Jennifer Delacruz's Tuesday Forecast

Well, it hasn't cooled off quite yet, but there's supposed to be an onshore flow of low pressure headed our way tomorrow. Perhaps it'll be a littler cooler. Either way, delightful weather.

Here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:

The Four Issues Driving Trump's Populism

From VDH, at the New Criterion, "Populism, VIII: The unlikeliest populist":

Leftists deride the “bad” populism of angry and misdirected grievances lodged clumsily against educated and enlightened “elites,” often by the unsophisticated and the undereducated. Bad populism is fueled by ethnic, religious, or racial chauvinism, and typified by a purportedly “dark” tradition from Huey Long and Father Coughlin to George Wallace and Ross Perot.

Such retrograde populism to the liberal mind is to be contrasted with a “good” progressive populism of early-twentieth-century and liberal Minnesota or Wisconsin—solidarity through unions, redistributionist taxes, cooperatives, granges, and credit unions to protect against banks and corporations—now kept alive by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Good leftwing populism rails against supposedly culpable elites—those of the corporate world and moneyed interests—but not well-heeled intellectuals, liberal politicians, and the philanthropic class of George Soros, Bill Gates, or Warren Buffett, who make amends for their financial situations by redistributing their millions to the right causes.

The Right is similarly ambiguous about populism. “Bad” populists distrust government in sloppy fashion, failing to appreciate the intricacies of politics that understandably slow down change. “Bad” right-wing populists, given their unsophistication and wild emotions, are purportedly prone to dangerous excesses, American-firstism, social intolerance, and anti-capitalist bromides: think the pushback by the Tea Party or the Ron Paul zealots.

In contrast, “good” conservative populists are those who wish to trim the fat off complacent conservatism, reenergize the Republican Party with fresh ideas about small government and a return to social and cultural traditionalism, while avoiding compromise for compromise’s sake. Good populists for conservatives might include Ronald Reagan or even Ted Cruz.

Within these populist parameters, Trump appeared far more the “bad” or “dangerous” populist.

Despite Trump’s previously apolitical and elite background, he brilliantly figured out, even if cynically so, the populist discontent and its electoral ramifications that would erode the Democrats’ assumed unassailable “blue wall” that ran from Wisconsin to North Carolina. In contrast, sixteen other talented candidates, some of whom were far more experienced conservative politicians, over a year-long primary race lacked Trump’s intuition about the potential electoral benefits of courting such a large and apparently forgotten working-class population.

Critics would argue that Trump’s populist strategy was inauthentic, haphazard, and borne out of desperation: he initially had few other choices to win the Republican nomination.

Trump began his campaign with exceptional name recognition and seemingly with ample financial resources. Yet he lacked the connections of Jeb Bush to the Republican establishment and donor base, the grass-roots orthodox conservative movement’s fondness for Ted Cruz, the neoconservative brain trust that allied with Marco Rubio, and the organizations and reputations for pragmatic competence that governors such as Chris Christie, Rick Perry, or Scott Walker brought to the campaign.

Trump never possessed the mastery of the issues in the manner of Bobby Jindal or Rand Paul. Ben Carson was even more so the maverick political outsider. Nor was Trump as politically prepped as his fellow corporate newcomer Carly Fiorina. Despite his brand recognition, Trump’s long and successful experience in ad-hoc reality television, millions of dollars in free media attention, and personal wealth, he started the campaign at a disadvantage and so was ready to try any new approach to break out of the crowded pack—most prominently his inaugural rant about illegal immigration.

By 2012 standards, Trump, to the degree he had voiced a consistent political ideology, would likely have been considered the most liberal of the seventeen presidential candidates. In the recent past he had chided Mitt Romney for talking of self-deportation by illegal immigrants, praised a single-payer health system, and had at times campaigned to the left of both the past unsuccessful John McCain and Mitt Romney campaigns. Yet in 2016 Trump found a way to reassemble the remnants of what was left of the Tea Party/Ross Perot wing of the Republican Party.

Such desperation might explain his audacity and his willingness to campaign unconventionally if not crudely. Yet it does not altogether account for Trump’s choice to focus on what would become four resonant populist issues: trade/jobs, illegal immigration, a new nationalist foreign policy, and political correctness—the latter being the one issue that bound all the others as well. Trump’s initial emphasis on these concerns almost immediately set him apart from both his primary opponents and Hillary Clinton...

 Keep reading.

Chocolate Easter Candy

At Amazon, Shop Easter Chocolates.

BONUS: C.L. Lewis, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters.

Jennifer Delacruz's Easter Forecast

She's enough to bring you back all by herself.

Here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer's forecast from last night, at ABC News 10 San Diego:

The Christian Exodus From the Middle East

From Robin Wright, at the New Yorker, "War, Terrorism, and the Christian Exodus from the Middle East":

On #Easter, my @newyorker piece on massive exodus of Christians from #Mideast, cradle of the faith. Stunning numbers https://t.co/nioa8yO3tt

— Robin Wright (@wrightr) April 15, 2017

A decade ago, I spent Easter in Damascus. Big chocolate bunnies and baskets of pastel eggs decorated shop windows in the Old City. Both the Catholic and Orthodox Easters were celebrated, and all Syrians were given time off for both three-day holidays on sequential weekends. I stopped in the Umayyad Mosque, which was built in the eighth century and named after the first dynasty to lead the Islamic world. The head of John the Baptist is reputedly buried in a large domed sanctuary—although claims vary—on the mosque’s grounds. Muslims revere John as the Prophet Yahya, the name in Arabic. Because of his birth to a long-barren mother and an aged father, Muslim women who are having trouble getting pregnant come to pray at his tomb. I watched as Christian tourists visiting the shrine mingled with Muslim women.

At least half of Syria’s Christians have fled since then. The flight is so pronounced that, in 2013, Gregory III, the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, wrote an open letter to his flock: “Despite all your suffering, stay here! Don’t emigrate!”

“We exhort our faithful and call them to patience in these tribulations, especially in this tsunami of stifling, destructive, bloody and tragic crises of our Arab world, particularly in Syria, but also to different degrees in Egypt, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon,” he wrote. “Jesus tells us, ‘Fear not!’ “

Syria’s Christians are part of a mass exodus taking place throughout the Middle East, the cradle of the faith. Today, Christians are only about four per cent of the region’s more than four hundred million people—and probably less. They “have been subject to vicious murders at the hands of terrorist groups, forced out of their ancestral lands by civil wars, suffered societal intolerance fomented by Islamist groups, and subjected to institutional discrimination found in the legal codes and official practices of many Middle Eastern countries,” as several fellows at the Center for American Progress put it.

Last weekend, suicide bombings in two Egyptian Coptic churches in Alexandria and Tanta, sixty miles north of Cairo, killed almost four dozen Egyptians and injured another hundred. The Palm Sunday attacks, coming just weeks before Pope Francis is due to visit the country, led the Coptic Church to curtail Easter celebrations in a country that has the largest Christian population—some nine million people—in the Middle East. A pillar of the early faith, the Copts trace their origins to the voyage of the Apostle Mark to Alexandria.

“We can consider ourselves in a wave of persecution,” Bishop Anba Macarius, of the Minya diocese, who survived an assassination attempt in 2013, said on Thursday.

The isis affiliate in the Sinai Peninsula claimed credit for the attacks. In the past two years, it has carried out a series of gruesome killings of Christians, including the forced march of twenty-one Egyptian workers in Libya, all Coptic Christians, each clad in an orange prison jumpsuit, to a Mediterranean beach, where they were forced to kneel and then beheaded. isis threats against Christians have escalated since a suicide bombing on December 11th at St. Mark’s Cathedral, in Cairo, killed more than two dozen Egyptians. After a February attack that killed seven Christians on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the majority of Copts have fled the Sinai, according to Human Rights Watch.

The largest exodus of Christians is in Iraq, where the group has been trapped in escalating sectarian clashes between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, targeted by an Al Qaeda franchise, and forced to flee by the Islamic State. “There were 1.3 million Christians in Iraq in 2003. We’re down by a million since then,” with hundreds more leaving each month, Bashar Warda, a Chaldean bishop in the northern city of Erbil, the Kurdish capital, told me last month. He was wearing a pink zucchetto skullcap and an amaranth sash tied around his black cassock. A large silver cross hung around his neck.

“It’s very hard to maintain a Christian presence now,” Warda said. “Families have ten reasons to leave and not one reason to stay. This is a critical time in our history in this land. We are desperate.”

Last month, I drove to Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and home for two millennia to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities. Within days of its conquest of Mosul, isis issued an ultimatum to Christians to either convert to Islam, pay an exorbitant and open-ended tax, or face death “by the sword.” Homes of Christians were marked by a large “N” for “Nassarah,” a term in the Koran for Christians.

Some thirty-five thousand Christians fled. Many of their homes were ransacked and then set alight. En route to Mosul, I passed other Christian villages, like Bartella, that had also emptied. Even gravestones at the local cemetery were bullet-ridden. In all, a hundred thousand Christians from across the Biblical Nineveh Plains are estimated to have abandoned their farmlands, villages, and towns for refuge in northern Kurdistan—or beyond Iraq’s borders...

Still more.

Lauren Southern Rocks Berkeley!

Following-up, "Trump Supporters Crush 'Anti-Fascist' Protesters in Berkeley (VIDEO)."

She's posted dozens of tweets and has produced a video report, which I'll blog later.

Meanwhile, this woman is hot, lol.

Pepper spray everywhere 👌🏻 pic.twitter.com/9EDLLL5cRq

— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) April 15, 2017

Trump Supporters Crush 'Anti-Fascist' Protesters in Berkeley (VIDEO)

At SF Gate, "Arrests made as protesters clash at pro-Trump rally in Berkeley."

And watch, at Associated Press, "Raw: Clashes at Pro and Anti-Trump Rallies."

Also, at KPIX CBS News 5 San Francisco, "Bloody Clashes As Trump Protesters, Supporters Exchange Blows At Berkeley Rally," and "Trump Supporter Insists Protest Wasn't Staged to Provoke Liberal Berkeley."

And at Instapundit, "The Antifa goons were so thoroughly outclassed, they were chased down and given wedgies."

Danielle Gersh's Glorious Easter Sunday Forecast

We're having fabulous weather, and it's going to continue through the weekend, with just slightly cooler temperatures tomorrow.

Here's the lovely Ms. Danielle, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Roger M. Carpenter, The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade

At Amazon, Roger M. Carpenter, The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade: The Three Thought Worlds of the Iroquois and the Huron, 1609-1650.

For three decades, Native American history has been dominated by two major themes. The first is "The Cant of Conquest," the notion that all native peoples who came into contact with Europeans suffered devastating effects due to disease, alcohol, and warfare. However, the argument can be made that in some cases native peoples controlled their own fortunes, at least for awhile. The other dominant theme is the "The Contest of Cultures," the idea that Native American history needs to be examined in the context of dealings with Europeans. Europeans changed the Americas, but this approach concerns colonialism and colonists as well as Native Americans.

The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade examines the changing worldviews of the Huron and the Iroquois in the first half of the seventeenth century, during a period of increasing European contact. From Samuel de Champlain’s armed encounter with the Iroquois, in 1609, to the dispersal of the Huron in the mid-seventeenth century, Carpenter’s book traces the evolving thought worlds of Iroquoian peoples.

The Iroquois and the Huron -- peoples with an intertwined history and many cultural similarities -- reacted differently to European contact. The Huron thought world began to change when the French initiated intense trade and missionary activity early in the seventeenth century. French missionary efforts resulted in a split within the Huron nation between traditionalists and Christian converts. By contrast, the Iroquois were interested primarily in trade with the newcomers. The Iroquois, like the Huron, accepted European trade goods, but unlike the Huron, they rejected European religion.

The Renewed, the Destroyed, and the Remade differs from other works of Native American history on several counts. Native American historiography has not been overly comparative. This work is a comparative history of two culturally similar Native American nations. It also differs in that, rather than another history of Native-European contacts, it is an Indian-centered history.

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Also, Best Sellers in Televisions.

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BONUS: Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815.

Robert M. Utley, A Life Wild and Perilous

Here's more on the "Mountain Men," from Robert Utley, who's a national treasure.

At Amazon, A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific.

And ICYMI, Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890.

Winfred Blevins, Give Your Heart to the Hawks

This book's great! I picked up a copy.

Available at Amazon, Winfred Blevins, Give Your Heart to the Hawks: A Tribute to the Mountain Men.

North Korea Parades New Long-Range 'Frankenmissile' (VIDEO)

I've gotta say, those NoKo military parades are pretty impressive.

I know. I know. NoKo's actually a weak country, and frankly not an existential threat to the U.S. That said, you don't have too many militant ideological Cold War throwbacks around these days, so the gamesmanship is something to behold. Plus, it's Trump in office, and he means business when he says NoKo nukes ain't gonna happen.

At WSJ, via Memeorandum, "Pyongyang displays military hardware, including apparently new intercontinental ballistic missile":

North Korea showed off what appeared to be at least one new long-range missile at a military parade Saturday, as tensions simmer over the possibility of a military confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea.

The weaponry on show, which appeared to include a newly-modified intercontinental ballistic missile and two types of large launchers with never-before-seen missile canisters, is likely to trigger fresh concerns about the speed with which Pyongyang’s missile program has advanced in recent years.

A spokesman for South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense declined to comment on the possible new military hardware, saying more time was needed to analyze the missiles.

But an expert on North Korean weapons said the new hardware appeared to be far more advanced than expected.

“We’re totally floored right now,” said Dave Schmerler, a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif. “I was not expecting to see this many new missile designs.”

Mr. Schmerler called the new ICBM, which appeared to have elements of two other ICBMS, the KN-08 and KN-14 missiles, a “frankenmissile.”

Missile experts said the new capabilities, if confirmed, may increase Pyongyang’s options as it seeks to test-launch a ICBM able to deliver a nuclear warhead to the continental U.S., as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un indicated in a speech in January. U.S. President Donald Trump responded after that new-year speech, posting on Twitter: “It won’t happen!”

More.

Also, at the Diplomat, "North Korea's 2017 Military Parade Was a Big Deal. Here Are the Major Takeaways."

Guess Launches New Swimwear Collection with A Bikini A Day

Hey, Devin Brugman and Natasha Oakley continue to enjoy success.

Coming May 2017 ❤️ @ABikiniADay x #GUESSswim designed by @Tashoakley and @devinbrugman https://t.co/lgWkX8yU4E pic.twitter.com/0odPj523vi

— GUESS (@GUESS) April 6, 2017

BONUS: At London's Daily Mail, "Curves ahead! Devin Brugman and Natasha Oakley flaunt ample cleavage and taut torsos in skimpy swimwear."

Lars Maischak's Only a Symptom of a Larger Disease

Following-up from yesterday, "Wow! Federal Investigation of Fresno State History Professor Lars Maischak."

From Bruce Thornton, who's a Professor of Classics and Humanities at Fresno State University, at FrontPage Magazine, "Drain the Higher Ed. Swamp That Produced the 'Hang Trump' Prof.":

ALERT: @SecretService @FBI Please check out @LarsMaischak twitter feed filled with HATE-MONGERING towards President @realDonaldTrump & #GOP pic.twitter.com/Rv8uF0zUPJ

— slone (@slone) April 11, 2017

The uproar over a Fresno State history lecturer’s tweets about assassinating President Trump is understandable, but in the end the outrage is pointless. It’s doubtful the feds will charge the fellow, given how outlandish and obviously hyperbolic the tweets are. Nor is he likely to be fired. All the commotion has accomplished is to turn a nobody into a left-wing martyr persecuted for “speaking truth to power.”

The fact is, there is nothing this guy said that wouldn’t be applauded by most faculty in the social sciences and humanities, even if they don’t have his gumption to say so out loud. The politicized university is entering its fifth decade, and was already a done deal when Alan Bloom publicized it in his surprising 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. Thirty years later, focusing on the stupid statements of individual professors, or in this case lecturers, does nothing to get at the root of the problem. They are symptoms of deeper structural changes in the administrative apparatus of most colleges, and these changes in part have been responses to federal laws, particularly affirmative action, sexual harassment law, and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. With federal agency thugs backing campus leftists by threatening administrators with investigation or the reduction of federal funds, it has been easy to transform the university from a space for developing critical thinking and intellectual diversity, into a progressive propaganda organ and reeducation camp.

The most important of these government-backed instruments is “diversity.” This vacuous concept was created ex nihilo by Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in the 1979 Bakke vs. University of California decision as a way to protect admissions “set asides” for minorities without falling afoul of the law’s prohibition of quotas. Since only a “compelling state interest” could justify exceptions to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban on discrimination by race, which naked quotas obviously did, “diversity,” along with all its alleged social and educational boons, was by judicial fiat deemed a “state interest.” In 2003, Grutter vs. Bollinger, and again in the two Fisher vs. University of Texas cases (2013, 2016), the Supreme Court confirmed Powell’s legerdemain in order “to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body,” as Republican-appointed Justice Sandra Day O’Conner said in the first Fisher case.

Of course, there exists no coherent definition of “diversity,” and no empirical evidence demonstrating its power to improve educational outcomes or create “educational benefits.” If there were such pedagogical benefits from diversity, we would have long ago dismantled the 107 historically black colleges and universities. On the contrary, there is much evidence that mismatching applicants to universities damages minority students and segregates campuses into identity-politics enclaves.

But using race to privilege some applicants over others wasn’t just about admitting students. The campus infrastructure had to change, which meant the expansion of politicized identity-politics programs, departments, general education courses, and student-support administrative offices and services. As a result, the cultural Marxism ideology that created identity politics in the first place now permeates the university far beyond the classroom, and enables an intolerance for competing ideas, not to mention shutting down the “free play of the mind on all subjects” that Matthew Arnold identified as the core mission of liberal education. And this corruption is encouraged by federal law and its leverage of federal money that flows into higher education.

So the issue isn’t a two-bit adjunct and his juvenile tweets. All the rancorous attention being given to him may make some conservatives feel better, but it will do nothing other than turn a nobody into a somebody. This bad habit is indulged by conservative outlets like Fox News: to entertain their viewers, they dig up some second-rate professor or blogger, and bring him on a show to be slapped around by the host. But in that person’s world, he is now a star, with credibility and a megaphone he would have paid Fox to give him. Getting angry at such a person is like blaming a dog for the stinking mess it left on your lawn. Of course it stinks, that’s its nature. The real culprit is the neighbor too lazy or inconsiderate to walk his dog and clean up after it...

Actually, I love watching second-rate leftist professors getting beat up on Fox News, lol.

But he's got a point. And it's not just the neighbor who's too lazy to clean up the cultural Marxist crap. It's all the fence-sitting professors, some sympathetic to the left and some not, who stand by, refusing to put real liberal principles of free speech (and intellectual exchange) before rank leftist bullying. I know first-hand the costs of doing so. (I've been investigated and persecuted on my campus after standing up for conservative values, and shutting down idiot leftists.) But it must be done.

In any case, keep reading.

Easter and Passover: Both Holidays Are About the Dead Rising to New Life

A lovely essay for Easter weekend, which (this year) is also the end of Passover week.

From R.R. Reno, at WSJ, "The Profound Connection Between Easter and Passover."

Easter and Passover share a profound connection: They both are about the dead rising to new life https://t.co/Q65bymKEzt

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) April 14, 2017

Hat Tip: Dr. Carol Swain.

Journalist Goes Undercover in North Korea (PHOTOS)

At London's Daily Mail.

No photos of concentration camps (complaints about this on Twitter). But still, it's an amazing, excellent photo-essay:

Journalist goes undercover to capture a side of North Korea we rarely get to see https://t.co/YBDCKGakf1

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) April 14, 2017

Trump Plumps His 2020 Campaign War Chest

Trump's a man of massive ego, so being reelected in 2020 should be the ultimate goal. The ultimate validation.

And remember, if Roger Simon's right, it's going to be a cakewalk, heh.

At WaPo, via Memeorandum, "Trump's reelection stockpile grows as small donors keep giving."

Thanks to slew of fundraising emails, Trump/RNC raised $42.6 mil in Q1, more than 2x Obama/DNC eight years ago https://t.co/bGKCKXmNPY

— Matea Gold (@mateagold) April 14, 2017

Nationwide Protests Over Donald Trump's Tax Returns?

Well, ahem, the times they are a changin'.

Seems like there's a lot more pressing problems than worrying about the president's tax returns. And besides, it's not like he's not paying his fair share. Just ask the idiot Rachel Maddow about that.

Either way, see Instapundit, "THE TEA PARTIERS PROTESTED THEIR OWN TAXES. NOW LEFTIES ARE PROTESTING OVER SOMEONE ELSE’S: Nationwide marches set to protest Trump tax returns."

Tomi Lahren's the Biggest Whiny Baby (VIDEO)

She's been having a hard time of it since the fallout last month. See, "Tomi Lahren's Pro-Choice?"

She's whiny, and actually stupid, if she thought Glenn Beck was going to cut her loose without a battle.

At the Dallas Morning News, "'I will not lay down and play dead — ever,' Tomi Lahren tells 'Nightline'":

Tomi Lahren, the conservative commentator known for her incendiary quick takes, said Wednesday on Nightline that she's disappointed and hurt by her employer's actions since she voiced her "pro-choice" stance last month.

In an interview on The View, Lahren said she "can't sit here and be a hypocrite and say I'm for limited government but I think that the government should decide what women do with their bodies."

Days after she made the statement, her show on the The Blaze was put on hold. On Friday, Lahren filed a wrongful termination lawsuit against her former boss, Glenn Beck, and his right-wing media firm.

The Blaze said last week that Lahren has not been terminated.

In a prepared statement, a Blaze spokesman said, "It is puzzling that an employee who remains under contract  (and is still being paid) has sued us for being fired, especially when we continue to comply fully with the terms of our agreement with her."
The spokesman said also Beck would not comment directly on the suit.

Lahren is being paid through September when her contract is up, but told Nightline host Byron Pitts that she was blindsided and feels lost without her job.

"The way I look at things I’m not doing what I was contracted to do — produce a television show, political talk show — I no longer get to do that," she said. The suit also alleges that The Blaze won't allow Lahren to access her Facebook page, where she has 4.2 million followers. She has not posted on the page since March 19, two days after The View episode aired.

The 24-year-old told Nightline that she has been silenced and that her ability to communicate with her followers has been wrongfully taken away...

Shoot, she's getting paid. And she's got until September. Hey, maybe write a book while you're chillin'? Work on your tan or something?

Keep reading.