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Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Bookworm Beat 8/13/2018 — the holding out against Leftists edition

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This Bookworm Beat has it all: Leftist racism, Russian conspiracies, the Cold War, cops, Hercule Poirot, education insanity, crazed campus co-eds, and more.

Bookworm Beat logoThe Trump Tower set-up and other Russian collusion fantasies. You have to be a Leftist to claim that Trump’s son walking away from a meeting at Trump Tower with Russians without promising anyone is collusion, while the fact that federal law enforcement, the DNC, and Hillary’s campaign worked closely with myriad Russians close to Putin to destroy Trump is not collusion.

Lee Smith helps clarify for the confused.

And if you’re still confused, Thomas Lifson reminds us of the staggering double standard that saw the federal government and the media cover for DiFi’s grotesque carelessness with (and profiting from) the Chinese government, while those same institutions are endlessly trying to destroy Trump because . . . something, something Russians, something something:

The contrast with the treatment received by the Trump campaign when a Russian spy was merely suspected (on the basis of what appear to be ginned-up concerns over Carter Page, an FBI informant)  is so stark as to raise serious question as to the integrity of the FBI counterintelligence operation.  The NSA’s ability to monitor every form of electronic communications except ham radio [footnote omitted], was mobilized to spy on the presidential campaign of the opposition party to the Obama administration. No notification to the campaign was offered, unlike Feinstein’s treatment.

The entire incident is being presented to the public as no big deal. That is a classic example of the fake news of which President Trump so vocally complains.

Finally, VDH looks at the insane Russianism driving the Left, some of whom have become true believers, and many of whom are cynical operatives trying to protect either their power bases or their ideological hold over American institutions:

Robert Mueller was tasked with investigating Russian collusion in the 2016 election. He was supposed to find proof that Trump campaign officials deliberately collaborated with Russian agents to subvert the election and thereby achieve through foreign subterfuge what they could not secure through votes.

Yet that mandate was jettisoned just weeks after Mueller began, apparently once his lawyers sensed what Peter Strzok (soon to be on his investigatory team) already knew when he had texted Lisa Page, “There’s no big there there” —an impression that both James Comey and James Clapper later shared when they confessed that they had no evidence of Russian collusion.

After a year and a half, Mueller so far has been reduced to indicting some Russians operatives for cyber crimes and a few former Trump officials on charges that have had nothing to do with collusion.

But out of the Mueller conundrum and congressional investigations arose damning information that Obama national-security officials illegally unmasked and leaked to the press the names of those surveilled. In addition, DOJ and FBI officials deliberately misled either gullible or partisan FISA court judges to obtain surveillance warrants on American citizens, on the basis of an unverified dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Discredited FBI officials lied to federal investigators. The former FBI director leaked confidential memos written on FBI time on FBI devices, and he probably worked with CIA Director John Brennan (who had previously lied twice under oath to the United States Congress) to monitor the Trump campaign, including but not limited to implanting government informants among Trump employees.

[snip]

In sum, Russian collusion is a 2016 election construct. The hysteria over it serves a palliative for hatred of a presidency that so far cannot be stopped before 2020. Had Hillary Clinton won the election as experts assured the nation she would, there would be no Mueller investigation, either of Trump or of wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton. Now-fired or reassigned FBI grandees like Andrew McCabe or Peter Strzok and DOJ officials such as Bruce Ohr would have thrived. If anything, embracing conflicts of interest and bias to successfully warp an election would be seen as a sacrifice to be rewarded, not culpability to be punished.

The Cold War reminds us that socialism is bad. A new poll came out showing that Democrats adore socialism, which they think is better for people than capitalism. This view, of course, means that they’re looking, not at National Socialism (aka Nazis), or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (aka the Soviet Union), or the completely socialists Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea).

Instead, what it means is that they’re looking at that rosy view of Western Europe from the 1960s through the 1990s. Of course, they’re totally missing the fact that Europe, despite its claim that it was “socialist,” wasn’t socialist at all.

What supported Western Europe’s cradle-to-grave socialism was America. We paid for their military costs and accepted their outrageous tariffs, all to help them to recover from WWII and to prevent them from once again falling into an apocalyptic conflagration. Europe may have art and architecture, but the 20th century proved that it had little in the way of actual civilization.

Anyway, if you know a Leftist stupid enough to think socialism is the answer, this video might (maybe, perhaps, just possibly) help you educate that person (h/t Seraphic Secret):

Big Tech is so bad, even Noam Chomsky objects. This comes from the wonderful world of “even a stopped clock is right twice a day“:

Responding from his official MIT email address, Chomsky wrote, “What I’ve seen of what he does is outrageous, but unlike many civil libertarians here and especially in other countries, I don’t think that the right way to deal with
‘hate speech’ and crazed fabrications is to ban them; rather, to confront them, and to seek and confront the reasons why anyone pays a moment’s attention to them.”

Who knew that the arch-Leftist Chomsky was a fan of the marketplace of ideas and free speech? (And no, I did not miss the fact that he accused “civil libertarians” of advocating censorship. I have no idea what he’s talking about, since the essence of libertarianism is that we don’t bring the government’s heavy hand down on things.)

Leftists hate blacks who aren’t Leftists: [Read more…]

The raw courage of an open conservative at UC Berkeley

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Meeting representatives of Berkeley’s College Republicans in the Trump era, you learn that courage is not limited to men in uniform on foreign battlefields.

Berkeley Free Speech MovementIn 1964, the Free Speech Movement came to the University of California, Berkeley. It began as a protest against Berkeley’s extremely strict rules regarding political speech. Wikipedia has a good rundown of those rules:

In 1958, activist students organized SLATE, a campus political party meaning a “slate” of candidates running on the same level – a same “slate.” The students created SLATE to promote the right of student groups to support off-campus issues. In the fall of 1964, student activists, some of whom had traveled with the Freedom Riders and worked to register African American voters in Mississippi in the Freedom Summer project, set up information tables on campus and were soliciting donations for causes connected to the Civil Rights Movement. According to existing rules at the time, fundraising for political parties was limited exclusively to the Democratic and Republican school clubs. There was also a mandatory “loyalty oath” required of faculty, which had led to dismissals and ongoing controversy over academic freedom. Sol Stern, a former radical who took part in the Free Speech Movement, stated in a 2014 City Journal article that the group viewed the United States to be both racist and imperialistic and that the main intent after lifting Berkeley’s loyalty oath was to build on the legacy of C Wright Mills and weaken the Cold War consensus by promoting the ideas of the Cuban Revolution.

On September 14, 1964, Dean Katherine Towle announced that existing University regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes or candidates, outside political speakers, recruitment of members, and fundraising by student organizations at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues would be “strictly enforced.”[13] (This strip was until then thought to be city property, not campus property.) (Hyperlinks omitted.)

By October 1964, the matter came to a head when police arrested a former student for setting up a political table on campus and students began a mass protest. Again, from Wikipedia:

On October 1, 1964, former graduate student Jack Weinberg was sitting at the CORE table. He refused to show his identification to the campus police and was arrested. There was a spontaneous movement of students to surround the police car in which he was to be transported. The police car remained there for 32 hours, all while Weinberg was inside it. At one point, there may have been 3,000 students around the car. The car was used as a speaker’s podium and a continuous public discussion was held which continued until the charges against Weinberg were dropped.

On December 2, between 1,500 and 4,000 students went into Sproul Hall as a last resort in order to re-open negotiations with the administration on the subject of restrictions on political speech and action on campus. Among other grievances was the fact that four of their leaders were being singled out for punishment. The demonstration was orderly; students studied, watched movies, and sang folk songs. Joan Baez was there to lead in the singing, as well as lend moral support. “Freedom classes” were held by teaching assistants on one floor, and a special Channukah service took place in the main lobby.

As it did often during the 1960s (and continues to do today), the campus administration backed down before the students’ wrath. What made the free speech movement different from all the other student demands over the decades since then is that, in 1965, the students had a valid point: Academic institutions, especially those that accept government money, cannot shut out the First Amendment.

Sadly, this righteous movement quickly became a Leftist cause — which is ironic, really, given how deeply opposed the Left is to free speech. The Leftists channeled that student energy into anti-war demonstrations and the usual Marxist pap. It also took the genuine civil rights concerns about the way blacks were treated in the United States and morphed it into all of the ills bedeviling race relations today, including support for militant black nationalist movements such as the Black Panthers (which reappeared in 2015 as the Black Lives Matter movement). (For more on the way the Left manipulated well-intentioned and true Civil Rights activism, especially in and around Berkeley, I recommend David Horowitz’s Radical Son: A Journey Through Our Times from Left to Right.)

Still, despite its sad Marxist decline, Berkeley continued for decades — indeed, right up until 2017 — to be associated with free speech. When I was a student there in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the campus definitely tilted Left (as evidenced by students celebrating the attempted assassination on Reagan in 1981), but you could still voice ideas inconsistent with McGovernite Democratic principles.

My, how Berkeley has changed. [Read more…]

Antifa, Puerto Rico, and minorities in a pluralist society

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A portmanteau post addressing Antifa, Puerto Rico and Mayor Cruz, and the problem of minorities who try to bend society to their will.

Puerto RicoThe items in this post bear no relationship to each other, unless you want to say that the first demonstrates how to undermine a civilized, pluralist society, while the second shows how a minority within that society is supposed to balance benefits and burdens. Oh, and there’ll be a detour into Puerto Rico. Still, as I have other things to do, this post is a little bit jumbled.

The first thing I want to bring to your attention is Steve Crowder’s video about going undercover with Antifa in Utah. The two take-aways are (1) that Antifa people are weird losers who get excited by violence and bloodshed and (2) that the media does not want to know about Antifa. It doesn’t fit the narrative and the media is about nothing but narrative:

Speaking of narrative, I’m going to slip one more thing in here, which is the media’s burgeoning narrative that the devastation in Puerto Rico is Trump’s fault for failing to react quickly. In fact, there’s every indication that Trump had FEMA and the military ready to roll. The problem seems to be that Puerto Rico, which is Democrat-governed, has no infrastructure. It also kicked the Navy out a couple of decades ago, meaning (a) that there’s no embedded Navy in place to help and (b) that it kissed good-bye the hundreds of millions that the Navy would have contributed to the economy. [Read more…]

Yes, it’s true: The evidence shows that Trump is a fascist dictator

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I’ve examined all of the evidence carefully and it’s true: What Trump has done — from spying on journalists to unconstitutional treaties — is tyrannical.

Donald Trump at CPAC 2016Spurred on by my Facebook friends’ assertions that Trump is a dangerous fascist dictator, one who seeks to control all aspects of American life, I examined the evidence — and it’s true. He is. Here are the facts:

1. Trump has been using violence to shut down free speech.

Although he hasn’t activated any branch of the government to shut down free speech, Trump has sent his minions throughout America to quash free speech, especially when people are attempting to the right to free speech to advocate for free speech. We’ve even got the videos to prove it.

Here are Trump’s minions running riot in Berkeley:

And here they are running riot in Portland:

And here they are again in Berkeley:

Wait! Wait. I am so sorry, but my editor has just informed me that those black-clad people are not Trump’s minions. They are, in fact, opposed to Trump.

Never mind. Let’s move on to the next example of Trump’s fascist takeover of America.

2. Trump has spied on the media.

We all know that Trump has had a running feud with the American media, which he has accused of lying rather consistently about him and about other matters important to Americans. As part of this feud, he has actually spied on media figures. Thus, we have this story:

Fox News on Monday angrily denounced the Justice Department’s “downright chilling” decision to target of one of its reporters, James Rosen, in a national security leak investigation. Executive Vice President Michael Clemente portrayed the government’s actions as an assault on “what up until now has always been a free press.”

“We are outraged to learn today that James Rosen was named a criminal co-conspirator for simply doing his job as a reporter,” Clemente said in a statement.

“In fact, it is downright chilling,” Clemente said. “We will unequivocally defend his right to operate as a member of what up until now has always been a free press.”

And this story:

Exactly 10 days ago, President Barack Obama was piously telling reporters who cover him that free speech and an independent press are “essential pillars of our democracy.” On Monday, The Associated Press accused his administration of undermining that very pillar by secretly obtaining two months’ worth of telephone records of AP reporters and editors.

“We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP’s constitutional rights to gather and report the news,” AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Oh, darn it! The editor says I messed up again. Indeed, on second reading, I realize that the last quotation I used actually says it was the Obama administration that was spying on the American media. It seems that the James Rosen spying also occurred during the Obama administration.

I don’t know about you, but spying on the media would seem to me to have a much more chilling effect than publicly scolding them and calling them out, a behavior that sees the media giving (or at least trying to give) as good as it gets. [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 8/31/17 — another “Leftist insanity” edition

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There’s so much Leftist insanity that one Bookworm Beat wasn’t enough to contain it all. It takes two posts to grasp what’s really going on.

Leftist Insanity

An un-retouched photo of Lynn Yaeger, the fashion writer who criticized Melania Trump’s shoes.

The craven FBI refuses to stop Leftist insanity. Although the mainstream media is silent, the conservative media is appropriately outraged that James Comey had already decided in April or May of 2016, in the very early stages of the investigation into Hillary’s national security violations, to clear her of wrongdoing. That is, his decision came about far in advance of the evidence — and nobody in the FBI called him on it.

I’m disgusted but not surprised that the FBI’s employees would do nothing about their head’s manifest violation of his duty to Americans. You see, I already predicted this outcome in early April 2016:

No matter how principled they’d like to think they are, most middle-class people will turn a blind eye to corruption in their midst rather than run the risk of being unable to pay their mortgage or fund all of the other payments necessary to support a middle-class lifestyle. They don’t think of themselves as dishonest or complicit in dishonesty. They think of themselves as cautious people who aren’t going to risk their children’s future for some grand-standing that, rather than resulting in applause, could leave them unemployed and desperate.

This episode from my past makes me doubt very strongly that Hillary Clinton will be indicted. I know that the rumor mill keeps saying that FBI agents, from Comey on down, will quit if Loretta Lynch lets Hillary walk. Some of the FBI agents whispering this to friendly reporters may even believe that they’ll quit.

Mostly, though, this is a bluff. Why? Because the people talking about quitting are middle-class people with mortgages, and school fees, and insurance, and all the other expenses that keep us in the middle-class living up to our own expectations. If Hillary really does walk, 99% of those “I’ll quit if she’s not indicted” agents will manage, very quickly and easily, to convince themselves to stay in their jobs, and get their salaries and pensions.

Was Jim Crow a cruel but necessary reality? David P. Goldman couldn’t writing something boring if he tried. His most recent post riffs off the fact that the North allowed the South the illusion of victory for almost 100 years after the Civil War. According to Goldman, this was an unpleasant necessity required to protect America against foreign threats and analogizes it to the West’s necessary decision to absorb former Nazis to protect against the Communist threat.

I’m not familiar enough with America’s foreign policy in the years between the Civil War and WWI to judge critically what Goldman wrote, but it’s an interesting argument. Certainly America needed its Southern fighters in WWI and WWII. Indeed, we still need them today.

Some Leftist Jews are catching on to the Left’s antisemitism. Lately, I’ve been totally obnoxious on Facebook. Every time my Facebook friends goes off about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and antisemitism, I’ve stated in bold language that I don’t take them seriously because they’ve completely ignored the fact that, for well over a decade now, I’ve made them aware of the vile, pervasive, normalized antisemitism in the Democrat party and, especially, on American campuses.

Thankfully, a few Leftist Jews are figuring out that their Leftist cohorts are not feeling the love. At Forward, a Leftist Jewish publication, Benyamin Moalem says what I’ve said forever, which is that antisemitism (and racism) on the right consists of a few bottom feeders, while antisemitism on the Left is large, mainstream, and very dangerous. After discussing Roger Waters (who revels in antisemitic imagery the Nazis would have loved) and the aggressive antisemitism on campuses, Moalem has this to say: [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 8-31-17 — the different cultures edition

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The Left says all cultures are equal, except for ours, which is worse. The Left then takes active steps to turn this falsehood into the truth.

Different culturesWhen I was looking for the common denominator tying together the various posts I found interesting, the binding word was cultures. Both inside America and outside, in the larger world, we are seeing that the internet not only connect us, but it brought together, cheek to jowl, successful cultures and failed ones. Each of the links examines cultures and their differences.

What makes successful cultures? I actually found boring the fact that a bunch of dead-end Marxist law professors got their knickers in a twist when a couple of other law professors pointed out, quite accurately, that in the modern world, it’s the Protestant model (or, one could say, the traditional Jewish model or the traditional Catholic model) that brings success: learn, work, marry, have children, in that order.

By now it’s a dreary “dog bites man” story about the way in which the cultural Marxists among us are desperate to destroy this tried-and-true recipe for material success and, instead, seek desperately to force on America behaviors that lead to criminality, promiscuity, and poverty. As part of this pattern, anyone successful who dares to preach what he or she practices is doomed to be pilloried and destroyed.

I did find interesting, however, David Goldman’s rumination on what constitutes a successful culture. After all, if we’re going to be proud cultural relativists (and I am), we’d better have a sense of what we consider “successful.” Goldman points out that most cultures die and, moreover, die without a trace. The ones that thrive are the ones that can latch onto and incorporate the best of other cultures, while retaining the virtues of their own.

What makes unsuccessful cultures? Sadly, Islam makes for an unsuccessful culture. Another thing that makes for an unsuccessful culture is that moment in a nation’s history when the power brokers refuse to identify the forces seeking its destruction. Such is the case in Europe and America, where every Allahu Akbar attack is denominated an insane act, unrelated to any specific cultural influence. Daniel Greenfield turns a gimlet eye on Islam’s cultural propensity for murderous violence and the West’s corollary  suicidal propensity for denial. [Read more…]

Orwell’s world: Telling the truth about Antifa is a revolutionary act

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Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit — telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” A brave journalist reporting on Antifa proves Orwell was right.

AntifaIf you ever question whether the American media has morphed into Pravda — a tightly controlled outlet for socialist propaganda — you need to check out a Facebook post from Frank Somerville (which I’ve embedded below). Somerville, if you’re wondering, is a very well-respected San Francisco Bay Area TV journalist.

Somerville’s post is an interesting one at two levels. First, it’s interesting because he reports honestly about the hatred and violence that characterized Antifa’s latest riot in Berkeley.

Second — and this is the important part — it’s interesting because he feels compelled to explain the pressure he felt not to do this accurate, honest reporting, including pressure from his wife, who fears for his safety (whether professional or personal is not clear).

As you read the following words, keep in mind that Somerville is not a journalist in Putin’s Russia or in Iran or in the Gaza strip. He is a journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area who has to screw up his courage and take a stand to report . . . the facts:

M wife told me I’m going to get crucified by posting this. I told her I didn’t care. This is what happened. This is what I saw. This is what I experienced. This is the truth. Period. If people dont want to heat the truth thats not my problem. I have No agenda. Im just saying that this is what happened to me today, think about it. And make your own decision.

Here’s Somerville’s entire post: [Read more…]

Snapshot USA: Decency in Houston; Indecency in Berkeley

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Almost no words, just images to tell the tale of two American cities: Houston heroically surviving epic rain, and Berkeley barely surviving Antifa.

First, images from Houston, which is inundated with water. Fortunately, there are wonderful people in Houston who are doing everything possible to save lives.

And from the “God is really playing with Houston now” department, comes this mini Sweet Meteor of Death:

You get the picture. This is the time to dial up the charity donations, if you’re so inclined. The people in Houston are going to need a lot of help to recover from this kind of inundation.

And now we turn to the left of Houston, both geographically and politically, to show you Antifa running wild in Berkeley. And yes, I know that Houston is a Democrat-run city, but a Texas Democrat city is nothing compared to Berkeley:

Berkeley deserves what’s happening to it — and the more America sees Antifa’s true colors the better.

America’s universities seed the Orwellian world that surrounds us

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America’s Leftist universities are the poisonous trees and America’s newsrooms are the toxic, hate-filled fruit they bear.

Universities Big Brother OrwellI routinely rant and rave about the fact that America’s colleges and university systems are Ground Zero for the thinking that is destroying America. Whether it’s Third-Wave man-hating feminism, anti-white racism, BDS antisemitism, open borders demands, or some other idea attacking America’s integrity and core values, these really evil ideas are incubated on campus so that graduates can later take them out into the world. You can think of the campus and its professors as poisonous plants, with the students functioning as bees. Once heavily coated with the plants’ toxic pollen, they graduate and disseminate that pollen in the wider world.

Today’s really perfect example of the sickness that lurks in academia is Elizabeth Harman, an Associate Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. I’m not going to tell you what’s in the video. You must watch it on your own to understand fully what’s going on in America’s educational institutions, from the Ivy League down. All you need to know to watch it is that actors James Franco and Eliot Michaelson ask Harman to explain her philosophical view of abortion:

Harman’s logic, which is based upon temporally based magical thinking, would fit well in a Kindergarten class, assuming a 5-year-old was bereft of all moral decency. [UPDATE: Talking with a friend, I finally distilled the essence of Harman’s argument: The moral worth of your life is entirely dependent on whether your mother wants to kill you.]

That she is an Associate Professor of Human values at a school that admits only 6.4% of its applicants and that costs almost $64,000 per year for tuition and room & board is the most scathing indictment imaginable of those Blue voters who believe themselves morally superior to Trump voters. To the extent that people like Harman aren’t on the fringe of the Democrat party but operate at its core is reason enough never again to let Democrats near the levers of power.

Now that you’ve watched Harman’s amazing performance, imagine more than a decade’s worth of students taking her class, and heading out into the world, many as journalists. With that in mind, you can readily understand why a college graduated at CNN (and we know it’s a college graduate because non-graduates are “dirty” Red staters who could never work in any self-respecting mainstream media newsroom) would write the following headline for a CNN’s Antifa article: [Read more…]

Where I stand on Charlottesville and Confederate monuments

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At Charlottesville, Antifa and Neo-Nazis proved to be birds of a feather; and blacks are right to want to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces.

Charlottesville protestI’ve been rather conspicuously silent about events in the South. As you know, I like to wait until the hysteria settles and facts emerge to throw in my two cents. Here are those two cents, in no particular order:

1. This needn’t have happened. The Charlottesville police stood down, which is a common tactic in Democrat-run cities when the loony Left is on the prowl.

2. Trump is correct that there were good people attending the event on both sides. The young woman who died, Heather Heyer, was one such person — and one, moreover, who had a truly moral, decent mother. I’ve read that there were others there who were not Richard Spencer supporters, but who were supporting free speech against Antifa’s thugs. Still, it was a stupid thing to say.

3. There were innumerable bad people at Charlottesville, both fascist Antifa thugs and fascist White Supremacist thugs. They’re all foul thinks and the Left is genuinely evil in its efforts to paint Trump and his supporters as fellow travelers of those White Supremacists. As a wise teen I know asked, “If you support me, and I hate you and everything you stand for, does that mean that the media gets to say that I support you just because you support me? I don’t think so.” The same teen, incidentally, said “extremism creates opposite extremists.” He hadn’t even read the Daniel Greenfield article from which I quote below when he said that.

4. There is nothing that Trump could have said about Charlottesville that would have assuaged the media. Nothing. And in talking with his supporters, I see them say that, no matter how inartfully Trump phrased things at his press conference, he was correct in the substance of what he said and they continue to applaud his bold frontal attacks against the media.

5. The media has a consistent double standard: Antifa, which is a burgeoning movement and can be seen as the militant arm of the campus Left (just as the KKK was the militant arm of the Democrat Party), is designated as a freedom fighting movement. White Supremacists, who are a teeny fraction of the American population, far less than the KKK was during its ascendancy in the 1920s and probably less than the Antifa mob, whether on campus or off, is treated not only as evil (which it is) but as representative of all conservatives.

6. When Antifa runs out of White Supremacists to attack (and it will, given the latter’s small numbers), the ground will have been laid for Antifa to attack all conservatives on the ground that they too are White Supremacists.

7. Antifa and the White Supremacists have a few things in common: They’re violent and they hate Jews. IowaHawk nailed it: [Read more…]

Leftist police chiefs and leftist rioters — a dangerous combination

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A former police officer’s tale about the 1979 White Night riots in San Francisco shows a disturbing pattern when you have a Leftist police chief or mayor.

Leftist PoliceI spoke yesterday with a friend, a former San Francisco police officer, who told me something very interesting about the White Night riots that devastated San Francisco in May 1979. I remember the riots well, as I lived in the City at the time, but the behind-the-scene details were fascinating and illuminating. Here’s what I learned:

George Moscone became the Mayor of San Francisco in 1976. Today, he would be called a Progressive. Back then, he was simply a Democrat who represented the electorate’s shift away from the old-fashioned, working- and middle-class Democrats who once had a say in San Francisco politics.

One of Moscone’s first tasks as mayor was to appoint a new Chief of Police. Traditionally, police chiefs came from within the ranks of the San Francisco Police Department, which was a solidly working- and middle-class organization with conservative social views, that was just branching out into having women and minorities serve.

Moscone, however, bypassed the SFPD when looking for a new chief and, instead, appointed Charles Gain, an African-American who had been serving as Chief of Police in Oakland. At the time, Gain was widely perceived as being extremely “liberal” — as the Left defines that word, rather than the classical definition.

When he became Chief, Gain decided that the SFPD needed an image overhaul. He therefore ordered that all police vehicles should be painted baby blue, so as to appear less threatening. The police officers, when driving around in their light blue paddy wagons likened themselves to a diaper delivery service. Gain was also extremely supportive of gays, something that didn’t sit well with traditional police officers.

Given Moscone’s and Gain’s Progressive politics, it’s scarcely surprising that Dan White, an elected supervisor who was an old-fashioned, working class San Francisco conservative, would clash with them. Eventually, White announced that he was retiring as Supervisor.

Conservative elements in the City, including police officers, begged White to reconsider, so he asked for his old job back. However, the Progressives on the Board of Supervisors, including Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician in America, lobbied against his reinstatement, so that they could get a firm lock on Leftist politics in San Francisco. Moscone had no problem with this agenda and refused White’s request to be reinstated.

White was extremely distraught. Unfortunately, his wife, who might have provided emotional ballast for him at this time, was out of town. So it was that Dan White sneaked into City Hall on November 11, 1978 and assassinated both Moscone and Milk. Most San Franciscans were saddened but gay San Franciscans were completely devastated. An icon had died. [Read more…]