America at a Rubicon Moment & MAGA Isn’t Enough

Author and speaker Os Guinness knows America is divided, but he has a different line of demarcation than some other cultural observers.  During an appearance at the Family Research Council in Washington to promote his new book: “Last Call for Liberty”, Guinness said the division is the difference between those who understand “the Republic viewed through the lens of the US revolution and those who view it through the lens of the French revolution.”

Rick Mckee, The Augusta Chronicle, GA

It’s a distinction between a successful revolution that was “profoundly biblical” here in the US and a revolution that was an “anti–biblical” failure in France.

Strangely enough, a rebooted French Revolution has seen remarkable success here. It’s now 50 years since German radical Rudi Dutschke called for revolutionaries to abandon violence and instead make a “long march through the institutions” and take over from the inside. Fortunately for the left their “long march” coincided exactly with conservative’s “long snooze.”

Since then the left has seized higher education and made potentially irreversible gains in government schools. The mass media serves as its propaganda arm, while the culture surrendered. Guinness acknowledges the left’s success and warns, “If they win, the American Republic is finished as the founders saw it.”

At the root of the conflict is the definition of freedom. Guinness believes America has failed to “wrestle with the paradox of freedom. Freedom tends to undermine freedom, because it carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.”

The second paradox of freedom, more important than the first although Guinness didn’t state it that way, is that the only framework strong enough to support freedom is that of individual self–restraint.

“Freedom is a challenge to responsibility,” he explained. “Today many of us want to be free, but don’t want to be responsible. The talk is always of rights and never of duties.” That line of thinking eventually leads either to the waiting room at Planned Parenthood, rehab clinics or Venezuela.

Guinness doesn’t believe either building the wall or Make America Great Again is enough. This doesn’t make him a never–Trumper exactly, but it does leave him skeptical. He’s disappointed that “no one at the highest level is addressing the founding principles of the nation” and one gets the feeling he doesn’t think President Trump is up to the task.

Guinness believes the underlying philosophies between the two sides are so divergent and the gulf between them so deep that America is at “a Rubicon moment.” Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army and entered Rome. For America’s “Rubicon moment” Guinness is less martial. He turns instead to Starbucks for inspiration and suggests the country “have a conversation.” Since no one at Starbucks is currently talking about race at the pickup counter, there may be room for that discussion on freedom, but I have my doubts.

Guinness other recommendation is equally futile. “Americans need to know the ‘unum’ that balances the ‘pluribus,” he observed wryly. I’m in agreement, but his method is fatally flawed.

Guinness wants the same government schools that can’t persuade teenagers to use the bathroom that corresponds with their sex to reemphasize civics education by “teaching what it is to be a citizen.” I would settle for teaching boys what it is to be a man.

My suggestion involves education, too, but not in government schools. Ideally, Congress would pass legislation where education funding follows the child — like Medicare funding does for his grandpa — and any school public or private the kid chooses gets the money. Unfortunately, under the leadership of Curator of the Senate Mitch McConnell the comfortable conservatives in Congress will never do this.

The alternative is to take what already exists and reinforce it, which has happened successfully before. After Roe v. Wade was imposed on the country the Catholic church lead a lonely fight against abortion while Protestants and other Evangelicals sat on the sideline. It took entirely too long, but Protestants finally joined the fight and together with Catholics that have made great strides in protecting the unborn.

The same can be done for the culture.

The Catholics have been running an efficient school system for decades. I suggest Southern Baptists, orthodox independent churches and the remaining orthodox members mainline churches offer to join the Catholics and set up a nationwide network of Bible–based schools that emphasize civics and responsibility.

The Catholics would have to agree to compromise and allow Protestants to attend Protestant religious education classes while the Catholics attended theirs. Protestants would bring more money and more students while the Catholics supplied the buildings and the infrastructure. This ‘umum’ would produce a new generation of youth that would understand what Guinness is stressing: Real freedom is “the permission to do as you ought” rather than “the permission to do as you please.”

¡Ay, Caramba! US Illegal Count Just Doubled

I should have known something was up when soccer team owners felt confident enough to put the squeeze on cities to help foot the bill for new stadiums.

Ballerina ball holds the record for the longest period of being The Next Big Thing, without ever becoming the next big thing. Starting back in the 60’s the sport was supposed to sweep across America. Sure little kids played, but most of them left Scooby Doo and soccer behind when they grew up.

Rick McKee, The Augusta Chronicle, GA

That’s why for the past 50 years mayors would sooner subsidize the WNBA than a ‘footie’ team.

Now the Atlantic complains Cincinnati, Detroit, Nashville and Sacramento are all willing to pony up between $25 million and $75 million tax dollars to subsidize their local fútbol stadium.

Colin Kaepernick — founder of Millionaires Against Jim Crow — may have driven football fans out of NFL stadiums, but I don’t think the alienated were so desperate for a dose of patriotism that they would attend a game just to watch illegals wave Mexico’s flag.

This new popularity didn’t originate domestically. Just as the vast majority of soccer balls are made overseas and imported into the US, soccer fans are bred overseas and imported, assuming ICE is looking the other way. Quartz discovered the last time soccer was this popular was during the 1920’s when waves of immigrants came to take factory jobs citizens didn’t want to perform for Bologna wages.

The foreign–born population was nearly 14 percent, a hard number because none of those immigrants were ‘hiding in the shadows.’ Today’s number is also supposed to be 14 percent, but the number is soft like my daughter’s elementary–school soccer ball. The real foreign–born number is so much larger it inspires rich capitalists to demand tax dollars to subsidize their hobby.

Two Yale professors recently completed a study that undermines all the numbers the nice men at the Chamber of Commerce have used to lull the citizen population to sleep. Edward Kaplan and Jonathan Feinstein were skeptical of population estimates for the number of illegals in the US. They believed the 11 million number, was too large and only excited MAGA deplorables.

These academics were convinced a more rigorous analysis would give a greatly reduced total.

Yale Insights reports the team, along with Mohammad Fazel–Zarandi, began with “parameters intentionally aimed at producing an extremely conservative estimate.” Kaplan was astonished by the result, “Instead of a number which was smaller, we got a number that was 50 percent higher.”

“After running 1,000,000 simulations of the model, the researchers’ 95% probability range is 16 million to 29 million, with 22.1 million as the mean (or average).” This total is twice as large as the generally–accepted figure and was arrived at through a conservative approach.

This means the US has imported the equivalent population of Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua, if you accept the average, and if you’re a pessimist you can add Paraguay to the total.

It’s a testimony to the intellectual integrity of the Yale team that the research was published, instead of being given a decent, Christian burial. The only reason the team isn’t currently asking Sen. Ted Cruz for suggestions on safe places to eat is because the dishonest Opposition Media has taken it upon themselves to inter the findings.

Little India may have covered the heck out of the groundbreaking report, along with Fox News and the Washington Times, but there was zero mention in the Washington Post, the failing New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or any of the TV networks.

And no wonder, when you consider the implications. The number doesn’t mean just the population of illegal aliens in the US today is wrong by at least a factor of two, it means all the other numbers and estimates derived from the original faulty number are also wrong by a factor of two or more.

Here are only a handful of the costs and burdens illegals impose on citizen taxpayers that should be revised sharply upward.

The estimated $11.9 billion in yearly healthcare cost that taxpayers must cover might be $24 billion.

The $135 billion in federal, state and local taxpayer dollars that’s spent on illegals each year might be $270 billion.

The 4.2 million illegal alien children crowding our schools might be 8.4 million.

And the 1.8 million DACA illegals demanding citizenship in return for their crime might be 3.6 million.

Compared to those numbers, $75 million to subside a sport that snuck into the country on the backs of illegals looks like a bargain. The future of North America may indeed be found inside a subsidized soccer stadium, but if conservatives don’t wake up, it won’t be the future of the United States.