The Real Motivation Behind the Left’s “Niceness”, by Kyle Smith.

If there is a guiding principle to today’s left-leaning bourgeoisie, it is niceness. The votes of this group depend largely on which party is seen as being nicer to those most in need. Being nice to minorities, women, the disabled, gay people, poor people and illegal immigrants is of paramount importance.

But what if niceness is not just vague but destructive? What if niceness is just an excuse for selfishness? What if being nice to groups seen as marginalized is actually hurting them? …

Niceness isn’t really a virtue, Lawler says. It’s more of a cop-out, a moral shrug. “A nice person won’t fight for you,” he points out. “A nice person isn’t animated by love or honor or God. Niceness, if you think about it, is the most selfish of virtues, one, as Tocqueville noticed, rooted in a deep indifference to the well-being of others.” …

Today, in Britain as in America, the nice-ocracy simply shrugs as the struggling classes make terrible decisions. Who are we to impose our values on others, ask the nice-ocrats? Isn’t this or that regional patois just as good as standard English? If children in the poorer zip codes are getting a terrible education, the nice-ocrats don’t make a fuss. People are intelligent in their own ways, say the nice-ocrats. If testing doesn’t support this, we should cast doubt on the tests. Anyway, if the not-so-gifted people raise not-so-gifted children, there won’t be additional competition for those few spots on the best campuses. …

Not-nice Trump voters sometimes speak dismissively of immigrants and others who refuse to learn English; nice Clinton voters are shocked that anyone could hold such cruel views. It isn’t nice to point out that some people don’t have very good command of grammar. Even teachers no longer make it a priority to teach others how to speak properly … To the nice people, “attempts to foist alleged grammatical ‘correctness’ on native speakers of an ‘incorrect’ dialect are nothing but the unacknowledged and oppressive exercise of social control — the means by which the elites deprive whole social classes and people of self-esteem.” Moreover, all forms of expression are equally valid, says the nice-ocrat … So refusing to teach grammar is “both in accord with a correct understanding of the nature of language and is politically generous.” If people who can’t speak properly find themselves subsequently accruing little value in today’s job market, the nice-ocrat simply shrugs again. …

Today’s elites, as Charles Murray has noted in his book, Coming Apart, … refuse to preach what they practice. They are well aware of the pro-social behavior that leads to success, but are too nice to encourage others to follow their lead. Indeed, they recoil in horror from the prospect of being thought “judgmental” toward others.

Dalrymple, who was born in 1949, is old enough to remember a time when the upper classes and the educational establishment encouraged the lower classes to acquire virtue. The lower classes took the challenge seriously.

Most claims about Trump’s visa Executive Order are false or misleading, by William Jaocbson.

There is a logic to the 7 countries. Six are failed states known to have large ISIS activity, and one, Iran, is a sworn enemy of the U.S. and worldwide sponsor of terrorism. … And, the 7 countries on the list were not even so-designated by Trump. Rather, they were selected last year by the Obama administration as posing special risks for visa entry. …

There are accusations that one particular provision discriminates. It gives preference to those fleeing religious persecution in countries in which they are a religious minority … This is being referred to as a de facto discrimination against Muslims because it mostly applies to Christians. Well, that’s because Christians are the most persecuted religion in the Middle East, by Muslims. If there were a country in which Muslims were persecuted by another majority religion, they would get preference.  …

An offshoot of the “Muslim ban” claim is the claim that Trump deliberately excluded countries in which he does business. This argument is made in order to claim Muslims are targeted even though most of the Muslim world is not affected. The problem, of course, is that Trump worked off of the Obama administration’s list of particularly risky countries for visa entry.

There is a lot of fake news in the media nowadays.

My Islam Problem and Yours, by Roger L. Simon.

You will note I say Islam and not some other euphemistic expression like radical Islam or Islamism or Islamofascism. Islam.

I know that disturbs you because chances are you live in a world where cultural relativism prevails and all religions — fusty old things that they are — are equal.

Well, it is so if you think so, but I will note again that at least one interested party — the current president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — has declared bluntly that his religion is in dire need of a reformation. Chances are he knows more about Islam than you. He certainly does than me.  Also, he lives in a hellacious region of the world dominated by that religion and its violent ideology.

How dangerous is that ideology?  Ask yourself this:  Why is it that since 9/11/2001 there he have been 30,209 terror attacks in the name of Allah?  There have been 38 in the last six days alone, resulting in 425 killed and 419 injured. There were also nine suicide bombings during that time frame. …

How about an ideology that urges you to do these things, just as it always has since the seventh century? Could that  be the reason — just possibly?

Captain Kirk and the Enterprise encounter the strange alien civilization of modern leftism. Oddly entertaining.

By the way, Ashley Judd is single, childless, and forty eight.

Remember The Time Bill Clinton Got A Standing Ovation For “Cracking Down On Illegal Aliens”, by Tyler Durden.

We are a nation of immigrants.. but we are a nation of laws

Our nation is rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country… Illegal immigrants take jobs from citizens or legal immigrants, they impose burdens on our taxpayers…

That is why we are doubling the number of border guards, deporting more illegal immigrants than ever before, cracking down on illegal hiring, barring benefits to illegal aliens, and we will do more to speed the deportation of illegal immigrants arrest for crimes…

It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws that has occurred in the last few years.. and we must do more to stop it.

[Standing Ovation]

Bill Clinton was then of the old left, who saw helping the working class as its main means of attracting votes. That is so out of date now. The new left is into open borders and non-white voters, attracting the bulk of non-white votes to gain power.

Trump is an awful lot like a 1990s Democrat. Remember any outrage at what President Clinton said in 1995? Not at all. But Trump in 2016? Massive outrage from the media.

Bill Clinton said it better, but noting how political correctness has changed dramatically in two decades: what was sensible and generally approved in 1995 is outrageous to the politically correct in 2016. Trump is Hitler, yet Bill Clinton was not.

Is Trump’s Immigration Order the Worst of Both Worlds? by John Hinderaker.

President Trump is taking a lot of political heat, and therefore expending a considerable amount of political capital, for an immigration order that doesn’t go far enough to be meaningful. …

There is no way to vet the immigrant’s descendants. This is one reason why the current liberal theme that relatively few terrorist attacks have been carried out by Islamic immigrants is so silly. Frequently, perhaps usually, the terrorist doesn’t appear until the second generation, like Omar Mateen.

Society expects justice from courts, not therapy, by Jennifer Oriel.

When law and order fails, ­society assumes the character of anarchy. It is ugly, tribal and lawless. In Victoria, the Apex gang has unleashed anarchy in brazen street fights, numerous robberies, assaults and rape. …

Speaking to Vice News, Victoria Legal Aid’s executive ­director of criminal law services, Helen Fatouros, complained that: “Visa cancellation should not be about punishment.” Last year, Flemington Community Legal Centre executive officer Anthony Kelly said the community should take responsibility for Apex gang violence and described the idea of targeting gang members for ­deportation as ­“racist”.

Left activists believe the Sudanese origin of some Apex gang members makes them deserving of special consideration. Conservatives view it as an opportunity to deport criminal thugs back to their country of origin.

One gains the impression that many TJ [therapeutic jurisprudence] advocates are engaged in a kind of virtue-signalling where the efficacy of courts is measured not by the faithful application of legislation and just punishment for crime but the degree to which criminals emote and judges manage their emotions. In a 2011 paper, Hoffman describes a therapeutic court in a scene evocative of the film Idiocracy. A judge roams around the court mic in hand “like a talk-show host”, prompting an offender renamed a “client” to confess his crime and emote about it before coaching him to ­denounce the past. They celebrate his rebirth with courtroom ­applause, a certificate and pen. …

The systemic failure of our legal system to protect innocent citizens from violent criminals is inseparable from the quiet revolution transforming court practice from black letter law to therapy culture. The judiciary is quick to remind us that the accused have rights. That is obviously true, but they don’t include the right to harm others.

When offenders commit violence on the scale we have seen in Melbourne recently — when a perpetrator on bail allegedly runs over and kills a three-month-old baby sleeping in his pram, when youths assault an elderly man ­returning home from his wife’s grave — that is when the scales of justice tip to protect innocents. In such cases, therapy is no substitute for justice. We expect justice in our court rooms. Leave therapy to the therapists.

Greens call for Australia to “junk” its longstanding alliance with the US because Trump banned people from seven Muslim countries from entering the US, by Pia Akerman.

Greens leader Richard Di Natale has called for Australia to “junk” its longstanding alliance with the US as retribution for Donald Trump’s move to ban people from seven Muslim countries from entering the US.

Dr Di Natale said Malcolm Turnbull needed to match the position shown so far by the UK and Germany, where the governments have already expressed their concern about the ban. …

“We need to now, more than ever, ask ourselves whether our alliance with the United States of America is in the national interest.

“Australia needs to junk the US alliance. It needs to renegotiate the terms of a new relationship with the US that advances our interests and advances the interests of people right across the world.”

See, the Muslim ban is that important. And it called forth a world-class piece of virtue-signaling from the Greens leader. Awesome.

Starbucks to hire 10,000 refugees over next 5 years, by Josh Boak.

Starbucks says it will hire 10,000 refugees over the next five years, a response to President Donald Trump’s indefinite suspension of Syrian refugees and temporary travel bans that apply to six other Muslim-majority nations.

Howard Schultz, the coffee retailer’s chairman and CEO, said in a letter to employees Sunday that the hiring would apply to stores worldwide and the effort would start in the United States where the focus would be on hiring immigrants “who have served with U.S. troops as interpreters and support personnel.”

Oh no, Starbucks isn’t going to discriminate against non-refugees is it? Starbucks discriminates!

Loud Arab Call To Prayer Inside Dallas Fort Worth Airport While Muslims Pray, Chant ‘Allah’, by Cristina Laila.

Protests erupted at airports across the country following Donald Trump’s executive order temporarily barring Muslims from seven countries from entering the United States.

Muslims gathered inside of Dallas Fort Worth Airport with a loud Arab call to prayer in protest of this ban.

This is not a protest. This is how Muslims show their dominance in a country that they are seeking to takeover. Would any Islamic country allow Christians or Jews to gather in an airport and demonstrate like this?

Now that they are mascots in the left’s struggle for political power, criticism of Muslims is off limits and all things Islamic are to be applauded in the media. Some PC governments are even close to making it a law — see Canada Inching Toward ‘Islamophobia’ Law.

Netanyahu: Trump is right to build a wall, it worked for Israel, by Tovah Lazaroff.

Earlier this month, the [Israeli] Defense Ministry said in a report that it had completed raising the height of the electronic “smart” fence along part of the border with Egypt to stop infiltration into the country by migrants. Construction of the original barrier, equipped with information collection centers and warning systems … , was completed in 2014 at a height of five meters along 242 kilometers, from the Gaza Strip to Eilat on the Red Sea.

The government built the fence in the hope that it would stop illegal migration, drug and weapons trafficking and terrorist infiltrations.

According to the Defense Ministry, the fence has already slashed the number of illegal African migrants arriving in Israel, with only 213 breaching the barrier in 2015. But the number of successful infiltrations prompted authorities to raise the height from 5 meters to 8 meters along a 17-kilometer stretch, the ministry said.

The raising of the fence, along with additional detection devices, “significantly curbed the flow of illegal infiltration into Israel, with only 11 successful attempts to cross the fence throughout 2016,” it said.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

What Trump’s Wall Says to the World, by Pat Buchanan.

Those desperate to see the wall built, illegal immigration halted, and those here illegally deported, see the country they grew up in as dying, disappearing, with something strange and foreign taking its place.

It is not only that illegal migrants take jobs from Americans, that they commit crimes, or that so many require subsidized food, welfare, housing, education and health care. It is that they are changing our country. They are changing who we are. …

Who America is, or rather was:

We did not become a new nation because we embraced Jefferson’s notion about all men being “created equal.” We became a new people from our familial break with the Mother Country, described in the declaration as a severing of ties with our “brethren” across the sea who no longer deserved our loyalty or love.

The United States came into being in 1789. The Constitution created the government, the state. But the country already existed.

When the Irish came in the mid-19th century to escape the famine and the Germans to escape Bismarck’s Prussia, and the Italians, Jews, Poles, Greeks, Slovaks came to Ellis Island, they were foreigners who became citizens, and then, after a time, Americans.

Not until decades after the Great Migration of 1890-1920, with the common trials of the Depression, World War II and Cold War, were we truly forged again into one united nation and people.

By 1960, almost all of us shared the same heroes and holidays, spoke the same language and cherished the same culture. …

In 1960, we were a Western Christian country. Ninety percent of our people traced their roots to Europe. Ninety percent bore some connection to the Christian faith.

The wall:

To the tens of millions for whom Trump appeals, what the wall represents is our last chance to preserve that nation and people. …

Given that 80 percent of all people of color vote Democratic, neither the Trump movement nor the Republican Party can survive the Third Worldization of the United States now written in the cards.

Moreover, with the disintegration of the nation we are seeing, and with talk of the breakup of states like Texas and secession of states like California, how do we survive as one nation and people?

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Editor of German newspaper: Assassination of Trump would end ‘tragedy’, by Arutz Sheva Staff.

Josef Joffe, the publisher and editor of the German newspaper Die Zeit, known for its left-wing views, criticized the new administration of US President Donald Trump and implied that the President should be assassinated.

The details of the comment:

During the television program Media Club on the ARD network, the studio asked guests if it was possible for the citizens of the US to vote Trump out of power to “end the tragedy of Trump,” as he termed the now week-old administration.

The first guest on the program, former Die Zeit editor Constanze Stelzenmüller, said that under the US Constitution, “there must be a majority of two thirds in the Senate to impeach the President from office. These legal and political hurdles are very high. A lot needs to occur for this to happen. We are very far off from it.”

During her answer, Joffe interrupted with a quicker solution. “Murder in the White House, for example.”

Don’t Say ‘Mothers’ – It Offends Transgender People, Doctors Told, by Virgina Hale.

Doctors have been told to refer to expectant mothers as “pregnant people” so as not to offend transgender people, in official guidelines issued by the British Medical Association (BMA). …

775,000 women give birth in Britain each year, yet there are no other known cases of people in the process of ‘transition’ becoming pregnant.

Bossy bossy bossy, and foolish.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Trump, May And The Return Of The Anglosphere Will Make The World A Better Place, by James Delingpole.

President Trump  … Prime Minister May … the good guys are back in charge and the world is all the better for it.

I’m talking like this partly because it’s so absolutely guaranteed to annoy the hell out of grisly, unpatriotic lefties like Laura Kuenssberg, the bitter-lemon-tonselled BBC News political editor who tried to sour the mood of the May/Trump love-in with a typically chippy, snobby BBC question pouring scorn on President Trump. She asked:

“Mr President, you’ve said before that torture works, you’ve praised Russia, you’ve said you want to ban some Muslims from coming to America, you’ve suggested there should be punishment for abortion.

“For many people in Britain those sound like alarming beliefs. What do you say to our viewers at home who are worried about some of your views and worried about you becoming the leader of the free world?”

If Trump thought this was representative of the way Britain really thinks, the Special Relationship would have died there and then. But he knows Britain well enough to realise that the BBC is not the voice of Britain, only the voice of a remote, unrepresentative metropolitan liberal-left elite which tried to stand in the way of Brexit and which would have much preferred the raddled, left-wing crook Hillary to have won the US presidential election.

In other words, Trump understands that the BBC is the voice of the losing minority not the winning majority. Which is why he felt comfortable dismissing Kuenssberg’s provocation with a relaxed, amused joke. The BBC, like the New York Times, is just another of those ignorable MSM institutions on the wrong side of history. ..

Canada to offer temporary residency to travellers stranded by Donald Trump’s immigration ban, by the ABC.

Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen told a news conference he did not know how many people might be eligible, but said only a small number of passengers trying to fly to the United States from Canada had been denied boarding

Justin Trudeau is a world-class virtue-signaller. A teacher who rode to power largely on his name and good looks, doing what the new left instructs without really thinking it through.

Erdogan Seeks Powers to Stay in Office Until 2029: Expect Perpetual State of Emergency, by Mish Shedlock.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s carefully planned move to become legal dictator of Turkey is in its final stages. In the wake of a foiled coup, Erdogan removed or imprisoned every judge not on his side, shut down all opposition newspapers, and jailed all of his political opponents.

Far-reaching constitutional changes that will be put to a referendum.

The proposed changes, which were shepherded through parliament on Friday night in alliance between Turkey’s ruling AKP and a nationalist party, would crown Mr Erdogan’s 14-year rule by boosting his formal role as president and allowing him to remain in post until 2029.

Turkey is returning to Islam and abandoning progressive ideas like democracy. How long before they officially leave Nato?

The US Left Adopts Muslims as Their Latest Mascots. Watch this video to see the mood. Notice how the left really protests hard, unlike the right.

“Immigrants are welcome here … Muslims are welcome here … the Muslim ban has got to go … let them in”

Step back and take a wider perspective for a moment. Here is one of the two main sides of a major western country demanding we import immigrants whose defining characteristic is adherence to the Koran.

Islam is a seventh century culture from Arabia that urges conquest of non-Muslims, justifies treating non-Muslims appallingly, treats woman as belongings, and kills gays. It is everything western culture is not — it is not enlightened and it is not progressive. Completely incompatible.

Islam is immutable because the Qur’an is the unchallengeable word of God, dictated to Mohamed by the archangel Gabriel and not open to later re-interpretation. For thirteen centuries Islamic societies that have tried to move away from fundamentalist Islam have always been dragged back to its roots by fundamentalists. I don’t want foolish lefties betting my great grandchildren’s lives on it changing for the first time ever real soon now.

Unlike any other major religion, Islam is also a totalitarian political ideology — Sharia law. It has more in common with a supremacist cult: the penalty for leaving Islam is death. As Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most renowned and prominent Muslim cleric in the world, stated: “The Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished … The majority of them …  agree that apostates must be executed.” Qaradawi also once famously said: “If they had gotten rid of the apostasy punishment, Islam wouldn’t exist today.” This is not some incidental detail.

But in the last week we have reached a new pinnacle in the glorious stupidity of the new left: the demonstrations pictured above, leftists in the US wants people steeped in Islamic culture to live, work, breed and vote in the US.

How did this absurd situation come about?

One factor seems to be that George Soros and other elitists use their influence to encourage open borders. Nothing else can destroy the West and its ideas, except diluting out westerners and changing their culture from within with immigration and demographics. Perhaps the elite think a backward world where they rule supreme is preferable to a world where large populations of advanced and culturally confident westerners can challenge or oppose them.

More importantly, this is the new left’s strategy for winning the  political contest. The old left championed workers and members of the lower class, especially the more intelligent in the lower class who were trying to better themselves. The leftist political class extracted itself wholly from the lower classes via universal education and a relatively dynamic and meritocratic social and economic order. But after that the new left grew rather tired of their old lower class supporters, and moved on to a new strategy.

The new left has a coalition-of-the-fringes electoral strategy — pick up all the non-white votes at the expense of the white votes, and use open borders to bring in more non-white voters. This is why the left regard any white nationalism or consciousness as anathema, while promoting and praising any nonwhite race-based political organizations, such as Black Lives Matter and La Raza. Hating on the white guys is their new way of gaining political power, even though they are mainly white guys. How shortsighted — and what a terrible demographic and cultural risk to the West.

So here we see the new left at all the major US airports, demanding open immigration of Muslims.

 The new left want to force the West to take several grave risks:

• That third world immigrants will fit into our societies as law-abiding and productive citizens. But many will not, because people are not identical blank slates and not all cultures and gene pools are identical. IQs and propensity to crime is partly genetic, no matter how much the left deny this Achilles heel in their strategy. What characterizes third world countries are third worlders –that’s why third world countries are like they are. The quickest way to turn the west into the third world is to bring in such people. The west used to have high trust, low crime societies, but slowly they are becoming diverse, low trust, high crime societies.  Hoping to only take the best and the brightest from the third world is naive (and selfish) — and they won’t be the only ones to come, given overly-generous western welfare.
• That western culture will be the first to break down Muslim culture and will convert Muslims to modern western ways. History and the European experience says that is far more likely that a future Muslim majority will impose Sharia law in the west.
• That identity politics and PC will not so weaken the West through divisiveness and inefficiency that the West will not be displaced or conquered by a more virile and able culture. History says that patriarchies always conquer matriarchies — but who knows, maybe this time it’s different.

This open borders idea is a huge campaign by the left, and one they see as vital to their success in holding political power. They are not going to back down; this will go on for years.

Apologies to regular readers for summarizing some main themes, but we need to make sense of what is going on here — because, on the face of it, it is absurd.

This  situation is new, and few people have thought it through. With the media, bureaucracy and academia almost completely dominated by leftist political correctness, the traditional opinion making organs of society can only recite leftist dogma — denying science and history, and overriding the instincts of the bulk of the western population. They think we are all progressing towards a glorious future, oblivious to the danger. So it is left to those outside the leftists institutions, such as bloggers, to oppose this nonsense.

Be Careful What You Wish For (especially if it is Hitler), by Scott Adams.

Lately I get the feeling that Trump’s critics have evolved from expecting Trump to be Hitler to preferring it. Obviously they don’t prefer it in a conscious way. But the alternative to Trump becoming Hitler is that they have to live out the rest of their lives as confirmed morons. …

When millions of Americans want the same thing, and they want it badly, the odds of it happening go way up. … I’m talking about ordinary people doing ordinary things to turn Trump into an actual Hitler. For example, if protesters start getting violent, you could expect forceful reactions eventually. And that makes Trump look more like Hitler. I can think of dozens of ways the protesters could cause the thing they are trying to prevent. …

If you are looking for the tells that this dangerous situation is developing, notice how excited/happy the Trump critics seem to be — while angry at the same time — that Trump’s immigration ban fits their belief system. If you see people who are simply afraid of Trump, they are probably harmless. But the people who are excited about any Hitler-analogy-behavior by Trump might be leading the country to a police state without knowing it.

The Media Honestly Doesn’t Get It, by Derek Hunter.

In 1968, if you’d railed endlessly about how the United States would never, ever send men to the moon, you would’ve had some crow to eat the following year.

If you made your declarations not in your local pub, but on television and in the newspaper, and if you had bolstered your claim with credentials in the sciences, you’d be having a Thanksgiving dinner’s worth of crow to consume.

And maybe, just maybe, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned, you’d recognize you need to rethink some of the things you had known to be true only a year ago.

Such is the case with the mainstream media and President Trump. Only, unlike someone who’d reflected and reconciled the reality of a moonshot with their worldview going forward, the media still lives in a bubble where it’s the reality that’s wrong.

Steve Bannon gets misquoted about the media — more fake news:

That brings us to the other part of Bannon’s quote, the part the media doesn’t want to talk about. “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut,” he said. And while most headlines stopped there, Bannon did not. He continued with, “and just listen for a while.”

It wasn’t a new sentence. It was the same sentence, though you wouldn’t know it from any of the headlines, tweets or talking heads who clutched their pearls over someone in the White House telling the media to “keep its mouth shut.”

They dishonestly played it as a “threat to the First Amendment,” because outrage is cheap and self-reflection is hard.

Media life insulates them from much of our reality:

Journalists, especially on the national beat, live in an insulated world populated by other journalists and like-minded, self-described policy wonks. Even if they happen to have come from the Midwest or somewhere else people do actual work for a living, they undoubtedly spent their youth yearning to leave. Having hated where they grew up, that economic reality is easy to escape and forget in recession-proof Washington, when you type and talk for a living.

Listening is only for people who “matter,” not those who labor. Industrial areas are places they visit every four years, like the zoo. You don’t listen to the animals at the zoo. They pop in, write their stories about blue-haired old ladies and how quaint it is, then head back to the DC cocktail circuit as a hero who can regale their peers with tales of how they survived some filthy diner lacking a proper brunch menu. “You mean they didn’t have mimosas?” The horror.

Friendly Reminder: Obama Selected The List Of Muslim Countries in Trump’s Executive Order, by Matt Vespa.

As the Left and some Republicans lose their minds over President Donald J. Trump’s executive order on immigration, let’s not forget that the list of concerned countries that the Trump administration outlined in the order is based on the one signed into law by the former Obama administration …

San Francisco airport, 29 Jan 2017

“At the initial signing of the restrictions [in December 2015], foreigners who would normally be deemed eligible for a visa waiver were denied if they had visited Iran, Syria, Sudan or Iraq in the past five years or held dual citizenship from one of those countries.

“In February 2016, the Obama administration added Libya, Somali and Yemen to the list of countries one could not have visited — but allowed dual citizens of those countries who had not traveled there access to the Visa Waiver Program. Dual citizens of Syria, Sudan, Iraq and Iran are still ineligible, however.

“Though outside groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union  … opposed the act, the bipartisan bill passed through Congress with little pushback.”

Yet, I don’t remember the Left freaking out over this. I certainly don’t remember them going indiscriminately insane when the Obama White House stopped processing Iraqi visas for six months in 2011 when — surprise!  — Al-Qaeda operatives feigned refugee status to get relocated to Bowling Green, Kentucky. And yes, some of the visa applicants who were screwed over worked as intelligence assets and interpreters for the U.S. military, according to ABC News. But remember, there was a Democrat in the Oval Office, so it was okay at the time.

Ah yes, but Obama was in favor of open borders, so his temporary ban was obviously really just for safety. But with Trump the open borders activists are afraid the current temporary bans are a foot in the door, a prelude to much wider restrictions on third world immigration to the US. On this I suspect they are correct, that Trump will keep pushing in this direction until the pushback forces him to stop.

hat-tip Tim

Nikki Haley Puts U.N. on Notice: U.S. Is ‘Taking Names’, by Somini Sengupta.

The American ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, issued a stark warning on Friday to allies and rivals abroad, saying in her first remarks at the headquarters of the world body that the Trump administration would hold to account those who do not back the United States.

“You’re going to see a change in the way we do business,” Ms. Haley said. “Our goal with the administration is to show value at the U.N., and the way we’ll show value is to show our strength, show our voice, have the backs of our allies and make sure our allies have our back as well.”

“For those who don’t have our back,” she added, “we’re taking names; we will make points to respond to that accordingly.”

Princeton Freshman: They’re Training Us To Hate Each Other.

Freshman Carrie Pritt revealed the diversity scandal:

This mandatory orientation event was designed to help us appreciate our diversity as a student body during the first week of classes. But what did it really accomplish? In compressing us into isolated communities based on our race, religion or gender, the minister belittled every other piece of our identities.

He faced a crowd of singular young adults and essentially told them that their heritage outweighed their humanity.  The message was clear: know your kind and stick to it. Don’t risk offending people from other backgrounds by trying to understand their worldviews. …

My teachers and classmates openly referred to Trump’s voters as uneducated bigots throughout the election season, while taking any criticism of Clinton as an attack against women. Anyone who dares to voice a religious opinion is regarded as unintelligent. The fear of being called racist draws our attention to a black woman’s skin instead of her character, and the fear of being called homophobic emphasizes a gay man’s sexuality over his personality.

Article writer Elliot Hamilton notes how it encourages tribalism:

Pritt ends her article by saying, “diversity is the celebration of individuality and nonconformity.” She is correct. The diversity of ideas remains integral to the republic; senselessly dividing the nation by complexion, sexuality, biological sex, and other physical features creates a tribalist society that threatens the institutions that keep us intact.

Ahh, but who benefits? It’s all about identity politics, encouraged by the left because of its coalition-of-the-fringes strategy for winning the political contest: everyone voting against the white guys.