Democrats will finally get a dose of what everyone else has been warning Antifa has been doing to them.

For a guy who hates capitalism, Bernie Sanders is exceedingly good at it. It’s not just the millions of dollars he’s made (and kept to himself)

from his books, but his campaign offers anything the young communist could want to show they are a true believer, short of a billy club or keys to a Gulag.

At his website, the unshowered parental disappointments in your life can buy $27 t-shirts with his name on it or “College for All” across the front, as if to advertise how your priorities are screwed up. If you’re angry about borrowing $25k per year for a worthless women’s studies degree, what business do you have dropping $27 on cotton rag demanding someone else picks up the cost?

For the adventurous granola cruncher, there is the $5 “Medicare for All” bumper sticker. After all, why not lay down what is likely a 10,000 percent mark-up for something to cover the rust on your VW Beetle or to replace the Grateful Dead sticker you bought just after Gerry died? It’s been a while. Time to move on.

Bernie also offers $7 car magnets, for those trust fund babies and yuppies who never grew up, but feel guilty about their wealth. Giving to charity is for suckers, but so is putting something that will be hard to peel off and could damage the paint on that new BMW.

There’s also the $5 “Not me, us” sticker which features a silhouette of Bernie superimposed over a faceless crowd, thereby defeating the message of the sticker by showing that it is, in fact, about Bernie.

Then there are the hats ($18-$27), a $27 rally poster (guaranteed to ensure virginity through middle age for anyone who hangs it on their bedroom wall), buttons ($5), a mug ($18), and more tote bags than PBS during a pledge drive.

For a mere $18 you can buy a canvas tote that will not only allow you to virtue signal everyone at the Whole Foods about how “woke” you are, but you can do so with a pretentious message emblazoned across it. Imagine tossing $4 avocados into a bag reading, “Bernie for the planet." What up-and-coming failure wouldn’t want a “Keep calm and vote Bernie?" Or, if none of those make you tingle in the right places, there’s always the one with what could be a poorly drawn planet Earth in a human hand (it kind of looks like a bar of soap, but that’s highly unlikely given the audience) with the words, “Vote Bernie, save this.” 

Bernie Sanders' online store offers everything you need to empower supporters to show the world that the education system has failed them and disappoint parents from coast to coast.

The worst part isn’t that Bernie is selling these and many, many other worthless things to raise money for his campaign, it’s that he’s running to essentially destroy anyone else’s ability to do the same. Not the “to raise campaign funds part,” the to make a living part.

People who make a living through their own initiative are the enemy of Bernie Sanders and his army, and all businesses must be destroyed. He’s not campaigning on that, obviously, but it’s the subtext of everything the man says and advocates.

American citizens are property of the state, not the other way around. Illegal aliens? They get a pass. More than that, they get the same “benefits” as Americans without any of that pesky “having to pay taxes to contribute to the cost” mess that ruins people’s April 15th.

How a campaign blatantly promising to screw over Americans while benefitting people in the country illegally gained traction in a major political party in the United States (or any country, for that matter) is a testament to the power of the fringe, the most extreme elements of the left. Why the Democratic Party can’t rally behind anyone who likes the country, is proud of it, is shocking.

Bernie Sanders is what happens when a party is devoid of leaders. Bernie is popular with a select group of naïve young people who’ve yet to earn anything worth having, so the idea of government-sanctioned theft is appealing to them. But the worst part is no one has stood up to him or his ideas; no one has stood up for the country or what made it great. Instead, they pander to the same people, mistaking enthusiasm for the man as enthusiasm up for grabs.

It’s Bernie or bust for his supporters. They’re already dominated by demographic considered the least likely to vote in the general election. Even if they are enough to win the nomination in a widely split field, they’re not likely to carry anyone over the finish line because there aren’t more of them. And the demographic most likely to vote in the general election are the least likely to embrace Bernie’s vision. They remember the horrors of socialism and communism, they fought them for this country and aren’t likely to embrace them now.

That’s where the other Democrats dropped the ball. Aping the radical left is never going to appeal to people who want it when the real deal is also on the ballot. You can’t out-Bernie Bernie.

Now, with no one willing to leave the race and allow opposition to coalesce around one alternative, it’s close to too late to stop him from at least getting a plurality of the delegates needed to win the nomination. If Bernie goes into the convention with the most delegates and doesn’t win the nomination, well, hell hath no fury like a Bernie-bro scorned.

The t-shirts will be donned, the tote bags will fly, and Democrats will finally get a dose of what everyone else has been warning Antifa has been doing to them.

Comrade Bernie came to win. And just like those historical monsters he admires, he’s not about to let anything stand in his way. If only the other candidates weren’t too busy sucking up to him and his army to notice

Time For a US-Brazil Free Trade Agreement

The election in 2018 of Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has shown that South Americans are pivoting away from socialism and towards free

market economics. This is a unique time in Central and South American politics with many nations rotating away from China and Russia towards the United States and other free market nations. Nations that show a healthy respect for property rights, low taxes, low regulatory policies and respect for intellectual property rights should be rewarded with free trade agreements that benefit both economies.

Right now, the United States is in a trade war with China with ongoing negotiations to resolve disputes over tariffs, intellectual property theft and corporate subsidies. There are large gulfs between the way the United States governs with a light touch regulatory scheme and the heavy-handed Chinese involvement in the economy. It makes geopolitical and economic sense for the two biggest economic superpowers to engage in commerce, yet these are nations trying to peacefully co-exist with vastly differing economic models. 

According to the Office of U.S. Trade Representative, the U.S. has free trade agreements with the South American nations of Chile, Columbia and Peru, yet none with Brazil.  According to the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook Database, the United States has the largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the world. The next highest in North, Central or South America is not Canada (#10), nor Mexico (#15); the next highest nation ranked in GDP in that region of the world is Brazil (#9).  It is ironic that the two biggest economies in the Americas are currently on the same page with economic policies, yet with no free trade agreement

With the recent shift under President Bolsonaro towards free market capitalism, and away from socialism, it is time for President Donald J. Trump to reward Brazil’s turn toward freedom with a free trade agreement.

The election in Brazil shifted influence away from China and Russia and toward the West. I wrote in Townhall on October 9, 2018, just before the Workers’ Party was tossed out of office, the election in Brazil “may help determine if Central and South America will move away from the corrupt socialist policies we see being promoted in Venezuela and Cuba toward free market-oriented policies promoted by the likes of a candidate who is likely to be the next President of Brazil.” With “The Trump of the Tropics” Bolsonaro winning that election in Brazil, it is time for Brazil and the United States to work closer together on military readiness and economic trade issues.

Years of rule by the corrupt Workers’ Party put Brazil in with a very low ranking in economic freedom in The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. Brazil has a low growth rate and high unemployment thanks to 13 years of rule by the corrupt Marxist Workers' Party. Policies being implemented by the new government are showing progress towards more economic freedom.

Brazilian leaders are saying all the right things. On September 11, 2019, Brazil’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Ernesto Araujo identified the big challenge for civilization as "not climate change,” but “ideology.  Araujo said that the new challenge is “globalism” with “cultural Marxism infiltrated in the institutions.” Coming from a nation with an economy poisoned by years of Marxist ideology stagnating the economy and allying with communist nations, Aruajo understands more clearly than most Americans the need for freedom, free markets and moral leadership. In November of 2019, Brazil’s Minister of Economy Paulo Guedes came to the United States to make the case that Brazil’s dismantling of the socialist state constructed by the Workers' Party is well under way. Guedes holds a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

There is one big obstruction to a free trade agreement with Brazil – protectionism by some in the Trump administration.  Oliver Stuenkel wrote in Foreign Policy on December 6, 2019 that recently imposed steel and aluminum tariffs have moved the relationship in the wrong direction. Stuenkel argued “as the most pro-American president in modern Brazilian history, Bolsonaro has put establishing a strong alliance with the United States at the center of his foreign policy from the start.” Early in the administration, Bolsonaro took a hard line against China and Araujo lamented the influence of “Maoist China” in South America. Guedes met with Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross a few months ago in the hopes of better relations.  Unfortunately, the Trump faction supporting hard line trade policies and protectionism beat out the pro-freedom factions in the government who would support free trade agreements with strong U.S. allies like Brazil.

It is time to abandon protectionist tariffs and reward President Bolsonaro with a free trade agreement. That will help Bolsonaro secure his position as a pro-American president in the largest nation in South America while benefitting the United States by having a large, strong military and economic ally in South America

What Christian Conservatives Need to Know About Mike Bloomberg

It is ironic that former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is presenting himself as the balanced alternative to extreme socialists like

Senator Bernie Sanders. In reality, when it comes to areas of great concern to Christian conservatives, Bloomberg has been anything but moderate.

As noted by Catholic activist Bill Donohue with references to his tenure as mayor, “on two key social issues — abortion and religious liberty — the presidential candidate was a total bomb.”

Donohue actually claims that “Bloomberg is one of the most radical pro-abortion politicians in American history.”

Among the former mayor’s accomplishments was this: “Bloomberg's passion for abortion allowed him to appropriate $15 million from a civic facility revenue bond transaction that benefited Planned Parenthood.”

Would you want someone like this in the White House?

Lest you think these policies were a thing of the past, on February 12 Bloomberg announced, “As president, I will fiercely protect a woman’s right to choose, and I will appoint judges who will defend that right.”
CARTOONS | Michael Ramirez
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He also declared, “On my first day in office, I will reverse the damage President Trump has done to women’s rights and ensure that every woman has access to reproductive health care.”

Never Trumpers who are pro-life might want to reconsider their stance should Bloomberg become the Democratic nominee. (For that matter, given the current crop of candidates, they should reconsider their stance regardless of which candidate emerges as the Democratic nominee.)

Donohue also states that, “On religious liberty issues, Bloomberg's record was similarly awful.”

To cite just one example, “The courts have long ruled that religious groups have a right to use public facilities, yet Bloomberg denied the right of an inner-city Christian church to hold religious services in a public school on Sundays, setting up a court challenge. He lost in federal district court in 2005, but his censorial effort was not lost on supporters of the Bronx Household of Faith.”

I ask once again: if you are a Christian conservative (or, simply a person who cherishes our fundamental freedoms), is this the kind of man you want in the White House?

My Stream colleague John Zmirak claimed that Bloomberg is an “amoral monster.”

Another Stream colleague, Rachel Alexander, has sampled some of Bloomberg’s derogatory comments about women and others, as opponents of Donald Trump have often done.

The difference, of course, is that Trump has proven himself a friend of the unborn and a friend of religious liberties. Bloomberg has proven himself to be the exact opposite.

Timothy P. Carney drew attention to several of Bloomberg’s more severe statements that confirm this. For example, he writes that, “Mike Bloomberg once pointed to the in utero child of an employee and said ‘kill it, kill it,’ according to two witnesses.”

And this, according to Carney, is part of a larger, dangerous mindset: “Telling an expectant mother to kill her baby, mocking a new mother’s desire for quality child care, cursing whenever a female employee gets pregnant, and publicly denigrating marriage among professional women all reflect a clear and consistent mindset: The women who worked for him were worker bees. Their humanity, their fertility, their love, and their human attachments were all impediments to productivity. He saw these women as means to his ends of profit.”

Let the reader look at Bloomberg’s more recent, pro-abortion comments and decide whether this assessment is accurate.

Personally, I’m sure about what his policies have been and what he promises his policies will be. That is not the person I want leading our country.

What raises even more concerns is that Bloomberg presented himself as a champion of religious liberty as mayor. As David French noted in 2012, “at the same time that the mayor declared that ‘no neighborhood’ in New York was ‘off-limits to God’s love and mercy,’ he was enforcing a unique-in-the-nation policy that in fact declared New York City schools ‘off-limits’ to private religious use that includes worship.”

Yes, this was unique to New York.

As ADF attorney Jordan Lawrence explained, “By state law, the city opens its 1,200 schools on weeknights and weekends to community groups for any use ‘pertaining to the welfare of the community.’ The public schools allow thousands of organizations — scout troops, labor unions, arts groups, etc. — to hold meetings, concerts and recitals. They’ve even allowed ‘Law and Order’ to film in the schools.

“Why single out religious groups and churches, by prohibiting them from conducting worship services in vacant schools when students are gone?”

So, under Mayor Bloomberg, everyone else had the right to rent and use the city’s 1,200 school buildings with the sole exception of religious groups and churches. Why?

The New York Daily News was not hyping things when its February 14, 2012 headline announced: “The Bloomberg administration says churches must leave school buildings now.”

Is this the administration you want running America?

Let the voter beware

Boy scouts of America bankrupt via Critical Theory.

What’s left of the Boy Scouts of America (now operating as Scouts BSA) is on the brink of declaring bankruptcy, according to recent news reports. With estimated assets of more than $1 billion, Scouting’s problems go beyond the financial, deep into the problems with America’s civil culture today.

The U.S. Boy Scout movement reached its numerical height in 1969 with 6 million members, in a year with President Richard M. Nixon as honorary head of the Scouts and Eagle Scout astronaut Neil Armstrong stepping out on the moon.

I was a Cub Scout that year, once a week proudly wearing my uniform to Armstrong Elementary School in our Chicago neighborhood, heading to our well-attended den meeting right after school. My liberal Democratic parents signed me up, my dad a World War II veteran supportive of Scouting’s patriotism.

Fast-forward ahead nearly 50 years: Scout membership has dropped toward 2 million. The impending departure of the Latter Day Saints troops this year will drop that total by one-fifth. Our local school district in conservative central Pennsylvania won’t allow promoting Scouting at school. In our college town, many in the woke local elite now despise Scouting as neo-Nazi and white nationalist, despite efforts to change the national movement to please progressives. My son’s local troop closed recently for lack of members, and so did others in the area.

The national organization faces large lawsuits due to alleged cases of sexual abuse as state legislatures change the statute of limitations on such cases. It also faces a lawsuit from the Girl Scouts for poaching on their membership by changing its name recently to Scouts BSA and recruiting girls.
It’s Not Just Financial Bankruptcy

The old American Boy Scouts might as well be filing for moral bankruptcy, having lost both its base and elite cultural capital. What used to be an organization designed to help boys become men has now been re-fashioned in line with the new gnosticism of American culture, accepting LGTBQIA ideology, while abandoning its traditional ascetic position about sex and its opposition to atheism.

Next year’s World Scouting Jamboree in West Virginia reportedly will be the first hosted by the former Boy Scouts of America to make condoms available to participants. A 2016 agreement with the Unitarian-Universalists overrode the group’s membership requirement of belief in God by allowing belief in humanism, contrary to the Scout Oath.

The “bowling alone” syndrome of declining civic groups in the United States, over-scheduling of young people, and the weakening of American family models all played a role. In fact, political scientist Paul Kengor of Grove City College has detailed the history of American communists and cultural Marxists’s efforts to target and subvert Scouting in particular, to help undermine American family life.

Yet it was corporate executives and members of the U.S. political establishment (including Scouting leaders such as Rex Tillerson and Robert Gates) on the national board who with progressive staff members agreed to surrender to pressure to sexualize the organization in recent years, despite an earlier hard-fought U.S. Supreme Court victory by the organization to preserve membership rules. In admitting openly gay members and leaders, accepting transgenderism, then admitting girls, Scouting turned its back on a cultural background of Christian teaching on sexuality going back millennia.

The central issue was not admitting openly LGBTQIA-identifying members and leaders, but redefining the group’s value of freedom as self-expression, rather than self-restraint. The latter was the traditional ethos of Scouting, not shaping boys into open heterosexuals or any other type of -sexuals, in the “Mad Men”/Hugh Hefner mold or anything else.
Turning On Historic Christian Morality

In Scouting in recent decades, physical edginess and “tough” training requirements also were loosened or removed. The values of a culture dedicated to the human person as totally malleable, based on self-will, took hold. Safety and comfort became increasingly the ultimate values.

Such values, which affected Scouting ultimately more because of changes in in its anchoring mainline Protestant and business cultures than leftist subversion, reject an age-old cultural inheritance of the American republic that regarded virtue and self-restraint as the goals of education of young men, to be leaders of a free society and the families that would continue it.

In the wake of the Neo-Chalcedonianism established by the Fifth Ecumenical Church Council in 553, St. Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century articulated the basis for traditional Christian ascetic approaches to identity as a cosmology, not merely morality. It was a synthesis in part of biblical and Greek philosophical traditions. He wrote of how God created man male and female, but also that there was neither male nor female in Christ.

Maximus’ Christian Byzantine Empire had a performative sense of biological and embodied sexual identity of men and women, with also a third gender or sex, that of both eunuchs and ascetics. Virtuous and holy women could aspire to manliness; men could venerate the Mother of God as the best of saints. Self-restrained and grace-filled chastity, engaged in marriage to the oppose sex or to Christ in monastic community, was seen as leading to the fulfillment of human life in oneness with God’s grace—not essentializing sexual passions by objectifying others.

The complementarity of marriage was a living symbol of the relation of humanity in the universal church to God. Biological sexes of male and female were an embodied sacred iconography to be honored and followed, nurturing trans-generational families in which men could learn to be guardians of peace, husbands who would lay down their lives for their families and country.

That is the deep and complex centuries-old basis for a moral initiation into manhood that dimly still underlay the Boy Scout Oath and Law, a distant cultural inheritance.

Setting Boys Adrift In a Mooring-less Culture

Scouts were never a perfect organization. Major problems with sexual abuse and coverups of it show that. They had quasi-Masonic aspects in Order of the Arrow ceremonies and “great Scoutmaster in the sky” language at camp chapel, emerging from an odd crucible of Teddy Roosevelt-style nationalist progressivism and British Empire civics of the early 20th century. Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book” also inspired Cub Scout ranks.
It is that much of a harder path today for many American boys without strong male role models to find their way.

But in the lost world of 1969 working-class Chicago neighborhoods, in the heyday of the Boy Scouts of America, I with many other boys before and since learned valuable lessons from Scouting, and however imperfectly kept respect for the virtues of the Scout Oath and Law tucked away with my old copy of the Scout handbook and Scout pocket knife in later years.

Our eldest son found a home in a small rural troop run by dedicated military and law enforcement veterans. I often went along on camping trips as an adult volunteer leader. It was a great experience and a sad day when the troop closed recently due to dwindling membership.

Our family’s relationship with regular Scouting ended around the time our younger son in fifth grade ran to get his copy of Boys Life magazine in the mail only to throw it aside because it was featuring girls, as if photoshopped into Norman Rockwell Scouting art. He lost his enthusiasm, our eldest lost his home troop, and dad didn’t want to send money to a national organization adrift.

Not just the old Boy Scouts but America may need receivership for moral bankruptcy. Either way, the real shame is that it is that much of a harder path today for many American boys without strong male role models to find their way to the freedom of self-restraint in manhood envisioned in that millennia-old tradition

former staffers would rather see corruption and FISA abuse continue than to have Barr drain the swamp.

More than 1,100 former Department of Justice alumni signed a petition calling on Attorney General William Barr to resign. They take issue with the fact that he instructed the U.S. Attorney’s Office to reverse their recommendation for Roger Stone to serve between seven and nine years in prison. According to the petition, Barr did not uphold the department's principle of "apply[ing] the law equally to all Americans."

We, the undersigned, are alumni of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) who have collectively served both Republican and Democratic administrations. Each of us strongly condemns President Trump’s and Attorney General Barr’s interference in the fair administration of justice.

"This obligation flows directly from the Constitution, and it is embedded in countless rules and laws governing the conduct of DOJ lawyers. The Justice Manual — the DOJ’s rulebook for its lawyers — states that 'the rule of law depends on the evenhanded administration of justice'; that the Department’s legal decisions 'must be impartial and insulated from political influence'; and that the Department’s prosecutorial powers, in particular, must be 'exercised free from partisan consideration,'" the petition stated.

"Although there are times when political leadership appropriately weighs in on individual prosecutions, it is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President, as Attorney General Barr did in the Stone case," the petition said. "It is even more outrageous for the Attorney General to intervene as he did here — after the President publicly condemned the sentencing recommendation that line prosecutors had already filed in court."

Those who signed the petition feel that President Trump has interfered with department policies and "gravely damaged the Department's credibility."

Although the group of former employees wants Barr to resign, they "have little expectation he will do so, it falls to the Department’s career officials to take appropriate action to uphold their oaths of office and defend nonpartisan, apolitical justice."

The DOJ alumni applauded the prosecutors who withdrew from the Stone case and/or resigned from the Department and said they want the agency's other employees to do the same.

"We call on every DOJ employee to follow their heroic example and be prepared to report future abuses to the Inspector General, the Office of Professional Responsibility, and Congress; to refuse to carry out directives that are inconsistent with their oaths of office; to withdraw from cases that involve such directives or other misconduct; and, if necessary, to resign and report publicly — in a manner consistent with professional ethics — to the American people the reasons for their resignation. We likewise call on the other branches of government to protect from retaliation those employees who uphold their oaths in the face of unlawful directives. The rule of law and the survival of our Republic demand nothing less."

Notable signatories include CNN analysts and former federal prosecutors Elie Honig and Renato Mariotti and MSNBC analysts Paul Butler, Frank Figliuzzi, Matthew Miller and Jill Wine-Banks, the Daily Caller reported.

These calls for Barr’s firing raise some serious questions.

    How many of those 1,100 former prosecutors and officials called for action when the IG reported that the FBI lied to the FISA Court 17 times? https://t.co/8FbKwz0fnz
    — Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) February 16, 2020

    Really. And how many of these same officials claiming to be principled said a word about James Comey, Andy McCabe, and others who got caught red handed by the IG report? https://t.co/yqiamGKqqr
    — Mark Meadows (@RepMarkMeadows) February 16, 2020

Bet it’s safe to say these former staffers would rather see corruption and FISA abuse continue than to have someone like Barr drain the swamp