Megan Rapinoe is so enamored of her own athletic prowess that she has somehow internalized the notion that we care what she thinks about the president, the anthem, the flag, and the country.  She seems to think her superior skill at soccer gives her the right to insult all the Americans with political views that differ from hers.

Rapinoe demonstrated an embarrassing lack of class that contaminates her entire team.  She is a woman who never learned that a bit of grace is an infectious thing in a good way.

This, of course, makes her a hero to the hate-America Left that populates CNN and MSNBC 24/7.  Her disdain for the country to them means she is presidential material!  Just ask Rachel Maddow.

The Left is now officially insane.  This arrogant, disagreeable woman, Rapinoe, because she plays soccer well, thinks she has the right to trash everything and everyone she loathes.

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Despite warnings from practically everyone, five Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps gunboats tried to seize a British oil tanker in the Persian Gulf Wednesday. They apparently backed off only when they realized the Brits were serious about defending themselves and had no interest in being held hostage, a standard Iranian tactic. Good for them.

The Iranians have been acting out quite a bit lately, testing the limits of our tolerance for violence and breaking the nuclear strictures (assuming there really were any) of the JCPOA, aka the Iran Deal.

That deal was always an extreme head-scratcher, that the agreement prevents entry to Iranian military installations by nuclear inspectors was only the tip of an absurd iceberg. And when the Mossad lifted a ton (!) of nuclear documents from a Tehran warehouse showing that Iran had lied about practically everything, the whole thing seemed ridiculous, even though that should have been obvious from the outset.

Now the mullahs are hurting because of the sanctions instituted by Trump. But that doesn't seem to be stopping their behavior.

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They are everywhere.

I am talking, of course, about white supremacists. The news media, Democrats, and NeverTrump Republicans would have us believe the country is under siege by a sinister cabal of Americans who want to return to the days of Jim Crow, or better yet, the era of slavery.

Since the election of Donald Trump, white supremacists, we are warned, occupy the White House and control the Republican Party.

The signs are everywhere.

A MAGA hat is the new white hood. A common hand signal for “OK” actually is a way to send a message of solidarity to other white supremacists. So is drinking a glass of milk. Or owning a dog. Or selling an athletic shoe embossed with an American flag designed by Betsy Ross.

What accounts for this mass hysteria of anti-white racism?

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[Note by JW:  This alarming report shows the urgent need for President Trump to join with Colombia President Ivan Duque and Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro to form a joint task force of the US, Colombian, and Brazilian armed forces to militarily remove the Maduro regime from Venezuela, and install a legitimate government.  The situation is becoming so dire there is no time to lose.]

Venezuela is in a stalemate.

Ruled as a colony by its Cuban masters with a little puppet leader in the persona of Nicolás Maduro, it's as bad an economic shambles as Cuba is, and as with Cuba, millions of its people are fleeing.

The United Nations declared it a death-squad regime, with 7,000 documented killings of dissidents.  There's a legitimate leader in the legislative declaration of Juan Guaidó as president, but the man is powerless without an army to command and sadly fading to irrelevance.

But there's not nothing going on.  Read on, this is gravely frightening.

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In the current American–Iran stand-off are a number of global players. That is hardly new, but what is novel is that, for the first time in decades, there’s almost no power that can obstruct or alter U.S. efforts to confront Iranian aggressions in America’s own time and fashion.

In other words, the United States is almost immune from the sort of pressures that usually coalesce to dictate, modify, or thwart U.S. decision-making in the Middle East.

Such liberation from outside coercion is singularly unusual in the post-war American overseas experience.  Let’s count the ways this is happening across the globe.

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President Trump has returned from the G20 summit in Osaka Japan in triumph.

During his time in Asia, the President reset relations with both China and North Korea. All while continuing to implement his strategic vision for the United States to a worldwide audience.

He engaged in talks with Russia to begin resolving regional disputes, reinforced our relationships with our allies in Japan and South Korea, then reengaged  with Xi Jinping to bring the China trade agreement closer to fruition.

Trump capped all that with a stirring “spontaneous” offer to meet Kim Jong Un at the DMZ in South Korea. The pandemonium, drama, and historical nature of the next two days completely eclipsed much of the G20 summit.

However, it totally reinforced Donald J. Trumps position as the preeminent player on the world stage.

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As the 2020 presidential election approaches, the Left is running drills to see how quickly and effectively their political hit squads can be deployed against Trump, his administration, and his Republican supporters.

A few other exercises—the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process, the MAGA hat-wearing Covington Catholic students—have been rolled out, but those spectacles will pale in comparison to what’s in store for Republicans next year.

No cabinet official, administration employee, Trump family member, GOP candidate or regular Trump voter will be spared.

In just the past week, the Left’s pre-election tactics have been on full display.

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Volodymyr Zhukovskyy is what happens when you stop enforcing all the laws, for all the people.  The photo of him above is at his arraignment in Springfield Mass. on Monday (6/21).

He’s 23, here from Ukraine on a green card.  Here’s a timeline of his driving history provided by WMUR radio news.  It’s a timeline of the horrific consequences of what happens when our politicians and judges define deviancy down.

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It’s easy to see why criminals should be prioritized for removal. But those who say all illegal aliens are criminals, by definition, have a fair point, too. If that’s too much to ask, then violent criminals, certainly.

But there is another group, more toxic to the body politic than most: the haughty, self-described “Undocumented and Unafraid” clique.

I mean the “undocumented” activists, organizers, and political operatives who have reaped the generosity of this country, only to spit in its face.  Even before those to be deported for not showing up at their asylum hearing, these need to be kicked out of our country, unafraid no more.

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It would seem tantamount to insanity to suggest that Donald Trump could win, or even make a sizable dent in, the African-American vote in 2020, but I submit that it's not quite as crazy as it sounds and he should give it a serious shot.

He should go into the black community as often as possible and make his case. This would be using identity politics in order to destroy it. (A noble task. Good riddance.)

Trump clearly has a good case to make — black and Hispanic unemployment are at their lowest numbers ever.  By contrast, over the last few days, we have seen the Democrats go race crazy, outbidding each other with asinine proposals. Reparations are back, ratified by nearly all the candidates to one degree or another.

That is insane. And racist.  Many, many blacks know full well it is and resent it.

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A new escalation in the long-running conflict between Russia and Georgia happened almost by chance last week (starting on June 20), but it answered the anxious desire in the Kremlin to move Russia proactively from the path of gradual decline.

Russian President Vladimir Putin likely suspects that the real economic situation in his country is worse than the officially registered sluggish growth and that the erosion of his popularity goes deeper than the slight decline reported by semi-official pollsters (Carnegie.ru, June 20).

The sudden quarrel with Georgia thus provided the policy-manipulators in the Kremlin with a perfect opportunity to produce a distraction from these unhappy domestic developments.  This is unlikely to end well for Russia’s dictator.

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Progressives do not see the United States as an exceptional uniter of factions and tribes into a cohesive whole—each citizen subordinating his tribal, ethnic, and religious affinities to a shared Americanism, emblemized by our national motto e pluribus unum. Instead, they prefer e uno plures: out of one nation arise many innately different and separate peoples.

Progressivism’s signature brand is now tribalism: all of us in different ways are victims of a white male Christian heterosexual patriarchy—or a current 20 percent hierarchy that past and present has supposedly oppressed anyone not like themselves. In contrast, our differences define who we are, and are not incidental to the content of our characters.

The salad bowl, not the melting pot, is the new national creed. America is to be a conglomeration of competing tribal parties in the fashion of the Balkans, Rwanda, or contemporary Iraq.

How does the relative victimhood work politically?

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I left Los Angeles for Nashville slightly over a year ago. When I call friends back in my former home (for 50 years), most of them tell me I got out just in time.

Actually, they're wrong. I should have gotten out ten or even fifteen years before. The handwriting was on the wall. "California dreamin'," pace Mama Cass, "was no longer a ray-al-it-tee." It hasn't been for a long time.

Now everybody knows about the 36,000 homeless on the streets of LA, over 60,000 in the county, replete with human feces and syringes littering the sidewalks, along with rats, typhus and even rumors of bubonic plague.

And those figures are what we're told. The real numbers could be three or four times the number.  Why are they here?

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The saga of Russia’s only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, has lurched from one embarrassing episode to another.

The vessel (technically classified as a “heavy aircraft cruiser” to be able to adhere to Montreux Convention restrictions on aircraft carriers passing through the Turkish Straits) is currently undergoing repairs and retrofitting .It will not be replaced with a more modern carrier for at least another 15 years—and quite possibly never.

The situation brings to mind Richard Hough’s classic 1958 study, The Fleet That Had to Die, about the failure and destruction of the Russian naval fleet in 1905 at the hands of the Japanese. Like that long-ago event, which culminated in the disaster at the Tsushima Straits, the current history is replete with bold promises of breakthroughs but marred by malfeasance, corruption and incompetence.

Not only does all this highlight Russia’s decline as a naval power, it also underscores the problematic natures of the Russian defense establishment and political system.

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President Trump's rally on Tuesday (6/18) in Orlando, Florida to officially launch his 2020 campaign for re-election was a tour-de-force.  The video above is his full speech, including Melania’s introduction, and is certainly worth your while to watch it entire.

The twenty thousand people in the arena, along with the thousands of people outside watching on jumbo screens were all on the same page:  He has been a great President these past two and a half years and they want more of the same.

The crowd was excited, happy, and phenomenally supportive of the President, much to the chagrin of the Angry Left.  And boy are they angry.

Their anger is why Trump's rally last night in Orlando, if they deigned to watch, will have left them quivering in their boots with shock.  Most probably did not watch, like the scene in Rocky when Apollo Creed is too busy to look at the video of Rocky in the meat locker when his trainer tries to get him to pay attention.

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The media outrage is itself outrageous.

President Trump’s renewed pledge to deport huge numbers of illegal aliens is inspiring anger, but it's hardly righteous.

If, as a Homeland Security adviser has explained, the targets of Trump’s deportation plans will be those illegal aliens who have failed to show for their assigned court hearings, then Trump is morally, ethically, and legally justified in deporting them.

The tut-tutting chorus might as well spare us their faux moral histrionics.

The aliens Trump is targeting are people who have broken American law not once but twice.

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Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention.

Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.

Like it or not, now lines are drawn. Trump so unhinged the Left that it finally tore off its occasional veneer of moderation, and showed us what progressives had in store for America.

One way is to see this as a collision between Trump, the proverbial bull, and the administrative state as a targeted precious china shop—with all the inevitable nihilistic mix-up of horns, hooves, and flying porcelain shards.

But quite another is to conclude that what we recently used to think was abjectly abnormal twenty years ago had become not just “normal,” but so orthodoxly normal that even suggesting it was not was judged to be heretical and deserving of censure and worse.

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If it’s true that “natural right is dynamite,” as political philosopher Leo Strauss wrote, then Justice Clarence Thomas just went nuclear on the abortion debate.

While Thomas’s concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood (5/28)has received considerable commentary, his deepening of the judicial and, hence, the political debate over abortion demands further elaboration. His reply to the leading threat to the principles of the Declaration of Independence is his latest attempt in a career of restoring its authority.

The ugly nakedness of the eugenics dogma, with its attendant euphemisms, stands exposed in Thomas’s explanation of Roe. No longer can credible critics of the court turn away from the monstrosity and focus on federalism and substantive due process clause interpretation issues.

The new, politicized abortion goes to the core of American political principles and the abiding integrity of the Declaration of Independence. Here’s how deeply the Thomas charge cuts:

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Mark Levin appeared at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California last Saturday night (6/08).

The event was a celebration of his new, bestselling book, Unfreedom of the Press.  It was a glorious evening.  The auditorium was packed with several thousand fans with an overflow crowd in another room.  Levin delivered not a speech but a conversation.

John Heubusch, the director of the Reagan Library introduced Levin then the two of them sat down.  Heubusch asked  questions and Levin answered in his usual inimitable fashion.  The crowd loved it.

But as we were all sitting in that spectacular library in California, the state of our state was the initial topic of discussion.  How did this state, once the envy of all others, become the pathetic, indebted Third World loser state it is today?  The answer is simple, single-party Democrat rule.

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[Note by JW: TTP views China’s seizure of Russia’s Eastern Siberia as an inevitability – the only question is how many years in will take.  See Chinese Siberia from November 2006.  Here, my old friend Paul Goble describes the latest moves of Beijing to accomplish this. 

Note the hilarity of Russian obliviousness, such as the Russian “expert” claiming the US is the threat to Russia’s Arctic sovereignty and not China.  If anything, the US is more on Russia’s side than China’s, as Paul points out.]

Three developments in early June 2019 call attention to China’s unrelenting efforts to become the dominant player on the Northern Sea Route (NSR)—the increasingly ice-free Arctic waterway along Russia’s northern coast, and the main segment of the longer Northeastern Passage, linking Asia and Europe.

(As you can see in the map above how much shorter (over 50%) the Northern route Yokohama to Rotterdam is versus the Suez Canal route.)

First…

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One of the media and beltway orthodoxies we constantly hear is that just a few bad apples under James Comey at the FBI explain why so many FBI elites have been fired, resigned, reassigned, demoted, or retired — or just left for unexplained reasons.

In short, in about every growing scandal of the past two years — FISA, illegal leaking, spying on a presidential candidate, lying under oath, obstructing justice — someone in the FBI is involved.

In sum, why did so many top FBI officials, some with long experience in the FBI, exhibit such bad judgment and display such unethical behavior, characterized by arrogance, a sense of entitlement, and a belief that they were above both the law and the Constitution itself?

Were they really just rogue agents, lawyers, and administrators  --  or are they emblematic of an FBI culture sorely gone wrong?

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With Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958-1962), it became increasingly clear China was a totalitarian police state willing to do almost anything to advance its aims.

That attempt to forcefully move from an agrarian to a socialist industrial society cost tens of millions of Chinese lives. One historian's estimate runs to a staggering 56 million deaths for that period alone, making Mao easily the greatest mass murderer of all time.

These days, however, the Chinese communists have become more subtle in the control of their populace. They are in the process of instituting a social credit system that allows the state to monitor technologically virtually every aspect of a person's life and reward or punish him or her accordingly.

And where did this ability to control such a giant country come from in the first place? As Pogo would say, I have seen the enemy and he is us! Namely, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, and all those other American high-tech companies eager to get a piece of the fat Chinese pie.

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China’s economy is reeling from President Trump’s strategic tariffs, and Beijing is getting desperate.

In a futile effort to compensate for China’s losses by developing economic ties with new global partners, Chinese leader Xi Jinping last Friday (6/07) met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both leaders touted the meeting in typically hyperbolic terms, presumably in the hope of deceiving American policymakers into believing that they had accomplished something significant.

Putin and Xi negotiated numerous economic partnerships, such as agreeing to boost energy and technology cooperation in the coming years. Those agreements, however, are only papering over the cracks.

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Before the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the idea that the Russians or anyone else could warp or tamper with our elections in any serious manner was laughed off by President Obama.

Obama was anxious that the sure-to-be-sore-loser Trump would not blame his defeat on voting impropriety in a fashion that might call into question Clinton’s victory.

How ironic that Russian “collusion” was used as a preemptive charge after Trump’s victory from those who actually had colluded with Russians for all sorts for financial and careerist advantages.

“Obstruction” is now supposedly the key to destroying the Trump Administration after collusion imploded. But what exactly would real obstruction of justice look like?

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On a Sunday afternoon last month (5/19), Etta Nugent found Marco Cobos, an illegal alien from Mexico, at her doorstep in Houston after his truck had broken down nearby.  Cobos forced his way into the elderly lady’s home and stabbed her in the chest.

Nugent’s horrific fate has become all too common in an America that has bought into the lie that it is “a nation of immigrants,” rather than simply a nation. Increasingly, however, immigrants show little appreciation, often outright hostility, for this nation and its people.

Consider the “Dreamers” of North Carolina, thousands of illegal aliens who were brought, illegally, into the country by their parents. The fact that they have not been deported despite their unlawful presence is, in itself, a benefit undeservingly conferred upon them.

We have tens of millions of the entitled uninvited in our country.  What are we going to do about it?

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Twelve years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. The decision in effect gave the Environmental Protection Agency massive additional regulatory authority.

This year, another landmark climate case appears headed for the high court: Juliana v. United States. This time, the stakes are even higher.

The “endangerment finding” in Massachusetts v. EPA was a missed opportunity for climate skeptics to have an honest debate on the entire scientific basis of climate activism. The failure of climate skeptics to successfully argue their position in Massachusetts has created a powerful precedent that favors the plaintiffs in Juliana.

Nonetheless, Juliana is an opportunity to challenge every scientific premise of the climate activist lobby.  For example:

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Most Americans are unaware of the long history of comradeship and chicanery between Special Counsel Robert Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey.

For nearly two decades, the pair have held the same jobs, earned the same foes, and swaggered in the same rarified sphere of political prestige and privilege.

This week, the country has been treated to another reminder of how often the twosome operates in tandem.  Now thanks to another grudge-seeking joint stunt by Mueller and Comey, the Democrats and the media are recharged and ready to chase the folly of impeachment in time for the 2020 election.

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Robert Mueller should have been disbarred decades ago, along with his enforcer Andrew Weismann; that is how egregious his record of malfeasance is, all matters of public record.

What he did yesterday morning (5/29) was his final IED tossed at the President to placate his Democrat overlords who desperately want to impeach Trump.

But for what?  Mueller gave no list of felonies in his report nor did he detail any crimes of which Trump is even amorphously guilty.

Who made him embarrass himself by offering the Democrats a new path to impeachment?  Who has something on Bob Mueller?

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Donald Trump’s opponents at home and abroad would love to see him get the U.S. into a messy intervention right before the election.

A big China trade deal, an agreement to denuclearize North Korea and Iran, flipping Putin to become a neutral rather than an adversary, or a Middle East halfway accord could change global realities and empower the U.S.

And so the gambler Trump wagers that he can do overseas what he did at home and pull off land-breaking agreements — all at once.

Can he?  The Democrats and Chinese Communists want him to fail instead, and are actively conspiring to see that he does.

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In key global debates, Russia’s voice has been uncharacteristically timid lately.

Various Russian domestic controversies are developing without the usual heavy-handed interference from the Kremlin—almost as if President Vladimir Putin has lost interest in the affairs of state.

Yet, as might have been expected, this current neglect of domestic matters is not caused by an overabundance of demanding international concerns.  Progressing economic weakness is a major underlying cause of Putin’s political passivity, to the degree that he is aware of this feebleness.

Is he losing his confidence and will?

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The recent push in Alabama to restrict most abortions has energized the culture war. But despite the seething passions on both sides, nothing has really changed.

Abortion has always been anti-family, always been about convenience, and always been evil.

What has changed is the candor of abortion extremists. The far Left’s recent embrace of late-term abortion on demand is as sign that the time for compromise and “dialogue” is rapidly fading.

Almost all people are still repulsed by overt infanticide—and most well-meaning liberals who aren’t so extreme probably do not realize what they are supporting when they acquiesce to a general “right to choose”—but the embrace of late-term abortion as a serious topic of discussion heralds a nation in decline.

The truth is that abortion is not just a “leftist” issue. It’s a gruesome convenience with which a broad swath of America has made peace.

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The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible.

No wonder that special counsel Robert Mueller’s partisan team spent 22 months and $34 million only to conclude the obvious: that Trump did not collude with Russia.

Mueller’s failure to find collusion prompts an important question. If the Steele dossier—the basis for unfounded charges that Trump colluded with Russia—was fraudulent, then how and why did the Clinton campaign, hand in glove with top Obama administration officials, use such silly trash and smears to unleash the powers of government against Trump’s campaign, transition team and early presidency?

The question is not an idle one.

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Sometimes political revolutions occur right before our eyes without us quite realizing it. I think that’s what’s been happening over the last few weeks around the world, and the message is clear:

The populist “New Right” isn’t going away anytime soon, and the rise of the “New Left” is exaggerated.

Start with Australia, where Prime Minister Scott Morrison won a surprising victory. Before the election, polls had almost uniformly indicated that his Liberal-National Coalition would have to step down, but voters were of another mind.

This is happening all over the world now.  Here’s a summary.

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Was Joe Biden projecting when he called Donald Trump the "divider-in-chief" in his big campaign speech in Philadelphia Saturday (5/18)?

The former Veep proposed -- in imitation of his one-time boss and apparent idol Barack Obama -- that he would be the man to unite our riven country.

Right. He represents a political party that could not accept the 2016 election of Donald Trump on any level, before or after his victory. Their supporters taking to the streets almost immediately, they and their compliant media were talking about impeachment before Trump was even inaugurated.

Where was Biden in that extraordinarily divisive behavior? Not uttering a peep.

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From Alberta to Australia, from Finland to France, and beyond, voters are increasingly showing their displeasure with expensive energy policies imposed by politicians in an inane effort to purportedly fight human-caused climate change.

Skepticism over whether humans are causing dangerous climate change has always been higher in America than in most industrialized countries. As a result, governments in Europe, Canada, and other developed areas are much farther along the energy rationing path, cutting carbon dioxide emissions as required.

However, residents in these countries began to revolt in 2018 against the higher energy costs they suffer under due to high taxes on fossil fuels and mandates to use expensive renewable energy.

But 2018 was just a prelude for the political climate revolt to come.  Here’s what’s happening now.

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If you harbor any doubts that the Democrat Party has fully embraced anti-Semitism, you can put them to rest by tuning in to C-SPAN and watching the replay of a single congressional session that began at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday (5/15).

The representative standing at the Rostrum, proudly presiding over the floor proceedings for the United States House of Representatives was none other than Rashida Tlaib.  She actually pretended the founder of Palestinian Anti-Semitic terrorism was a benevolent protector of Jews.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer have gone beyond their disgraceful defense of Tlaib’s grotesque distortions of Middle East history and have decided to rub the electorate’s face in a calculated exercise in bigotry.

And there can be little doubt that this was part of a well-thought-out strategy.  Here’s what it is.

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Russia tries to maintain a finger in every conflict in the Middle East, with President Vladimir Putin seeking to cultivate connections with various parties in multiple quarrels.

Presently, however, the Kremlin’s access is being curtailed: Moscow, for instance, cannot find an entry point into the exploding crisis in Gaza.

Furthermore, Putin clearly disapproves of the removal of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in Algeria under pressure from street protests.

Similarly, the Russian head of state opposes the ousting of his Sudanese counterpart, Omar al-Bashir, by military coup.

Moscow has been unable to employ any useful assets to make a difference in all three. The war in Yemen is also beyond Russia’s reach.

Everywhere he looks in the Middle East, Putin finds himself stuck in a tar baby of failure.

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