Women’s hour 130

… comes round at last.

Dark women taking preference over pale women.

For every plum job, every position of power, including in government and at the top of government.

Pale men – OUT!

We pursue thoughts arising from yesterday’s post, The woman who knows she can save the United States

From the Washington Post, by Michael Scherer and David Weigel:

The worst thing to be in many Democratic primaries? A white male candidate.

The newest star of the Democratic Party, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, launched her New York congressional campaign by declaring “women like me aren’t supposed to run for office” — a jarring embrace of her distinction as a 28-year-old Latina less than a year removed from a job tending bar.

Her campaign slogan: “It’s time for one of us.”

That appeal to the tribal identities of class, age, gender and ethnicity turned out to be a good gamble, steering her to the nomination in a year when Democratic voters are increasingly embracing diversity as a way to realize the change they seek in the country.

“Diversity” meaning, as usual when used by Leftists: women, blacks, Hispanics, and (preferably black and female) persons who declare “non-normative” sexual preferences. Which is to say, anyone except a white male. Even a gay white male being not very welcome.

Given an option, Democratic voters have been picking women, racial minorities, and gay men and lesbians in races around the country at historic rates, often at the expense of the white male candidates who in past years typified the party’s offerings. …

The divide is more stark than any other so far in the primary season, and it reflects the party’s growing dependence on female and minority voters. …

The tribal trend has implications for the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, where an historic number of nonwhite and female candidates are considering launching campaigns, including Sens. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) and Cory Booker (N.J.). …

At a rally in Nevada over the weekend, [the blonde blue-eyed Cherokee] Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), another potential 2020 Democratic contender who never fails to mention her own hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma, got cheers when she let slip that she wanted to see a woman occupy “that really nice, oval-shaped room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue”. …

This proved the case again in New York on Tuesday, when ­Ocasio-Cortez toppled [Joe] Crowley, one of the most powerful Democrats in the nation and one widely seen as heir apparent to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. …

Through the end of June, 151 women have won House Democratic primaries, nearly doubling the 81 female nominees at the same point in the 2016 cycle, according to data collected by the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. Republican nominations of women rose much more slowly, to 32 in 2018 from 27 in 2016.

On this difference, Neil Munro comments at Breitbart:

Unlike tribal Democrats who organize themselves into semi-fixed identity groups, the conservative GOP conserves the classical intellectual ideals built into the U.S. Constitution, and which aspires to help all people compromise on their voluntary political differences, regardless of color, sex, creed or tribe. According to the libertarian Mises Institute:

“Classical liberalism” is the term used to designate the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade. Up until around 1900, this ideology was generally known simply as liberalism

[Recent US-style] social liberalism deviates fundamentally … it denies the self-regulatory capacity of society: the state is called on to redress social imbalance in increasingly ramified ways. …

The progressive, elite-socialist ideology of “diversity” uses government to impose variety on settled, coherent communities with the goal of fragmenting political resistance to progressives’ centralized power. …

U.S. conservatives oppose the centralized variety of “diversity” and the grass-roots variety of semi-fixed tribalism.

Conservatives instead favor a small-government ideal which allows a shifting mix of personal freedoms and voluntary affiliations. They expect people — regardless of race, class, sex or birthplace — to organize themselves and their ideas to meet their own needs …

What the Democrats’ policy of “diversity” has come to mean in practice is choosing women “of color” as candidates.

In Europe, where there are fewer women “of color” to choose, white women seem to be preferred to white men. Whether such a policy has been articulated or not, women occupy a great many seats of government, and feminists almost all of them. The Swedish cabinet – fully half of it female – calls itself a “feminist government”.  As Western Europe under such governance declines – the female Chancellor of Germany having insisted on swamping the continent with immigrants from the Muslim countries of the Levant, North Africa, and the Middle and Far East – popular nationalist movements are arising and strengthening, and Italy recently elected a nationalist government (a coalition of two popular nationalist parties led by white males) which is taking active steps to stem the tide of the Muslim invasion. And Austria now has a white male Chancellor who in principle opposes more Muslim immigration into his country.

In fairness, and against our prejudice, we must admit that some of the popular nationalist movements (dubbed “far-right” and “neo-Nazi” by the globalist progressives) are also led, and ably, by women – notably Marine Le Pen of the National Rally party in France, Frauke Petry of Alternative for Germany (AfD), and Anne Marie Waters of the new For Britain party. But they rose on their merits, not because they are women. And that applies also to the excellent women in President Trump’s cabinet.

The thing is, if people are not chosen for a job because of their proven ability to do it well, but for irrelevant and ridiculous reasons such as their color, sex, or sexual behavior, the results will not be good. It’s obvious, but the Left studiously overlooks it. Of course the best person for a job might be female, black, Hispanic, homosexual, transgender, but any such state of being is incidental and cannot in itself be a qualification.

The supreme qualification for power in the US, and ideally everywhere, is the understanding that only the nation-state can protect the freedom of all, equally under the rule of law; that the nation-state must have well-guarded borders to survive; that small unobtrusive government is the only good government; and that only free market capitalism can produce general prosperity.

And those ideas, well proved to be good, were taught to us by – cry! Democrats, social democrats, socialists, communists, feminists – white men.

Deutschland, Deutschland, unter Islam 20

A majority of Germans have yet again voted for the globalist multiculturalist Islam-importing destroyer-in-chief of Germany and Europe: Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But this time a lot of Germans voted against her.

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine:

Europe has never been as committed to democracy as the United States. Its elites let people vote, but some issues they are not willing to allow to be decided by the masses. Thus, at quite an early stage, European liberals decided that immigration was too explosive an issue to be committed to the democratic process. Europeans were going to get mass immigration whether they wanted it or not, and anyone with reservations about that decision was deemed part of the “far right”.

This stratagem has mostly succeeded, at least temporarily. Few if any mainstream parties have been willing to oppose, or even question, mass non-European immigration. This left the large number of Europeans who wanted their countries to remain more or less as they have been, unrepresented, except by upstart parties that may or may not be “far right” on any issue other than immigration. The danger, obviously, is that by consigning the immigration issue to the “far right”, Europe’s elites may inadvertently, and needlessly, strengthen the otherwise insignificant elements that are, actually, far right.

In Germany, no mainstream party has been willing to stand up to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s importation of nearly a million immigrants and refugees, nearly all Muslims. So opposition has come from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which was founded in 2013 as a Euro-skeptic party, but now has taken on the immigration issue. Germany’s national election took place today, and the main story line [from the Star Tribune] is AfD’s strong showing:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel won a fourth term Sunday, but now faces the tricky prospect of forming a coalition with two disparate new partners after voters weakened her conservatives and a nationalist, anti-migrant party surged into parliament.

Merkel’s center-left challenger, Martin Schulz, conceded that his Social Democrats had suffered a “crushing election defeat”, with projections showing the party’s worst performance in post-World War II Germany.

That’s a good thing.

The biggest winner was the four-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD. It finished third after a campaign that centered on shrill criticism of Merkel and her decision in 2015 to allow large numbers of migrants into Germany, but also harnessed wider discontent with established politicians.

AfD got 13% of the vote. Germany’s “discontent with established politicians” was reflected in the fact that both Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats saw their vote totals decline substantially.

So is AfD really a far right party? The left-wing BBC bitterly opposes anti-immigration parties like AfD and tries to put the party in a bad light, for the most part unsuccessfully:

AfD also adopted some of Pegida’s anti-establishment rhetoric, for example the slogan “Lügenpresse” (“lying press”), which has echoes of the Nazi era.

Apparently you can’t question the establishment press without being a Nazi. Some American liberals say the same thing, but no one believes them.

Germany must reintroduce permanent border controls and the EU’s external borders must be “completely shut”, AfD says. …

AfD argues that Germany must set up a new border police force. Frauke Petry, who stepped aside from the AfD leadership earlier this year, even said German police should “if necessary” shoot at migrants seeking to enter the country illegally.

This tells us what we already knew, that AfD is anti-immigration. The BBC evidently considers the idea of shooting at people trying illegally to enter Germany shocking. But if people insist on entering a country despite that country’s laws, isn’t shooting them “if necessary” the last resort? Isn’t that why border guards are pretty much always armed? A country whose border guards could do no more than wave at foreigners and implore them not to enter the country would not – to put it mildly – have secure borders.

AfD says that “Islam does not belong to Germany”. …

AfD would ban foreign funding of mosques in Germany, ban the burka (full-body veil) and the Muslim call to prayer, and put all imams through a state vetting procedure. …

Those proposals wouldn’t fly in the U.S., but they cannot fairly be considered extreme. AfD has, however, had some unsavory moments unrelated to immigration:

Mr[Alexander] Gauland [an AfD leader] drew criticism for declaring that Germans should be “proud” of their soldiers in both world wars. While SS units were notorious for German atrocities in World War Two, the regular armed forces also committed many war crimes.

Earlier another top AfD politician, Björn Höcke, caused outrage by condemning the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. He told supporters that Germans were the “only people in the world who planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital”.

At least he admits to the shame!

Whether these few comments by AfD leaders are symptomatic of an underlying neo-Nazi tendency, I don’t know. To the extent that they may be, it illustrates the peril of suppressing and stigmatizing discussion of Germany’s immigration policies – which are, in my view, extreme and ill-advised. Doing so inevitably drives voters who are opposed to mass Islamic immigration into the arms of the only political leaders who are willing to give voice to their concerns.

If the only party opposing the gradual conquest of Germany by Islam is an anti-Semitic party, the issue of anti-Semitism falls away; because Islam is more anti-Semitic than any contemporary European party.

Could even civil war save Western Europe from becoming Islamic in this century?

It is hard to see how Angela Merkel’s work can be undone. She is not just one of the great destroyers in world history, she is probably the greatest of them all. Because what she is destroying is the greatest civilization in world history: the post-Enlightenment civilization of Europe and the West.  

Will something of it remain in America?

Bulletin from a battleground of the people’s revolution 221

The rulers of Europe and their supporting media are beginning to feel seriously embattled. They are aware and frightened of a spreading discontent, a darkening mood of defiance and even rebellion among the peoples they lead.

Their instinct – the instinct of tyrants – is to protect themselves by using government to silence criticism.

Of all the members of the European Union, Germany, it seems, is where the ruling class feels most insecure and is responding with most high-handed imperiousness. This is not hard to account for. Germany is anxious to live down its appalling modern history; dissolve its guilt in the wider sea of a European state; dilute its very nationhood in a flood of immigrants bringing different laws, culture, and religion.

But rising populist movements are demanding the dissolution of the European Union and a stop to Muslim immigration.

From Gatestone by Stefan Frank:

The elites and intellectuals are apparently now counted among the German minorities in need of protection.

Toward the end of last year, Germany experienced a previously unheard-of boycott campaign – funded by the German government, no less – against several websites, such as the popular Axis of Good (Achse des Guten). The website, critical of the government, was suddenly accused of “right-wing populism”.

The German government’s efforts at thought control seem to have begun with the victory of Donald J. Trump in the US presidential election – that seems to set the “establishment” off. Germany’s foreign minister and the probable future federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier – one of the first to travel to Iran after the removal of sanctions there to kowtow to the Ayatollahs – called America’s future president a “hate preacher”.

Herr Steinmeier, uniquely among European leaders, has come to his senses since then, recognized that there has been a world-transforming political upheaval in America, and plans to talk to President Trump in an effort to understand what the popular revolution is all about.

Germany’s newspapers were suddenly littered with apocalyptic predictions and anti-American fulminations.

For hard-core Trump-haters, however, a witch hunt by itself is insufficient; they want activism! Since November, Germany’s left-wing parties have had a strong increase in membership, as reported by Der Spiegel. At the same time, the federal government evidently decided, at least regarding the federal elections taking place in 2017, that it would no longer count on journalists’ self-censorship.

The German government, instead of merely hoping that newspapers would voluntarily – or under pressure from the Press Council – refrain from criticising the government’s immigration policies, decided that it, itself, would inaugurate censorship.

To this effect, as reported by Der Spiegel, the Federal Interior Ministry, intends to set up a “Defense Center against Disinformation (“Abwehrzentrum gegen Desinformation“) in the fight against “fake news on social networks”. “Abwehr” – the name of Nazi Germany’s military intelligence agency – is apparently meant to demonstrate the government’s seriousness regarding the matter.

“It sounds like the Ministry of Truth, ‘Minitrue,’ from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984,” wrote even the left-leaning daily, Frankfurter Rundschau.

Frank Überall, national head of the German Association of Journalists (DJV), bluntly stated: “This smells like censorship.”

It seems that all ideas suspected of being “populist” – or simply those ideas without the blessing of the elites – will now be banned in Germany. This restriction applies to criticism of the government (especially regarding immigration and energy policies), of the EU, of Islam, of government officials and of the media.

The Federal Agency for Political Education – the information agency of the Interior Ministry – is quite open about it: “Anti-elitism”, “anti-intellectualism”, “anti-politics” and “hostility toward institutions” are “the key characteristics of populism”.

Toward the end of 2016, one of the biggest German media scandals in recent memory erupted when Gerald Hensel, undoubtedly a member of Germany’s elite, tried to introduce a new form of internet censorship with the help of a team of media agencies and political players. Until recently, Hensel was “Director of Strategy” at Scholz & Friends, one of Germany’s two big advertising agencies. The firm counts among its clients multinational corporations such as General Motors, the German federal government and the European Commission; so one might say the company is close to the state.

Apparently in anger over Trump’s election victory, Hensel demanded: “Let us freeze the cash flow of the right-wing extremist media!” He had previously written a strategy brief declaring debate to be useless; instead, the political enemy — the “populists” – needed to be fought, even with questionable methods:

The liberal center must, especially in these new digital and information-based wars, take off the kid gloves. We have to turn the tables and learn about populism, particularly on the Internet … Thus, we have to respond in a more wide-spread digital manner and with explicitly less sympathy to those people who want to force their own future on us – and do this long before the next federal election … Political storytelling, targeting the political enemy, influencers, forums, rumors…”

“Measures,” he added, have to be taken against the “new right” – measures that:

… [A]re “Below the Line” and also digital. We need “good” troll factories in our fight against [European “populist” leaders] Frauke Petry, Beatrix von Storch, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen and the fat stupid white men behind them. Ideally, as quickly as possible. Starting in 2017, they will continue to dismantle the EU and thus our future and that of our children.

Toward the end of November, Hensel appealed to his colleagues in various advertising agencies, under the banner of “no money for the right”, to boycott all those who fit the description of his bogeyman – because they were “hostile towards the EU”, or because they might even harbor sympathies for Donald Trump. He was jumping on a bandwagon. A witch hunt was already under way against the American website Breitbart, due to the closeness of its former executive chair, Steve Bannon, to Donald Trump.

Without providing any kind of proof, countless German newspapers and broadcasters claimed that Breitbart was “racist”, “sexist”, “xenophobic”, “anti-Semitic” and “Islamophobic”, and a “hate site”. The state-owned German television station ARD described Breitbart as an “ultra right-wing” platform for “white supremacy”. Other journalists followed suit.

Hensel went one step farther. In the style of a prosecutor during the Inquisition, he called to break the “dominance of right-wing micro media”. He seems to consider particularly dangerous and subversive, anyone who reads articles that do not originate from one of Germany’s media empires:

“While I may satisfy my thirst for information with my subscriptions to ZEIT or Le Mode Diplomatique, the brave new-right freedom-fighter likes to stay informed via online media such as the Axis of Good or Breitbart News.”

This alone raises several suspicions. Hensel, whose website (which since December can only be accessed with a password) is graced by the display of a Soviet red star, likes to eliminate his opponents swiftly. Breitbart, for example, is deemed fascist (“salon-fascists”). Why? Because the blog — and here he, supposedly for simplicity’s sake, quotes an article from the Süddeutsche Zeitung — “covers all the topics of German right-wing populism”; Breitbart reports about “the migrant and refugee policies of the German federal government, as well as of supposed criminal acts conducted by migrants and Islamic activities”.

There is freedom of speech in my stupid little world. Undoubtedly, websites such as Breitbart News and the Axis of Good … are legal media. Nevertheless, one could ask brand names whether they … are aware that their banner ads appear on these particular websites and represent their brand there.

This type of “asking”, of course, roughly corresponds to the mafia “asking” the pizzeria owner if he has fire insurance.

Hensel also considerately provided detailed instructions for his readers. Those employed by an enterprise should check whether the websites that he deemed “right-wing” are registered on a blacklist. Employees of advertising agencies should form a team, with Hensel and other authoritarians, for internet censorship:

If your career in a media agency has propelled you a little higher up the hierarchy, you might be able to bring up the topic at the next media get-together with colleagues. 2017 is an election year. You, dearest colleagues, clearly have a part in determining who receives our advertising dollars.

Hensel also suggests that consumers put direct pressure on companies or approach them via social media, to dissuade them from advertising on “hate publishers” and “destroyers of the future”.

This manifesto was only published on a private blog — one that barely anyone had ever heard of before. But the power of which Hensel boasted – the networks in the advertising agencies and editorial offices – is real. On Hensel’s command, big newspapers and websites reported on the operation with much sympathy, along with the hashtag #NoMoneyForTheRight.

Large companies such as Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile), BMW, Mercedes-Benz and the supermarket chain REWE obeyed straightaway, and promised to place “Breitbart” on the blacklist immediately and never to advertise there againDer Spiegel cited Hensel’s “resistance” (!) and pilloried one business that did not follow suit: A plucky little pizza delivery service that responded to the blacklisting demand by declaring that it was “not the morality police”. The company was denounced by Der Spiegel as “inept”, and after “protests from customers”, it ended up capitulating, as the newspaper reported with much satisfaction.

Breitbart will cope with missing out on a few hundred dollars of advertising revenue from Germany. Hensel, however, was successful in his attempt to motivate his ad agency colleagues against German websites such as the Axis of Good. Within a few days, none of them advertised there anymore. Advertising revenue, equally important for websites as it is for newspapers, came to a halt. Hensel had achieved his goal.

For this campaign, Hensel also received support from the group Network Against Nazis (Netz gegen Nazis), which receives financing from by Germany’s federal government, the German Football Association and the newspaper Die Zeit, and which, until recently, also counted Scholz & Friends among its supporters. In the tried and true Orwellian fashion of calling things their opposite, the definition of “Nazi”, for Network Against Nazis, encompasses anyone who is “Islamophobic” or “hostile toward the media”.

Shortly after Hensel’s call for boycotts, the Axis of Good was placed on a list of “popular right-wing blogs” by Network Against Nazis – together with the liberal publisher Roland Tichy and the evangelical civil rights activist Vera Lengsfeld (who is a thorn in the side of communists, because she fought against the East Germany’s dictatorship in the 1980s). The Amadeu-Antonio Foundation, which runs the Network Against Nazis website, receives almost a million euros per year from the federal government. Not surprisingly, it demonstrates its gratitude with character assassinations of critics of the government.

Within a short time, Hensel had put together a kind of mafia, bent on economically ruining whoever rejected his ideological commands, by using libel and slander to scare away their customers.

As the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily newspaper commented:

It is very fashionable right now to stigmatize people and denounce them as “right-wing” if they do not share your views. Companies want nothing to do with that label, and, as you can see on Twitter, they quickly change direction if they are aggressively made aware that they support the wrong side with their ads (which are often automatically activated and run on the internet).”

The Left’s lie that Nazism (National Socialism) was “right-wing” rather than one of its own branches – which it was – has stuck, giving the Left one of its few lasting victories.

In response to the boycott campaign against it, the Axis of Good showed how a business can defend itself: the editors raised a public alarm about Hensel’s campaign in a series of reports and commentaries. Thousands of readers complained on the Facebook page of Hensel’s employer, Scholz & Friends, which, after its initial support, began to distance itself from its employee’s campaign and finally severed ties with him.

According to Hensel’s version, his campaign was “so successful” that he wanted to take his employer “out of the line of fire”.

My former employer and I became the victims of a massive hate storm consisting of countless tweets, emails and comments on social media … This is a systematic campaign.

As if that was a wicked thing, and as if his campaign had not been “systematic”.

Of course, it was Hensel himself who initiated a systematic campaign, including dirty tricks, which were waged with an eye to the government’s apparent plans to consolidate the population ideologically.

That is the chilling plan, precisely worded. And that is true Nazism, true Stalinism. 

As research by the Axis of Good has revealed, Hensel’s boycott operation was closely tied to the plans by the Federal Ministry of Family Affairs to conduct an advertising campaign in support of an open-door immigration policy in 2017. For this, an advertising agency was necessary, as reported in September by an industry journal:

As revealed by a Europe-wide announcement, the Federal Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth is looking for an agency to advertise the brand “Living democracy! Actively against right-wing extremism, violence and inhumanity”.

Ad agencies were invited to submit their suggestions by the middle of December. The Axis of Good concluded:

There is a suspicion that this [boycott] operation was a hurried pilot project for the bid for the million-euro project by [Federal Minister] Schwesig’s Family Ministry. A free trial run for the so-called “advertising pitch”.

Regarding the question of how much economic damage was caused to the Axis of Good by the boycott campaign, Henryk M. Broder, the website’s publisher, told Gatestone:

It is significant, but how big it really was, we will only know in a few months. After all, it is not the companies themselves that stopped advertising, but the agencies. The damage for Scholz & Friends could be even bigger, but they do not talk about it.”

The Hamburger Abendblatt daily referred to Hensel’s campaign as an “attack on the freedom of the press,” adding: “It seems as if the shot from the activists backfired.”

As in communist dictatorships, the more obvious the failings of the government, the more aggressively the establishment attacks those who speak out about them.