness of the times when a man “may think what he will and speak what he thinks.” This may still be true of men sitting at a diner or a bar, drinking beer and arguing about politics. Rational argument and freedom of thought, like the exercise of religion, has retreated into the realm of the private. You may still think what you will, so long as you keep it to yourself. You may not think or speak freely in our political assemblies, our newspapers, and our colleges. Here the reader may supply plenty of anecdotes about professors, insufficiently “liberal,” who have been driven from their jobs or burdened with legal troubles because they violated the new iron etiquette that governs the public sphere. My favorite, if such it may be called, involved an instructor of composition at the University of Winnipeg who remarked, near the end of a semester, that the most important work that most women do will be to raise their children well. For that remark — which would have struck sensible people alive three cultural minutes ago, both men and women, as a bland truism — the instructor was relieved of his duties forthwith, barred from his office, and forbidden even to administer his final exam. People who say that such events are rare and therefore not to be taken too seriously are either fools or liars. A thousand public lynchings are expensive and tiresome. Two or three will intimidate your enemies very nicely and save you the sweat and the struggle against your conscience. That is especially true if the victim is powerful and visible, as was Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard who opined that the difference between the numbers of men and women pursuing the natural sciences at the highest level might be due rather to predilection and intellectual inclination than to sexism. Again we are dealing with a bland truism; but the long knives came out, and Summers was dispatched. This etiquette is related to the cry for “safe spaces,” as college students, a majority of them female, demand to be protected from ideas and utterances that somehow, as they claim, deny their very existence or would cast doubt upon what they claim are their incontestable experiences as members of some historically underprivileged group. Their critics laugh at them and say that such students, “snowflakes,” want to lock our colleges into an orthodoxy that is unenlightened and medieval. These critics are wrong in their diagnosis and inaccurate in their criticism. It is also something of a mistake to point at the students and laugh at them for being weaklings. The students hold the hammer, and they know it. Yes, it is true that mere teenage boys in decades past — lads who stormed the bluffs of Normandy, sailed on ships cutting through the ice of the Northwest Passage, and slashed their way with explorers through the fever swamps and forests of Borneo — would not be preoccupied with hurtful words, and that a “trigger warning” in those days was the clutch of a rifle being loaded. But in our world of inversions, power is granted to people who claim that they have no power and who resent the greatness of their own forebears. They do not seek “safety.” They seek to destroy. The strong man is bound and gagged, and the pistol is pointed at his head — the seat of reason itself. In such a world, it is insufficient to say that higher education suffers. Except in the most technical of disciplines, and perhaps even in those, the very possibility of higher education comes to an abrupt halt. If a professor must negotiate an emotional and verbal and political mine field before he opens his mouth, then he is no professor any longer. He is a servile functionary, no matter his title and no matter how well he is paid. He instructs his students not in freedom but in his own servility. That many of the students demand this servility of him and of themselves makes their capitulation all the worse. The colleges have not abandoned moral considerations utterly. Relativism is an unstable equilibrium — imagine a pyramid upside down, placed delicately upon its apex. It might make you break out into a cold sweat to stand in its shade. The question is not whether some moral vision will prevail, but which moral vision. The colleges are thus committed to a moral inversion. High and noble virtues, especially those that require moral courage, are mocked: gallantry in wartime, sexual purity, scrupulous honesty and plain dealing, piety, and the willingness to subject your thoughts, experiences, and most treasured beliefs to the searching scrutiny of reason. What is valued then? Debauchery, perversion, contempt for your supposedly benighted ancestors, lazy agnosticism, easy and costless pacifism, political maneuvering, and an enforcement of a new orthodoxy that in denying rational analysis seeks to render itself immune to criticism. You sink yourself in debt to discover that your sons and daughters have been severed from their faith, their morals, and their reason. Whorehouses and mental wards would be much cheaper. They might well be healthier, too. — Anthony Esolen is a professor at Providence College and author of Out of the Ashes. 

Despite today’s outrage over President Donald Trump’s refugee executive order, many liberals in 1975 were part of a chorus of big name Democrats who refused to accept any Vietnamese refugees whe

False reports identifying the people who supposedly attacked a Quebec-area mosque are circulating online.

But since Trump made good on those threats, the GOP silence has been deafening.

Quebec provincial police say six people are dead and eight were wounded after shots were fired inside a mosque on Sunday night during evening prayers, an act Quebec's premier described as "murderous act directed at a specific community."

That was unexpected.

Last week, I put out The Liberal Translation Guide: 20 Translations of Things That Liberals Say and people were like, Woah, I had no idea that liberals say they want organic food; what they really mean is that they want to EAT BABIES.

Khan says he prays travel for Pakistani citizens to US is banned "so that we can focus on fixing our country".

Eliot Cohen: ?To friends still thinking of serving as political appointees in this administration, beware: When you sell your soul to the Devil, he prefers to collect his purchase on the installment plan. Trump’s disregard for either Secretary of Defense [...]

Democrats Put Japanese-Americans In Camps After A Single Attack With liberals across the United States going crazy because President Trump wants ...

Another Brilliant Moment From Bill de Blasio Moronic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared on CNN on Sunday ...

Saudi Arabia's King Salman, in a phone call on Sunday with U.S. President Donald Trump, agreed to support safe zones in Syria and Yemen, a White House statement said.

Don't delete Uber, you idiot. Open for links ▸ ~ Follow me on Twitter! ▸ https://twitter.com/jschlattAlt Join my Discord server! ▸ https://discord.gg/7HWvMUU ~

Criticism from major conservative donors.

On Friday, Donald Trump signed an executive order halting admission of refugees for 120 days and halting travel from seven majority-Muslim countries — Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and Somalia — for 90 days while the federal government undertakes a review of admission procedures. He has also imposed an annual cap of 50,000 refugees. The instant backlash, which has culminated in thousands of protesters creating chaos at the nation’s airports, is the result more of knee-jerk emotion than a sober assessment of Trump’s policy. It’s a well-documented fact that would-be terrorists are posing as refugees to obtain admission into Europe, and visa screenings have routinely failed to identify foreign nationals who later committed terrorist attacks in the United States. As the Islamic State continues its reign of terror across a large swath of the Middle East, it should be a matter of common sense that the U.S. needs to evaluate and strengthen its vetting. Trump’s executive order is an attempt — albeit, an ill-conceived attempt in several ways, about which more momentarily — to address this problem. Rhetoric about “open arms” aside, the United States. has been modest in its approach to refugees for the past two decades. During the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. regularly admitted fewer than 50,000 refugees. Barack Obama’s tenure was little different — he increased the refugee cap to 70,000 at the beginning of his second term but normally admitted numbers on par with Bush’s — until he dramatically expanded the cap (to 110,000) for 2017. Trump’s order is, to this extent, a return to recent norms. Similar myths have dominated the public understanding of the Syrian-refugee program. Until ratcheting up the program in 2016, the Obama administration admitted fewer than 2,000 Syrian refugees between 2011 and 2015 — this at the time that the former president was dithering over his “red line.” The 13,000 Syrian refugees admitted during 2016, pursuant to President Obama’s expansion, still constitute an infinitesimal fraction of the refugee population, which is in the several millions, of that war-torn country. Trump has suspended that program temporarily, pending review. When that program comes back on-line, it will include a directive to prioritize Christians, Yazidis, and other persecuted religious minorities — against which the Obama administration effectively discriminated at the same time that it was declaring Christians to be victims of “genocide” at the hands of ISIS. Given the unique threats these groups face, moving them to the front of the line should be an obvious measure, and contrary to outraged claims otherwise, prioritizing religious minorities is in accordance with law; religion is already used as a criterion for evaluating refugee-status claims. Finally, there is recent precedent for Trump’s order. In 2011, the Obama administration halted refugee-processing from Iraq for six months in order to do exactly what the Trump administration is doing now: ensure that terrorists were not exploiting the program to enter the country. No one rushed to JFK International to protest. Also, the seven countries to which the order applies are taken from Obama-era precedents. All of this said, Trump’s order displays much of the amateurism that dominated his campaign. There seems to have been no guidance provided by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security to the officials nationwide who would be responsible for executing the order; and on Saturday, as refugees were being detained at airports across the country, it was reported that local officials were struggling to contact Customs and DHS higher-ups. In 2011, the Obama administration halted refugee-processing from Iraq for six months in order to do exactly what the Trump administration is doing now. The confusion extended to the question of whether the executive order applied to green-card holders. It took DHS secretary John Kelly more than 24 hours to clarify that this is not the case. Similarly, the White House should stipulate that this policy does not apply to the many Iraqi refugees who have acted as aides and translators to Allied forces in the region. The order allows the relevant officials to intervene on a case-by-case basis to “issue visas or other immigration benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise blocked,” but this permission seems to have gone initially unnoticed. Kelly, who served in Iraq, should make sure that this power is used liberally. Most of this confusion could have been avoided if the White House had slowed down, taken time to brief the officials responsible for carrying out the order, and ensured that the legal details were airtight. Instead, it seems that White House political advisers overrode cautions from DHS lawyers and pushed the order forward, to their own detriment. The country is now embroiled, once again, in spectacular protests, and reasonable policy has been drowned in outrage. The White House’s approach here has probably damaged future efforts in this area. The United States needs to bolster its immigration policies across the board, and assessing whether our refugee-admitting procedures are adequately protecting American citizens is entirely reasonable. But President Trump has failed abjectly in the prudential considerations without which even good policy is often doomed. Refugees are not the only thing in need of more vetting.

It’s now socially acceptable to punch people in the face if you disagree with them