BLEXIT 87
So America “needs” to have a woman leader?
And she “should” preferably be black?
Your sex and race are not in themselves qualifications or disqualifications for leadership.
But intelligence is a qualification for it. So is political acumen. So are strength of character, determination to defend the Constitution, steadfast commitment to freedom and patriotism, competence, and the power to communicate. Especially if they are all present in one person.
They are all present in Candace Owens.
Candace Owens
And Candace Owens is calling for an exit of black voters from “the Democrat party”:
When I uploaded my first video onto YouTube one year ago, I entitled it “Mom, Dad, I’m a Conservative.”
It was a two-minute satirical stab at the social exiling that many Americans face when they announce their conservatism to friends and family.
Soon thereafter I would discover that for black Americans, the punishment that awaits is far worse than any social exile: it is a full-court social lynching.
Search the name of any prominent black conservative and peruse the words written by liberal journalists:
Dr. Ben Carson is a “porch monkey”
Larry Elder is but an “Uncle Tom”
Kanye West is “in the sunken place”
Clarence Thomas is “a womanizer”
I have been branded a self-hating black, Nazi-sympathizer and rather astonishingly — a white supremacist.
The underlying sentiments are clear; black people are meant to think and act within the confines of what white liberals deem acceptable.
But while in the past the threat of slander has worked to lag the spreading of black conservatism, over this last year, I have observed something of the opposite effect.
In fact, what many have misdiagnosed as political tension between two ideologically disparate groups is actually something far greater, far more deep-rooted, and much more likely to alter the trajectory of this country as we know it.
Across America, black people are beginning to question political orthodoxy. We have been quietly building an ecosystem of free thinkers and at long last, the intellectual dam is breaking.
This unique moment will come to be known as BLEXIT: the black exit from the Democrat party. …
BLEXIT is a national movement of minorities that have awakened to the truth. It is for those who have taken an objective look at our decades-long allegiance to the left and asked ourselves “what do we have to show for it?” …
Beyond anything else, BLEXIT is a chant of freedom. It is a chorus of voices from across the country whose hearts are exploding with the realization that we are more than the color of our skin.
We are also more than a voting bloc.
We are Americans first and foremost and we will work to piece back together our broken communities — absent overreaching government structures, absent hand-outs, and alongside our American brothers and sisters.
The tides are shifting. New leaders are emerging to help steer open minds into the uncharted possibilities of our futures.
We need all of America to join us in this fight. No matter your skin color, we need you to take up metaphorical arms against the Democrat party. First, visit our website, BLEXIT.com, where you will find the hard truths about the bigoted racism within the Democrat party. Second, spread the word. Your voice matters to those who are looking to make an “exit” from the bondage of the Democrat party. Finally, stand for truth. This battle will be one of the most consequential culture wars in American history. Your support is needed to allow us to arm the next generation with the facts they need to be free.
The “Democrat party”, moving ever more to the Left and becoming ever more aligned with the worldwide socialist movement, presents itself as – even perhaps believes itself to be – characterized by concern for the underdog. The Party of Compassion.
Socialism always advertised itself as a movement for the raising and empowerment, the “liberation”, of the oppressed: of the “workers of the world”, said Karl Marx; of the “outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and colors, the unemployed and unemployable”, said Herbert Marcuse, theorist of the New Left; of “the wretched of the earth”, said Frantz Fanon; of “women”, said the feminists; of “homosexuals” said some Leftists and later many; of “blacks”, they said in some places at some times and all of them eventually.
Blacks were not always classed by the prophets of the Left as worthy of liberation. Karl Marx was a fierce racist, despising blacks and Jews (though or because he was Jewish), and agreeing with Friedrich Engels that the Slavs should be wiped off the face of the earth. (See for instance here and here.)
In South Africa, in the early 20th century, the motto of the Communist Party was: “Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa”. Then, in 1928, the Comintern decreed that the South African case must no longer be subjected to “class analysis”, but instead to “race analysis”, so the blacks replaced the white workers in the tender concern of Stalin’s Kremlin.
In the real world, the extreme oppression of all classes, both sexes, and all races by the self-proclaimed Parties of Compassion wherever they came to power – in Russia, China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba – has repeatedly and invariably demonstrated that the Left is actually characterized by hypocrisy.
And intense, dumb, unexamined, class snobbery.
Connoisseurs of irony can particularly savor the treatment meted out by the Left, and all the politically compassionate, to a genuine working-class rebel leader now that one such has finally arisen in Britain to defend young girls exploited and oppressed by Muslim immigrants. Yes, young girls and boys persecuted by rapists of other races and colors coming from the countries where the wretched of the earth proliferate. He is called Tommy Robinson. They look down on him. They not only call him a “neo-Nazi”, “bigot”, and “racist” – though he is none of those things – but also an “oik”, which means a person of low class, an uncouth person. It is an expression of sheer snobbery.
And what do the Leftists and their sympathizers who rage against President Trump hold against him? They say he is “vulgar”, that he has bad taste, that he is not of their class. Right – the Latin word “vulgus” means the common people. Although he is rich and the rich are the upper class of America, they say he lacks the necessary refinement of the socially superior.
It wasn’t the compassionate snobs but the workers of America who voted for Donald Trump to be president. And very many who were poor before he came to power are now in well-paying jobs.
And it is a black woman who is leading the movement she calls BLEXIT, whereby the blacks of America, in numbers yet to be counted, will take their votes away from the Democrat party and give them instead to the Party of Trump.
BBCLGBTQ+ 240
Everyone in Britain who has a TV, or even just a radio, Internet connection, or a Smartphone, has to pay to keep the BBC going – under threat of severe penalty for delinquency.
What has this once much respected, once thoroughly trusted, sensible institution become?
Not respectable, not trustworthy.
Silly and menacing.
As Virginia Hale reports in an article at Breitbart:
The BBC is to fight a “heteronormative culture” with a raft of pro-LGBT reforms, despite figures showing sexual minorities are already overrepresented as much as fivefold in the broadcaster’s workforce.
Staff will be told to use gender-neutral pronouns for workers who say they are “non-binary” — identifying as neither male or female — under new BBC policies, which also detail plans to put additional support in place for transgender individuals, especially while they are “transitioning”.
Workforce training on diversity, inclusion, and “unconscious bias” will also be expanded to include LGBT issues, while non-heterosexual mentors will guide less senior staff who identify as a sexual minority.
Teams working in television, news and radio broadcasting have been told to increase representation of sexual minorities, specifically that they insert more “incidental” portrayals of LGBT relationships and individuals not directly related to a storyline or news item.
In addition, the BBC said it will raise the profile of employees who are not heterosexual and urge them to “bring their whole self to work”.
“Straight Ally” badges will be handed out to heterosexual members of staff.
The reforms were brought in following an internal survey of 300 LGBT members of staff, who called for “improvement” in a number of areas including the demand that the BBC adopt the umbrella term LGBTQ+ for sexual minorities so as to be “inclusive” towards people who claim to belong to identities other than Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender, including “Queer”.
James Purnell, director of radio and education, said:
One of our big challenges currently is around young audiences. In a recent YouGov survey only 51 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds said they identified as completely heterosexual. An organisation that appears to have a heteronormative culture is not one that is going to cut ice with them either as a consumer or an employee.
As Breitbart London reported last year, official government figures showing that just 4.1 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds reported themselves to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) was published just a week after an Ipsos Mori poll for the BBC showed only 66 per cent of young people said they were heterosexual.
Pause. Only two-thirds (at most) of the 16 to 25-year-old people of Britain are “completely” heterosexual?
No. To use an overused and much abused word correctly for once – INCREDIBLE!
Announcing in July the results of a confidential staff survey revealing that sexual minorities were overrepresented by about five times at the corporation the BBC praised the “very, very high” proportion of LGBT workers but insisted there was more to be done, suggesting a drive to hire lesbians.
According to the figures, more than 400 transgender individuals are employed at the BBC, while 11 per cent of its total workforce and 12 per cent of senior staff identified as sexual minorities.
The broadcaster’s seeking of an ever-more “diverse” workforce in terms of employing increasing numbers of staff from ethnic and sexual minorities is driven by the BBC’s “commit[ment] to reflecting and representing the diversity of the UK”, it claims.
It is unclear then why the significant underrepresentation of heterosexuals has at no point been raised as an issue of representation in the way lesbian staff numbers were.
Well, because Whites and heterosexuals are born despicable. Criminal. Because their ancestors were patriarchal imperialists. See? Understand now?
And about those “gender-neutral pronouns”. Surely it is not enough that they be used inside the temple itself?
Should they not also be used in the programs? In the news reports? In the drama, the movies, the documentaries?
Let’s review those Newspeak pronouns.
Here’s an American guide for university students (almost all US universities now being propaganda factories for the far-Left):
So the BBC has gone over, holus-bolus, to the dark side.
Ne is obsessed to the point of lunacy, as is the entire international Left, with race, “gender”, and the weather a hundred years from now.
(And – yes – also with promoting Islam.)
And the citizens of the United Kingdom are forced to pay for nem.
Trumpism triumphant? 232
Has the Kavanaugh affair united the Republican Party behind President Trump?
And if so, will it now defeat the ever more berserk Left?
Of the Republican reaction to the tactics of the Democrats opposing the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court, Gavin Wax writes at Western Journal:
The silver lining in this disgusting spectacle is a unified GOP moving forward with the singular goal of crushing the left. The line in the sand has been drawn, and there is no turning back. Even the most stubborn Trump haters of the right see that now. The Kavanaugh hearing will be a seminal movement in this fractured era of politics, and if the GOP can muster the courage to get ferocious with their contemptible enemies, it can be the turning point toward Making America Great Again.
He sees the affair as a vindication of President Trump’s leadership. It’s not only the Kavanaugh victory that proves the Trumpian way is the right way, but it provides the moment for full realization:
Anyone watching intently during the Obama years could see what was forming on the left, but it has reached critical mass due to Trump’s meteoric success. People who do not closely follow politics are seeing what the left is really all about aside from that flowery veneer of tolerance and diversity. The average blue-collar supporter of Trump has their eyes wide open, never to be closed again. This is a once-in-a-lifetime moment that we have to capitalize upon while there is still time.
“No turning back” for the GOP? Never again will the average blue-collar worker believe the Democratic Party serves his interests? Never again will the Republicans allow the Left an inch if by any means they can be stopped?
Well, it still depends on whether Republicans can “muster the courage to get ferocious”.
The writer hopes that “the most stubborn Trump haters of the right” see now how good is President Trump’s leadership is.
He hopes that certain Republican commentators who were against Donald Trump’s presidency have been brought by the Kavanaugh affair to see the light. They ought to have been, but he is not certain that they were:
Commentators like Erick Erickson, David French and John Podhoretz have to be realizing that Trump’s approach is vindicated. They can bemoan Trump for swatting the hornet’s nest and stirring up the left, but the communist threat is coming to destroy the lives of anyone who is to the right of Karl Marx. If you are white, Christian, conservative or a male (just one of these attributes is enough), they will target you and your family with a heinous smear campaign, and that will just be the beginning. Trumpism is currently the only viable alternative to the Orwellian machinations of the left.
How many Congressional Republicans formerly antagonistic to, or unenthusiastic about, Donald Trump have come round to his side because of the Kavanaugh affair?
A new eclectic coalition of surprising allies has coalesced around the president.
The most vociferous defender of Kavanaugh during Thursday’s hearings was arguably South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. Graham ran for president in 2016 largely as a wet blanket attempting to cool the Trump revolution but has come around in years since. Trump has also been able to hatch out solid working relationships with Mitch McConnell, Orrin Hatch, Rand Paul, Tom Cotton, and Mark Meadows — an interesting cross-section of political leaders. …. A coalition that seemed inconceivable just last year.
Some have been left behind — like now deceased former Sen. John McCain whose vendetta with Trump became personal, soon-to-be-gone Sens. Bob Corker and Jeff Flake who staked their careers on opposing Trump’s rise in the GOP, and Reps. Justin Amash and Walter Jones who went from constitutional heroes to pariahs over their stubborn opposition to the president — but the overwhelming consensus of the Republican Party is firmly behind Trump. Kavanaugh’s railroading has only strengthened Trump’s power over his constituency, and this party unity will be needed for what is to come.
If Kavanaugh’s confirmation was the convincing achievement, still it must be noted that Kavanaugh was not himself unwanted by Never Trumpers. The victory was not exactly a victory for Trumpism as such. Kavanaugh was “an establishment supported candidate”.
In what may have been a fortuitous coincidence or was perhaps another example of 4-D chess, Trump picked an establishment supported candidate in Brett Kavanaugh as his second proposed Supreme Court nominee.
In fact, some Trump supporters did not consider Kavanaugh conservative enough:
Although some of Trump’s die-hard supporters were tepid on the pick at first, the attacks from the left quickly solidified him into a hero.
But –
He had the full-fledged support of the NeverTrump right from the outset because of his closeness to President George W. Bush …
So let’s enquire: what do Never Trumpers on the Right themselves have to say about warming to the president’s leadership?
What is the National Review saying?
The editor-in-chief of National Review, Rich Lowry, does not count himself a Never Trumper; but his colleagues, Ramesh Ponnuru, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes, firmly and sternly do.
Or have done.
Until now? Until the victory of President Trump, the Senate Republicans, and the new Supreme Court Justice himself, won the fierce and prolonged battle to get Justice Kavanaugh’s appointment confirmed?
It seems there has been a change of mind.
Significantly, the authorship of this National Review article is attributed to “The Editors”:
After one of the most intense political fights of the last two decades, Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has become Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh of the United States Supreme Court. This is a good thing for the integrity of our Constitution, for elementary American norms, and for the long-term health of our political institutions.
Justice Kavanaugh has demonstrated throughout his career a firm adherence to a constitutionalist jurisprudence; indeed, that was the root of the opposition to him. He will undoubtedly stay true to this approach, which has guided him during his years on the D.C. Circuit and is evident in black-and-white in his hundreds of opinions. All of this was pushed to the side, though, in the final frenzy to destroy and defeat him. …
Judge Kavanaugh was not “on trial” in a formal sense. But that fact in no way undermines the practices and norms that mark formal trials. Presumption of innocence and an insistence on corroborating evidence are integral parts of our system because they work. Had the Democratic party prevailed in its attempt to set them aside, the precedent would have been disastrous. …
Throughout this saga, the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee maintained that their job was to investigate credible charges of wrongdoing and to determine whether they could be verified. Shamefully, their counterparts exhibited no such interest. It was unclear whether Judge Kavanaugh’s record was being examined for rape or for rudeness, for drinking or for defensiveness, for temperament or for truth. At times the lack of focus took on a Stalinist quality: “He did it,” Kavanaugh’s accusers insisted day in, day out, “but even if he didn’t, the vehemence with which he denied it is itself disqualifying.”
It is a testament to the fortitude of the Republican party that these conceits were rejected in the end. Donald Trump had the good sense to pick Kavanaugh, and then the determination to stick by him. …
In America we do not sacrifice individuals on the altar of collective guilt, and we do not entertain that illiberal alchemy by which “nobody can corroborate this” becomes “he did it and must pay”. When the Senate met yesterday to put a bow on this squalid affair, there remained as much evidence for Judge Kavanaugh’s unfitness as there had been on the day was nominated: none. To have rejected him despite this, [Senator Susan] Collins observed, would be to have abandoned “fundamental legal principles”.
The Senate refused to do so. The Justice prevailed, and so did justice.
The praise of Donald Trump for his “good sense” in picking Brett Kavanaugh, and his “determination” in sticking to his choice, does imply that “The Editors” of National Review, as a body, now approve of the president.
What then lies ahead?
Back to Gavin Wax who writes that “Trumpism is the only way forward”:
What is left of the Buckleyites thought that they and the “sane voices in the room” on the left could sweep this Trump embarrassment under the rug and head back to the politics of the past. That delusion is no longer tenable. The inmates run the asylum on the left, and every denizen must submit to every ridiculous trope regarding gender, sex, race, etc. or face the social consequences. Because groupthink is their default preset, nobody can speak up against this institutional insanity without getting cannibalized by the jackals. …
But –
The left is never going to capitulate. They have gone too far to stop now. They will only escalate things drastically from this point forward. They will repeat any lie — no matter how absurd, cruel or disgusting it may be — to stop Trump and his supporters. Anyone who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law, due process, and the presumption of innocence is a racist Nazi guilty of sexual assault. This is the future that we will live in if the left is successful, and it is probably worse than what Orwell envisioned in “1984″.
Remember, the left has many institutional advantages that are difficult to overcome. The demographic realities are on their side. The cultural downslide has already reached epidemic proportions. We cannot expect another Trump to come along and move things forward if he is ultimately stopped. This may be our final stand, and we have to move ever more boldly as a result. Trump has taught us that we have to be willing to fight as ruthlessly as the left in order to win.
If the Republican Party now fully accepts President Trump’s leadership; if Republicans at last have the stomach for a fight, or better still an appetite for it; if they engage the fight and if they win it, then the Kavanaugh hearing will have been “a seminal movement in this fractured era of politics” and a turning-point.
Now for the ferocious battle.
How much is that socialism in the window? 206
To a conservative who lived in a Western country through the decades of the Cold War, the current fashion for Socialism in America is likely to be shocking and terrifying. To those who lived under the iron heel of Soviet Socialism in Eastern Europe, or any other Marxist regime, it must be many times worse.
(Throughout this article, “Socialism” and “Communism” are used interchangeably – as was customary in the USSR.)
Some dangerously under-informed American women entering the political arena seem really to think that it is a pretty thing, Socialism.
Here’s one of them – Democrat Cynthia Nixon, who fortunately lost her challenge to the Democrat Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo by a difference of 30% of the votes – smilingly, in all the self-deceiving self-confidence of ignorance, urging Socialism on New York voters:
And here’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who won the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th congressional district – demonstrating how innocent she is of Economics:
Another fan of Socialism, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, wants to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 2020.
Lloyd Billingsley writes at Front Page on Cory Booker’s claim to be Spartacus: a hero of resistance to ancient Roman tyranny re-canonized by Communists in the 1950s. Booker founded his claim on the extreme daring he showed in rising against the Left-alleged tyranny of President Trump – by making public certain documents, in relation to the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, that were in fact already public.
As Billingsley says, “Booker’s gambit was something of a bust.”
He goes on to tell us how one Communist, the author of the novel Sparticus, lost his faith.
The movie Booker cited is based on the 1951 novel Spartacus by Howard Fast, a Communist pisseur d’encre whom Time magazine had dubbed “Big Brother’s U.S. pen pal.” In 1953, Fast won the Stalin Peace Prize, the only American to win the award other than Paul Robeson, a black American Communist who spent his life defending all-white Soviet dictatorships.
Stalin died in 1953 and three years later, Soviet boss Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes and mass atrocities to the Soviet Communist Party’s 20th Congress. The revelation devastated many American Communists and motivated Howard Fast to write The Naked God: The Writer and the Communist Party, released in 1957.
Khrushchev’s revelations, Fast wrote, “itemizes a record of barbarism and paranoiac bloodlust that will be a lasting and shameful memory to civilized man”. Communism is not social science but “naked terror, awful brutality and frightening ignorance“. Fast denounced “Stalin and the collection of hangmen and murderers around him” and charged that the Communist Party is “based on pseudo-religious cant, cemented with neurotic fear and parading ritualistic magic as a substitute for reason”. And the Spartacus scribe wasn’t done.
The only people who resisted the revelation of Stalin’s crimes, Fast wrote, were “the mental revolutionaries, the parlor pinks, the living-room warriors, the mink coated allies of the working class”. These were “Sick people who had seen no death [other] than a painted corpse in a funeral parlor, no other violence than an auto crash – these people lusted for an Armageddon their mad dreams had promised them.” …
The Spartacus screenwriter was Dalton Trumbo, who joined the Communist Party during the Stalin-Hitler Pact, when many others left, and remained in the Party after the Khrushchev revelations. Trumbo hated Fast’s Naked God but he wasn’t going to pass up a big payday. And since Trumbo had been one of the famed Hollywood Ten, Spartacus remains a classic on the big screen of the left, which duly consigned The Naked God to the forbidden list.
While some fled the Communist Party after 1956 many others remained and the Soviets continued to run candidates in American elections. In 1976 their candidate for president was Gus Hall, an old-line Stalinist, with Jarvis Tyner for vice president. College student John Brennan voted for Gus Hall and incredibly enough, only four years later in 1980 Brennan gained employment at the CIA, which he headed under POTUS 44.
One of those Americans who remained faithful to Communism and the Soviet Union was Angela Davis. In 1979 Davis won the Lenin Peace Prize, her primary for the Communist ticket in 1980, with Davis for vice president under Hall. The same duo lost to Reagan and Bush in 1984, and thereafter the Communist Party USA declined to run candidates and urged their supporters to vote for the Democratic Party.
In 1988, American Bernie Sanders spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union, where the gulags were still functioning and Soviet bosses torturing political prisoners in psychiatric hospitals. If Hillary Clinton had not rigged the primaries, Sanders would have been the Democrats’ candidate in 2016.
Cory Booker wants to be the candidate in 2020, and his bid for a “Spartacus moment” suggests that he knows the Old Left back story. For their part, Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cynthia Nixon and Andrew Gillum [Florida’s Democratic Gubernatorial nominee. also advocating Socialism without perhaps fully realizing that he is], like their media supporters, show little if any familiarity with The Naked God, The God That Failed, and The Road to Serfdom.
Right. They show no familiarity whatsoever with the theory or practice of the Socialism that charms them so. If Cory Booker knows, and yet desires to impose the horror that is Socialism on his fellow Americans, he is a lot worse than they are.
On every hand they rise crying “I am socialist!” thereby confirming ignorance of the actual record. Howard Fast, who died in 2003, knew what socialism was all about. So did Milan Kundera, who wrote, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”.
Candidates can’t recall what they never knew in the first place.
They need to be told, but their teachers have not told them, and will not tell them: Socialism is hungry, bleak, smelly, shabby, hopeless, poor, cold, painful and very frightening.
Prize lies 140
Obama claims that the eight years of his presidency were free of scandal. In fact, the scandals were many and appalling.
Obama claims to have stopped Iran becoming a nuclear power. In fact, he entered into a deal that permitted Iran to become a nuclear power.
Obama claims to have improved race relations. In fact, he worsened them.
Obama claims to have launched an economic boom. In fact, he never achieved even 3% GDP growth.
In sum, he was a weak and destructive president. The harm he did would not be easy to repair, and America is lucky to have found the man to succeed him who could not only mend what he had broken, and is doing so, but is going much further, turning the failure round and achieving success. Even some unprecedented successes. And all in record time.
Obama sees the repair as an undoing of the changes he wrought. As he puts it, “The status quo pushes back.”
The complaint comes from a speech he made at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Ill., on Sept. 7, 2018, when the university honored him with the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government.
The speech he gave on the occasion of receiving the prize included these claims:
Each time we painstakingly pull ourselves closer to our founding ideals, that all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights; the ideals that say every child should have opportunity and every man and woman in this country who’s willing to work hard should be able to find a job and support a family and pursue their small piece of the American Dream; our ideals that say we have a collective responsibility to care for the sick and the infirm, and we have a responsibility to conserve the amazing bounty, the natural resources of this country and of this planet for future generations, each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. …
To which political party does that last sentence most aptly apply? We say the Democratic Party? But then, the Left has a habit of accusing its opponents of the faults, failings, bad emotions, plots, conspiracies, evil intentions, underhand actions, and failures of which itself is guilty.
Most of you don’t remember a time before 9/11, when you didn’t have to take off your shoes at an airport.
Did he mention who was responsible for 9/11 and for us having to take off our shoes at an airport? No. Because he never did and never will blame Islam for its acts of terrorism.
Most of you don’t remember a time when America wasn’t at war, or when money and images and information could travel instantly around the globe, or when the climate wasn’t changing faster than our efforts to address it.
A strange combination of references. No one living remembers a time when America wasn’t at war, if the Cold War is counted. About the money and images he probably meant “remember a time when they could not …” And then he throws in as a certainty that there was a time when climate was not changing fast, but it is now.
And this was all before a change. What change? Have the wars stopped?
The only change he almost got right was a change to faster communications than ever before.
He claims that all three factors together brought about this consequence:
This change has happened fast, faster than any time in human history. And it created a new economy that has unleashed incredible prosperity.
Only, of the three phenomena he mentioned, could the faster communications be said to have promoted prosperity.
Actually, he just gabbled nonsense. And all to get in a claim to an “unleashed incredible prosperity” – the prosperity he claims as his own achievement.
He goes on to say how he rescued the economy from wicked men.
[T]he reckless behavior of financial elites triggered a massive financial crisis, ten years ago this week, a crisis that resulted in the worst recession in any of our lifetimes and caused years of hardship for the American people, for many of your parents, for many of your families. Most of you weren’t old enough to fully focus on what was going on at the time, but when I came into office in 2009, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. 800,000. Millions of people were losing their homes. Many were worried we were entering into a second Great Depression. So we worked hard to end that crisis, but also to break some of these longer term trends. And the actions we took during that crisis returned the economy to healthy growth and initiated the longest streak of job creation on record. And we covered another 20 million Americans with health insurance and we cut our deficits by more than half, partly by making sure that people like me, who have been given such amazing opportunities by this country, pay our fair share of taxes to help folks coming up behind me.
While it is true that employment rose before he left office, his claim that higher taxes (on “people like me”) were a formula for prosperity is false. President Trump’s tax cuts (for all tax payers) prove it. Furthermore, Obama heavily regulated business, and President Trump’s lifting of many Obama regulations has been a factor in creating the very real present economic boom.
And by the time I left office, household income was near its all-time high and the uninsured rate had hit an all-time low and wages were rising and poverty rates were falling. I mention all this just so when you hear how great the economy’s doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started. …
He came on then to his foreign policy.
Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and our combat role in Afghanistan, and got Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder. …
And even though your generation is the most diverse in history …
Nonsense! No generation is more “diverse” than any other.
… with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. …
[O]ver the past few decades, the politics of division, of resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.
Remember when a Republican Attorney General refused to prosecute a bunch of white people although they were breaking the law, on the grounds that he would not act against “his people”? No. Neither do we. But we do recall Eric Holder- Obama’s black AG – saying something like that in a case of the Black Panthers …
This Congress has … embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi, or my birth certificate.
The trick: he throws out, in passing, that the (factually accurate) report of his failure to send help to a US ambassador and three servicemen who were killed by Muslim terrorists in Benghazi was a “wild conspiracy theory’, and associates it with an unproved, unlikely, and petty story that he was not born in the United States. But the horrible events in Benghazi were proved and profoundly important.
He comes to his own party’s wild conspiracy theory:
[The Repulicans in power are] undermining our alliances, cozying up to Russia. What happened to the Republican Party? Its central organizing principle in foreign policy was the fight against Communism, and now they’re cozying up to the former head of the KGB, actively blocking legislation that would defend our elections from Russian attack.
And he calls the partial repeal of his unworkable health legislation “sabotage”:
Their sabotage of the Affordable Care Act has already cost more than three million Americans their health insurance. And if they’re still in power next fall, you’d better believe they’re coming at it again. …
He defends the media who gave him uncritical support in all he did, and never stp attacking President Trump. What is indefnsible in his eyes, is Trump hitting back at his media enemies. To do this, he lies again:
I complained plenty about Fox News – but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them enemies of the people.
We did hear that his administration “spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama ‘the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation’ after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources”. (See our quotations from Matt Margolis below.)
Next, he endorses the lie that President Trump sympathizes with Nazis:
We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers.
How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad.
How hard can it be to say that Islamic terrorism is bad? That Communism is bad? Too hard for him, it appeared.
Then comes the most blatantly impudent accusation of them all:
And we won’t win people over by calling them names, or dismissing entire chunks of the country as racist, or sexist, or homophobic.
Who, every minute of every day, calls whom “racist, or sexist, or homophobic”? Or all three?
Matt Margolis comments at PJ Media:
Today we saw just how far academia is going to perpetuate the myth of Obama’s “scandal-free” administration when he was awarded the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government by the University of Illinois. Not since the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has Obama been so undeserving of an award. But, I submit that this award is even worse than the Nobel Peace Prize he didn’t deserve. In 2009, the Nobel committee was at least ignorant of what Obama’s record would turn out to be. There is simply no excuse in 2018 for Obama to be receiving an Ethics in Government award. … The Paul H. Douglas Award is now forever tainted.
What, exactly, did the committee at the University of Illinois think Obama did to earn an Ethics in Government award? The Obama years were plagued by scandal and defined by a hyper-partisan government.
Last month I cited six Obama scandals where a special counsel should have been appointed to investigate but was not. Unlike Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Obama’s attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were partisan lackeys who did everything they could to protect Obama from being held accountable. Obama, Holder, and Lynch knew that if they left the investigating to Republicans in Congress they could write them off as partisan witch hunts and use any and all tactics possible to obstruct and stonewall those investigations, or in some cases, run their own sham investigation that cleared them of any wrongdoing.
I document thirty different scandals in my book The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. Each scandal on its own makes the idea of Obama receiving an ethics award laughable. All of them together make this award blasphemous. From the moment Obama took office he was under a dark cloud of scandal, having been involved in illegal negotiations with [the condemned criminal] Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich to give him a cabinet position in exchange for Blagojevich nominating an Obama-preferred candidate to his vacated Senate seat … yet Obama just received an Ethics in Government award? What a joke!…
There are plenty of well-known scandals that the committee that decided to award Obama had to have been aware of but chose to ignore. There was the Fast and Furious scandal, which involved sending guns to Mexico in the hopes of tracking them to drug cartel leaders. Not only did they lose track of a large number of guns, but one gun was found to have been used in the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The Obama administration tried to cover it up, and they stonewalled a congressional investigation, resulting in Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents. Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois?
The Obama administration also abused the Espionage Act to target reporters and their sources. They even spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation” after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources. Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois? …
There were also –
The Solyndra scandal [see here], the Benghazi cover-up, Uranium One, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the covering up of thousands of deaths of veterans waiting for care at VA hospitals, manipulating intelligence, paying ransom money to Iran, Project Cassandra [see here], spying on Donald Trump, the Hillary email scandal, which I should add, also implicated Obama, who communicated with Hillary via her private email address and used a pseudonym himself.
It’s bad enough when Obama claims he was scandal-free. But, when he receives an ethics in government award, it diminishes the meaning of ethics. It’s time to stop pretending Obama was scandal-free or ethical. … I’ve only scratched the surface of Obama’s scandalous and unethical presidency.
The only reason why Barack Obama was elected president was that he was black. He had nothing else to offer. A sufficient number of white Americans voted for him to get him into the White House for no better reason than that they needed to feel good, to prove to themselves, and the country and the world, that they were not “racist“.
Barack Obama, for all his expensive education, was ill-informed and strangely ignorant – and he embraced ideologies inimical to America. He seemed not to know how many states there were in the country he governed. He thought Austrians spoke a language called Austrian. He did not know how to pronounce “corpsman”. And he was a follower of the Communist “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, and a lackey of the Muslim Brotherhood.
He lied and commanded others to lie. Under his leadership, his party worked an elaborate plot, which it still pursues, to destroy the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump with false and slanderous allegations of treason.
If prizes were awarded for lying, Obama would deserve them all.
Under a lidless gaze from high dark towers 216
Is the American Left totalitarian in its ideology, policies, inclination?
Victor Davis Hanson thinks it is. He writes (in part) at National Review:
A definition of totalitarianism might be the saturation of every facet of daily life by political agendas and social-justice messaging.
At the present rate, America will soon resemble the dystopias of novels such as 1984 and Brave New World in which all aspects of life are warped by an all-encompassing ideology of coerced sameness.
Or rather, the prevailing orthodoxy in America is the omnipresent attempt of an elite — exempt from the consequences of its own ideology thanks to its supposed superior virtue and intelligence — to mandate an equality of result.
We expect their 24/7 political messaging on cable-channel news networks, talk radio, or print and online media. And we concede that long ago an NPR, CNN, MSNBC, or New York Times ceased being journalistic entities as much as obsequious megaphones of the progressive itinerary.
But increasingly we cannot escape anywhere the lidless gaze of our progressive lords, all-seeing, all-knowing from high up in their dark towers.
When there is a Republican president, a Republican Congress, a Republican majority in the Supreme Court, and a majority of the states (33 of the 50) have Republican governors, does the Left have the power to inflict its “political agendas and social-justice messaging” on America?
The answer is yes. The faithful do it from inside government agencies.
The Peter Strzok–Lisa Page texts, along with the careers of former FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe, reveal a politicized and in some sense rotten FBI hierarchy, beholden far more to its own exalted sense of a progressive self than merely to investigating crimes against the people.
Lois Lerner was a clumsy reflection of how the IRS long ago became weaponized in service to auditing deplorables. Former CIA director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper used their supposedly nonpartisan positions to further political agendas. That each in his own way is clownish does not mitigate their rank efforts to graft intelligence agencies onto political causes.
The same deterioration is true of many in the Department of Justice, who, along with the FBI, misled FISA-court justices, as if that were the only, or perhaps the easiest, way to obtain politically driven surveillance on U.S. citizens. Americans now are woke to the reality that straying too much into the forbidden zone guarantees that their communications can be monitored on the pretense that they’re colluding with some nefarious power. Yet if foreigners are the menace, why did our proverbial best and brightest traffic with a paid foreign spy at election time to sabotage a political campaign, then trump even the improper use of electronic surveillance with the insertion of paid informants?
They do it through the social media companies.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter are facing accusations of censoring social-media accounts and massaging Internet searches according to their progressive political agendas. The masters of the universe have given us the stereotype of 20- and 30-something social-warrior geeks, fiddling with their algorithms to virtue-signal their left-wing fides to a global audience. …
First-time congressional candidate Elizabeth Heng, a conservative from central California, found her video ad blocked on Facebook and Twitter. Apparently, her description of the Cambodian holocaust that her parents fled was too graphic or politically incorrect, or both. But then again, in California, everything is politicized, from plastic straws to single-user restrooms, in an Orwellian effort to distract us from the fact that we do not have enough water, usable roads, or workable public schools to remain a civilized state.
They do it through the news media and the institutions of education. They do it through”newspeak” – the control of vocabulary.
Language is especially enlisted to disguise bothersome reality. During the Obama administration, no one would ever have known from “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disaster”, “workplace disasters”, and “holy struggles” that radical Islamic terrorists were seeking to kill Westerners from San Bernardino to Paris. As in the case of illegal aliens, undocumented aliens, illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants, immigrants migrants, the progressive rationale is that anyone killed or harmed by a terrorist or migrant is usually a nobody and so an acceptable casualty in the greater war against incorrect speech and attitude.
When our public colleges now find that an increasing number of newly admitted students cannot do college-level work when they begin their courses, administrators drop the old idea of catch-up “remedial” classes or compensatory “remediation” courses. The new language conveys that students are now suddenly qualified, or at least it virtue-signals the university’s effort to be suitably sensitive to the fact that in California nearly half of those entering the CSU system cannot read or compute at what previously had been thought to be a college level.
And since the Left is now dedicated to the destruction of “white privilege” and the demotion of the white race, Whites on the Left announce from their dark towers that they are not white:
Our very names and identities have become politicized. Desperate to highlight their progressive purity (or to enhance careers), politicians sometimes reinvent their nomenclatures and ancestries to suggest solidarity with those deemed racially, ethnically, or economically oppressed. … [Is] their intent to pose as poorer, more victimized Americans without actually having to become poorer or more victimized?
Senator Elizabeth Warren claimed falsely — albeit not quite in the clumsy fashion of left-wing political activist and professor Ward Churchill — that she was part Native American. Socialist New York state senate candidate Julia Salazar recently and falsely rebranded herself as a virtual foreign-born immigrant. Was their intent to pose as poorer, more victimized Americans without actually having to become poorer or more victimized?
White-male aspirant for a Texas Senate seat Patrick Francis O’Rourke has used the Latino nickname “Beto,” probably on the assumption that “Beto O’Rourke” might ensure a little more street cred among Texas’s Latino voters. I suppose “Pat O’Lopez” would be too shameless? But then again, California Senate candidate Kevin de León has added both a “de” and an accent to remind voters that he is not just an Anglicized Kevin Leon who could be mistaken for a third-generation Portuguese American.
Americans have long accepted that Hollywood movies no longer seek just to entertain or inform, but to indoctrinate audiences by pushing progressive agendas. That commandment also demands that America be portrayed negatively — or better yet simply written out of history. Take the new film First Man, about the first moon landing. Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong became famous when he emerged from The Eagle, the two-man lunar module, and planted an American flag on the moon’s surface. Yet that iconic act disappears from the movie version. (At least Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong, does not walk out of the space capsule to string up a U.N. banner.)
Gosling claimed that the moon landing should not be seen as an American effort. Instead, he advised, it should be “widely regarded as a human achievement” — as if any nation’s efforts or the work of the United Nations in 1969 could have pulled off such an astounding and dangerous enterprise. …
Julia Salazar, whom Hanson refers to, is a “Democratic Socialist” running for a Democratic Party seat in the New York State Senate. She claimed for unexplained reasons to be a Jewish immigrant from Colombia, though she was born to a Catholic family in Miami and is intensely anti-Semitic. When the Jewish periodical The Tablet exposed her lies, “the response from Salazar and her supporters was to accuse the Jewish community of racism”. They –
” … insisted that as a ‘woman of color’, she was a victim of Jewish racism. The Democratic Socialists of America backed their candidate and repeated her anti-Jewish slurs.”
– So writes Daniel Greenfield at Front Page.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another “Democratic Socialist”, is a rich man’s daughter who pretends to be a low-waged resident of the Bronx, where she has won the Democratic primary and will be elected to Congress in November.
So our betters who claim the moral high ground and know what’s best for us, are liars, slanderers, poseurs, hypocrites, illiterates, and subversives.
And they are would-be totalitarians, those up there in the dark towers.
The illiberal Left 12
Pat Condell talks about the intolerant religion of Marxism/Progressivism.
Many of our Pat Condell videos have been removed by YouTube.
We wait to see how long this one, in which the good, brave, atheist conservative praises the truly liberal values of the Enlightenment and condemns the intolerance of the now extremely illiberal Left, will be allowed to stay.
Becoming Mexico 63
The Democrats want no southern border.
Mark Steyn accurately describes the Democratic Party moving ever further to the Left, and how, without the border, the US would become Mexico.
On the snobbery of egalitarians 176
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher of that scurrilous daily, the New York Times, is a white male.
So why does he appoint someone who declares that she hates whites and males to his editorial board?
It’s not a question that can be easily answered (except of course by psychologists and sociologists who know everything about the human mind and heart but can only explain what they know unintelligibly).
A similar question is: Why do Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the ladies who rule Sweden want to hand over their countries to Islam?
And another in the same genre is: Why do intellectuals who claim that their political mission and life-goal is to raise the folks at the bottom of the social hierarchy and sink the rich by robbing them until they are no richer than anybody else in order to achieve and establish an egalitarian society, despise and insult the working class?
At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes (in part – the whole thing is well worth reading):
Recently Politico reporter Marc Caputo was angered at rude hecklers at a Trump rally who booed beleaguered CNN correspondent Jim Acosta.
(Yay!)
So Caputo tweeted of them, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”
Politico had not employed such a crass journalist since before it fired Julia Ioffe for tweeting, “Either Trump is f—ing his daughter or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?” (Ioffe was then snatched up by the Atlantic …).
I suppose Caputo meant that Trump voters intrinsically lacked either the money to fix their teeth or the knowledge of the hygiene required to take care of them or the aesthetic sensitivity of how awful their mouths looked. Or Caputo was simply rehashing the stereotypes that he had seen on reality TV shows like Duck Dynasty and The Deadliest Catch.
Or none of the above: the journalist grandee was just stupid.
That last alternative seems most likely since Caputo then escalated and called them collectively “garbage people”. …
What did “garbage people” mean? That by birth or training such toothless, smelly people were subhuman, like refuse? And if Caputo had substituted any other racial minority for his slurs, would he still have his job according to the cannons of progressive censure and Internet lynching? Could he have said something similarly degrading about the attendees of after an open borders or Black Lives Matter rally and still have his job?
Last week, the New York Times named tech writer Sarah Jeong to its editorial board with apparent knowledge of her long history of racist tweets, as well as verbal attacks on police and males in general. Perhaps such gutter venom was proof of militant orthodoxy to be appreciated rather than medieval racism to be shunned. Her mostly empty résumé seems compensated by her identity and her politics—as the Times more or less confessed in its sad defense of her racist outbursts.
Jeong claimed that white people smelled like wet dogs. She had bragged that she hated them, and hoped that soon they would become childless and disappear. Her final solution of demographic extinction was, she said (in historically dense fashion), “my plan all along.”
One wonders whether she will canonize her collected tweets into something like My Struggle …
(The translation of the title of Adolf Hitler’s book, in German Mein Kampf …)
… replete with less abstract territorial theories how to reify her “plan” or add pseudo-scientific details explaining why and how whites, as she alleges, smell or have had no cultural or scientific achievements. …
Many whites smell. (Or “stink” as the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson told a lady he did when she complained to him that he “smelt”, while she, he said, was the one who “smelt” – transitive verb, meaning she smelt him). But (to state the obvious for the average American Lefty who may have some academic degrees but has learnt little and cannot even spell) whites are responsible for most of the scientific achievements that have made our lives longer and better and our civilization great. The old Greeks who launched science were white. Isaac Newton who relaunched science and so also the Enlightenment, was white. The Age of Science began then and is with us still. As for other cultural achievements …
What’s that you say, Ms. Jeong? Shakespeare was black, and actually a woman? Einstein too? Good grief, we never knew!
In the text message trove of disgraced FBI operatives Lisa Page and Peter Strzok there was the same sort of barnyard contempt. Georgetown graduate Strzok claimed to Page that a local Virginia Walmart “smelled” of Trump voters—a progressive stereotype of white Neanderthals that is increasingly freely expressed.
In another government text, an unidentified FBI agent, assigned to the Hillary Clinton email investigation, had written of the Trump voters that they were “lazy POS that think we will magically grant them jobs for doing nothing.”
Again, demonizing the Trump voter as beyond cultural redemption is nothing new. During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton infamously dismissed Trump supporters as “deplorables” who were“irredeemable” and were “not America”. …
In some sense, the rebranded Clinton simply continued where Barack Obama had left off in his denunciations of the “bitter clingers” of Pennsylvania, who were prone to simplistic trust in their guns and religion and, out of insecurity, scapegoated others.
When Obama periodically wrote off Americans as “lazy” and ignorant of the world beyond them (this, from another Harvard law graduate who thought Hawaii was in Asia and Austrians spoke “Austrian”), he was, to use a progressive metaphor, dog whistling the themes of his clingers speech.
Elites are confident that there is nothing either ethically wrong or career-endangering in smearing middle-class Trump supporters with such crude stereotypes.
When pundits on television go after Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), they inevitably resort to attacking his Tulare roots, and his dairy-farm upbringing (“A former dairy farmer”; “way over his head”; “nothing in his résumé that would have qualified him for the post”, etc.) to claim that he is mismatched by Harvard-trained Adam Schiff. Again, how strange that egalitarians always revert to base snobbery and class stereotypes in lieu of an argument or an idea. …
Jeong is a Harvard Law graduate. Strzok has a master’s degree from Georgetown. The ridicule of the white working class by NeverTrump conservative pundits is read on the pages of the nation’s premier newspapers or voiced in hallowed symposia.
Is such ignorance of an entire class because of, or in spite of such, elite training?
Does the university-bred cursus honorarium have room for real-world experience beyond the campus and laptop?
Has Jeong ever worked welding alongside the grandchildren of Dust Bowl diaspora to adjudicate their actual skin-colored advantage? Did her class and gender studies work at Harvard Law constitute a tougher curriculum than a 12-hour shift at Denny’s? Is the soybean jack-of-all-trades farmer really denser than the Yale English major?
Which reminds us of this best of all satires ever. We cannot resist re-posting it: