wnd--2020-08-11--George Soros and how he's remaking justice with his radical prosecutors

[ Editor 's note : This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics . ]
In the first six months of this year , 329 people were killed in Chicago , most of them by firearms , only three at the hands of police .
This death toll was a 34 % increase over the first half of 2019 .
In one 24-hour span -- May 31 , 2020 -- 18 Chicagoans lost their lives .
According to the University of Chicago Crime Lab , it was the city ’ s single most violent day since it began collecting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ve never seen anything like it at all , ” Max Kapustin , senior research director at the lab , told the Chicago Sun-Times .
But gunfire in the city is unabating : 16 Chicagoans were shot Thursday , July 24 , three of them fatally , in a cycle of violence and suffering that has continued all summer .
As I write these words , there have been 440 homicides in Chicago so far in 2020 .
By the time this column is finished , edited , and published , that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
More Windy City residents will be wounded as well : Non-fatal shootings in this first six months of the year increased by about 42 % -- from 978 in 2019 to 1,384 in 2020 .
TRENDING : Lindsey Graham : 'Somebody needs to go to jail for this' Many of the injuries suffered in those shootings are grievous , and the victims exceedingly young : Among those wounded recently was an 8-year-old boy shot in the back .
A 10-month girl was shot at 11:30 a.m. on July 27 while strapped in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the freeway .
She was the fourth Chicago child under 10 fatally shot in a five-week span .
“ Here we are again , praying that this baby makes it through the night , ” said Christopher Scott , who is active in of one Chicago ’ s anti-violence groups .
“ I ’ m in shock , ” added the baby ’ s mother .
She ’ s hardly alone .
The city ’ s cops feel under siege .
Three were shot last week by a carjacking suspect being transported in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Privately , the police are also reeling .
Ten Chicago officers have taken their own lives in the last two years .
The most recent was Dion Boyd , who turned his gun on himself last week after 30 years on the force .
Boyd had recently been promoted to deputy chief .
Chicago ’ s top police official , David Brown , has been on the job for only three months .
He has said he knew the Chicago job would be hard , but not this hard .
He is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the city ’ s murder wave .
He ’ s not the only one .
The Chicago Sun-Times has begun entering every killing on a publicly available data base .
Tow truck operator Early Walker has started a new organization called I ’ m Telling , Don ’ t Shoot .
Known in the community as the kind of guy who delivers food for free to shut-ins during the pandemic and raising money for violence victims ’ families , Walker has decided that Chicago ’ s culture must change .
“ We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ NO SNITCHING rule in our communities , ” his group proclaims .
“ If you SHOOT A GUN , WE ARE TELLING !
!
We are fed up with losing our children and innocent bystanders to senseless violence.
” The organization ’ s solution ?
Offering large cash rewards for the identity of killers .
Earlier this week , John Kass , the city ’ s most prominent newspaper columnist , weighed in on the crisis .
Writing in his familiar space , Page 2 of the Chicago Tribune , Kass focused on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ municipalities controlled by the Democratic Party , including St. Louis , Philadelphia , and San Francisco .
The mayors in those cities take the heat for rampant crime , Kass wrote , but perhaps a better place to look is the local district attorney offices .
In those cities and many others , he wrote , “ left-wing billionaire George Soros has spent millions of dollars to help elect liberal social justice warriors as prosecutors.
” “ He remakes the justice system in urban America , flying under the radar , ” Kass @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not the mayors , are the ones who help release the violent on little or no bond.
” This is an interesting point of view , one you ’ d think more journalists would find worth pursuing .
Megan Crepeau could do it , for instance .
It ’ s her beat and she works on the same newspaper , covering criminal courts for the Tribune .
Or Gregory Pratt could dig deeper .
He ’ s the paper ’ s city hall reporter .
The assignment would be straightforward , albeit painstaking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ around the country have been put in place because of financing from the Soros organization -- and try to determine whether the liberalized policies they ’ ve implemented have contributed to violent crime .
Personally , I ’ m skeptical that this narrative is the most significant factor at play in rising murder rates .
In addition , it seems that , at the least , this cadre of new left-leaning prosecutors aren ’ t necessarily out of sync with the prevailing mood in their communities .
Yes , Soros ’ organization may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaign coffers of Kimberly Foxx , the Cook County state ’ s attorney who beclowned herself by taking a dive in the Jussie Smollett hoax .
But the record murder rate in Chicago that 2020 threatens to eclipse occurred in 2016 , and she didn ’ t take office until the last month of that year .
And while it is true that Foxx immediately announced that her office would no longer seek pretrial detention for minor crimes , that step simply comported with a state law passed in Springfield the same year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Foxx ’ s campaign platform , and the voters evidently supported it .
Likewise , New York City ’ s “ stop and frisk ” policies -- widely credited with lowering many shooting and killings -- were not abandoned by a rogue prosecutor installed slyly into office by liberal political donors .
The program was aborted by Bill de Blasio , shortly after he was elected as mayor .
De Blasio also campaigned on ending stop-and-frisk , which had become politically radioactive .
The reason for its unpopularity was not that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , including Hillary Clinton , have asserted .
It helped lower crime .
But it also had a toxic side effect : alienating the Latino and African American communities from the police , who had tended to abuse the authority this policy gave them .
On the other hand , it ’ s also undeniably true that as bail reform and lenient parole policies have taken effect , cops on the street are often dismayed to find out how many violent suspects they apprehend have been released from jail , many while awaiting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Washington , D.C. , in a heart-breaking case .
When 11-year-old Davon McNeal was caught in the crossfire between two gangs on July 4 and killed , D.C. detectives quickly realized that the suspects had prior firearms felonies on their record and two of them were out on bail .
In Chicago , a 25-year-old suspect who wounded three officers is a convicted felon who ’ d already been to prison four times -- and was recently paroled on a gun charge .
So bail is a complicated issue -- especially if you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the United States incarcerates too many people .
Instead of going after this story , however , Megan Crepeau and Greg Pratt , along with seven other Trib employees -- the nine members of the Chicago Tribune Guild executive council -- went after John Kass , claiming that what he wrote was “ anti-Semitic.
” George Soros , you see , is Jewish .
Not that Kass mentioned that fact , or that it has anything remotely to do with this topic .
Yet in a letter to their Tribune colleagues , without @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the guild quoted a couple of left-leaning Kass critics who seized on his “ under the radar ” phrase and portrayed it as some sort of anti-Jewish dog whistle .
“ The essential point ?
” the guild letter reads .
“ The odious , anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that billionaire George Soros is a puppet master controlling America ’ s big cities does not deserve a mainstream voice , especially at a time when hate crimes are rising.
” “ We ask , ” this letter continued , “ that the paper @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his indefensible invocation of the Soros tropes.
” What ’ s really “ odious ” here is to see reporters behaving like political operatives .
These Chicago newsroom activists used the same tactics that were employed in June against James Bennet at the New York Times .
Progressives at the paper forced his ouster as editorial page editor by playing the race card and used the guild to do it .
There are differences .
Bennet was management .
Kass is not .
Also , the Times case concerned an op-ed written by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , an Arkansas Republican who advocated calling in the U.S. Army to maintain order on our city streets .
That ’ s a radical idea and hasn ’ t worked out in the past .
Kass , by contrast , is a lifelong Chicagoan with a popular following among Trib readers .
He was expressing his brand of working-class populism , which is hardly an outlier .
The thrust of his argument was that Democrats ’ lenient criminal justice policies , facilitated by wealthy left-wing donors , have made U.S. cities less safe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ valid issue to raise , it ’ s an obvious one .
Contrary to the guild ’ s assertion that this view “ doesn ’ t deserve a mainstream voice , ” any honest reporter would be a moron not to be wondering about it .
As for the notion that any criticism of George Soros ’ political goals or tactics constitutes anti-Jewish “ tropes , ” that ’ s such thin ice it ’ s hard to believe any professional journalist would stand on it .
Born 90 summers ago in Budapest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , George Soros and his family escaped persecution from both the Nazis and the Soviets .
Understandably , he cherishes freedom and tolerance .
Presumably , Soros also venerates free-market capitalism , a system he mastered in England and in the United States with a combination of insight and nerve .
In a long career as a financier , Soros speculated in currency and gold and launched a remarkably successful hedge fund , earned billions of dollars and accruing unofficial nicknames ranging from “ the man who broke the Bank of England ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ manager.
” Moving from Europe to New York in 1956 , Soros became an American citizen five years later .
For decades , he ’ s been extraordinarily generous with his fortune : He estimates his charitable giving to be in excess of $ 32 billion , much of it funneled through the international nonprofit he founded called the Open Society Institute , later renamed the Open Society Foundations .
The sheer scope of its international work is breathtaking : combating apartheid with educational scholarships for black South Africans in the l970s ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s ; funding academic exchanges between the West and his native Hungary , and establishing a private university with campuses in Budapest and Vienna after the fall of the Berlin Wall ; helping besieged residents of Sarajevo survive ethnic cleansing in the 1990s ; spending $ 100 million on early childhood education in the Balkans ; supporting democratic reformers in Burma ; supporting the beleaguered Gypsy community in Romania ; fighting tuberculosis in the poorer countries in the Russian Federation ; underwriting democratic reformers in a dozen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ war on drugs ” in several nations , including the United States ; and much , much more .
The agonizing issue of illegal drugs helped Soros focus more intently on U.S. domestic policy , and in 1996 his organization turned to an array of American social and political issues .
“ Our programs in the United States were an outgrowth of our programs in the rest of the world : social justice , vulnerable populations , and the criminal justice system , ” Open Society explains .
A 1998 effort selected @ @ @ @ @ @ @ understand and solve the most intractable problems facing urban America … drug addiction , an overreliance on incarceration and the obstacles that keep youth from succeeding inside and outside of the classroom.
” In furtherance of its social vision , Soros ’ foundation adopted many other causes over the years , injecting its founder squarely into partisan U.S. politics .
These issues ranged from reforming marijuana laws , legalizing gay marriage , and lowering America ’ s incarceration rate to gun control and combating climate change .
Without exception , his resources were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because this foray into domestic policy coincided with a general polarizing trend in American politics -- the GOP became more conservative while Democratic Party became solidly liberal -- this activity was inevitably viewed as partisan , particularly by Republicans .
Soros certainly came to view it that way himself .
In 2003 , he told The Washington Post that denying George W. Bush a second term in the White House was “ the central focus of my life.
” For him , the 2004 campaign was “ a matter of life and death.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ did not expire .
Vibrant and healthy into his 70s and 80s , he doubled down .
Long before his foundation ’ s support for groups such as Black Lives Matter prompted intense criticism , his political donations brought scrutiny of the man and his motives .
Even friends and allies wondered : What changed him ?
Prior to the 2003-04 campaign cycle , Soros had ardently supported financial transparency -- and strict campaign spending limits -- as did most leading Democrats .
In the 1990s , Soros donated $ 18 million -- @ @ @ @ @ @ @ money -- to good-government groups working to curb the influence of special interests .
He was a force behind the passage of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law .
Yet with no real public explanation , Soros began funneling huge sums of political “ soft money ” to super PACS and various Democratic Party entities .
When Republicans called him a hypocrite , it only made him more partisan .
In the autumn of 2004 , he literally told the New Yorker magazine that the ends justified the means .
This explanation , troubling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ important question : What had radicalized him ?
The short answer seems to be the terrorist attacks of 9/11 .
Almost all Americans rallied behind the flag and the president in those daunting days , in a manner that almost certainly would not happen now .
Soros did , too , at least initially , but he soon came unglued over the Bush administration ’ s response .
In the rare interviews he granted at the time , Soros mentioned two aspects of that response : the decision to invade Iraq and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the American people .
The first is entirely understandable : a majority of Americans also developed misgivings about the U.S. military invasion of Iraq .
Soros ’ second response seems inexplicable , notwithstanding how evocatively he explained it .
In 2003 , he told The Washington Post : “ When I hear Bush say , ‘ You ’ re either with us or against us , ’ it reminds me of the Germans.
” The comment conjures up nightmarish memories of his childhood , he added , of Nazi slogans on the walls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The enemy is listening ” ) .
“ My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me , ” he said .
The following year , Soros ratcheted up the Hitler talk .
In that New Yorker piece , he told Jane Mayer , a sympathetic interlocutor , that the statements of Attorney General John Ashcroft “ reminded me of Germany , under the Nazis .
It was the kind of talk that Goebbels used to use to line the Germans up .
I remember , I was 13 or 14 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ about how ‘ We are endangered ’ and ‘ We have to be united.
’ ” He also told Mayer that for 18 months after 9/11 , Bush had managed to “ suspend the critical process ” and “ suppress all dissent.
” This was palpable nonsense .
George W. Bush never mentioned Islam without describing it as a “ religion of peace.
” And opposition against the Iraq War was given a prominent platform in every major news outlet in the country , in White House news conferences , and on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before and after the March 2003 invasion .
America resembled the early days of the Third Reich no more than it resembled Mars .
Even Soros ’ allies didn ’ t understand his obsessiveness .
But why argue with the guy ?
He was on their side and wanted to give them something they wanted : untold sums of money for the purpose of influencing U.S. elections .
My Dark Money Is Cleaner Than Your Dark Money The problem -- if one considers hypocrisy a problem -- is that as Democrats began tapping @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elections , party leaders remained on record in vehement opposition to no-limits campaign financing .
They never veered from this catechism even while quietly assembling their own roster of billionaires to counter GOP-supporting moneymen such as the conservative Richard Mellon Scaife and libertarians Charles and David Koch .
All the while , leading Democrats continued to demonize wealthy Republican donors .
From 2004 to 2014 , Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid denounced the Koch brothers 134 times on the Senate floor -- and many other times off the floor .
In a convincing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Kochs “ shadowy ” and “ dishonest ” and “ radical ” men trying to “ buy our democracy ” and “ rig ” elections .
He also said they were “ un-American.
” If Harry Reid ’ s demagoguery bothered George Soros , there ’ s no record of it .
Moreover , nearly every leading Democrat joined in the Koch-bashing and frequent attacks on so-called “ dark money.
” Nice work , if you can get it .
Attack Republicans for using wealthy conservatives to hijack American elective democracy while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ liberal donors .
Viewed that way , the Democrats are arguably worse because they know better .
What ’ s remarkable is how faithfully the Democrats followed the Republican script .
It was in 2004 that the Koch brothers formed a super PAC called Americans for Prosperity , the entity used to funnel hundreds of millions into Republican causes and campaigns and to run attack ads against leading Democrats , including Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama .
Yet it was the very same election cycle that George Soros and four fellow Democratic billionaires @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democratic Party officials to launch their own super PAC , America Coming Together .
In the end , ACT would spend some $ 137 million trying to get John Kerry elected ( and pay a $ 775,000 fine to the Federal Election Commission for violating election laws . )
The first organization meeting was in Aspen , Colo. , a session revealed by Jane Mayer , a liberal journalist who would later write extensive exposés of the Koch brothers ’ political spending .
Mayer described the Aug. 6 , 2004 , summit as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ added , were “ sworn to secrecy ” and an assistant to one of them told her , “ No one was supposed to know about this .
We don ’ t want people thinking it ’ s a cabal.
” The Democrats were trying to operate “ under the radar , ” in other words – the words used by John Kass to such consternation .
Not that anyone accused Jane Mayer of it , but describing the Democrats ’ machinations in this fashion was no more anti-Semitic than it would be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some Koch brothers ’ critics have explored their family ties to the Fatherland . )
Yet Soros himself has raised that specter repeatedly .
As long ago as 2000 , he was complaining about anonymous Internet trolls playing the “ Jewish cabal ” card .
Soros ’ son Alexander , deputy chairman of the Open Society Foundations , penned a recent screed for NBC lashing out at the “ vile allegations ” made by “ white supremacists ” against Soros Sr .
The younger Soros mentioned John Kass by name , asserting that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ somehow responsible for the unrest in Chicago and other American cities because of his support for a liberal approach to criminal justice.
” This is misdirection .
Kass ’ column didn ’ t focus primarily on protests .
It was mostly about street crime : “ A recent Chicago Tribune investigation , ” he noted , “ found that of 162 offenders arrested and charged with felonies before the Floyd protests -- and who were bailed out by liberal social justice warrior groups -- more than one in five were charged with new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ late April , a month before George Floyd ’ s death .
If there ’ s a familiar “ trope ” here , it ’ s using anti-Semitism as a ruse to deflect questions about accountability .
And since when did asking who funds anti-bail groups or the campaigns of political candidates become a topic that gives working journalists the vapors ?
It sure isn ’ t off-limits when the Koch brothers donate untold millions of dollars to oppose pro-environmental Democrats .
Information about the Soros donations to liberal candidates in prosecutors ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which is curious from a group calling itself “ Open Society.
” In this area , they are not so open .
The reason political “ dark money ” is so controversial is that it ’ s not always clear where it ’ s coming from .
But it ’ s a matter of record that in 2018 , Democratic Party dark money surpassed Republican Party dark money for the first time .
A lot of that cash came from the Soros organization , and in races where big money was a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an independent 2018 candidate for Senate from Maryland , noted , “ George Soros took things to a new level by ‘ going granular , ’ meaning he poured enormous sums into hyper-local political races.
” According to the Washington Post , the Soros ’ affiliated Justice & Public Safety super PAC poured $ 1 million into two Northern Virginia commonwealth ’ s attorney races – where expenditures are usually measured in the thousands of dollars .
Both of the Soros-backed progressives won , ousting longtime prosecutors .
What was that money used @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ads , for one thing , against incumbents with no real means to respond .
The local elections in Fairfax and Arlington were not unique .
“ George Soros ’ quiet overhaul of the U.S. justice system ” – that ’ s Politico ’ s wording , not mine ( or Kass ’ ) -- began in 2016 .
When he broke that story , Politico reporter Scott Bland couldn ’ t get the Soros organization to explain its rationale or its reach .
Digging into local records , however , Bland found @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Illinois , Louisiana , Mississippi , New Mexico , and Texas .
The American Association of Assistant District Attorneys have identified Soros ’ footprint in elections in California , Colorado , and Pennsylvania .
These $ 1 million Soros campaigns have also targeted prosecutors ’ races in Massachusetts and Oregon .
And so it goes , piecemeal .
How many of these prosecutors are out there ?
Dozens ?
A hundred ?
What effect are their policies having ?
This is what John Kass was getting at in his July 22 column , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ guild deemed unsuitable for public discourse .
I disagree .
I worry that many Americans ’ lives depend on the answers .
Perhaps these progressives are doing more good than harm .
To be honest , that would be my own bias .
But honest dialogue could help shed light on that .
Ironically , that ’ s what the Chicago Tribune Guild executive committee now says it was trying to facilitate .
“ We did n't , and wouldn ’ t , set out to ‘ silence ’ him , ” Megan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an apology and a conversation , that ’ s all.
” It ’ s an odd conversation that demands an apology as a precondition , and in any event there ’ s a better way of going about it than writing a nasty letter you know will leak .
From more than four decades ’ experience in the news business , I know that the way you approach a colleague who wrote something you deem problematic is to approach them personally and say , “ Hey , some of the stuff in your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ buy you a beer at the Billy Goat Tavern and I ’ ll tell you why.
” I realize this is harder to do during a pandemic-induced quarantine , but that ’ s why God made Zoom .
In the end , there ’ s something else about this episode that is troubling besides the astonishing lack of collegiality in today ’ s newsrooms .
The Chicago Tribune Guild ’ s original letter attacking John Kass said that one their motivations was that they believe his column was “ detrimental to our hopes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ down skeptical that new readers would flock to a predictable , politically correct newspaper featuring reporters wearing their biases on their sleeves and repeating partisan talking points .
Even if they did , would such a publication really be a newspaper ?
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics .
Reach him on Twitter @ CarlCannon .
[ Editor 's note : This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics . ]

[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]
By Carl M. Cannon
Real Clear Politics
In the first six months of this year, 329 people were killed in Chicago, most of them by firearms, only three at the hands of police. This death toll was a 34% increase over the first half of 2019. In one 24-hour span -- May 31, 2020 -- 18 Chicagoans lost their lives. According to the University of Chicago Crime Lab, it was the city’s single most violent day since it began collecting crime data in 1961.
“We’ve never seen anything like it at all,” Max Kapustin, senior research director at the lab, told the Chicago Sun-Times. But gunfire in the city is unabating: 16 Chicagoans were shot Thursday, July 24, three of them fatally, in a cycle of violence and suffering that has continued all summer. As I write these words, there have been 440 homicides in Chicago so far in 2020. By the time this column is finished, edited, and published, that grim total will almost certainly be higher. More Windy City residents will be wounded as well: Non-fatal shootings in this first six months of the year increased by about 42% -- from 978 in 2019 to 1,384 in 2020.
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Many of the injuries suffered in those shootings are grievous, and the victims exceedingly young: Among those wounded recently was an 8-year-old boy shot in the back. A 10-month girl was shot at 11:30 a.m. on July 27 while strapped in her car seat in a vehicle on the freeway. She was the fourth Chicago child under 10 fatally shot in a five-week span. “Here we are again, praying that this baby makes it through the night,” said Christopher Scott, who is active in of one Chicago’s anti-violence groups. “I’m in shock,” added the baby’s mother.
She’s hardly alone. The city’s cops feel under siege. Three were shot last week by a carjacking suspect being transported in a police vehicle to a police station. Privately, the police are also reeling. Ten Chicago officers have taken their own lives in the last two years. The most recent was Dion Boyd, who turned his gun on himself last week after 30 years on the force. Boyd had recently been promoted to deputy chief. Chicago’s top police official, David Brown, has been on the job for only three months. He has said he knew the Chicago job would be hard, but not this hard. He is, quite obviously, desperate for answers to the city’s murder wave.
He’s not the only one. The Chicago Sun-Times has begun entering every killing on a publicly available data base. Tow truck operator Early Walker has started a new organization called I’m Telling, Don’t Shoot. Known in the community as the kind of guy who delivers food for free to shut-ins during the pandemic and raising money for violence victims’ families, Walker has decided that Chicago’s culture must change. “We’re no longer subscribing to the NO SNITCHING rule in our communities,” his group proclaims. “If you SHOOT A GUN, WE ARE TELLING!! We are fed up with losing our children and innocent bystanders to senseless violence.” The organization’s solution? Offering large cash rewards for the identity of killers.
Earlier this week, John Kass, the city’s most prominent newspaper columnist, weighed in on the crisis. Writing in his familiar space, Page 2 of the Chicago Tribune, Kass focused on the political culture in Chicago and other municipalities controlled by the Democratic Party, including St. Louis, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. The mayors in those cities take the heat for rampant crime, Kass wrote, but perhaps a better place to look is the local district attorney offices. In those cities and many others, he wrote, “left-wing billionaire George Soros has spent millions of dollars to help elect liberal social justice warriors as prosecutors.”
“He remakes the justice system in urban America, flying under the radar,” Kass added. “The Soros-funded prosecutors, not the mayors, are the ones who help release the violent on little or no bond.”
This is an interesting point of view, one you’d think more journalists would find worth pursuing. Megan Crepeau could do it, for instance. It’s her beat and she works on the same newspaper, covering criminal courts for the Tribune. Or Gregory Pratt could dig deeper. He’s the paper’s city hall reporter. The assignment would be straightforward, albeit painstaking: Find out how many progressive prosecutors around the country have been put in place because of financing from the Soros organization -- and try to determine whether the liberalized policies they’ve implemented have contributed to violent crime.
Personally, I’m skeptical that this narrative is the most significant factor at play in rising murder rates. In addition, it seems that, at the least, this cadre of new left-leaning prosecutors aren’t necessarily out of sync with the prevailing mood in their communities. Yes, Soros’ organization may have contributed $2 million to the campaign coffers of Kimberly Foxx, the Cook County state’s attorney who beclowned herself by taking a dive in the Jussie Smollett hoax. But the record murder rate in Chicago that 2020 threatens to eclipse occurred in 2016, and she didn’t take office until the last month of that year. And while it is true that Foxx immediately announced that her office would no longer seek pretrial detention for minor crimes, that step simply comported with a state law passed in Springfield the same year. Moreover, bail reform was part of Foxx’s campaign platform, and the voters evidently supported it.
Likewise, New York City’s “stop and frisk” policies -- widely credited with lowering many shooting and killings -- were not abandoned by a rogue prosecutor installed slyly into office by liberal political donors. The program was aborted by Bill de Blasio, shortly after he was elected as mayor. De Blasio also campaigned on ending stop-and-frisk, which had become politically radioactive. The reason for its unpopularity was not that the practice was ineffective, as some critics, including Hillary Clinton, have asserted. It helped lower crime. But it also had a toxic side effect: alienating the Latino and African American communities from the police, who had tended to abuse the authority this policy gave them.
On the other hand, it’s also undeniably true that as bail reform and lenient parole policies have taken effect, cops on the street are often dismayed to find out how many violent suspects they apprehend have been released from jail, many while awaiting trial. It happened this summer in Washington, D.C., in a heart-breaking case. When 11-year-old Davon McNeal was caught in the crossfire between two gangs on July 4 and killed, D.C. detectives quickly realized that the suspects had prior firearms felonies on their record and two of them were out on bail. In Chicago, a 25-year-old suspect who wounded three officers is a convicted felon who’d already been to prison four times -- and was recently paroled on a gun charge. So bail is a complicated issue -- especially if you believe, as I do, that the United States incarcerates too many people.
Instead of going after this story, however, Megan Crepeau and Greg Pratt, along with seven other Trib employees -- the nine members of the Chicago Tribune Guild executive council -- went after John Kass, claiming that what he wrote was “anti-Semitic.” George Soros, you see, is Jewish. Not that Kass mentioned that fact, or that it has anything remotely to do with this topic. Yet in a letter to their Tribune colleagues, without so much as talking to Kass first, the guild quoted a couple of left-leaning Kass critics who seized on his “under the radar” phrase and portrayed it as some sort of anti-Jewish dog whistle.
“The essential point?” the guild letter reads. “The odious, anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that billionaire George Soros is a puppet master controlling America’s big cities does not deserve a mainstream voice, especially at a time when hate crimes are rising.”
“We ask,” this letter continued, “that the paper, and Kass separately, apologize for his indefensible invocation of the Soros tropes.”
What’s really “odious” here is to see reporters behaving like political operatives. These Chicago newsroom activists used the same tactics that were employed in June against James Bennet at the New York Times. Progressives at the paper forced his ouster as editorial page editor by playing the race card and used the guild to do it.
There are differences. Bennet was management. Kass is not. Also, the Times case concerned an op-ed written by an outside voice, Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican who advocated calling in the U.S. Army to maintain order on our city streets. That’s a radical idea and hasn’t worked out in the past. Kass, by contrast, is a lifelong Chicagoan with a popular following among Trib readers. He was expressing his brand of working-class populism, which is hardly an outlier. The thrust of his argument was that Democrats’ lenient criminal justice policies, facilitated by wealthy left-wing donors, have made U.S. cities less safe. It’s not only a valid issue to raise, it’s an obvious one. Contrary to the guild’s assertion that this view “doesn’t deserve a mainstream voice,” any honest reporter would be a moron not to be wondering about it.
As for the notion that any criticism of George Soros’ political goals or tactics constitutes anti-Jewish “tropes,” that’s such thin ice it’s hard to believe any professional journalist would stand on it.
A Man With a Mission
Born 90 summers ago in Budapest (his birthday is next week), George Soros and his family escaped persecution from both the Nazis and the Soviets. Understandably, he cherishes freedom and tolerance. Presumably, Soros also venerates free-market capitalism, a system he mastered in England and in the United States with a combination of insight and nerve. In a long career as a financier, Soros speculated in currency and gold and launched a remarkably successful hedge fund, earned billions of dollars and accruing unofficial nicknames ranging from “the man who broke the Bank of England” to “world’s greatest money manager.”
Moving from Europe to New York in 1956, Soros became an American citizen five years later. For decades, he’s been extraordinarily generous with his fortune: He estimates his charitable giving to be in excess of $32 billion, much of it funneled through the international nonprofit he founded called the Open Society Institute, later renamed the Open Society Foundations.
The sheer scope of its international work is breathtaking: combating apartheid with educational scholarships for black South Africans in the l970s; supporting democracy in China and promoting dissent behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s; funding academic exchanges between the West and his native Hungary, and establishing a private university with campuses in Budapest and Vienna after the fall of the Berlin Wall; helping besieged residents of Sarajevo survive ethnic cleansing in the 1990s; spending $100 million on early childhood education in the Balkans; supporting democratic reformers in Burma; supporting the beleaguered Gypsy community in Romania; fighting tuberculosis in the poorer countries in the Russian Federation; underwriting democratic reformers in a dozen African countries; declaring war on the “war on drugs” in several nations, including the United States; and much, much more.
The agonizing issue of illegal drugs helped Soros focus more intently on U.S. domestic policy, and in 1996 his organization turned to an array of American social and political issues. “Our programs in the United States were an outgrowth of our programs in the rest of the world: social justice, vulnerable populations, and the criminal justice system,” Open Society explains. A 1998 effort selected Baltimore “as a laboratory to better understand and solve the most intractable problems facing urban America … drug addiction, an overreliance on incarceration and the obstacles that keep youth from succeeding inside and outside of the classroom.”
In furtherance of its social vision, Soros’ foundation adopted many other causes over the years, injecting its founder squarely into partisan U.S. politics. These issues ranged from reforming marijuana laws, legalizing gay marriage, and lowering America’s incarceration rate to gun control and combating climate change. Without exception, his resources were deployed on the liberal side. And because this foray into domestic policy coincided with a general polarizing trend in American politics -- the GOP became more conservative while Democratic Party became solidly liberal -- this activity was inevitably viewed as partisan, particularly by Republicans. Soros certainly came to view it that way himself. In 2003, he told The Washington Post that denying George W. Bush a second term in the White House was “the central focus of my life.” For him, the 2004 campaign was “a matter of life and death.”
Bush won reelection, but Soros did not expire. Vibrant and healthy into his 70s and 80s, he doubled down. Long before his foundation’s support for groups such as Black Lives Matter prompted intense criticism, his political donations brought scrutiny of the man and his motives. Even friends and allies wondered: What changed him? Prior to the 2003-04 campaign cycle, Soros had ardently supported financial transparency -- and strict campaign spending limits -- as did most leading Democrats. In the 1990s, Soros donated $18 million -- when that was considered a lot of money -- to good-government groups working to curb the influence of special interests. He was a force behind the passage of the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law.
Yet with no real public explanation, Soros began funneling huge sums of political “soft money” to super PACS and various Democratic Party entities. When Republicans called him a hypocrite, it only made him more partisan. In the autumn of 2004, he literally told the New Yorker magazine that the ends justified the means. This explanation, troubling on its face, also begged an important question: What had radicalized him? The short answer seems to be the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Almost all Americans rallied behind the flag and the president in those daunting days, in a manner that almost certainly would not happen now. Soros did, too, at least initially, but he soon came unglued over the Bush administration’s response. In the rare interviews he granted at the time, Soros mentioned two aspects of that response: the decision to invade Iraq and the rhetoric used to bolster the spirits of the American people. The first is entirely understandable: a majority of Americans also developed misgivings about the U.S. military invasion of Iraq.
Soros’ second response seems inexplicable, notwithstanding how evocatively he explained it. In 2003, he told The Washington Post: “When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans.” The comment conjures up nightmarish memories of his childhood, he added, of Nazi slogans on the walls: Der Feind Hort mit (“The enemy is listening”). “My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me,” he said.
The following year, Soros ratcheted up the Hitler talk. In that New Yorker piece, he told Jane Mayer, a sympathetic interlocutor, that the statements of Attorney General John Ashcroft “reminded me of Germany, under the Nazis. It was the kind of talk that Goebbels used to use to line the Germans up. I remember, I was 13 or 14. It was the same kind of propaganda about how ‘We are endangered’ and ‘We have to be united.’” He also told Mayer that for 18 months after 9/11, Bush had managed to “suspend the critical process” and “suppress all dissent.”
This was palpable nonsense. George W. Bush never mentioned Islam without describing it as a “religion of peace.” And opposition against the Iraq War was given a prominent platform in every major news outlet in the country, in White House news conferences, and on the floor of the House and Senate -- before and after the March 2003 invasion. America resembled the early days of the Third Reich no more than it resembled Mars. Even Soros’ allies didn’t understand his obsessiveness. But why argue with the guy? He was on their side and wanted to give them something they wanted: untold sums of money for the purpose of influencing U.S. elections.
My Dark Money Is Cleaner Than Your Dark Money
The problem -- if one considers hypocrisy a problem -- is that as Democrats began tapping the largesse of partisan billionaires to influence elections, party leaders remained on record in vehement opposition to no-limits campaign financing. They never veered from this catechism even while quietly assembling their own roster of billionaires to counter GOP-supporting moneymen such as the conservative Richard Mellon Scaife and libertarians Charles and David Koch.
All the while, leading Democrats continued to demonize wealthy Republican donors. From 2004 to 2014, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid denounced the Koch brothers 134 times on the Senate floor -- and many other times off the floor. In a convincing imitation of Joseph McCarthy, Reid called the Kochs “shadowy” and “dishonest” and “radical” men trying to “buy our democracy” and “rig” elections. He also said they were “un-American.” If Harry Reid’s demagoguery bothered George Soros, there’s no record of it. Moreover, nearly every leading Democrat joined in the Koch-bashing and frequent attacks on so-called “dark money.”
Nice work, if you can get it. Attack Republicans for using wealthy conservatives to hijack American elective democracy while doing the exact same thing with wealthy liberal donors. Viewed that way, the Democrats are arguably worse because they know better. What’s remarkable is how faithfully the Democrats followed the Republican script. It was in 2004 that the Koch brothers formed a super PAC called Americans for Prosperity, the entity used to funnel hundreds of millions into Republican causes and campaigns and to run attack ads against leading Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.
Yet it was the very same election cycle that George Soros and four fellow Democratic billionaires banded together with help from a half-dozen Democratic Party officials to launch their own super PAC, America Coming Together. In the end, ACT would spend some $137 million trying to get John Kerry elected (and pay a $775,000 fine to the Federal Election Commission for violating election laws.)
The first organization meeting was in Aspen, Colo., a session revealed by Jane Mayer, a liberal journalist who would later write extensive exposés of the Koch brothers’ political spending. Mayer described the Aug. 6, 2004, summit as “clandestine.” The participants, she added, were “sworn to secrecy” and an assistant to one of them told her, “No one was supposed to know about this. We don’t want people thinking it’s a cabal.”
The Democrats were trying to operate “under the radar,” in other words – the words used by John Kass to such consternation. Not that anyone accused Jane Mayer of it, but describing the Democrats’ machinations in this fashion was no more anti-Semitic than it would be to call anti-Koch journalism anti-German (although some Koch brothers’ critics have explored their family ties to the Fatherland.) Yet Soros himself has raised that specter repeatedly. As long ago as 2000, he was complaining about anonymous Internet trolls playing the “Jewish cabal” card.
Soros’ son Alexander, deputy chairman of the Open Society Foundations, penned a recent screed for NBC lashing out at the “vile allegations” made by “white supremacists” against Soros Sr. The younger Soros mentioned John Kass by name, asserting that Kass had claimed “my father was somehow responsible for the unrest in Chicago and other American cities because of his support for a liberal approach to criminal justice.”
This is misdirection. Kass’ column didn’t focus primarily on protests. It was mostly about street crime: “A recent Chicago Tribune investigation,” he noted, “found that of 162 offenders arrested and charged with felonies before the Floyd protests -- and who were bailed out by liberal social justice warrior groups -- more than one in five were charged with new offenses.” That investigative piece ran in late April, a month before George Floyd’s death.
If there’s a familiar “trope” here, it’s using anti-Semitism as a ruse to deflect questions about accountability. And since when did asking who funds anti-bail groups or the campaigns of political candidates become a topic that gives working journalists the vapors? It sure isn’t off-limits when the Koch brothers donate untold millions of dollars to oppose pro-environmental Democrats.
Information about the Soros donations to liberal candidates in prosecutors’ elections has been difficult to come by, which is curious from a group calling itself “Open Society.” In this area, they are not so open. The reason political “dark money” is so controversial is that it’s not always clear where it’s coming from. But it’s a matter of record that in 2018, Democratic Party dark money surpassed Republican Party dark money for the first time. A lot of that cash came from the Soros organization, and in races where big money was a new concept. As Neal Simon, an independent 2018 candidate for Senate from Maryland, noted, “George Soros took things to a new level by ‘going granular,’ meaning he poured enormous sums into hyper-local political races.” According to the Washington Post, the Soros’ affiliated Justice & Public Safety super PAC poured $1 million into two Northern Virginia commonwealth’s attorney races – where expenditures are usually measured in the thousands of dollars. Both of the Soros-backed progressives won, ousting longtime prosecutors.
What was that money used for? To finance negative television attack ads, for one thing, against incumbents with no real means to respond. The local elections in Fairfax and Arlington were not unique. “George Soros’ quiet overhaul of the U.S. justice system” – that’s Politico’s wording, not mine (or Kass’) -- began in 2016. When he broke that story, Politico reporter Scott Bland couldn’t get the Soros organization to explain its rationale or its reach. Digging into local records, however, Bland found Soros-backed district attorney candidates in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas. The American Association of Assistant District Attorneys have identified Soros’ footprint in elections in California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. These $1 million Soros campaigns have also targeted prosecutors’ races in Massachusetts and Oregon.
And so it goes, piecemeal. How many of these prosecutors are out there? Dozens? A hundred? What effect are their policies having? This is what John Kass was getting at in his July 22 column, the one his newspaper’s own guild deemed unsuitable for public discourse. I disagree. I worry that many Americans’ lives depend on the answers. Perhaps these progressives are doing more good than harm. To be honest, that would be my own bias. But honest dialogue could help shed light on that.
Ironically, that’s what the Chicago Tribune Guild executive committee now says it was trying to facilitate. “We didn't, and wouldn’t, set out to ‘silence’ him,” Megan Crepeau told me. “We wanted an apology and a conversation, that’s all.”
It’s an odd conversation that demands an apology as a precondition, and in any event there’s a better way of going about it than writing a nasty letter you know will leak. From more than four decades’ experience in the news business, I know that the way you approach a colleague who wrote something you deem problematic is to approach them personally and say, “Hey, some of the stuff in your column made me uncomfortable. Let me buy you a beer at the Billy Goat Tavern and I’ll tell you why.”
I realize this is harder to do during a pandemic-induced quarantine, but that’s why God made Zoom. In the end, there’s something else about this episode that is troubling besides the astonishing lack of collegiality in today’s newsrooms. The Chicago Tribune Guild’s original letter attacking John Kass said that one their motivations was that they believe his column was “detrimental to our hopes of winning new readers.”
Put me down skeptical that new readers would flock to a predictable, politically correct newspaper featuring reporters wearing their biases on their sleeves and repeating partisan talking points. Even if they did, would such a publication really be a newspaper?
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]


wnd--2020-08-11--'Unmasking Obama' also unmasks ... 'the corrupt media'

[ Editor 's note : This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics . ]
A slew of political books will be hitting bookshelves between now and Election Day , covering everything on the spectrum from communist propaganda to Trump hagiography .
Many of those books , such as Sean Hannity ’ s “ Live Free or Die , ” will make millions of dollars for their authors and publishers .
Some have the potential to influence the election , such as disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok ’ s attempt at reputation rehabilitation titled “ Compromised : Counterintelligence and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Yet in this onslaught of new titles , literally dozens of which will attempt to capitalize on the 2020 election frenzy , there will be a few small polished gems that may be lost in the fray .
One such could be Jack Cashill ’ s “ Unmasking Obama : The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency ” ( Post Hill Press , 249 pages , available for pre-order now ) .
TRENDING : Lindsey Graham : 'Somebody needs to go to jail for this' Cashill has been fighting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the 2008 election .
His 2003 book “ First Strike ” was a compelling account of the evidence that the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 resulted from a missile attack that was covered up by the Clinton administration .
Perhaps his best known work is “ Deconstructing Obama , ” which used textual analysis and biographical information to decode the myth of Barack Obama ’ s life , and particularly to debunk the notion that Obama wrote his best-selling memoir “ Dreams From My Father.
” In this new book , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deceptive politics of Obama and how he has had a willing partner in the mainstream media to protect him from unwanted publicity that might disrupt his magical mystery presidency .
Indeed , what Cashill makes crystal clear is that the eight years of Obama ’ s presidency provide a perfect introduction to the first 3½ years of the Trump presidency — not because Trump followed in Obama ’ s path but because the double standard of the major media is on full display .
The Russiagate conspiracy , which still has not been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ CNN , is the missing link between the two administrations and was the capstone achievement of Obama ’ s team in successfully misleading America .
The conspiracy against Trump is the evidence in plain sight that Democrats , bureaucrats and media rats together have been able to control the narrative to an unprecedented degree .
“ Unraveling that conspiracy , the Russian version or the Ukrainian one , is beyond the scope of this book , ” Cashill notes , but adds , “ What I can do is show how the eight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many more years of media entropy created the conditions for a distinctly modern , media-driven coup.
” “ Eight years of scandals ” would be a more appropriate appellation for Obama ’ s two terms , despite the former president bragging about how his administration didn ’ t have any “ significant ” scandals .
Cashill ’ s most important accomplishment in this text is to reveal in page after page that Obama ’ s unblemished record is not based on lack of scandal , but rather on lack of serious investigation by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ media .
But the second most important component of “ Unmasking Obama ” is his praise of the independent citizen journalists who have tirelessly investigated not just Obama ’ s scandals , but those of President Clinton , George W. Bush and the Fake News Media in general .
Although Cashill has been a significant member of that underground network of investigators , he gives generous credit to dozens of others who have contributed to the search for truth .
That includes climate warriors such as James Delingpole , libertarian feminists such as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as Sharyl Attkisson and daring provocateurs such as James O ’ Keefe .
Cashill describes this ragtag band of misfits and angels as the American version of the samizdat , the self-published illegal underground press of the Soviet Union .
The name may not catch on , but it is apt , and although most of the American samizdat does not risk imprisonment for challenging the “ party line , ” they are marginalized and minimized by the establishment media in a clumsy effort to discredit their inconvenient reporting .
Whether it is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the New York Times ( previously at BuzzFeed and Politico ) , these guardians of the far left act in unison to dismiss or suppress any news that goes counter to the politically correct narrative du jour .
Cashill labels these forces of suppression as “ firemen , ” taking the name from Ray Bradbury ’ s dystopian novel “ Fahrenheit 451 , ” in which firemen of the future burn books in order to discourage free thought and limit the spread of knowledge .
Sadly , this is an obvious parallel @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , young journalists aspired to gather information and spread it , ” Cashill writes .
“ During the Obama era , however , the firemen on the left , like those in Bradbury ’ s novel , aspired to destroy inconvenient information before it could spread .
… The firemen had numerous ways of protecting the Obama presidency : defaming opposition journalists , mocking their work , exposing their past sins , trivializing their information , and twisting their facts , among others.
” With his own penchant for puncturing far-left narratives , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a literary pariah .
He is routinely dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy kook , and it is no surprise that his Wikipedia entry refers to him as a white nationalist without the slightest hint of evidence to justify that slur .
I would be remiss if I did not mention that Cashill has included me as a member of the samizdat and recites accurately my 2012 discovery of an “ eye-popping column from November 1979 written by one Vernon Jarrett , a widely syndicated black columnist then with the Chicago Tribune.
” Jarrett @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who later became Obama ’ s senior adviser , and he was close friends with Frank Marshall Davis , the black communist who was the youthful Obama ’ s mentor in Hawaii .
In September 2012 , I wrote a story showing that Jarrett ’ s column in 1979 provided circumstantial evidence to support the 2008 claim by Democrat elder statesman Percy Sutton that he had been asked decades earlier by radical attorney Khalid al-Mansour to write a letter of recommendation for Obama to enter Harvard Law School .
Sutton ’ s very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ fireman ” Ben Smith as the muddled imaginings of an octogenarian , and a story that might have raised serious questions about Obama ’ s murky past died on the vine .
Then , four years later , in the thick of Obama ’ s reelection campaign , I found the Jarrett column that provided valuable context for Sutton ’ s claim that al-Mansour was raising money for Obama ’ s college education .
Jarrett , in 1979 , had revealed that al-Mansour was the designated go-between to spend Arab money to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ students ” such as Obama .
If our president had been shown to be beholden to Saudi princes , it might have raised serious concerns about his Middle East policy and more , possibly ending his presidency altogether .
That , of course , was not to be , but my personal experience was emblematic of Cashill ’ s thesis of a war between the samizdat and the firemen .
My column published in Kalispell , Mont .
— which Cashill denotes as “ the furthest reaches of the samizdat ” — didn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , my reporting had been targeted by none other than Ben Smith himself , who tried to put out the fire by quoting al-Mansour saying that he had never heard of Jarrett ’ s column and didn ’ t know anything about it .
This had the effect of protecting Obama by throwing two famous black Americans — Jarrett and Sutton ( both of whom were dead by that point ) — under the bus .
I wrote a follow-up story to poke holes in the BuzzFeed defense of Obama , but it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had the cachet to stifle whatever traction my story would have gotten .
A real journalist with Smith ’ s resources would have tried to find substantiation for my theory , not dismiss it .
Unless Vernon Jarrett was a liar , then there must have been other payments made from Saudi Arabia and other conversations with other universities that could be documented .
“ Follow the money , ” I wrote , with hope that some enterprising reporter could trace Obama ’ s college funding back to its source .
Alas , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cashill shows in repeated examples , once the firemen have doused the flames of any inconvenient reporting that threatens their favored politicians and issues , the rest of the mainstream media take the advice of Obi-Wan Kenobi : “ Nothing to see here .
Move along !
” Both of my columns on Jarrett , al-Mansour and Sutton are reprinted in my own book about the Obama presidency ( “ Obama ’ s Fundamental Transformation , ” which is Part 2 of the “ Why We Needed Trump ” trilogy ) .
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I am struck by how many of the topics I covered during eight years are the same ones that Cashill revisits : the politicization of the IRS , the bait-and-switch selling of Obamacare , the mischaracterization of the Benghazi attack , the Iran nuclear boondoggle .
In almost every case , it was virtually impossible at the time to write about these topics without being labeled ( as I frequently was , even in Montana ) a racist , a xenophobe , or , like Cashill , a white nationalist .
Of course @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
What I am — and what Cashill is , too — is someone with a sense of curiosity and a healthy dose of skepticism .
Add that to the ability to apply logic to a story , and you have what used to be called an old-school journalist .
You won ’ t find them often these days at the New York Times or the Washington Post , and not at all at CNN ( thanks , Jeff Zucker ! )
but they are still out there somewhere — underground , underpaid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to complete a third century as a free country , we had better pay them heed .
The alternative is unthinkable .
Without the American samizdat , all we would have is the official party line as served up by the corrupt media , protecting the public from the need to make up their own minds .
As George Orwell warned Britain in 1945 in an essay titled “ The Freedom of the Press ” : “ If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it .
In our country ... it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect.
” Nothing much has changed in the ensuing 75 years , except you can add the United States to the list of countries where liberals fear liberty .
And you can bet that they fear Jack Cashill .

[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Politics.]
By Frank Miele
Real Clear Politics
A slew of political books will be hitting bookshelves between now and Election Day, covering everything on the spectrum from communist propaganda to Trump hagiography.
Many of those books, such as Sean Hannity’s “Live Free or Die,” will make millions of dollars for their authors and publishers. Some have the potential to influence the election, such as disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok’s attempt at reputation rehabilitation titled “Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump.” Yet in this onslaught of new titles, literally dozens of which will attempt to capitalize on the 2020 election frenzy, there will be a few small polished gems that may be lost in the fray. One such could be Jack Cashill’s “Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency” (Post Hill Press, 249 pages, available for pre-order now).
TRENDING: Is this the 'Final Battle'?
Cashill has been fighting to tell repressed narratives since well before the 2008 election. His 2003 book “First Strike” was a compelling account of the evidence that the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 resulted from a missile attack that was covered up by the Clinton administration. Perhaps his best known work is “Deconstructing Obama,” which used textual analysis and biographical information to decode the myth of Barack Obama’s life, and particularly to debunk the notion that Obama wrote his best-selling memoir “Dreams From My Father.”
In this new book, Cashill focuses much more directly on the deceptive politics of Obama and how he has had a willing partner in the mainstream media to protect him from unwanted publicity that might disrupt his magical mystery presidency. Indeed, what Cashill makes crystal clear is that the eight years of Obama’s presidency provide a perfect introduction to the first 3½ years of the Trump presidency — not because Trump followed in Obama’s path but because the double standard of the major media is on full display.
The Russiagate conspiracy, which still has not been acknowledged by the New York Times or CNN, is the missing link between the two administrations and was the capstone achievement of Obama’s team in successfully misleading America. The conspiracy against Trump is the evidence in plain sight that Democrats, bureaucrats and media rats together have been able to control the narrative to an unprecedented degree.
“Unraveling that conspiracy, the Russian version or the Ukrainian one, is beyond the scope of this book,” Cashill notes, but adds, “What I can do is show how the eight years of Obama’s governance and many more years of media entropy created the conditions for a distinctly modern, media-driven coup.”
“Eight years of scandals” would be a more appropriate appellation for Obama’s two terms, despite the former president bragging about how his administration didn’t have any “significant” scandals. Cashill’s most important accomplishment in this text is to reveal in page after page that Obama’s unblemished record is not based on lack of scandal, but rather on lack of serious investigation by either the relevant authorities or the mainstream media.
But the second most important component of “Unmasking Obama” is his praise of the independent citizen journalists who have tirelessly investigated not just Obama’s scandals, but those of President Clinton, George W. Bush and the Fake News Media in general.
Although Cashill has been a significant member of that underground network of investigators, he gives generous credit to dozens of others who have contributed to the search for truth. That includes climate warriors such as James Delingpole, libertarian feminists such as Camille Paglia, castoff mainstream journalists such as Sharyl Attkisson and daring provocateurs such as James O’Keefe.
Cashill describes this ragtag band of misfits and angels as the American version of the samizdat, the self-published illegal underground press of the Soviet Union. The name may not catch on, but it is apt, and although most of the American samizdat does not risk imprisonment for challenging the “party line,” they are marginalized and minimized by the establishment media in a clumsy effort to discredit their inconvenient reporting.
Whether it is Brian Stelter on CNN or Ben Smith at the New York Times (previously at BuzzFeed and Politico), these guardians of the far left act in unison to dismiss or suppress any news that goes counter to the politically correct narrative du jour. Cashill labels these forces of suppression as “firemen,” taking the name from Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451,” in which firemen of the future burn books in order to discourage free thought and limit the spread of knowledge. Sadly, this is an obvious parallel to contemporary journalism.
“Years ago, young journalists aspired to gather information and spread it,” Cashill writes. “During the Obama era, however, the firemen on the left, like those in Bradbury’s novel, aspired to destroy inconvenient information before it could spread. … The firemen had numerous ways of protecting the Obama presidency: defaming opposition journalists, mocking their work, exposing their past sins, trivializing their information, and twisting their facts, among others.”
With his own penchant for puncturing far-left narratives, Cashill has managed to turn himself into a literary pariah. He is routinely dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy kook, and it is no surprise that his Wikipedia entry refers to him as a white nationalist without the slightest hint of evidence to justify that slur.
I would be remiss if I did not mention that Cashill has included me as a member of the samizdat and recites accurately my 2012 discovery of an “eye-popping column from November 1979 written by one Vernon Jarrett, a widely syndicated black columnist then with the Chicago Tribune.” Jarrett was the father-in-law of Valerie Jarrett, who later became Obama’s senior adviser, and he was close friends with Frank Marshall Davis, the black communist who was the youthful Obama’s mentor in Hawaii.
In September 2012, I wrote a story showing that Jarrett’s column in 1979 provided circumstantial evidence to support the 2008 claim by Democrat elder statesman Percy Sutton that he had been asked decades earlier by radical attorney Khalid al-Mansour to write a letter of recommendation for Obama to enter Harvard Law School. Sutton’s very clear remembrance had been quickly attacked by “fireman” Ben Smith as the muddled imaginings of an octogenarian, and a story that might have raised serious questions about Obama’s murky past died on the vine.
Then, four years later, in the thick of Obama’s reelection campaign, I found the Jarrett column that provided valuable context for Sutton’s claim that al-Mansour was raising money for Obama’s college education. Jarrett, in 1979, had revealed that al-Mansour was the designated go-between to spend Arab money to benefit black Americans, including “disadvantaged students” such as Obama. If our president had been shown to be beholden to Saudi princes, it might have raised serious concerns about his Middle East policy and more, possibly ending his presidency altogether.
That, of course, was not to be, but my personal experience was emblematic of Cashill’s thesis of a war between the samizdat and the firemen. My column published in Kalispell, Mont. — which Cashill denotes as “the furthest reaches of the samizdat” — didn’t go unnoticed. Within days, my reporting had been targeted by none other than Ben Smith himself, who tried to put out the fire by quoting al-Mansour saying that he had never heard of Jarrett’s column and didn’t know anything about it. This had the effect of protecting Obama by throwing two famous black Americans — Jarrett and Sutton (both of whom were dead by that point) — under the bus.
I wrote a follow-up story to poke holes in the BuzzFeed defense of Obama, but it didn’t matter. Ben Smith had the cachet to stifle whatever traction my story would have gotten. A real journalist with Smith’s resources would have tried to find substantiation for my theory, not dismiss it. Unless Vernon Jarrett was a liar, then there must have been other payments made from Saudi Arabia and other conversations with other universities that could be documented. “Follow the money,” I wrote, with hope that some enterprising reporter could trace Obama’s college funding back to its source.
Alas, that was not to be. As Cashill shows in repeated examples, once the firemen have doused the flames of any inconvenient reporting that threatens their favored politicians and issues, the rest of the mainstream media take the advice of Obi-Wan Kenobi: “Nothing to see here. Move along!”
Both of my columns on Jarrett, al-Mansour and Sutton are reprinted in my own book about the Obama presidency (“Obama’s Fundamental Transformation,” which is Part 2 of the “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy). As I thumb through my book now, I am struck by how many of the topics I covered during eight years are the same ones that Cashill revisits: the politicization of the IRS, the bait-and-switch selling of Obamacare, the mischaracterization of the Benghazi attack, the Iran nuclear boondoggle.
In almost every case, it was virtually impossible at the time to write about these topics without being labeled (as I frequently was, even in Montana) a racist, a xenophobe, or, like Cashill, a white nationalist. Of course, I am none of those things. What I am — and what Cashill is, too — is someone with a sense of curiosity and a healthy dose of skepticism. Add that to the ability to apply logic to a story, and you have what used to be called an old-school journalist.
You won’t find them often these days at the New York Times or the Washington Post, and not at all at CNN (thanks, Jeff Zucker!) but they are still out there somewhere — underground, underpaid and under siege. If we hope to complete a third century as a free country, we had better pay them heed. The alternative is unthinkable. Without the American samizdat, all we would have is the official party line as served up by the corrupt media, protecting the public from the need to make up their own minds.
As George Orwell warned Britain in 1945 in an essay titled “The Freedom of the Press”:
“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. The common people still vaguely subscribe to that doctrine and act on it. In our country ... it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect.”
Nothing much has changed in the ensuing 75 years, except you can add the United States to the list of countries where liberals fear liberty. And you can bet that they fear Jack Cashill.


wnd--2020-08-11--Biden's hideous plan to make family life in suburbs unbearably miserable

[ Editor 's note : This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy . ]
President Trump recently decided to rescind the Obama administration ’ s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing ( AFFH ) rule , which put pressure on suburbs to construct more low-income , high-density housing in their communities .
Trump ’ s decision met with a predictable outcry .
“ It ’ s not even a dog whistle anymore , ” Connecticut senator Chris Murphy tweeted .
“ Our President is now a proud , vocal segregationist.
” Somehow , Democrats still see the suburbs as racially @ @ @ @ @ @ @ haven ’ t been for a long time .
According to demographer Joel Kotkin and urban studies professor Alan Berger , 151 million Americans live in the suburbs and exurbs , compared with only 25 million in urban cores .
A majority of African-Americans in the nation ’ s 100 largest metropolitan areas live in the suburbs .
More Hispanics have been moving to the suburbs than whites , and the Asian population in suburban areas is growing nearly twice as fast as that of Asians living in inner-city cores .
TRENDING : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to jail for this' Yet during the Obama years , the Democratic Party positioned itself on the wrong side of these realities .
“ The days where we ’ re just building sprawl forever , those days are over , ” Barack Obama declared in February 2009 , less than a month into his presidency .
“ When it comes to development , it ’ s time to throw out old policies that encouraged sprawl , ” he told the U.S. Conference of Mayors in January 2010 .
Sprawl .
Note the word @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to describe where most Americans live and many others aspire to live .
It ’ s the housing equivalent of Obama ’ s clinging-to- guns-or-religion comment or Hillary Clinton ’ s “ basket of deplorables ” remark .
It ’ s not racist to want to live in a single-family home on a quarter-acre plot ; it ’ s more like wanting to live the American dream .
And the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the suburbs means , Kotkin argues , that the targets of these heavy-handed federal social-engineering efforts are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who have worked hard to get where they are .
The AFFH rule , an addition to the 1968 Fair Housing Act , elevates the goal of expanding economic opportunity — but as Stanley Kurtz , the leading conservative critic of the AFFH , argues , that purpose has no basis in the 1968 law .
Far from helping inner-city minorities to move out to quiet residential neighborhoods , restricting the supply of new single-plot housing in favor of high-density , subsidized municipal housing denies them the life they seek for their families @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their neighborhoods threatens the value of their principal asset —their homes — as well as their quality of life .
Voters understand this , and they don ’ t like it .
A 2015 Rasmussen poll of likely voters found an astonishing 83 % of respondents agreeing that it ’ s not the government ’ s job to diversify neighborhoods so that people of different income levels live together .
Nonetheless , Joe Biden is running on a reinstated , beefed-up AFFH rule , incorporating New Jersey senator Cory Booker ’ s proposal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contingent on their compliance with federal “ inclusive ” zoning mandates .
Rather than race , the Biden campaign now makes “ environmental justice ” its justification for extending federal control over the suburbs .
Reducing the climate impact of urban sprawl is one of the core components of Biden ’ s “ net-zero ” climate plan .
Under a Biden administration , federal housing policy will be a tool to “ alter local regulations ” in order to “ eliminate sprawl , ” prioritizing denser housing to shrink the country ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re-urbanization plan harmonizes with recent recommendations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change .
“ Effective urban planning can reduce GHG ( greenhouse gas ) emissions from urban transport between 20 % and 50 % , ” the IPCC says in its 2018 Net Zero report .
“ Significant reductions in car use are associated with dense , pedestrianized cities and towns , ” its section on urban transport and planning states .
The transition to net-zero emissions requires changes in urban design “ that encourage walkable cities , non-motorized transport and shorter @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and exurbs are not .
Transforming the suburbs with large , publicly owned multi-dwelling units — with elevator shafts blasting viruses and microbes to every floor — and forcing people out of the safety of their automobiles onto mass transit looks especially reckless amid a global pandemic .
Suburban living is cleaner , safer , and healthier .
But progressives ’ true target is the culture and values fostered by suburban living : family life , homeownership and independence from the state , and a sense of autonomy within stable , law-abiding communities @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the AFFH rule means that the survival of those values will be on the ballot on November 3 .
Democrats may regret putting them there .
Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of The Climate Noose .
[ Editor 's note : This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy . ]

[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy.]
By Rupert Darwall
Real Clear Policy
President Trump recently decided to rescind the Obama administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which put pressure on suburbs to construct more low-income, high-density housing in their communities. Trump’s decision met with a predictable outcry. “It’s not even a dog whistle anymore,” Connecticut senator Chris Murphy tweeted. “Our President is now a proud, vocal segregationist.”
Somehow, Democrats still see the suburbs as racially homogenized, lily-white enclaves — something they haven’t been for a long time. According to demographer Joel Kotkin and urban studies professor Alan Berger, 151 million Americans live in the suburbs and exurbs, compared with only 25 million in urban cores. A majority of African-Americans in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas live in the suburbs. More Hispanics have been moving to the suburbs than whites, and the Asian population in suburban areas is growing nearly twice as fast as that of Asians living in inner-city cores.
TRENDING: Is this the 'Final Battle'?
Yet during the Obama years, the Democratic Party positioned itself on the wrong side of these realities. “The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over,” Barack Obama declared in February 2009, less than a month into his presidency. “When it comes to development, it’s time to throw out old policies that encouraged sprawl,” he told the U.S. Conference of Mayors in January 2010. Sprawl. Note the word. That’s how progressives chose to describe where most Americans live and many others aspire to live. It’s the housing equivalent of Obama’s clinging-to- guns-or-religion comment or Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark.
It’s not racist to want to live in a single-family home on a quarter-acre plot; it’s more like wanting to live the American dream. And the increasing racial and ethnic diversity of the suburbs means, Kotkin argues, that the targets of these heavy-handed federal social-engineering efforts are not only whites but also many minorities who have worked hard to get where they are.
The AFFH rule, an addition to the 1968 Fair Housing Act, elevates the goal of expanding economic opportunity — but as Stanley Kurtz, the leading conservative critic of the AFFH, argues, that purpose has no basis in the 1968 law. Far from helping inner-city minorities to move out to quiet residential neighborhoods, restricting the supply of new single-plot housing in favor of high-density, subsidized municipal housing denies them the life they seek for their families. For suburbanites, the urbanization of their neighborhoods threatens the value of their principal asset —their homes — as well as their quality of life.
Voters understand this, and they don’t like it. A 2015 Rasmussen poll of likely voters found an astonishing 83% of respondents agreeing that it’s not the government’s job to diversify neighborhoods so that people of different income levels live together.
Nonetheless, Joe Biden is running on a reinstated, beefed-up AFFH rule, incorporating New Jersey senator Cory Booker’s proposal to make federal surface-transportation grants to communities contingent on their compliance with federal “inclusive” zoning mandates. Rather than race, the Biden campaign now makes “environmental justice” its justification for extending federal control over the suburbs. Reducing the climate impact of urban sprawl is one of the core components of Biden’s “net-zero” climate plan. Under a Biden administration, federal housing policy will be a tool to “alter local regulations” in order to “eliminate sprawl,” prioritizing denser housing to shrink the country’s “carbon footprint.”
Biden’s re-urbanization plan harmonizes with recent recommendations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Effective urban planning can reduce GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions from urban transport between 20% and 50%,” the IPCC says in its 2018 Net Zero report. “Significant reductions in car use are associated with dense, pedestrianized cities and towns,” its section on urban transport and planning states. The transition to net-zero emissions requires changes in urban design “that encourage walkable cities, non-motorized transport and shorter commuter distances” — everything the suburbs and exurbs are not.
Transforming the suburbs with large, publicly owned multi-dwelling units — with elevator shafts blasting viruses and microbes to every floor — and forcing people out of the safety of their automobiles onto mass transit looks especially reckless amid a global pandemic. Suburban living is cleaner, safer, and healthier. But progressives’ true target is the culture and values fostered by suburban living: family life, homeownership and independence from the state, and a sense of autonomy within stable, law-abiding communities. Biden’s promise to revive the AFFH rule means that the survival of those values will be on the ballot on November 3. Democrats may regret putting them there.
Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of
The Climate Noose.
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Policy.]


wnd--2020-08-11--Simon Cowell broke back in multiple places, nearly left paralyzed after crash

The normally stoic Simon Cowell has been enjoying a good amount of quarantine outdoors .
The judge who speaks his mind on various talent shows seems to have a soft spot for camping in the yard with his 6-year-old son , Eric .
The 60-year-old celebrity has taken a renewed interest in his health starting last year .
He 's eating better , exercising more and spending more time with his son and girlfriend .
`` I ’ m doing a bit of cooking , '' he told Extra in May .
`` I ’ m exercising .
Funny enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , sticking to the diet . ''
`` I think I have dropped , since I started this diet a year ago , 60 pounds . ''
TRENDING : Lindsey Graham : 'Somebody needs to go to jail for this' Perhaps in an effort to up his outdoor time , Cowell recently bought an electric bike that he tried out at his home in California .
Somehow , with the whole family ( girlfriend Lauren , their son Eric and her son Adam ) gathered around , he managed to fall and break @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the New York Post 's Page Six about the incident .
`` He did a turn in his courtyard , changed gear , and then the bike went into a wheelie and threw him off the back ... Simon was in complete agony and was stretchered out of his home and taken in an ambulance to hospital , '' one source said .
`` Friends at the scene quickly checked that he could move fingers and toes -- he could have been paralyzed . ''
Doctors said Cowell narrowly missed severing his spinal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ `` When he fell off the bike he landed right on his back which broke in a number of places , '' one said , according to Page Six .
`` He was in shock and in massive amounts of pain . ''
`` Lauren went with him to the hospital and has been allowed in briefly to see him .
He ’ s doing OK in the circumstances . ''
Cowell 's representative confirmed to E !
News that he had `` broken his back in a number of places . ''
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but by all accounts is resting and healing well .
According to what friends told Page Six , he now has a metal rod in his back .
Cowell is doing well enough to post on social media , so on Sunday he posted a suitably dry review of the incident on Twitter and Facebook .
`` Some good advice ... '' the post began .
`` If you buy an electric trail bike , read the manual before you ride it for the first time .
`` I have broken part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ everyone for your kind messages .
`` And a massive thank you to all the nurses and doctors .
Some of the nicest people I have ever met .
Stay safe everyone . ''
While Cowell will need to heal up before trying any such stunt again , his friends say the bedrest will be brutal for him .
`` Knowing Simon , he ’ ll be ready to go home as soon as they ’ ll let him , '' one said .
`` He ’ s going to hate being cooped @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on The Western Journal .

The normally stoic Simon Cowell has been enjoying a good amount of quarantine outdoors. The judge who speaks his mind on various talent shows seems to have a soft spot for camping in the yard with his 6-year-old son, Eric.
The 60-year-old celebrity has taken a renewed interest in his health starting last year. He's eating better, exercising more and spending more time with his son and girlfriend.
"I’m doing a bit of cooking," he told Extra in May. "I’m exercising. Funny enough, more during this time as well, sticking to the diet."
"I think I have dropped, since I started this diet a year ago, 60 pounds."
TRENDING: Is this the 'Final Battle'?
Perhaps in an effort to up his outdoor time, Cowell recently bought an electric bike that he tried out at his home in California. Somehow, with the whole family (girlfriend Lauren, their son Eric and her son Adam) gathered around, he managed to fall and break his back.
Various sources spoke to the New York Post's Page Six about the incident.
"He did a turn in his courtyard, changed gear, and then the bike went into a wheelie and threw him off the back ... Simon was in complete agony and was stretchered out of his home and taken in an ambulance to hospital," one source said. "Friends at the scene quickly checked that he could move fingers and toes -- he could have been paralyzed."
Doctors said Cowell narrowly missed severing his spinal cord, according to the report.
"When he fell off the bike he landed right on his back which broke in a number of places," one said, according to Page Six.
"He was in shock and in massive amounts of pain."
"Lauren went with him to the hospital and has been allowed in briefly to see him. He’s doing OK in the circumstances."
Cowell's representative confirmed to E! News that he had "broken his back in a number of places."
He underwent a six-hour surgery on Saturday, but by all accounts is resting and healing well. According to what friends told Page Six, he now has a metal rod in his back.
Cowell is doing well enough to post on social media, so on Sunday he posted a suitably dry review of the incident on Twitter and Facebook.
"Some good advice..." the post began. "If you buy an electric trail bike, read the manual before you ride it for the first time.
"I have broken part of my back. Thank you to everyone for your kind messages.
"And a massive thank you to all the nurses and doctors. Some of the nicest people I have ever met. Stay safe everyone."
And a massive thank you to all the nurses and doctors. Some of the nicest people I have ever met.
Stay safe everyone
Simon. — Simon Cowell (@SimonCowell) August 10, 2020
While Cowell will need to heal up before trying any such stunt again, his friends say the bedrest will be brutal for him.
"Knowing Simon, he’ll be ready to go home as soon as they’ll let him," one said. "He’s going to hate being cooped up."
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.


wnd--2020-08-11--Pastor John MacArthur on COVID defiance: 'Jesus Christ is the head of the church'

Pastor John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley , California , is defying state orders that his church remain shuttered during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic -- and the move is sparking intense discussion and debate .
The preacher spoke about his decision in a recent episode of the `` Edifi With Billy Hallowell '' podcast , explaining that Grace Community Church initially complied with California 's restrictions before changing course in recent weeks .
`` I ’ ve been here 50 years ; the church is 63 years old , and this church has never had any kind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , '' MacArthur said .
`` So , when they came up with this mandate it seemed to be so rare and so unusual that we were listening . ''
Upon hearing dire predictions about the death toll , MacArthur said it was `` enough to make anybody with common sense '' pause and take steps to ensure no one was endangered .
The church initially moved to a livestream model and closed down in-person services -- but within a few weeks , MacArthur said , parishioners started showing up again .
Listen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ defying orders : TRENDING : Lindsey Graham : 'Somebody needs to go to jail for this' '' They were beginning to realize that it wasn ’ t what they said it was going to be , '' he said of the COVID-19 impact , estimating that about 0.02 percent of California 's population had died .
`` There were 8,500 deaths [ in the state ] -- half of them were people over 80 with obvious comorbidity issues . ''
MacArthur continued , “ It just seemed to me that 99.98 is pretty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and people were crying out to open the church because of the fears -- and then , of course , the church is the center of life for people who love the Lord , and they were cut off from their friends.
” And thousands of people have flooded back to the pews since Grace Community Church reopened , with around 3,000 attending the first weekend and an estimated 6,000 the second .
And despite threats of government crackdowns over defiance , MacArthur said he has no plans to change course .
`` @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and we ’ re going to continue to meet and we ’ re going to always meet because Jesus Christ is the head of the church .
Jesus is Lord , '' he said .
`` And government has a certain purview given by God , but it doesn ’ t cross over into the realm of the kingdom of God , so we ’ re going to meet . ''
MacArthur noted that the church has hired attorneys and that leaders will do everything they can within the court system to defend @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I don ’ t know what that ’ s going to look like … this is not the America that I ’ ve known for many , many decades , '' he said .
`` It ’ s just a bizarre reality that we haven ’ t navigated in the past .
I ’ m not a prophet , so I can ’ t predict what ’ s going to happen , but I can say this : Grace Community is going to meet . ''
Critics have taken issue with the fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government orders and is allowing crowds of people to congregate at a time when social distancing orders are being heralded for helping stop the spread of coronavirus .
Still , debate persists surrounding how far these orders should go .
Debate and discussion aside , MacArthur believes California Gov .
Gavin Newsom simply does n't have the authority to deem churches `` non-essential '' entities .
`` The governor said the church is not essential .
Some things were essential -- liquor stores were essential , abortion clinics were essential , grocery stores @ @ @ @ @ @ @ essential , '' MacArthur said .
`` Based on the Constitution , the governor doesn ’ t have the authority to say what is essential … the governor has no constitutional authority to say the church is not . ''
In the end , MacArthur believes `` intentional discrimination '' is unfolding `` against biblical Christianity and the church . ''
And he said there 's no end in sight to the restrictions ushered in by COVID-19 .
Listen to MacArthur 's entire interview for more .
This article was originally published on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for access to thousands of faith and family-friendly movies and TV shows .
You can get a free trial here .
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal .

Pastor John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, is defying state orders that his church remain shuttered during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic -- and the move is sparking intense discussion and debate.
The preacher spoke about his decision in a recent episode of the "Edifi With Billy Hallowell" podcast, explaining that Grace Community Church initially complied with California's restrictions before changing course in recent weeks.
"I’ve been here 50 years; the church is 63 years old, and this church has never had any kind of mandate from the government to close," MacArthur said. "So, when they came up with this mandate it seemed to be so rare and so unusual that we were listening."
Upon hearing dire predictions about the death toll, MacArthur said it was "enough to make anybody with common sense" pause and take steps to ensure no one was endangered. The church initially moved to a livestream model and closed down in-person services -- but within a few weeks, MacArthur said, parishioners started showing up again.
Listen to MacArthur explain why his church is defying orders:
TRENDING: Is this the 'Final Battle'?
"They were beginning to realize that it wasn’t what they said it was going to be," he said of the COVID-19 impact, estimating that about 0.02 percent of California's population had died. "There were 8,500 deaths [in the state] -- half of them were people over 80 with obvious comorbidity issues."
MacArthur continued, “It just seemed to me that 99.98 is pretty good odds to come to church, and people were crying out to open the church because of the fears -- and then, of course, the church is the center of life for people who love the Lord, and they were cut off from their friends.”
And thousands of people have flooded back to the pews since Grace Community Church reopened, with around 3,000 attending the first weekend and an estimated 6,000 the second. And despite threats of government crackdowns over defiance, MacArthur said he has no plans to change course.
"Grace Church is going to meet … and we’re going to continue to meet and we’re going to always meet because Jesus Christ is the head of the church. Jesus is Lord," he said. "And government has a certain purview given by God, but it doesn’t cross over into the realm of the kingdom of God, so we’re going to meet."
MacArthur noted that the church has hired attorneys and that leaders will do everything they can within the court system to defend themselves and to continue meeting.
"I don’t know what that’s going to look like … this is not the America that I’ve known for many, many decades," he said. "It’s just a bizarre reality that we haven’t navigated in the past. I’m not a prophet, so I can’t predict what’s going to happen, but I can say this: Grace Community is going to meet."
Critics have taken issue with the fact that the church is in violation of government orders and is allowing crowds of people to congregate at a time when social distancing orders are being heralded for helping stop the spread of coronavirus. Still, debate persists surrounding how far these orders should go.
Debate and discussion aside, MacArthur believes California Gov. Gavin Newsom simply doesn't have the authority to deem churches "non-essential" entities.
"The governor said the church is not essential. Some things were essential -- liquor stores were essential, abortion clinics were essential, grocery stores were essential but the church was not essential," MacArthur said. "Based on the Constitution, the governor doesn’t have the authority to say what is essential … the governor has no constitutional authority to say the church is not."
In the end, MacArthur believes "intentional discrimination" is unfolding "against biblical Christianity and the church." And he said there's no end in sight to the restrictions ushered in by COVID-19.
Listen to MacArthur's entire interview for more.
This article was originally published on Pure Flix Insider. Visit Pure Flix for access to thousands of faith and family-friendly movies and TV shows. You can get a free trial here.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.