"Holidays aren’t just our history. They’re our present. They show us the way forward."

In Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield wrote,

Thanksgiving teaches us two values that lefties hate: gratitude to a higher power and coexistence.

...Days of thanksgiving were not unique in American history. But Thanksgiving as a paradigm of man’s relationship with G-d, and man’s relationship with man, is part of American exceptionalism. It’s how English, Scottish, French, and Dutch settlers were able to come together. And how waves of German, Irish, Jewish, Swedish, and Italian immigrants joined them to make the United States of America.

It’s why, despite the weight of history, African-Americans, Mexicans, and American Indians could all meet around a common national table in thankfulness and fellowship even in a divided nation.

...The real lesson of Thanksgiving is not that history isn’t complex, or that oppression doesn’t exist, but that oppression is not the most powerful force in human history. Fellowship and gratitude are. Politeness and civility are not a white supremacist conspiracy. They are the ways that we live together.

Assuming that we want to live together.

Thanksgiving doesn’t mean that we don’t have fundamental differences. The pilgrims and the Indians certainly did. They don’t mean that we have never fought and will never fight again. Only that we will not fight in this moment, that we will appreciate our common humanity, and the higher power that blesses us with prosperity and peace. If we can’t do that even for a moment, then we can’t coexist.

...Columbus Day has become a casualty in many parts of the country. Thanksgiving is next. And then the Fourth of July. Each of those days plays a vital role, not only in the nation’s history, but in its present. They’re part of an ongoing journey, of discovery, coexistence, and independence that has not ended.

Holidays aren’t just our history. They’re our present. They show us the way forward.

...Thanksgiving is a weapon that shatters the politics, history, and economic theorems of the Left. That weapon is the transcendence of gratitude. The politics of radicalism are fueled by outrage. Nothing is ever forgotten or forgiven. There is never a moment’s peace. Not even at the dinner table.

But Thanksgiving reminds us that we don’t have to be prisoners of the past. That our conflicts, past and present, personal and national, can be set aside if we choose faith and love, even for a moment.

...Thanksgiving liberates us from that prison, as it liberated the ancestors of our nation. Americans are not the prisoners of history. We make our own history. We transcend our past and build our future.

That is the power of Thanksgiving. It frightens the Left. And it should.

Thanksgiving, from its earliest days, had the power to unite a nation. The greatest weapon of the radicals is division. They amplify the divisions of family and nation, breaking us apart and driving the wedges deeper. But the true power of Thanksgiving can defeat them and reunite a nation.

Read more here.

Eavesdropping on the political opposition: the crime of the century!

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page Magazine,

...Desperate Obama cronies had figured out that they could bypass many of the limitations on the conventional investigations of their political opponents by ‘laundering’ them through national security.

If any of Trump’s people were talking to non-Americans, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) could be used to spy on them. And then the redacted names of the Americans could be unmasked by Susan Rice, Samantha Power and other Obama allies. It was a technically legal Watergate.

...Furthermore, the Obama espionage operation closely tracked Trump’s political progress. The first FISA request targeting Trump happened the month after he received the GOP nomination. The second one came through in October: the traditional month of political surprises meant to upend an election.

The spying ramped up after Trump’s win when the results could no longer be used to engineer a Hillary victory, but would instead have to be used to cripple and bring down President Trump. Headed out the door, Rice was still unmasking the names of Trump’s people while Obama was making it easier to pass around raw eavesdropped data to other agencies.

Obama had switched from spying on a political opponent to win an election to spying on his successor to undo the results of the election. Abuse of power by a sitting government had become the subversion of the government by an outgoing administration. Domestic spying on opponents had become a coup.

The Democrat scandals of the past few administrations have hinged on gross violations of political norms, elementary ethics and the rule of law that, out of context, were not technically illegal.

But it’s the pattern that makes the crime. It’s the context that shows the motive.

...When we learn the whole truth (if we ever do), we will likely discover that Obama Inc. assembled a motley collection of different technically legal pretexts to spy on Trump’s team.

Each individual pretext might be technically defensible. But together they add up to the crime of the century.

Obama’s gamble was that the illegal surveillance would justify itself. If you spy on a bunch of people long enough, especially people in politics and business, some sort of illegality, actual or technical, is bound to turn up. That’s the same gamble anyone engaged in illegal surveillance makes.

Businessmen illegally tape conversations with former partners hoping that they’ll say something damning enough to justify the risk. That was what Obama and his allies were doing with Trump.

It’s a crime. And you can’t justify committing a crime by discovering a crime.

If everyone were being spied on all the time, many crimes could be exposed every second. But that’s not how our system works. That’s why we have a Fourth Amendment.

Nor was Obama Inc. trying to expose crimes for their own sake, but to bring down the opposition.

The first and foremost agenda must be to assemble a list of Trump officials who were spied on and the pretexts under which they were spied upon. The pattern will show the crime. And that’s what Obama and his allies are terrified of. It’s why Flynn was forced out using illegal surveillance and leaks. It’s why McMaster is protecting Susan Rice and the Obama holdovers while purging Trump loyalists at the NSC.

...If the gamble fails, if no criminal case that amounts to anything more than the usual investigational gimmick charges like perjury (the Federal equivalent of ‘resisting arrest’ for a beat cop) develops, then Obama and his allies are on the hook for the domestic surveillance of their political opponents.

That’s the race against the clock that is happening right now. Either the investigation gets results. Or its perpetrators are left hanging in the wind. If McMaster is fired, which on purely statistical grounds he probably will be, and a Trump loyalist who wasn’t targeted by the surveillance operation becomes the next National Security Adviser and brings in Trump loyalists, as Flynn tried to do, then it’s over.

And the Dems finally get their Watergate. Except the star won’t be Trump, it will be Obama. Rice, Power, Lynch and the rest of the gang will be the new Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell.

Once Obama and his allies launched their domestic surveillance operation, they crossed the Rubicon. And there was no way back. They had to destroy President Trump or risk going to jail.

The more crimes they committed by spying on the opposition, the more urgently they needed to bring down Trump. The consequences of each crime that they had committed spurred them on to commit worse crimes to save themselves from going to jail. It’s the same old story when it comes to criminals.

...Obama and his allies had violated the norms so often for their policy goals that they couldn’t afford to be replaced by anyone but one of their own. The more Obama relied on the imperial presidency of executive orders, the less he could afford to be replaced by anyone who would undo them. The more his staffers lied and broke the law on everything from the government shutdown to the Iran nuke sellout, the more desperately they needed to pull out all the stops to keep Trump out of office. And the more they did it, the more they couldn’t afford not to do it. Abuse of power locks you into the loop familiar to all dictators. You can’t stop riding the tiger. Once you start, you can’t afford to stop.

...A turning point in history is here.

If Obama goes down, the left will go down with him. If his coup succeeds, then America ends.

Read more here.

Who the left supports in the Middle East

Daniel Greenfield writes:

The left's worst crime in the Middle East has been its support for the region's Arab-Muslim majority at the expense of its minorities.

The left backed the Arab Spring which rewarded the ambitions of Arabist and Islamist activists at the expense of Coptic, African and other minorities. Its great regional obsession is statehood for the Arab Muslims of Israel, (better known by their local Palestinian brand), but has little to say about the Kurds in Turkey or the Azeri in Iran. The million Jewish refugees and the vanishing Christians of the region never come up in conversation. They certainly don't get their own lefty protest rallies.

For the left to shout racism when Americans empowered the Kurds in Iraq, or when Israeli soldiers stand watch over tiny strips of land where the region's oldest and most frequently oppressed minority finds shelter is the height of hypocrisy. It is the left which is racist. It is the left which backs theocracies and always supports the majority's oppression of the minority.

The left's worst crime in the Middle East is its craven love for tyranny, for grand empires built on race and religion, over the national and political rights of the minority. These Apartheid states are all they care about. Their greatest effort has been set not on resolving the stateless problems of the Kurdish minority, on the national borders of Armenia or ending the Turkish occupation and settlement of Cyprus-- but on adding yet another Arab-Muslim state to the region.

Palestine, the cynical project of Pan-Arabist and Pan-Islamist thugs, is the great obsession of the left. Because if there's one thing that the Middle East doesn't have enough of, it's totalitarian regimes built on Arab and Islamist identity. And the one thing it has too much of is democratic state with a non-Arab and non-Muslim majority. And that one thing is what they are committed to destroying.

Read more here.