Bookworm Room

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

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…]

Progressive ideology drove the anti-Milo violence at Berkeley

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Progressive Ideology leads to violenceWith two days having elapsed since rioters disrupted Milo Yiannopoulos’s planned speech at UC Berkeley, using fire, pepper spray, sticks, fists, and feet in a successful effort to silence Milo, I’ve now got a bit of the distance I need to comment on the event. My conclusion is a simple and obvious one: While it was career agitators who committed the worst mayhem, there can be no doubt that Progressive ideology — which reached hysteric pitch when it became apparent that President Trump really would end 8 years of Obama’s hard Progressivism and the preceding 12 years of soft Progressivism — drove the entire disgraceful, tyrannical event.

To make this case about the inherent violence in today’s anti-Trump Progressive ideology, I’ll begin with Zombie’s photo and video record of the event. And while I’m sure you’ve seen other photos and videos, do check out Zombie’s page, as it contains unique images and footage that add to our understanding about what happened in Berkeley.

What’s clear from watching videos such as the following is that, while the professional anarchists in their black clothes and concealing face masks (they call themselves “Antifa,” ostensibly because they are anti-fascist) are the leading edge of the violence, the large assembled crowd is at all relevant times enthusiastically applauding and egging them on. The crowd is open in appreciating Antifa’s destructive, dangerous, and determined efforts to silence speech with which they disagree. That is, while some Berkeley students and citizens are now trying to distance themselves from Antifa, that was not the case when mob rule was on the streets and the Progressives hadn’t yet realized that the whole thing looked remarkably Kristallnacht-like in subsequent media reports:

[Read more…]