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Charleston-shooting

June 17, 2015: Police and ambulances responded to the scene of a shooting in Charleston, S.C. (Photo: WCSC)

Nine people were killed late Wednesday at a historic African-American church in Charleston, S.C. after a white gunman walked in during a prayer meeting and began shooting. Authorities have classified the Charleston shooting as a hate crime, indicating that authorities do indeed know who the individual is or because it was committed in a church.

Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said at a press conference early Thursday that the gunman was a clean-shaven, approximately 21 year-old with sandy blonde hair and a slender build. He said the suspect was wearing a gray sweatshirt with blue jeans and Timberland boots, calling him “extremely dangerous.” The suspect’s car had what authorities are calling a “very distinct” license plate.

“This is a tragedy that no community should have to experience,” Mullen said. “It is senseless and unfathomable in today’s society that someone would walk into a church during a prayer meeting and take their lives. This tragedy that we are addressing right now is indescribable. No one in this community will ever forget this night.”

The church is a well-known historic black American church that traces with roots dating back to 1816. After several churches split from Charleston’s Methodist Episcopal church, the congregation became part of the Underground Railroad that helped runaway slaves get to the North. Denmark Vesey, one of the founders of the church, even tried to organize a slave revolt in 1822 but was caught and the church was burned to the ground. Parishioners worshipped underground until after the Civil War.

Among the dead was the church’s pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, 41, who had been a pastor since he was 18. Pinckney was the youngest African-American elected to the South Carolina legislature when he won office in 1996 at age 23 and had been a state senator since 2000.

“We know that it was definitely a hate crime, but it is just to early to know if it was race-related,” said Samuel Rivers Jr., a personal friend of Mr. Pinckney. “To pick it out a say that it is race-related at this particular moment is unfair.”

Mr. Rivers called for calm and urged everyone to wait for the facts. He was joined by Bishop E.W. Jackson, Bishop of THE CALLED church in Chesapeake, Virginia, who said it may turn out that this attack was targeting Christians. At this point, we just don’t yet know the facts.

“We’re urging people to wait for the facts, don’t jump to conclusions,” Jackson said. “But let me tell you, I’m deeply concerned that this gunmen chose to go into a church because there does seem to be a rising hostility toward Christians in this country.”

But soon after Wednesday night’s shooting, a group of pastors huddled together praying in a circle across the street where community organizer Christopher Cason was gathered. Cason told the Associated Press he felt certain the shootings were racially motivated.

“I am very tired of people telling me that I don’t have the right to be angry,” Cason said. “I am very angry right now.”

Authorities said the shooting took place at approximately 9 p.m. (local) ET, but would not immediately confirm the identities of the victims. Mullen said there were 6 females and 3 males among the dead. PPD has learned that the suspect let a female go free in order to tell the story about what had happened, though we do not know what else may have been said or transpire. Another two victims, including one child, allegedly pretended to play dead in order to survive, which they appear to have done.

“The only reason that someone could walk into a church and shoot people praying is out of hate,” said Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley. “It is the most dastardly act that one could possibly imagine, and we will bring that person to justice … This is one hateful person.”

Dot Scott, the president of the Charleston NAACP, told the Post and Couriernewspaper that she had spoken with a female survivor who said the gunman walked into the church and briefly sat down before standing up and opening fire. Scott said the gunman told the woman he was letting her live so she could tell others what had happened.

“There is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people engaged in the study of scripture,” NAACP President and CEO Cornell Brooks said in a statement Thursday. “Today I mourn as an AME minister, as a student and teacher of scripture, as well as a member of the NAACP.”

Republican Sen. Tim Scott, the South’s first black senator elected since Reconstruction, posted a series of Twitter messages on the tragedy.

“My heart is breaking for Charleston and South Carolina tonight,” another one of them read.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley issued a statement calling the shooting a “senseless tragedy,” but cautioned that the community and those looking on should wait until we learn more before turning a bad situation into a worse one.

“While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivated anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” Haley said. “Please join us in lifting up the victims and their families with our love and prayers.”

Only about two hours after the Charleston shooting took place a man matching the suspect’s description was detained for a short period of time near the scene. However, the man, identified as 21-year-old David Corrie, was later let go by police. He told the Post and Courier he was walking out of a Shell gas station’s convenience store when police forced him to get down on the ground and handcuffed him.

Anyone with information on the suspect’s whereabouts is asked to contact Charleston Police dispatch at 843-743-7200 or the FBI at 800-CALL-FBI

Authorities have said the Charleston shooting that

Opinion

Quicken Loans Arena, home of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Quicken Loans Arena, home of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

For most of my life, I could not understand why anyone would hitch his or her identity to the win-loss record of a professional sports team.

Sports fans, you’d call them.

Fanatics, I’d say. Lunatics, I’d say after a glass of wine, but only if my dad wasn’t within earshot.

“Those players don’t care about us,” I’d tell friends and relatives. “They don’t know our names. They don’t care how much money we have to spend on tickets to see them. And even if they win everything, we will get up the next morning to the same old life we had before we cheered them on to victory.”

I was so superior. So above it all.

So beside the point, my husband likes to say. A lifelong Cleveland Indians fan, he has a personal email address that begins with “damnyankees.” Make of that what you will.

I grew up in northeast Ohio, and I live in Cleveland. No one was going to catch me sobbing in my beer as we racked up decade after decade without a single professional sports championship.

Then I lost my mind.

I can give you the exact date: July 11, 2014. That’s when LeBron James announced his decision to return to the Cleveland Cavaliers. You would have thought I was personally welcoming home the prodigal son.

Two days later, the Republicans announced that they would be bringing their 2016 national convention to Cleveland. Overnight, news coverage across the country was all about Cleveland, Cleveland, Cleveland…

And it was: All. Good. News.

We weren’t used to this, but there were plenty of us who thought it was way past time for it.

Most every city in a major metropolitan area is struggling to define itself as something other than what it used to be. Cleveland is no different, and our five decades without a professional championship — basketball, baseball or football — had come to define us. Sports are everything in this country, and we could lay claim to nothing but heartache.

In November, we made national news again after a white Cleveland police officer killed a 12-year-old black boy carrying an air gun. In December, more headlines after then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder visited our city just long enough to roll out a report chronicling a pattern of excessive force by Cleveland police.

“The trust between the Cleveland Division of Police and many of the communities it serves is broken,” the report read.

This weighs on us, as do multiple other bad-news stories illustrating the racial tensions we’ve tried for too long to ignore. The rooster is crowing at our door.

No sports team can fix these problems. We know that. The Cavs’ glorious season was not so much a distraction as it was an affirmation that there’s a lot more to us than what’s broken.

On Tuesday night, we lost the championship to the Golden State Warriors. Heartbreaking, yes, but we are so proud of this team, which suffered injury after injury and still made it to Game 6 of the NBA Finals.

Minutes before the final game ended, my friend Jackie turned to me and said, “My God, they just never give up.”

She’s right. We never do.

The following morning, The Plain Dealer’s front page ran a full-length photo of an exhausted LeBron James under an unfortunate headline, “NOT ENOUGH GRIT.”

If you had seen me in the moments after I first laid eyes on that, you might have thought, “Hmm. I wonder what’s up with that woman who has storm clouds around her head and is firing lightning bolts from her fingertips.”

Fans’ tempers exploded. If there was one thing our Cleveland Cavaliers had demonstrated, it was grit.

A little past noon, Plain Dealer Editor George Rodrigue demonstrated another version of Cleveland grit by posting a column online agreeing with us.

“I wish we had said, ‘Grit was not enough,'” he wrote. “That’s what the editor who wrote the headline meant to say.”

This Clevelander — this fellow human — is ready to forgive.

We are a city like so many other cities, full of problems that were years in the making and will take many more years to solve. We are on the brink of something big or something irreversibly bad, depending on where we go from here. We are living the question of what comes next.

We’re all that. But we are also the city with a basketball team that only a year ago was so bad it got the No. 1 draft pick. A team that lost three of its star players this season to injuries. A team that just six months ago most thought would barely survive the regular season.

In the final series, we came this close to winning it all.

And on Wednesday, we couldn’t wait to welcome them home.

Connie Schultz discusses the season with the

Opinion

moammar-gaddafi

Former Libyan dictator Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

What if President Obama secretly agreed with others in the government in 2011 to provide arms to rebels in Libya and Syria? What if the scheme called for American arms merchants to sell serious American military hardware to the government of Qatar, which would and did transfer it to rebel groups? What if the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of the Treasury approved those sales?

What if the approvals were kept secret because some of those rebel groups were characterized by the same Departments of State and Treasury as terrorist organizations? What if the ultimate recipients of those arms were the militants and monsters in al-Qaida and ISIS who have slain and tortured innocents?

What if this scheme is defined in federal law as providing material assistance to terrorist organizations? What if that’s a felony? What if that’s the same felony for which the U.S Department of Justice has prosecuted dozens of persons merely for attempting? What if this scheme was not a mere attempt, but an actual arming of terrorists?

What if this scheme was approved not only by the president, but also by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? What if the idea of doing this was hers? What if congressional leaders in both houses of Congress and from both parties signed off on this? What if the remaining members of Congress and the American people were kept in the dark about this scheme? What if those who agreed to permit this scheme knew that the arms were destined for terrorist organizations and they were flirting with a criminal conspiracy to violate federal law?

What if Clinton was asked by senators while under oath about the delivery of arms made by American manufacturers to ports in the Middle East and she denied knowing anything about it? What if she knew she had personally approved the deliveries but falsely claimed she had no knowledge?

What if this arms-to-terrorists scheme began to unravel? What if the rebels were really bad guys? What if there are many rebel/terrorist groups with varying degrees of hatred for the United States? What if some of the groups that received American arms are so hateful of the U.S. that they will bite the hands that fed them?

What if Clinton’s job was to prevent American arms from slipping into the hands of terrorists? What if she secretly did the opposite of what her job required? What if she and the president and the other conspirators viewed themselves as being above the law? What if they thought the terrorist groups they were arming would overthrow the Gadhafi government in Libya and the Assad government in Syria? What if they believed those revolutions would be greeted with cheers in the West? What if they hoped the cheers would be for them?

What if their goal of regime change succeeded in Libya, and yet the result was chaos? What if under Col. Gadhafi Libya had been a stable U.S. ally? What if today there is no central government in Libya and it is ruled by gangs and tribes and militias?

What if the American assistance to Syrian rebels became known to the Russians? What if that knowledge prompted Russian President Putin to help his ally, President Assad of Syria? What if the American and Russian introduction of heavy military hardware into the Syrian civil war has resulted in prolonged war and more deaths of innocents and destruction of property, not less?

What if one of the terrorist groups that received American arms from this scheme attacked the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, because it wanted more arms from the U.S. and it knew arms were stored there? What if that attack killed U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three of his colleagues? What if this was a nightmare scenario for the conspirators? What if the conspirators now fear that the truth of their plot will become known?

What if the tragedy at Benghazi was unwelcome but not unforeseen? What if the conspirators knew of the risks to innocent lives attendant upon breaking the law by giving arms to madmen? What if members of Congress who were kept in the dark about the arms-to-terrorists scheme were outraged over Benghazi? What if leaders of the House of Representatives, some of whom were conspirators, formed a committee to investigate how the murder of Stevens came about?

What if some members of that committee already know that Stevens and the others were murdered with U.S. weapons illegally given to U.S. enemies secretly by U.S. government officials? What if the stated purpose of the committee — to seek the truth about Benghazi — is not the true purpose? What if the real purpose of that committee is to suppress the truth so that the president and Clinton and the other conspirators do not get indicted? What if the truth is the last thing the conspirators want to see come out?

What do we do about lawless government by secrecy? What do we do about government officials who act as if they are above the law? What do we do if one of them lives in the White House and controls all federal prosecutions? What do we do if another of them is presently on her way there?

What if President Obama is hiding the

Politics

irs-building-dc

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) headquarters building in Washington D.C. (Photo: AP)

On June 6, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the IRS to provide an answer for the missing Lois Lerner emails by Friday, June 12. Judicial Watch raised questions about the IRS’ handling of the “lost” emails in a court filing on June 2, 2015, demanding answers as to why those that had been recovered from backup tapes had not yet been provided.

“Our review of the seven-page filing shows that the IRS remains intent on stonewalling Judicial Watch and Judge Sullivan,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “Indeed, contrary to false representations to the court and Congress that the emails were lost and unrecoverable, the IRS finally admits that it has as many as 6,400 new Lois Lerner emails but won’t promise to turn them over to Judicial Watch.”

The IRS claims they are sifting through the emails to ensure there are no duplicates. But, according to Fitton and the Inspector General, the agency’s reasoning isn’t particularly valid.

“Even though the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration already identified and removed emails that are duplicates, the IRS is in ‘the process of conducting further manual deduplication of the 6,400’ emails, rather than reviewing them in response to Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act requests that are more than two years old now,” Fitton said. “Our legal team will continue pursuing all necessary and available legal options to hold the IRS accountable for its flagrant abuse of power.”

Emails recently obtained by Judicial Watch and shared with PPD revealed Lerner, the official at the center of the IRS scandal that involved excessive scrutiny of conservative groups, was “willing to take the blame” for the inappropriate targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups. However, as was the case in previously obtained emails, Lerner was well-aware of how the targeting practice “might raise questions” and attempted to keep information from Congress and investigators from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

The TIGTA testified on February 26, 2015, to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it had received 744 backup tapes containing emails sent and received by Lerner. This testimony clearly showed that the IRS — including Commission John Koskinen — had lied to both Congress and Judge Sullivan when they claimed that Lerner’s emails were irretrievably lost.

President Obama had claimed during a previous interview with Bill O’Reilly that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” involved at the IRS.

“That’s not what happened,” Obama told O’Reilly when asked if mass corruption was at play. “There were some bone-headed decisions. Not even mass corruption. Not even a smidgen of corruption.”

However, according to emails, including an email from Lerner in February 2012 asking that a program be set up to “put together some training points to help them [IRS staffers] understand the potential pitfalls” of revealing too much information to Congress, clearly suggest otherwise.

The IRS continued to stonewall U.S. District

Video

[brid video=”9874″ player=”1929″ title=”Jeb Bush Slow Jams the News with Jimmy Fallon and The Roots”]

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush joined Jimmy Fallon and The Roots to slow jam the news following his presidential announcement in Miami Monday. The governor won praise in many circles for breaking out of the traditional Republican mold, but some aren’t too thrilled.

During a segment on “The Five” on FOX News Wednesday, host Eric Bolling said “more power to him,” but well-known Bushite Dana Perino disagreed?

“I don’t know. I have to disagree,” Perino said, claiming it was too risque.”

The 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney also slow jammed the news with Jimmy Fallon, but the content wasn’t quite the same. Further, Romney chose not to show the American voters his more human, comedic side. Didn’t work out too well, of course.

Watch Jeb Bush slow jam the new with Jimmy Fallongave the governor, then tell us what you think.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush joined Jimmy

Video

Trey-Gowdy-Darrell-Issa-AP

House Select Committee Chair Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., left, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA, right, the former chair of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. (Photo: AP/Carolyn Kaster/J. Scott Applewhite)

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C, escorted Calif. Rep. Darrell Issa, the former chair of the House Government and Oversight Committee, from a closed-door meeting Tuesday.

And it was caught on tape.

Gowdy, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, was deposing Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal about the nearly 60 emails he sent to Clinton about the attack during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state. Issa tried to crash a hearing on Benghazi on Tuesday, but was escorted from the closed-door meeting by Chairman Gowdy.

“I’m a prosecutor; we always follow the rules,” Gowdy told NBC News. “[Issa] is not a [Benghazi] committee member and non-committee members are not allowed in the room during the deposition. Those are the rules and we have to follow them, no exceptions made.”

Issa previously lead an investigation into the Benghazi terrorist attacks in his role as House Oversight chairman.

During Tuesday’s deposition, Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal was being questioned about the nearly 60 emails he sent to Clinton about the attack during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state.

Last month, the State Department released more than 800 pages of emails that had been turned over by Clinton from her personal server, but emails mysteriously continue to surface.

“I think it’s noteworthy that no committee of Congress that has previously looked into Benghazi or Libya has uncovered these memos, and I will leave it to you to figure out there was a failure to produce on the former secretary’s part, or a failure to produce on the Department of State’s behalf,” Gowdy told reporters on Tuesday, according to NBC News.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C, escorted Rep. Darrell

Policy

john-kerry-bicycle-ap-740x400

FILE PHOTO – In this March 16, 2015 file picture, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, rides a bike after a bilateral meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister in Lausanne, Switzerland. Kerry is in stable condition in a Swiss hospital after suffering a leg injury in a bike crash on Sunday, May 31, 2015. (Photo: Jean-Christophe Bott, Keystone via AP, file)

I’m in Geneva, Switzerland, where I just gave a speech about how international bureaucracies such as the OECD are seeking to undermine tax competition in hopes that the welfare state can be propped up for a few more years with ever-higher taxes.

But regular readers already know my views on these issues, so instead I want to focus today on a referendum that just took place a couple of days ago in this Alpine nation.

That referendum has convinced me that I was wrong when I wrote a few years ago that there were five reasons (government-constraining federalism, pro-gun culture, etc) to put Switzerland above the United States.

I’m not convinced there’s a 6th reason. Simply stated, the Swiss have to be the most sensible people in the world.

Here are some excerpts from an English-language report published by Swiss Info.

An attempt to federalise Switzerland’s inheritance tax system and redistribute wealth by taxing legacies worth more than CHF2 million ($2.15 million) has been rejected by Swiss voters… On Sunday, 71% of voters and all 26 Swiss cantons rejected the proposal. …Two-thirds of the revenue from this new tax, projected at CHF3 billion a year, would have been credited to the nation’s old age pension fund.

Yes, you read correctly. The Swiss left thought they could lure voters into supporting a tax hike based on a discriminatory tax on a tiny segment of the population.

But an overwhelming share of Swiss voters rejected this class-warfare scheme. Here’s a map of the results. But instead of liberal blue states and conservative red states that are found in the United States, Switzerland has nothing but conservative brown cantons.

The German-speaking cantons voted no. The French-speaking cantons voted no. And the Italian-speaking canton voted no.

It’s almost enough to make one feel sorry for Swiss statists.

…the political left has continued its losing streak at the ballot box. In the past two years voters have rejected pay caps within companies, the introduction of a nationwide minimum wage and a plan to scrap lump sum taxation for rich foreigners. …Supporters of the plan countered that the overall tax burden in Switzerland is still one of the lowest in Europe.

Though I have to wonder if Swiss leftists are extraordinarily stupid.

Did they really think that complaining about low taxes was the way to win an election?!?

I can just imagine what went through the minds of ordinary Swiss voters: “hmm…we’re richer than our high-tax neighbors and we’re growing faster than our high-tax neighbors…should we copy them or maintain the policies that have worked?”

Opponents had a more compelling argument.

Several politicians and media described the tax as a “KMU Killer”, referring to the German abbreviation for small and medium-sized businesses, which employ more than three-quarters of the Swiss workforce. Businesses said it would have been an effective double tax on income since firms already pay tax on earnings. …Switzerland’s cabinet, both houses of parliament and all 26 cantons had recommended voters reject the proposal, as did the main business lobbies.

Needless to say, I appreciate the argument about double taxation. That’s the obvious economic argument against the death tax.

But what makes Switzerland remarkable is the last part of the excerpt. It appears that the entire Swiss political establishment, as well as the entire business community, understand that it would be crazy to kill the low-tax goose that lays the golden economic eggs.

But ultimately, you have to give credit to the Swiss people. As mentioned in the article, they keep rejected statist proposals.

Here are a few I’ve written about.

Needless to say, my favorite Swiss referendum took place back in 2001, when 85 percent of voters imposed a spending cap on the central government. As explained in this video, this system has been remarkably effective at limiting the growth of government.

P.S. Oregon voters and California voters, by contrast, are far less discerning than their Swiss counterparts.

I’m in Geneva, Switzerland, where I just

Politics

donald-trump-announcement

Donald Trump announces he is running for president at Trump Tower on Tuesday June 16, 2015. (Photo: Getty)

Billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he is running for president after years of flirting with the idea, as PPD promised.

“I am officially running for president of the United States,” he said from inside his signature Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan. “We are going to make our country great again.”

“The Donald” vowed to be the “greatest jobs president God has ever created” and gave a vintage Trump speech that unabashedly celebrated his wealth and slammed the notion that politicians, who have been taking America down the wrong road for decades, even know how to solve the nation’s woes.

“Politicians are all talk and no action,” said Trump. “We have losers. We have people who are morally corrupt. We have people who are taking the country down the drain.”

The media, to include the Bush-cheerleader FOX News, moved to dismiss Trump’s candidacy as “not serious.” Self-proclaimed conservative commentators like George Will, who once characterized then-Ronald Reagan as a “kamikaze conservative,” and Charles Krauthammer, who shortly after was writing speeches for Reagan’s opponent Walter Mondale, outright mocked the speech.

(Update: In a Fox & Friends interview shortly after this article was first published Wednesday morning, Trump called both Will and Krauthammer “losers” in response to their mocking commentary.)

But the reason Trump resonates with blue collar Americans beyond the bubble is not only his straight-talk style, but what he is saying.

“How are these people going to lead us? How are we going to go back and make America great again?” Trump asked. “We can’t. They don’t have a clue.”

A focus group conducted by pollster and GOP strategist Frank Luntz during Trump’s speech Tuesday found that Mr. Trump made the best- and worst-tested statements of the campaign, thus far. Americans weren’t thrilled with his “best jobs president” comment, but voters across the spectrum gave him high marks when he promised to take on China, make Mexico pay for a fence to end illegal immigration and bring American jobs and money back to the United States.

There is little doubt that the American worker feels left out, or even betrayed, by deal-making politicians that seem to have the best interest of their friends and other nations at heart, rather than them. They will have to answer the questions and charges leveled by Mr. Trump whether the GOP establishment, who has lost two elections in a row with their play-it-safe strategy, likes it or not.

According to the PPD average of national Republican nomination polls, Trump is qualifying for at least the first two debates. Even before his announcement speech, his numbers began to rise in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire. A Gravis Marketing poll out Tuesday found Trump surging to third place with 12 percent of the vote.

And that’s before voters even knew if he was serious about running.

“This is going to be an election, in my opinion, based on competence,” Trump said. “The American Dream is dead. And if elected president, I will make it bigger and stronger than ever.”

Billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump announced

Opinion

Blackfish-Tilikum

A from the documentary Blackfish, depicting Tilikum the killer whale.

This year is the 10th anniversary of a book called “The Republican War on Science.” I could just as easily write a book called “The Democratic War on Science.”

The conflict conservatives have with science is mostly caused by religion. Some religious conservatives reject evolution, and some oppose stem cell research.

But neither belief has a big impact on our day-to-day lives. Species continue to evolve regardless of what conservatives believe, and if conservatives ban government funding of stem cell research, private investors will continue the work.

By contrast, the left’s bad ideas about science do more harm.

Many on the left — including a few of my fellow libertarians — are paranoid about genetically modified organisms. These are crops that have DNA altered to make them grow faster or be more pest-resistant. The left calls that “playing with nature” and worries that eating GMO food will cause infertility, premature aging and a host of other problems.

The fear makes little scientific sense. There is no reason to think that precise changes in a plant’s genes are more dangerous than, say, the cross-breeding of corn done by American Indians centuries ago or a new type of tomato arising in someone’s organic garden. Nature makes wilder and more unpredictable changes in plant DNA all the time.

Yet the left’s fear of GMOs led activists to destroy fields of experimental crops in Europe and, most tragically, bans on GMO foods that might help prevent hunger and malnutrition in African and Asian nations.

Leftists often claim to be defenders of progress, but they sound more like religious conservatives when they oppose “tampering with nature.”

The new movie “Jurassic World,” in which scientists tamper with DNA to create a super-dinosaur that gets out of control, doesn’t just recycle ideas from the original “Jurassic Park.” It recycles the same fears that inspired the novel “Frankenstein” 200 years ago — the idea that if humans alter nature’s perfect design, we’ll pay a terrible price.

But it’s nature that is terrible. We should alter it. “Living with nature” means fighting for food, freezing in the cold and dying young.

The left’s anti-science fears also prevent us from building new nuclear reactors, especially after Fukushima and Chernobyl. But those reactor designs were already considered obsolete. Future reactors could be far safer and would reduce our dependence on carbon-producing fuels.

Humans thrive by improving technology, not abandoning it.

Lately, some people think they’re “erring on the safe side” by avoiding vaccinations. The result is outbreaks of diseases like mumps and measles that we thought were all but eliminated. In Nigeria, conspiracy theories frightened people away from getting polio vaccinations just as we were on the verge of eradicating that crippling disease.

The left also objects to science that contradicts their egalitarian beliefs. A few years ago, I interviewed scientists who had discovered ways in which male and female brains differ from birth. The scientists told me that they wanted to continue such research, but political pressure against it was too intense. Men and women clearly have different aptitudes, but today leftists demand that government punish any company that treats genders differently.

Few scientists today would even study relative IQs of different ethnic groups. They know they’d be de-funded if they discovered the “wrong” facts.

I say, follow the truth wherever science leads. “Science Wars” is the subject of my next TV show.

Last week, I reported how SeaWorld had been smeared by animal rights activists. The activists responded with more smears.

They claimed my producers and I wouldn’t talk to animal trainers seen in the film “Blackfish.” But I tried interviewing them — they refused to talk. The activists also claim we based our report on views of Bridget M. Davis and Mark Simmons, but I don’t even know who they are. Then they claimed we got all our information from SeaWorld, but that, too, is a lie; of course, we consulted independent sources.

As often happens, activists put politics before reality.

This year is the 10th anniversary of

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