In 1968, while teenage Red Guards beat their professors to death with clubs in Beijing courtyards, Jean-Paul Sartre sat in Paris calling Mao's Cultural Revolution a model of revolutionary democracy. The most celebrated intellectual in France looked at a country burning its own libraries and saw liberation. He sold the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on French street corners himself, holding it aloft like a sacrament. Consider what he was endorsing. Between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between 500,000 and two million people. Schools shut down across the entire country. Students dragged teachers onto stages, hung placards around their necks, forced them to kneel on broken glass, then murdered them. The historian Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of a girls' school in Beijing, died on August 5, 1966, beaten by her own students with nail-studded clubs. Sartre called this the people governing themselves. You should understand why a man this intelligent got it this wrong. Sartre believed knowledge served power, that truth was whatever the revolution required, that the individual existed to be dissolved into the collective will. So when Mao abolished the distinction between teacher and student, between expert and mob, Sartre cheered. He had spent decades arguing that bourgeois reason was a class weapon. Here was a regime taking him at his word and clubbing the reasoners to death. This is what economic illiteracy buys you. A university, a price, a contract, and a peasant's grain stockpile all carry knowledge that no central planner can seize or replicate. Mises explained the calculation problem in 1920. Hayek explained dispersed knowledge in 1945. Sartre had access to both and chose the dunce cap of the collective instead, then handed out its propaganda on the Rue de Rennes. He died in 1980, mourned by 50,000 followers, never having retracted a word about Mao. The professors of Beijing got no such funeral. They got a ditch, and a philosopher in Paris explaining that their murder was freedom.

While we can’t know the consequences of Democrats’ decision to allow FISA to go dark, we do know it is almost certainly putting our nation at greater risk. I hope that in the coming days, my Democrat colleagues will rethink their decision to take this program hostage and will restore this key safeguard of our country’s security.

Someone’s retaining water .. 😬😬

🚨 JUST IN: President Trump announces he's going to hold a press conference and personally READ EVERY WORD of the Iran deal to force the fake news into covering it accurately GREAT IDEA 👏🏻 "I will actually not only release it. I'll probably have a press conference and read it to you word by word so that the press covers it accurately because it's a very important document!" "And unlike Obama who could have destroyed the Middle East with a horrible JCPOA. It is the worst agreement!"

Iranian people remind America that it's a shame to show the flag of terrorism on US soil. The flag of a regime that murdered Iranian protesters, the flag of a regime that targeted the US soldiers and shot down US helicopter and fighter jet. Good thing that Iranian people will remind the world where the moral compass is.